According to the BBC, Hefce, the acronym of the body that funds higher education, has banned the psychology department at Kingston University from its national survey of student opinion about their courses. Academics were found to have exerted pressure on the students to give positive ratings about their 'modules', in line with what the university administration called 'reputation management'. Students were told that if Kingston slid in this league table, employers would regard their degrees as worthless. So why not bump a 4 up to a 5? Having watched examiners' meetings where through mysterious forces every dullard gets a better sort of coconut at the end of a long day, I suspect that corruption of this sort is rife in British universities. Whether any future government will do anything about it is another matter since like the disability benefits scam, the expansion of higher education was another way of concealing unemployment. It has always perplexed me that whereas even major businesses come and go, not a single university in this country has ever undergone the same fate.