[Discussion] Cultural Studies and the Battle for British Higher Education

[Paksoy, Hb]

Chronicle of Higher Education

Monday, July 15, 2002

 

  Cultural Studies and the Battle for British Higher Education
By PAUL GILROY

This month the University of Birmingham announced that it was closing, or
restructuring, three of its departments. Given the chaotic state of higher
education in Britain, that was not surprising. But the closures have
attracted comment and opposition, particularly because one of the units was
the original program brave enough to use the term "cultural studies" to
describe its innovations in the interdisciplinary study of media and
culture. The program had played a major role in transforming scholarship
around the world, and the Birmingham brand name has remained strong, despite
increasingly virulent attacks on the academic probity and intellectual value
of studying the media and popular culture. 

The decision to close the department of sociology and cultural studies
indeed reflects the sorry state of education in Britain; it is also,
however, a sign of the strength of cultural studies both there and abroad. 

Founded in 1964 as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
Birmingham's program was the birthplace of distinctive and pioneering
interdisciplinary approaches to the study of class, culture, and
communication. It built upon the intellectual strengths of the New Left --
particularly in the field of history -- and drew powerful critical energy
from the social and political insurgency of the late 1960s. At first meant
exclusively for graduate students, it was started by Richard Hoggart, whose
pathbreaking 1957 study, The Uses of Literacy, focused on the social impact
on post-World War II everyday life of nascent consumer culture, restructured
gender relations, and the changing shape of households. As those inquiries
became more systematic, an emerging field grew between the porous boundaries
of the humanities and the fortified walls of the social sciences. 

This cultural studies was committed to, but not defined by, ethnographic
methods. It was engaged with, but not dominated by, structuralist and
poststructuralist approaches to language and meaning. Its innovative,
critical analyses -- particularly of deviance, youth, and broadcasting --
helped to emancipate a desperate intellectual generation from a host of
moribund and stultifying paradigms. 

Under the stewardship of Hoggart's Jamaican-born successor, Stuart Hall, the
Birmingham center became known worldwide, its work circulated in a journal,
a blizzard of stenciled working papers, and, eventually, a series of
collectively written books. At its best, such work was not only political,
committed to a nonsectarian leftist agenda, but also grounded in educational
and administrative practices that were usually democratic. Arriving to start
my own graduate work at Birmingham in the 1970s, I found the conventional
university hierarchy between students and teachers to have been deliberately
recast; the privatized monastic rules of research had been enthusiastically
erased by people intent on intellectual discovery rather than an academic
career. 

The original cultural-studies program created a global network of readers
and interlocutors who, no matter how far from Britain, sensed and
appreciated the unusual pedagogic circumstances in which the center's
vibrant studies were being produced. Of course, it helped that the best work
was theoretical without being theoreticist, and that it directed scholarly
attention toward areas hardly taken seriously elsewhere as objects of
sustained academic interest. 

The program was merged with sociology during the 1980s, amid an earlier
phase of restructuring. The new department was required to accommodate
substantial numbers of undergraduate students, altering its orientation
accordingly. Rather than be imprisoned by the center's history, which had
oddly begun to acquire its own mythological value at that time, a new
generation of faculty members struck out into new areas: technology,
citizenship, and the environment. 

Conspiracy theorists may present the Birmingham closure as a matter of
settling scores by colleagues envious of the reputation of its
cultural-studies brand; or it may be seen as belated punishment for
radicalism. Indeed, earlier incarnations of the unit had a history of
conflict with administrators who found its innovations hard to accept and
its political positions unpalatable. However, this month's announcement has
less to do with the specifically political character of cultural studies,
either in the institution or beyond, and everything to do with immediate
pressures on higher education in Britain. 

It is far more accurate -- and indeed, more worrisome -- to understand the
university's actions within the current crisis of British higher education.
The symptoms are everywhere. The same week Birmingham unveiled its decision,
a prime minister who had made "education, education, education" the clarion
call of his incoming administration was discovered to be employing private
tutors to supplement the education his teenage children were receiving at an
elite state school, thereby bolstering their prospects for Oxbridge
admission. The Labor minister for higher education, Margaret Hodge, was
pressing hard for 50 percent of British schoolchildren to go on to higher
education, to produce an intellectual rather than a social elite; at the
same time, many grants have been abolished and levels of student debt are
climbing steeply. 

The country's older, richer, and better-established universities are loudly
pursuing a campaign to finance their operations by substantial increases in
tuition. The newer, poorer, and less-respected ones, which have done most to
widen access and make admissions more diverse, complain that requiring them
to compete for research money to finance many of their operations is unjust
and self-defeating. In the background, damaging disputes about the whole
sector's apparent inability to address issues of institutional racism and
sexism raised by faculty members are rumbling on. Morale among the
professoriate is very low, pay and working conditions continue to decline,
and higher education faces the prospect of huge job loses in the immediate
future. The use of adjuncts and fixed-term contracts is becoming the new
norm. 

Despite this volatile atmosphere, the closing of the Birmingham department
seemed unlikely because it came after the unit had been awarded maximum
marks in the government's assessment of teaching. The sociology program had
also been judged, as seen in data drawn from government tables, to be
providing the best undergraduate training available nationally. According to
the market-based thinking that has recently predominated among university
managers, the department, with student recruitment buoyant and a steady flow
of graduate students and visiting faculty members from all over the world,
was clearly a success. 

But the closures of well-known departments at Birmingham, the University of
Leicester, where the respected Centre for Mass Communication Research is
also being shut, and elsewhere signal the start of a concerted attempt to
reorganize higher education in Britain, in the biggest shake-up since the
transformation of the old polytechnics into new universities a few years
ago. The goal is an institutional pattern in which a small, well-financed
group of research institutions will compete in global markets, while the
task of fulfilling the government's target of greater participation in
higher education will fall upon everybody else. 

Academic tenure was abolished in Britain during Margaret Thatcher's early
years, but there has been reluctance to sack faculty members --
well-organized and enjoying widespread student loyalty -- as part of
institutional reforms. The hand of university managers has now been forced
by the government's reluctance to finance higher education adequately.
Restructuring, with extensive redundancies among faculty members, is
presented as the only alternative. 

The rationale for closing the Birmingham department was provided by its
performance in the government's controversial Research Assessment Exercise.
Disciplinary panels read the work of faculty members in each department. The
resulting data are then used to allocate money. Excellence in teaching does
not bring equivalent financial benefits. The overall quality of research
conducted in the Birmingham department was not felt to have been up to the
level of excellence demanded by university management. To consolidate the
institution's position among the emergent elite, administrators have decided
that none of their departments will in future be ranked at less than level
4, the benchmark of national excellence. Cultural studies was ranked just
below, at 3a, in 2001. 

Apart from the financial inequalities of the evaluation system, other
problems with it exist. There has been, for example, inflation in the number
of institutions considered excellent, partly because some have become adept
at manipulating the procedures of assessment. The political battle is
shifting toward the principle of peer review, until now considered
fundamental. Panelists assigned to evaluate their colleagues' work may not
be willing to discharge that thankless, Herculean task if closures and job
losses are the inevitable result. Whether the unsavory process will pass out
of the hands of faculty members altogether, and into the talons of managers,
remains to be seen. The procedures for the next round of evaluations will be
available in the fall. A review of the entire system is now under way. 

As for cultural studies, far from being a symbol of the exhaustion of a
project that has run its course, the termination of the Birmingham
department might be reinterpreted as another measure of the impact of
cultural studies as a project. It's not just that the "restructuring"
proposed by the university will be easier because it is able to say that
faculty members in many other Birmingham departments and disciplines are all
now "doing cultural studies." Cultural studies, for good or ill, is
everywhere. Its worldwide popularity marks out a deeper realignment in the
constellation of disciplines and scholarly interests. The mythic wellspring
amid Birmingham's red brick is no longer needed. The current closures will
be fought, but what is at stake in that confrontation is the future of
British higher education, not the future of cultural studies. 


Paul Gilroy is a professor of sociology and chair of African-American
studies at Yale University, and a visiting professorial fellow at Goldsmiths
College, University of London. He is the author of, among other books, The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University
Press, 1993). 





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