Our Vice-Chancellor

Is the name of ‘university’ subject to inflation?

This question is prompted initially by the recent growth of all kinds of providers of higher education who are taking on the name. But, more generally, the question arises out of a situation in which, as higher education becomes a larger and more diverse sector, there seems less and less sense to be found in calling so many higher education institutions by the same name.

Over the last couple of months in the northern hemisphere, students have been making their way to university in the hundreds of thousands. Cars full of possessions are driven up and down the major roads in a gigantic game of location swapping (there is a nice depiction of the process at Stanford at the end of the recent movie, “The Kids Are All Right”). We can often forget just how scary the event can be for first-time students. Their fears are nearly all about fitting in and they are no less real for being generally ill-founded.