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May 5, 2011
In this post at the Defend the Arts and Humanities blog David McCallam says that the Browne Report into funding higher education in England was depressingly reductive, judging the worth of university education almost exclusively in economic terms.
McCallam says:
Only those subjects deemed capable of growing the economy were hailed as fit for funding. The general good, in other words, is nothing more than GDP. No mention of university’s moral transformative capability, its democratizing potential or its civic duty. No defence of its role in providing personal enrichment, cultural apprenticeship or aesthetic pleasure. Society, in Browne’s vision, is competition, not conversation; it is entrepreneurial, not inclusive....his is today’s world, Browne says, and there is no alternative. And in such a world those academic disciplines caricatured as having no clear economic utility should have their public funding withdrawn in its entirety.
He adds that Browne wants to asset-strip precisely that intellectual domain in which powerful and imaginative alternative worlds are constantly being proposed, explored and debated.
In this sense, the arts and humanities are the prime site of resistance to Browne and the coalition government’s economic instrumentalization of university education. What they ‘produce’ instead is critically empowered citizens with the capacity to envisage a different future from the one presented to them by the logic of the market
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