As leaders at UK universities wrestle with our financial positions, with ever-increasing restraints on a healthy bottom line, we often feel we are forced to look beyond our academic ideal of a commitment to all subject areas, making cutbacks in places we think it will be least painful.
As a pro vice chancellor of a faculty comprised entirely of SHAPE subjects, Arts, Design, Humanities, and Social Sciences, I remain deeply committed to these disciplines, knowing, though, that external forces continue to threaten their survival. Survival depends on many things, but perhaps, more than anything, it depends on academics willingly and happily showing off what we think might cheapen our quest for knowledge: that our disciplines not just generate and contribute to social and public good, but they also contribute to the employability profile of our graduates and to the socio-economic health of our communities, regions, and beyond.
Society is made of humans
For too long, SHAPE subjects have been downplayed to the seemingly more generative force of STEM. This is a problematic binary that has meant the sector (and beyond) are forced into making false economies. For instance, a refrain running throughout a recent British Academy report is that SHAPE impact demonstrates a research commitment to the higher good, which drives public knowledge leading to behavioural changes that benefit people’s local communities, regions, as well as the national and global landscape. While the report does not make any recommendation to preserve SHAPE education, it comes only a year after the House of Lord’s report that the creative industries are vital to the local, regional, and national socio-economic good and that we must continue to educate students in order to fulfil this promise; something quite similar to this HEPI report on Humanities or this analysis by the English Association.
All of these upend the dominant narrative that STEM subjects are better for society and graduate employability. Both the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) continue to insist upon interdisciplinary research and the complementarity between SHAPE and STEM because, as many of us know, the challenges facing humanity will not be resolved by either on their own.
Rather tellingly, one of the STEM Research Excellence Framework (REF) panel members interviewed for the British Academy report said that engineering, medicine, and technology are useful and necessary; yet, they “are the handmaidens to society,” in which “society…is made out of individual humans. And if you don’t understand individual humans, you don’t understand what makes an effective culture. There is nothing more important to the survival of society than social science and the humanities.”
The UK needs a holistic approach to university education, one that enables our academics to do problem-solving research and one that prepares our students to be creative, critically-minded problem-solvers. Those who believe in SHAPE need to do a better job of communicating the utility of these disciplines. When I think of how to convince future students—and their family and friends—to follow their passion into humanities or arts or social sciences, I think of my own parents, who told me to save Art History for my mid-life crisis and that, instead, I needed to focus on a degree that would pay (imagine the conversation when I told them I was pursuing academia). Years later I am still having that conversation, only this time I am better armed. I know from the reports discussed above to conversations with entrepreneurs and business leaders that they not just want our graduates, they need them. They often articulate a picture similar to the REF STEM panel member and their desire to hire SHAPE graduates who are taught to be critical, creative, articulate and empathetic thinkers.
Interdisciplinary solutions to interdisciplinary challenges
We—academics, administrators, and marketing/recruitment staff—have to find a way of making all of our programmes attractive to students, thereby future-proofing vulnerable programmes against drops in recruitment that do point to decisions made in reference to the financial bottom line. At Northumbria, we aim to deliver outstanding, impactful research alongside an experiential, impactful education with our vitally important partners in Newcastle-Gateshead and the wider region, from the aforementioned entrepreneurs to the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. The questions we pose to our students foster their ability to think holistically about a variety of challenges.
Through these relationships with partners, which are predominantly focused on social transformation, we are demonstrating the importance of SHAPE subjects to our culture and communities, nationally and globally. We also need our partners in government, the creative and cultural industries, and at SME and larger corporations to amplify the importance of our often co-created research, the impact it generates, and the necessity and value of the education we deliver to our students, who go on to be the very innovators UK society says it is seeking.
Thus, as the HE sector wrestles with the hard choices foisted on it by this financial black swan, I hope we do not always make what has been posed as the easy choice, where some changes might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is no easy answer to the financial predicament many UK universities find themselves in, but we do know that SHAPE is as important as STEM to research, education, and employability and seeing these as dichotomous and therefore as in tension is reductive. Indeed, valuing all subjects for the insights and learning they provide is the way forward, seeking interdisciplinary answers to interdisciplinary challenges.
