In the last few weeks, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a crackdown on ‘rip-off degrees’ as a key pledge of his election campaign, following on from proposals first made in July 2023 (though the issue of ‘mickey mouse’ degrees has a much longer history). The gist of the policy is to do away with ‘soft-touch degrees with high drop-out rates that fail to land graduates with a well-paid job’ (Rodger, 2024). More specifically, there will be limits on recruitment where providers fail ‘to deliver positive outcomes for students on HE courses,’ as well as reductions in ‘the maximum fee and loan limits for foundation years in classroom-based subjects… which cost less to deliver and in which there has been rapid and disproportionate growth’ (Department for Education, 2003, p. 1).
I agree wholeheartedly with the need for educational reform, at all levels, and view the debt accrued by students (me included) as unconscionable, and there are what seem to me some ideas in this proposal worth considering, but it’s far from a silver bullet. In their Equality Analysis report, the Department of Education identifies certain shortfalls, such as ‘recruitment limits [being] more likely to apply to providers with higher-than-average proportions of students with some protected characteristics,’ and the likelihood that ‘for some students, entering HE with generally poor student outcomes could still have led to better outcomes than if they had not entered HE at all’ (Department for Education, 2003, p. 2). However, reading Sunak’s remarks in the light of fourteen years of Tory rule, rather than relieved at an apparent attempt to open a meaningful dialogue about long overdue restructuring, I find myself both infuriated, frustrated, and, as a professional musician, feeling personally attacked. You’ll forgive me for being suspicious of the pedagogical wisdom of a politician whose flagship educational commitment has been for ‘all school pupils in England [to] study maths in some form until the age of 18’ (Francis, Jeffreys, & Shearing, 2023). I imagine there is no shortage of British politicians who have studied maths to 18 and beyond, and yet national debt is the highest it’s been for more than fifty years (BBC, 2020). On the other hand, the government has consistently failed to deliver on a 2019 Conservative manifesto pledge to commit £90 million to secondary schools to fund arts programmes and activities (Campaign for the Arts, n.d.).
Such a hit and miss, chaotic, lazy, and cynical style of governance, as evidenced in flimsy proposals and ill-conceived claims about education policy, paints this latest Sunakian vox-pop as a thinly disguised attack on the arts and culture, situating the debate within a naturalised conception of capitalism, taking as its basic argument the holy grail of managerial, technocratic idiocy, the figures, reducing humans to capital, civilisation by numbers (and look how that’s working out so far). Sunak is very literally dreaming of a nation of jobsworths.
Universities haven’t been functioning well for some time. The (re)introduction of tuition fees in 1997, implemented by an incoming Labour government in order to make possible the expansion of student enrolment and to support part-time students (Wikipedia, n.d.), seems to have been a turning point, culminating in what is now commonly referred to as the ‘neoliberal academy,’ a situation in which university policy and structure is dictated in large part by financial (corporate) factors. The relationship between education and money doesn’t begin in 1997, of course, but the balance has swung further and further towards the fiscal, leading recently to widespread lecturer strikes (BBC, 2023), controversies over preferential treatment for international students (Calvert, Arbuthnott, & Menzies, 2024), and plummeting student intake (Foster, 2024).
To my mind, the catastrophic failures of HE can be laid squarely at the foot of neoliberal ideology. Universities have become infected by an absurd commitment to the market, a blind faith in the notion that money, once freed from the irrationalities of human agency, will work itself out, will build the world better, will locate the most efficient path to development and growth available. The collapsing/ed infrastructure of almost all public services in both the UK and US must now demonstrate to even the most ardent adherents of this religion that they were sold a lie. HE has not been spared.
The great irony is that corporate mouthpieces like Sunak will propose solutions slavishly rooted inneoliberalism to the problems created by neoliberalism—akin to trying to stamp out a house fire with a flaming table leg. In more general terms, neoliberalism is allowed to proliferate through the weaponisation of problems of its own creation.
When Sunak, who I don’t for a second believe is in any way invested in the proposed changes to HE (at this point, he might as well promise to colonise the moon), talks about how ‘around one in five people who are on degrees would have been financially better off not doing them’ (no surprise there, when a three-year degree can set you back around £30,000 before the cost of living), or about ‘the earnings of people on those degrees’ (ITV, 2024), he is setting the terms of the debate in the realm of the financial, the only terms in which so many politicians seem capable of thinking (which I would call a form of breathtaking stupidity, yet such human wrecking balls are often handsomely rewarded). The Sutton Trust pinpoints several glaring blind spots, most significantly that ‘less selective universities are really doing the heavy lifting to promote social mobility’ (The Sutton Trust, 2021). Factors such as social mobility can remain hidden as, in absolute terms, the graduate outcomes may appear below average. It’s for reasons like this that ‘the people who will be hardest hit by this policy are students from less advantaged backgrounds who stand to gain the most from going to university’ (Morrison, 2023).
At this stage in the oftentimes wilful deconstruction of any semblance of cohesion in British society, proposals like the crackdown on ‘rip-off’ degrees are insulting in their relative insignificance. The Tories have sown destruction, an opinion which is no longer a fringe view. They may not be the sole reason for it, but here we are nonetheless. Perhaps the Prime Minister could consider tackling rising rent and mortgage prices, energy costs, precarious and exploitative zero-hours contracts, the mental health crisis, shrinking wages, diminishing job openings. Instead, we get diversions, dog whistles, and culture wars.
All of this is true to form and entirely unsurprising. I wouldn’t typically pay much attention to the increasingly vapid wheezes of a post-satire political class, and yet the announcement triggered a bitter memory. During the pandemic, a newspaper published a poll which identified the professions participants considered the most and least valuable (I’ve since been unable to locate the poll, but I don’t think the question was much more detailed than this). Musicians (or perhaps it was artists in general) took pride of place towards the top of the ‘least valuable’ category. The irony of people so publicly disrespecting musicians at a time when most of us were clinging onto sanity through a mixture of literature, television, and music, was illustrative of a creeping normalisation of capitalist understandings of the world, an insidious devaluation of the beautiful and plural expressions of our very being, wherein meet the tendrils of the past and the imaginings of the future in the eternal crucible of the earthy present. Sunak’s crackdown feels like it belongs more to this normalising trend than any genuine commitment to the greater good (if Sunak met the greater good he’d probably ask it if it works in business).
Perhaps I should have read the poll in a more optimistic light. Perhaps people were thinking in far more radical terms than I gave them credit for. After all, music and other art forms are indeed beyond evaluation. They are invaluable, impossible to pin down, constantly shifting and reaching each person in drastically different ways. Perhaps this was an act of resistance, refusing to lump the sublime with the quotidian.
But really it just felt like a kick in the teeth, and (failed) populists like Sunak hitch rides on kicks in the teeth. People love music, but they don’t understand musicians (excepting celebrities, who are in many cases the grinning skull of capitalism), how being a musician can possibly be a job, how we justify what we do, how we are productive members of society (again, the debate is positioned according to insidiously internalised ideological foundations). All the while, music and art are everywhere, and not just in the artefacts or performances generated, but in the very fabric of our communal being (one of our first interpersonal experiences is being sung to).
Georgiou situates the debate in a broader context, worth quoting at length:
‘As I reflect on the experience of labouring while undervalued, I consider the many other kinds of social roles that are currently neglected by the system: parenting, caregiving, cultural and environmental custodianship, community stewardship and activism (to name a few). To me, art is only a “real job” as much as all of these are real jobs – everyday labours that require the whole self. All are similarly embodied, life-affirming and creative while being historically othered by the colonial, patriarchal and capitalist systems that continue to define what is valuable… Artists labour not just with our bodies, but with our subjectivities, our communicative abilities, our identities, our cultures and our communities. These are inherently human kinds of labour that blend work and life to a great extent by involving our whole selves… These elements of artist labour are not generally valued by ideologies of budget-balancing austerity’ (Georgiou, 2023)
When viewed through this wider lens, we can, in fact, give the naysayers the benefit of the doubt. Their suspicion and dismissal of the arts are indeed well founded, inasmuch as the arts don’t ultimately have a place in the world as envisioned by capitalism[i]. We could just as well do without them. The maximisation of profit functions best without the burden of human producers, whereas art ceases to exist under such conditions. Instead, the arts ask us to imagine different versions of society, systems in which the problematic dialectic between work and non-work vanishes; we don’t need to assign a numerical value to each and every activity (and which oftentimes bears no correspondence to the real value of the work being done); we honour the ‘kinds of labour that blend work and life… by involving our whole selves’ as the very point itself.
By creating a system within which actions and interactions can only be understood through economics, we have constructed and naturalised an Orwellian framework which renders the arts illogical and unnecessary, justifying and nurturing a hostile environment.
The problem with Sunak’s proposal, as with so much of his lacklustre political vision, is that he seeks to give the illusion of representing progress whilst in fact offering only ‘crackdowns,’ put-downs, and bureaucratic shortsightedness, evidencing a spectacularly depressing hollowness of character that points towards a bleak and soulless future. Yes, the government proposal has some substance behind it, but the grounds on which the entire project rests have been built on questionable assumptions and thrown together with the expected arrogance and utter joylessness of the Tory circus (this is in no way an endorsement of the Labour party). To borrow an apocryphal quote by Churchill, supposedly responding to proposed cuts to the arts to fund war efforts, ‘then what are we fighting for?’ Before pointing the finger and declaring certain individuals, many of whom demonstrate, through the fact of their precarious financial existence, their commitment to a society rooted in connection and beauty, as failures of the HE system, perhaps Sunak and colleagues might, rather than look for easy targets, ask themselves why ‘art is making more money but artists are getting poorer,’ how it can be ‘that creative industries generated £126bn in gross value added to the economy and employed 2.4 million people in 2022’ (Evennett, 2024) whilst ‘performing arts graduates are among the lowest-paid across the UK’ (Wood, 2024). What is needed is an entire overhaul, a fundamentally different society in which the arts are not problematised but centralised, wherein we can work together in creative community to address the challenges of each moment.[ii]
John Garner
[i] Presently, of course, capitalism recognises and effectively utilises the power and worth of art for its own ends. I am grateful to Hazel Donkin for this clarification.
[ii] Many thanks to Hazel Donkin, Will Edmondes, and John Pope for their suggestions and reflections on this article.
References
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BBC. (2023, October 20). UCU strike dates: Which universities are affected? Retrieved June 02, 2024, from BBC News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-59415694
Calvert, J., Arbuthnott, G., & Menzies, V. (2024, January 27). Cash for courses: top universities recruit foreign students on low grades. Retrieved June 02, 2024, from The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cash-for-courses-the-foreign-students-with-low-grades-at-top-universities-pcskjb6xx
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Wood, P. (2024, May 29). ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees that could face the chop in Sunak crackdown. Retrieved June 02, 2024, from MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/mickey-mouse-degrees-that-could-face-the-chop-in-sunak-crackdown/ar-BB1ngxcy
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