All of which should help to propel Brunel up the league table – maybe even to within spitting distance of Bath.. In the old days the words “university” and “management” were rarely mentioned in the same breath. But, today, with the new emphasis on universities as businesses and the importance of higher education to the global economy, university administrators are thought to be in need of some training in management. That is why a new two-year programme has been launched this year at the Institute of Education, London University, for high-flyers in university administration.

The first MBA in higher education management, it aims to nurture the vice chancellors of the future to ensure that universities are well-run institutions and that those in charge are abreast of the latest thinking in a ferociously competitive marketplace. We need people who will talk to one another about how you manage.” It is envisaged that the new MBA will work rather like a staff college There are 24 in the first group. The same number will be enrolled next year so that at any one time 48 middle managers will be going through the course.Based broadly on the Warwick MBA, the programme contains six modules, which are being studied over six individual weeks, three in the first year and three in the second year. The content includes compulsory courses in strategy, finance, the management of teaching and research and marketing.

In addition, there are some optional courses in such things as new technology and academic freedom.The first group contained ambitious young people from universities around the UK as well as William Locke, a policy adviser at Universities UK, the umbrella body for higher education. One of the best things about it, according to Mr Locke, was the feeling that he would be part of a network of university administrators trained in management.”It’s been very stimulating,” said Gail Turner, planning officer at Royal Holloway London. “It’s given us time to stop and reflect on what other people do.”Two-thirds of the students are women, and the MBA costs £5,250 over two years. When in 1974 Alex Eadie MP, a former senior official for the Scottish Region in the National Union of Mineworkers, was appointed by Harold Wilson as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy with responsibility for the coal industry, he was warmly congratulated by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Lord-Lieutenant of Midlothian: “Do you realise, Alex, that you are the first Minister of the Crown Midlothian has sent to the House of Commons since Mr Gladstone?”
No man was more steeped than Clerk in his county’s history. Eadie, Member of Parliament for Midlothian from 1966 to 1992, remembers the patrician Clerk as a most friendly Lord-Lieutenant (from 1972 to 1992) carrying out many unsung duties, and consequently being hugely popular in a predominantly mining and working-class community.The present Queen’s representative in Midlothian, George Burnet, endorses the view that Clerk did not spare himself in his duties; that he knew how to arrange things and that he was excellent on Midlothian’s royal occasions. As a Lothians MP for 40 years, I know at first hand the amount of untrumpeted good that Clerk did.