Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities
New York Review blog
Anthony Grafton
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/437005501/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities
British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit.
For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians,
bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional
foundations of academic life. Unless policies and
practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to
remedy.
As an “Occasional Student” at University College London in
the early 1970s and a regular visitor to the Warburg
Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge after that, I—like many
American humanists—envied colleagues who taught at British
universities. We had offices with linoleum; they had rooms
with carpets. We worked at desks; they sat with their
students on comfy chairs and gave them glasses of sherry.
Above all, we felt under constant pressure to do the
newest new thing, and show the world that we were doing
it: to be endlessly innovative and interdisciplinary and
industrious.
British humanists innovated too. Edward Thompson and Eric
Hobsbawm, Frances Yates and Peter Burke, and many others
formulated new ways of looking at history for my
generation. But British academics always admitted, as we
sometimes did not, that it is vital to preserve and update
our traditional disciplines and forms of knowledge:
languages, precise interpretation of texts and images and
objects, rigorous philosophical analysis and argument.
Otherwise all the sexy interdisciplinary work will yield
only a trickle of trendy blather.
There was a Slow Food feel to British university life,
based on a consensus that people should take the time to
make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could
be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast
Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to
produce, regularly and rapidly. By contrast, Michael
Baxandall spent three years at the Warburg Institute,
working in the photographic collection and not completing
a dissertation, and several more as a lecturer, later on,
writing only a few articles. Then, in 1971 and 1972, he
produced two brilliant interdisciplinary books, which
transformed the study of Renaissance humanism and art,
remain standard works to this day, and were only the
beginning of a great career. Gertrud Bing, E.H. Gombrich,
J.B. Trapp, and A.M. Meyer, who administered the Warburg
in those days, knew how to be patient. Their results speak
for themselves.
From the accession of Margaret Thatcher onward, the
pressure has risen. Universities have had to prove that
they matter. Administrators and chairs have pushed faculty
to win grants and publish and rewarded those who do so
most successfully with periods of leave and other
privileges that American professors can only dream of. The
pace of production is high, but the social compact among
teachers is frayed. In the last couple of years, the
squeeze has become tighter than ever. Budgets have shrunk,
and universities have tightened their belts to fit. Now
they are facing huge further cuts for three years to
come—unless, as is likely, the Conservatives take over the
government, in which case the knife may go even deeper.
Administrators have responded not by resisting, for the
most part, but by trying to show that they can “do more
with less.” To explain how they can square this circle,
they issue statements in the Orwellian language of
“strategic planning.” A typical planning document, from
King’s College London, explains that the institution must
“create financially viable academic activity by
disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level
with no realistic prospect of extra investment.”
The realities that this cloud of ink imperfectly conceal
are every bit as ugly as you would expect. Humanists who
work on ancient manuscripts and languages or write about
pre-modern history or struggle with hard issues in
semantics don’t always make an immediate impact or bring
in large amounts of grant money—even when other scholars
around the world depend on their studies. If you don’t see
the point of their work, why not eliminate them? Then you
have room for things that pay off immediately.
At King’s College London, the head of arts and humanities
has already informed world-famous professors—one, David
Ganz, in paleography, the study of ancient scripts, and
two in philosophy—that their positions will be
discontinued at the end of the academic year. All three
are remarkable scholars who have had remarkable students.
Paleography—to take the field that I know best—is to the
study of texts what archaeology is to the study of cities
and temples. Paleographers lay the foundations other
humanists build on. They tell historians and literary
scholars which texts were written when and what they say,
which scripts were used where, and why, and by whom.
Training in the analysis of manuscripts is central to the
world-famous programs in medieval studies that are among
the glories of King’s College. That is why Jeffrey
Hamburger, the Harvard art historian who is one of the
world’s leading experts on medieval manuscripts, has
helped to organize a worldwide campaign to reverse the
decision. (Similarly, the Chicago philosopher Brian Leiter
has publicized the cuts in philosophy on his widely read
blog).
The cuts are not intended to stop with the first victims.
All other members of the arts and humanities faculty at
King’s are being forced to reapply for their jobs. When
the evaluation is finished, around twenty-two of them will
have been voted off the island. Even the official
statements make clear that these faculty members will be
let go not because they have ceased to do basic research
or teach effectively, but because their fields aren’t
fashionable and don’t spin money. When criticized, the
principal of King’s, Rick Trainor, complained that foreign
professors don’t appreciate the financial problems that he
faces. He’s wrong. All of us face drastic new financial
pressures.
But we also appreciate a principle that seems to elude Mr.
Trainor—as well as his colleagues at Sussex, who have
begun similar measures, and the London administrators who
seem bent on turning the Warburg Institute from a unique
research center, its open stacks laden with treasures
uniquely accessible to all readers, into a book
depository. Universities exist to discover and transmit
knowledge. Scholars and teachers provide those services.
Administrators protect and nurture the scholars and
teachers: give them the security, the resources, and the
possibilities of camaraderie and debate that make serious
work possible. Firing excellent faculty members is not a
clever tactical “disinvestment,” it’s a catastrophic
failure.
Are academic salaries really the main source of the
pressure on the principal? Vague official documents
couched in management jargon are hard to decode. The
novelist and art historian Iain Pears notes that King’s
has assembled in recent years an “executive team with all
the managerial bling of a fully-fledged multi-national,
complete with two executive officers and a Chief
information officer.” The college spent £33.5 million on
administrative costs in 2009, and is actively recruiting
more senior managers now. These figures do not evince a
passion for thrift. Moreover, the head of arts and
humanities proposes to appoint several new members of
staff even as others are dismissed. Management probably
does want to save money—but it definitely wants to install
its own priorities and its own people, regardless of the
human and intellectual cost.
Universities become great by investing for the long term.
You choose the best scholars and teachers you can and give
them the resources and the time to think problems through.
Sometimes a lecturer turns out to be Malcolm Bradbury’s
fluent, shallow, vicious History Man; sometimes he or she
turns out to be Michael Baxandall. No one knows quite why
this happens. We do know, though, that turning the
university into The Office will produce a lot more History
Men than scholars such as Baxandall.
Accept the short term as your standard—support only what
students want to study right now and outside agencies want
to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects
and methods that will matter most in twenty years are
often the ones that nobody values very much right now.
Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and
more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer
to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ
eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The
British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us
on the way to the other extreme.
At this point, American universities are more invested
than British in the old ways. Few of us any longer envy
our British colleagues. But straws show how the wind
blows. The language of “impact” and “investment” is heard
in the land. In Iowa, in Nevada, and in other places
there’s talk of closing humanities departments. If you
start hearing newspeak about “sustainable excellence
clusters,” watch out. We’ll be following the British down
the short road to McDonald’s.
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Loughborough University
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On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:16:52 +0100
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