There’s a debate raging at the moment, and its one sparked by the pre-eminence of the American Ivy league in the international university stakes. MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for those who don’t know) in Cambridge, Boston, is a renowned world leader in science and technology research and teaching. So much so that over here in Europe we are apparently feeling the pinch.

In an attempt to keep up with such lofty institutions there is a proposal by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission to create a ‘European MIT’ in an effort to “act as a pole of attraction for the very best minds, ideas and companies from around the world”.

All this sounds very nice, although the Vice-Chancellors aren’t too impressed by the idea (no surprise there then) citing duplication of existing partnerships in an effort to stave off this latest challenge to their own best interests.

However, the real subtext here is the spending gap between Europe and the US, and Japan (and increasingly China and India) on research and development, namely, you guessed it, were falling behind and the European MIT is one proposed attempt to close the gap.

You see we really do now live in a globalsied world and the competition between nations for those prized foriegn students is ever more keen. Furthermore, if we continue on the present course of reducing the student spend per head here in blightie, we can only ever fall further behind the likes of the Ivy League.

Like it or not but they set the bar regards academic excellence and research endeavour, and we in Europe are trying to keep up!