It was disappointing to see the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson this week instruct the Office for Students (OfS) to remove Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG) funding from some humanities and arts subjects.
Out of this year’s £1.25bn allocation, the OfS has been told to prioritise funding for “specified strategically important subjects”, including laboratory-based STEM, technology and healthcare provision. Maintaining that focus would, she wrote, “necessarily require trade-offs elsewhere”, with the result that the independent regulator will now remove SPG funding from performing arts and creative arts courses, alongside archaeology, geography and history.
This is happening in a context where humanities research is also quietly being relegated to a distant second place by the little-noticed Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, which pushes universities towards government-determined “national priorities”, the valorisation of commercialisable research, and a narrow, economistic definition of usefulness.
STEM teaching and research are obviously vital. But where funding, recognition and institutional rewards flow so decisively towards strategic alignment with government-defined priorities, departments and programmes rooted in less obviously “aligned” areas begin to look increasingly exposed – as proposed cuts in humanities, arts and social sciences at Exeter, Lincoln and Hertfordshire, to name only three recent examples, already suggest.
The forms of inquiry most vulnerable here are often precisely those academic freedom is most needed to protect: pure rather than applied research; artistic and creative work that refuses to let what J.S. Mill called “dead dogma” harden into common sense; and teaching that treats the systems, norms and theories government would prefer to regard as inert resources as proper objects of critique.
Where university teaching and research become so closely bound up with government priorities, much of what that freedom enables is lost – not because of direct censorship or speech codes, but through “organisational restructuring”, with all the attendant redundancies, broken careers and dismantled intellectual communities hidden beneath that euphemism.
Over the coming weeks, CAF will submit a first round of FOI requests to a targeted sample of English universities – including research-intensive and post-92 institutions with significant humanities, arts and social science provision – to establish what changes are projected in SPG funding, and whether reductions, or the implications of the Skills White Paper, are already feeding into course reviews, departmental restructuring or closures.
We would also be very interested to hear, in confidence, from academics whose departments are already being affected by these changes, or who have relevant information about how these priorities are being interpreted inside their institutions.
Anyone with information can get in touch at manager@afcomm.org.uk.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.