We are being treated to a news snippet in a rather zealous tone, orchestrated by our very own Prime Minister.

Expecting us to dance ecstatically in gratitude, we have been told that a so-called American University of Malta is planning to set up shop in Malta.

Reports suggest the deal was struck by the Office of the Prime Minister, without consulting with anyone, including, as it seems, the Education Minister.

We were then regaled with the painful punchline - the ‘university’ is to be given a huge tract of pristine land in an outside development zone area in the south.

It will measure 91,000 square metres of land, the equivalent of 12 football pitches, only metres away from residential housing.

To sugar the pill, Joseph Muscat told us an adjacent natural park will be built, to offset the brutal and sheer scale of destruction.

The agreements were signed with a Jordanian investor, Hani Hasan Salah, CEO of Sadeen Group, a Jordanian hotel development and construction company.

It later transpired that Salah is operating on his own, through his newly-registered company called Sadeen Education Investment Ltd, surprisingly registered in Malta. These things can raise suspicions about back-room dealings.

De Paul University, an actual university in the US, will be providing the curriculum but will not be accrediting, choosing the tutors or even delivering the courses.

This will be a new university with no previous history or experience and it does not yet have a licence as a university.

Despite the protests from many quarters, Muscat stubbornly insists this project will go on.

As an academic, activist and a Maltese citizen, apart from the obvious environmental destruction, there are a number of issues that trouble me.

This so-called ‘university’ is the creation of a foreign investment company well-acquainted with building hotels and real estate, not education. Until given a licence, it is not a ‘real university’. What happens if it does not go through quality assurance? How can a university that doesn’t yet exist, with no track record or reputation, predict a student population of 4,000?

We are told this project will create 400 jobs. How many Maltese workers – from maintenance to academics – will be employed? Do you remember the thousands of jobs promised by the Nationalist administration when the Smart City project was conceived?

We are told this will contribute to economic development. Like any other multinational, the question to be asked is: how many of these profits will be repatriated?

Luring them to invest in Malta is one thing, selling our post-colonised soul is another... Now we know, Malta is all up for sale

This is a question which many low-income countries are well accustomed to asking as their own landscapes and resources are pillaged and raped.

This university appears to be targeting wealthy foreign students. The bulk of the Maltese, bar some tactical last-minute ploy offering a few scholarships to locals, will not afford to study there.

The government offered the land as a cheaper alternative for private enterprise.

Luring them to invest in Malta is one thing, selling our post-colonised soul is another. If they want it, they go through the hoops (especially legal ones) and they pay the price. It is not for the government to dispose of Malta by the inch. If they can’t afford it, they can go elsewhere.

I repeat this is not even a public-private venture. What’s next, offering them a subsidy on electricity and porters to open the doors? Now we do know, Malta is all up for sale.

Giving away public land and signing deals without prior environmental assessments is illegal and not very democratic.

For this government, it seems profit is all that matters, not education, social or environmental development. Token corporate social responsibility will not quite cut it while Salah destroys Malta’s environmental lungs and lines his pockets.

The Prime Minister claims this will challenge the ‘monopoly’ of the University of Malta.

Economic terms such as ‘monopoly’ used in conjunction with education, a public good, are hugely problematic.

But, critically, such discourse simply serves to justify continued neo-liberal assaults on public and free education.

The University of Malta will, if anything, have to continue existing and even grow, not least to cater for those who can’t pay, who don’t want to pay or shouldn’t have to pay to learn.

With a 36 per cent illiteracy rate, this is hardly rocket science. Public education is the model a real socialist government should be trying to strengthen, not kill.

Muscat claims he is bringing to Malta ‘world class education’. This is incorrect. He is bringing in ‘world class’ capitalists monetising education at huge social, cultural and environmental cost.

As he should know, these are two very different things.

When business people choose courses they are normally motivated only by profit and not by personal, contextual and community needs.

This means that the humanities will continue to be undermined and eventually culled. Does this ring a historical bell to Muscat?

I would like to thank him for even selling our national identity and allowing it to be called the American University of Malta.

I double dare him to find something like the American University of the UK. The issue is indeed beyond political or environmental. It is ideological (or lack of it) and attitudinal.

As Bob Marley once said: “You can fool some people sometimes but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

The populist political gerrymandering Muscat will come up with in the coming weeks will not hide the environmental and educational disaster he is driving Malta towards. Economics will hardly save him this time round.

Dr Shaun Grech is an international academic and director of The Critical Institute.