The value trap

As a rough barometer of the issues preoccupying university staff, you could do worse than track the recurring themes in articles pitched by contributors to Times Higher Education.

Some that dominate are temporary or local, but others are long-term and universal.

The most persistent coalesce into genres – quit-lit, for example, in which disillusioned academics leaving for less precarious and all-consuming careers let out a cathartic scream as they exit.

Another genre that readers will be familiar with is the beautifully written defence of the humanities.

But do not let familiarity tempt you to skip over this week’s contribution from Joe Moran, professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, which offers a persuasive analysis of why he and his peers are back on red alert – and, most importantly, why it matters.

For Moran, there is a potentially fatal disconnect between the nature of the humanities and today’s framing of the debate about value in higher education.

The result is that humanities scholars are pushed into trying – and largely failing – to make arguments that fit an incorrectly allocated mould, overreaching for measurable, preferably financial, benefits in an area of scholarship that is more accurately and richly defined in other ways.

Giving the value-for-money crowd what they want is particularly difficult because “it is hard to quantify what would be lost if the humanities weren’t there. They don’t come up with solutions like the sciences do, in the form of, say, new vaccines or alternative sources of energy”.

Rather, “the loss of the humanities would be like the loss of habitat in the natural world – something profound and far-reaching that occurs piecemeal and unnoticeably, while attention lies elsewhere”.

Moran’s typically well-observed points demonstrate how difficult this argument is to run when debates are narrowly focused on value propositions and return on investment.

“Most people don’t miss that wildflower meadow now that it has become a motorway, especially if they didn’t know the meadow was there in the first place,” he writes. “But something precious was lost, all the same.”

This reminder of what the world stands to lose if it continues to define universities and their role and value solely in terms of STEM-based discoveries and graduate earnings is, it should be said, understood well beyond the confines of English departments.

A year ago, at a THE event, I interviewed Geoff Hinton, the lauded “father of machine learning” who now splits his time between the lab at the University of Toronto and a role with Google.

He could not have been clearer about the importance of supporting the humanities, including cross-subsidising from better funded areas of science if necessary, and said that when he himself donated money to Toronto, he gave it to humanities projects.

One of his concerns, as he looked ahead to a world dominated by artificial intelligence, was that we would end up with “technologically advanced societies but without the humanities”, citing China’s extensive use of high-tech state surveillance as an example of where that can lead.

The loss or erosion of humanities also has big implications for what universities themselves are, and the rapid progress being made by China in key areas of science and technology alone shows that the Western model can and is being challenged.

In our cover feature, we look in detail at the future of higher education in Africa, which by the end of the century is forecast to be home to two in every five people on the planet, and the way in which it might be able to address enormous capacity issues.

One route is to hitch future expansion to China’s wagon, and indeed commentators suggest that this is already happening and could be “a game changer because China can deliver higher education infrastructure in a cheaper way than the West, and also to a high standard”.

“China gets Africa: they understand what our needs are,” one expert tells us. “It is like a barter system: we give this, we take that.”

That approach may be attractive and may get things done, but it applies the same transactional reasoning as is seeping into discussions about higher education’s value and purpose in the West.

Perhaps that will give some of the critics pause for thought – is that the model of university and future they really want?

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com