ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the attempted conversion of the university from what can be called a public good model to one serving private interests. The value, therefore, of academics achieving impact and consequently, one would assume the value of their public interface, was felt to rapidly escalate. The chapter considers what prospects exist for resistance and challenge by both students and academics themselves to the neoliberal higher education agenda. There is in fact an overwhelming sense of the higher education sector in the United Kingdom and more globally being at a point of profound change, some say crisis, in terms not only of its organization but membership. An impact agenda for higher education as it occurs in the Research Excellence Framework is all the more problematic for rendering the public interface as something that occurs safely and in the terms of that which is measurable.
