Humanities without humanity

The British government’s vision for university funding – as outlined by Jo Johnson, minister for universities and science – seems both promising and alarming. That it seeks to elevate teaching to the same level of importance as research is to be welcomed. But to do so via a model based on the Research Excellence Framework (REF), as promised in the Conservative party manifesto, would seem to exacerbate many of the problems the government wants to address. 

A great deal of university funding in the humanities is based on the REF, most recently undertaken in 2014. It is officially said to cost £250m, but it has been estimated by some critics to come in at four times that figure, or much if not more than is spent annually on all the humanities.

I turned to it – and in particular to the report from the 2014 History Sub-Committee – for a sense of clarity and intellectual rigour with regard to university finance and the reward of excellence. I did not find it. If there are measurable criteria that can be used to judge the quality of research in the humanities, they are not readily apparent. Rather, one forms the impression that, in the absence of such criteria, proxies and ersatz benchmarks have had to be found. 

According to the latest REF, 31 per cent of the submissions in the UK’s history departments are ‘world-leading’, which is defined as:

1. A primary or essential point of reference.
2. Of profound influence.
3. Instrumental in developing new thinking, practices, paradigms, policies or audiences.
4. A major expansion of the range and depth of the research and its application.
5. Outstandingly novel, innovative and creative.

Points 1, 2 and 3 are self-evidently not measurable in anything like the time frame within which REF operates.

More generally, these are large claims that are being made. Is there anyone who thinks nearly a third of all work in UK history faculties reaches such an exalted level? 

This is not a criticism of the work itself, merely of the absurd process by which individual excellence is distilled, refined, sieved, ground and otherwise reduced to a heap of lifeless data by the very funding body which should, in fact, be nourishing it. 

I doubt whether many History Today subscribers have read the REF report. I cannot encourage you to do so. Take this sentence, picked at random:

In the case of impact and environment, the same materials were used in both the sub-panel and the main panel calibrations to ensure that sub-panels calibrated material from across the main panel UOAs [units of assessment] as part of the calibration exercise for impact and environment.

Possibly the report was outsourced to Google Translate, but it is hard to respect the judgment of anyone who could write – or sign off on – that kind of sentence.

Our higher education institutions are bureaucratised to an absurd degree. Managerialism and corporatisation are rampant. The quality of both education and research in the humanities is being seriously undermined as a result. The REF is fond of outputs, impacts, calibrations and other wildly inappropriate nomenclature. Yet this is not the language of the humanities. It is as if some benighted administrator has stumbled across the Dummies Guide to Mechanical Engineering and energetically rifled its index to gussy up his or her vocabulary. It is, in short, pseudo-science of the highest order, the intellectual equivalent of the spray-on tan. 

All of which leads me to wonder whether the future of the humanities in Britain is in the public sector at all. Perhaps smaller, student-centred institutions modelled on the kind of liberal arts colleges found in the United States are the next stage in the evolution of higher education in the UK. If the sector is not soon radically restructured, it is very hard to see it being capable of fulfilling any meaningful purpose whatsoever.

Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011). @MathewJLyons