What price impact?

[ashwednesday]

The future of arts and humanities research in the UK?

Tonight I heard that King's College London is making substantial cuts, including eliminating the palaeography programme. This despite King's having, according to their own prospectus, "the only established Chair of Palaeography in the English-speaking world." For those of you who don't know, palaeography is the study of pre-modern handwriting as well as the practice of reading manuscripts. (As far as I know; can one be a palaeographer of modern documents? I don't think so, but do correct me if I'm wrong.) It's not necessarily the sexiest subject, but it is a vital one for the advancement of ancient, medieval and early modern studies. King's College has done some wonderful work in the world of palaeography, and to lose this programme is a real blow.

But this is not an isolated incident. This ties in to the government's £900 million cuts to universities. Of course I understand the UK is in a difficult financial position right now (and who got us here? But that's another post), but to strike at universities, the heart of the UK's intellectual life, is to potentially cripple us for years to come. The UK will, if cuts like these are sustained, become an academic backwater. We're not a great power any more; our top universities have somehow managed to remain bright spots even as our global star has faded, but for how much longer?

And that's without even thinking about "impact". University research must now be shown to have "impact", that is it must “achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society”. Sounds great, right? No, not really. "Impact" doesn't include intellectual impact on other scholars, or the intrinsic value of work in and of itself. It must have value outside academia. If you think education is about utility, this may not seem a big deal to you. If you think that learning has value in and of itself, that to be educated is about more than functionality but is also about enrichment and intellectual development, you should be very worried indeed. This article sums up the whole sorry mess better than I can. Here is a succinct summary:

[It] is worth insisting that what we call “the humanities” are a collection of ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity. To attempt to deepen our understanding of this or that aspect of that activity is a purposeful expression of human curiosity and is – insofar as the expression makes any sense in this context – an end in itself. Unless these guidelines are modified, scholars in British universities will devote less time and energy to this attempt, and more to becoming door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”.

The problem is - how? I feel quite powerless. Having only recently gained my PhD and not holding an academic post, I feel helpless in the face of all this. I want to do something, and I hope that my fellow academics - and well-wishers in other fields! - will also want to do something. The question is: what do we do?