When I was doing CS there in the mid-90s, the university was saturated with Israeli law students, who must have made up well over half the undergraduate intake of the law school and perhaps much more (the halls were 80% Israeli, 20% everyone else). It seems that if you don’t have a law degree in Israel you have no hope of a job anywhere and must dig ditches or something, and the UK gave Israel a copy of its civil code so a UK law degree is valuable there. So Brunel (and presumably every other UK university) gets saturated with desperate Israelis who didn’t get into a uni in .il.

And foreign students pay a lot.

So I can understand them standing in the cold for a night if they thought it might save their degree…

“It’s amazing the change in this generation of students. The issue is not fomenting Maoist revolutionaries somewhere. They are much more likely to complain about how crowded seminars are or how slow the response to their dissertation was. Those are the kind of things that young people register.”

It’s really not that similar though, either.

Whereas I, another Yank, kept reading it as Buñel University, which I also thought rather fitting.

*Not to be confused with gonk research, which also went on. Worryingly, the medics’ lucky-item count cleared everyone else’s by a factor of 3.

** Not its real name.

I assume the place is actually named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Constructor of Very Large Iron Things?

(I second Rea’s comment at no. 1. Law school in the US is about training mercenaries, not academics. If you are in the upper echelon, though, you get called on to write a law review article, which is not totally dissimilar.)