At a British Academy debate, I suggested to David Willetts, the minister for universities, that the government could win immense goodwill in higher education, and many other professions, through the simple expedient of urging the civil service to make a modest reduction in the proportion of economists they recruit and using the saving to create a small cadre of humanities-trained graduates tasked with the rewriting of all policy documents and spending edicts in what Wordsworth called "a selection of language really used by men" as opposed to the jargon of managementspeak.

The insidious long-term effect of the Fulton reform of the civil service is that within government there is now a reflex that economics and management are the master-disciplines to whose tune the universities must march. Few within the universities would want to go back to the old days when gentlemen-scholars took long vacations in the Alps and published nothing other than the odd footling article about the textual emendation of Nicander's poetry. But accountability need not be synonymous with the measurement of academic research, scholarship and teaching by means of the language of the KPI.

It is not hard to defend the humanities in an age of utilitarianism by arguing that they make a huge contribution to the economy. After all, if we ask what are the areas where the UK really is a world leader, the answer might be banking, higher education, arms manufacture and the creative industries. Banking is now in a state of some disrepute; universities are (as they always are) in a state of some anxiety; the trade in arms has always been in a state of disrepute; but the creative industries continue to thrive, and it is this most buoyant area of the economy that is fed by humanities graduates. One may say with confidence that the long-term future of the humanities is bright because the training in critical thinking provided by the humane disciplines will prove a key benefit in the virtual and global "knowledge economy" of the 21st century.

The dilemma faced by those making such a defence is that the moment you start talking about the "knowledge economy" you are falling in with the reflex that economics is the master-discipline and that the moment you focus in bushy-tailed Blairite fashion on "the future not the past" you run the risk of implicitly denigrating the past — that very past which it is a prime duty of the humanities to conserve.