The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Universities

The first properly mounted attack on the commercialization of the university came more than a century ago, not in the UK but in the United States. In The Higher Learning in America (1918), Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist and author of the classic analysis of conspicuous consumption The Theory of the Leisure Class, lambasted the growing conception of the university “as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge,” where corporate interests prevail over intellectual ideals. “This incursion of pecuniary ideals in academic policy,” Veblen bemoaned, leads to the “supersession of learning by worldly wisdom”.