If we're going to have two-year degrees, leave them to revived polytechnics

Simon Jenkins says universities should switch to two year degrees and give up research. I disagree

For once there is something in an article by Simon Jenkins with which I agree. He wrote that "Britain's wiping out of polytechnics in the 1990s and the subsequent suppression of 16-plus technical education was a disaster ... It left industry bereft of trained skills and work ethic, and reliant on foreign migrants." Leaving aside the negative connotations of that last clause, I concur that lumping polytechnics and (pre-1992) universities together as all the same is unhelpful. They do not all have, or wish to have, indistinguishable missions and student populations, and thinking of the sector like that has been not only unconstructive but damaging.

Despite his comment, Jenkins proceeds to treat the university sector as a homogeneous collection of institutions, attacking them all as "bastions of privilege", a description that will incense vice chancellors and their staff. As a PPE graduate of Oxford, he has experience of a particular period of history and a particular course of study from which he has made general extrapolations that don't stand up to scrutiny.