Well, that was interesting.

One enormous placard read, “We are not your slaves!” An odd sentiment, really, from people so engorged with entitlement they assume an almost aristocratic right to other people’s labour and other people’s earnings. A more honest placard might have read, “You will pay for things I want or I’ll smash up your stuff.” But that would sound like extortion more than slavery.

And Tim steers us to The Englishman, who offers a handy summary of the higher education funding debate: 

The Question, Punk, Is Do You Think Your Course Is Worth £9000?
? 
If you answer no then there isn’t a problem. Do something else.
If you answer yes there isn’t one either. Grow up, invest in your future.

Update, via the comments:

It’s strange how the protestors are somehow missing the larger issue. The higher education bubble appears unsustainable. This has quite a lot of bearing on assumptions of inter-generational subsidy. For instance, the average lifetime financial return on an arts degree is estimated at around £30,000. Set against the cost of courses, accommodation and lost earnings during the period of study, the net result is most likely a reduction in lifetime earnings. In short, there’s no longer a return for the taxpayer and little economic incentive for inter-generational subsidy.

Students first aimed their indignation at Conservative Party offices, to loud and destructive effect. A predictable gesture, certainly, but one that misses a much more pertinent target. The current bubble was inflated largely under New Labour and largely by people sympathetic to the left, with widespread grade inflation, an implausible doubling of first class degrees, insubstantial or disreputable courses, including football studies and pole dancing research, and an arbitrary target of 50% of young people in higher education, supposedly in the name of fairness. Taken together, these factors have had a huge impact on whether higher education is economically sustainable in its current form. The bizarre belief in “degrees for (almost) everyone” comes at a high and unprecedented price. Loans and higher fees follow from that egalitarian conceit. Subsidies and maintenance grants for 2% or 5% is one thing; for 20% or 50% it’s something else entirely.

Some view “free” higher education as an entitlement warranting violence. But who’s going to pay for this “free” service when its value is increasingly called into question, not least by employers, many of whom point to dramatically lowered standards and ill-prepared graduates? One complaint we hear is that many students will be left with large debt (or theoretical debt) and limited prospects of a suitable job. But if so, doesn’t that call into question the value of what’s being demanded? In the UK there are currently around 20,000 students of fine art, 10,000 philosophy students and 27,000 enthusiasts of media studies. But is there a corresponding economic need? If the investment of time, effort and (other people’s) money doesn’t pay off with a lucrative and fascinating career in the private sector, and a return via taxation, then how is the process justified in its present form?

You’d think of spot of protest would be aimed at the egalitarians who devalued the investment and made it all but unworkable.

Kim Jong-Il looking at things. Includes Kim Jong-Il looks at wall and Kim Jong-Il peers through hatch. // The lifecycle of bureaucracy. // Kubrick’s ‘elevator-of-blood’ redone with CG. // Inception heist in real time. // Quote of note. // How crayons are made. // “Wisconsin man builds own planetarium.” // Building a terrarium. // Build your own Egg-Bot. // Edible gingerbread playhouse. // Yes, those Jews control everything, even sharks. // It’s a spoon, it’s a fork, it’s a metric wrench. // Mining sulphur. // There are bodies on Mount Everest. (h/t, MeFi) // Hundreds of Mad magazine covers. // They grow up so fast. // Paths of Flight.

Photographed by Andrew Zuckerman. One of these. Via.

Anna steers us to this.

The Guardian’s caption reads, “A demonstrator holds her arms up during a protest at the Tate Britain.” Though readers may wish to devise captions of their own. For those who missed yesterday’s, um, spectacle, art students “invaded” Tate Britain and organised a series of life drawing classes to protest against proposed cuts to arts budgets:

Supporters of the protest handed out leaflets outside the building warning that higher fees could lead to empty art schools.

A Guardian reader adds,

A brilliant, well executed and peaceful protest from students who are angry at the blatant betrayal and abandonment of the arts.

Yes, trembling readers, artists are angry.

As angry as they were five months ago when protesting against BP’s sponsorship of the arts, estimated at around half a million pounds:  

BP’s money is tainted and it is hard to see how the company’s reputation won’t have a long-term impact on those who accept it.

That was dirty money, see? Given voluntarily, unlike taxpayer subsidy, but still, dirty, dirty, dirty. Among those protesting at this insult to moral hygiene was John Jordan, an “artist and activist” and co-editor of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, an anarchist guidebook to “direct action” and a “collision of subjectivities… charged with inspiration.”

In his Guardian column, Mr Jordan wrote,

Art acts as a great detergent, and being involved with a gallery enables the company to host glitzy events at which it can foster vital relationships with ministers, journalists and foreign dignitaries…

The fiends. Just as being involved with a gallery enables anti-capitalist poseurs a chance to sound important and foster vital relationships with taxpayers’ money.

And worse,

Corporate sponsorship creates an insidious climate of self-censorship that keeps art trapped in the disease of representation: a tool for preserving the status quo rather than showing us how to live differently.

Clearly, recidivist anti-capitalists showing us how to live deserve better than this. They deserve more public subsidy. It’s vital work. Art institutions must not take donations from companies of which some artists may disapprove. That would be wicked, insidious and a cause of artistic disease. Instead, those institutions should encourage the state to take money from the taxpayer, forcibly, and give it to artists and projects of which the taxpayer may disapprove. That would be virtuous and clean, apparently.

Megan McArdle suspects Julian Assange is unwell.

[Assange says,] “In a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

Ah. This must be why WikiLeaks has been getting so much material from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, and why internal documents from Cargill are currently dominating their traffic. Ooops! That was a flash from an alternative universe where what Assange is saying isn’t nonsense. In the real world, he got a bunch of government documents because the US, in its addlepated, well-meaning way, dumped all of them on a network open to 3 million people where they could be seen by a disaffected 23-year old stupid enough to either believe he could get away with this, or not understand how long the years in jail might be.

Theodore Dalrymple on what’s wrong with WikiLeaks.

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness.

And Tim Blair notes the vanities and secrets of the WikiLeaks mouthpiece.

[Assange] says that WikiLeaks has “changed two governments, taken the scalp of a prime minister, taken the scalp of a defence minister and [achieved] many other reforms.” Assange doesn’t identify the governments or the two ministers. Perhaps he’s talking about the 2007 election in Kenya, which Assange claims to have influenced by leaking a secret report. Then followed months of deadly violence, with which Assange seems oddly comfortable: “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya.” So another 1,300 corpses won’t matter much. Tipping an already-volatile African nation into further mayhem might be Assange’s greatest achievement to date.

Update:

Christopher Hitchens weighs in.

The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda… All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.

As usual, feel free to add your own.