Of facts and calculations

Not surprisingly, the spending cuts affecting higher education in the UK look likely to have a disproportionate impact upon institutions that only or chiefly offer arts-based courses. Just as happened in the Thatcherite 80s, the balance has been tipped in favour of notionally “useful” subjects, that can guarantee the fastest possible return on investment; the difference now being that a far higher proportion of that investment is provided by the student rather than the state. The spirit of Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’s utilitarian schoolmaster with his pathological loathing for anything other than facts, hangs over the coalition like a chemistry experiment gone wrong. Leaving aside for a moment the heretical notion that a university education might be allowed to transcend the banalities of the balance sheet, and that having lots of educated, knowledgable people is good in and of itself for society as a whole, there are two reasons why this imbalance is stupid and self-defeating.

The first is that people who study arts subjects make money, for themselves and for the wider community. The whole Cool Britannia phenomenon was slightly embarrassing at the time, and now feels utterly cringe-making, but it did draw attention to the fact that there are some things – art, music, fashion, literature, even the odd movie – that the British can still make pretty bloody well, and other people will want to buy them. The Young British Artists – many of them spawned by Goldsmiths College, one of the institutions that seem likely to have their government support reduced to zero – were successful not just because of their creative skill, but also because of their entrepreneurial instincts. Moreover, because people like Damien Hirst and Jarvis Cocker were associated with British education, lots of foreign students thought it might be a good idea to come to Britain to study, bringing their dollars and euros and yen with them, much of it to the universities themselves.

Of course, just because Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Music and the Central School of Speech and Drama will suffer massive cuts in public subsidy, it doesn’t mean that Britain will stop producing good artists and musicians and actors. It just means that those artists and musicians and actors will come disproportionately – even more so than at present – from social groups where students can rely on the financial support of their parents. There’s nothing wrong with posh people; I’m hardly a horny-handed proletarian myself. But if the creative community is almost entirely drawn from the offspring of the professional classes, this will inevitably be reflected in the art and music and drama that is produced. Less Mike Leigh, more neo-Merchant-Ivories along the lines of Downton Abbey, which might produce a welcome fillip to the tourism figures for stately homes in the coming decades, but hardly presents an image of the United Kingdom as a nation ready to make a big noise against the clamour of the 21st century. I mean, why on earth would David Cameron (Eton and Oxford), Nick Clegg (Westminster and Cambridge) or George Osborne (St Paul’s and Oxford), not to mention the man tasked with the review into tuition fees (King’s, Ely and Cambridge) want to do such a thing?

The second point addresses the whole question of what a university education – indeed, any education – might be for. Yes, the Gradgrinds are right that we need more scientists and engineers to compete with the technological challenge offered by the growing Asian economies, not to mention plenty of lawyers and accountants to keep the wheels oiled and a doctor or two to stop them all dying on the job. But a modern society, a modern economy, also needs salespeople and marketers and copywriters, HR and PR staff, all sorts of people who are clever, but not in ways that can be neatly encapsulated by an academic or professional qualification; otherwise the glorious innovations of the scientists and engineers would just be garden-shed self-indulgences. Oh yeah, a few teachers might be handy as well. And what they learn at university is just as useful to them in their jobs as the science is to the scientists. Not necessarily the specific details of the literature or history or philosophy in their text books, although they’re always handy in a pub quiz; but the skills involved in dealing with something – texts, data, an ethical conundrum – coming up with a response to it, and communicating that response to an audience, coherently and accurately and persuasively.

That might sound like an easy call compared to isolating a genome or building a bridge, but evidence would suggest that people who can really do that aren’t all that thick on the ground, and they’re rather useful to businesses and other organisations. Not all employers need bridges to be built for them, and very few need an understanding of the geopolitical effects of the Congress of Vienna. But most employers need to draw on the sort of intellects that can analyse and explain the geopolitical effects of the Congress of Vienna, even if those intellects are engaged in planning a PR campaign a new bridge that your client’s just built. And while there are people who didn’t go to university who can do that, a degree course that challenges and provokes and teases such aptitudes from a student must surely be seen as a good thing, for the economy, for society and for its own sake.

Or maybe it’s just that if nobody studies arts subjects any more, eventually nobody will know who Thomas Gradgrind is?