Publish or be damned

If dons don’t churn out books and articles – whether they want to or not – they will lose funding. Rachel Johnson wonders whether that’s what education is about

Our rendezvous is the new laptop-and-latte bar on the first floor of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. The history don is a few minutes late and this gives me time to reread an extraordinary document, which reveals that he (and thousands like him all over the country) is being subjected to a production quota for published work that makes Stalin’s five-year plans look positively market-driven.