Well, what a surprise. The implicit threat in the great top-up fees furore has now emerged into the daylight as an all-singing, all-dancing, no-holds-barred gun to the head. As the Telegraph reports:

'Elite universities will be fined up to £500,000 and prevented from charging higher tuition fees if they do not do more to "secure a broadly based intake of students", Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, said yesterday. He published details of the powers given to the Office for Fair Access (Offa) to force universities to attract more applications from prospective students who are at present "under-represented".They include those from the three lower social classes, from state schools and colleges, from poor performing schools, from "low participation neighbourhoods", from some ethnic minorities and those with children or "eldercare" responsibilities or who have a disability.'

In other words, the universities are to be blackmailed into discriminating against bright pupils on account of their social background, in order to shoehorn into their places pupils who happen to come from the right side of the tracks -- that is, poor schools in every sense of the word, along with others deemed worthy of such preferential treatment.

Thus the core principles of equal access and meritocracy which underpin both education and a fair society are destroyed. Thus, the fight to improve lousy schools so that poor, bright children stand a better chance of getting to good universities on merit is utterly undermined.

The universities were warned that this would be the price of the tainted government money for which they grovelled on their knees. They dismissed such concerns, saying that if there were any real threat to academic freedom then of course they would press the nuclear button and declare independence. Given the utter spinelessness they have shown so far, in conniving at the progressive dismemberment of academic standards and the increase in government control, I would say the chances of their taking a stand against being turned into fully-fledged state apparatchiks of social engineering are nil.