Apparently in Britain, universities are closing all sorts of science courses. Not just science courses actually, entire science departments - and not wierd, random, non-mainstream departments, very mainstream ones like chemistry and physics.
That can't be good.
Apparently members of the Commons Science and Technology Committee said that "This is the logical outcome of introducing a market in higher education". Well, then, obviously the market isn't very good at figuring out what might be beneficial to us all in the long term. Doesn't this vague, "market thing" know anything about the economic potential in industries like: pharmaceutical, aerospace, electronics...
I guess that they've allowed the universities to be autonomous - basically because they're allowing them to get their funding from outside the government - and now they have no control over what happens there and can't 'make the universities keep these departments going.
If losing entire science depatments is the logical result of this approach, the obvious question seem to be:
"WTF were they thinking?"
Thanks to Amazon.com for the Beaker plush toy image
2 comments:
It's huge news in the Chemistry world... a lot of UK science faculties are just going to stop teaching chemistry (except basic general and organic chemistry for the biotech / pre-med crowd) -- Sussex is the most famous, and there are links to the story in the Guardian article you linked to.
It's tragically short-sighted.
I actually hadn't heard anything about this before seeing that article. I still can't really get over it...
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