Simon Marginson

What are we to do about education? Few other human enterprises are discussed more often – family, money, sex, and politics, perhaps – but the practice of education never comes close to satisfying us.

Travellers who go to Beijing usually visit the Great Wall. Along the way the government tour operators often take them to the Ming tombs, the final resting place of thirteen of the sixteen emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), three of which are now open to the public. The underground mausoleums have been cleared of all the grave goods and works of art that were set there to accompany the dead.

On February 19 this year, Francis Fukuyama jumped ship. In the course of an essay in the New York Times on the failings of the American strategy to ‘democratise’ the Middle East, he declared that, ‘I have numerous affiliations with different strands of the neo-conservative movement’, but ‘neo-conservatism, both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support’. The neo-conservative project, he stated, has become self-contradictory. Though the Bush administration retains an evolutionistic scepticism about the limits of social engineering in domestic matters, it feels no such restraint in foreign policy, where its faith in the transformational uses of American power and in the exceptionalism of American virtue has overcome traditional doubts about the malleability of humanity.