Cuts Ahoy At Cap'n Mandy's Universities!

Cuts will cost British universities their international reputations British universities can look forward to hard times under the stewardship of Mandelson:

Universities are facing a new funding crisis with looming public spending cuts and intense competition from overseas, according to the man employed by the government to allocate money to higher education in England.

Sir Alan Langlands, head of the university funding council and a former chief executive of the NHS, warned that the UK risks losing its international reputation for higher education as other countries pump cash into universities to try to train people out of the recession.

It comes after research by the lecturer's union this week suggested that universities are already making widespread job cuts in anticipation of a decrease in public funding. In the last year 1,318 academics have been laid off and a further 5,097 are threatened, it found. Cardiff University has lost 50 jobs, City 65 and Salford 150 through voluntary and compulsory redundancies.

Again, it's good to see the British government coming up with positive solutions, particularly when it relates to the possibility of raising cash:

Mandelson, the business secretary who is also responsible for universities, has launched a new plan for universities which suggests that funding would be increasingly skewed in favour of science and technology subjects. That has already been happening in some areas over the past year meaning that many arts and humanities areas have suffered. There has been a series of high profile closures of language departments in universities.

Mandelson, mind you, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, so maybe getting rid of all this airy-fairy humanities stuff would be a good idea after all.