‘This is water’

The complaints voiced within the Carnegie Report (Colby et al. 2011) and related discussions, and extensively echoed in this book, do concern the specifics of the business school but can just as easily be more widely framed in terms of the ideas and politics that govern the modern university.¹ It makes sense to do this because the standoff between liberal humanism and utilitarianism, one with a long history in some countries (Newman 1907 [1852]; Lawson 1998; Collini 2012), has shaped academics, disciplines and institutions. Lawrence’s catty complaints about ‘a university where smart men would dispense doses of smart cash-chemistry in language of common-sense’ don’t sound as if they are a century old, but could be echoed by anyone who nowadays bemoans the massification and marketization of higher education. Universities, it seems, have been accused of ‘dumbing down’ for quite a long time.