“… While most public institutions have had too much privatisation in recent years, universities have not had enough. To outsiders, a European university is a thing of archaic wonder, its outlook and methods essentially unchanged since the middle ages. Its teaching terms still reflect the need to go home for sowing and harvest. Its courses are assumed to require three or four years of roughly half-time study, with no attempt to assess productivity or the cost of such labour withheld from the economy …” (more)
[Simon Jenkins, Guardian, 11 June]