Lord Wills
Main Page: Lord Wills (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Wills
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the impact of recent reforms of the higher education system on university education and research in the arts, humanities and fundamental science.
Lord Wills
My Lords, I sought this debate tonight to highlight concerns about the future of the arts and humanities and fundamental science in higher education. These subjects play a vital part in our country’s well-being but they are not immediately apparently commercially valuable and that places them more at risk than they should be.
The study of the arts and humanities, and research into them, are crucial to developing the critical thinking and human empathy which nourish democracy and nourish society more widely, and which, incidentally, apart from their intrinsic value, also provide the best possible environment for business and economic prosperity to flourish.
All Governments of recent times have recognised this. However, we are entering a new era of higher education, where students incur unprecedentedly large amounts of debt to pay for their education and where they will be entering an increasingly competitive and insecure jobs market. In this new era I have three concerns about the future of the arts and humanities. First, that students will abandon their studies in favour of subjects that, on graduation, are more likely to get them work and larger salaries. Secondly, that those who do study them will tend to be those who need to worry least about debt and work—in other words, the children of the affluent. It would be a sad day if the study of these vital subjects were to dwindle and become the preserve of the children of the affluent. Such outcomes would not occur independently of government. They would flow directly and significantly, though not exclusively, from policy on higher education. My third concern is that such trends could encourage government further to reduce support in higher education for the arts and humanities.
This is not a prediction. The data for the past decade are too mixed to be able to draw any firm conclusions about trends, and the radical changes introduced by this Government to higher education funding are too recent for any data to be meaningful. However, it is a worry because students, like most of us, respond to economic stimuli, and in this case the justification for studying these subjects is not economic but cultural.
The Minister may say that there is no cause for alarm—Governments tend to say that kind of thing—but she will be aware that such concerns are not confined to this country. Many countries are undergoing much the same pressures as we are, and have much the same concerns about the future of these subjects. Three years ago, for example, in an article for the New York Times, the president of Harvard wrote of her concern that in the US,
“there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees”.
The distinguished American philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote, in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, which was published in this country earlier this year, of her concerns about education in the United States. She wrote:
“The ability to think and argue for oneself looks to many people like something dispensable if what we want are marketable outputs of a quantifiable nature”.
She worried that,
“the humanities are widely perceived as inessential”.
She concluded her book, which looks at liberal arts education across the globe, by saying that, sadly, in terms of support for the traditional role of humanities, the worst case by far is Britain. Professor Collini of Cambridge University has written of,
“the difficulty, in a consumerist democracy, of justifying the expenditure of public money on open-ended scholarly enquiry”.
For all their merits, markets are imperfect. They should not be the measure of all things. The introduction of market disciplines into higher education should not be allowed to jeopardise the viability and vibrancy of subjects so critical to our national well-being. I should be grateful if the Minister would indicate that, if my concerns turn out to be justified, the Government will not stand by but will intervene to protect the position of the arts and humanities in higher education. There are a range of possible interventions, although at this stage I am not advocating any particular one. I am simply asking the Government whether, in the circumstances that I described, they would be prepared to intervene to preserve the position of the arts and humanities.
I turn now to the question of research into fundamental science. For the past 20 years, successive Governments have tried to develop what this Government have called a “robust methodology” to allocate scientific research funding on the basis of the impact such research makes on what they described as,
“society, public policy, culture, the quality of life and of course the economy”.
This sounds reasonable. Democratically elected Governments need some measure to reassure taxpayers that their money is not being wasted.
It might seem as if such a formulation would protect fundamental science, as impact is to be measured over 10 to 50 years. However, the impact of fundamental science is often hard to measure except with hindsight, and the position of fundamental science is made all the harder when all the noises from politicians from all parties are, perhaps understandably, about the need to promote economic growth. We hear very little about the cultural merit of advancing knowledge for its own sake, or of the value of transmitting learning and knowledge to future generations. This is dangerously short-sighted, not simply because we neglect cultural enrichment at our peril but because it is to misunderstand the complex relationship between scientific research and economic development and prosperity.
Hendrik Casimir, a theoretical physicist who once worked with Niels Bohr and became research director of Philips—so had a foot in each of the two camps of academic life and business—once pointed out the role of fundamental science in the development of transistors, basic computer circuits, nuclear power and electronics. What all those had in common, as Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, the former director-general of CERN, argued, was that they were all highly profitable and were all unforeseen when the underlying discoveries were made—and in each case, there was a long time lag between the discoveries and their exploitation.
It is simply not possible for politicians and scientific administrators to predict with any certainty what the impact of scientific research will be. What, for example, might have been the impact assessment of Tim Berners-Lee’s original work on the world wide web 20 years ago? It was designed to enable different national proprietary computer systems to communicate with each other at CERN, an organisation dedicated to,
“nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character”.
It would have taken a bold and visionary leader of the sort not usually found in the ranks of politicians and scientific administrators to have predicted the impact of that world wide web just 20 years later.
Intellectual curiosity and exploration, not “impact”, ought to be the yardstick for scientific research, and politicians ought to have the courage to justify that to taxpayers. Apart from all its other merits, history and experience suggests that, in the long term, this is the best way to ensure the economic growth to which the Government attach such priority. If problems develop with the arts and humanities in higher education, and with fundamental science, they may well become evident only when it is too late, when the most brilliant academics and researchers have left for more congenial environments overseas, and when intellectual communities have been gravely damaged.
Research and learning subsist in a fragile ecology which, once harmed, can take a long, hard time to repair and rebuild. The science base in this country received a tremendous one-off boost from brilliant refugees from Nazi tyranny—a boost that lasted generations as outstanding scientists passed on their learning and wisdom to new generations. Ill judged public policy could reverse that process, to the benefit of other countries.
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report, Setting Priorities for Publicly Funded Research, stated that it understood the wish of the Higher Education Funding Council to take account of the wider impact of research, but that it was,
“yet to be convinced that a practicable and fair way of doing so has been found”.
It suggested that the weighting given to “impact” should be significantly less than the 25% proposed. Since then, I understand that the Government’s response has been to lower the weighting to 20%, but with an expectation that it may rise again in future.
Will the Minister say something more about this tonight? Will she also say whether, in the weighting given to quality of outputs, which accounts for 65% of the total and the criteria for which are “originality, significance and rigour”, there is any overlap between the term “significance” and “impact”?
As the Government review such concerns and develop further their policy on allocating research funding, I hope that they will bear in mind that research in near-to-market fields where it is already apparent that there are commercial opportunities should surely be more appropriately funded for the most part by the private sector and not by the taxpayer.
In conclusion, I hope that the Minister will reassure your Lordships tonight that as the Government develop their approach, their “robust methodology” will be sufficiently ecumenical to place the highest priority on fundamental science and the pursuit of knowledge—a pursuit in which this country has such a glorious history and that should not be abandoned now.