“It wasn’t that she thought her history teacher was lying. It was just so hard to believe the world had ever trusted and loved men like that. Bullies, that’s what they were.”

8: Short-termism and the ensuing crisis is damaging an international reputation that has taken literally centuries to build. (Or maybe this is just point 2 repeated. But the long-term loss of reputation really is a serious problem.)

7: Universities are having to prioritise relationships with large corporate creditors over academic considerations, leading to job precariousness, workload creep, administrative bloat and degraded institutional identity.

5: Higher education is the great social leveller. Unless your students have to take 20 hours paid work a week alongside their studies, and then face an essentially permanent 9% graduate tax unless they happened to have wealthy parents when they enrolled. 6: Goodhart's Law.

3: Research in many subjects is not directly profit-producing and should not be evaluated against standard business metrics. 4: Marketisation inherently favours profitable or trendy subjects, not socially-enriching subjects.

I'll have a start. Reason 1: All recent-decade political regimes have explicitly wanted UKHE to expand. 2: UKHE has long been regarded as a point of pride, producing many breakthroughs and research giants for centuries. It did this almost entirely before marketisation and seems to be suffering now.