David Willetts speech:
The Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in the modern university -
British Academy, London
Embargoed 12.00 pm 01 March 2011 - Check Against Delivery
It is a great privilege to declare the enlarged British Academy
formally open – and I am proud that BIS has supported this
excellent refurbishment alongside the Wolfson Foundation and
Academy Fellows.
I well remember 11 Carlton House Terrace as the headquarters of
the Foreign Press Association. But, as Sir Adam has said, it is as
Gladstone’s London home that this building has greater historical
significance.
Originally a high Tory who stuck with Peel, later the greatest
Liberal of them all, a man who never lost his faith in free trade
– Gladstone is someone that all of us in the Coalition can
celebrate. And here we should remember his exceptional
intellectual curiosity, as reflected in his great library.
Even when he was over eighty, Gladstone was closely involved in
the transfer of 32,000 of his books from Hawarden Castle to their
new home a quarter of a mile away, undertaking much of the
physical labour himself. Many of the books were moved by
wheelbarrow. "What man"
, he wrote,
"who really loves his books delegates to any other
human being, as long as there is breath in his body, the office
of introducing them into their homes?"
That library is still thriving – the only prime ministerial
library in Britain.
Today is an opportunity to recognise the ongoing significance in
our intellectual life of both the British Academy itself and the
humanities and social sciences – the disciplines you represent.
Their distinctive qualities were neatly summarised by Sir Adam
Roberts in his excellent introduction to your recent pamphlet:
"The humanities explore what it means to be human: the
words, ideas, narratives and the art and artefacts that help us
make sense of our lives and the world we live in; how we have
created it and are created by it. The social sciences seek to
explore through observation and reflection the processes that
govern the behaviour of individual and groups. Together they help
us to understand ourselves, our society and our place in the
world."
This is clearly the right place and the right occasion to tackle
a worry in the academic community – and beyond – that the
Coalition’s policies on universities and on research are a threat
to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Last week, for
example, Simon Schama expressed his fear that “sciences and
subjects which seem to be on a utilitarian measure useful have
retained their state funding while the arts and humanities are
being stripped of theirs.” Previously, Stefan Collini argued in
the London Review of Books that the proposals contained
in the Browne Report meant the “dismantling of the public
character of education.”
I would be concerned if these charges were true. I am concerned
that such distinguished thinkers could entertain them. Quite
simply, the humanities and social sciences are essential to a
civilised country. They bring deep fulfilment to us personally.
They often give meaning and shape to our lives. Universities are
among the most precious institutions any country possesses and
they should be nurtured as such. Universities comprise a very high
proportion of those European institutions which have lasted more
than 500 years. That tells us something about their special value.
But rather than just assert that we in the Coalition value these
disciplines, let me begin by clarifying what appears to be a
genuine misunderstanding of our policies on funding, teaching and
research – before turning to some deeper questions about their
place in our universities.
Teaching
At the moment, the amount of money a university receives to teach
is divided into four bands, depending on the type of subject.
These different bandings are not judgements of the relative value
of courses. They are supposed to reflect the objectively higher
costs of teaching that some types of subject require:
Band A is worth around £17,800 per student and covers the most
expensive-to-teach courses, like medicine and dentistry;Band B is
worth around £8,700 and is for lab-based science courses;Band C is
worth around £7,100 and covers subjects with a fieldwork element;
andBand D is for all other subjects and is worth around £6,000.
Currently, there is a standard expectation that, for every
undergraduate course, some £3,300 of these costs will be covered
by tuition fees and loans. The key feature of the reforms proposed
by Lord Browne is to remove about £4,000 of basic teaching costs
across all subjects and put it into the hands of students. They
will be lent the money to pay the higher fees and only pay back as
graduates when they earn more than £21,000 – a more progressive
repayment system than present.
That means teaching grant will generally only remain for subjects
in Bands A and B at a level about £4,000 lower than now. A
university wishing to cover its existing costs for these courses
may decide to set an average graduate contribution of around £7,000.
This is a scrupulously neutral policy. But you will have noticed
one special feature affecting arts and humanities courses, the
vast majority of which are in Band D. For them, the loss of HEFCE
grant that needs to be made up from higher graduate contributions
is smaller. It amounts to around £2,700 – over £1,000 less, in
fact, than the £4,000 all other subjects are losing in teaching
grant.
So, to cover the existing costs of a Band D student, most
institutions should only need to charge £6,000 – or perhaps a bit
more once inflation has been accounted for. As I said in my
Dearing Lecture a fortnight ago, the maximum allowable charge of
£9,000 in 2012/13 would actually represent an increase for them of
over 40 per cent even after inflation, as against an increase of
20 per cent or so for the other disciplines.
A lot depends on how universities choose to respond to these
financial changes but you could argue that the replacement of
teaching grant is greater for disciplines outside the arts and
humanities because humanities and social sciences were receiving
less. So even though it is correct that these disciplines have
lost their teaching grant, it is wrong to see this as any kind of
bias against them.
Even when there will be no teaching grant for a discipline, that
does not mean there is no Exchequer contribution. In fact, there
is still a lot of taxpayer money going into universities but in
rather different ways. As I said in a speech to Universities UK
last week, we're looking at about £6.5 billion in tuition
loans (on top of £2 billion of remaining teaching grant going to
the high-cost subjects), £2 billion in maintenance grants and
scholarships, and £3.5 billion in maintenance loans. We estimate
that the cash going to universities in grants and fee loans
combined could be 10 per cent higher by 2014-15 than it is now. We
can afford this only because we get a lot of it back, eventually,
from higher-paid graduates. Of the £10 billion we will be
allocating in loans, around 30 per cent will be written off by the
taxpayer, quite rightly, because some graduates do not earn enough
to pay them back. This long-term contribution from the taxpayer
helps to make this a progressive system.
There are some disciplines officially classified as
"strategically important and vulnerable". In our
grant letter, Vince Cable and I asked HEFCE to consider
"what subjects, including arts, humanities and social
sciences subjects" should qualify. HEFCE will begin a
consultation in May on how the remaining teaching grant should be
allocated, and will present final proposals by Autumn for
implementation in 2012/13.
There are also some relatively small, specialist institutions –
like conservatoires – which have unusually high overheads. In the
same letter, Vince and I hope that HEFCE will "continue
to make dedicated funding available" for these important
subjects and institutions – "for the foreseeable future".
Will young people be willing to pay higher fees – even though
they are funded upfront by the Exchequer – for the humanities and
social sciences, or will they prefer other subjects instead? The
evidence is that these subjects are actually very popular –
representing almost half of all applications. Student numbers in
these subjects – undergraduate and postgraduate – increased by 40
per cent between 2001/02 and 2009/10. And this is not because of
some uniquely British focus on these disciplines. Our reputation
in these disciplines is global – among non-EU students, the
increase in these disciplines has been almost 80 per cent.
Employability is something students may think about more
seriously, even though they will only start repaying their
graduate contributions at the higher threshold of more than
£21,000. I do not believe this is a test that these great
disciplines need worry about where they are well taught in
universities which attach high value to the quality of the student experience.
I have taken you through this analysis at some length because the
charge of a bias against humanities or social sciences is very
serious. But, quite plainly, our higher education reforms have no
such bias. Your disciplines are cornerstones of academia.
Research
Now let’s look at research. As a result of the Comprehensive
Spending Review, we have a ring-fenced, cash-protected budget of
£4.6 billion for science and research. That is evidence of our
strong commitment to research, even in tough times.
It is sometimes called the science ring fence but it contains
funding for all the research councils, including the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research
Council. It also includes funding for university research via the
Research Assessment Exercise, which is worth £1.6 billion a year
in England. This element of research funding is included in the
ring fence for the first time. It is of particular value to the
arts, humanities and social sciences, as they traditionally get
about a third of it. Perhaps some people have not appreciated that
we have protected the research budgets to a far greater extent
than the previous government.
When Sir Adrian Smith consulted the research community and
National Academies – including this one – about the specific
allocation of funds within the research budget, there was a strong
view that the balance between the different disciplines should not
be shifted. There are always some specific pressures, such as the
effect of exchange rate pressures on disciplines where research is
financed via international subscriptions. However we have
maintained the broad balance between the different research
councils. The combined allocations in 2011-12 for the AHRC, ESRC
and the British Academy will be a little over £280 million. Once
again, we have not favoured one discipline with public funding at
the expense of another.
Capital spending is outside the ring-fenced budget for research.
I accept that this is where financial pressures are acute, but
even here we have still been able to support really important
projects such as the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation
and the Diamond Synchrotron at Harwell. However, big capital
projects are not just the preserve of the physical sciences. Today
I can announce a major commitment to capital spending on social
science research.
Birth cohort studies
British birth cohort studies are acknowledged worldwide as unique
data resources which have underpinned innovative research on the
health, socio-economic status and wellbeing of people in our
country. The five studies to date – in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1990,
and, most recently, in 2000 – have followed large cohorts of
babies from birth into adulthood. They have yielded a series of
important findings and have influenced crucial areas of healthcare
policy and education – from alcohol consumption and obesity to
child development. The lively debate about declining social
mobility has largely been driven by comparing the 1958 and 1970
birth cohorts – and finding that those born in 1958 were more
likely than those born in 1970 to move from families with the
lowest incomes to enjoying high incomes as adults. And when you
read stories about how effective early intervention actually is or
about the effects on a child of different patterns of parental
work, they are likely to draw on analysis of the millennium birth
cohort.
Today, I'm delighted to announce that we are proceeding
with the 2012 birth cohort study, which – in addition to its
predecessors – will investigate how pre-natal influences, as well
as the interplay of genetic and environmental factors, affect
human development. The 2012 study will be the first UK-wide cohort
for whom information will be captured before birth and in the
first year of life. It will also examine differences within and
between ethnic groups.
Who are these babies? Project leaders will recruit 90,000
pregnant women from 25 different UK maternity units. Parents will
be invited to attend one of eight BCS Centres between the 25th and
30th week of pregnancy, when they will complete a questionnaire
and provide samples. Mothers will then bring their babies to the
same centres at four and 12 months to be weighed, measured and
provide further samples. At the same appointments, experts will
carry out detailed neuro-developmental assessments of the babies.
The second part of this £33.5 million project involves a
programme to unlock the full potential of the existing studies. A
new facility will enable social scientists to compare and contrast
the experiences of the different birth cohorts, from the
generation born into post-war Britain to the children of Olympics
2012. It will put us at the cutting edge of research in public
health, education and social integration. For me personally, with
my interest in fairness between the generations, this new resource
should transform our ability to compare the lives and life chances
of different generations.
Both aspects of the project are crucial to the
Government's social mobility agenda, led by Nick Clegg.
Tracking successive generations is essential to determining
whether people are able to rise above the status of their parents.
A crucial ambition of the Coalition is for children born next year
to have greater opportunities to make their ways in life than the
children born at the start of the millennium. This database will
enable our performance to be judged over years to come. And of
course it is a means of improving public policy by building up the
evidence about what works and what doesn’t.
Perhaps I can make one other point here. You will have noticed a
twenty-year gap in cohort studies between 1970 and 1990. It is
regrettable that the Conservative government of the 1980s chose
not to commission a cohort study during that decade.
Today's announcement demonstrates that this Government
has a different approach. Despite the tough times, we are
committed to gathering vital data – in the truest sense of the
word – and to making full use of Britain's strengths in
social science.
Research Excellence Framework
There has been another announcement today of interest to many
people here. HEFCE and the Devolved Funding Bodies have confirmed
that they are putting a 20 per cent weighting on impact in the new
Research Excellence Framework (REF), when it succeeds the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2014.
Quality-related Research funding (QR) is a major income stream
for some of our most competitive universities. In recent years,
Bath, for example, has used QR money to establish the only UK
research centre devoted to the social aspects of death, dying and
bereavement. Exeter has supported its Institute of Arab and
Islamic Studies. And for individual scholars, QR is often the main
source of co-funding – enabling fellows and temporary lecturers to
establish themselves and complete research projects.
I know there are some in academia who have fears about impact. I
myself was a sceptic, for we must never jeopardise blue skies
research. Indeed, one reason for the £5 million increase in the
British Academy budget in the spending review was to boost
fundamental research among the next generation of scholars.
My own fear was that impact assessment would end up requiring
clunky attempts to make impossible predictions about the impact of
research activity. That's why I decided to delay the REF
for a year for HEFCE to review its design, and decide how impact
could best be assessed. HEFCE has since piloted it across several
disciplines. The REF Panel on English Language and Literature was
– by all accounts – one of the star turns in the pilot exercise.
Indeed, the British Academy, the AHRC and the ESRC have each
published excellent accounts of the impact of research in their
fields.
When introduced, the REF will reward academics who wish to spend
part of their career outside universities – in, say, a cultural
institution – and recognise the incidental impacts of excellent scholarship.
It will have other benefits. A number of scholars have spoken to
me about the constraints of peer review. Richard Smith has
described some of these in his book, The Trouble with Medical
Journals – and they can affect the humanities and social
sciences too. They affect the historian or the social scientist
who feel they must investigate their subject in Massachusetts or
Michigan – rather than Caithness or Cornwall – to increase their
chances of having an article accepted by a prestigious US journal.
The particular structure of academic publishing in some subjects –
with so many of the leading journals based abroad and rewarding,
above all, theoretical innovation – can itself distort research
activity in some disciplines, such as business studies or
economics. And for me as a layman who tries to draw on research in
these disciplines, I hope proper value can be given to the review
essay, the masterful scholarly book with a broad sweep, and to
those academics willing to work for a time outside academia –
giving policy advice, for example. I would welcome a more open
debate in academia about these issues. Perhaps there is a role for
the British Academy here.
Peer review is clearly a global gold standard. It means critical
assessment by international scholars and engages audiences beyond
our shores. However, peer review is not the only measure of
success. The REF will, I hope, reward other achievements.
The value of the humanities and social sciences
One worry about impact has been that scholarship just becomes a
means to something else. I say again that your disciplines are
fundamentally worthwhile in and of themselves. They are deep
sources of human satisfaction, helping us to navigate our way
through the world – both as individuals and as a society.
But there is a paradox: as soon as we start trying to explain why
they have this value, we focus on utilitarian outcomes. That is a
theme of the recent collection sponsored by the AHRC and edited by
Jonathan Bate, The Public Value of the Humanities. His
collection follows on from the important recent book Not for
Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha
Nussbaum, herself a corresponding fellow of this Academy.
This public value comes across most clearly when we see how the
natural and medical sciences find themselves needing to draw on
insights from arts, humanities and social sciences. Perhaps I can
briefly offer two examples of this.
After the attempted bomb plot over Detroit in December 2009,
lawyers, ethical philosophers and psychologists got together in
two workshops with computer scientists and physicists to discuss
aviation security. The solution to safer air travel is not only
about introducing state-of-the-art sensors, for example; they must
be compatible with democratic values and the expectations of
travellers.
Then again, I was recently at a meeting to discuss the
contribution of our research to international development. We can
be very proud that drugs emerging from research funded by the
Medical Research Council tackle the diseases of the developing
world. But then the medical researchers said that discovering the
drug was not the end of the process. One problem they had
encountered was that, in some developing countries, people were
very wary of drugs or vaccinations promoted by Westerners and even
feared they were a plot to damage their health. The medics needed
to understand where these beliefs come from and how they spread.
That meant learning from research on local cultures, the
dissemination of rumour, and attitudes to medicine. Almost every
really big issue needs to be looked at from the perspective of
different disciplines. That is why humanities and social sciences
are quite rightly at the heart of contemporary enquiry.
Integrity of the university
Let me end by considering the place of the humanities and social
sciences within universities as our reforms are introduced over
the coming years. Among the concerns expressed by Stefan Collini
is that a more contractual relationship between students and
institutions will undermine teaching and learning, and indeed the
very identity of the university. I always learn from Stefan’s
beautiful and intelligent essays on these issues. But perhaps I
can risk three challenges to his argument.
First, I do actually want the student to have a stronger consumer
voice. Over the past decades, universities have had such strong
incentives to focus on research that the role of teaching has been
undervalued. That has to change. It is one of the most important
reasons for putting financial power in the hands of the student.
And that has to be backed up with information on all those
practical issues from promptness of academic feedback to how many
seminars you will get.
This sort of consumerism should not jeopardise the relationship
between teacher and student – in fact it brings it back to the
heart of the university. Why should students lose respect for
their lecturers as macroeconomists or linguists because they have
clarity on contact hours or about the ways in which certain
disciplines will help to develop their broader skills? And I am
four square with Stefan when he says that these consumers are – as
graduates – paying for an education, not for a degree. We will be
robust in protecting the boundaries around academic integrity and freedom.
My second response is to accept that some students go to
university as a route to a job. This is part of the role of the
university in a modern economy and we should not be too sniffy
about it. After all, it is probably how universities began,
training people for jobs in the church or staffing the royal administration.
Take a lone parent who might have left school at 16 without much
by way of qualifications and is now struggling to raise her
children. But she wants to do better by her family and so she is
studying part-time at a local university so she can get a
qualification to work as a radiographer. She may have a
“transactional relationship” with her local university, but there
is still a fundamental nobility to what she is doing. We should
respect her for it and we should respect the universities, not
always the most prestigious, which provide such opportunities.
Even if it is not particle physics or Jane Austen, it is still
entirely worthwhile: it transforms people’s lives for the better.
And you know there are quite affluent students with opportunities
in life a lot better than hers for whom university is also,
essentially, a route to a job.
Our higher education system accommodates students with all sorts
of goals. And students with the most utilitarian of intentions may
change once they start a degree course and experience university
life. Last Friday, a young man studying at Southampton Solent
University came to see me in my constituency office. He was
studying journalism and wanted a trial interview with me on my
book, The Pinch. He described how he had come to
university pretty uninterested in what happens in the wider world
but, but the experience had got him hooked on politics and the
news. That awakening happens at university for hundreds of
thousands of young people every year.
But the third response to Stefan is the most important. Our
universities are very special places indeed. I have the good
fortune to visit many of them. I always enjoy the notice boards
with posters about a new indie band on tour, a special lecture by
a visiting expert, invitations to audition for a play, a campaign
against injustice somewhere in the world. It is a glimpse into a
kind of community many of us on the outside rather envy. It works
because it brings together such a diverse range of people and such
a range of interests.
Stefan's deepest fear is that the university, as an
institution like this, is at risk of unravelling. But I am an
optimist. The institution works because of its range. Arts,
humanities and social sciences are a crucial part of the life of
such institutions, just as they form an important part of our own
lives.
Notes to editors:
BIS' online newsroom contains the latest press notices,
speeches, as well as video and images for download. It also
features an up to date list of BIS press office contacts. See http://www.bis.gov.uk/newsroom
for more information.
Contacts:
BIS Press Office
NDS.BIS@coi.gsi.gov.uk
Sally Catmull
Phone: 020 7215 6577
sally.catmull@bis.gsi.gov.uk