In both the UK and the US, ideas about the market place have deeply affected universities, with such obvious manifestations as the disappearance of idealism and the rise of the undisguised pursuit of material well-being.

As one commentator puts it, students are ‘treated like pampered consumers whose preferences must be satisfied, not as acolytes whose preferences are being formed in the process of being educated’: for the current generation of undergraduates, ‘monasticism is out and hedonism is in’. (D. L. Kirp, ‘This little student went to market’)