Here's another nice mess you've gotten us into 1

• Published in: Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965) 2025-02
• Main Author: Thrift, Nigel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0020-2754; 1475-5661
• DOI: 10.1111/tran.12747

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. 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 the system.