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Frank Furedi highlights the difficulty of challenging students intellectually. This problem will grow as younger colleagues are initiated into the Quality Assurance Agency-led culture of reductionist "learning outcomes" and box-ticking benchmarks.

The QAA is an unaccountable professional priesthood, the philosophy of which (in the words of the chair of one of its benchmarking groups) "trivialises and compartmentalises intellectual activity".

David Packham
Materials Research Centre
University of Bath