Youthful charm and energy narrowly won out over statesmanlike experience when the Dragons' Den came to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) yesterday.
As one of five "contestants" trying to sell their ideas for investment to an audience of sceptical vice-chancellors, Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students, got a much friendlier reception than the one she endured at her national conference in Blackpool the week before when her reform plans were narrowly defeated amidst uproar.
It seems compared to student representatives VCs are pussycats - or at least a lot more polite - and they warmed to her scheme for a pilot project to tap into the student voice.
Was it the price - a mere £60,000 - that clinched it for Ms Tumelty when the audience pressed the voting buttons on their palm-held devices? After all the university audience had just listened to David Eastwood, chief executive of Hefce, outline the prospects for the next few years, a message that could have been summed up as "bad times are just around the corner".
Or was it her shrewd promise that her scheme would boost their scores in the National Student Survey?
Lord Dearing ran her close though, with an impressively youthful display of energy and passion himself, as he put out a begging bowl for £50m to improve students' communication skills and turn them into entrepreneurs. Humanities and traditional subjects could do this just as well as vocational ones, he said, rounding fiercely on Michael Brown, VC of Liverpool John Moores, when he suggested this was being done already. His 23% of the vote was just behind Ms Tumelty's 29%.
Also on 23% was Ann Finlayson, of the Sustainable Development Commission, with her plea for action research to get students involved in the struggle for sustainability. She proposed an "action competence certificate" for every student to recognise the work they would do in the community or schools. A brilliant idea, commented David Green, VC of Worcester, but let's have a better name.
Sir Martin Harris proposed to have dedicated staff and remunerated students working in schools to raise aspirations and tackle the social divide in education, which seems to have got worse over the past 50 years. Schools do have dedicated staff raising aspirations and promoting higher education - they're called teachers, as Ralph Seymour-Jackson, of the Student Loans Company, remarked acidly.
Perhaps curiously, the proposal for a VC-led inquiry into university boards (aka councils) put forward by Patrick Dunne, communications director of 3i group, didn't get more backing. As things get tougher you're going to need good boards to help you run your universities, he told them. Were they just confident that they have good boards already? Or is that more active governors will be exerting uncomfortable pressure to keep them on their toes? Perish the thought.
Click here for the Hefce conference blog
