As the Facebook fiasco unfolds, one image sticks in my mind: that of the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre physically nestled inside the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. It calls itself a “strategic research network”, meaning it does research, but also sells its services to commercial companies. It has come to international attention because its studies informed the development of an app that passed data from Facebook to Cambridge Analytica . The case highlights worryingly blurred boundaries between business and academic research.

Collaborations between academia and corporations are nothing new, but they used to be less complicated. In the 1990s and early 2000s, energy focused on boosting the tech transfer: how to ensure that the ingenious discoveries of academic researchers could be commercialised, with both the university and the researcher receiving some reward. Protecting intellectual property was paramount. Expectations of revenue, originally rather modest, rose in the UK, where there was a pervasive feeling of lagging behind the global competition.

Since then, pressure has built on higher education to secure ever more attention-grabbing research: that’s how they receive funding and it is how they improve in the rankings to attract students and staff.