2024 ended with at least one good news story. Early in December, world leaders, dignitaries, celebrities and clergy gathered on the Île de la Cité in Paris, France, to see Notre Dame cathedral open its doors once more. Just over five years since the world watched it become a fiery beacon on the Paris skyline, the building’s reopening was a moment of shared celebration that contrasted with the grief that followed its destruction in 2019. It was also a celebration of the work that has gone into its rebuilding, involving architects, engineers and builders of course, but also a broad collaboration of academics from across the sciences, humanities and arts who were all engaged in the restoration.
Yet as one door opens, others were closing. Just a few days before the ceremony, across France, the universities that house many of those scholars shut in protest against the government’s proposed budget. It’s a common theme for higher education in many countries. And despite the recent UK budget promising uplifts in research funding and tuition fees, leaders are warning that years of financial strain mean widespread cuts and redundancies are all but certain. Achieving financial stability means difficult decisions will have to be made, but there is a real risk of underselling the sector’s value if those decisions focus too heavily on the bottom line.
As we’ve covered recently, budgetary woes are already affecting chemistry. Courses and departments are faced with closure, so the news that the University of Reading will retain its department is most welcome. Yet while expensive chemistry courses might draw the eyes of administrators, plenty of other less costly subjects are also at risk. In the arts and humanities departments have been shedding staff, and cohorts in English literature, for example, are in freefall as students facing sizeable debts opt for subjects with more bankable prospects.
Universities and governments alike are pinning their ambitions on economic growth to secure their futures. A particularly striking example of this viewpoint also came early in December as New Zealand’s government decided to cut humanities and social sciences entirely from the Marsden Fund – its only pot for fundamental research. The science minister wants the fund to focus on core research as part of ‘a system that supports growth, and a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs’. The Stem subjects do make a compelling case here with a proven track record in connecting innovation and industry, and it’s one that deserves to be made. Though it should also be noted that while R&D does have a proven positive impact on the economy, our ability to predict that impact in any given case is modest at best.
The Marsden Fund is an extreme example, but it’s not hard to find statements of a similar tenor around the education world. As many commentators have already pointed out, we should not only defend the value of subjects in other fields, but decry the division caused by raising some subjects at the expense of others, pitting colleagues against each other in a zero sum game. A narrow focus on the potential economic value of research and scholarship reinforces the enterprise business model of education and it undermines the contribution of disciplines that have a less direct link to GDP, but which are valuable nevertheless. Scientists develop the vaccines, for example, but social scientists know how to make sure people take them; or where scientists strive for impartial objectivity with logic and reason, artists can dare to rouse our emotions with imagination and storytelling.
Marsden itself supplies another example. The fund is named after the physicist Ernest Marsden, who grew up in the north west of England where Marsdens have lived for centuries and where the village of Marsden can be found. The UK’s poet laureate Simon Armitage grew up in that village. In 2014, he worked with the University of Sheffield’s professor of chemistry Tony Ryan to print a poem ‘In Praise of Air’ on a banner made of air-purifying material. His poem ‘Finishing It’ was engraved on an anticancer pill for the Institute of Cancer Research. And in 2023 he visited the Arctic, penning poems on its climate-changed landscape, which evoke the reality of the crisis more effectively than any peer-reviewed publication.
As with the congregation that rebuilt Notre Dame, academia is a broad church with strength in its diversity. It delivers far more value and benefit when it works together than any part of it does alone.
No comments yet