Quality | 2010.03.29
Scientists may gloat, but an assault is under way against the arts | Simon Jenkins
Why is there such a huge funding bias towards science when the chief growth in graduate jobs has been elsewhere?
Which is more important, science or the humanities? The right answer is not: what do you mean by important? The right answer is a question: Who is doing the asking?
The budget reached a nadir in government micro-management of British universities. The chancellor, Alistair Darling , announced "£270m more" for 20,000 university students for one year, but it must go on the "key" subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths (so-called Stem). He did not mention the £900m less for universities over three years in last year\'s pre-budget report, or how this related to the 6,000 places cut last autumn, or the 10,000 increased last summer.
Some of the money comes from our old friend "efficiency savings", but then Darling strangely allocated £20m "to achieve" those savings. He appears to be spending money to save money that he has already spent. This is the public finance of Dadaism. Besides, these numbers are trivial against the over-100,000 applicants for student places who could this year be turned away.
More serious is the bias in the budget and in recent cuts in research spending that declares science to be more important than anything else. This bias has become rampant since first adumbrated by Margaret Thatcher in the late-1980s, though it echoed Lord Snow\'s "two cultures" divide in the 1950s and Harold Wilson\'s claim that only "the white heat of technology" would arrest Britain\'s industrial decline.
Convinced that the humanities and social sciences were socialist breeding grounds, Thatcher abolished the autonomous University Grants Committee and made deep cuts in university finance in 1980-83. Universities were then invited to bid for new money, but not for social sciences. Within five years, the education secretary, Lord Baker, brought universities under his heel. A 1986 white paper declared: "The major determinant for the planning of higher education must be the demand for highly qualified manpower." It should be brought "closer to the world of business, in line with the economy\'s needs". The concept of the free-spirited scholar/academic was dead (except in privately resourced Oxford and Cambridge).
John Griffith, professor of administrative law at London University, rightly described what Baker did as "historically comparable to the dissolution of the monasteries". The universities simply capitulated. Though they were legally independent, they bought the Queen\'s shilling. The government fixed their fees, their student numbers and their staff posts. Research grants were allocated by civil servants with increasing eccentricity. Money was given by number of books written, articles published, or citations in learned journals.
This dirigisme reached its logical conclusion when Lord Mandelson took universities into his " business, innovation and skills" department , and rendered their planning a matter of political infallibility. Last year, many universities lost the will to live when he demanded a measure of every scholar\'s "contribution to demonstrable economic and social impacts", with reference to "public policy, cultural impact and improving the quality of life". It was a Leninist parody. But Mandelson was echoing Thatcher\'s demand for "stronger ties between universities and business". And he still equated this to more spending on Stem.
While some companies clearly need science and engineering graduates (as opposed to technicians and apprentices), the chief growth in graduate employment over the past quarter-century has been in finance, business, medicine, law, leisure and public administration. The only other country that took science-first seriously after the 1950s was the Soviet Union, at one point producing half the world\'s scientists and technologists. It forgot about economics, politics and, some might say, humanity – and paid a heavy price.
Any fool can quote a success story of an individual scientist who went on to make a million, against an artist struggling in a garret. We could equally blame fancy maths (ignorant of ethics) for destroying the banking industry in 2008, while history was making the film industry rich and David Starkey famous.
Britain has about 600,000 students learning Stem subjects that are mostly vocational and that few of them will practise. It can defend this bias only on the Snow thesis that Stem offers a fully rounded cultural experience that contributes uniquely to economic growth. Had manufacturing blossomed over the past two decades, there might at least be circumstantial evidence for this. It has not.
No other education system allows up to a third of its brightest young people in sixth forms and universities to learn nothing of the arts and social sciences, of the history and culture of their country and the working of its political economy – let alone that of the rest of the world. For sure, humanities students should know something of the wonder, history and methods of science. Any exclusivity runs counter to a liberal education. But exclusive science cannot be equated with exclusive humanities.
A concerted government assault now seems under way against teaching and research in the arts and social sciences. If applications to university are any guide, this is clearly against the wishes of most students. While scientists might gloat, a group of vice-chancellors pleaded in the Observer last month that understanding the world and its people comes from understanding "their language, identities, histories, faiths and cultures". The head of the University of East Anglia, Edward Acton, championed the humanities as offering "the ability to make life more beautiful, profound, funny and interesting". I admire their eloquence, but I can feel the thud of Mandelson\'s bovver boot in their guts.
Government manpower planning never works. Attempts to regulate medical students led to wild fluctuations in doctor supply, including a glut two years ago. Many good science graduates complain they must seek work abroad, while top salaries go to accountants, lawyers, designers and other service skills. Yet no cry goes out from the government for more financiers or advertising executives. The BBC, besotted by science, would never stage a banking innovation of the year (let alone now).
The best indicator of what universities should teach is what students want to study. They have the clearest view of their local jobs market. Likewise, universities must sell their research wares to businesses and benefactors, as well as government. Certainly the Treasury should help poor students go to university. But it should not tell them what to study, because it does not know. If the labour market wants particular skills, it will find ways of financing their supply.
The universities are now prisoners of a barren ideology. The belief that the intellectual outlook gained from the arts and social sciences is an impediment to national growth is philistine and wrong-headed. Like all such fundamentalist creeds, it started with an epiphany (CP Snow\'s), became an infallible doctrine, and ended in a vested interest.
To break out of this prison, universities will have to rediscover their institutional and intellectual muscle. They must charge students what it costs to teach them, raise endowments, and call the government\'s bluff on bursaries and research. They must buy back their souls from the devil of Thatcher and Blair. At present they can bleat the bleat, but they cannot walk the walk to freedom.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]r-education-arts-sciences-bias
