The Conservatives, along with their consistency-free Lib Dem allies, are to preside over the greatest assault on the arts and humanities in the history of modern Britain. Lord Browne's review paves the way to the privatisation of higher education. With cuts in funding of up to 80%, university courses have been thrown open to market forces. Government can "withdraw public investment … from many courses" in favour of "priority courses and the wider benefits they create". The arts and humanities are to be debilitated as investment is directed to engineering and applied sciences. This is a partisan review that favours corporate industries, not universities and their students.
Naturally, if investment is to be withdrawn that is not necessarily a bad thing if many utterly useless courses are axed such as Media Studies or Golf Course studies. The government should try to re-introduce and encourage apprenticeships in practical subjects that need to be done. not studied
It is hard not to think that Gopal is indulging in special pleading. There should be open ended finance for degrees that are meaningless and no dintinction made between those that are of use to society and make for a better one with more informed citizens and those who just want a cushy time at university.
For Gopal then claims,
With students gouged for huge fees to give them "choice" and thousands priced out of university altogether, subjects without a self-evident "market value" face extinction. All but the most affluent will be induced to turn away from courses in literature, history, modern languages and most social sciences and towards professional qualifications in "high-utility" subjects like law and business administration in the understandable hope of a certain return for investment.Whilst Gopal is correct to emphasise the inherent philistinism of the utilitarian cult that has seen radical neoliberal forces reduce knowledge and learning to market use value, many institutions and academics have made this possible by sabotaging higher education for so long.
When post-modernist frauds have denied there can be any standards or meaning outside the text or made moronic claims about Shakespeare having no more meaning than the text on a cornflake packet, academe is ripe for a large cull.
Whole swathes of academia should have finance removed from it: gender studies and all those parasitical useless drains on public finance should just not be state funded. If people want to study them and choose to, they can fund them privately.
Moreover, there is simply no point sending so many young people to get stoned and hammered for three years at "uni" whilst doing arts degrees to then pick up the token 2:1. Academics themselves often find students a bore who get in the way of them doing their research.
Quantity in education has for too long been prized over quality with far too many students studying courses of little intellectual or even negligible use value on crude free market lines. Perhaps reducing the amount of mickey mouse degrees and students and to invest in quality would prevent this.
Simply wanting more students to go to university to reduce youth unemployment is another short termist measure in an economy and society founded more and more on illusions and wish thinking in a fools paradise of debt fuelled consumerism.
Another fact needs to be faced. The neoliberal system does not require intelligent, thoughtful or truly reflective individuals: such people are sceptical about unwarranted authority and are not geared up towards the compulsive obsessive ends of a utilitarian and decadent consumerist society.
This is particulary obvious with those who study the humanities in order to go into PR, advertising, identity politics and "community" based political activism.There are many branches of the parasite economy in Britain that need cutting off.
Such parts of the "knowledge economy" require mediocrities who research useless themes in order to avoid the rigours of dealing with reality and who take refuge in a world of abstruse jargon like some of the dunces of medieval theology. The post-modernists are but one example.
When graduates do become "successful" in the arts and humanities, they oftenwork as part of think tanks espousing group think philosophies. The age of the Oxford Don who spends his days meditating on ethical problems or writing long treatises that are not for publication have gone.
To maintain one's integrity in the suffocating domain of a society run on neoliberal utilitarian lines is increasingly difficult. The casualisation of university careers is atrocious but it reflect the general decline in academic standards and the running of universities as knowledge factories.
More talented academics able to write brilliant books are simply giving up. Such people include the historian Michael Burleigh who thinks that universities are dominated by idiot ideologues and post modernists who have downgraded higher education.
They have, of course, but this is a symptom of the decline which has been caused precisely by universities expanding and offering half baked arts degrees that require the mere recycling of jargon in accordance with the prescription of creeds.
That in turn is the result, paradoxically, of universities being run on consumerist lines of quantity not quality.Of giving people what they want, freedom from the claims of real lived life, instead of having to grapple with it without throwing up walls made from an inpenetrable thicket of jargon
If universities are to become centres of disinterested inquiry and free thought again, then man utterly useless degrees need to go, funding given to the better and more talented students in the arts and government funding given to those who go into maths, science and engineering.
The problem is that the obsession with getting so many people into university when they might be better off taking up plumbing or doing something useful but valuable to society means that it will be taken over by business corporations and this is not a good thing.
Psuedo-egalitarians and tenured campus radicals will accuse those who want more rigorous selection and to bring back polytechnics will be accused of "elitism". Most obviously by those with vested interests in packing more students through.
Higher education needs to be reformed so that state support is given to talented individuals of all backgrounds, but especially in degrees that have more obvious social benefits. Britain stands in need of more graduates in the sciences and maths and better graduates in the arts and humanities.
More vocational studies closely attuned to jobs need to be introduced. Polytechnics reinstated. Pointless humanity subjects removed. "Media Studies" is not a fit subject for university. University entrance should be based only after grades are known. No idiotic clearance scramble.
Before university, A Levels need to be made as they were back in the 1970s: i.e challenging and with unpredictable 25 mark questions and not broken down three parts answers that people can rote learn from past papers and study guides.
Gopal does not distinguish between quality degrees in the arts and humanities and pointless ones. That must be done. Courses in the humanities, especially history, should not be skewed merely to fit in with the research interests of the academics. This will mean they have to start teaching again.
Courses at university should aim at giving the student a broad knowledge of the subject and connect them with real life problems vividly and not introduce them to modular specialisms within the first year just because that's convenient for the academics.
Targeted funding needs to be introduced not privatisation. The state's resources cannot stretch to all these students and the needs of the country need to be considered. It's a waste of time, effort and money to have so many people studying futile subjects at bad universities.
Loans for science and maths students would be paid by the state on completion of the course and incrementally for each year the graduate remains in the UK over a period of 15 years. Emigration would mean the loss of that pay off and sequestration of assets on return to the UK if not paid off before leaving.
Higher education has to take into account the needs of the country: it cannot be merely a individual lifestyle chioce. If so then like any leisure activity it must be personally funded. If Gopal does not like the sense of "entitlement" in the First World then this is the answer.
Academics in subjects dedicated to demolishing the pretensions of Western Civilisation as a mere discourse in postcolonial studies can sink or swim depending on whether they really do serve any purpose other than in rationalising hatred and resentment towards British society.
There is a difference between reducing all knowledge to market use value but Gopal is using that to advance special pleading for humanities that simply really serve little academic or intellectual use for improving society and churning out more professional activists and lobby groups.
Many specialised professions in which Britain excels – theatre, film, curating, journalism, publishing, advertising – require research and teaching in the humanities....reading closely and knowledgably is an invaluable skill in all walks of life and yes, it has to be taught and kept alive through research.This in nonsense. Advertising is about manipulating people into buying trash they don't often need. That's market research. Not academic research. That hardly needs a degree in the humanities. It means selling a line.
Hence Gopal's claim is pure New Labour. Journalism depends not on media studies but on being able to write well and communicate.That can be learn from apprenticeships with newspapers or a degree in history or learning how to write.
Given how many academics, not just postmodernists, do churn out jargon drenched texts the evidence does not bear this out. In the Guardian we get think tanks spewing out meaningless propaganda and tedious identity politics, much of which is to get access to resources for some "community".
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