The UK university system keeps changing as the current government seeks to open it up to competition, that chimera. My concern is with the idea that university education should always be about "giving students the skills they need for a good job in the marketplace". Sure, college skills are always going to be important for gainful employ, but some things are goods in themselves, not least, knowledge.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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I am so glad that I went to university when I did. I received a first class education (with one on one tutorials!) and it didn't cost me a copper penny. I feel really sorry for kids like my nephew and niece who are going up to university in the next couple of years and will probably be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives.
Best wishes from Simon