Does globalisation stink?

The older you get the more easy it is to predict the future that you will not see. When you are young it seems that things have always been as you find them. After you have lived over, say, half a century you witness very great changes. There is nothing very new about the pace of change though the management consultants might tell you otherwise. Dr Grumble's grandmother lived to the age of 96. As a young women she used to go about in a pony and trap. Decades before she died men landed on the moon.

One of the things that Grumble predicted though he failed to mention on the blog is that the wealthy would soon be able to buy places at university. There were a number of things that suggested that this would happen. Universities are now run like private companies. They are contract research organisations rather than academic institutions. The teaching they do has gone the same way. The student will pay and somehow recover the cost of the fees later. The management consultants say that this will improve teaching because the students will demand it. They might be right as students are, in some ways, already more demanding than they once were. We shall see.

Of course all this talk of students demanding higher standards which will benefit them and get them better teaching is really an attempt to justify the global university market. Chinese students will want to come to Britain for their education and we must prevent them going to other English-speaking nations. That's today's management mantra. You can see where they are coming from. Only last week Dr Grumble's Oxbridge college wrote to him to explain that they are running out of money as government funding has been cut back. They want Grumble to help out. Their position is unsustainable.

They didn't say so in the letter but there is an obvious light on the horizon. What Chinese youngster would not like to spend a few years in Oxford or Cambridge? Many could now easily pay for the privilege. They could just sell places to the highest bidder and their problems would be over.

This is one of the things that Grumble has been predicting. It really is inevitable. There is one more inevitable thing that Grumble has been predicting which follows from this. If wealthy foreigners can buy themselves a place at Oxbridge, why shouldn't wealthy Britons? Which is why Grumble is not at all surprised by today's news.

Many years ago Grumble got caught in a traffic jam with one of his scientific colleagues who was then, perhaps, in his 50s. He looked out of the window at the cars and said, "Thank goodness I will be dead soon." Dr Grumble though it was a joke and laughed heartily. Now he is not so sure.