Collini has three searchingly Socratic questions about universities’ present obsession with rankings: ‘1) What do they actually provide reliable information about? 2) Whose interest is served by them? 3) Why do they persist even in the face of quite devastating criticism?’ The effective (if not the logical) answer to all these questions in Australia is that international students use rankings to choose their place of study. Universities can charge them substantially more than locals, and this makes the difference between deficit and profit in all their budgets. The saddest consequence is the perverse incentive to move effort and resources into research, so as to go up in the rankings, so as to attract more students who are then overwhelmingly taught in large groups by sessional tutors paid insecurely by the hour. The coin of prestige for academics is a buy-out from teaching for research. This is not healthy.

So the pursuit of rankings success actually undermines the educational experience for students. Does this matter if those students get prestigious degrees with a minimum of disruption to their working and social lives? If we are a service industry, clearly no. The maximum satisfaction for the minimum expense of energy at the highest marginal profit should be what motivates us all. Fortunately, I do not work with many people (students or colleagues) who actually think this way.

Collini puts it particularly well: ‘The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you “want” – and you certainly can’t buy it. I can bustle about and provide a group of students with the temporary satisfaction of their present wants, but ... the really vital aspects of the experience (a condition very different from “the student experience”) are bafflement and effort.’ When Cornwall puts out Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, should I give my second-year students a nicely packaged explanation to parrot back in essays? Or should I take them to that dark place and let them work it out for themselves? In practice, we talk about the horror, and come to a conclusion more through a dialogue of intellectual and emotional generosity than through relentless competition. We are naughty consumers.

Students and academics could agree to ask and give less of each other, and it might be all right, for a while. It is not market forces or a commitment to excellent service delivery that have so far kept us from going down that path, but a shared sense of vocation in learning. This may be economically irrational, but it is the engine that makes the whole thing work, and it is only moderately amenable to quality assurance, as Collini demonstrates at length.

There is far too much wit and wisdom in Speaking of Universities to fit in a review. It is full of stuff that is shockingly true about the corporate tide in universities, and that has long been hiding in full view. This is not, however, a jeremiad bewailing a lost Eden, but rather a forensic analysis of the gaps between rhetoric and reality in the world of access, efficiency, impact, and excellence. Collini does not think governments should just hand over the money to academics and leave us alone. Yet he rightly questions the opportunity cost and perverse effects of the vast managerial apparatus designed to ensure responsiveness to each abstract noun presently in vogue.

He argues relentlessly that higher education policy has to derive from a clear understanding of the range of things that universities are actually for, not from a handful of econometric proxies that assume it is a service industry functionally indistinguishable from health or retailing. There is a public value and mission as well as a private value to students who get credentials or companies that get subsidised research. There need to be some anchoring assumptions which articulate this.

Stefan ColliniCollini is always aware of the risk of special pleading. The apparently reasonable belief that public value costs money so it should be measurable in dollar terms is hard to shift, but we don’t ask the same questions of health or defence. These, too, should be businesslike in many respects, but are both more and less than ‘pure’ corporate businesses. Similarly, it would be nice to ensure that government was supporting research only of substantial real-world impact, but there is no reliable way of knowing what this will be. Big data gives us the illusion that an algorithm will solve this, but only really allows us to see more complexity.

These are hard problems and they point, as in so many areas of our current public life, to a deficit of trust. Universities are manifestly fallible institutions which need reasonable external checks and balances, but they have delivered for a long time. Their commitment is not the clear and urgent one to shareholders, but a complex compact across decades and even centuries, to cities, regions, alumni, staff, and scholarly disciplines. Collini argues that they work best with some autonomy from the ruck of corporate and political life. If you consider successful universities (and none has ever failed after reaching university status in Australia), he seems to be right. Would it be a victory for anything other than market ideology if a university went broke in the wonderful world of higher education competition, as is now happening regularly in vocational education?

Collini’s gadfly question, the one he keeps coming back to, is ‘what are universities for?’ Our present reflex answers are pretty unsatisfactory.