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AUA Conference: V-c casts doubt on humanities funding
16 April 2009
Reluctance to engage with Government's practical agenda could prove costly. John Gill reports
Doubts have been raised about the future of research funding in the arts and humanities by the president-elect of Universities UK.
Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter, said that although funding for the sciences was secure, he did not believe that the arts and humanities had made the case for continued public support.
He expressed particular concern about what he saw as the sometimes wilful failure of the disciplines to co-operate with the Government's demands for researchers to demonstrate the social and economic impact of their work.
"That's a key question: what impact does research in the arts and humanities have?" he asked.
"The battle for science funding has been won, I see no threat to its budget. But ... if you were sitting in the Treasury, you would ask: do we need 159 institutions doing humanities and social science research?
"I am afraid, and I speak as a social scientist, that when Treasury officials ask social science and humanities people what they get for their money, what the impact is on the economy, the answer all too often - and this is the polite version - is: 'Please go forth and leave us with more money.'
"As they get on the train back to London, do they think: 'Gosh, they've got a jolly good point there?' I suspect they don't."
Professor Smith was speaking at the national conference of the Association of University Administrators in Exeter, where he used a keynote speech to set out the challenges, threats and opportunities facing the sector.
Perhaps inevitably, many of the difficulties he forecast were financial.
He admitted: "It worries me greatly that my time as UUK president is going to be spent focusing on economic pressures."
He suggested that among the audience of several hundred administrators were many who had never managed a university during a downturn. Pay and, more significantly, pension costs would become harder to meet, Professor Smith added, and the steady growth in public funding enjoyed over the past decade would end.
Looking forward several years, beyond the long-awaited review of fees, he said that the bulk of future funding would have to come from students, which in turn would have to be invested primarily in student services as expectations rose in line with fees.
"The only source of future funds, whatever the colour of government, is the individual in the long term," he said.
A more immediate financial danger identified by Professor Smith was the Government's threat to fine universities that ignored its freeze on additional student numbers, imposed after miscalculations in the student support budget exposed a £200 million deficit last year.
He said: "We've worked out that that adds up to £9,500 per student per year, so if you over-admit by 100 students, that's £1 million per year for three years. These are serious issues for the sector."
Raising his eyes from the economic gloom and doom to the sector's mid-term future, Professor Smith said that the traditional view of a hierarchical system with "the University of Poppleton near the bottom and Oxbridge at the top" was increasingly antiquated.
Instead, universities should be viewed on a horizontal spectrum, with each one excelling, or not, in specific areas such as research, business engagement or widening participation.
"Success and failure in the marketplace we are moving towards will be judged much less on a single hierarchy and much more on how you're doing in the spectrum you're in," he said.
"The critical question is: do you know which bit of the spectrum your university is in?"
He added: "Go and look at university mission statements. I did an analysis - this is slightly naughty but it's true - and found that there are 50 research-intensive universities that claim to be in the top 20, and 11 post-92 universities that claim to be the leading post-92 university in their mission statements.
"With students and their parents scrutinising the choices with an even keener eye than before, we need to know what we are good at as institutions."
john.gill@tsleducation.com
Readers' comments
Why does he elide "humanities and social sciences" with the "arts and humanities"? Such a huge lack of precision, if it reflects some lumpen thinking in the Treasury, is worrying.
two rather different points : 1. Even if given 'solid' social science research the government quite often ignores it ( e.g. testing in schools/consequences of invading Iraq) 2. Why assume the Treasury is right? Surely part of the point of education in the humanities and social sciences ( or anything else ) is to see further than The Apprentice view of the world in which people fight each other to produce rubbish?
The article slightly misrepresents what I heard at this talk - Prof. Smith's point was that most HSS could quite easily demonstrate its worth (in Treasury-understandable terms) but that it declined to do this and that this refusal to go after an "easy win" was to its long-term detriment. The premise that funders want to understand what they are getting for their investment isn't unreasonable - and HSS does itself a disservice by not engaging with what is still the largest single provider of HE income. This position also means that it's the Treasury which is controlling the funding framework not the academic community.
There's an interesting bit of odd thinking here: (quote) ""I am afraid, and I speak as a social scientist, that when Treasury officials ask social science and humanities people what they get for their money, what the impact is on the economy, the answer all too often - and this is the polite version - is: 'Please go forth and leave us with more money.' " (Endquote) I often come across this - that funders want to spend their money on the 'evidence trail' rather than the substance itself. we've become so used to the idea that people asking for money should have to jump through hoops and 'sell themselves' that we take it for granted that that is the way things should be done. But hang on - why would I want to spend my hard-earned money paying good researchers to be substandard salesmen? - and even if I did, given their obvious vested interest, would I take at face value anything they said? My point here is that it should not be up to the institutions providing the research to do the bulk of the assessment work as to value for money (which, as I've said, they can't even do anyway, so it's a hypocritical exercise) - that should be conducted through intelligent inquiry by a disinterested party. When all's said and done, we treat the situation as though research organisations are going cap in hand to beg - but that shouldn't be how it is at all - it's a straightforward transaction, and therefore the conditions of that transaction cannot be entirely stipulated by only one of the parties involved. Come on Vice Chancellors! - earn your keep - it's high time you lot got together and threatened NOt to accept funding unless the conditions are more equitable - if you can't do that, what do we have you for?
Steve Smith is a go-getter in so many ways. Not all focused on Arts and Humanities subjects, as UK institutional history proves all too well. The terrific Rick Trainor, who has preceded him at Universites UK, was perhaps more so. . . But what Professor Smith is missing - and what is missed all too often, is that some of the so called "top universities" in this country, and in other countries, are not "top" in certain subjects, or in relation to certain kinds of research. Personally, if I was a practice-led arts researcher I wouldn't go near Oxbridge with a barge pole; but give me Humanities research at an Oxford College - sure, it's first rate. Isn't it about time we stopped talking about "top" universities and started focusing on "world-class subject specialists", "world-class individual researchers", "world-class research clusters/groups"? They won't all be in what are currently considered "top" (sic) universities!
If I understand this discussion, the point is in the arts and humanities funding and its turnback. And if I've understood (part of) the Bologna Process' philosophy, specific skills and competences are expected from learners in order to better serve business and market needs of better communication, team-work skills, etc. Empathy. Whay about liberal arts in this sense? Don't 'trivium' and 'quadrivium' fulfil what the economic and finance world is asking for nowadays?