Introduction

Higher Education occupies a peculiar place in discussions among academics. It is the place where we work and a source of professional, intellectual and often personal identity, as well as a site of mundane frustrations and everyday distractions. Whatever our institutional affiliations or disciplinary specialisms, the University is interesting to us because it occupies so much of our lives. So it is not surprising that Higher Education generates reams of research, commentary and critique written by academics for academics. This large and important body of literature addresses a range of specific questions, including the demands of teaching, the pressures of research, the trajectory of policy, the problem of funding, the rise of the ‘student consumer’, the decline of academic freedom, the changing composition of the student body, and the construction of new forms of academic identity. But all such accounts, explicitly or implicitly, touch on the central questions posed by Furedi (2017) – What's Happened to the University? – and Collini (2012) – What Are Universities For?

For better or for worse, the University of the 21st century is a very different beast from its earlier incarnations. The magnitude of this transformation, the reasons behind it, and its implications for academics, students and wider society have been deftly explored in the critical literature, addressing the global context of Higher Education (Trow, 1999, 2007; Altbach, 2016) and the trajectory of British policy (Shattock, 2012; Williams, 2013). In recent years, particular attention has been paid to how processes of marketisation and financialisation are increasingly shaping the funding, practices and narrative of the British University (Molesworth et al, 2011; Brown, 2013; McGettigan, 2013), resulting in a reorientation of Higher Education's purpose, away from its conceptualisation as a public, social good to its positioning as an individual benefit (Marginson, 2011; Nixon, 2011; Williams, 2016).

Less attention, however, has been devoted to the rise of public interest in, or debate about, Higher Education. Until fairly recently, what happened on University campuses in Britain was of marginal concern to anybody not working or studying there, or making policy about it.