Europe’s universities, taken as a group, are failing to provide the intellectual and creative energy that is required to improve the Continent’s poor economic performance. Too few of them are world-class centres of research and teaching excellence. Many are desperately short of resources.

The picture is not uniformly bleak. Taxpayers in the Nordic countries already make generous provision for higher education. Countries such as the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark have in recent years greatly improved the way their universities are run. The UK has some of the best research universities in the world, thanks in good measure to the relative autonomy of its institutions and to the way that research funding is allocated on the basis of peer-reviewed excellence, as opposed to the whims of central government.