The back page of the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement of August 26 carried a sad little letter from Professor Wilfrid Prest of Adelaide. He laments the disappearance of true learning from our universities, while the marrow is sucked out of their bones by the monstrous managerial bureaucracies which have invaded them. He gives the example of the once-distinguished Melbourne University school of history, “dwindling to the verge of disappearing altogether”. Fast backwards fifty years to Encounter magazine of July 1960. It contained an article by Kingsley Amis, attacking the incontinent growth of universities just then beginning to spread over Britain.…