I spent part of my weekend reading the report of the Woolf Inquiry into the LSE’s links with Libya & lessons to be learned.
I don’t expect that this particular sad & sorry chapter will earn much more than a footnote or passing reference when (not in my lifetime) the full & authoritative history of the West’s links with Libya, in the context of the need, or lust for, & dependence upon oil, & of the wars, violence & compromises (shabby or noble) which that entailed, comes to be written.
What the report did succeed in doing for me was to set into very sharp relief some of the consequences of British policies on higher education & the seemingly laudable aim of providing higher education for at least 50% of the population – an aim which was possibly necessary as a disguised way of coping with our inability to provide jobs for all those young people.
But without concomitant increases in public funding (or student fees), universities have been forced to seek alternative sources of finance from international students, donations & consultancy, competing in what is now a global business.
And in the particular case of LSE, declaring its independence from the federal University of London.
As such it had become a growing global business, but one which had not completely appreciated or understood the risks that that involved, nor taken care to make sure appropriate governance & management procedures were in place to cope with all those challenges.
Just keeping track of, & managing the learning of ‘ordinary’ students must be challenge enough; their number has grown from some 4,000 in 1980 to over 10,000 in 2010. (I think it was more like 3,000 in the 1960s), & in 1976 the entire University of London had only 40,000 internal students.
