Dark warnings about what the future holds for higher education, the fear that American system was ‘coming here’, have been ten-a-penny for years.

Today, though, it’s a different story. What the meteorologists call ‘nowcasting’ – when you turn your head up to the sky to check the weather – has become possible in higher education too, because we see the effects of marketisation in the day to day life of our campuses.

Even before the government’s recent reforms, commercialisation and competition had already led universities to become balance-line driven organisations.

The situation at London Met is a telling example of the worst practices this elicits. Back in 2007-2008 corrupt management accounting was exposed and the fallout since has been a continuous programme of devastating cuts. The university was claiming teaching grants for students who had dropped out by submitting false ‘completion rates’ reports.

It may be letting the management off the hook to simply blame competitive pressures for such malpractice, but we shouldn’t ignore it as a factor. Moreover, what’s remarkable about all the public discussion of the cuts imposed since – the latest stage of which sees a huge 70 per cent slashing of courses and big job losses for support staff too – is how this crisis is treated as merely a financial question, with downsizing the inevitable, indeed ‘logical’, answer. The failure to even discuss the problem of low degree completion rates at a university where 57 per cent of the student body comes from working class communities is sadly indicative of today’s new realities.

At London Met it is subjects like philosophy, history, performing arts and languages that have been hit as the university adapts its range of courses in anticipation that the choices of its majority working class intake will become more and more employment focused. It is exactly this kind of regressive choice, between culture and self-discovery on the one hand and the pay-slip on the other, that the new marketised world forces on the poor.

It was, of course, the old tripartite system of secondary modern education that famously filtered the working classes into a preparatory system for the factory floor, when only 6.5 per cent of the population went to university. But would those working class children who defied the odds to pass the 11-plus really go to grammar school, if it meant choosing life-long debt?

This is the big uncertainty the market imposes on the future of higher education. Distortions have been built into the system of undergraduate teaching funding, but the market is still there. Higher education is a commodity, students the consumers – and so long as they continue to bite at the cherry of life-long debt then supply will meet demand, but if this loses its appeal many institutions will be threatened with closure. And more and more will do as London Met has and tailor their courses to economic imperatives.

This transformation in what higher education means – its commodification and subordination to the wider world of private, commercial concerns – doesn’t just hit the poor either.

At the other end of the university hierarchy, the cultural impact of the global market place and the turn to private-funding sources to boost investment is keenly felt too.

With research budgets squeezed universities are encouraged to open up to the world of business, finance and statecraft, exploring ‘new avenues’ of funding and revenue-raising. Needless to say, ‘he who pays the piper’ can often ‘call the tune’. Sometimes the result is overtly political; Gaddafi family money, for instance, won the regime fawning praise at the LSE. Other times the effect on research interests and outcomes is more subtle, but it is rarely benign.

In the scramble over the small remaining pots of publically funded money a similar process exists. Ambitious universities need to excel in what’s called the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ – that means boosting the citation-count on their academics’ published work by orientating to widely-read, high-profile international journals. The same subtle tailoring of the research agenda results: innovative ideas on the fringe can be marginalised with the pressure to conform to the mainstream zeitgeist. The commercial pressure of the balance-line looms large over the process too. Failure to perform threatens jobs and careers. Ironically, given sky-rocketing fees, the emphasis on delivering quality teaching can be lost as well.

The cumulative effect of these pressures is the withering of the principle of academic freedom, enshrined both in custom and the 1988 Education Reform Act. The latest guidelines from university employers even encourage taking protections for academic freedom out of university statures and putting them into easily amendable policies.

These regressive measures have a two-pronged dimension: a confluence of state and financial power, where bureaucracies are mobilised to systematically serve private interests.

One critical assessment rightly called this incursion ‘the Grim Threat to British Universities’, because the system is now at the mercy of a ‘bureaucracy of command and control that links the UK Treasury, at the top, all the way down to the scholars at the base’.

The direct connection between research output and financial viability is the crowning glory of neoliberalised higher education. It gives us the ‘fee-earning’ academic each with their own profit/loss account, increasingly impelled to say the right things in the right places. With the majority of academics now on short term contracts this becomes a matter of survival.

The creeping bureaucratisation and top down state control of the academic world flies in the face of the image of the free citizen promoted in the neoliberal dystopia. We live not with the nightwatchman state envisaged by the neoliberal dystopia, but with a large and expansive bureaucratic complex that is highly sensitive and reactive to the needs of private capital.

What’s being lost in all this is the ideal, never quite achieved but that society once appeared to be pushing towards, of the university as a semi-autonomous public space, one in which society could reflect on itself and develop new means of self-improvement. The dominant ethos is now to gallop as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

The picture then appears bleak. But these tendencies would already have all been far further advanced if it were not for students and lecturers. The resistance is often local and even goes largely unseen in daily wars of attrition within the walls of the university bureaucracy.

Last winter, though, resistance went from local to global with the return of the mass student protest. This spring lecturers have been out on strike too. It is through such collective acts that we can put the brake on the neoliberal enterprise, and throw it into reverse gear.

Luke Cooper is a postgraduate student and associate tutor in International Relations at the University of Sussex and a supporter of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.