NOVEMBER 2 — A university does not have to close its doors to diminish as a place of learning. Its intellectual purpose begins to weaken when everything can be questioned except the system by which it is governed.
Lectures continue. Papers appear. Professors are appointed. Graduation ceremonies retain their splendour. Yet the conditions that make scholarship meaningful can deteriorate beneath this institutional continuity.
Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (Pluto Press, 2021) criticises commercialisation, managerial control and the excessive power of performance metrics in universities. His argument invites an uncomfortable question: can an institution keep expanding while eroding the conditions that sustain its intellectual life?
