As an aid to the reader I give a chapter-by-chapter outline of how the central thesis of the book develops.

Chapter One begins with a mathematician called G.H. Hardy, who extolled and exemplified the idea of ‘pure’ research. From Hardy’s views I extrapolate some general features of research, not least the manner in which it may rely on Platonic preconceptions. One such Platonic preconception is ‘the idea of a university’, which has much to do with a voluminous 19th-century tome by John Henry Newman, on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. In the cold war era such thoughts solidified into what I call the standard model university, aloof from society, where the academic discipline is central, research matters more than teaching, and ‘pure’ research enjoys the highest esteem. By the 1990s, a number of authors were starting to question such an inward focus of higher education, calling for a return to the idea of the university as a public good. Just as this move was gaining traction, however, a new phenomenon arose to reinforce the standard model: university rankings and league tables.

Chapter Two is on rankings and league tables. I give some background and examples, to show how rankings focus mostly on research, and specifically on the kind of research paradigmatic to the standard model university. I also play around with the technicalities a bit, just enough to make the point that constructing a ranking involves so many choices that what you end up with is an ordering of preference more than a reflection of reality. As a reality check we may note that even the periodic national Research Assessment Exercise (or Research Excellence Framework), which deliberately produces research profiles as an evaluation of research quality, almost immediately gets turned into different kinds of rankings. Rankings have become astoundingly influential – so much so that the leading expert on the topic compares their growth to the spread of a virus. Which raises a challenge for those who argue, as I do, that ranking is a poor way of reflecting quality. Namely: what do we mean by quality?

Chapter Three, therefore, is on the notion of quality in higher education.