ABSTRACT
People all know that chance plays its hand when it comes to things like how well seminars, or lectures, or parties etc. run but nonetheless we seem reluctant to admit commonsense, preferring instead to seek explanations in mysterious alternative qualities such as intelligence. Alison, Kalam, and the rest of the seminar group may well come to measure their own academic worth by the marks they receive for their essays, projects, dissertations, and finally by their overall degree classification, by the currency of academic comparison. The spectators applaud his skill at seeming clumsy, but what they applaud is not some hidden performance executed "in his head". It is his visible performance that they admire, but they admire it not for being an effect of any hidden internal causes but for being an exercise of a skill. Profound changes to university funding and to the ethos of higher education are not subjects which academics should treat dispassionately.
