The arts and humanities under attack
I’m one of the editors (alongside Harriet Curtis, Glenn Odom and mélissandre varin) of the academic journal Studies in Theatre and Performance. Recently, I submitted my editorial for issue 42.2, which contains a wide range of essays engaging with performance through the framework of ecological thinking. After the usual paragraphs summarising the articles and highlighting relationships between them, it felt crucial to say something about the current crisis in UK higher education, which is being felt in particular in the discipline of theatre and performance studies. Because the editorial won’t be out for a while and the crisis is developing week-to-week, I’ve copied my thoughts below. Solidarity with everyone at the sharp end of what I call below the ‘deliberate dereliction’ of UK universities.
This issue’s focus on ecologies of performance resonates dispiritingly with the state of UK higher education as I write. Although STP is committedly internationalist in its outlook, it depends fundamentally upon the ecosystem of UK theatre and performance studies. Currently, our discipline is caught in what seems to be an ever-narrowing space circumscribed by the hostility of government to the arts and humanities and of senior managers, who are increasingly committed to programmes euphemistically termed ‘organisational restructuring’. 2022 has seen further industrial disputes in numerous branches of the Universities and Colleges Union and Unison. Some branches currently engaged in an assessment boycott are being threatened with 100% pay deductions. The action is being taken in two disputes: over proposed cuts to pensions held in the Universities Superannuation Scheme (based on what is now widely recognised to be a faulty evaluation undertaken during covid-19), and over the ‘Four Fights’ of pay, equality, workload and casualisation.
All of these fronts of struggle indicate a crisis in the university sector, whose roots clearly lie in its heedless marketisation just over a decade ago. Those reforms accelerated competition between universities for student fee and rental income (meaning that campus development projects were prioritised over staff pay and conditions), and imposed the ideology of ‘employability’ on the sector. Inevitably, the consequences of these changes are being felt most acutely in disciplines marginalised by government policies, among which the creative and performing arts have been further weakened by the reduced provision of these subjects in secondary schools. For all of these reasons, it was predictable that university managers would begin to turn on those departments that government policy had made most vulnerable. Attempting to justify cancelling recruitment to 138 courses including all those in the performing arts, Professor Julia Clarke, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Wolverhampton University, said that the university ‘just can’t afford the arts’. Such assertions are becoming more commonplace, though not always so blunt. De Montfort University and Goldsmith’s University of London have both announced ‘restructuring’ with about 50-60 jobs at risk in both institutions, Roehampton University has informed almost half of its academic staff (including all those in the School of Arts) that they are at risk of redundancy, and the University of Huddersfield has announced 37 redundancies in the arts and humanities.
The government’s response has been a lesson in studied negligence. Ministers have sought to distract from the crisis by inflating right-wing talking points about free speech and so-called ‘viewpoint diversity’ on campuses, and amplifying attacks on the National Union of Students (NUS) for alleged antisemitism. That controversy was sparked by the reporting of a decade-old tweet by NUS president-elect, Shaima Dallali (for which she has apologised), and echoes the treatment of another black Muslim woman, Malia Bouattia, who became NUS president in 2016. The NUS has announced a review of antisemitism in the organisation, but the government has decided to suspend recognition of the union and has formally questioned the process whereby Dallali was elected. Undefined ‘substantive action’ is required from the NUS before the government will be prepared to ‘work with them again’.
These signs of the deliberate dereliction of UK higher education could not be more clear, with the arts and humanities – for the moment – bearing their brunt. They are also being directly felt by members of this journal’s editorial team. If we are to grasp the politics of the sector’s current trajectory we need to understand two things. First, the wreckage of the complex ecology of UK higher education is the current government’s objective. Secondly, that objective is being delivered by the imposition of the conditions for an alternative ecology, in which competition for increasingly scarce resources is the means of starving sites of ideological and material resistance to the government’s agenda. This ecology reaches, of course, via university leaders, deep into the institutions in which we work, entangling all of us in its operation. Reversing this trajectory and repairing ourselves, will only be possible with deep and critical collective scrutiny of the ecology we are being corralled into creating, and the fostering of alternative possibilities.
