Universities in the UK are being pulled, pushed, threatened, bullied and seduced into joining what is being called a ‘national framework for education and training’. The pieces of this framework are almost all in place: the National Curriculum, the National Vocational Qualifications, definitions of so-called Core Skills - all that remains is for the universities to slide into position. Many of the éx-polytechnics are already in place (as a result of a more vocational ethos or a less defensively traditional community of scholars), which makes the abolition of the binary divide a very neat trick - resistant universities will be left out in the cold suffering a kind of identity crisis. The magic material with which this bold and brazen new edifice has been constructed is the notion of ‘competence’.