Having labored incessantly to tear down the “ivory tower bastion of elitism,” some left-wing academics now find themselves lamenting its demise. In “Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities” (Continuum, 172 pages, $34.95), Mary Evans, a professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the department of Women’s Studies, denies harboring any nostalgia for the good old days. But she has come to deplore the climate in which she teaches and to fear for the future of independent thought.

In America, conservative, neoconservative, and even liberal academics denounce the straitjacket imposed on free thought by political correctness. Ms. Evans seems untroubled by that particular form of mind control. Her critique, essentially from the left, is nonetheless well taken. Although it arises out of a specifically British set of circumstances, the problem it highlights is closely aligned to one affecting universities in this country: a mentality concerned exclusively with the “bottom line.”

In Britain, state support for education has brought about government bureaucracy on a scale far beyond the imagination of most innocent Americans, a never-ending series of assessments and evaluations – or, as Ms. Evans puts it, “bureaucratic Rottweilers snapping at our heels.” What she detects is “a shift from a collective world in which independent and critical thought was valued, to a collective world in which universities are expected to fulfill not these values, but those of the marketplace and the economy.”

The current Labor government shares this diminished view of the function of universities with its Tory predecessors, she says, citing a fascinating passage from a 1997 government report. Universities are to “be a significant force in the regional economy, support research and consultancy and attract inward investment, provide new employment and meet labor market needs and foster entrepreneurship among students and staff.” Under the new dispensation, students are expected to learn “transferable skills”; learning is “modular” rather than interconnected; and the faculty are constantly being evaluated as to how well they have succeeded in imparting to their students a body of information (be it calculus or the history of soap opera).

In other words, there is no emphasis on the free play of ideas, on teaching students to think critically, or on allowing faculty to pursue research that does not promise an immediate profitable application for the economy and the state.

By focusing attention on the powerful nexus between the state and the marketplace and the way it reduces non-marketable values to oblivion, Ms. Evans performs a valuable service. She wittily and vividly shows us how the “Orwellian” language of bureaucracy channels thinking along preconceived lines, closes off discussion, and reduces education to mere training.

When she ventures into the realm of “gender,” however, she’s on weaker ground, largely because she ends up arguing in the same old circle: If women want to join the “male” world, they have to adopt “male” tactics like aggression, so that’s bad; if women allow themselves to remain kindly helpers, on the other hand, they’ll be kept down, so that’s also bad. And in a book that is supposed to be about education, she indulges in far too many distracting asides.

She deplores the “masculinist” leadership of Prime Minister Blair and President Bush regarding the war in Iraq, for instance, decrying “neat … profoundly stupid, distinctions between right and wrong” without stopping to consider that certain circumstances may cry out for direct action and clear-cut distinctions. She concedes women were raped and tortured under Saddam Hussein and deprived of their rights under the Taliban, but resents that point being made by “fundamentalist” Christians who favor virginity. She reminds us that many women in the West are still consigned to poorly paid jobs: True enough, but hardly an argument that the West need therefore not concern itself with women being tortured, thrown out of school, or stoned for adultery!

When she returns to her mutton, she very presciently locates the attack on the traditional “high” culture of the universities on an unholy coalition of “leftwing modernizers, Tory pragmatists, and all-party, all-class philistines.” Yet she can’t seem to let go of her own association of these standards with “over-privileged white men” – she fails to understand that symbols of class privilege are not in themselves class privilege, and that to oppose “high” culture because it was associated with well-off white men is like turning down indoor plumbing, oral hygiene, nutritious food, and other desirables on the same perverse grounds.

But two wrongs don’t make a right, and if the purveyors of political correctness have done their share in breaching the bastions that sheltered independent thought from social engineering, the new breed of marketplace efficiency experts seem to be finishing the job. Ms. Evans rightly reminds us what universities best supply: basic research; independent, even playful thinking; and well-educated students who know how to reason for themselves. Such “products” are not material commodities, but fall into the category of “public goods,” the purpose of which is not to make short-term profits, but to strengthen society.

Ms. Rubin last wrote for these pages on Shakespeare.