Last week thousands of students and academics marched on parliament to protest against sweeping changes to higher education funding. The coalition government has announced an astonishing 80 per cent cut in public funding for higher education. As a result, fees will treble to £9,000 per year. Students will foot the bill as government withdraws.
David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham; he is a former Minister of State for Higher Education and Intellectual Property and is a former Minister for Culture
Last week thousands of students and academics marched on parliament to protest against sweeping changes to higher education funding. The coalition government has announced an astonishing 80 per cent cut in public funding for higher education. As a result, fees will treble to £9,000 per year. Students will foot the bill as government withdraws.
Unsurprisingly, no one is happy with a deal that increases fees for students but not funding for universities. If that were all, the government could probably ride out a rough period, even with the prime minister telling students on a visit to China that they will pay less because their British counterparts will pay more. But it is not.
These reforms are not just a hike in the cost of university, they are an unprecedented attack on the liberal arts in higher education. Some of this country’s greatest institutions, from the London School of Economics to SOAS, will effectively be privatised.
Whilst departments teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics (S.T.E.M.) subjects have the capacity to secure sponsorship from industry, arts subjects do not have such connections. The result is that when the teaching grant cuts are cut, it will be the liberal arts that suffer.
If George Orwell or Adam Smith applied to university today, they would be told to pay their own way. David Cameron (PPE), George Osborne (History) and Nick Clegg (Social Anthropology) might also reflect on whether their own education deserved public subsidy.
There is the view that the eternal human need for knowledge and self-expression will be enough to sustain demand. But the truth is that the certain subjects will become the preserve of a small elite whose exposure to the arts reflects their upbringing rather than their interests of aptitudes. This concern may not register in a government with 22 millionaires sitting around the cabinet table, but already those from poorer backgrounds are less likely than middle class students to study arts and humanities.
Students will no longer ask themselves which subjects they are passionate about, or which skills they want to acquire. The only question will be a depressing, utilitarian one: which courses are worth taking all the debt on for?
The rationale for the changes is framed in economic terms, but even this belies the nature of work in the modern world. Google doesn’t just employ physics graduates. It also needs people to work in marketing, communications, legal, managerial and human resources roles.
To address problems like climate change, we need scientists to determine the impact of carbon emissions, but also economists and social psychologists to help establish what really drives more environmentally-friendly lifestyles.
Above all these reforms beg wider questions about the kind of society we want to live in which go beyond material wealth or inequality. The presence of liberal arts in higher education provides a voice of sanity, of cultural analysis and resistance that business and science do not. The very fact that it does not attract corporate sponsorship makes its presence in the academy an increasingly important counterweight to the inroads of big business in every part of society.
If university is where the boundaries of knowledge, analysis and creativity are stretched, then Britain will become decidedly lopsided if S.T.E.M. subjects forge ahead whilst liberal arts subjects are left underdeveloped. The arts are not all pretty rhymes and sunsets, but rife with philosophical, social, historical and economic insights about the modern, complex societies we live in.
In a global age these things matter. The strength of work produced in British writing, performing arts, visual arts and architecture is universally recognised and envied. Forget Trident, the arts are the one thing which allows Britain to punch above its weight on the world stage. Despite this, we may become the only major Western democracy to withdraw public funding for the arts and humanities. In the US, France, Germany and across Scandinavia the government pays its fair share. Britain will now stand alone.
In the name of austerity the government is undercutting one of the central planks of British culture and British identity. It is an historic constitutional decision and it is a mistake. The government must think again.
40 Responses to “In defence of the liberal arts – why the government must think again”
jdennis_99
Fees are NOT going up to £9,000 per year. The MAXIMUM fee is going up to £9,000 per year – some universities will charge less than that. And the students with the lowest parental incomes will still not pay any fees at all.
Secondly, don’t know if this is sinking in with any of you yet, but we’re borrowing £155BILLION A YEAR, just to make ends meet. It’s all very well saying ‘you shouldn’t cut this, you shouldn’t cut that’, but something’s got to give.
David Jackson
RT @leftfootfwd: In defence of the liberal arts – why the government must think again: http://bit.ly/duwMv7 by @DavidLammy
Henry
Oh why don’t we just get rid of all state education & save the money? People who want high-earning jobs at Google etc should find the cash to go to Eton or wherever. If they haven’t got it, that’s their problem: they should have been born to parents who’d made an effort.
The current ‘deficit hysteria’ is a great opportunity for right-wingers to promote all sort of daft ideas they wouldn’t dare mention publicly in more normal times.
Dirk vom Lehn
RT @DavidLammy: bit late to this, but my article on defending the arts at Univ is up on LFF – http://bit.ly/duwMv7 #arts #artsfunding
cim
Some of this country’s greatest institutions, from the London School of Economics to SOAS, will effectively be privatised.
Rubbish. They will receive the same – in fact, slightly more if they charge the expected £9k fees – funding per student from the government as they currently do. (And I’d expect LSE and SOAS to both be able to increase student numbers, too, and increase their teaching budgets as a result)
The change from “funding based on expected student numbers” to “funding based on actual student numbers” is not privatisation. Indeed, given that universities are already private [usually charitable] bodies that receive government funding for certain activities, it’s no more “privatisation” than a change in details in some government catering contracts to pay per sandwich rather than a bulk sum for the year would be a “privatisation” of Tesco.
There is quite a potential for unpredictability and change due to the deregulation of undergraduate student numbers, and how that shakes out in the sector may well lead to some universities shrinking, closing or merging (but others will expand) – but that is not a change that’s getting much attention: it’s all been on the (big but largely meaningless) numbers of “tuition fees” and “block grant teaching budgets”.
jdennis_99: Fees are NOT going up to £9,000 per year. The MAXIMUM fee is going up to £9,000 per year
Because of the way fees and repayments are structured, though, it doesn’t make any sense for universities to charge anything other than the maximum (except for a few courses), since it doesn’t make any difference to the majority of graduates whether they paid a £7k fee (the minimum practical to maintain existing funding levels) or a £9k fee.
The incentive to charge anything other than the maximum fee actually (and perversely) decreases as the maximum fee rises, since if you were going to benefit from having your “loan written off” after 30 years under a £9k fee anyway, you won’t make any extra repayments under a £20k fee.