The notion of the university as a critical institution is far from new but the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have provided many profound challenges for higher education institutions, both in Europe and beyond, from the growth of a globalised context and massification of their undergraduate education cohorts (Altbach, 2015) and dealing with diversity and social inequality (Smith, 2009; Eggins, 2017; Deem, 2018), through audits of their research and teaching and league tables/rankings (Cheng, 2009; Shore & Wright, 2015), to funding regimes (Jongbloed & Vossensteyn, 2016), the changing meaning of the ‘public good’ (Marginson, 2016), academic capitalism (Rhoades & Slaughter, 2004), new managerialism (Deem & Hillyard et al., 2007), student consumerism (Budd, 2016) and student employability (Rooney & Rawlinson, 2016 ).