Illustration by Mitch Blunt.

A war is being waged within the cloistered world of academia, a war whose repercussions will be felt down through the generations. Long one of Britain’s global success stories, our universities are under attack by an austerity-obsessed government looking to maintain the excellence of our institutions at a fraction of the cost. The dictates of the market economy have been unleashed upon our once-sacred seats of learning, and academics wear the haunted looks of the terminally battle-scarred. With the threat of further cuts to come whichever side wins the general election, and none of the major parties promising to stand in the way of the corporate colonisation of education, the debate has reached an unseemly head, with many academics in open revolt and professional publications full of bilious fulmination.

The corridors of our universities are stalked by soft-footed technocrats who draw down six-figure salaries in exchange for implementing “right-sizing” exercises and “internationalisation programmes”, while harried academics are forced to deal with a wall of bureaucracy that is being constructed, form-by-form, between them and their students. Research is centrally mandated and programmatic; time – once the academic’s greatest resource – must be accounted for in meticulous detail; and everywhere, and at all times, the onus is on academics to “monetise” their activities, to establish financial values for their “outputs,” and to justify their existence according to the remorseless and nightmarish logic of the markets.

Since Margaret Thatcher’s education reforms in the red-braced 1980s, when performance management was the watchword and universities suffered more from cuts than any other public service, academics have been living on borrowed time. It is rarely remarked that Thatcher – the only prime minister to have been secretary of state for education – made the universities the exception in her neo-liberal drive to decentralise. She asserted more government power over the universities in an attempt to strong-arm them into complying with her vision of an entrepreneurial, vocational education system. And yet, as Roy Jenkins, then chancellor of Oxford university, noted at the time, “It is difficult to think of any field of human endeavour in which central regulation is a greater enemy of excellence than that of the organisation of the teaching and research of universities.”

Currently fixed in the crosshairs are the disciplines of the humanities – arts, languages and social sciences – which have suffered swingeing funding cuts and been ignored by a government bent on promoting the modish, revenue-generating Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) subjects. The liberal education which seeks to provide students with more than mere professional qualifications appears to be dying a slow and painful death, overseen by a whole cadre of what cultural anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”: bureaucrats hired to manage the transformation of universities from centres of learning to profit centres. As one academic put it to me: “Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.” The humanities, whose products are necessarily less tangible and effable than their science and engineering peers (and less readily yoked to the needs of the corporate world) have been an easy target for this sprawling new management class.

The coalition government’s education policies, led by Michael Gove and David Willetts, continued Thatcher’s market-driven reforms, cutting all direct funding to the humanities, creating the cumbersome research excellence framework (Ref), which seeks to audit the academics’ research “outputs”, and overseeing a dramatic increase in the number of staff on short-term contracts. The coalition also put in place the recommendations of the Browne review, the manifesto of philistinism commissioned by the Labour party to map the future of higher education funding in the UK. Written by the former chief executive of BP, it was originally offered as a sop to those who opposed the imposition of £3,000 student fees in 2004. In fact, it marked the final step in the marketisation of our universities, with academics as middle management, pulled apart by the competing demands of their non-academic overlords and the newly powerful “consumers” of their “product” – the students.

A character in David Lodge’s Nice Work, set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s reforms, comments on “the extraordinary meekness with which the academic establishment has accepted the cuts”. That cannot be said this time around.

Those who read the letters pages of Times Higher Education have long been aware of the tribulations endured by humanities academics, watching horror-stricken as their disciplines are eroded and cut. More recently, the discussion has burst out of academia, led by the redoubtable figure of Dame Marina Warner. Warner has found herself, rather reluctantly, at the forefront of the struggle to defend the humanities against assaults from within and without the universities. She retired from her position as a professor in the department of literature, film and theatre studies at the University of Essex in 2014, setting out the reasons for her departure in a lucid, angry philippic in the London Review of Books. She ended the article by comparing her treatment at the hands of the managerial technocrats at Essex with life under Chinese totalitarianism, “where enforcers rush to carry out the latest orders from their chiefs in an ecstasy of obedience to ideological principles which they do not seem to have examined, let alone discussed with the people they order to follow them, whom they cashier when they won’t knuckle under.”

Dame Marina Warner, the former University of Essex professor and historian, has written angrily of the transformation of British universities. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rex

I spoke to Warner on the telephone on a balmy post-eclipse Norwich morning, sitting on a bench outside the cathedral. I felt the irony of the situation – I was there to read at the International Literature Showcase, a star-studded event organised by the government-funded Writers’ Centre Norwich. It was hard to feel too desperate about the state of our creative culture as we listened to Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson and Helen Macdonald in this Unesco City of Literature. The University of East Anglia (UEA) was a short bus ride away, still churning out an impressive array of authors from its renowned school of creative writing. Warner also had reason to be peppy. She had just walked away with one of the richest literary awards in existence, the £385,000 Holberg prize.

Earlier this month, Warner wrote another, longer, LRB article about what she called “the disfiguring of higher education”, which was also delivered as a lecture at the British Museum. “You know it’s not really my subject,” she told me with a laugh, “but I was forced into it by this tremendous sense of injustice, not only to myself but to many others. I also have this very deep sense that the future is being robbed.”

Warner believes strongly that there is a category error taking place in the government’s vision of the humanities as impracticable and unprofitable, elitist and outdated. “Investing in the humanities should be seen as infrastructure,” she told me. “It’s not a balance-sheet equation where if you put in this much you’ll get that much out, but if you’re teaching people to be articulate, if you’re teaching people about the traditions of the country and the traditions of their culture – which can be very broad, this doesn’t mean little England at all – that’s how people connect. If we diminish that, we will all be the poorer and I really do think you can put that in value terms.”

Warner’s experience at Essex – once a model of radically enlightened educational thought – was a long, losing battle against the technocratic tyranny of the new managers, in particular the vice-chancellor Anthony Forster (an ex-military man of whom Warner wrote “the joke on campus is that Forster was too tough for the army. His talents needed a boot camp: a university was just the thing.”) At the centre of her campaign is an appeal to government to put power back in the hands of academics. “Academics used to have a great deal of autonomy, now quite the opposite. And if you look at some of the most successful companies in the world, Microsoft or Google for instance, they have very flat structures. And that’s much more successful. People feel – jargon word – empowered, they feel in charge of their destinies in ways that makes them productive and expressive and inspired, if they’re not being leant on and breathed down on all the time by people in authority who often do not have legitimate title to that authority, people who are just brought in and appointed without any proper screening structures.” Warner contends that the management structures being imposed on universities are nothing like one would see in a real business in the current economic environment, but one from 30 years ago. “It’s so 80s. It’s Reaganomics.”

Perhaps the most shocking paragraph of Warner’s most recent article deals with the salaries being earned by the MBA-toting administrators who have been brought in to “rationalise” our universities. She points out that the average wage of a vice-chancellor exceeds £260,000, while some earn more than £400,000. A recent study by Brighton University found that wage increases among vice-chancellors ran at four times those of academic staff between 1998-2009 and that 20 institutions had more than 100 employees on £100,000 a year or more. I asked Warner what she felt when she saw these figures. “I felt I was drowning in shit, really. I couldn’t believe it. To me it’s really appalling. Ethically, universities should not have these toppling hierarchies, they should be examples of good conduct in society and I think these income differentials are unjust. They also make for a world that we dislike, where we have gated communities of the very rich and cheap labour, often imported and exploited, doing all the jobs that we don’t want to do.”

Warner, now teaching part-time at Birkbeck College in London, retains a fondness for Essex. She even suggested, given a change in the regime, she might return to work with her friend and head of department, Philip Terry (“He defended me to the end,” she said of Terry.) With the Holberg prize money burning a hole in her pocket, she has big plans. “I learned a lot in the Essex department,” she told me. “I just don’t want to do anything for the university under the current regime. If something happens – and I hope it will – I’d like to do something there about cultural memory and performed poetry. Phil is a dear friend of mine and now I’ve won this prize, I’d love to do something with him, with that money.” Alternatively, she could pay the vice-chancellor’s salary for a year or so.

I’ve met David Willetts, and read The Pinch, his thoughtful and salutary consideration of the economic stranglehold enjoyed by baby boomers. Willetts was minister for universities and science from the 2010 election until July 2014. Even his opponents within academia admit that he is an informed speaker on higher education theory, far superior to the man who replaced him, the current minister for universities, science and cities, Greg Clark. And yet it was Willetts who presided over the government’s full-frontal attack on the humanities, Willetts who appeared to usher in this new age of philistinism. It felt like there was something I was missing, and so I arranged to meet Nick Hillman, Willetts’s former chief of staff and special adviser on educational reform, one of the architects of the coalition’s higher education policy.

Nick Hillman, who advised on education reform under David Willetts. Photograph: Public domain

Hillman was waiting for me in the morning room of the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall, his swanky London headquarters now he has left government to run an Oxford-based thinktank, the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi). Hillman is puckish and youthful, with a cheeky mop of ginger hair, a blue shirt open at the collar. We ordered a coffee and I asked him about Marina Warner and the widely held perception that this government had set out to destroy all that was great in our universities. Hillman confessed that he hadn’t read Warner’s latest LRB article, but he could guess the content. “There are these whinges about corporatism in HE and the erosion of the concept of an ‘academy’” – here his voice rose into little quote marks – “that should be run by academics. I wonder if academics have been whingeing about this since the dawn of time. Universities are different to any other institution. They’re not profit-making companies nor are they part of the public sector. But they’re not completely insulated from outside forces and the world is just a different place to be. Any multimillion-pound business – and some of the universities have a turnover of close to a billion pounds – is going to be run differently in 2015 to how it was run in 1950. They get a hell of a lot of money from the public and there should be an accountability here. I’ve pressed universities to sit their students down and say ‘This is where your £9,000 fees are going.’”

Hillman believes that there’s something disingenuous about the humanities’ complaints. “What the humanities are saying is that for the first time ever, history, for instance, is getting no money directly from the taxpayer. And they say that this means that the government doesn’t care about the humanities, which is not true. Because those £9,000 fees that are being racked up, many of them won’t end up being paid [because the students won’t earn more than the threshold where repayment kicks in] and so the burden will fall on the taxpayer in the end. The idea that there’s no public subsidy for historians is untrue, it’s just not direct any more.”

Throughout our conversation, Hillman presented humanities academics as mulish luddites, being dragged by government into the 21st century. “There is a generational thing amongst academics. If you’re 50 and your academic career predates the precursors to the Ref, you’ll think that all of this is just a pain in the arse and a whole lot of paperwork. Younger researchers tend to take it more in their stride.” He did accept that there was a problem with the levels of administrative staff in some universities. “You can look at the data for how many managers versus academic staff there are and by some measures we have more than anywhere else. Academics are stable and managers are rising.” He also conceded that the increasing use of short-term contracts for academic staff was a problem. “There has been much bigger casualisation of the labour force, which academics are right to be worried about. But taking on a permanent member of staff is a really costly proposition with pension schemes etc.”

There was also the suggestion that universities had fared rather better than other publicly funded institutions in bearing the burden of austerity so far, but that darker days may lie ahead. “You can no longer get more university funding and say ‘Listen old chap, things are running a bit short here, give me some more money.’ And the reasons you can’t do this are a) austerity – there’s no more money around, and b) not one of the political parties is promising to protect the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [BIS] in which HE lands. So the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies] say the cuts to BIS after the next election could be up to 40%. Now where are those cuts going to come from? BIS only funds three things: science and research, which no one wants to cut; HE; and apprenticeships, which are protected. So the cuts will hit HE.”

Hillman ends by suggesting that humanities are not alone in their sorrows. “Every week James Dyson’s lamenting the fact that we don’t produce enough engineers from our universities. Stem also feels hard done by – there’s this sense among academics of ‘Woe is us…’”

In November last year, Nicky Morgan, the secretary of state for education, speaking to group of teenagers, exploded the long-held belief “that if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, then the arts and humanities were what you chose because they were useful for all kinds of jobs. Of course,” she went on, “we know now that couldn’t be further from the truth – that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the Stem subjects.” The speech prompted a furious backlash, the most eloquent of them a heartfelt opinion piece in THE in support of the humanities. It was written by Sarah Churchwell, one of our most prominent public intellectuals and professor of American literature at UEA.

I met Churchwell – rather under the weather with a cold – for lunch in Soho and, hearing that I’d come straight from Nick Hillman, she launched into an indignant tirade. “Labour instituted this policy, the Tories implemented it and the Lib Dems have taken the blame. It would be funny if it weren’t so dreadful. There’s nothing to choose between them. They’re all fixated on the marketisation of education and the university system.”

I, well-schooled by Hillman, quoted him back at her. Aren’t humanities academics stuck in the 1950s, desperate for an age of long lunches and even longer holidays? “The stereotypical academic world of the 1950s, of dilettantes lounging around with pipe and slippers sipping sherry, disappeared decades ago,” Churchwell said. “The idea of the easy life of the academic is a straw man, a caricature of academics when they say ‘You can’t just swan around like it’s 1950 any more.’ There’s been no swanning for some time, believe me. What initially happened under Thatcher was the forced professionalisation of academia and actually I don’t disagree with the imperative of professionalisation. But this notion that there are still academics at universities who can say ‘I’m going to spend 50 years at this institution, I’m never going to write a book, I’ll never publish, I’ll just sit around reading and chatting with students’, is absurd. Yes there are still a few people who chronically underperform and whom it is difficult to remove. There’s a bit of dead wood. Now I don’t know much about government-funded organisations outside of HE, but I’d venture to speculate that this may be true in other bureaucratic regimes. And the vast majority of people in UK HE are working extremely hard, all the time.”

Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature at UEA, who has written in defence of the humanities in Times Higher Education. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex

We discussed Warner’s article (“Marina is a very good thing”) and the sense that the reforms begun under Thatcher had been taken to their logical conclusion under Gove and Willetts. “What has changed radically in the last 10 years is that they’re trying to turn everything into a for-profit business,” said Churchwell. “And that’s bullshit. Universities are not for profit. We are charitable institutions. What they’re now doing is saying to academics: ‘You have to be the fundraisers, the managers, the producers, you have to generate the incomes that will keep your institutions afloat.’ Is that really what society wants – for everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity? Maybe I’m just out of step with the world, but what some of us are fighting for is the principle that not everything that is valuable can or should be monetised. That universities are one of the custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration. That education is not a commodity, it’s a qualitative transformation. You can’t sell it. You can’t simply transfer it.”

Churchwell went on to talk about what would be lost if we didn’t stand in the way of this systematic destruction of the traditional liberal education. “Virtually every cabinet minister has a humanities degree,” she said. “And I think there’s something quite sinister about it: they get their leadership positions after studying the humanities and then they tell us that what we need is a nation of technocrats. If you look at the vast majority of world leaders, you’ll find that they’ve got humanities degrees. Angela Merkel is the only one who’s a scientist. The ruling elite have humanities degrees because they can do critical thinking, they can test premises, they can think outside the box, they can problem-solve, they can communicate, they don’t have linear, one-solution models with which to approach the world. You won’t solve the problems of religious fundamentalism with a science experiment.”

Churchwell was rehearsing the old “two-cultures model” famously – and bitterly – fought over half a century ago between Cambridge colleagues CP Snow and FR Leavis. “There is a divide-and-conquer strategy, whether it’s conscious or not, in which politicians are setting the humanities and the sciences against each other, competing for funding, competing for esteem, when in fact we’re on the same side. They are creating a zero-sum game where they say ‘resources are limited and we’re only going to give them to the sciences’. My answer to that is look at China. They’ve spent the past 30 years investing almost exclusively in the sciences and now they’re having to send their students over here to learn how to be creative, actually making announcements that as a nation they’ve lost creativity.”

This reference to China reminded me of Marina Warner’s comparison of life at Essex to Chinese totalitarianism. There has been much talk both in America and the UK of attempts to mirror China’s approach to education – rigorous, regular testing and centralised management. When I got home I telephoned Dr Yong Zhao, an expert on the Chinese education system. I’d first contacted Yong after reading his groundbreaking book on Chinese creativity, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon, and we’d stayed in touch since. In the book, Yong, who is a professor and director of the institute for global education at the University of Oregon, notes with bemusement international admiration for China’s schools and universities. “The Chinese national educational system,” he writes, “has won high praise as an efficient system with national standards, a national curriculum, a high-stakes test (the college entrance exam), and a clearly defined set of gateways to mark students’ transitions from one stage to another. Admirers note that every Chinese student has a clear and focused goal to pursue; Chinese teachers and parents know exactly what to do to help their students; and the government knows exactly which schools are doing well. What those admirers ignore is the fact that such an education system, while being an effective machine to instil what the government wants students to learn, is incapable of supporting individual strengths, cultivating a diversity of talents, and fostering the capacity and confidence to create. China, a perfect incarnation of authoritarian education, has produced the world’s best test scores at the cost of diverse, creative, and innovative talents.”

The Chinese educational system has been criticised for its focus on science and failure to produce fully rounded individuals. Photograph: REUTERS

Yong and I had spoken repeatedly about this “creativity gap” – the sense that China has been unable to indoctrinate lateral thought or innovation in its students and that they were forced to come in their hundreds of thousands to the UK or the US to learn “outside-the-box” creativity. I told Yong of my own experience as a PhD student at University College London in the early years of this decade, when the vague sense of alienation that comes with being a mature postgrad among wide-eyed undergraduates was heightened by the dizzying number of those on campus chatting away in Mandarin. Now we spoke about the humanities, and how Britain was seeking to repress exactly the elements of its education system that China most envied.

“Liberal arts degrees have not been traditionally valued in China,” he told me. “People have generally placed more value on vocational/professional degrees, which is quite understandable because of the utilitarian view of education. Education – or passing exams – exists in order to get a good job. However, there is an increasing interest in liberal arts there as the government and people have begun to recognise their value in a more balanced education. One of the key problems in China is that children are not developed in a well-rounded way. Their educations don’t contain enough humanities, enough arts. There just isn’t that traditional liberal arts idea of education bringing you social welfare and emotional development. And we can see evidence of this in the lack of Chinese creativity in all domains.” Only 10% of Chinese college graduates are deemed employable by multinational businesses, according to research cited by Yong in his book. The main complaint? They are too regimented, predictable and lack the creative spark.

I’ve interviewed a dozen humanities academics for this piece. The majority were downcast, pessimistic, reeling off vivid administrative nightmares and harking back to Edenic earlier academic careers, when they’d been immersed in their research and enthused by their students. Few of them would let me quote them by name, fearing the faceless technocracy that had them under constant surveillance, the gagging orders in their employment contracts. It’s clear that the situation for many academics in non-Stem subjects has become untenable, the exigencies of working within the new, market-oriented university system stripping so much of what was good and useful from the academic life.

In her book The Value of the Humanities, Helen Small, author and professor of English literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, traces the history of the science/humanities divide within the universities, demonstrating a critical genealogy that wends from Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley through Leavis and Snow to present a clear-sighted vision of the current state of the humanities in this country. I spoke to Small – who taught me at Oxford many years ago – about her book, which is far from the jeremiad I’d heard from Warner and Churchwell. “What I wanted to do,” she said, “was talk about the different genres that we rely upon in our advocacy for the humanities, many of which have their place in 19th-century thinking about the university and education, when they were putting together that idea that many of us feel is now in peril – that idea of higher education as a public good.”

I told Small that I found her book, for all its academic detachment, extremely powerful in its presentation of the central role that the humanities have to play in our cultural, social and political lives. Wasn’t she tempted to channel the anger of Marina Warner or fellow academic Thomas Docherty? “I understand their rage,” she told me, “but the kind of calmer, cooler defence that I’m trying to promote has a place in the debate. My sense is that anger and defensiveness does not play very well with politicians, and that’s partly the audience I wanted to address – Whitehall mandarins as well as academics. Because if you write only for academics, you’re preaching to the converted. It risks becoming special pleading very quickly if you keep telling academics how beleaguered they are. We have privileges, after all, we have a degree of employment protection that others in the arts would kill for. The politician who comes to academia from dealing with other areas that receive public funding that have received much harder hits than we have… We have to be very careful how we play this one, or we’ll find ourselves the targets of much harsher cuts in the next budget.”

I’m reminded of a line in Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For? (2012), where he says “compelling and often devastating criticisms appear to have had little or no effect on policymaking. The arguments have not been answered; they have merely been ignored. Rather than blaming academics for not speaking out sufficiently strongly, the conclusion… is that those who make policy are just not listening.” And this, in the end, may be the sad truth of the situation. I spoke to Jonothan Neelands of the Warwick Commission, a multidisciplinary report on the future of culture in Britain. He told me that, soon after winning his Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen was invited to Downing Street. He asked Nicholas Serota of the Tate what he should speak to Cameron about. The answer: education, education, education. McQueen duly spent his 10 minutes with the prime minister talking about the need for a renewed focus on the humanities in schools and universities. At the end, Cameron, distractedly, said: “Oh yes, the arts, you should talk to Sam about that – she’s interested in all that kind of thing.” Despite the Warwick Commission showing that cultural industries contributed some £77bn to the British economy, the government is simply not interested, and the cries of the academics take on a plaintive note as they realise that they are not being heard now, and will probably not be heard in the future.

Alex Preston is the author of In Love and War (Faber)