Terence Kealey

Terence Kealey is the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. Kealey writes a blog at the Centre for Policy Studies

Privatisation of Education

Kealey is a passionate defender of the University of Buckingham as a succesful private University. He argues that:

'the University of Buckingham was created specifically to protect freedom, intellectual as well as commercial. This is not a trivial issue. Only last year, the LSE accused the government inspectorate, the Quality Assurance Agency, of having "infringed academic freedom, and imposed its own bureaucratic and pedagogical agenda". Morally, the Government should indeed inspect the state universities: its money must be accountable to students and taxpayers. And, to be fair, the Government has reined in the QAA. But a university, to retain its soul, must refuse accountability to any government. The only honest answer is independence'.

Keeley argues that:

'The thinkers who have really mattered, internationally, since the war have either worked in the independent American universities or for independent American think-tanks - or they have been independent, period. So Milton Friedman, who pioneered the post-war rediscovery of markets, worked at the (independent) University of Chicago. Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, the book that launched the environmental movement, was a freelance journalist. Ronald Bailey, whose 1995 book, The True State of the Planet, triggered the anti-environmentalist reaction, works for the free market Reason Foundation. And Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, stimulated the worldwide remoulding of welfare into workfare, worked for another free-market think-tank, the Manhattan Institute.