ABSTRACT
In an essay titled ‘Only quality can save universities’ in The Times, December 6, 1993, the then U K Education Secretary Patten set out his ‘vision for the future of higher education’ in England. The essay opens with a reference to a New Zealand university that is meant as a kind of cautionary tale:
Some 11,000 miles away at New Zealand’s University of Otago, courses are being offered to the ‘intellectually challenged’. Opening the doors of universities to all and sundry is one way of growing a higher education sector. It is, however, not a good one if universities are to remain the pinnacles of excellence, the ivory silos fit for the toil of scholarly elites that we expect them to be. The day we sacrifice these essential principles on the evergrowing altar of political correctness will mark the beginning of the self-destruction of one of the nation’s greatest assets.1
