As professor of English literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, Stefan Collini has several years of experience as a university teacher and administrator at Cambridge and elsewhere. He is well placed to write this excellent and timely polemic against the marketisation of higher education. Collini is at pains to say that to argue against such changes is not to suggest that all was well with universities in the good old days, or that public money ought be poured out like water on them. He is no proponent of an aloof “ivory tower”, nor does he deny that universities ought to be efficiently and prudently run.