Quote(s) of the day, yay!

'Dressed up in a benign rhetoric of egalitarian progressiveness (now everyone can be educated – and in debt!), the blithe snobbery of the government’s position can be sampled by glancing at an article by Michael Gove, now Education Secretary, from 2003: “Anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of that debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place.” The arrogance and privilege of this statement beggars belief. It is utterly obscene that a post-war generation who enjoyed free education as a democratic right can now, while in government (as a result of that free higher education), condemn future generations to a lifetime of liability.'

- Claire Bishop, Con-Demmed to the Bleakest of Futures: Report from the UK in e-flux journal #22

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'What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. … there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.'

- Terry Eagleton, The death of universities in The Guardian, 17 December 2010