Dickens’s Gradgrind would surely have approved of Rishi Sunak. And of the less familiar Orcadian Samuel Laing the Elder, whom I discovered and then wrote about in the historical journal Albion, thirty years ago. (The essay is recycled in my Britain Before Brexit, chapter 5.) Laing was a quintessential Victorian philistine; as of course was the fictional Thomas Gradgrind.

I’m thinking here of course of Sunak’s recent policy statement, that ‘low value’ university courses should be abolished or ‘capped’. By ‘low value’ he means courses that don’t materially profit those who take them. ‘Under his plans, the Office for Students (OfS) will be asked to limit the student numbers on courses seen to fail to deliver good outcomes – including on future earnings potential.’ At present, ‘people are being taken advantage of with low-quality courses that don’t lead to a job that makes it worth it – leaves them financially worse-off.’ (That’s a direct quote from Sunak.)

Which is OK if you think that the only purpose of a university education is to maximise your earnings or profits after it. But most of us who have actually taught in universities regard it quite differently. Universities have far more extensive agendas: broadening minds, stimulating critical thinking, introducing young people to matters beyond the ‘practical’, and so contributing to the quality as well as the profitability of personal and national life. As a by-product, they may maximise wealth in unexpected ways – look at the contributions that many ‘Arts’ graduates have indirectly made to the Exchequer. But that is emphatically not their purpose.

In the broad if uneven advance of ‘late’ capitalism, which seems to be the main underlying trend of British and world history at the present time (and is a running theme of this whole blog), non-utilitarian education, together with the arts, could be seen as capitalism’s final frontier: the fortress to be scaled and destroyed in order to complete the victory of the market and its values. Rishi must be looking forward to that. And Gradgrind chortling happily in his grave.