The next time somebody asks you to believe that the best way to allocate educational resources is through the well-informed consumer choices of (mostly) 18 year old kids, or that the best way to assess the performance of academic staff is through the considered judgement of those same kids, I ask that you make an earnest effort to remember what you were like when you were 18 years old.

When I was 18, I borrowed from the library a book on metaphysics, expecting it to be a popular science book. Which is how I came to be sitting on a train thinking "Windowless monads? Carl Sagan never said anything about windowless monads! Who is this Leibniz crank?"