Alexander Ewing finds a trip to Wales to be rewarding

From time to time it is important that academics, and those aspiring, stretch their legs outside of the university in order to gain perspective on their profession and general being-in-the-world.

Otherwise rot sets in.

A bleak job market and general penury can do strange things to someone in the latter stages of their DPhil. Not long ago PriceWaterhouseCoopers set up a tent in Broad Street where Oxford students could alight for some free bicycle repairs and a chat about what to do with their lives after university.

I almost stopped.

So a few weeks ago, it was with great relief that I glided out of Oxford station on the way to Wales for a school visit on behalf of an Oxford college’s (not mine) access and outreach programme.

I digress to say that on this particular day I gladly left behind what many colleagues billed as the debate of the century – over whether the university should spend £30m to remove a floor off the Castle Mill flats.

Since I’m writing about perspective: that’s just around the annual budget for postgraduate funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Never mind. My trip felt more important: a chance to speak to year 10 and 11s about what it is like to study politics at university, and to discuss, and remind myself, ‘what university is for?’.

The students’ enthusiasm was infectious. In light of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I asked them whether they thought government should protect an unlimited right to free speech.

And in under an hour, the students, unbeknownst to them, had sketched out arguments on utilitarian grounds, worked out JS Mill’s harm principle and made an impassioned (and nuanced) defence for protecting free thought and discussion.

These varied ideas, I told them afterwards, demonstrate why it is important to reflect upon what politics is for and what it ought to be for. In fact, I could do with a couple of these youngsters among my first-year PPE students.

More sobering, however, were their stated reasons for aspiring to go to university – all of them reflecting the realities of our increasingly marketised world. We go to university to get a good job. A course in the humanities is an impractical luxury.

None of this is their fault; it is what society tells them. Even AHRC funding, according to its website, is there to support research that “not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK”.

But I simply can’t – and don’t want to – “sell” political theory, or PPE more generally, as a useful degree according to standards of employability and social or economic output.

And should we? These barometers of value are precisely what the university experience is meant to question. It is a rarefied space to enquire about the human condition and the appropriate ends of human endeavour.

I didn’t explain this in my presentation. But I hope they find out.