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From the Observer, last Sunday:

We will soon have no world-class universities left in this country. Oxford and Cambridge struggle to retain a position among the top 10; I expect that they will soon drop out through the bottom. It is easy to assume that better government resourcing would make all the difference, but the problem is not wholly, or even perhaps mainly, financial.

This is, in the broadest sense, political: a matter of ideology or ideals. Certainly, the criteria for judging a university to be world-class are narrow - roughly, how many Nobel Prize winners it can claim as its own - but no university is likely to achieve this status unless its educational as well as its research reputation is high. There are exceptions, but in general, it is dangerous to separate research from teaching, if only because research and teaching alike flourish in an environment in which science, scholarship and the arts are valued as intrinsic goods and where it is assumed that, within the institution, new and perhaps revolutionary ideas are being pursued.

But as things are, because funding follows research output, heads of department, especially in the sciences, discourage young researchers from teaching undergraduates, which is thought to be a waste of their valuable time. This means that in Oxford and Cambridge, it is difficult to persuade young scientists to become fellows of colleges, with administrative and teaching duties. Undergraduates suffer and, without a body of undergraduates inspired to pursue their studies further, gradually the quality of the research itself will decline.

Thanks reader HH Chung for the heads-up.

Meanwhile, Rosmah Mansor, the wife of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, was installed Monday night as the first chancellor of Universiti Industri Selangor (Unisel).