While NUS crafts its message going forward into the 2009 fee review we need to look to our philosophical foundations of what our outlook of higher education is. Following the Leach Report, the government’s targets are based on skills. Higher education educates its students with skills which have a utility to society. We need more engineers and scientists if we are to compete in the global market place that we now inhabit. Without getting 40 per cent of the country with higher education skills we will never become the global competitor we need to be.

There is nothing wrong with gaining a skill; we need good doctors and lawyers, we need excellent vets, engineers and scientists; we need our architects and builders all to be fully qualified and doing a brilliant job. The skills-based agenda is an easy sell and, importantly, a vital sell. The fact is that we do need these jobs in order to carry on as we are. We need our roads and greener cars; we need people who can work in a nuclear reactor and those who can create new drugs.

Yet where does this leave our philosophers and poets, our historians and theologians, our musicians and artists? I have heard members of the Department for Innovations Skills and University (DIUS) [speak of] of the vital need for chemists but not playwrights. Yet the problem is that policy is being driven this way as well. The government’s outlook is that higher education is not an end in it self, rather a means to an end, the end being skills. Yet to the thousands of our students in arts and humanities, myself included, we are not gaining any practical skill set. What is our contribution to society?

The skills based agenda misses out the keystone of higher education, a founding principle of the academy. We are seeking knowledge, not for any other end than knowledge itself. The government used to recognise this by pledging itself to life-long learning, it flip-flopped on this when it cut ELQ funding, we are now seeing an attack on knowledge. Knowledge is vital, it is valuable not in its worth to society but as a thing of worth. It allows us to see beyond the frames we currently operate and change the paradigm. An agenda of knowledge will recognise that universities are not merely graduate recruitment fairs; they go beyond the career centre. There is a value to the lectures you go to and the environment you learn in, not just the two week cram at the end of the academic year to get the 2:1.

The reality may be that a skill based agenda is necessary and realistic to what the country needs but is this what we want? A vocational course is neither without knowledge nor a humanity course without skills, but is the institution there to teach a skill and nothing else or to foster a culture of knowledge beyond the given skill it is required to teach?

If knowledge is recognised as our goal, then our argument going into 2009 will be radically different than if we accept a skill-based system. It is a debate that needs to happen in every students’ union, and between every student. Until we are clear about why we go to university, we cannot be consistent in our message about how it should be funded. Skills can create the saints who help us when we are sick and allow us to travel as far as our imagination allows. Yet the thinkers who have changed our horizons time after time, who have spoken with the moral authority that has toppled governments and given millions hope, we need knowledge to create the prophets who can lead us further then we can currently imagine.

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