The future of universities already decimated by corporate interests hangs in the balance as tuition fees look set to rise
Is it ever not the moment to lament the fortunes of arts education in Britain? To deplore a decades-long, cross-party experiment in running universities and colleges as if they were corporate entities? To roll our eyes at the latest ideological assault on creative or scholarly work in the academy? Ever not the time to marvel at the credulity of public and media, who have swallowed whole the idea that certain institutions or subjects offer ‘value for money’, while others are pits of debt and future penury for those who pursue them? Still the familiar sense of emergency. With the election of a Labour government in July, it was possible to feel some slight relief. Perhaps the dismaying combination of know-nothing attacks on academic ‘wokery’, and closing programmes or job losses at universities such as Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and Kent would at last recede.
One of the fronts on which the Labour Party fought and won the general election was a misty promise that the ‘war on universities’ was over. Did they mean merely the cultural front of that conflict, best exemplified by the Conservatives’ ‘free speech’ agenda, but also by extreme assertions about the purely decorative or possibly dangerous nature of arts and humanities subjects? Because in the scant months since the election the new government has not enlivened a ‘sector’ – as the management-minded like to say, when they are not describing a ‘space’ – that can no longer survive while it relies massively on static tuition fees. These fees, introduced under Labour in 1998, and raised substantially in 2010 by the Cameron-Clegg coalition, have been capped for the past twelve years at £9250. That money, say the country’s Vice Chancellors, is no longer enough to support their vaunted ‘excellence’. Not to mention those universities bloated and then financially hollowed out by years of infrastructural expansion and global-campus adventurism. There have been intimations that if some universities risk going out of business, well, market logic may be left to do its worst, much as it does in the US, where (according to the Wall Street Journal) 500 private colleges have closed in the last decade.
How might the art colleges, whether standalone or part of larger universities, cope or comport themselves in this setting? It is probably fair to say that a certain stratum will remain untouched. A recent reminder of how things operate for a blessed few among us: the Courtauld Institute’s announcement of funds raised to create the Manton Centre for British Art, a research resource for postgraduate students and visiting scholars – the centre will be housed in the Courtauld’s present campus at Vernon Square, and move later to Somerset House. The money comes from the Manton Foundation, thus from the bequest of Edwin Manton (known as Jim) and his wife Gretchen, whose fortune derived from the AIG insurance corporation. Good luck to the Courtauld, its staff and students, all the future art historians who get to consult the library and collection. It’s possible, I suppose, to hold one’s nose and ignore AIG’s part in the housing bubble of the early 2000s, the lavish bonuses and subsequent bailout, all of which occurred after Jim Manton’s influence had receded (he died in 2005). Still, the Courtauld plan is a reminder that for some institutions the future of arts education depends rather less on dwindling currents of fee income.
What about the rest of us? In mid-September, some hints started to emerge as to how much Universities UK – a body that represents not the universities themselves (as often reported in the press) but around 140 heads of those universities – was willing to concede to get the fee hike it claims is needed, which is something in the region of an extra two or three thousand pounds. For years, universities have relied on higher fees from overseas students to make up the shortfall, while successive governments made it as hard as possible for those students to stay in the country after graduation – and counted them anyway as part of net migration figures. The result, compounded by Brexit, is a mess. According to the Guardian, UUK is about to announce it is willing to limit numbers of foreign students if universities are allowed to raise their fees. Not one hint, in this back-and-forth between apparently competing guardians of the same commercial system, of what any of this means intellectually, creatively or personally for the real students and staff involved, whether domestic or ‘foreign’.
Recently Sir David Behan, head of the Office for Students – the UK loves a bureaucratic ‘watchdog’ whose task is to intimidate the householder, not repel the burglar – opined that the ‘golden age’ of higher education may be coming to an end with the present funding crisis. For those of us engaged in arts education in the past few decades, Behan’s golden age is a mystery. (I’ve worked at both an ‘elite’ college where overall student numbers can compensate for small programmes, and at a struggling university department where a collapse in undergraduate fees has quickly turned ‘existential’.) Did he mean the age of students who spend so much time and energy trying to earn money that they can hardly make it to class, let alone pursue independent study? Of course, there are those who need paid work and those who don’t. The period when students have been encouraged to believe they are not getting the bargain they were promised when the grades they want don’t materialise, or when their teachers are not constantly available like solicitous service staff? The age in which the same students, no fools after all once they see what’s afoot, have mostly supported their teachers’ industrial action over conditions, pensions and more? (Students who, as at my own institution, have largely refused the invitation to snitch on their lecturers for the crime of discussing strikes in class.)
Whatever ‘change’ (the Labour shibboleth this time round) means for education in general and the arts in particular, it will be, one suspects, merely the continuation of the flux and insecurity – I expect a second voluntary-redundancy ‘quotation’ to come my way this year, while students suffer from reduced staff numbers and thus expertise– that have long been the background to teaching, writing, thinking and making. An emergency that’s always arriving.
Brian Dillon’s Essayism Trilogy is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. He is working on Ambivalence, a book about education. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London, and formerly head of the Writing programme at the Royal College of Art
