This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, the author suggests that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible because academia has lowered its own critical faculties and allowed academic institutions to be colonized by social policy objectives to the detriment of knowledge for its own sake. Fundamentally, he wants to explore the effects of today's doctrinaire approach to education, which, as far as he is concerned, has resulted in the degradation of students' expectations, the abrogation of responsibility by those in erstwhile academic authority, and the failure--or refusal--of the academy to defend education in its own terms. (Contains 44 footnotes.)