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The Humanities and the University: a Brief History of the Present Crisis

2022; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12679

1467-8705

Joe Moran,

Digital Education and Society

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. According to John Sutherland, it bothered all three of them that they were 'condemned to work in these lowly not-Oxford institutions'. When Sutherland arrived as a student at Leicester in 1960, three years after it was granted its Royal Charter, it remained 'the hopeful undergraduate's third, "safety net", choice' and 'the campus air was porridge-thick with inferiority complex'. Jones carried on calling Leicester 'the college' until she retired, believing it did not merit the title of university.44 John Sutherland, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021), ebook. In July 1960, in Encounter, Amis attacked the 'university numbers racket', the fallacy that 'there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there'. On the planned expansion of universities he warned, with emphatic caps: 'MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.' Amis's piece relied more on memorable phrasing and anecdote than argument. It had two key assumptions. First, academic ability is rare and finite. Unlike 'cars or tins of salmon', students could not be increased at will in a productivity drive. They were like 'poems or bottles of hock … you cannot decide to have more good ones.' Second, students needed to arrive at university with sufficient knowledge for meaningful learning to begin. In the past, his students could be expected to discuss 'the niceties of Pope's use of the caesura', but now he was having to spend time on 'the niceties of who Pope was'.55 Kingsley Amis, 'Lone Voices', in What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 161, 163, 162. A student who starts a university English course knowing nothing about Pope should not be there. Although Amis's examples came from his own subject, his broader aim was to defend the humanities against some future university geared towards the sciences, by command of those 'quantitative thinkers' who feared that Britain was 'falling behind' America and Russia and needed to 'catch up'.66 Ibid., p. 161. In February 1961, Amis and four Swansea colleagues published an Observer article, 'The Threat of the Practical'. It was in reply to a piece by A. D. C. Peterson, Director of the Department of Education at Oxford, calling for university expansion and the creation of more 'relevant' courses, 'in tune with the realities of the world outside'.77 A. D. C. Peterson, 'Degrees for Living', Observer, 8 January 1961. Amis and his colleagues objected to this 'strident rhetoric about the importance of science for the sake of its practical ends' and argued that 'the greatest current threat to education is that of practicality'.88 Kingsley Amis, E. J. Cleary, R. F. Holland, David Sims and Peter Winch, 'The Threat of the Practical', The Observer, 26 February 1961. These battlelines were already familiar. One side of the battle was led by C. P. Snow, whose 'two cultures' lecture of 1959 had criticised the scientific illiteracy of Britain's elites.99 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, with an Introduction by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22. Authors broadly on the left such as Anthony Sampson, Michael Shanks and Anthony Crosland suggested that Britain's economic decline was being hastened by a disdain for science and a lack of state planning for skills shortages.1010 See Peter Mandler, 'The Two Cultures Revisited: The Humanities in British Universities Since 1945', Twentieth Century British History, 26:3 (2015), 406. On the same side sat most university heads – such as the Swansea Principal, John Fulton, a keen supporter of expansion who went on to be the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex. Amis had viewed his initiatives at Swansea as 'splashy and modish'1111 Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis, 240. – a fairly common complaint about university leaders, then and now. The other side was led by F. R. Leavis who, in his caustic reply to Snow, had defended the idea of the university as 'a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and responsibility'.1212 F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 29. Leavis placed the humanities (and especially his own subject, English) at the university's heart, as an antidote to the soulless utilitarianism of 'technologico-Benthamite civilisation'.1313 F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University: The Clark Lectures 1967 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 24. As early as 1953, before the post-war expansion of higher education had really begun, Leavis attacked the egalitarian tendencies of the 1944 Education Act, arguing that 'Oxford and Cambridge cream the country' and that 'for a good long while before the well-known postwar education reforms associated with the Welfare State, very few in Great Britain capable of justifying their presence at a university had failed to get there'.1414 F. R. Leavis, 'The "Great Books" and a Liberal Education', in The Critic as Anti-Philosopher, ed. G. Singh (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), 161. The pre-eminence of the ancient universities had to be preserved, for they made possible 'not merely a cloistral vegetation, but also a free play of spirit and a concentration of humane forces impossible anywhere else'.1515 F. R. Leavis, 'Why Universities?', Scrutiny, 3:2 (1934), 131. This was broadly Amis's position too. Universities should not be tools of manpower planning or vocational training but self-governing centres of learning, moral and intellectual beacons for the rest of society. He and his colleagues clarified that they were not against science per se so much as the effort to judge it 'not by its power to increase understanding, but rather by contributions to our prosperity'.1616 Kingsley Amis, E. J. Cleary, R. F. Holland, David Sims and Peter Winch, 'Practical', Observer, 19 March 1961. Snow's 'two cultures' argument was heavily weighted towards the elite universities and metropolitan literary life. Britain's further and higher education at this time was in fact dominated by the sciences – especially at the Redbricks, which had always been more open than Oxbridge to applied science and links with local industry.1717 Mandler, 'Two Cultures', 404. The share of students taking A-levels in maths and science had steadily increased after the war, up to a peak of 64.5% in 1960.1818 Michael Sanderson, Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96. This rise in share translated to universities. Between 1949 and 1961, the number of science and technology students rose by 63%, and the number of humanities students by only 30%. Since most science students were men, this exacerbated gender disparities.1919 William Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain's Civic Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 240. In the early 1960s, women made up 23% of students, a fall from nearly 30% in the 1920s.2020 Selina Todd, Snakes and Ladders: The Great Social Mobility Myth (London: Chatto & Windus, 2021), 209. From the early 1960s onwards, though, the share of humanities and social sciences students began to rise. The abolition of National Service in 1960 was one factor, because science graduates going into industry had been exempt. Another was the 1962 Education Act, which required local authorities to pay tuition fees and maintenance grants. This support broadened young people's options away from the vocational. Working-class students no longer needed to train as teachers to study the humanities.2121 Whyte, Redbrick, 240. Women who would have gone to teacher training colleges (where tuition fees were less than half those at universities) now went to university. By 1966–7, women made up more than 40% of students in the new plate glass universities of Kent, York and UEA.2222 Carol Dyhouse, Students: A Gendered History (London: Routledge, 2006), 87, 102. Amis's confession in his Encounter piece that he did not fancy teaching in 'something that is called a university but is really a rather less glamorous and authentic training college' was 'a significantly feminized indictment', as Peter Mandler points out.2323 Amis, 'Lone Voices', 162; Peter Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 81. Amis meant teacher training colleges, where about 70% of students were women.2424 Dyhouse, Students: A Gendered History, 87. Beesley's lament in Lucky Jim about the 'pressure to chuck Firsts around like teaching diplomas' is similarly gendered.2525 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 169. The swing away from science became known as 'the Dainton swing' after Fred Dainton, the University of Nottingham Vice-Chancellor whose inquiry reported on it in 1968. The historian of education Harry Armytage complained in that year that most 18-year-olds were 'like lemmings … plunging under some compulsive hallucination into the already over-crowded waters of the arts and social sciences, leaving the dry lands of the pure and applied sciences'.2626 W. H. G. Armytage, 'Thoughts After Robbins', in John Lawlor (ed.), The New University (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 96. But there was nothing lemming-like about it. The new knowledge and service economy was not dependent on subject-specific skills. The boom graduate careers in these years – in the media, local and central government, teaching, social work, the law, accountancy, commerce, industrial management – were mostly happy to take both arts and science graduates.2727 Mandler, 'Two Cultures', 411-12. Kingsley Amis's interventions on universities continued through the 1960s. In 1961 he had become a Fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, with, he later wrote, 'the hope of a kind of a displaced return to Oxford, an echo of the romantic view of it which intervening time had enhanced'.2828 Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (London: Penguin, 1992), 217. But he was disillusioned by Cambridge and resigned in 1963 to become a full-time writer. On one level he was still concerned about standards. In response to the 1963 Robbins Report, which called for universities to draw on the untapped talent in the population, he complained that university teachers were already dealing with 'the pool of tapped untalent'.2929 Nicholas Tomalin, 'Report on Robbins', Sunday Times, 27 October 1963. In a letter to the Observer in April 1965, he criticised an article about university dropouts for ignoring 'the almost invariable cause of failure – insufficient ability or, alternatively, excessive stupidity'.3030 Kingsley Amis, 'Welcome News', Observer, 18 April 1965. He claimed that in today's university classrooms, where the lecturer took up valuable time having to explain who T. S. Eliot was, 'the thicks get what they need' while 'the bright people doodle'.3131 Kingsley Amis, 'Why Lucky Jim Turned Right', Sunday Telegraph, 2 July 1967. These were more ill-tempered and colourfully-phrased versions of what he had said before. But Amis's emphasis was now shifting, away from fear of the domination of the sciences to the ideological axe-grinding of the arts and social sciences. In a Daily Telegraph article of July 1967, 'Why Lucky Jim Turned Right', he explained how his disdain for left-wing thought on a subject on which he had some expertise – university expansion – had spread to a disdain for left-wing thought in general, from 'the Chelsea poems attacking South African apartheid' to 'the first twangings of the protest song industry'.3232 Ibid. The first student sit-in had been staged at the London School of Economics three months earlier. Over the next two years there were demonstrations in about half of all UK universities.3333 Louis Vos, 'Student Movements and Political Activism', in Walter Rüegg (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, Volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 293. The unrest originated in arts and social science faculties; science students rarely got involved.3434 'The Uses of Numeracy', Times Literary Supplement, 31 October 1968. Amis was not alone in seeing new, voguish university courses as breeding grounds for subversion, and proof of the folly of expansion. In a speech in June 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell dismissed as 'bunkum' the Labour government's idea that increasing student numbers led to increased economic growth. This came two months after his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which had led to student demonstrations against Powell in several university cities. Amid rising student discontent, he argued that viewing students as 'furnishing the means of future economic growth' had led them to bargain for the terms and conditions on which they were willing to perform this service, copying the methods of strikes and lock-outs from trades unions.3535 'Education and Growth Theory "Bunkum" – Powell', Financial Times, 24 June 1968; 'Powell Broadside at Higher Education', Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1968. Powell's solution would be mooted more and more in the decades to come. The market alone, he said, should prescribe how universities developed: 'If a lecturer is incompetent, then his lecture theatre will be empty; if a course is futile, it will have few enrolments; if a qualification is irrelevant or excessive, it will not be sought – or so it should be.'3636 Paul Corthorn, Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 65. In the same month as Powell's speech, Philip Larkin, now the University of Hull librarian, wrote to the novelist Barbara Pym about a student sit-in of the administration building in which he had briefly been held captive. The universities had expanded 'suicidally', he told her, and 'must now be changed to fit the kind of people we took in: exams made easier, place made like a factory'.3737 James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 337. In his letters, Larkin had long been misanthropic, perhaps overegging it for comic effect, about students invading the place and destroying his peace.3838 See, for instance, Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 20, 31, 251. Now he tied this Eeyorishness to a sense that the country was being held to ransom by decadent and ungrateful youth. As students became more visible, they focalised anxieties about wider societal changes. 'It may sound snobbish,' Larkin wrote to Pym again in March 1973, 'but I do think that now we are educating the children of the striking classes.'3939 Booth, Philip Larkin, 338. Both Larkin and Amis contributed to Brian Cox and Tony Dyson's Black Papers on Education (1969–77). These papers anticipated much of the educational policy agenda, and many of its motifs, of the next half century. In the first Black Paper, Amis blamed the recent spate of student sit-ins on 'an academically-unfit majority' who were 'painfully bewildered by the whole business and purpose of university life; more has meant worse'.4040 Kingsley Amis, 'Pernicious Participation', Critical Survey, 4:1 (1969), 10. That first Black Paper was conceived specifically as a response to the student sit-ins. As it developed, though, its remit expanded to include the general perils of progressive education: child-centred learning and free play in primary schools, the shift to comprehensive schools, and experimental courses at the new universities.4141 Colin MacCabe, 'Brian Cox, 5 September 1928 – 24 April 2008', Critical Quarterly, 50:3 (2008), 2. Anticipating current concerns about de-platforming and 'cancel culture', the Black Papers feared that 'universities show signs of a student and staff intolerance of free discussion which threatens a new Dark Age'.4242 C. B. Cox and Rhodes Boyson, 'Black Paper Basics', in Cox and Boyson (eds), Black Paper 1975: The Fight for Education (London: Dent, 1975), 3. They also diagnosed a student mental health crisis in strikingly similar terms to how Generation Z students are characterised today: as fragile, coddled and hyper-sensitive. Dyson attributed this collective undergraduate neurosis to 'a bankrupt and dangerous romanticism' which saw self-expression and self-fulfilment as 'inalienable goods-in-themselves'.4343 A. E. Dyson, 'The Sleep of Reason', Critical Survey, 4:1 (1969), 78. The 'all must have prizes' mentality of progressive teaching had contributed to this lack of resilience in young people, by failing to challenge them intellectually and separate them clearly in ability. The Black Papers were sceptical about increased pass rates at O- and A-level, a complaint that has since become a ritual of the August results season. Cox linked grade inflation to the growing preference for coursework over exams. Exams, he argued, prepared young people 'for the realities of adult life' by measuring them against set standards 'rather than inclinations spun lazily out of the "self"'.4444 C. B. Cox, 'In Praise of Examinations', Critical Survey, 4:1 (1969), 56. A key preoccupation of the Black Papers has come to dominate government thinking on education up to the present: ensuring that the bright working-class child had a route to the elite universities. They worried especially that this child had been deprived of a traditional academic education by the ending of selection at secondary-school level. They objected to comprehensive schools partly because they tied poor, bright children to their neighbourhoods, making it harder for them to escape. They worried about the 'non-academic' children only insofar as they disrupted the education of the academic ones. Hence their opposition to the raising of the school-leaving age to 16 in 1972. One regular contributor, Rhodes Boyson, told a press conference on the 1975 Black Paper that a 14-plus test could serve for most pupils as a school-leaving exam: 'If a non-academic child knew he could leave school at 14 if he was literate, he'd be literate.'4545 John Fairhall, 'Turning the Clock Back in Schools', Guardian, 21 April 1975. The psychologist Cyril Burt, whose research had underpinned the 11-plus exam, contributed to two of the Black Papers.4646 Cyril Burt, 'The Mental Differences Between Children', Critical Survey, 4:3 (1969): 19-25; Cyril Burt, 'The Organization of Schools', Critical Survey, 5:1 (1970): 14-25. Underlying much Black Paper thought was Burt's belief that differences in levels of intelligence were genetic, innate and measurable, and that a small number of working-class children, with abilities that belied their class position, needed help to reach their true place in society. The 1975 Black Paper put it starkly: 'You can have equality or equality of opportunity: you cannot have both.'4747 Cox and Boyson, 'Black Paper Basics', 1. This understanding of social mobility was rooted in the Black Paper authors' own experiences. As James Robert Wood points out, they were predominantly male and often from working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds.4848 James Robert Wood, 'Upward Mobility, Betrayal, and the Black Papers on Education', Critical Quarterly, 62:2 (2020), 80, 93. Their lives had been transformed by grammar-school scholarships and university – an example of how the debate on selective education has been skewed by this small, visible and vocal group. Rhodes Boyson, the son of a Lancashire cotton spinner, had failed his 11-plus but attended Haslingden Grammar because an aunt who owned a chip shop paid his fees. Dyson, whose parents worked as assistants in a drapers' shop, won a scholarship to the Sloane School, Chelsea. Cox, the son of a coal exporter's clerk and a lady's maid, went to Wintringham Grammar in Grimsby. Cox seemed especially prone to what Richard Hoggart calls 'the "Primitive Methodist syndrome"', the tendency to generalise and see singular stories, as the lay preachers in Hoggart's native Hunslet did, as 'moral parables'.4949 Richard Hoggart, Townscape with Figures: Farnham – Portrait of an English Town (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), xv. Cox's memoir, The Great Betrayal, reveals a deep-feeling man, ill-suited, unlike Amis, for the public confrontations of the education wars. He had been greatly affected by his mother's death from tuberculosis when he was 10 years old and the way that her long illness had plunged his family into poverty. As a sixth-former, towards the end of the Second World War, he studied in the evenings in the box bedroom of the family's small semi-detached on the outskirts of Grimsby. From this room, heated by a one-bar electric fire, he could see searchlights, flares and ack-ack fire lighting up the sky over the docks. Here he 'enjoyed much adolescent self-pity and romantic inspiration'. As his father's tense second marriage curdled the atmosphere at home, Cox discovered literature and classical music as a portal into another life. Reading Milton felt like 'an entry into a brave new world' and left him 'overcome with exaltation'.5050 Brian Cox, The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education (London: Chapmans, 1992), 43-4. It is a familiar story: the scholarship boy discovering high culture and plotting his escape from the provinces, and a constraining home life, via elite education. Cox pursued his academic ambitions doggedly. With little encouragement from his school, he applied to University College, London, but was scarred by a bad interview, having been given no advice on how to conduct himself. He then entered himself for and won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge. In The Great Betrayal, Cox recounts his alienation from the confident ex-public schoolboys there, with their established cliques. At the end of his first college dinner, he realised he was the only one eating pudding with a spoon. 'I am proud to recall that I did not change over to a fork,' he writes.5151 Ibid., p. 75. In the first issue of Critical Survey, the journal he co-founded with Dyson in 1962, he lamented that 'lack of knowledge causes great injustice in our university entrance system'. His article included useful advice for teachers about applications to Oxbridge colleges. But he was clear that only the brightest should bother: 'The average student who applies is wasting everyone's time, and the Colleges are likely to be very annoyed with his school.'5252 C. B. Cox, 'Cambridge Scholarships: Some Reflections', Critical Survey, 1:1 (1962), 25-6. Cox's attitudes derived in other ways from his life story and his inability, as he admitted, to 'slough off the puritanism inherited from my Methodist upbringing'. In 1964 he was a visiting associate professor at Berkeley, when thousands of students, emboldened by Joan Baez singing 'We Shall Overcome', staged a sit-in against restrictions on academic freedom. Cox was sympathetic to the students' demands but discomforted by their methods. By the time a student of his was arrested for reading aloud from Lady Chatterley's Lover in a public place, he felt the protests had deteriorated into 'the making of satisfying gestures'.5353 Cox, The Great Betrayal, 137, 130, 132. After returning to work at the University of Hull, Cox found that he disapproved of the informal teaching methods at t