The Editors

Saturday 26 November at 10 a.m.Venue: Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King's College London The Research Assessment Exercise, corporate sponsorship, ‘impact’, the Browne Report, a 200 per cent increase in tuition fees, the introduction of private universities, budget cuts: we are living through a period of rapid and sweeping change in higher education. Where will the changes leave us, and what higher education come to look like? What do the changes mean for our idea of the university?

Peter Campbell, the LRB’s resident designer and art critic, who wrote more than 300 pieces for the paper since almost its very first issue and painted or designed the covers, died this afternoon. His review of Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century by Sabine Rewald will appear in the issue just gone to press.

As Wynne Godley observed in the LRB nearly twenty years ago, the current crisis in the EU, and governments' inability to deal with it, were inevitable given the terms of the Maastricht Treaty (yes, we've linked to the piece before, and may well link to it again): The incredible lacuna in the Maastricht programme is that, while it contains a blueprint for the establishment and modus operandi of an independent central bank, there is no blueprint whatever of the analogue, in Community terms, of a central government.

The company secretary of the Russell Group, Glynne Stanfield, has told Times Higher Education that 'universities could be in private hands in six months':

Mr Stanfield said private equity firms or "trade buyers" (established private higher education providers) could buy out a university in its entirety and thus gain its degree-awarding powers...

A private equity firm or trade buyer could buy a stake in a university, providing the institution with working capital in return for using its degree-awarding powers overseas, for example.

'It would not be surprising if the first resignation were to come from Liam Fox,' John Gray wrote in the LRB nearly a year ago (though he admittedly didn't have Adam Werrity in mind).