'Graduateness' and a core curriculum for geography?

Geography is an academic discipline, not a profession, and one of its traditional strengths in British higher education is its use as a vehicle for the development of critical intellectual skills. These require neither a core curriculum nor standard assessment procedures and 'quality thresholds'. This feature should be defended against the short-term materialist and politically correct arguments of programmes seeking to define 'graduateness' and core curricula.