CC BY
12EDITORIAL
y/JK 821.111-31
Nice Work (If You Can Measure It)
Will May
Southampton University, Lecturer University Road, Southampton, Great Britain, S017 1BJ; willbmay@gmail.com
An editorial on the present state of the humanities in British universities with reflections on problems of finance and research funding that Russian readers will recognise.
Key words: Humanities; British Universities; student fees
One of the most popular books on the ORF Contemporary English Literature programme is David Lodge's Nice Work (1989), which updates the setting of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South to a 1980s redbrick university. Robyn Penrose, an academic who likes deconstructing texts, finds her own comfortable world threatened by a work-exchange scheme ; she is required to spend rather more time than she would like with Vic Wilcox, the manager of a local engineering firm. Lodge's narration pokes gentle fun at her academic snobbery, and her obliviousness to the world around her. The Thatcher government are making swingeing cuts to the public sector, but Robyn is too preoccupied with feminist scholarship to pay much attention. Only when her job comes under threat does she realize no-one is above society, or immune from its changes.
This world might seem very different from the quadrangles and high tables of Oxford, the British university you are most likely to have visited if you are reading this editorial. Yet it speaks with sufficient urgency to the crisis in British universities today that at Southampton, where I have worked for the last five years, it was chosen as the first novel new undergraduates would read on their English course. The questions that Robyn Penrose is forced to ask -what is higher education for? what benefit does it have to society? what good is an English degree? - are the very same ones that students and teachers in Higher Education have been asking,
® Will May, 2012
avoiding or worrying about over the last three years. What has prompted this soul-searching?
Two forces have dominated Higher Education in the UK over the last twenty years; expansion, and marketisation. After the Second World War, university education was still for a minority of school-leavers - around 3% in the mid 1950s. As successive governments argued for, and implemented, the growth of the Higher Education sector, university education became a real possibility for the aspiring majority. Such huge growth prompted a rethink about how it was funded. A mixture of local grants and bursaries gave way to a nationalised grant scheme which began in 1963. Inflation ate away at the value of these national grants; by 1990, students received a small maintenance grant and a loan. By 1998, students were required to pay just over £1,000 a year for their fees, receiving a student grant loan from a private company which would take back loan repayments from their salaries. This had risen to £3,000 by 2006; from 2012, students are paying £9,000 a year for their degrees. This is not an upfront payment; it will be collected from their salaries (with interest) when they begin working. The increasing numbers of students was not the primary reason for this increase: the global economic downturn and the UK recession prompted the government to withdraw all funding for humanities teaching in higher education. Effectively, as of this year, I am working in the private sector.
This situation seems particularly unfair on humanities students. The real cost of their degrees is, in fact, about £2000 under the £9000 fee: the remaining money cross-subsidises science students, who pay the same fee although their degree costs much more. Humanities students are likely to be earning less - on average -than science graduates. Those staying in academia face difficult choices too. The new intake of undergraduates, starting in 2012, will leave with debts well over £27,000; fees for postgraduate and doctoral degrees are already £5,000 a year, and likely to rise. The government has withdrawn nearly all scholarships for postgraduate students, so only the richest will be able to contemplate staying on after their degree. This is far from the meritocratic principle underpinning the original expansion of education.
The situation is also prompting national crises and tensions.
Wales and Scotland currently have devolved governments, who have decided to subsidise fees for Scottish and Welsh students wherever they choose to study. This works against diversifying the campus, as well as causing curious anomalies: EU students pay no tuition fees if they study in a Scottish university, but at least £9,000 if they study in an English one. These anomalies are part of wider debates, and may lead to more profound differences: for example, in 2014, Scotland will vote on whether to become entirely independent from the UK.
Attracting students willing to pay at least £27,000 for their education has led English universities to brand and sell themselves in ways that may seem alien to our Russian colleagues. Prospective parents and students at open days now less often ask, 'what are your courses like?' and 'what is the structure of the degree?' and more often ask 'what are your employability statistics?' (what percentage of your graduates are in work six months after finishing?). Being involved and committed to your degree from the outset is, of course, a good thing. In the new system the money follows the students, giving them greater powers to decide what they are taught, how they are taught, who teaches them and for how many hours a week. But the government's consumer-led, private-sector model makes the curious assumption that people not yet in possession of a university education are the people best placed to decide which universities should succeed and which should fail. It is a curious experiment to perform on one of the most successful tertiary education systems in the world. Certainly, a system shielded from the market seems to have produced fine results.
What will the future of higher education in England look like? Catherine Brown, known to many of you through the Perm seminars, is now the English convener at the New College of Humanities, the country's first ever private 'liberal arts college'. The college offers students an Oxford-style collegiate education for an annual fee of £18,000. This is double the £9,000 set by the majority of universities, although the college also offers a range of scholarships and exhibitions. Will it come, in time, to be seen as a viable alternative to universities still receiving public subsidy, rather than an exception? Oxford and Cambridge have been some of the most powerful critical voices in the public debate about this
new system, in particular the work of Cambridge professor, Stefan Collini, whose book What Are Universities For? (2011) offered a useful historical perspective on the government's reather shortsighted higher education policy. However, our richest universities can often seem removed from the effects. The wealth of many individual colleges in Oxford or Cambridge rival whole universities in the UK. Large endowments, and better developed alumni and sponsorship models, mean my counterparts teaching at Oxford or Cambridge have found that day-to-day life has altered little under the new system.
Because there are no longer subsidies for humanities teaching in the UK, there has been increased competition for research income. Since 1986, the government has carried out vast nation-wide surveys of research going on at its universities, and allocated funding on the basis of its findings. The current scheme is called the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a gargantuan paper-collection exercise taking up large amounts of academic research time, and employing armies of people to crunch numbers. Despite all the associated labour, its measurements are, at best, crude, rating all research in any field from 1 to 4. 25% of the rating is based on what is called 'impact': the definition has changed (evolved) over the last five years, but now relates to any measurable effect the research has had outside the academic world (economic impact, cultural impact, influence on public policy, and so on.) Should you happen to be working in conflict resolution and working with heads of state, so much the better: if your research involves editing a medieval text for a specialist publisher, you may be in trouble. There are many difficulties with this method of measuring research. As we all know, excellent research takes time to have impact: its systems of dissemination (academic publishers, research journals, other thinkers responding to and writing about it) are all slow. Even if your book had happened to have sold 10,000 copies, and you gave successful public talks about it all over the world, none of this would help unless you had taken the trouble to collection questionnaires at every available opportunity. Suffice to say, the 'rules' of this 'game' have been revealed so late that that all departments around the country are scrabbling to make a case for their own research. You would not be paranoid to wonder whether
the system, rather than giving humanities researchers the chance to make the case for what they do, was in fact designed to show the world how irrelevant they were.
Hovering around all these new systems is the sense that reading, studying and writing about literature is not in and of itself significant, or worthwhile: its justification must always be instrumentalist or linked to economic benefits. If it doesn't increase your earning power, or your ability to get a better job, why bother? These issues have been particularly on my mind while thinking about the Oxford-Perm Fund, which seems to me to have done some incredibly valuable work in opening up the study of contemporary British literature in Russia, allowing cultural differences to be a point of debate and exchange rather than a barrier to understanding a particular text or author. Of all the schemes, programmes, and teaching opportunities I've been lucky enough to be involved with, this one seems most attuned to the rich benefits and human revelations the world of literature can afford us.
You may remember Karen having sent you an email recently asking you to record any responses you had to our lectures and talks at the most recent Oxford-Perm seminar. Reading this editorial, you may realise that the email was not a coincidence, and not unrelated to the things going on in the UK. There are many absurd examples I might give you of 'impact' and its consequence, but I'll limit myself to one: a colleague whose research explores music-making in the Nazi concentration camps gave a talk last year to an adult education class. As you can imagine, the material was upsetting, and several people in the room were in tears by the end of the session. As no questionnaires had been collected, the academic was asked by her boss to do the talk again this year, but with end-of-session forms and photographs to track audience responses. She began to wonder, perhaps not without cause, whether she was being asked to collect human tears in a pipette and send them in as part of her 'impact' statement.
David Lodge's Nice Work remains good-humoured about the iniquities and limitations of Higher Education in Britain. Certainly, reading it today, we can remind ourselves that public education systems are always in a state of flux, always imperfect, and that humanities researchers seem to perpetually feel aggrieved and
undermined by governmental interference; mutatis mutandis. All humans are wonderfully fallible, and to work in the humanities without this at the forefront of your mind would be misguided. The title of Lodge's book puns on the Gershwin brothers' song ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It': the implication is that Robyn Penrose (and all those in the ivory tower) are incredibly privileged to be paid for what they do. I, too, feel very lucky to work where I do, and doing what I do, even if Lodge might re-title his book today Nice Work If You Can Measure It.
Хорошенькое дельце (если сможешь оценить)
Уилл Мэй
Университет Саутгемптона, преподаватель.
University Road, Southampton, Great Britain, S017 1BJ; willbmay@gmail.com
Редакторская статья посвящена современному состоянию гуманитарного образования в британских вузах. Основной акцент сделан на проблемах финансирования и научных исследований, близких российским коллегам.
Ключевые слова: гуманитарные науки; образование; британские университеты.
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