The guardianの記事、'The threat to our universities' by Stefan Collini (Friday 24 February 2012 22.56 GMT)から。
'What are universities for? Should they be businesses 'competing on price'? Are students 'consumers', concerned only with getting jobs? A half-baked market ideology informs official thinking about higher education, and it undermines an ideal that a vast number of people cherish.
Take one job centre. Add several apprenticeship programmes. Combine with an industrial lab (fold in a medical research centre for extra flavour). Throw in some subsidised gigs and a large dollop of cheap beer. Don't stir too much. Decorate with a forward-looking logo. And hey presto! – you've got a university.
At this point, I should be able to say (according to the formula): "Here's one I made earlier." In reality, of course, no one has ever successfully created a university by following this recipe. But if you simply go by what is now said about universities in official pronouncements from government departments or funding agencies or employers' associations, you could be forgiven for thinking that this recipe pretty much describes what these institutions are all about.
*pronouncements 公式見解
In recent years, universities have been in the news as perhaps never before, but increasingly in public discourse in Britain, they are said to serve two purposes – and two purposes only. The first is to "equip" "young people" to get jobs in "the fast-moving economy of tomorrow". The other is to contribute to "growth", to develop the "cutting-edge products" needed in "today's competitive global marketplace" (and preferably to discover the odd miracle drug, too).
I realise that by merely raising a quizzical eyebrow about the self-evident priority of these goals I am going to be damned for being out of touch with "the real world". What's even more curious is that everyone who expresses the slightest reservation about this vocabulary turns out to live at the same address. Simply to suggest that universities might have other purposes is immediately to be classed as someone who "lives in the ivory tower".
* quizzical いぶかしげな
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