Summer of Blood

According to this report at the Telegraph, another English university has directed cuts in Government funding towards parts of the History faculty.

Sussex University is reportedly considering a proposal to withdraw from research and specialist teaching “in English social history before 1700 and the history of continental Europe before 1900”. Not as drastic a cut as the Telegraph would spin it up to: their standfirst, referring to a letter published in today’s paper, is ‘Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700′, which is technically accurate but implies a broader raft of cuts than actually seems to be proposed.

Nevertheless, it is part of the trend reported earlier in the week at King’s College, London, where the Paleography chair is to be made redundant. No doubt we will see a further trickle of these sorts of stories over the coming weeks, as academics dig in to protect their own specialist subjects and departmental funding by kicking up as big a stink as they can, knowing that the conservative press can use each case study as a political grenade to hurl at Labour.

Of course, the truth is that the Tories will have to cut at least as much from university budgets as Labour proposes to do. Will they be able to cope with the same sort of criticism, should more non-profitmaking, specialist courses and teachers go to the wall? Furthermore, how long will British universities allow themselves to be driven by the wind of political economics? Strikes me that Oxbridge and any number of the better redbricks have little to lose and everything to gain by cutting as loose as they can from government funding and looking towards an American model of private payment supported by a massively broadened scholarship system. It wouldn’t look pretty to the left, but the quality and depth of British higher education would stand a far better chance of maintaining its international prestige….

As has been reported today, King’s College, London, is directing some of the pain of its wider academic cutbacks towards the faculty of paleography, where the UK’s only specialist chair in the discipline is being abolished from August.

The protest has been rather noisy. There’s already a Facebook group with more than 4,000 members, and an online petition with more than 5,000 signatories. Mary Beard has written intelligently about the subject at the Times, calling King’s in particular on its preposterous use of academic sub-committee speak in justifying its wider cutbacks (They’re aiming “to create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment” - got that?) And David Blackburn at the Spectator has implied that this is just another consequence of Labour’s economic incompetence, cultural vandalism, cackhandedly egalitarianist dumbing-down etc.

Now, all this foot-stamping is hardly on the scale of the NHS hashtag business, or that hullaballoo Jan Moir attracted for going overboard when the lad from Boyzone died. But for the abolition of a paleography seat to have caught national headlines and thrown up such sizable breakers on the web is still interesting in itself.

Paleography is a highly technical and difficult discipline. It is something that could and can only be done professionally when subsidised in a university - few and far between are the high-flying paleography jobs in the private sector. Its value is as a humanity per se - it advances our understanding of our common cultural heritage, decodes the past the better to elucidate the present, and so on. Hanging the paleographers out to dry because - essentially - thems don’t pays thems way really does misconstrue the whole business of paleography.

But then again, these are the times. The entire nation is busy opening a vast, hitherto unheeded pile of bank statements, final demands etc, and realising just how much we cannot afford. The financial pressure on universities has never been greater, and is unlikely to ease whoever wins the next election. In such an environment, faculties that can be seen as drains on a university’s balance sheet, rather than attractors either of private investment or heavy student demand, are going to be extremely vulnerable to the sort of expedient cutbacks that could see unglamorous but culturally valuable areas of expertise snuffed out for a generation or more.

I’m about as far from a Guardian-reading anti-capitalist crybaby as it gets. But this, I will concede, is the problem with unregulated market forces. They don’t suit paleography faculties one bit. Not in a recession, at any rate.