Professor Steve Smith, president of the umbrella group Universities UK, says the cuts cannot be considered good news, though he appreciates Hefce's efforts to protect core university funding.
To maintain high-quality teacher training we need a better mix of core university and school direct places, and a more effective way of allocating funding for training.
There's a difficult tension between recognising public engagement as a core university activity, and allowing the 'goodwill' and 'voluntarism' of earlier public engagement activities to flourish.
Letters from the universities secretary, John Denham, to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) confirm that savings should be made in administration costs, rather than the core university business of teaching and research.
Firstly, diversifying income streams beyond the well understood core university activities of teaching students and winning research grants is still relatively new territory for many institutions; and it's clearly important to gain a good understanding of potential customers.
This article provides detailed estimates of the economic impact on the U.S. national economy of one core university activity – licensing of university inventions to industry.
Yet, Georgetown has generally done the opposite, promising free speech as a core university value.
With core allocation, universities know how many students they are likely to have and can plan staffing accordingly.
Karl Benson, the WAC commissioner since 1994, said the recent defections "hurt" more than when the core eight universities of his sprawling 16-team league defected to start the Mountain West.
It is at the very core of universities' modus operandi to have one arm working at the optimal dissemination of the best of our present knowledge while the other works equally hard on replacing this knowledge with something even better.
