Championing intellectual curiosity in a higher education policy landscape dominated by conversations around skills and economic growth is becoming increasingly challenging. Which is exactly why we need to defend it, argues Anna Kiernan.
Anna Kiernan is Associate Professor in Creativity and Literary Culture, University of Exeter & Co-director, The Literary Platform. She is also a member of the Creative PEC Industry Champions, a UK-wide network of practitioners drawn from all parts of the creative industries to provide Creative PEC with on-the-ground insight to inform our research and policy.
David Ogilvy, one of the architects of modern advertising, distinguished between two kinds of copywriter: the ‘poet’, motivated by ideas and creative craft, and the ‘killer’, focused on what sells.
Universities are increasingly being asked to perform a similar double act – to protect the space for imagination, experimentation and critical thought while also producing graduates with the capabilities to drive economic growth.
Like Ogilvy’s killer/poet paradigm, HE administrators need to embrace a strategic ‘breadth and depth’ approach. To attract students and engage employers, universities must drive productivity, support innovation and engage with the possibilities (and pitfalls) of AI. To attract highly competitive research funding, however, disciplinary depth, room to fail and time (a valuable commodity) are required.
A university serving the creative economy not only should, but must, have room for both.
The Creative Industries as an engine of economic growth
The Government’s Creative Industries Sector Plan (2025) positions the sector at the centre of the UK’s growth strategy, aiming to increase annual business investment from £17 billion to £31 billion by 2035. Creative PEC’s Creative Industries Skills Audit similarly calls for stronger links between higher education and industry. But the talent pipeline the sector needs is not produced by skills training alone. It depends on universities cultivating curiosity, experimentation and original thinking long before their economic value can be measured.
The challenge, then, is not whether universities should engage with industry, but how. The most effective models connect students to professional practice without reducing education to immediate workforce needs.
Universities and apprenticeships
This means thinking differently about how universities connect learning to the creative economy. The University of Exeter, where I work, offers a practical example. I recently led the development of a Level 6 Digital Marketing Degree Apprenticeship, working with more than 20 employers and public-sector organisations, with professional accreditation through the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Students on this programme (and other apprenticeships) will combine paid employment with university study, gaining a degree alongside professional experience without conventional undergraduate tuition-fee debt. For young people interested in hands-on careers, apprenticeships offer a paid, regional route into study and progression. For employers, apprenticeships offer a supported way to recruit and develop talent. For universities, apprenticeships support widening participation and the civic agenda, while allowing them to diversify income in order to partially offset against the losses incurred through a diminishing post-graduate taught market.
Creativity as a policy instrument
That market-driven narrative of education is now deeply embedded in how universities operate. In Against Creativity (2019), Oli Mould argues that creativity, an innate human capacity, has been repurposed as innovation: the process of creating value from ideas. In this formulation, creativity is valued less as a cultural or social good than as an economic asset. Mobilised in pursuit of growth, competitiveness and productivity, it becomes a policy instrument and a workplace imperative. The demand to be permanently inventive, entrepreneurial and adaptable turns creativity into a resource that can be exploited (through the gig economy, for instance) and from which value can be extracted.
Luke Kennard’s Black Bag, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, turns that contradiction into absurdist comedy. The protagonist, a penniless actor, takes a job sitting inside an oversized black leather bag at the back of university lectures. His best friend, an online influencer, looks for ways to monetise the situation, making ‘black bag’ an online entity. The novel’s dark joke is the big reveal: that a creative person becomes valuable only insofar as his or her experience can be converted into something that can be bought and sold. Kennard’s satire exposes the limits of measuring human worth solely through market value. While others scramble to turn Black Bag into a brand, the protagonist becomes increasingly invested in the performance itself.
Which is why the humanities matter.
A literature seminar, an art history class or a drama studio may not look like innovation infrastructure in a business school sense, but they cultivate capacities on which creative work depends: imagination, critical thinking, cultural literacy and storytelling (Kennard did his creative writing PhD at Exeter). Creative innovation rarely begins with a market-ready proposition. It begins with curiosity, knowledge and the freedom to explore.
The financial paradox
A creative economy capable of sustained growth needs to protect this generative capacity. Yet universities are being asked to build that economy while their own financial foundations are suffering from an era of financial attrition. Universities UK estimates that real-terms funding per home student in England fell by 35% between 2015-16 and 2025-26. In 2025, 49% of universities surveyed by Universities UK had closed courses and 18% had closed departments.
At Exeter, academic provision has also recently been reviewed, with proposed reductions and voluntary redundancies hitting the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences particularly hard. We are seeing this pattern in many other HE institutions across the country, as well as debates about the role of universities as anchor institutions contributing to their city and region’s wider creative economy, and how this is also now becoming more vulnerable.
The case for the poet
Ogilvy’s killer would appear to have inherited the future. Content can now be produced at extraordinary speed (albeit with an acute environmental cost). Yet the glut only increases the value of discernment. Someone still has to decide whether a work says anything worth saying, whether it understands the people and cultures from which it borrows, and whether it offers insight rather than imitation. The problem is no longer how to generate content, but how to judge it.
The killer represents one purpose of the university: responding to current societal productivity and economic needs, working with employers, developing professional capability and contributing to socioeconomic growth. The poet represents another: curiosity, experimentation, critical enquiry and the capacity to pursue an idea without knowing where it will lead. The error lies in imagining that only the former generates economic capital.
The poet and the killer have different jobs. A university serving the creative economy should have room for both.
This article was produced for Creative PEC. The views and opinions expressed in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Creative PEC.
Illustration by Neil Webb
References
Carey, H., Giles, L. and Hay, B. (2026) Creative Industries Skills Audits. Creative PEC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20072107
Department for Business and Trade/DCMS, Creative Industries Sector Plan, 2025.
Skills England, Sector Skills Needs Assessment – Creative Industries, 2026.
Mould, O., Against Creativity, Verso, 2019.
Kennard, L., Black Bag, John Murray, 2026. shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Universities UK, How teaching funding per student in England has declined over the last decade, 2025.
Universities UK, Universities grip financial crisis – but at what cost to the nation?, 2025.
Department for Education, Building a world-class curriculum for all: Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report, 2025.
