2022/10/01 by Joe Moran
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Higher Education Practises and Engagement #Education, Philosophy, and Society #Digital Education and Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/criq.12679
The humanities in UK universities are under attack on two fronts. The first is economic. A new government orthodoxy has emerged: the New Labour target for increasing participation in higher education led to too many young people attending university. Arts and humanities courses at lower-ranking universities have come under scrutiny for offering students a poor return on their financial investment and for contributing little to economic growth. Current policies or proposals to reform higher education look to divert demand away from these ‘low value’ courses: the lifelong loan entitlement, allowing adults to study short courses flexibly or build up to a full degree over time; minimum grade requirements for student loans; lowering the threshold for repaying those loans; and cutting funding for arts courses. The second front is cultural. The humanities have been dragged into a culture war, driven partly by the shift in the Conservatives’ electoral base towards the older, non-university graduates who voted for Brexit, especially those who occupy the ‘red wall’ seats gained from Labour in 2019. According to the crude caricatures deployed in this war, the overexpansion of higher education, and especially of the ‘low value’ humanities degrees, has exposed young people to ‘woke’ ideas. It has birthed a generation consumed by identity politics and its language of ‘preferred pronouns’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘decolonising the curriculum’. The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph have often used Freedom of Information requests to inspect university humanities syllabuses for evidence of trigger warnings, ‘cancelling’ white authors, or national self-flagellation about our imperial and slave-trading past. To humanities lecturers, particularly those in former polytechnics fearful for their jobs, these attacks can seem scarily unprecedented. In fact, they draw on resilient themes, rehearsed in various iterations for more than sixty years. Since the 1950s, powerful and vocal groups have lobbied against mass higher education, and governments have tried to redirect higher education’s priorities away from the arts to science, technology and vocational subjects. At first, these critiques were separate; opponents of university expansion wanted to preserve the humanities against the dominance of science and technical subjects. From the late 1960s onwards, the critiques began to align: opponents of expansion began to focus on the over-provision of arts subjects at less prestigious institutions. Today’s educational culture wars also have their roots in the late 1960s, when radical student movements emerged. As student numbers expanded and universities assumed more prominence in British public life, they became caught up in wider debates about education, the state of modern society and the future of its young people. Arguments for and against the expansion of universities were a constant of British public life in the 1950s. In Kingsley Amis’s 1954 novel Lucky Jim, Alfred Beesley, Jim Dixon’s housemate and colleague from the English department, enters this debate. He begins by praising a professor in his department for failing almost half of his first-year students. ‘All the provincial universities are going the same way … ,’ he complains. ‘Go to most places and try and get someone turfed out merely because he’s too stupid to pass his exams – it’d be easier to sack a prof. That’s the trouble with having so many people here on Education Authority grants, you see.’ Dixon agrees with Beesley but ‘didn’t feel interested enough to say so’.11 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Penguin, 1976), 169-70. W. Somerset Maugham, while praising the ‘ominous significance’ of Lucky Jim, condemned its cast of characters, made up of this new breed of men going to university on government grants. ‘They are mean, malicious and envious … ,’ he wrote in the Sunday Times. ‘They are scum.’22 ‘Books of the Year – I’, Sunday Times, 25 December 1955, 4. Amis’s views were closer to Maugham’s than many realised, and he was soon identifying Beesley’s views as his own.33 Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 560. Lucky Jim, often seen as a redbrick satire, is more accurately a satire on the university college, a rung further down the educational hierarchy. The fear of expansion was often directed at these institutions – not-quite-universities in unglamorous provincial cities, more likely to let in first-generation interlopers into higher education. The university in Lucky Jim is based less on Swansea than on University College Leicester, where Amis’s friend Philip Larkin was librarian and Larkin’s girlfriend Monica Jones lectured in English. 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