New rules, new rulers? The changing balance of values and powers in higher education, and where it is taking us

It is usually terribly clichéd to start a talk or article by referring to these times of great change and turbulence, but it is indeed difficult to exaggerate how fundamental and far-reaching the changes have been in UK higher education over recent years, months and even weeks. And, to coin another cliché, I suspect we ain’t seen nothing yet. Changes in policy, funding, markets and technology are combining to transform every dimension of the hitherto stable and predictable world of universities. Increasingly it seems as though Lewis Carroll might have written the emerging story of twenty-first century HE, creating a looking glass image of our former experiences in which old certainties have been overturned and the rules of the game turned inside out. Change, especially on this scale and at this pace, is always disruptive. It has led to rumblings that the enduring values of university life are being betrayed, and that academic freedoms are being usurped by rampant managerialism and the pursuit of revenues. A recent Universities UK report on the changing academic profession paints a picture of a disenfranchised, disenchanted and generally unhappy Academy, while our own surveys of university leaders