Discussion
I'm going to say this again (in light of another university advising staff they are at risk of redundancy);
if the exposure of a growing number of the workforce of any other sector was reaching the level of universities, the media & politicians would be all over it, demanding action and the 'saving' of jobs.
With the university sector; not so much.... the Q. is how have we become a country that seems to care so little for a major socially & economically vital sector?
If there is a distinctive answer to this question for the UK, then I would first look to historical changes in higher education to see if there are drivers.
For example: the conversion of {attending university} from an initiation process accessible to a small, class-privileged cohort to a mass consumer event and post-adolescent life stage ringed by extractive practices like privatised student housing, ritualised rejection of the parental home and hence isolation of students with increased vulnerability to marketing, , binge drinking, poverty, and failed promises of employability might mean that successive generations of first-generation university attendees were thoroughly disenchanted and lost the sense of university as access to symbolic capital that made the whole widening access project seem appealing in the first place. From there, it's easy to connect that disenchantment to an awareness that the hollow promise of universities here is being marketed aggressively to aspiring international elites who are often more mobile and privileged than the home students, and those people are often doing performative taught postgraduate courses.
At which point it would be very hard to not be cynical about universities.
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