A Campus Christmas Carol

Quite funny and thoughtful (and thought provoking) but marred by the snobbery about science. Science should get back below stairs where it belongs; the good old days when humanities were at the centre. In my University they remain the absolute centre, the surplus they generate on the £9K fees mean they, not the sciences are the earners. With the anniversary of the two cultures, one might have hoped we had moved beyond such point scoring.

I believe it would have been better if Ebenezer had reconnected with Cratchit at the end, or some other person he knew, although there was a hint of that in the mention of his OUP contact, who may well in the future have returned to university and been the recipient of his postdoc fellowship. Nevertheless, this is assuredly an imaginatively interwoven story of love and sex, and of health, aging, work, money, and hope, with a bit of politics thrown in, would surely . But what of the comment, "as long as the young people kept coming, there was hope." Did Max mean hope for universities, for without young people there wouldn't be any and lecturers would be redundant, or hope for our world - our different societies and ways of life, and our technologies and sense of humanity? Away from the campus, I have concocted another interpretation of the life of Ebenezer Scrooge, actually a response to Professor Levin's own 'In Defense of Scrooge.' But aren't most of these about aging in general, retirement, and the meaning of life, in some form or another? See 'Life story of Ebenezer Scrooge' http://www.diversityinretirement.net/BeingSingle/EScrooge.html

I really enjoyed this. Very astute. The pity is everyone knows it's true. But like a Tom Sharpe farce it will play out to end. "Going forward" - >the Ghost of Universities to come is indeed the end of the (let's use corporate claptrap accordingly) "estate". The online university that sells online degrees for $200 a year from a top university brand to millions of punters world-wide will mark the end of those institutions that are £$millions in red after expanding their debt-fuelled"estate".

John Sutherland's Ebenezer writes here that the problems originated from outside the universities, that the government was at fault. But in the story Ebenezer does acknowledge, too, that he did nothing throughout his career to stop these kinds of changes. How close to reality is this? Did the government start it, and did academics and the powers that be simply fall in line? How much of the problem is actually to do with the academics themselves, unwilling to take a chance on new research, to do anything that would threaten their own continuing career moving upwards and onwards? When the main aim of universities is self-preservation (both at the individual level, and the socioeconomic), to maintain class distinctions - the elitism of the ivory tower, with the occasional addition of 'fresh blood' to enhance their reputation as fair and open to all, how can this system possibly expect to continue? The world is changing - society is changing, and universities must change also.

This is the quote I was referring to in the comment I made above, beginning "John Sutherland's Ebenezer": "How had we got here? Ebenezer wondered. Governments – both parties – had come to the view that universities were dangerous (all those ideas). Purse strings had been pulled. Throttlingly. And then had come differential funding, based on external inspection. In just a couple of decades, universities had been brought to heel. They had also discovered that science and technology was where the real money was." Merry Christmas. And Happy Holidays!