The way forward

The way forward is to abandon the POP culture, which is a product of neoliberal market ideology according to which universities should be held accountable for the amount of scholarly output they produce, as measured by the quantity and quality of publications. According to this ideology, universities should be run like private enterprises because the provision of private goods, such as education, should be governed by the market mechanism. The implication here is that universities should be left on their own, without public funding, and that they must generate income from teaching, automated or otherwise, and from contract research. In this case, academic staff will be under pressure to bring students or perish (for the teaching staff) and bring in research money or perish (for the research staff). The way forward is to go back to days gone by, prior to the emergence of the destructive ideas associated with Reaganism-Thatcherism.