Toby Young was not fit for public office. That much is, and has always been, clear. But the relentless focus on his personal record, and subsequent wave of celebration surrounding his resignation, has allowed us to be distracted from what’s really at stake in the latest round of changes to higher education. By concentrating our outrage on the makeup of the Office for Students, we have forfeited the chance to oppose its existence.

This is not the defeat for the government that it seems. The former Universities Minister lost his closest friend on the board, and his pet pitbull in the culture war against ‘snowflake students’, a bandwagon onto which Johnson had enthusiastically jumped in the last few weeks of his tenure. Nevertheless, the central project of the Office for Students has passed almost completely without challenge. The funding council that governed English universities as public bodies has been replaced with, in Johnson’s words, “a classic market regulator” modelled after those in privatised industries like water or railways.

The creation of the OfS is explicitly a part of the government’s ideological drive to turn higher education into a market where universities compete to provide degrees not to students being educated, but to consumers whose interests are measured in terms of ‘satisfaction’ or ‘value for money’. This was a project that predated Johnson, and it will outlast him; his successor, Sam Gyimah, has written of the need to “give the young reasons to believe in the market economy as the best path to opportunity”.

“Students must be prepared to argue for an alternative vision of universities”

Toby Young was a battle, but this is the war. While Young had all the attention, hardly anyone noticed that also on the board are the CEO of DLA Piper and the Managing Director of Boots. The OfS is the final act in the Tory plan to destroy the idea of universities as public institutions which exist for the sake of creating and spreading knowledge, rather than to provide a service to paying customers.

This failure of opposition is not new. The last nine months since Shakira Martin’s “moderate” slate, whose prominent members include former CUSU President Amatey Doku, took control of the NUS have seen a relentless retreat from positions of principle, in the name of not being left behind by these reforms and winning influence over the government.

They sacrificed a lot in their desperate plea to be brought in from the cold: any institutional support for the national Free Education demonstration in November, lobbying work against the Teaching Excellence Framework which the OfS will implement, and a nationally coordinated plan to boycott the National Student Survey. Those were actions that previously had important successes, when the significance of the NSS boycott was mentioned in the House of Lords and the government conceded NUS’ main demand, that the link between TEF and fees be severed.

The reward for all this palatability was a slap in the face. Martin was not appointed to the board of the OfS, but only to the student advisory panel. This is being dressed up as a victory, but really it is conclusive evidence of how far accountable student representation has fallen under her leadership. Campaigns for genuine change have made way for failing attempts to be in the room as the government sells out students to the market.

“Toby Young was a battle, but this is the war”

No sooner had Young gone than calls began for Martin to replace him on the board. One of the first to speak out was Labour MP and former NUS (and CUSU) President Wes Streeting. His sympathy for Martin is understandable. When he had her job in 2008-9, he dropped NUS’ longstanding opposition to tuition fees, trying to be taken seriously enough to influence the 2010 review of university funding. “Just shouting ‘free education’”, he said “would not work”. When the review was published it called for tuition fees to be tripled.

Students must be prepared to argue for an alternative vision of universities. This is the end for those who think we can win by engaging with the government’s reforms. Instead we must be prepared to fight back, and reclaim the ground the NUS has conceded on our behalf. Piecemeal opposition will get us nowhere, and engaging with the marketisation of universities will only make us complicit in it. Most importantly, finalists should boycott the NSS. We should not participate in this tool of the new education market, not just because it will likely be used to increase fees, but as a refusal to enable the government’s plan to put education up for sale. The last few weeks have shown that the student movement will only win if it takes a stand