The Long View | Who’s to blame for the disaster facing the Humanities?

If you think the cliff edge facing the humanities in British universities is a crisis for another sector to worry about, think again. It seems astonishing that the University of East Anglia (UEA) could cripple the literature department that taught Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. But this is the same UEA that closed its music department altogether in 2014 – a department associated with Benjamin Britten.

What if the University of York were to shut the music department that has furnished the classical music industry with so many of its current leaders? Like defunding the English National Opera, it’s only unthinkable until it happens. The impact for our sector on the effective eradication of musicology and composition teaching (and more besides) would be profound indeed.

But that’s not the only way to think about it. Humanities departments aren’t conveyer belts for the production of novelists, playwrights or individuals equipped to run orchestras and opera companies. They are chroniclers of human reflection and behaviour whose research and teaching environments are uniquely capable of rounding out minds which can then go on to pursue whatever careers they like – from teachers to restaurateurs to professional footballers to civil servants.

Even journalists! Emma Duncan’s recent column in The Times, headlined ‘we should cheer the decline of humanities degrees’, summarised the thinking pretty neatly. Straight out of the Jeremy Clarkson playbook, it was almost as if Duncan knew she was writing dog-whistle stuff she didn’t actually believe but was guaranteed to rile an already downtrodden constituency and get her name trending. Clever!

What Duncan knows is that the humanities simply don’t figure in the current administration’s educational ethos – which wills you to get as many procedural qualifications as possible, use them to get the best-paid job you can, and thereby initiate a Mephistophelean relationship with money that will eradicate whatever rays of imaginative sunshine existed in your life and ensure the highest possible tax receipts for ministers to spend.

Not only do humanities degrees not quite cut the mustard there (except they do – go check the rich lists) they actually propose the alternative narrative found in all those poxy books and plays – that life isn’t all about chasing ever-higher quantities of money. Who knew? Well, those many ministers who studied the humanities at university might have got a whiff of it, but like the benefits of a wide cultural education provided by their private schools, they remain of the opinion that everyone else must do without.

Yes, yes, yes… it’s easy to blame the current government, when the roots of the issue actually go far further back – all the way to the commercialization of higher education in the last century and its more recent turbo-charging through increasingly higher tuition fees. Students are no longer at university to learn about the world around them and certainly not to engage in frank debate about it. They are there to have their future secured for them, to have the return on their colossal investment rubber-stamped, to be provided with a ready-made professional network.

That principle has conspired with the painting of STEM subjects as future-proof and the humanities as futile to downgrade the subjects in the eyes, not only of students, but of universities themselves, who increasingly view them as a less profitable ‘product’ (hence the faculty closures in Norwich, Exeter, Reading and counting). When you consider the development of universities over the last five centuries, even of the explosion of more progressive humanities courses since the 1960s, this seems at best tragic and at worst very damaging for civilisation.

As a classical music community, we should worry about what that means for general musical curiosity and an ability to listen (I’m thinking here of to the ticket-buying, radio-listening public). More importantly, it an act of utter lunacy for our entire species – to dispense with what counts for real human intelligence just as we rush to work out what advantages we might have over the robots.