Here are two tales you may have heard about what's happening in higher education in countries like England at the moment. Excuse the lack of references, but I am concerned here to give a general gloss on these accounts in their simplest forms.

The first tale concerns the marketisation of higher education. The introduction and steady (and not-so-steady) increase of tuition fees has created a volatile environment where no quantity of students is enough and no student– staff ratio is too high. Treating higher education institutions as businesses has corrupted the system, resulting in a glut of overpaid, corporate managers and ill-prepared, instrumentalist students. Box-ticking exercises have replaced a genuine concern with students’ welfare, and basic research is rarely pursued due to the clamour of impact. Writing in this vein is sometimes described (though not always by the writers themselves) as ‘critical university studies’.

The second tale is, among other things, a critique of this critique. While in agreement that there are serious problems in higher education today, this second story takes aim at the diagnosis supplied by the first. It claims that to focus on the ever-growing, ever-hastening university as the problem is to indulge in nostalgia for a past before mass higher education. The first diagnosis tends not to dwell for too long on remedies for the ailment, but it seems to imply that everything was better in some specific time in the past. Thus, according to the second tale, the first tale hankers after an elitist and highly selective higher education system, and is, at best, ignorant of and, at worst, indifferent to that system's history of entanglement with empire, worker exploitation, racism and sexism. Writing of this sort is sometimes described as ‘abolitionist university studies’.

Both bodies of work (to which this hurried sketch does no justice whatsoever) show us important truths about higher education. Rarely does either tale claim to be the whole story. Yet, how do we account for the fact that so many who work or study in universities are so critical of both marketisation and elitism? Or, to flip over to the more cynical side of this coin, how can we account for the fact that so many of these critics (myself, for instance) continue to invest their lives in the pleasures and the pains (as well, of course, as the pay cheques) of higher education?