My first degree was in Humanities. Should I have bothered?
Kenan Malik (Observer 31.7) has argued that education is now focused on getting a job and the skills needed for it. The liberal education of the Robbins Report (1962) where learning and knowledge were seen as good in themselves is fading in the face of an educational profit nexus.
Recent developments at Roehampton and Goldsmiths suggest Malik is right. Arts and Humanities course have been closed or downgraded. After all they don’t attract money or lead to jobs. This is wrong in itself, there are many jobs in the area of arts and humanities (just not as well paid as bankers).
It is a continuation of a process E PThompson identified 50 years ago when he wrote of the University not as a place of learning but of business.
The world has certainly changed and not for the better(it can change again btw). My first degree in 1978 was in Humanities. In due course I joined a part of what was then the Civil Service as a property manager. I knew nothing about the job but the view was this didn’t matter. If you had a degree-in any subject- you’d pick it up. And actually I did…
Malik isn’t quite right about wider working class education outside of the academy btw. Trade unions do a lot of this for activists and left groups and indeed the Labour Party in some places still do political education of various kinds.
There is hope but it doesn’t lie in the Business University
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