A perfect storm is destroying thousands of years of scholarship and teaching experience in UK Higher Education.
Disaster, crisis, and madness are just some of the words which come to mind when trying to describe the tidal wave of redundancies and cuts to arts, humanities and social sciences ripping through British universities.
A distinguished STEM scientist and physicist, Sir Keith Burnett, has said what is happening at my university, Goldsmiths in South East London is ‘the canary in the coal-mine.’ He added: ‘Why even a physicist like me should shudder at Goldsmiths’ predicament. The humanities- and social sciences-focused institution is the canary in UK higher education’s increasingly explosive coalmine.’
It is not surprising that the Guardian has focused an elegantly written feature on the UK HE crisis in New Cross by the journalist Zoe Williams, who is herself the recipient of an Honorary Fellowship from Goldsmiths.
‘The Goldsmiths crisis: how cuts and culture wars sent universities into a death spiral’ also argues: ‘Arts education is essential – yet on both sides of the Atlantic, the humanities and critical thinking are under attack. With massive redundancies announced at this London institution, is it the canary in the coalmine?’
I would strongly emphasise this is not a crisis where the left and right should be taking sides in some ludicrous and trivial culture war. This is an issue which should be uniting the broad political spectrum because what we risk losing will be catastrophic to the British national interest in the global sphere.
The issue should be attracting concerning coverage in the Daily Telegraph, Times and other media.
It chills to the bone to contemplate the impact on this country’s university system if after the canary keels over an explosion detonates a wider collapse.
As I happen to love canaries as much as I do Goldsmiths, I beg your indulgence to explain why everything must be done to stop and reverse what is happening at Goldsmiths and in other places.
Higher education is a public service not an adjunct of precious metals futures, the electric car industry or groceries.
Just as critical theory is not and should never be the only academic theory taught in universities, free market theory economics should not be the only method of regulating and managing them.
A university which only teaches Marx and Marxism is not a real university and the same can be said for only teaching John Stuart Mill and libertarian socialism, or Michel Foucault and the theory of ‘Power is everywhere.’ The reality of the British university system is that it is not perfect, but there always has been and always will be an ebb and flow in the nuances of critical thinking and there has to be.
I taught at Goldsmiths for 30 years and even though my contract said I was supposed to work 35 hours a week, my reality and that of many of my colleagues is that 70 or 80 was and is still the norm.
I was not the only lecturer in my office when security opened the gates at 7 a.m. and indeed leaving at 9 p.m.
As with any field of human endurance not everyone will have their shoulders to the plough of teaching and learning, but in my experience they get found out; most frequently by the students they have a duty to serve and care for.
With voluntary severance and compulsory redundancy, I estimate Goldsmiths is in the process of losing around 200 of its social science, education, arts and humanities academics over a period of two to three years.
With an average of 20 years of service for each academic lost, that is the destruction and disappearance of around 4,000 years of scholarship and teaching experience.
That’s just one university. Multiply the effect with cutbacks at other UK universities. Can the country really afford to lose this?
This is happening because loans have replaced grants to primarily fund student fees from 2010 as part of a wider project to expand universities.
But this was followed by the freezing of student fees since 2017 and the interest charged to students has been barely a viable option for payback in most of their lifetimes.
What industry, whether service or manufacturing, could ever survive if for seven years it could never increase the price of what they provide and in the midst of the highest inflation since the 1970s?
All forms of education whether primary, secondary, further or higher have needed central, regional and local government regulation which preserves infrastructure and stability.
Yet the sensible capping of the numbers of UK and EU-domiciled undergraduates that English higher education institutions could recruit was irresponsibly removed from 2015.
So, the professed brilliance of United Kingdom Higher Education plc in the global market place would have to come to the rescue with overseas students and their double or in some case triple scale of fees.
But overseas students are the easiest target for political point scoring through measurable and achievable immigration reduction. Cutting legal migration is so much easier than stopping the perilous boat crossings over the Channel and the vile people smugglers.
And this squeeze in the last two years has been devastating. This has been recognised by former Education Secretary David Blunkett in a recent article for the Sunday Times. He said: ‘They earn the country hundreds of billions but are being undermined by constant criticism and curbs on overseas students.’
Whether you were for or against Brexit, its impact has undermined and diminished the market for European Union students who always enriched the Goldsmiths’ student community, as did academics from EU countries.
EU membership meant students from EU countries paid home fees and UK students had the same opportunities in Europe.
Goldsmiths has also had to cope with additional cuts imposed on the central government funding which supplemented equipment and technical based creative and arts programmes.
Goldsmiths was always the ‘unique’ university emerging out of a thrilling experiment to provide adult education to thousands of working class people at the end of the 19th century.
This continued with the powerful fusion of art for art’s sake and public and commercial art and design into the 20th century.
From 1905 Goldsmiths led the world in educating teachers for teaching starting with pupil teachers who had been working in the classrooms in charitable village and town and city board schools between the ages of 13 and 18.
By the time they arrived in New Cross for two years of specialised and higher training, many needed the refectory food in the College kitchens to reverse the damage done by poor diet.
Emergency treatment for medical, dental and ophthalmological disorders had to be provided for diseases and conditions caused by poverty.
What Goldsmiths has achieved in more than a hundred years is phenomenal and unrivalled.
For all the famous star-studded and resonant names such as artists and designers Graham Sutherland, Mary Quant, Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Anthony Gormley, Punk art innovator and Manager of the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren, musicians Alex James and Graham Coxon of Blur and James Blake, poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, artist, film and documentary director and producer Steve McQueen, author Bernardine Evaristo, Hairy Biker Dave Myers, theatre director Rebecca Frecknall, and playwright Winsome Pinnock, there have been tens of thousands of other alumni who have enriched, innovated and improved the human condition.
Goldsmiths higher educational culture inspired the Open University, social, cultural and political activism and has made the world a better place and so many of its graduates through the ages have never claimed the honours and the jewels of ‘winner takes all’ media recognition.
It has been enough to inspire the green-eyed monster of competition. So, in addition to the perfect storm of free market forces, many of the more powerful and supposedly ‘more prestigious’ universities have wanted what Goldsmiths had.
There has been nothing to stop them scooping up the better academically qualified student applicants and duplicating the successful programmes- sometimes releasing the funds they have to guarantee student numbers with fee and subsistence scholarships.
This has led to recruitment freezing on the specialist postgraduate programme in radio, audio and podcasting I inaugurated in 1992-3 which over 30 years has helped launch brilliant and award-winning audio drama producers, documentary producers and sound poets and artists from all over the world.
This is exactly what was once described by former Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, as ‘the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.’
There is also the political prejudice against Goldsmiths for being such a ‘radical and woke’ university- but this is simply another form of bigotry. Goldsmiths has always been a genuine centre of diversity.
For every member of the Communist party of Great Britain, and there were many of them among staff and students during the Cold War, there have been as many Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats.
No other university had a chief who at the age of 50 enlisted in the Army to fight and die on the front line as did Goldsmiths’ first Warden William Loring in 1915.
At the same time the College magazine published a poem sympathetic to conscientious objectors who at that time were being reviled by press and public, and persecuted and jailed by tribunals.
As in the First World War, Goldsmiths lost some of its very best students and staff during the Second World War. One such example was Cuthbert Edward William Jones from Ebbw Vale who had a few precious months teaching at what would later be the primary school in Cardiff attended by Dame Shirley Bassey.
He was conscripted into the RAF and died a Japanese prisoner of war in Java in 1943. He was only 26.
Three Goldsmiths art students, Derek Cooper, Jack Chalker and Robert Brazil did survive the horror of Japanese captivity during WW2. They surreptitiously drew and painted and returned to teach at Goldsmiths.
Robert Brazil’s capacity for understanding and forgiveness of his captors can be discovered by listening to the remarkable oral history interviews with him recorded by the Imperial War Museum.
Forgiveness, learning to disagree, understanding, listening, tolerating, and appreciating awkward and disruptive thinking are the hallmarks of the Goldsmiths tradition.
That is why Sir Ross Chesterman, Goldsmiths’ fourth warden, forgave the President of the student union who stole all the union’s funds to subsidise his six-month sojourn in Moscow when Stalin still ruled the Soviet Union. He would work to pay back every penny.
That is why nobody at Goldsmiths reported Malcolm McLaren to the police when he confessed to burning down the College library to cover up his theft of art books.
Who remembers the ‘George Davis is Innocent OK’ campaign of the 1970s? By occupation Mr Davis was a ‘Stoppo (getaway) driver’ in the criminal practice of armed robberies. But his controversial conviction and imprisonment for a 1974 robbery at the London Electricity Board in Ilford, Essex and the dramatic campaign for his release questioned the reliability of eye witness identification evidence.
Home Secretary Roy Jenkins exercised the Royal Prerogative of Mercy and ordered his release in May 1976. He was offered a place at Goldsmiths to study a sociology degree, but could not take it up due to his admitted role in an armed bank raid on 23 September 1977 at the Bank of Cyprus, Seven Sisters Road, London.
In 2011, the original ‘George Davis is Innocent OK’ 1974 conviction would be quashed as unreliable by the Court of Appeal. A complex narrative rooted in social reality with Goldsmiths being there with compassion and offering the door of rehabilitation.
That is why Goldsmiths is respected for the development of its much admired and hugely successful ‘Open Book’ project which aims to break down the barriers that discourage people from entering higher education.
That is why there is the paradox of many Goldsmiths students occupying buildings protesting for Palestine and one of its leading and most respected academics founding the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
A Trinidadian First World War hero, George Arthur Roberts came to Goldsmiths at least four times during WW2 as a leading fireman from New Cross to save the college from attack by incendiary, high explosive, and V1 rocket.
George Roberts would be painted elegantly and memorably by a Goldsmiths Art student George Hepple and he helped save the main building. This meant that some 25 years later Russell Profitt of the Windrush generation would become the first Black student union President of a British University.
The warning sirens about what is happening at Goldsmiths and what this means for the wider field of UK higher education are being sounded loudly and clearly across the media.
The distinguished Emeritus Professor and Fellow of the British Academy Angela McRobbie offered her own account and perspective of the crisis in terms of her experience at Goldsmiths and the global sphere of university education. She warns there is a real risk that: ‘…the arts and humanities become superfluous and disposable rather than an urgent part of the cultural life and wellbeing of the nation.’
The canary in the British University system’s coal mine needs to be singing gloriously and everything must be done to support and preserve it and reverse the cruel cuts and redundancies it now faces.
See Al Jazeera news report on the ‘UK arts sector crisis’