This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Up and down the land, university managers are waging war on their arts and humanities departments. Music is the discipline that is most beleaguered. First there was the Battle of Oxford Brookes, in which I was an early casualty. Elsewhere there was the War of Wolverhampton and the Campaign of Kent; grievous losses have since been sustained at Goldsmiths.
Now hostilities are intensifying: the excellent music department at Cardiff University, large, well-resourced and highly respected, finds itself under siege, with a 90-day consultation under way prior to probable confirmation of closure. There have been smaller skirmishes elsewhere, rumours about new fronts that may yet open up in the north. Staff must regroup and reinforce, bugles and drums at the ready, but in all likelihood their campaigns to hold on to their courses and their jobs will be in vain.
Of course, music’s malaise is part of a bigger picture. The British university sector in general has got itself into an unholy mess, for many reasons: a chronic lack of funding (the fault of successive governments); an expansion of the sector beyond realistic student demand; vice chancellors who have embarked on reckless building programmes with glass and concrete vanity projects they can no longer afford to complete; tier upon tier of managers, endlessly inventing pointless “systems” to justify their existence; a model that has foolishly allowed itself to become dependent upon a steady, now dwindling, stream of applicants from China.
Redundancy and “restructuring” schemes abound. STEM disciplines are by no means safe — chemistry will soon close at Aston and Hull — but undoubtedly the axe is falling harder elsewhere. Aberdeen has cut single-honours language courses; Canterbury Christ Church has scrapped English literature. There is not a single arts or humanities discipline where staff are not fearful, but music seems to be declining fastest of all. And if a Russell Group university of Cardiff’s calibre can close its music department, music isn’t safe anywhere.
Recruitment to Music degrees is down across the board, the result of the arts being downgraded in schools, belittling comments from MPs and a starry-eyed obsession with STEM. Peripatetic instrumental lessons and school trips to theatres have been drastically cut back. Arts disciplines were excluded from the Russell Group’s own now-abandoned list of “facilitating” (recommended) A-level subjects.
Received wisdom seems to be that if your child wants to get a job, they shouldn’t study the arts. Yet my teenager was told by barristers, diplomats and bankers at a careers day that choice of A-levels, or even degree subject, doesn’t matter, so long as you go to a top university and get a good result.
Thinking at the top is lacking interest in education
Universities themselves no longer seem to recognise the value of arts disciplines, their centrality to the fundamental notion of what a university is. Gradgrind managers focused solely on the success of their business school, who see education as about training rather than learning, look at the humanities faculty and see nothing but a row of salary figures to be struck off a spreadsheet.
Sometimes managers do not even seem to understand what is being taught in their own institutions. On Radio 4’s Today programme on 31 January, the vice chancellor of Cardiff University justified music’s closure on the grounds that “There are two music schools in Cardiff … In a context where resources are so constrained, the sector cannot afford to compete in the way it has historically.”
Yet the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Cardiff University have never been competitors. One is a conservatoire focused on vocational practice, the other offers a traditional academic degree that fosters transferable skills through essay writing, analysis and debate that prepare students for a wide range of professions.
It is hard to see how to save the academic discipline of Music, and music history is the subdiscipline most severely threatened. (Lecturers with trendier specialisms may be able to pick up work in sociology or film studies departments, or in private provider institutions which attract wannabe pop singers and musical theatre performers.)
When the institutional thinking at the top of universities is relentlessly utilitarian, business-minded and lacking any interest in education per se, nobody is going to save a “minority” arts subject. Radical rethinking is required instead. So indulge me, if you will, as I set out a bold vision. If dreams could come true, here is where I would like to teach: a small institution entirely devoted to the history of the arts. Think of it a bit like a conservatoire, where students immerse themselves in music for three years, but for the life of the mind. Students could learn about the history of music, art, architecture and literature, supported by modules in history and languages.
The curriculum could be organised into blocks devoted to particular periods, or by country or theme. A student might study the music of Monteverdi alongside the artists of the Italian Renaissance and the architecture of Venice, Florence and Rome. Or they might examine Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris’s urban landscape, the Impressionists and the works of Baudelaire and Hugo. Field trips would bring it all to life.
In addition to full degrees, there would be opportunities to dip in and out; mature students, with their wealth of life experience, would be warmly welcomed. There would be thriving extra-curricular activities: a choir and orchestra, art classes, perhaps some creative writing. Everybody who worked there would be committed to the study of the arts and humanities on their own terms, as a source of intellectual enrichment.
The principal would be a historian, not a technocrat; lecturers would not be bogged down in bureaucratic processes, “learning outcomes” and robotic talk of “stakeholders”. The teaching would be rigorous and the debate would be lively.
What about employability, you might say? There is a good case for arguing that employers have greater respect for the “hard” academic skills that have historically been taught at serious universities than they do for the content-lite courses in nebulous, pseudo-vocational disciplines that are so widespread today. Nevertheless, let’s work in some imaginative and meaningful work experience placements for those who want them, whether in arts organisations, auction houses and archives or with law firms and in journalism.
Studying the political factors that shaped art works would be encouraged, but only within their appropriate historical context. Across the university sector, the study of the humanities has been drastically reinvented in recent years. Politics are ubiquitous, the American critical social justice bandwagon rolls on and the focus of many degree courses is moving sharply towards the popular culture of the present day, in the name of “relevance” and discarding “the canon”.
Supposedly this is what students want, but admissions figures appear to tell a different story. This suggestion will outrage some academics, but if a university really is a place of intellectual enquiry then we must allow for the possibility of doing things in ways that depart from current fashion. Surely there is a place in the market for an institution — just one — which leaves “intersectionality” to others and asks different questions. There is a strong case for arguing that the arts, treated as a serious field of historical enquiry, in a way that is free from both ideology and bureaucracy, need their own home.
It simply couldn’t be done, many will say. But something like this has been done, and not only in America, where liberal arts courses and “great books” programmes have long flourished. The Courtauld and Warburg Institutes offer something similar to what I have in mind but with a narrower focus. I also draw some inspiration here from the Open University as it used to be when I taught there 25 years ago and from my own combined honours degree course at Newcastle (still running today), on which I studied History, Politics, French and Music, eventually majoring in the latter.
Perhaps this made me a Jack of all trades and master of none, but it certainly sharpened my interdisciplinary skills and gave me a broad understanding of how the world worked. I might be writing an essay about the place of music in the Medieval mind one day and about the rise of the French Fifth Republic (in French) the next. I studied the Arab-Israeli conflict and I learnt how to conduct a Beethoven symphony. I could have taken the whole course again, with a different choice of subjects, and still not got bored.
It is undoubtedly true that my vision for a university dedicated to the history of the arts would not have the freedom to flourish in the current, near-broken university sector, where it would become bogged down in red tape. Almost certainly such an enterprise would require private investment, but there are wealthy individuals in this country who invest significant sums of money in the arts, quietly and out of the public gaze. A few would need to club together, true enough, but wouldn’t this be a great legacy to leave to the nation?
Who will step forward and be the new Thomas Holloway, the pills magnate who used his business’s profits for the greater good, establishing a pioneering women’s college (the present-day Royal Holloway, University of London), complete with art gallery and chapel, its buildings modelled with audacious confidence on a French chateau?
Beautiful architecture, institutions devoted purely to intellectual enquiry, cherishing the arts for their own sake — all these things seem beyond our wit in the twenty-first century. But need they be? Really, need they be?
