ABSTRACT
You might think that a curmudgeonly old nostalgic like me would be sulking at the news that more institutions are going to be able to call themselves universities. I did groan at the first wave of name changes, not least because I knew a bit about the distinctiveness and sense of purpose of the old polytechnics (I once had a boyfriend who taught in one and talked about it endlessly). It did not seem to me that calling more courses by the honorific of ‘university degrees’ would contribute to that sense of purpose.
