Stefan Collini’s book is a good read, that manages to be inspiring and depressing, amusing and annoying. Too many good passages to mention, but here’s one that we should put to the test:

In this connection, it would be interesting to submit the speeches and articles about universities by politicians, academic administrators, business leaders and others to a small textual experiment. We could try removing all references to ‘economic prosperity’, ‘growth’, ‘our economic competitiveness’, ‘wealth creation’, and so on, and then consider whether there is anything left which looks at all like an argument in favour of the value of universities and the activities they pursue. I suspect the resulting texts would resemble those pictures of pre-modern battlefields where small clumps of survivors are left going through the motions of military activity though they have lost all contact with the main army and will be fatally vulnerable to the first concerted attack by the enemy. A few nominal values will be left wandering through the scarred and vacant landscapes of these denuded paragraphs – this one with the once-proud title ‘culture’ still legible on its shrivelled pennant, that one left dragging a limber marked ‘excellence’ to which no piece of artillery is now attached – but they have no fight left in them and no sense of their place in a larger strategy (pp. 95-6).