Crisis management logic suggests that planning and preparing for crisis should be a vital part of institutional and policy toolkits. This paper explores the difficulties in translating this ideal into practice. It focuses on four key difficulties. First, crises and disasters are low probability events but they place large demands on resources and have to compete against front-line service provision. Second, contingency planning requires ordering and coherence of possible threats, yet crisis is not amenable to being packaged in such a predictable way. Third, planning for crisis requires integration and synergy across institutional networks, yet the modern world is characterised by fragmentation across public, private and voluntary sectors. Fourth, robust planning requires active preparation through training and exercises, but such costly activities often produced a level of symbolic readiness which does not reflect operational realities. Finally the paper reflects on whether crisis preparedness is a 'mission impossible', even in the post-9/11 period when contingency planning seems to be an issue of high political salience.

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When the first full round of teaching quality assessments (TQAs) was completed by the UK funding councils, the older universities had gained the largest percentage of the higher grades of assessment, while the new universities had the highest share of the lower grades. This pattern repeated itself, with minor variations, during later assessments. Utilising data from the Times Higher Education Supplement league tables for all UK universities (THES, 2000), covering the years 1993‐2000, this paper examines the relationship between TQA results, reputational factors, and resourcing indicators. Concludes that league tables may be instrumental in perpetuating the divide between the old and new university sectors, by failing to acknowledge the diverse missions of the institutions. We suggest that it may be more useful to group universities by set criteria which would allow for more meaningful comparisons.