Investing in investment, British university style

Those who follow academic politics know that British universities are in deep trouble, and I was not surprised to open the 'Prince' two weeks ago to find that Tony Grafton had devoted his first column of the semester (“Slow food and fast, university style”) to the latest, and brutally personal, outrage: the proposal to remove, within the coming months, 22 members of the faculty at King’s College London, including two philosophers and the only chair of paleography in the United Kingdom. Sometimes one must fight fire with fire, and colleagues all over the world have been filling both blogosphere and printosphere with words, paragraphs and full-blooded argumentation whose eloquence makes a mockery — or would make a mockery, were the situation not so serious — of the stinking seven pages of bureaucratese from KCL titled “Arts & Humanities Restructuring Consultation Document.” Well, here for consultation are 825 more fiery words.

These are tough economic times for everyone, and British universities are indeed being forced to figure out how to survive Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s election-year anti-intellectualism. (As two commentators wrote in The Guardian in January, “It has taken more than 800 years to create one of the world’s greatest education systems and it looks like it will take just six months to bring it to its knees.”) But universities are not corporations, and no university, much less one of Britain’s flagship institutions, whose eye-catching posters along the Strand boast of the important people affiliated with it (Virginia Woolf, Maurice Wilkins, Desmond Tutu, ...), should be “[c]reat[ing] financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment” — a phrase, already quoted and condemned by Professor Grafton, that one could hardly mistake for either acceptable English or humane praxis. These “areas” are, after all, occupied by living, breathing people, and very distinguished people the paleographer and the philosophers are, too.

Maybe, just maybe, if this were a true emergency, one could countenance some sort of weakening — though surely in the first place a temporary, modest weakening — of presumptive tenure. (The British system is different from ours, but academic types who go successfully through the system typically receive “permanent” positions at a young age.) But this is not an emergency. And we know it is not an emergency because the authors of the same document that suggests “disinvesting” from some areas are happy to point to the need to find the resources for supposedly “financially viable academic activity” elsewhere: “A need has been identified to invest in a number of areas of strategic investment and growth through six new appointments for 2010-11 at a cost of £320,000.”

This investment in investment has been identified by whom? The passive allows us not to know, but it seems a good bet that some of the identifiers identify with the three “areas of strategic priority” that are among the six “distinctive research themes” of KCL’s School of Arts and Humanities. These areas are “Global Politics, Culture and Identity,” “Digital and Visual Cultures” and (my favorite) “Creativity.” Does anyone believe it is a coincidence that the man who is making heads roll, Professor Jan Palmowski, is a specialist in European politics, culture and identity? Has it not occurred to Professor Palmowski and whoever is pulling his strings that paleographers study visual culture and, furthermore, that digital paleography is a growing field and one well-practiced in London? And as for “Creativity” as an area of strategic priority, I’m delighted to hear it. So why fire creative scholars? (Probable answer: because creative scholars would never think to say that their distinctive research theme is creativity.)

Professor Grafton and others have explained why we should care about a subject like paleography. But, many will say, paleography is an ivory-tower subject that doesn’t help the world. My response to this cannot fit into a paragraph. But let me throw down the gauntlet on the subject of utility and impact, especially since decisions about which subjects get funded at British universities will soon be based to no small degree on the new Research Excellence Framework, which claims to be able to measure “[i]mpacts ... assessed through a case-study approach.” Sure, there are people who make a real difference to humanity. But these people are very, very rare. If Paul Farmer, the extraordinary co-founder of Partners in Health, wants to say that paleographers should move to Haiti rather than sit in libraries, OK, I’ll listen. And I grant that some folks in some professions — midwifery and grave-digging come to mind — have a higher chance than I do of being visibly and obviously and regularly useful. But I have no reason to believe that serious paleographers and philosophers have less impact than serious astrophysicists and European historians, and experience suggests that scholars and teachers, whatever their subject, contribute at least as much to the happiness of mankind as advertising executives, truck drivers, golfers, butchers, bond traders, oboists and lawyers.

Joshua Katz, a professor in the Department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser, will be on sabbatical in England in the fall. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu