Ask who is responsible for an English university and you will get a long list: the governing body, the regulator, the funding council, the Home Office, the research councils, the competition authority, the Department for Education, the students, the market.
The list is the problem. Each of these bodies holds real power over some part of the institution. None of them holds responsibility for the whole of it. Powers that are individually reasonable do not combine into anything that could be called stewardship, and the gap between them is where institutional risk quietly accumulates.
The essay also draws a line the rest of the book keeps: England is not the United Kingdom. Four nations share a higher-education reputation, a labour market and a set of league tables. They do not share a funding system or a regulator, and the differences are not decorative.
They determine who may enter, what a student is charged, how a shortfall is covered and who notices first when a university is in trouble.
Regulated to Fail, Part I closing 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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