CITY AND SUBURBAN
Sir Ron can't solve the riddle of the funds, so send for his smarter brother
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It is not widely known that Sir Ron Dear- ing, the panjandrum, has a smarter brother, Norman. Their relationship resembles that between Sherlock Holmes and his reclusive brother, Mycroft, who could solve a case without leaving his club. So some of Sir Ron's solutions to questions of public poli- cy are really down to Norman, or as his few intimates call him, 'N' Dearing. In their lat- est case, though, something seems to have gone wrong. Sir Ron was asked to bring his deerstalker and magnifying glass to the unsolved riddle of university funding. The report put out in his name recommends that students should pay £1,000 a year to go to university — but when this idea was put up to N Dearing, he demolished it. I have had the advantage of reading his draft. This flat-rate charge, N said, would rightly be seen as a tax levied by government, with the universities left to do the dirty work of tax collection. What was needed instead was a price to be charged for admission. The price — or prices, rather —would be set by universities and colleges in accordance with what the traffic would bear. So media stud- ies at some bumped-up polytechnic would be cheaper than a place at . . . (The text here is garbled, but confirms that N is a Balliol man.) Higher prices would finance eleemosynary funds for poorer students. The market would work, the consumers would have choice, and the dons would be kept on their toes. Today's system of pay- ment is geared to research and publication, however pointless they may be. At this very moment, some reader in media studies must be working up a thesis on compara- tive spectatorology, with an appendix on Jeffrey Bernard's state of health. She is welcome, but N's plan would put a premi- um on teaching.
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