So has John Denham done enough to recover from his retro moment with a Sunday Times journalist who reported that the universities secretary might have a yearning to resurrect polytechnics in his future framework for higher education?
The answer has to be yes, judging by his speech to a Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (Dius) consultative conference yesterday.
This is probably just as well. NUS presidents are too young these days to remember polytechnics, but are unlikely to thank ministers for consigning future generations of students to a gulf of resources and reputation that such a recreation of the binary divide would undoubtedly create.
But one has to wonder what half-baked ideas about former polytechnics are swirling around Dius for such an idea even to see the light of day. Perhaps Denham would be better served by talking to communities and the local government minister Sadiq Khan (an alumnus of North London polytechnic), the attorney general Baroness Scotland (Thames Valley) – or even the likes of Sir Michael Lyons, chair of the BBC Trust and one of thousands of public figures with postgraduate qualifications from a former polytechnic, in this case Middlesex.
Denham would soon appreciate that the polytechnics never were principally about adult learning or so-called 'vocational' qualifications. The Tories worked this out in 1992, realised that these institutions were delivering more undergraduate degrees than the older universities, had good track records in research and postgraduate study and more than deserved to be liberated from local authority control and granted university title.
This is why those lobbying to recreate polytechnics and to distinguish between vocational and other degrees need, like the secretary of state, to get over it. It's not the future of higher education for students or employers, and it would do real damage to the international partnerships that modern universities have done so much to promote with such a myriad of benefits for the UK.
• Pam Tatlow is chief executive of the university thinktank Million+
