Corey K Katir on Cities, Colleges and Political Figures

MY PRINT column this week reports on William Hague's recent visit to south-east Asia and what it reveals about the Foreign Secretary's vision for British foreign policy. The essence of British diplomacy Hague-style, I suggest, can be summed up in a phrase I watched him utter in a crowded lecture theatre in Hanoi: friendliness mixed with self-interest.

You can add to that Mr Hague's hunch that all diplomacy, deep down, is bilateral, and his insistence that Britain needs to "get over" its neuroses about post-imperial decline or its sometimes tetchy relations with Europe, and instead focus on selling its best assets (he cites things such as Britain's armed forces, her universities, civil servants and service industries).

The end result, I conclude, is that Mr Hague is making a bet that Britain will mostly have to look after herself in the next phase of globalisation. He may be right, but if he is to win that bet, Britain will have to ensure that it really does have world-class services, products and capabilities to sell. That will involve unprecedented effort and hard work. Are we British ready to work that hard? I hope so, but I am not sure.

Here is the column.

BLUSHING lightly, the Vietnamese undergraduate had a question for William Hague. Britainas foreign secretary was in Hanoi, on the first leg of a tour of South-East Asia between April 24th and 27th, and had just made a pitch for local students to continue their education in Britain.

An unabashed salesman, Mr Hague reeled off impressive facts. His Oxford college was founded in 1458. One-quarter of the worldas 20 leading universities are still British. There are 7,000 Vietnamese students in Britain now, and more are eagerly sought. It was then that a student shyly stood and asked: why?

Mr Hague offered a disarmingly honest reply. Itas a mixture of friendliness and self-interest, he said: most good things in the world are based on a mixture of those two things. It was quite a British thing to say to a foreigner: candid, self-deprecating and with just a hint of coldness to it, despite being delivered in Mr Hagueas warm, Yorkshire-accented baritone. It was also a helpful summary of the foreign secretaryas vision for British diplomacy.

A decade ago Mr Hague was not much known for diplomacy of any sort. Chosen while in his 30s to lead the Conservative Party in opposition to Tony Blair, he fought (and badly lost) the 2001 general election wrapped in the flag, vowing to resist European integration and curb immigration. Today he is one of the coalition governmentas big beasts. In an underpowered cabinet, he stands out for command of his brief, for staying calm in a crisis, and for having a clear idea of what he wants to do in government.

Some years ago, Mr Hague says, it was predicted that the world would evolve into a series of fixed blocks. The only telephone numbers needed for diplomacy would be in Washington, Brussels and Beijing. That has been proved wrong: the world has never looked more multipolar and networked. He is duly expanding Britainas diplomatic footprint for the first time in years, opening posts in Latin America, Africa and Asia, placing a renewed emphasis on language-learning and deploying 140 extra staff to Asia, some 60 of them in China alone.

Diplomats have been told to focus on three objectives: defending national security, looking after British citizens abroad andaabove allaboosting prosperity by promoting British business. If Britain moves quickly, it can be the first European country to spot the vital need for long-haul, bilateral diplomacy, Mr Hague suggests. Even so, it will be only just in time.

The commercial push can be felt everywhere. At Britainas embassy in Vietnam, the trade and investment job (once a bit of a backwater) is held by a high-flyer trained in Arabic politics, who proudly reports on work with a Midlands manufacturer of incinerators for animal carcasses. Across South-East Asia, Britain employs 20 expatriate and local officials to work on climate change: more than any other European government. The environmental focus began under Labour. But now officials also worry about how Britain might profit from their work (there is talk of selling British weather-forecasting kit to typhoon-lashed Asian nations).

Britain goes it alone

All this effort is as much a gamble as a plan. Britain can decide to strengthen bilateral ties with the world, but the world must see a matching interest in a far-off land of just 60m people. Nor does Britain lack for competition in fast-growing markets. In much of the world, even friendly British visitors arrive freighted with colonial baggage. These are hard problems. Mr Hagueas solution involves briskness, both personal and in his political analysis.

He moves quickly, with minimal kerfuffle. Landing at Hanoi on a commercial flight, his small delegation canters through the airport unnoticed by milling passengers. Shaven-headed and crisply suited, Mr Hague could be an American executive, were it not for his ministerial red box and cufflinks bearing maps of Britain in blue and silver. A fast evening drive (police sirens, flags flapping on the ambassadorial car bonnet, families glimpsed eating supper in open shopfronts, a local tycoonas Bentley hemmed in by mopeds) takes him to a meeting with British businessmen. With Europe facing years of austerity, countries like this offer our only source of growth, Mr Hague says to them. Tell me issues you want raised with Vietnamese officials. Information gathered, he heads for his hotel. He has been in the country about two hours.

His analysis of Britainas place in the world is equally brisk. Britain is no longer a superpower? Get over it, he saysaat the age of 51, his is the first generation that cannot remember the empire in its pomp. Britain is not loved by every European nation? Stop worrying about itathough he argues for continued EU membership, hailing the value of the single market and a united European front on trade, diplomatic sanctions and the like.

Britain is a smaller power than before. More interestingly to Mr Hague, it remains a serious power that is good at some hard things. Among other assets, he cites Britainas armed forces, its counter-terrorism know-how, universities, legal and financial firms, civil service andain a rebuke to nativists in his own partyaits commitment to overseas aid and fighting climate change.

Yet no salesman succeeds without the right product. Britain needs to watch the quality of its education, comes a warning from Vietnam: some students return from Britain with good degrees but rudimentary English. Graduates with American degrees are seen as more dynamic, says a financier in Singapore. Britain is respected and can plausibly play a role in Asia, says a think-tank boss, but the British must really want it.

Do the British really want it? Mr Hagueas strategy is, in essence, a bet that Britain must rely mostly on herself in the next round of globalisation, buttressed by efforts to show voters at home that engagement with the world profits the country. That is a brave bet. To win, the British will have to work harder than ever.

CHARLOTTE Leslie, the thoughtful new Conservative MP for Bristol North West, makes an interesting suggestion in today's Daily Telegraph. Given that improving the quality of teachers is a big part of the vital task of improving British state education, and given that professions such as medicine have no trouble attracting high-quality recruits, might there be useful lessons for the educational establishment to learn from the professional training given to surgeons?

Ms Leslie, the daughter of a surgeon, notes that ministers have spent years wrestling with the puzzle of giving good teachers the freedom to teach while preventing bad teachers from wrecking the lives of children. Their solution to that puzzle has, all too often, been political interference in the classroom, with ministers setting out "national literacy and numeracy strategies", backed by endless targets and tests. This would not happen in medicine, she writes:

aYOU donat see many white people round here,a said the American lecturer, visibly startled to encounter Bagehot at the Banking Academy of Vietnam, a sprawling finance college in a far-flung district of Hanoi.

Actually, on this particular morning there were two more Europeans upstairs, giving an economics lecture on the optimal level of managerial ownership in a British company (not too little, but not too much either, I can report, otherwise managers start hoarding cash).

But learning was not really the point this morning. This visit by two academics from a branch of London University was really a thinly-disguised sales pitch, advertising the joys of studying in far-off Britain.

Vietnam is a young countryaa quarter of the population are under 15aand its local universities are a source of endless complaint among the rising middle class. The teaching is pretty patchy, and students are obliged to leave their core studies to study such irrelevances as family planning, military drill and aideologya.

As a result, Vietnam is seen as a boom market for western universities, notably in Britain, the top overseas destination for students from Hanoi (the southern middle classes from Ho Chi Minh City favour American and Australian colleges, reflecting both the legacy of American influence in southern Vietnam, and family ties to A(c)migrA(c) communities in Australia and North America).

Your correspondent is in south-east Asia with William Hague, the British foreign secretary, reporting on his governmentas drive to deepen relations in fast-growing corners of the world such as south-east Asia.

Education is a high-profile part of the British pitch in this corner of the world, and on this leg of the trip I was keen to break away from the official delegation, if only for a morning, to get a glimpse of how Britainas wares are seen on the ground.

After taking a straw poll among local students, the tentative answer is that Britainas reputation is good. But it could be damaged if some universities and colleges lower standards too far in their hunger for foreign students and the fees they pay (Vietnamese undergraduates might pay APS12,000 a year in Britain, apparently, and as much as APS16,000 a year for a business-related Masters).

To quote one education professional who sees students return to Vietnam from Britain each year: aI am amazed. Some come back with a degree, even with a distinction in an MA, but they are not confident in their English. How come?a

British colleges have been aoverdoing ita when it comes to recruitment, is the feeling. At education fairs or via sales visits to their colleges, students meet endless British professors and business development officers, all clutching glossy brochures and statistics about how high their institution features on student satisfaction rankings, staff-to-pupil ratios and the like. The recruiters aoffer so much that very ordinary students think they can pick and choose, or ask for a scholarship,a I was told.

As it happens, the story from British universities is generally the opposite, with lots of grumbling about the country becoming unwelcoming to foreigners. Speak to British university bosses and their top concern is a recent tightening of visa rules for students: part of a general push by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to reduce net immigration.

Flying here via Hong Kong, the front page of Mondayas South China Morning Post carried a report focussing on the rules that require would-be students to demonstrate a higher standard of English than is currently the case, and which tighten the rules on seeking work in Britain after they graduate. An accompanying cartoon in the SCMP showed a Hong Kong student being handed his degree by a British vice-chancellor, with the caption: Hereas your degree, now go home.

Instinctively, it does seem an own-goal to make Britain less friendly to foreign students at the same time as the government is backing a big expansion in overseas student recruitment. But speaking to students and professionals at the Banking Academy and later on at the British Council, where Mr Hague took questions from a group of students, I have to admit that a counter-intuitive point kept coming up. In such a competitive market, it seems, Britainas unique selling point is precisely that it is not very friendly.

The sort of middle class Vietnamese able to contemplate an overseas degree has a pretty strong sense of the big players in English-language higher education. Australia is arelaxeda, and afuna. The weather is good and there are lots of Vietnamese. Canada is a new market, and attractive because students believe it is easier to stay on after their studies, finding a job or making a new life there. America is adynamica and aenergetica and business-friendly, but is also seen as perilously relaxed.

Britain is amore old-school, more carefula, said Do Hoang Quan, a 20 year old from the countryas best college, Vietnam National University.
British education is avery conservative,a said Nguyen Minh Tam, who has just won a Chevening Scholarship from the British government to study in Britain. She meant this as a compliment.

So should rule-tightening British border authorities and Home Office officials in fact be hailed, for making it harder to go to Britain and inadvertently preserving the countryas overseas brand? That is precisely the view of Nguyen Thi Nhu Nguyen, director of The Education Company, a private agency that advises Vietnamese families on where to send their children for an overseas education. Dr Nguyen sends about 100 students a year to Britain, receiving a commission from the colleges that accept them. She sends students to Australia and America as well, but takes especial pride in sending students to aprestigiousa British colleges (she also recruits for English boarding schools for children as young as 12 or 13, whose appeal to nervous Vietnamese parents includes the fact that Britain is seen as conservative and asafea).

aI think it is quite good that the UK border is tightening up,a she told me. She likes the fact that it is harder for higher education institutions to gain ahighly trusteda status as visa sponsors, closing down rogue colleges. She is pleased that students who fail their exams will no longer to be allowed to stay in Britain and look for another courseaor ajust hang about doing nothing,a as she puts it. She is delighted by stricter English language tests. All this rigour is agood for the image of the UK,a is her conclusion.

A final word goes to Hoang Anh, a basketballer-height undergraduate met at the Banking Academy. Under impertinent questioning from your reporter, he admitted to hearing that the British are not very friendly to foreigners, or as he put it, that athey do not want to talk to thema. Yet he is already deep into internet research on British universities. He has a sister studying in America now, he explained, and she has put him off. aShe says her studies are very easy,a he said. aBut easy is not good.a

Georgia Tech-bound Shamire DeVine won MVP honors at Atlanta NIKE camp (AJC)

Georgia Tech landed a commitment from a hometown star who some rate as the stateas best college football prospect on the offensive line.

Shamire DeVine, a 6-foot-7, 331-pounder from Tri-Cities High School, committed to Georgia Tech after his teamas spring practice on Wednesday night.

aI like the academics,a DeVine told the AJC.

DeVine, who was named OL MVP at last monthas Atlanta NIKE camp, had around a dozen offers, including UGA, Florida, FSU, Tennessee and Southern Cal.

aI picked Georgia Tech over Florida State, and I really donat know who the third guy was,a said DeVine, who has a 3.0 GPA and wants to study Computer Engineering and Programming.

Nick Saban: "So when you start saying 'this league champion should be in it against this league champion,' we donat have that kind of parity (in college football). This is not the NFL." (Photo courtesy of Chick-fil-A)

• RELATED: Nick Saban finally speaks on Justin Taylor grayshirt controversy

Some of college footballas biggest names endorsed the impending four-team playoff system to determine future national champions on Tuesday.

aMy opinion is people want to see the best four teams play,a Alabama coach Nick Saban said after playing in the Chick-fil-A Bowl Challenge celebrity golf tournament in Greensboro, Ga.

aI donat think we need to be watering it down with aYou need to win a [conference] championshipa a| they want to see the best four teams play.a