Glen O’Hara argues that arts and humanities subjects are victims of a chaotic system
Although many universities are now beginning to struggle financially, the situation is particularly dire in subjects that cannot claim to be vocational, mathematical or scientific. Every indication is that a bleak time stretches ahead for the arts and humanities in particular. If that seems a strange way for the United Kingdom to go about pressing one of its key competitive advantages, that’s because it’s happening almost by accident, without the conscious design or planning that should guide any higher education system.
Universities including Roehampton, the University of East Anglia and the University of Kent are downsizing or even closing humanities departments. The middle of the traditional rankings is now full of casualties in languages, history and English literature. Before the shakeout is over, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of posts will be lost. Why is this happening?
The first and main reason is scale. A-level numbers for some languages, and English literature, have fallen markedly in recent years, and there simply does not seem to be enough student demand to support so many different departments.
But it isn’t the only reason. History A-level numbers have declined only marginally, and the Royal Historical Society has been forced to speak out angrily against cuts and closures. The real cause of this extreme turbulence is the decision by the then chancellor George Osborne to remove controls on student numbers by institution in 2015, coupled with a freeze on tuition fees (in England) since 2017.
Hostile ecosystem
Taken together, these two policies now threaten to eviscerate chunks of the sector, and to leave regions of the country without a strong arts and humanities offer. Big Russell Group names can hoover up students by dropping their true grade offers a little, while local players can attract students who want to stay at home or cannot afford to move away to university, such is the shrunken level of the student loan for living costs. But that leaves everyone in between—the University of East Anglia, for instance, or the University of Kent—gasping for oxygen in an ecosystem that is becoming more and more hostile.
That environment is likely to get even more inhospitable. Until now, vice-chancellors have packed in arts and humanities students because they are relatively cheap to teach and can cross-subsidise science, technology and maths undergraduates. That dynamic may now be losing steam.
There is only so long you can go on making seminars bigger before your brand starts to deteriorate, however well-known you are. Every city or town can only take so many students, and many are now full to bursting with students, leading to deteriorating relations with residents and councils alike. Most of all, the point is now approaching where universities can no longer make a surplus on arts and humanities students. At that point, senior management teams may decide to cut their losses and call a halt to expansion.
That won’t relieve pressure further down the grade pyramid, though—partly because so much capacity will already have been lost, and partly because damage to the intellectual and social superstructure of the humanities will have gone so deep. Economic scarring will also play a role. A year or two hence, lower-prestige institutions that have been suffering and that are finally able to fill up on a few more non-Stem students will happily accept the extra tuition fees without expanding the number of increasingly unaffordable teaching staff.
Rescue attempts
Since all assume that an incoming Labour government will have little to spend, and that raising tuition fees will likely be off the agenda too, it is possible that rescue attempts under a new administration led by Keir Starmer will mean bringing back a numbers cap for specific institutions. That will help a little, but the process of degeneration has gone too far for it to be a panacea.
Universities may be told to seek more donations and links from local business and industry, but outside a few hotspots for arts and culture that’s unlikely to bring in the kind of money that Stem departments can capture. Cash-strapped theatre, dance, music and youth groups are on the edge themselves, without being asked to contribute more.
A graduate contribution paid by employers rather than graduates could become a Conservative alternative. But it is difficult to imagine many employers wanting to subsidise history of art or politics at the same rate as, for instance, maths or law. Indeed, anything that ties arts and humanities degrees to ‘skills’ devalues and degrades their whole point: to illustrate and illuminate the world in imaginative, surprising and holistic ways. Encouraging businesses in that cramped, pitiful view of education, and thence moving society further in that direction, is less than attractive.
Unless government can be encouraged to see the number of university places as part of regional infrastructure, seeking to provide an excellent arts and humanities education in each part of the country, much arts and humanities provision that was expensive and laborious to build up will be destroyed. While universities continue to see each programme as a self-funding unit within their business, having to justify their own existence via the bottom line rather than as part of a greater whole, some of the UK’s most vibrant and vital subject areas will suffer.
Turning the supertanker away from the rocks will not be easy, as the far-reaching extent of the ideological changes needed suggests. But without a sharp turn of the wheel, the arts and humanities in higher education can expect little relief and must brace for further decline.
Glen O’Hara is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of a series of books on contemporary governance and policy, including Governing Post-War Britain: The Paradoxes of Progress (2012), and The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (2017). He is the principal investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain.