Trust or Trussed?

Regulation in an economic system is often used to protect consumers where market failure cannot be remedied through encouraging competition. Profit is often the measure of market failure as less competition motivates suppliers to maximise their market advantage.

At the root of these motivations is a profit motive.

Regulation in Higher Education also aims to protect "consumers" but from what?

Do Universities have a profit motive? Do they abuse the position of trust that society has bequeathed them? Are academics out for what they can get? ( well, perhaps some are).

Regulation ties Universities up in knots, requires them to comply with ever more detailed rules and regulations, and actually deflects them from their key purpose to educate, inform and to create knowledge.

So do we trust our institutions or do we truss them like the Christmas turkey in red tape, law, regulation and rules?