Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities is an uncompromising attack upon the process that has turned the British university from a place of higher education and thinking, however imperfect, into a site of 'battery farming for the mind', where academics and students are enslaved by the principles of audit, assessment, and regulation, and the role of the university is reduced to meeting the needs of the market in Britain's so-called knowledge economy.

…[The author] refuses to pay lip-service to the leftist-sounding justifications that are given to the expansion and modernisation agenda - that it is more democratic and equal than what went before.

Evans makes clear that she is not harking back to some golden age, in which the university was 'a world of intellectual conversation, engaged students and limitless indulgence'. To do so would be 'to depart to the realms of fantasy' - 'we cannot easily defend the past, or invoke that past as an attack on the present'. As a professor of women's studies, Mary Evans can also hope to avoid the caricature of those who criticise the modernisation agenda as fusty old men, bent on preserving their position at whatever cost. Unlike many critics, Evans recognises that a combination of political and cultural agendas has set the modern university on its disastrous course, making it impossible simply to blame the political right, or the cultural left: 'The attack on the traditional 'high' culture of universities has come, in Britain, from a complex coalition: left-wing modernisers, Tory pragmatists and all-party and all-class philistines'.

...Instead of putting up and shutting up, disgruntled academics, sold-short students and anyone else with an interest in education should think about adding their own thoughts and writings to those of the unhappy dissenters, and formulating their own vision about what a university should be for.