In the spirit of free inquiry

Most of my readers will doubtless be rather fed up of reading opinions of various stripes about the government's proposals to triple undergraduate tuition fees, a subject which has already been more-than-adequately discussed throughout the British blogosphere. It is not my intention to express an opinion on that subject today.

Rather, I would like to address a much more troubling facet of the government's higher education cuts, and one which has received far less media attention. I am, of course, talking about the proposed cuts to public funding of research. Specifically, research in the arts, social sciences and humanities is to lose almost all of its public funding. Natural science and medical research will survive, but in a severely reduced form. 

Ben Goldacre has already explained why the funding of scientific research matters. But it falls to me to point out, in the face of apparent apathy, why funding for the arts and humanities matters too.

If arts and humanities researchers are deprived of public support and must beg for funds from corporations and private donors, there will, of course, be far too little to go around. Charitable foundations do not have even a fraction of the resources necessary to support the bulk of British research. And corporations - being, rightly, concerned to make a profit for their shareholders - will fund research only when it is, in some sense, profitable for them. Of course, the private sector might fund plenty of research in science, technology, marketing and advertising, and the like: the more farsighted companies might even fund "blue sky" research without the prospect of an immediate payoff. (Like Google's famous "20 percent policy", which encourages Google engineers to devote 20 percent of their working time to projects of their own choosing.) In no way am I attacking corporations, nor am I denying the value and power of free-market innovation.

But it's hard to see why any rational media corporation, for instance, would want to pay for, say, a sociological study into the portrayals of race and gender in children's television. (Not least, because the results, when published, are more likely to make the corporation look bad than good.) Or why any corporation would see fit to fund an archaeological project on the remains of thirteenth-century Byzantium, or an ethnographic study on the lives of the rural poor in Tanzania. There is no profit to be earned from such endeavours, however far down the line. And they could not be made profitable without corrupting their purpose, and transforming them into corporate PR rather than honest academic inquiry.

Some of my readers might therefore ask why the taxpayer should be funding research endeavours that are, by their own admission, unprofitable and commercially unviable. My answer: because a university is not just about maximising economic growth. It is not just a training ground for "future leaders", a proprietary laboratory for our industries, or a means of attracting investment from the wealthy. Rather, it is about improving the human condition. And in a democracy, free inquiry in the social, political and cultural spheres is no less important to the human condition than free inquiry in the scientific and technological spheres. We cannot improve our society unless we first understand it: and the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences are the best intellectual tools at our disposal for doing so.

British higher education is, increasingly, about money. Desperate for funds to cover its financial gap, Oxford's first priority at the moment is to attract investment from the rich. Aside from begging its alumni for donations, Oxford is also building a successful business model. The state-of-the-art plate-glass Said Business School, endowed by a Saudi arms dealer, charges aspiring members of the global elite some £44,200 for a one-year MBA. And Oxford is building on its successes by opening the new Blavatnik School of Government, funded by a generous donation from fabulously wealthy Russian tycoon Leonard Blavatnik, aping Harvard's Kennedy School in the hope of becoming a premier training centre for "future world leaders". Meanwhile, research funding is being cut. The direction seems clear: it's all about attracting the attention of the world's elite, and giving them the prestige of the Oxford name in exchange for a hefty fee, and, with luck, large alumni donations further down the line. 

In other words, it's all about money. The spirit of free inquiry in our universities, such as it is, gives way to the pursuit of wealth. And, to paraphrase the King James Version... no man can serve two masters; ye cannot serve both knowledge and Mammon. If we commercialize research in the arts and humanities, we will confuse its purpose, and lose the critical independence that makes such research worthwhile.

But perhaps this is inevitable, and we are struggling against the tide.