When the levee breaks: academic life on the brink

It is, of course, impossible to separate the pressures on staff within business schools from the state of the universities in which they are based. I therefore start this chapter by paying tribute to the memory of an academic colleague in a different discipline, and who I never met. His name was Stefan Grimm and he died in 2014. The story of what happened to him is extreme, though perhaps less so than we would like to imagine. I think it serves as an illustration of university life at its worst and should alert us to the need for a change of direction.