Lectures at Britain’s best universities now come with subtitles. Look around the room and you’ll see rows of students who can’t follow the English, reading it off their phones instead, getting a line-by-line translation as the professor speaks. Every student in that hall has been certified as able to understand the material in English. On this evidence, the certification is not worth a great deal. Students at several universities have described the same scene to me, each in the flat tone reserved for what no longer surprises them.

One student says he rarely sits through a lecture without noticing several classmates following it in real-time AI translation, each of them deemed to have proficient English language skills before they arrived. The apps can just about keep up in a lecture, but not during class discussions. Others describe seminars in which the conversation falls to the handful of students who have the language skills to answer in real time. Sometimes, the class cannot make itself understood to the tutor at all and, remarkably, the discussion switches to Mandarin, leaving the only home student unable to take part in a seminar at their own university. There is something........

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