I suppose I ought to be celebrating a report from the New College of the Humanities that shows that 60% of the UK's leaders in business and government possess humanities degrees. Indeed, a massive 65% of our current MPs studied arts, humanities or social sciences; just 10% had a science, technology or engineering degree.

If I was being cynical, though, I could hardly think of a worse manifesto for the value of the humanities. Considering our current and recent leadership in the UK, one hardly feels optimistic about the extent to which liberal values have been instilled within them. Consider:

• The humanities encourage one to empathise with those of different cultural backgrounds. George Osbourne (History, Oxford) must have failed this lesson.
• The humanities reward creative thinking. Admittedly, there are some FTSE 100 banking chiefs who managed to do a lot of this in relation to financial accounting. Shame they lacked the other core humanities skills of reflexive or critical thinking.
• Humanities provide us with historical and fictional narratives about a troubled world, and so allow us to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. Unfortunate that Tony Blair (Jurisprudence, Oxford) never mugged up on his Afghanistan 101.

OK, so I'm being horribly facetious here. But at a time when we are led by a set of socially divisive and market-minded politicians, to herald the humanities as having inculcated a wide and empathetic view of the world in them seems hardly apposite, does it?

PS To be fair to the humanities, our present Tory leaders are acolytes of Margaret Thatcher, who perhaps indicates that it's the political background, not the degree, that determines a leader's view of the world. Her degree: Chemistry.

Labels: humanities, Politics, University Life

This is one of a series of posts in which I respond to the Browne review of higher education funding and student finance. Other posts look at the implications of the Browne review for postgraduates, and at the possible impact on teaching and learning.

As one might expect of the former boss of an energy company that puts profit before the environment (namely BP), Browne appears to have looked at higher education with dollar signs in his eyes, seeing value in purely financial terms. The value of allowing young adults to immerse themselves for three years in a subject that they are passionate about; the value of the arts, humanities and social sciences in articulating human and moral behaviour; the value of practising the soft skills that underpin all knowledge (reading, digesting information, writing well) rather than specific, scientific knowledge in its own right - these are not values that can be easily quantified, tabulated, charted, counted, economised or budgeted. And so they are not the values which, according to Browne, public funding should pay to support.

As an indication of Browne's priorities, the word "business" occurs 22 times in the report; "science" occurs 6 times; "humanities" does not even appear. Page 27 of the Browne report makes damning reading for anyone concerned about the arts, humanities and social sciences:

There is a critical role for public investment even if students are investing more. There are clinical and priority courses such as medicine, science and engineering that are important to the well being of our society and to our economy. The costs of these courses are high and, if students were asked to meet all of the costs, there is a risk that they would choose to study cheaper courses instead. In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefts they create. 

The Faustian trade-off with increased tuition fees is that subjects like sciences typically have a higher infrastructure and teaching cost - more labs, more staff to supervise those labs - than the arts and humanities. In order to limit the price of courses like science and engineering, and hence not deter students from them, they will need some form of public subsidy. This will come by withdrawing funding from those subjects deemed to have no "wider benefits," namely the arts, humanities and social sciences.

I have dealt elsewhere on this blog with the demonstrably false assumption that subjects like these have no social or economic benefit. The creative industries employ 1.8 million in the UK, and if business is so in need of scientists, it is strange that twice as many graduates in science disciplines are unemployed compared to their arts counterparts. As the most recent Prospects survey, What Do Graduates Do?, noted, "Six months after graduation, art and design, media studies and performing arts graduates showed higher employment rates than the average for all first degree graduates (61.4%)."

For anyone who has a broad minded picture of what the UK economy is like, this is not surprising. As with UK universities as a whole, the arts is one area where the UK retains a world-leading status, in spite of underfunding compared to other developed countries. London, for example, is not only a hub for global finance, but for the international art market, publishing, media, advertising, and tourism. Nationally, the creative industries contribute £57 billion to the economy. The roots that underlie this activity are hidden and various - but one of the deepest is in academia. Without graduates who are trained to think creatively, to understand human psychology, to write, draw, paint, design, the creative industries will have to recruit elsewhere; without university teachers - human scientists - who are able to inspire, research and influence our understanding of human thought, politics and culture, we will lose that sense of direction and vision that gave us such social enterprises as the welfare state, or institutions like the BBC. What Browne sees as irrelevant courses, aimless undergraduates, and useless researchers cannot simply vanish, without the withering of one of the UK's most important economic outputs, and without the gradual decline of those millennia-old subjects through which we gain a greater understanding of what it means to be human, beyond quantifiable dollars and often with unforeseeable consequences.

However, to return to those numerical terms that former industrial chairmen can relate to, it is important to recognise that the arts and humanities clearly appeal to business in an indirect way. In my own subject, English, career destinations vary widely. Again, according to Prospects, 8.6% of English graduates go on to become managers; 7.4% enter marketing; 17% go to retail; 18.8% enter secretarial occupations. English students in these workplaces may not on a daily basis demonstrate their understanding of free indirect speech in Jane Austen, or the feminist values of The Color Purple. What they do use, however, are the soft skills that underpin many arts and humanities subjects: the ability to summarise a vast range of reading in concise and rhetorically confident essays (for which read, business reports); the confidence to argue a point in front a group of peers (for which read, making one's case in the board room); the ability to study independently, and to pursue their own research around a subject (for which read, low-maintenance employees).


Browne argues that a fifth of businesses report having a skills gap in their workforce. His report suggests that "there needs to be a closer fit between what is taught in higher education and the skills needed in the economy." However, the economy is not some static entity, but changes and shifts in unpredictable ways. Witness the current push to move away from banking and services, and back into manufacturing, or the advent of the green economy. Clearly, engineering or business graduates are capable of adapting to such changes. But for arts and humanities graduates, too, a degree is not just for three years, but for life. Those abilities inculcated through three years of close engagement with a particular subject are not fossilised in the brain so that the student who studies Austen or anthropology will only ever be able to have a career reading novels or living in the jungle; learning is, rather, an organic form which, once established at university, takes on its own life in the mind of the graduate, and which can be nurtured and adapted to new economic environments.


The other factor missing in this is students themselves. Last time I looked - as I did today in my tutorials - students are not cogs in a wider economic machine. They are individuals who bring to university a wide range of skills and abilities, who possess unique personalities, who pursue their subjects in ways that interest them. Some students, sadly, are not possessed of the brains to do maths or physics; they do not have the synaesthetic capacity to "see" the results of algebraic equations, as good mathematicians do, or the ability to write fluently in the language of computers. Some students, however, do possess a strangely refined empathy that marks them out from many of the general population, an ability that they choose to turn to the interpretation and understanding of human psychology in that vast database known as the novel; some students feel a peculiar sympathy with distant tribes in sub-Saharan Africa, and want to better understand their unique cultural behaviours. Are these students to be told that they must study engineering, not English, must be architects, rather than anthropologists, because their greater duty is to feed the beast known as the Gross Domestic Product?

Whilst tuition fees risk discriminating against students on the basis of their economic background, the equal but unacknowledged risk is of disenfranchising them on their basis of their brains, a kind of market determinism dominating the natural imperative that some people are better and more fulfilled studying and working in certain areas.

In spite of my rhetoric, which cannot help but become heated and defensive in the wake of a report like this, I am not anti-business. Neither am I suggesting that the arts and humanities ought to be of equal importance to the sciences. As someone whose research is in science and culture, I have been happy to lend my signature to  the Science is Vital campaign. I understand if some rebalancing of universities priorities is necessary in the wake of funding cuts and tuition fee rises, and as I wrote in my essay on The Value of an English PhD, the utilitarian socialist in me acknowledges that the arts and humanities often do a poor job of explaining their value, economic and otherwise, to the taxpaying public.

Nevertheless, the Browne report terrifies me for its utter disregard that these subjects might, behind all appearances, have a worth in our national life. The singular failure to mention the arts or humanities, those 22 appearances of the word "business" - this is the voice of the big businessman speaking, and being heard in government, at a time when the potential blindness of big business to human wellbeing - evidenced in banking crises or the environmental disaster in Browne's former company -  ought to be something that concerns us all. To close our eyes to the human disciplines, to pretend they do not even exist in a university, is to forget that the good human is defined by more than money in the pocket. The wealth of the mind is also something worth possessing, and we ought to be prepared as a society to reward students by providing them with three years education in those subjects that most enliven theirs.

Labels: Browne review, English Literature, humanities, Politics, University Life

In a two-part blog for the New York Times, the veteran literary critic Stanley Fish considers the uses of the humanities in contemporary society and education. Sadly - and like myself - he struggles to come up with a definitive answer. In his first post, "Will the Humanities Save Us," Fish takes on Antony Kronman's claim in his new book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

Kronman considers that in the past “a college was above all a place for the training of character, for the nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together from the basis for living the best life one can” and that immersing oneself or even memorising the great texts of history would improve one's capacity to live the good life: “to acquire a text by memory is to fix in one’s mind the image and example of the author and his subject.” Only the humanities can address “the crisis of spirit we now confront” and “restore the wonder which those who have glimpsed the human condition have always felt, and which our scientific civilization, with its gadgets and discoveries, obscures.”

It's a nice idea, though as Fish observes it appeals not so much to the promotion of literary study as to the denigration of everything else, particularly science (and I would argue that some of the best scientific writing contains a powerful sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of the natural world, even if it does not offer a template for ethics and living).

Admirably refusing to buckle to this vision of secular humanism and literary criticism's didactic value, Fish argues:

If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

And that, I believe, is how it should be. Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject.

In his second post on The Uses of the Humanities, Fish analyses a religious poem by George Herbert, riffing on the ambiguity of the homophone "sun beam" and "son beam." Such humanistic readings matter, Fish declares, because:

The satisfaction is partly self-satisfaction – it is like solving a puzzle – but the greater satisfaction is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use. “Isn’t that amazing?,” I often say to my students. “Don’t you wish you could write a line like that?”

Fish notes, rightly, that when we talk about the use of the humanities, we are invariably - if often implicitly - referring not to the creation of texts like George Herbert's, but to the analysis of such products within the disciplinary silos of academia:

The challenge of utility is not put (except by avowed Philistines ) to literary artists, but to the scholarly machinery that seems to take those operating it further and further away from the primary texts into the reaches of incomprehensible and often corrosive theory.

This is a somewhat different issue:

The funding of the humanities in colleges and universities cannot be justified by pointing to the fact that poems and philosophical arguments have changed lives and started movements. (I was surprised that no one mentioned “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book Lincoln is said to have credited with the starting of the Civil War.) The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?

Again, Fish reiterates his argument against secular humanism: the neoconservatives who declared war on Iraq in apparent ignorance of religious history were actually "as widely read in history, philosophy and the arts as anyone." Fish - excuse the pun - sticks to his guns:

I am saying that the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external to the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to them – measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination. If these or some other instrumental benchmarks – instrumental in the sense that they are tied to a secondary effect rather than to an internal economy – are what the humanities must meet, they will always fall short. But the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.

This all sounds very bold in the face of some philistine comments: the point is, there is no point. Only it seems that for Fish, contrary to his own terms, sees that there is a pragmatic value, though it is methodological rather than ethical:

The first is that taking courses in literature, philosophy and history provides training in critical thinking.

Well, he's right, and the ability to analyse texts and motivations, the refusal to conform to received authority, and the willingness to assert alternative arguments all explain why English graduates are among the most highly sought-after by employers.

Of course, it would be wrong to claim that English literature students have any special ability to think critically. As Fish observes, sports commentators do this all the time. But I do think there may be a case that English studies does it more (economic jargon warning!) efficiently and with more transferable potential. If you are able to study a John Donne poem and a postmodern novel, you are probably going to be able to scrutinise the latest marketing material for Proctor and Gamble. The capacity to analyse Manchester United's skill at the offside trap probably does not.

The second reason for supporting the humanities that Fish offers is less forceful:

Let's support the humanities so that Stanley Fish and his friends have more people to talk to.

That is, being able to discuss literature, culture and politics in a sophisticated way enlivens dinner parties whereas discussions of football or the weather invariably dull them. Unfortunately, I think the champagne is probably still on ice when it comes to the issue of the true value of literature, as I have been discovering throughout my PhD in the subject. Still, at least I now have something to talk about over the cheese twists.

Labels: English Literature, humanities, Stanley Fish