The paradoxical academic cultural revolution : a long march to a capitalist road

I would like to begin by juxtaposing a personal anecdote of mine with a recent online "hot take." The former is a remembrance of a meeting of the members of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University with our dean in 2010, at which he was explaining why the university was effectively shutting us down. Against the invocation of conventional norms of higher education, he offered a contrasting vision of a university that was open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that had no students at all. Even today, more than a decade later, this sounds like dystopian science fiction, and I can scarcely believe that a senior university administrator would say this in such a meeting, but I am nonetheless reasonably sure that my memory is correct here.