Although the “marketisation” (3) and “economisation” (5) processes of higher education in the United Kingdom have already been broadly considered and analyzed across academic literature, in Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance, Zoe Bulaitis addresses the new and specific question of the process of the valuation of the humanities.

Bulaitis analyzes British higher education policy and reforms between 2008 and 2018, focusing on the ways these policies and reforms articulated the human values—the ones that may increase the well-being of society—higher education is supposed to help students understand and develop. The period that Bulaitis covers saw a shift from public to private funding for higher education with the removal of the cap on tuition fees and the dissolution of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, both in line with the creation in 1986 of the Research Assessment Exercise under Margaret Thatcher's government, which gave birth in 2008 to the Research Excellence Framework from 2008 to the present.

Bulaitis scrutinizes the relationship between liberal and neoliberal universities’ values and education. She compares nineteenth-century educational values with the present ones to show how this Victorian inheritance paved the way for the current higher educational system, which is increasingly focused on and organized around economic values. Among these Victorian liberal educational ideals, universal access to higher education and a self-civilizing attitude emerge as two of the most predominant goals to be achieved.

Bulaitis connects philosophical debates with political practices to develop a critical and humanistic approach to articulate educational value. She refers to the tradition of critical theory developed by Matthew Arnold's “liberal education” (24), Herbert Spencer's “economic liberalism” (24), and the ideas of Jeffrey J. Williams, who in 2012 coined the term “critical university studies” in the US context.

Bulaitis brings to light the recent predominance of economic values within higher education in the United Kingdom since the 2008 reforms. The reforms have tended to supersede the Victorian social, ethical, and moral values of arts and humanities. She also argues that alternative sites for valuation beyond the market remain an underdeveloped area in critical university studies.

First, chapter 2 studies political discourse in both the Revised Code of Education (or Lowe's code) of 1862 and the Browne Report of 2010 and discusses how these reforms dealt with the issue of educational assessment and the creation of tuition fees. The chapter also explores how Victorian individual social liberal values strengthened individual self-regulation at the expenses of state regulation and public good and how it promoted students’ self-fashioning (25).

Chapter 3 discusses the reasons why science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, often referred to collectively as STEM, were prioritized by higher educational policy. In examining the debates between the sciences and the humanities, Bulaitis draws on an exchange between C. P. Snow and F. R Leavis, which enables her to study the rhetorical expression of value in the two different fields. She finally demonstrates the existence of two different and opposing types of values.

Chapter 4 explains how fictional representations of academia in literature helped to articulate the ethical value of the humanities but finally led to an opposition between the language of literature and the language of economics. To present the qualities of a liberal education as they appear in academic fiction, Bulaitis investigates Victorian novels such as Tom Brown at Oxford (1859), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Jude the Obscure (1894–95), and she explores the literary representation of the values of the humanities.

Finally, chapter 5 explores the relationship between the management of the humanities and public cultural sector, including the consequences of the Research Excellence Framework's assessment had on the humanities. As a point of comparison, Bulaitis looks at the case of museums and the way their management evolved. In closing, Bulaitis argues that scholars working in the humanities have already started responding to these recent changes by increasing their accountability to the Treasury, and she observes that with the rise of the new public management model an even greater contribution is now required from them.

Bulaitis's analysis of the values conveyed both in higher education speech and policies provides a useful study of how they are perceived, imagined, and put into practice within the British neoliberal context. I note her mention of the survey about “the most desired jobs in the UK” (120), the result of which showed that the three most desired jobs in 2015 were not to be an investment banker (only 26 percent), but rather an author (60 percent), a librarian (54 percent), or an academic (51 percent), thus suggesting that academic life is still very much valued among British people.

It might also have been interesting to query the existence of universal or specific definitions of these values for sciences and humanities, as the term value is polysemic—understood differently according to its contexts and cultures. Yvonne Downs, for example, suggested focusing on cultures of valuation, which provide “the contexts for judgements about value, act as mechanisms through which value is attributed and lenses through which it might be recognized,” rather than on the value of higher education itself (“Neoliberalism and the Value of Higher Education,” in Tim Rudd and Ivor F. Goodson, eds., Negotiating Neoliberalism: Developing Alternative Educational Visions [2017], 59–70, at 60). (See also Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life [2014]; Simon Lilley and Dimitris Papadopoulos, “Material Returns: Cultures of Valuation, Biofinancialisation and the Autonomy of Politics,” Sociology 48, no. 5 [2014]: 972–88.)

Economics is a social and human science. Alfred Marshall defined it as “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing . . . Thus, it is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man” (Principles of Economics, 8th ed. [1920], book 1, ch. 1.). The academic values that students can acquire while studying economics cannot simply be restricted to know-how: they are also to know how to be.

As it stands, Bulaitis has articulated very convincing academic arguments to explain the shift from liberal to neoliberal university values and debates. This book offers accurate, clear, and meaningful food for thought for those interested in the study of the processes of “marketisation” and “economisation” of higher education.