Such an account is not difficult for natural scientists to render, given the close relationship between the natural sciences on the one hand, and the good of physical health and the means of life-saving, -securing or -enhancing technology. Nor is it very difficult for social and human scientists, given the direct bearing of their disciplines on the psychological health of individuals and the social health of societies. 

Explaining why the arts and humanities matter, however, is more difficult. Among the doctoral dissertations in the Humanities being examined in Oxford in 2009 was one on the function and status of landscape painting in late 16th- and 17th-century Rome, another on the Mamluk historiography of the Fatimids, and another entitled Flirting with fame: Byron and his female readers. Now no doubt these topics fascinate those whose hobby it is to study them, but why exactly should they matter to anyone else? And why should public money be spent on them — as opposed to, say, being spent on more helicopters for our hard-pressed troops in Afghanistan? If there is a robust answer, it doesn't lie immediately to hand — as witness the Arts and Humanities Research Council's strangulated attempts to articulate it in the face of the shamelessly utilitarian "impact agenda" of the late Brown government. 

This dismaying inarticulacy is one reason why, six years ago, the then Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, himself a graduate in maths and economics, felt no embarrassment in opining that public funding should only support academic subjects of "clear usefulness". He was quoted in the Guardian as saying: "I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them." (He denied saying this.) It is also the reason why in June 2009 Lord Mandelson's delivery of university affairs entirely into the hands of a new Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills provoked no public outcry. And it explains why — notwithstanding the fact that David Willetts, the new Minister of State for Universities and Science, has publicly denounced the "bleak" utilitarian view of higher education and asserted its social, civic importance — the new coalition's Programme for Government mentions universities only ever in connection with "building a strong and innovative economy" and fostering stronger links with industry.  

To ask a scholar of history, literature or theology to explain what he does matters is one thing. To ask that he demonstrate its usefulness is quite another. "Usefulness" connotes a shrunken, materialistic, utilitarian understanding of human goods — an understanding that is sunk deep into Anglo-Saxon mentality. In contemporary colloquial English, when we talk about "goods" we're referring to washing machines, sofas, cars and plasma TVs. Until the modern era, however, the word "goods" encompassed the likes of beauty, justice, friendship and communion with God — meanings that now survive among us only in university departments of moral theology and (to the extent that they follow Aristotle rather than Bentham or J. S. Mill) moral philosophy. Compared to this rich, colourful and dignifying vision of human flourishing, our modern utilitarian view is pinched, anaemic and degrading. This secularised Protestant view is embedded in the fate of other words in the English language. Take, for example, otium, the Latin noun that the medievals used to refer positively to the freedom to reflect and admire: this has come down to us as the disdainful adjective "otiose" — meaning "unemployed," "idle", "sterile". And the medieval word for the basic university course in the liberal rational and public arts of thinking, writing and persuading — trivium — has reached us as "trivial". (I very much wanted to be able to convert this etymological point into a hat-trick by sharing my discovery that the word for the other half of the medieval liberal arts course — quadrivium — had given us "drivel". Disappointingly, the Oxford English Dictionary yielded up no oxygen for that wild speculation.)