For free universities

Abstract

This article is a shortened version of an inaugural professorial lecture given at the University of Greenwich on 19 January 2005 as an intervention in the debate at that time within that university and other English further and higher education institutions over the appropriate level of fees to charge in 2006. It anticipates the likely effects upon FE and HE and the relations between them of the rise in fees in both sectors and is set in the context of contemporary historical changes to distinguish new divisions of knowledge and skill, information and competence in the labour market and the wider society. Instead of the partial curricular reform that was proposed by the Tomlinson Report on 14–19 qualifications and its extension to HE as a way of overcoming these divisions, free public universities and colleges are advocated as the best means of maintaining the best traditions of further and higher learning.