The question “Is the University of London relevant?” has raised its head more times than I can remember during my university career, which started in 2001. The University is an odd, lumbering beast, with individual colleges and institutes of vastly different sizes, subject areas and reputations. The Central School of Speech and Drama has fewer than a thousand students, UCL over twenty times that many, and SOAS falls somewhere in between with around 4,500. It is for this reason that there is no simple answer to the question.

 For the big colleges, the likes of UCL, King’s and LSE, the central university seems of little relevance at all. All have strong national and international reputations. They have the resources to provide and fund social activities for their students, which they can permit students from elsewhere to use. There is less need for a central university to help with collaborations, as they work with the best researchers and win large amounts of funding. The extra affiliation also dilutes their brands and reputation – try and find a reference to UL on the front page of the King’s or UCL websites. LSE only mentions it in legal blurb at the bottom of the page!

 Birkbeck, Queen Mary and Royal Holloway are in a similar position, but still proudly display the University of London name. They are not quite ready to rely just on their own reputation, but as they climb the league tables and swell their numbers, the University of London will disappear from their advertising too.

 This leaves the University relevant only to the smaller, lesser-known colleges, who include the University of London name in everything they do. For these specialist colleges a federal university makes perfect sense: greater bargaining power, pooled advertising, common facilities, central administration and an opportunity to be associated with institutions whose national and international identities are far more prominent. Yet these colleges also look set to disappear. The desire in government to see consolidation within the sector will be what breaks the University. As colleges grow larger, their need for the central university becomes smaller and so it loses its relevance – smaller colleges, such as St George’s, can shelter under the wing of large ones such as Royal Holloway.

 The real doom-mongers have been talking of the demise of the University for at least a decade, yet it has survived. The question is, can it continue to do so? In its current form, with both very large and very small colleges, it’s hard to see how it can. The large ones don’t really need it, especially as they grow in size. The small ones do need it, but are merging or being encouraged to merge. All the while, UL has lurched from one funding problem to another, doing a good impression of being a basket case at the same time.

 If it wants to survive, it should get rid of the big boys and focus on the small, specialist institutions with the most to gain from a common pool of resources. Their students benefit most from the shared facilities and they tend not to compete with each other for students or research money. Where is the sense in having a university where the constituent parts fight each other?

 The process would be painful, particularly without the money from the big institutions to prop it up. But a leaner, meaner University of London would let the large colleges focus on their own affairs, while setting UL apart as the leading provider of specialist education in the country.

What to do with ULU is another matter – how about a fully inclusive London-wide union, where people actually vote in elections?

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