To my English and perhaps wholly mistaken ear, Stefan Collini’s anxieties about attempts to relate the humanities more closely to the societies which support them are reminiscent of those often expressed in this country by battle scarred veterans of the RAE. These letters stand for a `Research Assessment Exercise’ which has now been discontinued but replaced by something very similar with a different acronym. They represented a process whereby the authorities attempted to not only quantify but also evaluate the research that goes on in the largely State-funded British universities. One of the intentions was not far removed from similar developments in the Welfare sector designed to separate the strivers from the shirkers: those who were actively seeking employment from those who were thought to be lounging about at home waiting, in the words of a splendid British music hall song, `till the work comes along’. What one might charitably call the unintended consequences of these have been very effectively dramatized recently in Ken Loach’s film, I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. But the target in the education sector was rather those people in universities who had been living in the fond delusion that their major function was to be dedicated, conscientious teachers and that they did not therefore need to be making `contributions to knowledge’.
The difficulty for those administering the RAE was of course to recognise what constituted a truly worthwhile contribution to knowledge (what the meaning of `good’ is in Stefan Collini’s `the best advertisement for good work in the humanities is good work in the humanities’). But one of their key criteria was relevance to modern society, which was better news for those working on labour relations in post-war Britain than for specialists on the 16th century sonnet. Crude and offensive as all this was, it was hard to deny that the government had a point. Books from the university presses priced so high that no member of the general public could never think of buying them, articles in the academic journals that can expect only a few dozen readers (beyond the colleagues who have been kind enough to referee them), and conferences whose consequences are more social than intellectual…, there is surely a threat of solipsism hanging over many areas of intellectual enquiry, and how many of us who work in them can honestly say that when we have been asked to attend a conference, or contribute to a collection, we have always said `yes’ because we were conscious of having something we urgently wanted to say? The implications of these realities are easier to ignore if you work in Oxbridge, or the Ivy League, because there is in these places so much more private money around and your work on the 16th century sonnet cannot be traced back so easily to the hard-pressed tax payer in the British equivalent of the rust belt. Not that there aren’t more heroic ways of conceiving the situation. In the early 1920s a disillusioned D. H. Lawrence wrote a short piece `On Human Destiny’ in which he recalls that, during the Dark Ages, `in the howling wilderness of slaughter and debacle, tiny monasteries of monks, too obscure and poor to plunder, kept the eternal light of man’s undying effort at consciousness alive’. Hard as it is to envisage high table at an Oxford college as `too poor to plunder’, perhaps every society needs searchers after knowledge and understanding who are insulated against its darker realities?
Speaking of which, the British papers were full a few weeks ago of the President elect and Nigel Farage in a warm embrace. I understand the impulse to turn away from these images even though they perhaps contain rich material for the social psychologist trying to discover how a billionaire property developer, and a former City trader, managed to present themselves as champions of the common man; and it has also to be said that those two figures read the runes much more accurately than a whole panoply of pollsters and social scientists who were often attached to universities. My own institution is only twenty miles from Dover and advertises itself as `the European university’ so that the implications of `Brexit’ are difficult to ignore; and it also operates in a county where support for the `UK Independence party’ Farage once led is at its strongest. Yet I agree that we should not allow ourselves to be intimidated by these essentially `contingent’ factors even if there are others that are more long-term and which ought to disturb those of us involved in literary studies. It is increasingly clear, for example, that many of the young people who come to university no longer belong to a reading culture. Without quite constituting slaughter and debacle, there are intimations of the future here which only those who clap their hands over their ears can fail to hear knocking on the monastery walls.