This chapter offers some further context on the liberal arts in England and, in particular, foregrounds how senior academics describe their efforts to get a liberal arts degree on the books (and, in some cases, off the books). The broader context of English higher education's marketisation is important here: clearly, with a national funding model where the money follows the student, curricular innovators must make a business case to their institutions. This will generally hang on the twin hooks of student recruitment and cost effectiveness. These academic-to-institution justifications are important, including to those academics doing the justifying, and are generally not experienced as only hoops through which one must jump. The responsibility to recruit and to contribute to a sustainable institution is taken seriously by academics.

Yet, it is clear that this is not all that's going on. Mantras of either efficiency or giving students what they want do not account for the fact that at many institutions, student recruitment is not actually expected to be particularly high (though poor student recruitment is certainly the main reason given for the closure of liberal arts degrees). At some institutions, relatively small student intakes are positively desired (though this remains in tension with the need to recruit), and both the introduction of new core modules for small cohorts and the increased need for academic advising are hardly efficiencies. Instead, we should think about market concerns as entangled with a plurality of further values, including: a conservative domestic register of trust in the past; ideas about fame, repute and likeness with competitors; and an inspirational mode that prizes innovation and change. A complete picture of higher education today must contend with all this.

Therefore, just as the market for students should not be understood as the fundamental truth of the liberal arts, nor should we treat the proclaimed innovation of these degrees as a mere cover for elitism. It would be easy, for instance, to understand the turn to the liberal arts in English higher education as a mere re-traditionalising impulse: a longing look backward to some gilded past before application, vocationalism or even disciplinary specialisation contaminated the hallowed halls of higher education. The aristocratic undertones of liberal arts advocacy are a central concern of this book and should not be discounted as coincidental. Nonetheless, to stop at this observation is to simplify a much knottier picture.