This article is written out of the desire to continue the debate started by previous contributors to STP concerning the history and current condition of drama as it is taught and researched in UK universities. Its author is the current Chair of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments, although he is writing here in a personal capacity. The article accepts Connolly's characterisation of the current situation as the product of neoliberal ideology, 'economism' and 'commodification' and uses this analysis as a framework within which to consider some of the immediate and longer term issues facing the discipline, including student recruitment and graduate employment. The analysis also looks beyond the university sector and considers the implications for higher education of the pattern of decline in the number of school students taking General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSEs) and A levels in drama and performance. The article is not pessimistic, however, arguing that neoliberal hegemony is not complete and that there is space to influence debates as neoliberalism falters. There is now a good deal of evidence of the value of drama as an educational and cultural force in the public domain, and it is up to the discipline to exploit it. The healthy state of the discipline's research culture, as revealed by the 2014 Research Excellence Framework results, is also a cause for celebration.Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (Karl Marx 1852) Studies in Theatre and Performance has published articles in recent issues by Thomson (2012), Connolly (2013 and Freeman (2013) that focus on drama and performance in the Academy -that is, the practice and ideological underpinnings of our discipline as it is taught and researched in UK universities. All three, in different ways, address both the history and the institutional context in which we operate, and this includes not only individual universities, or even Higher Education (HE) as a sector, but the configuration of the arts and education in a neoliberal economy. This focus is partly the result of the discipline of drama and performance having 'come of age' -that is, having been around long enough to have a history that requires debating, and distinct periods and ideological crosscurrents, the configuration between which can be charted and argued over. Roy Connolly's excellent account of this history and its significance within the wider ideological landscape tells this story well. However, it is not only because of that, as Connolly makes clear. We are in a period of considerable, perhaps unprecedented, change in HE, and not only in relation to the discipline of drama. *