As for the connection to the climate change scientist – I thought I had explained.

The recently died top climate change man used to sing the song (a lot) in his spare time.

I got this from the BBC Radio Four “Last Word” obiturary show – which tends to specialize in the Reds who have died that week (if a conservative gets an obituary it will because he was corrupt, or was a “moderate”, or if neither corrupt or “moderate” their “right wingness” will be presented in an unsypathetic light).

The show really is “Dead Reds” in content (if not name) – no socialist politician, scientist, cultural figure (such as an academic) can die without getting a spot on the show.

And the bigger the scumbag they were the more sympathy the show will show for them.

When Ronald Reagan studied economics at his small midwestern college (it is often forgotten that Reagan is the only President in American history to be an “economics major” as Americans say) he funded himself via his work as a life guard at a local swimming pool.

That would be impossible today – it would be joke even to try and do this (because tuition fees are so vast – due to government subsidy and regulations).

However, not so long ago some universervities (such as Rice down in Houston) charged no tuition fees at all (funding themselves via donations and via investments).

“The government will pay your tuition” sounds nice – till one understands two things.

The first being that tuition costs will EXPLODE over time under this principle.

The second being the CONTROL this gives government – not control by elected politicians even, but control by the government ADMINISTRATIVE MACHINE over supposedly “private” universities.

One of the first (perhaps the first) University in the United States to allow blacks (and women) to take degrees was Hillsdale in Michigan – founded by Free Will Babtists in the early 19th century.

Did this save it from government regualtions? Of course not.

Hillsdale faced a tidel wave of regulations – not just over race (endless paperwork and hidden distortions), but also over everthing else. And the excuse was “you accept taxpayer Dollers”.

Only by refusing “aid” (not just direct aid, but government backed student “loans” also) was some measure of independence kept.

And yes this does reflect on what is taught in a university and how it is taught.

If your primary source of income is government (in one way or another), then you will not be so interested in what private donors (for example ex students) or current students want.

They are not the ones paying you – at least not with their own money, so why should you give a toss what they want?

So collectivism (mostly Marxism with the word “Marxist” carefully removed from the Marxist doctrines and background ASSUMPTIONS) gets taught – it comes to dominate.

First the humanities and social sciences (with “critical” studies being oddly uncritical of any leftist assumptions in fields as varried as history, law and English Literature) – then off into the “hard sciences” also (with, yes, even the study of the climate being dominated by leftists who spend their free time singing 1930′s Communist Songs such as the Willie Guthrie “classic” “The times they are achanging” – I got that from the BBC Radio obituary show “Last Word” which each week gives glowing accounts of the lives of the dead leftists of that week, A. Clarke rightly calls the show “Dead Reds”).

The “long march through the institutions” is continued, as more of the “cultural superstructure” falls under the inluence of the foe.

In short – yes higher education is going to go bankrupt, and that is a good thing (given what higher eduction has become).

Now admittedly, ChemE once was more a mixture of Alchemy and Black Magic and Big Books of Tables with Here Be Dragons in the margins, but is now on a much more theoretically successful footing I hear.

As for engineering at Cambridge, I think the standard practice now is to award a BA after three years and a Master of Engineering after four years, and it being standard practice to do the four year course. I think this is likely to be less confusing to Americans (“I have a BA and a Master of Engineering”) than simply having a BA in Engineering. I think there has been a slight move in recent times for Cambridge degree titles to come more into line with the rest of the world. (The advanced law degree that used to be an LLB got renamed an LLM, although the normal law degree is still a BA, for instance).

I also agree with the folk arguing for the worthiness of two-word degrees with “Engineering” in them – although it’s fortunate that CompSci remains CompSci, since you normally need to be a little brave to ask a Civil / Electrical / etc engineer what he / she thinks of “Software Engineering”…

There is one thing great about studying mechanical engineering and holding a degree in the subject: whenever anyone asks you what you study/studied, your answer is immediately satisfactory and requires no further explanation. You’d be surprised how few people this applies to.

On the wider point, I’m currently sojourning in the arse end of nowhere in the centre of CONUS and, to keep from going insane, am taking a MSc. It turns out that, by studying with a UK university, I can get a course that pushes me to develop my skills much more than a typical US institution, at about one sixth of the cost.