1 Review published in International Journal of Lifelong Education, Taylor and Francis Published online: 17 Mar 2020 The Good University: What Universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change Raewyn Connell ISBN 9781925835038, Monash University Publishing, 233 pages, 2019 Dissident knowledge in higher education Edited by Marc Spooner & James McNinch ISBN 9780889775367, University of Regina Pres, 319 pages, 2018 The University of the Future: Can the Universities of today lead the learning of tomorrow? Ernst and Young EYGM Limited, 34 pages, 2018 Tim Moore Swinburne University of Technology The first two volumes reviewed here – one a monograph and the second an edited collection – are the latest in a long line of publications about our universities and the troubled state they find themselves in. My first encounter with the genre – a type of ‘low level horror’ genre – was an Australian collection published in 2000, Why Universities Matter (Coady et al.) – where a sense of the troubling happenings in the sector over the previous decade led the authors to feel that this question actually needed to be asked. Since then one has been aware of a steady stream of publications, the titles of which leave little doubt about the position taken in relation to their subject: University, Inc.: The corporate corruption of higher education (Washburn 2008, US); Wannabe U: Inside the corporate university (Tuchman 2009 US); The fall of the faculty (Ginsberg 2011, US); Whackademia: An insider's account of the troubled university (Hil, 2012 Australia); Australian universities: A portrait of decline (Meyer 2012, Australia); Neoliberalism's war on higher education (Giroux 2014, UK) and more. A number of these works are referred to in the first two publications reviewed here. What follows is a review in three parts. First, I provide separate summaries of these two volumes, focusing on their respective takes on what it is that so ails our places of learning. In the second part, I consider the types of solutions and remedies collectively offered in the two works, including how much these appear as credible ways out of the malaise. In the final part I make reference to the third text listed – the Ernst and Young report. This document offers a very different type of vision, as one would expect. One might also read its ideas for change as posing a very real threat to the public future of our universities. In The Good University, Raewyn Connell, a long time researcher and commentator on higher education, provides very well-researched, highly readable, and quietly ferocious account of developments. One assumes the ‘good’ in her title, rendered as a fundamentally ethical quality, is intended partly as an ironic reference to the long running Australian series, The Good University Guide. In that volume ‘goodness’ refers unashamedly to some consumer-based ‘good’ i.e. how well