“I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Stage one: Introduction to the arts degree – principles and perspectives
“Imagine a world without English majors,” proposed a recent headline in the New York Times. Although such a prospect may seem utopian to some, there are good reasons to be concerned about declining interest in the study of traditional arts subjects in universities here and overseas.
While some subjects taught in arts faculties, such as criminology and sociology, are thriving, others are not. In general, the more a subject appears to offer the promise of employment, the more popular it will be.
Take English, perhaps the archetypal “arts subject” and a good example of the challenges facing parts of the faculty. The number of equivalent full-time students (EFTS) studying English at the University of Auckland has fallen from 548 in 2002, to 377 in pre-pandemic 2018, to 328 in 2020. Accompanying these changes are increasingly punishing workloads and pressure on standards. But the problem is much wider and goes back much further, according to Brian Roper, associate professor and former head of the politics programme at the University of Otago.
“The damage was really done in the 70s and 80s, where we see the expansion of commerce faculties at the expense of arts faculties,” Roper says. “Basically, arts go from being 50% of university students to 25%. And commerce goes from being 0% of universities to 25% … If you look at the period from 2005 to 2019, there was a decline in the overall number of tertiary education students of 124,500. This was when we had rising tuition fees. And the John Key government cut funding for student allowances by 27.8%.”
Universities are obsessed with international rankings and Roper has plenty to quote: “We’re in the top third of the OECD in terms of tertiary fees for domestic students. We’re towards the top of the OECD in terms of fees for international students. We have some of the lowest levels of student income support in the OECD. And the costs of all of this are being pushed onto students and their parents through the loan scheme.”
He notes one important exception to general underfunding of tertiary education: “The government increased funding per student for science, technology, engineering and mathematics [STEM] subjects, beginning in 2012, while simultaneously imposing a freeze on government funding per humanities student from 2011 to 2017.”
Dougal McNeill, senior lecturer in English and president of the Victoria branch of the Tertiary Education Union, says that “sent a very clear indication that arts subjects weren’t valued in the same sense”. But he has found a bright side: “In that context, I find the ongoing student interest and student numbers encouraging rather than depressing.”
It’s possible that the 200 or so students enrolled in each of the two literature papers available for stage-one English at Auckland this year are more committed than those in the past who took English because it was something they were good at while at school.
Greg Booth, acting dean of arts at the university, isn’t so sure. “A lot of the people who did English in our day discovered that they really loved it in ways they didn’t even expect. But choosing to study English in university is quite an intentional decision, much more so now than it probably was.”
It’s easy for baby boomer arts graduates to lapse into nostalgic golden ageism when considering the state of tertiary education. Not only was theirs free, they were granted performance-related student allowances which could cover living costs of rent and food. But it was also elitist, due to such factors as the almost forgotten practice of scaling, which saw exam results artificially manipulated so that 50% of School Certificate (Year 11) students failed, with many choosing not to continue education rather than repeat a year.
The single change that had the greatest impact, says McNeill, was “the introduction of the fees system in the 1990s, which fundamentally reshaped the way the relationship inside the institution and [with the] community was conceived”.
Michael Neill, emeritus professor of English at Auckland, has watched with dismay the growth of “the idea that education was a business like any other. For some reason, tertiary education was a purely private value, unlike primary and secondary education. The moment it became something that was increasingly costly, more parents began to be anxious about the direction their children were taking. And young people, in consequence, began to think the same way.”
Stage two: Contemporary developments in tertiary education and their impact on arts subjects
Things have only got worse under a Labour-Green government, says Roper. The much-vaunted fees-free initiative, which in practice ended up favouring students from affluent families, has been limited to one year rather than extended to the promised two. And, says Roper, “Whatever increased nominal spending the government has introduced has been focused almost entirely on the student loan scheme. In the 2022 budget, there was an extra $313 million allocated for students to borrow and get deeper in debt.”
You don’t have to lean left to find fault with the effects of reforms. Michael Johnston, associate dean (academic) at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka’s school of education, is a senior fellow at the pro-free market New Zealand Initiative. He thinks the expansion of student numbers enabled by the fees regime has resulted in a dilution of standards, made worse by a self-defeating focus on relativism, particularly in the arts.
“We were much better off with a small proportion of highly capable people being trained at universities,” says Johnson. “[Historically] there was an access problem – a socioeconomically mediated one, which is correlated with race, but I don’t think that it was inherently racist. I think it comes back to the cultural capital advantage that you have if you come from a well-off family … But I don’t think the right answer was to say, ‘Let’s water down the degree.’”
Staff-student ratios have been a popular area for savings, with inevitable pressure on teaching standards as those teachers who are left have to attend to more and more students. At Auckland, says professor of English Alex Calder, “We currently have seven permanent members of staff: five in English, two in drama. In 2013, we had 21, so we’re down two-thirds in 10 years. For most of my career, we had a staff-student ratio of around 1:16 EFTS. I’m told that we can’t expect replacement staff if we are below 1:28 EFTS.”
Universities have responded to all these pressures in predictably commercial ways with suitably commercial jargon to go with them. Like “paper density”, which puts the focus on the student-to-paper ratio rather than the teacher-to-student ratio. For the arts, this means labour-intensive subjects such as languages will be discouraged at the expense of others that don’t require as much student supervision.
At Auckland, the English department website dangles a tantalising array of courses in front of students, most of which are revealed on closer inspection to be available “next year”. It has the air of a bait-and-switch marketing ploy to make the customer think there are more goods on offer than are actually available, although this may not be deliberate.
“As you put your papers on a rotation cycle,” says Roper, “there’s a real risk. You have fewer choices and options for students around their interests. That can contribute to them being more likely to decide, ‘Well, I’m not going to go to university at all.’ It can lead to fewer enrolments, which leads to more financial problems, which leads to more cutbacks, which means you get this downward spiral.”
Booth says, “We try to make sure that everything that’s in the calendar is taught at least every two or three years. Students are attracted to the faculty of arts in part because of the variety of courses we offer. And we’re really committed to doing that. But that wide range of subjects, in purely management speak, seems counterproductive. Because, rather than teach a course with 500 students each, we’re teaching five courses with 100 students each. It’s a very difficult model when the money is tight and the logic is economic. And when money gets tight, logic always gets economic.”
He says total enrolments in arts subjects are not down. But what about a drop in stage one BA enrolments relative to the other degrees?
“That’s very possible. But we offer more degrees than we used to. In the faculty of arts, in addition to the BA, we teach a bachelor of global studies, which is quite a popular degree and engages students across a whole range of subjects. And we offer a bachelor of communication. So, it’s probably reasonable to say that the number of students enrolled in the BA programme as opposed to other programmes is getting smaller, but it doesn’t mean there are fewer students in the faculty.”
In business terms, global studies and communication are brand extensions that have become part of the product mix, and helped to keep overall student and staff numbers up.
“I’m all for global studies. I’m all for communication,” says Roper. “But I do think there is that marketing element to it as well.”
Not that English has failed to adjust to changing times. Where once stage one offered a paper called “Introduction to Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Study of Language”, there is now one called “Great Books: Seduction and Betrayal”.
Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, professor of social and cultural studies at Victoria and a staff member on its university council, has her doubts about innovative new degrees. “Are we actually gaining something from diminishing the bachelor of arts, which is so wonderfully broad and gives you so many choices, and locking people into these specialised bachelor degrees, promising them jobs? They can be a real cul-de-sac for students.”
Not that she is against all change. “We should always think about how can we make it more modern. How can we put something else on that really needs to be done? Otherwise, we would never have courses about feminist literature, or indigenous literature or history, or the anthropology of liberation. So, of course, we need to do this.”
Stage three: Weirdos and wonder – arts degrees for art’s sake
The pressure for anyone and everyone to complete tertiary education means “it turns into a signalling game”, says Eric Crampton, chief economist at the New Zealand Initiative. “The point is to signal that you aren’t a weirdo, that you meet some minimal cognitive threshold, that you’re not an embarrassment.”
If career-oriented arts subjects are becoming studied less and replaced by global studies and communication, is the commercial imperative winning the war?
Maybe, but it’s a phony war, according to Bönisch-Brednich, who points out that arts graduates always had and still have excellent job prospects because their studies give them general skills that can be applied in all sorts of areas.
“We need a counter-narrative to the neoliberals who say we need people who are job-ready,” she says, “because they are job-ready for the jobs they are going into. A policy analyst in government needs to be able to critically and thoroughly think through a problem and do research about it, and we are teaching them that. All my anthropology students get jobs.”
Really? There’s a thriving anthropology industry out there? “They are in the diplomatic service and NGOs. Three of my students work for the United Nations. One became the chief ritual adviser for the government and has designed Anzac Day ceremonies, the mourning ceremony for the Christchurch massacre and the opening of the women’s football world cup.”
Crucially, says Booth, arts degrees are future-proof because “we’re teaching how to think – how to look at information and try to make sense of it. How to ask questions about what is behind a statement.”
In the communication degree, “We’re not teaching the practicalities of how to be a journalist or a television news presenter. It’s the critical level behind that. How does communication work? How does culture affect communication?”
Although science and technology change “every 10 minutes, thinking doesn’t. We have to be able to respond to change. And that’s one of the things this faculty is good at.”
As Dougal McNeill points out: “The idea that we should be training for today and yesterday, rather than developing the skills that allow us to engage with what might happen in a year or 10 years, seems to me kind of silly.”
Furthermore, as Roper tells his students, “How well you do counts for more than what you do when you are looking for employment. An arts student who has an A-grade average has vastly better employment prospects than a commerce student who has a C- or B-grade average.”
So much for the practical advantages of the arts degree in the jobs market. The less-tangible benefits remain, and in an existentially iffy world, they may be more important than ever. If we’re going to be motivated to fix the planet and stay alive, we need to have some good reasons to go on living.
“The shift that has been so corrosive,” says McNeill, “is going from seeing education as a public good to a private good – something that can be purchased and viewed solely through the lens of an individual’s employment prospects or earning capacity. Obviously, those things matter, but I think the broader point around what education provides for us as a community and a society has been allowed to go by the wayside. And that’s the part I’m particularly keen to defend.”
If studying for the sheer love of the subject is under threat, there are plenty of people willing to stand up for it. Michael Neill probably puts it most clearly.
“In the world in which I grew up, education seemed to be all about learning to understand the world, learning to question the beliefs that were instilled in one as a child, discovering that some of them were valuable and others perhaps not so much. It was all about learning what it means to be a human being. And whether one did that through the study of literature, reading history or studying philosophy, fundamentally, those were the goals. Critical thinking is something that you’re likely to learn only inside the sorts of disciplines that still feebly exist in an arts faculty.”
Isn’t this also, for a lot of people, their last chance to develop passions they won’t have time for again until they retire?
“It’s an important question,” says Booth, whose academic specialty is Indian music and culture. “That’s a real responsibility. You’re going to get a job and the job’s going to be whatever it turns out to be. But what happens when you come home at night? Maybe there’s another interest – something that enriches the way you see the world and how you fit into the world. And that’s something we do.”
As the numbers of students dwindle, so, as we have seen, do the numbers of staff, and inevitably, so does the amount of learning that goes on. Just ask an economist. “We do definitely, I think, lose something important when we don’t have these repositories of knowledge that are held primarily at universities, but then disseminated through their students,” says Crampton. “The arts are really important for that and we’re losing some of it. But what to do about it is a hell of a lot more complicated.”
Critical thoughts about the teaching of humanities
Eric Trump teaches a humanities paper to medical students at the University of Otago. The idea that a grounding in the humanities is of benefit to people in the professions has long held sway in some US universities but is less well established here.
“The programme is about 20 years old,” says Trump. “And it’s very popular. The idea of medical humanities is to try to bring medicine in touch with the humanities. How does one think about medicine outside of the lab and the operating theatre?
“For example, Frankenstein is a classic text of medical humanities – looking at Frankenstein’s monster as a kind of animated transplant, the ethics of trying to create life, the fantasy of a male pregnancy. That text opens itself up to all kinds of discussions that have to do with medicine.”
Trump has also taught first-year English students. “There’s a real difference between the passion that the medical students have and what my first-year English students had. My students now are engaged. They do the reading. They do the writing. They come into class, and they all seem to have things to say. I’ve heard students say, ‘It’s great to use my brain again.’ I’ve never studied medicine, so I don’t know what they’re really talking about, but maybe there’s a lot of memorisation.”
One problem from the traditional arts perspective remains: “My students, here and in the US, seem unable to consume long narratives. I wonder if the day will come when no one reads Dickens?”
At Auckland, most undergraduates currently have to complete two courses in a “general education” programme, but this will be abolished within the next couple of years. The arts faculty provides about a third of those courses. The philosophy department, says Associate Professor Matheson Russell, “offers a very popular GE course: critical thinking. We teach over 1500 stage-one students each year in this course, and most are from outside the arts faculty.” When the GE programme ends, “we are expecting enrolments to plummet”, he says, noting that staff numbers in the department are already half what they were when he joined the university in 2007.
Paul Little graduated with an MA Hons (First Class) in English, Auckland, 1979, and it never did him any harm.