In a plot twist that would make even the most jaded Leicester Square script doctor wince, it has emerged that British universities, those hallowed halls of fiscal responsibility and moral rectitude, have been peddling fraudulent degree schemes to students fleeing the very real and not-at-all-academic horrors of war. The news, which landed with the grace of a half-brick through a stained-glass window, has belatedly prompted a public backlash. Apparently, there is a line, and it is drawn just past the point of selling educational snake oil to people who have already been sold the idea that the world is a kind and gentle place.
Let us be clear. The university industrial complex in this sceptred isle has long since replaced the pursuit of knowledge with the acquisition of revenue. Vice-Chancellors now resemble hedge fund managers who have misplaced their souls in the glove compartment of a leased Porsche. But to turn the trauma of displacement into a marketing opportunity? That is not just cynical. That is a species of alchemy that turns mud into dirt.
These scams, as they are being called by those who have not yet been sued for libel, promise the sun, the moon, and a guaranteed Tier 4 visa to terrified young people who have seen their homes turned to rubble. In return, they get a piece of paper that might as well be printed on toilet roll and a chasm of debt that would make Odysseus weep. The government, of course, is standing by with all the moral fibre of a damp digestive biscuit, issuing statements about 'robust quality assurance' while simultaneously slashing the budgets that might allow for any such assurance to be more than a damp squib.
But let us not point fingers solely at the suits in the Russell Group. The Home Office, that pantomime villain of British bureaucracy, has made the asylum process so Kafkaesque that a dodgy university offer begins to look like a golden ticket. Desperate people do desperate things. And it takes a particular kind of predator to exploit that desperation with a stiff upper lip and a prospectus.
What is the grand solution? More regulation, they say. More oversight. But I have seen the oversight in this country. It is a man with a clipboard who has been told to count the number of gnats in a thunderstorm. No. The solution is simpler, and thus utterly impossible. It requires empathy. It requires a system that sees a human being before it sees a revenue stream. It requires the House of Lords to be dissolved and replaced with a giant bouncy castle. I admit the last part is not strictly policy, but it would be more fun.
The backlash, such as it is, has come from the usual quarters: outraged op-eds, stern tweets from MPs with nothing better to do, and a general sense of queasiness that has settled over the nation like a bad fry-up. But will anything change? Of course not. The machine will chug on, processing the desperate into debt, until the day the last library is turned into a luxury student flat and we are all too hungry to protest. So raise a glass (of airport gin, naturally) to the British university: a proud tradition of fleecing the vulnerable since 1167.
