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Graham Cunningham's avatar

I would love to be impressed - heartened - by this analysis and action plan. But it so hopelessly underestimated the scale of the task. Some reality here:

1) it's taken conservative politicians (and most thinkers) an extraordinary long time (50 years) to get the measure of the power of an (overwhelmingly leftist) academia to effectively emasculate our supposedly pluralist democracy. To finally wake up to it only when it is way too late. The leftist academia meanwhile has been churning out entire generations of ambitious young professionals, managers and administrators (let alone BBC-type arts and media leftist clones) sheep-dipped in its bogus 'social justice' vanities and delicious victimhood cults. What now do you hope to do about all these people? Somehow 're-educate' them. Of course not.

2) so any return to sanity in our culture will now take generations as well.

3) 'successes' (in the UK at least) are delusory. The UK has been in the vanguard of wokeness etc so much so that (unlike America) it barely has any conservative political constituency left now.

The only real (slim) hope is that the arts, humanities and social 'sciences' parts of our tertiary education institutions will self-destruct their useless narcissistic/virtue signalling selves. If anyone doubts the scale of the problem, read this: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind

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D'ward's avatar

Whether universities are the capstone in a progressive education or not, this doesn't consider why almost 40% of UK students need to attend full time tertiary education. Why only 30% will fully repay fees (covered by UK taxpayers) or why we need 250k activist-academics to be employed full time. Only 15% attended in the 1980s, 25% 1990s. Yes to higher ed for brightest. Yes to opinion diversity. No to degree factories and a backdoor immigration channel. Let's offer current fee rates for the best students and in vocational nationally important career paths. Let universities set their fees (without any state underpinning) for the rest. Let nature take its course and sub-standard universities adapt or perish.

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