What was once a profession defined by autonomy, intellectual craft, and vocational commitment has been reshaped by metrics, managerial hierarchies, and market logic.

Over the past two decades, universities have been quietly re-engineered. In How Universities Die, Peter Fleming traces the consequences of this shift with clarity and bite. He examines the commercialisation of higher education, the rise of managerialism, the treatment of students as consumers, and the competitive individualism now baked into academic life. Fleming also confronts the psychological fallout of this transformation: burnout, anxiety, precarity, and rising levels of mental distress among staff and students alike.

Written with sardonic anger and sharp insight, this is not a nostalgic defence of a lost golden age, but a diagnosis of a system in structural decline — and a warning that time is running out to reverse it.