Pressure on History Flashcards
Commodification of Education
Dearing Report 1997 - students identified as principle customers of universities
Tuition fees 1998
£3000 fees 2004
Browne Review 2010, Dept of Education - increase in tuition fees by 3x
Politicians
Tony Blair, speech to US Congress, 2003
‘there has never been a time when… except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day’
Charles Clarke, Br Secretary of State for Education (2002-4) - ‘I don’t mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay them’
Donald Trump has proposed eliminating both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, in a move that would see the worst fears of arts groups around the US realised.
Established 1965 when Johnson signed legislation saying any “advanced civilisation” must fully value the arts, the humanities, and cultural activity.
Academics
Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[1]’
University dept closures
University of Sussex
axed British history before the 18th Century and European history before the 20th century bc low enrolments made them unsustainable
University of Middlesex closed Philosophy department, announced 2010. Despite fact it was the uni’s highest-rated research department in the 2008 RAE
Cuts
End of direct government funding for arts, humanities and social sciences at English universities from 2012
Marketisation of education
Thatcher - 1981, 5-year run-down period announced. University Grants Commission (UGC) to take 13% real-terms cut
1987 Croham review of UGC, replaced with new model abjuring subject-specific planning in favour of block grants to institutions, on the basis of ‘selectivity’ exercises which would apply efficiency and market tests to institutions
1989 UGC replaced by new set of HE funding councils
Research Assessment Exercise (1989)
Research Excellence Framework (2014)
To create market competitions for the distribution of funds and league tables for students to make informed decisions as consumers
Impact Agenda
Funds to hums distrib through Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and British Academy
almost all funding directed to research areas identified as strategic priorities
Research Councils UK (RCUK) definition of impact:
‘the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy’
AHRC - ‘Impact’ - demonstrating the value of arts and humanities research; why
it should be funded by the taxpayer.
‘declinism’
The postwar economic miracles experienced by Germany, France and
Italy—largely fuelled by their relatively late transfer of populations
from rural to urban occupations, such as Britain had experienced a
century or more earlier—were perceived in Britain not as convergence
or ‘catch up’ but as Britain’s relative economic decline.
CP Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Rede Lecture at Cambridge May 1959 - blamed humanities for British failures in economic growth
1964 - new PM Harold Wilson promised to bring the ‘white heat’ of the tech revolution to bear on Britain’s ills. CP Snow elevated to House of Lords
In the media
Cohen, 2012, writing in Forbes.
To Boost Post-College Prospects, cut Humanities Departments.
Utilitarian. Rigid functionalist view - if not getting job in degree field, pointless. Particularly as 100 000 graduates in US in jobs not requiring degree
‘Those who still wanted to study zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities could read the books during their Starbucks barista work breaks’
Weakness of hums in Research Excellence Framework criteria
History 30th highest-rated of 35 departments at Bristol in 2014 REF
Mandler, The Two Cultures Revisited (2014)
Having seen off the ‘declinist’ threat, the
humanities are now faced with a more formidable adversary in the
form of narrowly vocational understandings of what a university
education is for
James Vernon, ‘The State they are in: History and Public Education Funding in England’, American Historical Association,Perspective on History(March 2011)
As neoliberal states across the world disinvest from public educational systems, the pressures on the humanities and social sciences to justify their public utility and value have been growing.
undergraduate enrollments will be supreme in the new system and those disciplines and departments that attract students will thrive, and those that cannot are likely to wither away.
One unkind explanation for current state of affairs:
The Research Assessment Exercise (1989) and the Teaching Quality Assurance (1993) sought to measure the excellence of research and teaching in order to create market competitions for the distribution of funds and league tables for students to make informed choices as consumers.
did what they were supposed to do: they created a new entrepreneurial academic who embraced the new market conditions of career advancement
Bunce, Baird, Jones, The student-as-consumer approach in higher education and its effects on academic performance
Surveying 608 undergraduates at higher ed institutions in England
Since the UK government identified students as ‘customers’ (Dearing 1997), higher
education institutions (HEIs) in England have increasingly had to operate under
forces of marketisation which demand competitiveness, efficiency and consumer satisfaction
students appear more
career-focused than before, for example, by choosing courses that offer clear employment
prospects and higher salaries
In line with our prediction, there was a negative relationship between consumer
orientation and academic performance whereby a higher consumer orientation was
associated with lower academic performance
Students at universities in England are increasingly being treated as customers by the
government
C. B.KandikoandM.Mawer,Student Expectations and Perceptions of Higher Education.(London, 2013).
Research consisted of conducting interviews and focus groups with over 150 students (primarily
Years 1 and 2) at 16 institutions, across a range of mission groups, institutional types and UK‐wide
geographical locations
students have a consumerist ethos towards higher education, wanting ‘value‐for money’.
This was seen tangibly through sufficient contact hours and resources available and
abstractly through institutions’ investment
Students’ expected their learning environment to meet clear benchmarks across four areas:
instrumental (computers and physical spaces); organisational (timetabling and course structure);
interpersonal (staff support and engagement); and academic (lecturers’ knowledge and attitude
towards students).
Student expectations for employability: “Future‐focus”.
M.Tomlinson,“Students’ Perception of Themselves as ‘Consumers’ of Higher Education (2014)
Drawing
upon a qualitative study with students across seven different UK
higher education institutions, the article shows that while there is
evidence of growing identification with a consumer-orientated
approach, this does not fundamentally capture their perspectives
and relationships to higher education. The article shows the degree
of variability in attitude and approaches towards consumerism of
higher education and how students still perceive higher education
in ways that do not conform to the ideal student-consumer approach.
The majority of students interviewed expressed what might be described as a mixed,
almost ambivalent position on the consumerism of higher education. At one level, they saw consumerism as an inevitable consequence of a marketised higher education system and something that was justified through students’ private contribution and the need for experience commensurate to increased costs. This further gave rise to a belief that they had considerably more ‘rights’ in shaping their institutions’ activities and to question the value of their formal learning experiences
However, whilst having a partial identification with aspects of more consumerist
and service-user values, they also acknowledged the limitations of this approach sense that higher education was not fully comparable with other services; that they still had to work within the authority structures of their institutions, Reference was made to the balance between students’ stronger rights as fee-payers and their responsibility in the process of attaining their degrees; what was referred to as a two-way process of responsiveness and engagement between themselves and their institutions:
The perception of being positioned as a ‘consumer’ by institutions, wider media and policy discourses was therefore prevalent. In some cases, students referred to invasive marketing from their institutions and other media that affirmed their role as consumers.
