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….
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The scrapheap of history, part II
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….
This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 9:41 am and is filed under Comment, Historical Application and Problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.