In 1970, students staged a sit-in in the registry offices of my alma mater, Warwick University. There, they stumbled across shocking files detailing extensive surveillance of students and staff as well as the incestuous relationship between the university administration and big business. The protests, rent strikes, and student occupations of this era earned the university the nickname “Red Warwick.” Acclaimed historian E. P. Thompson gave the institution he once lectured at a rather different name: Warwick University Ltd. In his account of the files affair, Thompson made a much broader point about the trajectory of a marketized higher education system:

The demands of the institution become larger — moving outward from the working life to the private and social life of its employees — and its attempts to enforce loyalties by moral or disciplinary means, by streaming its procedures or by managing promotions and career prospects, become greater. The managers, at the top, need not even see themselves as police-minded men; they think they are acting in the interests of greater “efficiency”; any other course would damage the institution’s public image or would encourage subversion.

In the decades since those words were written, we’ve witnessed the systematic subordination of higher education to the whims of neoliberalism. For staff, that has meant pay cut after pay cut, attacks on pensions, unbearable workloads and growing precarity. And, of course, the disciplinary means to enforce all that Thompson foretold, including pay deductions for staff currently engaged in a grading and assessment boycott. For students, grants have gone, fees have tripled, and the cost-of-living crisis soars. Now graduations are in limbo too.