The head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, recently criticised schools that focus on acquiring “badges and stickers” rather than offering their students a well-rounded education. “This all reflects a tendency to mistake badges and stickers for learning itself,” she said. “And it is putting the interests of schools ahead of the interests of the children in them. We should be ashamed we have allowed such behaviour to persist for so long.”

Maybe she should take a look at university websites: many are becoming overrun with badges, stickers and logos. On one, I counted 13 in a continuous ticker tape. Most manage at least four or five. Some are straightforward – for example, Stonewall or Fairtrade badges. Others less so. Is being in the “Sunday Times 100 best not-for-profit organisations to work for” really worth showcasing on a homepage?

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Other logos are plain bragging. I doubt that the “Russell Group” – unadorned – will be familiar to casual browsers. Finally some are tendentious, such as the claim to be “a world top 100 university” (no source given), still made on several websites despite the Advertising Standards Authority’s insistence that Reading University remove a not-dissimilar claim.

Now, of course, there is a new logo in town – the grades awarded under the new teaching excellence framework (Tef), the government’s official ranking system. Some gold winners are splashing it across their websites, while others have just added another logo at the bottom. Those institutions that received only a silver, not surprisingly, adopt a lower-key approach. Bronze winners (losers?) are more reticent still.

Of course, the head of Ofsted was not talking about the Tef. But she could well have been. The Tef measures neither teaching nor excellence, even if you accept it is the business of the state – through proxies masquerading as peers – to attempt such measurement.

Once the grades are public, institutions tend to abandon all critical judgment. Instead the grades become another logo to add to the website or to dissemble about in a guarded press release. With the research excellence framework, on which the Tef is mis-modelled, there is some slight excuse. But the Ref is 10 times more defensible. There is nothing positive to say about the Tef. It is “performance” measurement gone mad.

What is even worse is that the Tef was a key element in the Higher Education and Research Act, rushed through parliament by a government that has lost all credibility after the general election. Why do we have to take it seriously? It should be abandoned.

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And why are we not taking seriously a key message that came out of the campaign? Labour’s manifesto promise to abolish tuition fees in England, initially seen as off-the-wall, gained enormous traction. This is hardly surprising given the prospects faced by graduates – escalating debt, doubtful job prospects in a declining post-Brexit economy and decent homes out of reach.

That particular threat to their short-term funding – which, revealingly, is how many university leaders see it – has been narrowly averted. But maybe it will be only a temporary reprieve. Andrew Adonis, the Blairite super-moderniser and supporter of fees, said last week he expected both major parties to propose their abolition at the next election.

For the moment, universities seem to have collapsed back into their comfort zone, collecting Spielman’s badges and stickers to burnish their positions in spurious league tables in order to compete in an equally spurious market. It is a market that may be over before it has properly begun.

The ground is shifting. The details of the endgame may still be obscure, but there can now be little doubt that the age of under-regulated markets, the small state, the deliberate erosion of the public sphere, and the cults of “modernisation” and “management”, is drawing to a close.

The tragedy for universities, as a sector and as organisations, is that they have become so thoroughly used to that world, whatever their initial resistance to its values and practices, that they can imagine no other.

So they are at real risk of ending up on the wrong side of history. They will be seen as accomplices in failing neoliberal markets, against which their students are in revolt, and spurious “modernisation”, which alienates many of their staff. They need to get back on the right side of history – quickly.