Liam Burns, the newly elected president of the National Union of Students (NUS), recently dismissed the idea that universities should be about the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge and truth. “I think we should be honest about our priorities”, he said. “At the end of the day, the point of the university has changed. If you look at when only five per cent of the population went, that was about knowledge, discovery, pushing boundaries, people talked about the creme de la creme. That’s not the purpose of universities now – it is about social mobility and people changing their lives. The reality is you need that bit of paper to get into better jobs with greater earning potential and influence. So we want as many people to get one as possible, at the expense of quality if necessary.”
If, as Burns suggests, degrees are being compromised in the name of fake equality and “greater earning potential” for as many young people as possible, the traditional role of universities as purveyors of academic excellence is being sacrificed on the altar of social engineering.
Burns is a Physics student. He might do well to heed the words of Thomas Browne: “No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.”
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