We need to begin to tell these stories about universities as well. So — what did university mean to you? Contact @cdbu.bsky.social at cdbupress@gmail.com with your story. You can read some previous submissions here: cdbu.org.uk/stories/

... but they are also places that foster the messier and less quantifiable aspects of understanding ourselves, each other and the world around us. They are places whose value we only really come to understand years after we have left them.

I recall that Martin Brasier liked to use this phrase precisely to get people motivated to figure out reasons why it wasn't boring :-). Personally I like to teach histories of the Earth that skip over the boring Phanerozoic...

That's true, but the individual VC is the tip of an iceberg. More than sixty employees of my university receive higher salaries than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Senior "leadership" salaries are inflated across the board, and it adds up to a really serious waste of money.