In spite of the European Union’s current prattle about becoming the most competitive “knowledge economy” on the planet, only Cambridge and Oxford are still among Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s global top twenty. If ministers and bureaucrats managing British education have their way, the twain will soon slip further down the list, too. Given the plight of European universities, your enthusiasm about a few fresh attempts to bolster their competitiveness is somewhat amusing (“Under Threat of Change,” June 7, 2008). Most of the Union’s universities are part and parcel of the pervasive “welfare economy,” and that is where they are likely to stay for many more years. They will do their best to keep the unemployable youth off the labor market, and there are many more useless master and doctoral degrees to add to the youth’s bulging references, but that is about all we can expect in the future. For the first step in the direction of true knowledge economy is wholesale privatization of the university system, something few ministers and bureaucrats dare even dream about. As it appears, even you have abandoned that wholesome dream.