ABSTRACT
Written within ten years of Bentham’s various texts on the idea of the panoptican (referred to at the beginning of Chapter 9), Newman’s thoughts would appear to strike a similar chord of resonance amongst the academic community in Britain today. In producing a passionate defence of what is often referred to as the Liberal educational creed, Newman outlines an essential quality of a university education: first and foremost, a university should be a place where knowledge is pursued for its own sake. Although it is highly debatable whether there has ever been a university which upholds this purely and exclusively, it is, nevertheless, still held by many as a cherished belief. We saw this previously throughout Chapter 2 concerning the American academy. In this chapter I will be considering the ways in which post-16 education in the UK has increasingly
been asked to accommodate itself to a series of social engineering projects, and to see itself, first and foremost, as a servant of the economy and society; and asking whether there is any validity in seeing these projects as forms of political correctness.
