There is a comfortable story in which universities were once free, self-governing communities of scholars, and regulation is a modern intrusion that arrived with the Office for Students and spoiled everything.
This opening essay declines the story. Universities have always depended on rules — on someone with authority recognising the institution, and on a degree meaning something to a person who was not in the room when it was awarded. Charters, privileges, visitors, statutes: the medieval university was an intensely regulated object, because a credential that nobody enforces is not a credential.
Which sets up the real question, and it is not whether to regulate. It is what the regulation is for. Rules that remember what they are protecting behave very differently from rules that have forgotten.
A system built to protect universities can therefore end up helping to break them.
Regulated to Fail, Part I opening essay
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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