Many lecturers and professors are privately quite appalled by the rise of creative writing in universities. They believe, for very good reasons, that it is not compatible with the study of literary texts: works of literature demand rigorous critical attention, a strong understanding of the workings of the English language, a good grasp of historical context, an abiding respect and love for tradition (including a firm knowledge of literary genres), and an impartial aesthetic and intellectual curiosity about the great artistic accomplishments of others. Such teachers are often, indeed, sharply opposed to the idea that creative writing could be part of proper university study. They certainly would not be willing to teach a course with any creative writing component and, secretly, quite possibly wish their creative writing colleagues would die horrible deaths, with the senior management in their universities deciding not to advertise for replacements.

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Despite the speed and apparent smoothness with which creative writing has become incorporated into English departments, or (especially in the US) as a separate department alongside English, its institutionalisation is complex and deceptive. It is obvious, however, that its recent and remarkable expansion is closely bound up with the marketisation of higher education, especially in the US and the UK. Once you start thinking of “the student” as “the customer”, and once the customer’s own preferences are “prioritised” (to echo the business-speak that has come to prevail), it is inevitable that you should expect to see more courses in creative writing than in, say, medieval English prose or 18th-century pastoral verse.

The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?

Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?

My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

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The problem is that as online education becomes more pervasive, universities can no longer primarily be in the business of transmitting technical knowledge.

Finland has no standardized tests. They don’t rank their students, select valedictorians, or even care all that much about grades. Teachers give individualized grades to each student and develop their own tests for their specific classrooms without any input from some central authority. There’s no competition in Finnish education, and no private university scholarships to compete for. It sounds like the bullshitiest hippie wet dream ever conceived … and it works better than any other educational system in the Western World.

How is that possible? Well, competition may make perfect sense when it comes to grown-ass men fighting over a leather ball, but in the classroom, it appears to just distract kids from the important business of learning. Denise Clark Pope, a lecturer at Stanford’s School of Education, followed five high school students around for a year, and while a stunt like that would have landed us in a very special sort of prison, her outcome was much more productive: She found that high achievers spent more time “finangling the system” than they spent gaining knowledge. Meanwhile, students in Finland don’t worry about maximizing their GPA or collecting enough extra credit hours to impress [College X], and as a result they end up actually learning stuff.