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”
FreeArtLondonList
RT @SouthieJ: In defence of the liberal arts – why the government must think again | Left Foot Forward http://artsn.biz/bqMTRA #artsfunding
Alex Herod
In defence of the liberal arts -why the government must think again | Left Foot Forward http://artsn.biz/bqMTRA #artsfunding (via @SouthieJ)
jdennis_99
@ Chris Roberts:
I recognise that spending cuts isn’t the only way to reduce the deficit, and that it could be done by raising taxes. However, raising taxes stifles economic growth, and can actually lead to lower tax revenues, making the deficit larger, not smaller.
The necessity for real-terms reductions in public expenditure is fiscal, not idealogical. I agree there is a political aspect to what is cut, but this should be forming the crux of the debate, not whether to reduce spending or not, and at the moment, no one on the Left seems to be volunteering any proposals for what should be reduced instead.
Insofar as the bank bailouts are concerned, that is a cyclical, not structural, deficit – the money will very likely be returned upon the sale of public shareholdings in those banks. As long it is done intelligently, unlike Gordon Brown’s disposal of gold reserves. Admittedly, some of the £155billion is also cyclical, and can be attributed to below-average tax revenues rather than overspending. But over £100billion is structural – the country is simply spending too much. In the face of this, arguing that the deficit argument is simply cover for rolling back the State does not wash.
Public spending needs to be brought back under control so that the structural deficit is eliminated. The Government are doing this – I’m not an apologist for them, and I don’t agree with every step that they’re taking to accomplish this aim. But I do recognise that the general principle of re-balancing the public finances is absolutely necessary, and it’s time that people on the Left did as well.
Louise de Winter
Good article by David and I’ve enjoyed reading the posts above. The wider issue is one of what sort of society we ultimately want to be. We once believed in education for education’s sake, recognising that the discipline of research and exploration into a subject would bring both individual rewards and a societal return of its own. Now we are moving towards a system that only looks to replace skills gaps and respond to the needs of the market. But which one of us can really predict what those needs will be five or ten years hence and, more importantly, how can the super tanker of higher education be turned around quickly enough to meet them on demand? How can we predict the future ways of thinking, of ideas and subjects sparking off each other and the connections between different academic disciplines that might lead to something new and exciting? Let’s not forget that James Dyson trained at the Royal College of Art; scientists and engineers need designers to make their ideas come to life. After all, these other-worldly, slightly fey boffins may be good at coming up with the concepts, but they also need hard-headed, practical artists and designers to turn their ideas into 3-D reality!
There is beauty and creativity in the sciences and rigour, discipline, evidence and analysis in the arts and humanities. They can borrow from each other to make a sum greater than their parts. To imply that one is more important than the other betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how people and ideas work.
But, most importantly, a higher education should also be for the joy of learning, not just for jobs. Just as enjoying and appreciating the arts and humanities bring us a richness of experience and understanding of what it is to be human, so should an education broaden our horizons, spark our creativity and lead to the development of great ideas. To place a greater value on one set of academic subjects and disciplines to the exclusion of all others is to warp our development as a nation and beggar the minds of the future.
Frances London
RT @leftfootfwd In defence of the liberal arts – why the government must think again: http://bit.ly/duwMv7 by @DavidLammy