Why medicine is killing our universities

The refusal of Britain's leading universities to take part in an international assessment of their performance was reported last week in the Financial Times (“Top universities snub OECD ranking”, July 2). AHELO, or the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes, hopes to discover reliable metrics that institutions can use to track their strengths and weaknesses. What is worth noting is not the isolationist position of Britain's foremost universities. What raises an eyebrow is that the report appeared in a newspaper that sees its main role as offering “unparalleled business coverage”. Moreover, the assessment is not being conducted by an educational institution (eg, UNESCO), but by an organisation concerned with policies to improve the economic wellbeing of nations. The fact is that today our world-class universities are classified as instruments of wealth creation, not institutions for knowledge, enlightenment, or cultural engagement. Universities have not only lost their purpose. They have also lost their soul. And medicine is partly to blame.