A university does not have to close to disappear. It can stay open while losing the people, subjects, research and laboratories that made it worth having. The sign stays above the entrance; there is simply less university inside it.
The prologue argues that what the sector describes as a storm — a restructuring, a hiring freeze, a round of voluntary severance — is becoming a structural contraction. Nobody knows how much smaller British higher education will get. The point is that nothing in the present model automatically stops it: the underlying activities are underfunded, the cross-subsidy that concealed the gap is weakening, and the easy savings have mostly been taken.
Which makes it personal in a way sector commentary rarely admits. Being good at your job may not save your job — institutions remove activities they can no longer afford, not the people who perform worst. And the assumption that you could simply move somewhere else works during one institution's crisis, not during the whole sector's.
They made the impossible look merely difficult.
Regulated to Fail, Prologue
Where this goes next
This is the question the chapter opens with and the mechanism it identifies. What it concludes — and what follows from it — is in the book.
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