When ideas emerge from right-wing think-tanks, appealing to popular resentments about existing bureaucratic systems and vaguely promising a brighter future for all, maybe we should be prepared for trouble. And so it goes with John Marenbon’s Intangible Assets: Funding Research in the Arts and Humanities, which makes a delightfully subtle case for ‘funding’ by removing the arts and humanities from their two principal funding streams.
Readers of the report might know Marenbon as a distinguished Cambridge professor of Medieval philosophy. Or they might remember him as the author of such 
articles, released through the Politeia think-tank, as Militancy on the March (attacking the academic strikes earlier this year), or ‘OFFA’s Topsy-Turvy World’ (a critique of widening participation in higher education). From the perspective of a senior research fellow of Trinity College, it is perhaps easy to believe that humanities researchers should not have to scrabble about for state funding, submitting ourselves to scrutiny and public accountability. One’s college does a much better job of supporting one’s research.
Intangible resources for intangible assets
Intangible Assets proposes abolishing the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and removing arts and humanities subjects from the Research Excellence Framework (REF). (The latter argument was repackaged for The Guardian last week.) He suggests that the quality-related (QR) funding that flows from the REF would remain the same, but be determined by the performance of all those other subjects which are so manifestly more suited to the REF’s assessments. AHRC funding, meanwhile, would be redirected into the creation of permanent teaching-and-research posts. The British Academy, which accounts for a small fraction of arts and humanities funding, could stay, because its standards are sound – and, well, John is a fellow, of course. How we would continue to fund PhD students remains something of a mystery.
The report’s evidence is heavy with questionable assumptions and back-of-an-envelope statistics. If I was trying to determine how much time a REF panellist devotes to grading an item, I might start by surveying some of them. I might also consider whether their universities relieve them of other duties while working on the REF. But that would be too rigorous for Marenbon, who concocts his way to a figure of 2000 pages of reading a day, to be done outside normal hours. (Conclusion: The REF is a sham.) Similarly, before dismissing the assessment of impact – which he considers pointless for the humanities – I might bother to read some four-star case-studies. I might also enquire about the effect of QR funding on arts and humanities departments across the sector, before asserting that ‘no [QR] money reaches’ them (an outright falsehood by my experience). And I might even consider the achievements of some AHRC-funded projects before pontificating about the ‘damage’ that grant-funding does. Indeed I might consider these to be basic methodological expectations of a researcher.
Some arts and humanities academics – particularly those involved in institutional struggles for resources and recognition – might as a result feel uneasy about Marenbon’s logic. He breezily assumes that if the overall QR pot remains the same, universities will remain well resourced and the arts and humanities will be protected. Hence universities should be required – presumably by the Office for Students, but he doesn’t say – to provide research leave, while somehow or other all that former AHRC money will find its way to the right place. How this all squares with resource allocation models within legally autonomous institutions, a culture of ‘value for money’ in a sector otherwise funded by students’ fees, and a mass higher education system with vastly uneven funding and career structures to begin with, is never really addressed.
And is there honey still for tea?
Like so much utopian discourse, Marenbon relies heavily on an idealized representation of an ‘old world’. There was a time, he says, when arts and humanities academics all did some teaching, some research, and paused every day for a three-course lunch at high-table. Ok, so I made up that last bit, but the vision of a world in which nobody was monitoring academics’ work, nor urging them to compete for research support, and assessment was reserved for the rare occasions on which one would apply for promotion, is designed to seduce. What’s not to like?
In truth, this is a blueprint for constraint and elitism. Oxbridge would survive well enough, but what about other universities, where resources are tighter? If no income was generated by research in the arts and humanities, could we confidently expect the vice-chancellor of a university struggling with debt and falling student numbers to maintain staffing levels and protect research time, let alone consider promotions and pay-rises in the humanities faculty? Moreover, it’s worth noting that some universities never experienced the revered ‘old world’, so it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine how, from current working conditions that are often radically different to those familiar to Marenbon, they might now contrive to return to it. And with no research council to make the case for what we do as researchers, could we realistically hope that policy-makers would smile benignly upon us for ever more? Like many who profess to believe in a small state, Marenbon places great trust in its readiness to enforce the regulations that he devises.
As much as we might sometimes wish to deny it, money matters for the arts and humanities. Within a year from now, in the wake of the Augar Review, students could be paying less for arts and humanities degrees. Already many universities are under financial strain, and redundancies and departmental closures are likely to accelerate. The system as a whole is fluid and contested, and in this context both the REF and the AHRC give the arts and humanities visibility, credibility and representation. These things matter. Even to contemplate tossing all that away risks inviting all sorts of insidious and unreliable forces into the conversation. After all, there are plenty of people who would like to see the arts and humanities weaker and poorer.
To pretend that we can improve working conditions while evading public accountability and competition for resources is thus to display reckless disregard for the prevailing conditions in which we operate. Right now there are people in this country fighting tirelessly to convince sceptical politicians of the value of the arts and humanities, in the many contexts in which they are taught and researched. John Marenbon is not one of them.
[ex-] HEAD OF DEPARTMENT’S BLOG 