It's quite difficult to know at this stage - mid 2004 - what is going to happen to 'Tertiary Education'. There are clearly moves to blur the distinction between Further and Higher education.

If we're thinking about those latter day Joan Bakewells, bright working class girls trying for university... I've suggested - to some consternation from some University Vice Chancellors - that far from offering these girls the escape into Germaine Greerhood that they seem to think is what the market wants, the pendulum will swing back.

I'm very much of the opinion that a woman's primary goal in life is to get herself a dose of the most impressive bloke she can get her hands on but NOT to end up as his housekeeper.

I've suggested that the Bakewell generation now have daughters of their own and they may say to those daughters: I love you dearly and I wouldn't have been without you for the world but if I could 'ave got a dose of that Professor or Olympic rower.... Go to university by all means meet interesting people - you're not in the armed forces so you don't have to kill them, cop a dose, come away from university with more than some poxy bit of laminated paper...

That means a swing back to universities employing men...

The above refers to the 'joke' Join the Armed Forces, Travel the World, Meet Interesting New People , and kill them.

I've quite seriously suggested that universities could offer special masters degrees to any student who could prove their baby's father was a member of faculty.

Irecognise that this has shades of the parentage of the red head in ABBA but I don't think that an idea has to be discarded simply because it has been associated with a discredited regieme.