It began, literally, with the thesis of John Ralston Saul. When the Canadian philosopher realised the sources in his PhD on Algerian intelligence might be identifiable from the roman-à-clef he penned soon afterwards, he stole his doctorate from the library of King’s College London.
When he returned the manuscript half a century later, he met and inspired Jonathan Grant, who had been recently appointed by the university, and whose own provocative and important new book The New Power University describes his mission.
Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism, published in the build-up to Brexit, argued that the world was experiencing the latest in a cyclical series of “in-between times”, when the existing system is being overturned and the value of knowledge, the role of the expert and the purpose of learning are called into question.