Here's another nice mess you've gotten us into1

Abstract

The British university system, like the systems in a number of other countries, is being transformed as it grows in size and function into a set of industrial combines that power a process of mass production which is both downgrading the role of academics and threatening the production of creative work. I enumerate some of the reasons why this is happening, including questionable government policies, a tangle of over-regulation and apparent management quiescence, and consider what might be done to reinvent a system which is, quite frankly, an overly bureaucratic mess. To right the system, I pose a series of questions that urgently need constructive answers. As the creative core of the university, many of these answers need the contribution of academics—and, it might be argued, as a matter of right. But it is a measure of how far the system has gone in the wrong direction that this isn't happening. They have been supplanted by policy-making forces for whom their interests are rarely central. That must surely change.