ARE THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES RELEVANT TO SOCIETY?

An audio podcast from the Warwick Higher Education Summit

Four speakers gathered at the recent Warwick Higher Education Summit to discuss the question of whether the arts and humanities are relevant to society. What is the value of the arts and humanities today? Is it wrong to try and quantify it in monetary terms?

Listen to the podcast:

Professor Shearer West

“I want to start by being a little bit potentially controversial... there is a lot of apocalyptic language surrounding the arts and humanities at the moment – words like 'doom', 'despair' and 'crisis' are frequently used. I think if you look dispassionately at this, ever since the Industrial Revolution there’s been this kind of talk.

We are in a turbulent state in Higher Education at the moment but I would say we’re not in a crisis and it isn’t a disaster. I think in the arts and humanities are more relevant than they have ever been.

If we ask the question ‘What does the UK actually need right now’ I think we could answer it in a number of ways. We’re going through enormous change in the global context but also in the UK. We need a capacity for innovation in a time of change. We need to have nuanced engagement with civic values with issues like trust, responsibility and civility, we need politicians, policy makers, the military and police to have a global perspective and understand cultural diversity. And we need to engage with a changing digital world and the new ways that knowledge is collected, transmitted and used.

All challenges involve the complexity of human beings and I think we need to recognise that. We have skills in the arts and humanities of questioning, problematising and challenging that are very necessary in a functioning democracy. The arts and humanities are involved in preserving, interpreting and refreshing cultural artefacts that otherwise would be lost, and also [they] foster lateral and divergent thinking. This is necessary for any kind of innovation.

I think these are things that we need and I think we can supply them... We should not be defensive; we have nothing to be defensive about. I don’t think we should demonise sciences; the world of knowledge is a big world and I don’t think we should pit ourselves against sciences, which is often what we do. I think it’s important to get out of the ivory tower and take our knowledge, skills and thoughts out to the world.”

Professor Morag Shiach

“Are the arts and humanities relevant to society? It seems, when you put it like that, it's a disarmingly easy question to answer, because how can an informed and complex understanding of the human potential for creativity, or of the fundamental structures of society, or of the interactions between the human and natural world - all those things within the domain of the arts and humanities - not be relevant to society, unless we are prepared to accept the definition of society that is stripped down to a kind of instrumentality and inhumanity that would make it more or less empty?

I take Shearer’s point that we shouldn’t be defensive and we need to see this, I think, as a trigger for slightly more substantial and reflective thought, which I would also suggest needs to be located historically; so in general terms I would say, starting from the idea that, yes, there is a sense in which it’s obvious that the arts and humanities are relevant to society, I do think there are substantial issues that remain for us to debate.

The first of these is basically political – having said there are forms of activity and forms of understanding that are central to what we might think of as our understanding of the social, we do then generate a question as to who should meet the costs of generating this kind of informed and complex understanding, and for whom?

The second set of questions is broadly more historical. I do think we need to examine the precise circumstances under which the large and complex organisations that we call universities have developed because part of this debate is about the future structure and funding of universities; and just remembering that these are historical, complex institutions that have developed in certain ways, and could have developed in other ways, and might transform and change over the next 50 years.

Alongside that we might also want to think historically about how universities have contributed to the development of modern states and economies, but perhaps even more importantly, how they have not.”

Dr Paul Thompson

“Of course the arts and humanities are relevant to society. The creative act, the study of our languages, the study of our past, the study of our works of imagination are all so intrinsic to human nature that they have to be essentially both personal and societal acts of enquiry. I think it’s almost better to put the question the other way around and say 'How can the arts and humanities not be relevant to society?'

It’s when artists work together with scientists that the most interesting things in life happen.

We are now living in a decade that is driven by metrics and measures, it’s a highly polarised academic environment in which we work and there has been an assumption that the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects have somehow been deemed to be superior or of greater national economic interest than the arts and the humanities.

I think that is a very crude division which ignores the interrelationship between such subjects as art and design with such STEM subjects as technology and engineering... it’s when artists work together with scientists that the most interesting things in life happen. An example is the artist-in-residence programme at CERN showing the fascinating relationship between theoretical physics and visual artists.

The big question of course is... are the arts and humanities relevant to the government’s current growth agenda, and I believe that they are, because it is the arts and humanities graduates who overwhelmingly proceed on to the creative industries of advertising, film, theatre, heritage, the cultural sector, the commercial art world and the design and digital economies.

Britain’s creative industries currently comprise six per cent of our GDP. Now that’s only three percentage points behind financial services. Think of the prioritisation successive governments have made of that sector in the past 30 years. If we are to feed our creative industries with the graduate level employees they need then the arts and humanities should be elevated to subjects of national strategic importance.”

Professor Thomas Docherty

“There are various ways in which we can defend the arts and humanities, especially in the present climate... one of the things that I think is often expected of people like me in this position is to talk about the civilising power of the arts and humanities... that’s a rather weak argument, it’s an argument that provokes the obvious question: 'How is it that bad people like poetry? How is it that bad people make good music?'

The second kind of argument, though, is one... about the economic value of the arts and humanities. Many people have made these kinds of arguments in recent times to deal with the present climate in which the arts and humanities are under special attack from certain powers within our social formation. But in order to work out how it is that you actually make sense of what the arts and humanities are contributing to this society you have to do things like understand the statistical number of visits that people make to certain galleries, the psychology that inspires them, having visited that gallery, to go and buy something in a shop, and so on, and all of these things require things from the other so-called faculties, including mathematics.

In all of this the arts are placed against the STEM subjects but they ought not to be... these are not opposed to the sciences and I do not wish to make an argument for the arts against science and technology.

But where I really want to disagree with this statement is in the formulation of it: 'Are the arts and humanities relevant to society?' No, because that presupposes there’s something called society prior to the arts and humanities... The arts and humanities are at the centre of society. So are the sciences and so are the universities. But the big trick is to... compartmentalise the universities away from society, and to ask us to think about how we - academics, students, teachers, learners - deal with the political problems that the politicians have given up on... it’s down to folk like you, me and others to deal with it.”

Shearer West is Professor of Art History, Head of the School of Historical Studies and now Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University. She is the author of numerous books and articles on 18th- and 19th-century British, Italian and German art. Prior to her appointment as Head of Oxford University's Humanities Division, she represented the UK arts and humanities community at the Arts and Humanities Research Council as a panel chair and as a member of the 2008 RAE panel.

Paul Thompson is the Rector and Vice-Provost of the Royal College of Art. Prior to 2009, Paul was Director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York (from 2001–9), and Director of the Design Museum in London (from 1993–2001). He is a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is on the Ashmolean Museum Board of Visitors. He is also a member of the Programme Advisory Committee of the Wellcome Collection, Wellcome Trust.

Morag Schiach is Vice-Principal and Executive Dean, Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University. She studied Drama and Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, before taking a masters in Montreal, and completing her doctorate at Cambridge where she was supervised by Raymond Williams. At Queen Mary University, Morag's research interest is cultural history of the late-19th and early-20th century. As Vice-Principal for Humanities and Social Sciences, she has strategic responsibility for all schools in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and also sits on various national policy groups.

Thomas Docherty studied in Glasgow, Paris and Oxford. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick where his research interests include the philosophy of literary criticism; critical theory; and cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures. His latest publication is For the University (Bloomsbury, 2011).

By Penelope Jenkins