By Professor Paul Gough
It’s probably not a good time to be using flu symptoms as a metaphor for the grim circumstances that envelops us all. But being the good scholar I aim to be, if I am going to use it then I’d better use the right source. It was, in fact, not an American politician but the Austrian diplomat, Klemens von Metternich, who first coined the snappy phrase “When France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches a cold.” Metternich used the words in a negative sense as he witnessed the seismic changes that wracked Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.
What’s this to do with our current challenges? Well, it’s become something of a truism of UK higher education policy that whatever Australia does, England will do a few years later. Think back to the issue of student fees and loans schemes, or the pilot studies in measuring research impact (remember the RQF anyone?) and more recently, the debate about capped and uncapped student number control. Australia’s experiments in higher education were watched keenly from the UK.
I guarantee that Minister Tehan’s urgent call for more health professionals, engineers and scientists will have been heard with sympathy in Whitehall, even though its offices are now unpeopled and the watercoolers sport a layer of algae. In London it’s clear that the message could gain traction, sharpen in emphasis and double in potency, not unlike the exponential growth in fees soon to be charged in Australia for creative arts, humanities and cultural courses.
Sobering indeed. But will the Brits buy it? Possibly not in the present climate. Despite the Conservative government’s historic claim that the “magic money tree” was exhausted, its leaves depleted, roots impoverished, and acorns squirreled away, the current Tory government has been doling out readies by the billion, running up a huge national debt not witnessed since the Second World War.
To mimic the Australian scheme of selective expansion and lower fees for more “desirable” disciplines, would require a fundamental overhaul of our student loans system to be affordable. In Australia, your graduates pay back their debts more quickly than here in the UK. So the ones whose program costs – and presumably their loans – your government want to double, are the ones in the UK who take longer to pay back and earn less in the out years of their graduate employment. By contrast the fees that Australia wants to reduce are the very ones here that are alleged to prop up the whole system. That said we had a bevy of rather gullible Tory MPs who thought the Australian scheme a tip-top idea.
Thus far, these ideas have not found their way to our shores. Instead we employed one of your less celebrated ex-Prime Ministers as an international trade advisor: the one that ridiculed climate change and talked of turning the boats back. Ideas germinate though, so across the creative arts sector we are hyper-vigilant, ready for anything. Demand for our courses is still high, though slowly fraying at the edges. Last year in 2019, 42,307 students took A level Art & Design; this year 570 fewer did so. But fortunately we’re at the tipping point of a demographic rise in 18-year-olds, so we could see a change for the better.
Photographer: Paul Gough
However, dark clouds loom over horizons near and far. HM Treasury is already expressing concerns that there are “too many creative arts graduates” and the possibility of differential fees lingers in a sub-committee somewhere.
Yet, are we downhearted? No, not quite: our arts, media and design students are proving resourceful and robust; our staff endlessly ingenious in keeping the practice-based learning alive via computer screens and through carefully choreographed face-to-face sessions. I know it’s early days, it’s massively challenging, there’s a media frenzy out there; but my university, a specialist arts institution with outstanding student satisfaction scores and a global reach, is riding the storm. We’ve launched a new Strategy, achieved through widespread engagement with our staff, stakeholders and students, and we’re facing outwards and forwards.
I learned a lot from my six years at RMIT in Melbourne, and a lot from the spirit of colleagues across Australian HE and VE arts education– resilience, adaptability, and sheer bloody-mindedness to make do and make good. That should keep us going through these benighted times: of that I’m absolutely convinced.
Professor Paul Gough is Vice-Chancellor and Principal at Arts University Bournemouth, having moved from a role as Vice-President of RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
A painter, broadcaster and writer, he has exhibited internationally and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. In addition to leading roles in national and international higher education and global research assessment, his research into the imagery of war and peace has been presented to audiences throughout the world. In addition to an exhibiting record, he has published nine books, including monographs on the British painter Stanley Spencer, Paul and John Nash and several comprehensive studies of art from both world wars. He worked in television for ten years and is currently writing his second book about the street artist, Banksy.