For some, what happens in Oxford will be of little interest: an elite preoccupation of a political class who haven’t recovered from their own university days. But our leading universities should be elite – in the education they provide, the characters they nurture and the students they produce. This can be explained by two malign forces: a perpetual expansion of universities that put quantity ahead of quality and the self-destructive vagaries of progressivism. Universities lose money on the average undergraduate so, unable to hike fees, pile the students high. Even without this, universities face a demographic struggle, with the population of 18-year-olds falling from 2030.