At the other extreme, ordinary students attend the University of Phoenix, mostly on-line, and not in any way artisanal.

FORBES: Walmart State College

The impact of the Cold War on the lives of ordinary people in Norfolk and Suffolk is to be researched by the University of East Anglia.

BBC: Cold War study looks at communities in Norfolk and Suffolk

"Much of the controversy about abortion is really stimulated by the interest groups on both sides of the political question, rather than by ordinary Americans, " said David Garrow, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and a longtime Supreme Court scholar.

CNN: Four decades after Roe: A legacy of law and morality

Themba Sono, a professor at the University of Pretoria's management school, suggests that the programme would accelerate if ordinary South Africans supported it, which at the moment they do not.

ECONOMIST: The painful privatisation of South Africa

And William Sharpe, a Nobel prize-winning economist at Stanford University in California, asserts that most of the financial-advice software now being touted to ordinary investors fails miserably to deal with risk.

ECONOMIST: Money managers