Know Your Enemy

This essay has been on the boil for a while, so bear with. At Exeter this summer, more than five hundred academics - one in seven - received an email that they were ‘at risk’ of redundancy - so that the university could shed the equivalent of a hundred and fifty jobs, 85% of them in the humanities. These are the disciplines that carried Exeter into the top hundred in the world for Humanities and won it its place in the Russell Group. History, English, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Drama, Anthropology - some of these departments are facing a quarter of their staff gone, some half.

You’d think there was some cosmic catastrophe about to obliterate Exeter University, so swingeing are these cuts. But the union’s financial modelling tells a different story – Exeter is not standing on an economic precipice. In fact, it has a small deficit, anticipated to close by 2029, with £50 million still in reserve. Not a financial situation that requires a single compulsory redundancy. Nor do you need to take the union’s word for it: the university itself has published details of its own finances, including the eye-watering fact that sixteen members of senior management shared £3.8 million between them last year. And over 400 staff received salaries between £100,000 and £250,000 – over 100 more people than the year before. Again, where’s the fire that needs putting out? Simply capping those salaries at £120,000 would put enough cash back into the pot to save Archaeology and History.

So, what’s going on? When the union asked for sight of the figures behind the redundancy plan, their request was ignored, and the matter is now before an arbitration committee. So, we are not, whatever the university’s press release says, watching a wounded institution grapple with the hard sums of survival. We are watching a solvent one choose to dismantle its own estate – and not even doing us the courtesy of pretending the dog ate their homework.

We’ve seen this same assault on the Arts & Humanities play out in institution after institution, to the point where another day, another story slides past the eyes. Goldsmiths, UEA, Nottingham, Sheffield Hallam, Kingston, Kent, now Exeter. All the cuts have disproportionately affected the Arts & Humanities, as management claims they have looked into the crystal ball and divined that there is no longer any public need for courses in Medieval Literature or French Drama of the Nineteenth Century, or Theories of Mind, without considering for a hot minute what such courses were actually teaching the students to do. The uses of literacy to the general population, the way that humanities methods help us to build democracy, think about and deal with the future and so on and on and on.

Because the university isn’t being re-thought by academics and theorists of education and society, or by people with a teaching background and years of practice in the classroom, lecture theatre and workshop. It’s being remodelled by call-us-by-our-initials-only consulting firms – PwC, KPMG, EY, PA Consulting – who pitch up in every city with exactly the same hollowing-out strategy. Quietly, like Sylvia Plath’s mushrooms, these firms got their foot in the door; now they are directly impacting the ways in which universities are being managed and what they stand for. Goldsmiths, Dundee, Edinburgh, Kent – it doesn’t matter – their prescription fizzes with the same empty buzzwords – digitise, partner, right-size. Never mind the money they charge for their services – millions for documents that cannot begin to price the value of what a humanities seminar might do for the mind, for an infinite number of minds, in truth. Of how students learn incrementally, through the efforts of mentors and tutors and their peers in shared spaces of learning, to focus, to be flexible, to develop character, to consider points of view other than their own.

In Australia, the University of Technology Sydney paid KPMG millions to diagnose its path to a hundred-million-dollar saving. Among the outputs was a spreadsheet ranking its academics by research income and publications – scholars sorted like cattle on a stock inventory. When people asked to see it, the university claimed it didn’t exist. It took a further FOI request and a journalist to prove otherwise. UTS now says its own Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research judged the list neither reliable nor required, and argued that earlier denials of its existence may have resulted from poor search parameters or genuine human error. So: millions of dollars for a document your own research chief dismisses as junk, and which you then tell the world you never commissioned. But none of this was ever really about the number. It was about having a number in the first place, so a pre-determined decision could be presented as fact.

Writing some 2,500 or so years ago, in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, he says that to win at battle you need to ‘know the enemy and know yourself’ – and in this particular battle it seems that one of the things we can know about our enemy is that it is not a person, it is instead a story, told by a small number of firms who produce reports with interchangeable titles. New Public Management is sold back to institutions as their own idea, having arrived in every city in the same first-class train carriage, delivered by people who have never marked an essay or delivered a lecture, or taught a seminar or sat with a student at the end of a tough week.

And over the years, this management strategy has been adopted across the sector – resulting in what feels like a zombie university shaped by spreadsheets, constructed inside the towering blocks of glass and steel that have proliferated across the city of London. This is not the future imagined by people who actually want to live in it, but a future designed by people who are exempting themselves from it. We’re being sold the death of Humanities by companies that have no vested interest in the social nor the commons. It’s a deferral of governance to raw capital, which has over the past fifteen years saddled the sector with impossible levels of debt. At this stage, the question is why we still keep deferring to it as if it’s the One True Reality.

If we’re to understand Sun Tzu’s strategy, then knowing ourselves is the other half of this battle. Which means making loud our refusal to take this attack – this act of war – lying down. The message of the spreadsheets is that anything that doesn’t directly make money is irrelevant and dismissible, and that AI, the upstart technology, will invariably replace much of the humanities. But this vision of the future is not the only one – it is far from inevitable and, in fact, as the weird mindfuckery of LLMs extend and deepen their reach into the world, we’re going to need more thinkers and researchers who can consider AI’s effect on human thought and development.

AI increases the value of exactly the human faculties it can’t replicate – judgement, attention, the ability to parse a true sentence. The act of writing. A machine that produces plausible text on demand doesn’t make close reading obsolete; it makes it the most essential, urgent skill in the room. The future is going to need more humanities not less. Our need to adapt to this future is a given, but in the context of our universities, this adaptation needs to be driven by the expert practitioners on the ground who actually do the teaching and thinking, not some overpriced, overpaid apparatchik in an office in the Square Mile.

What we do in humanities education is produce humans who can think for themselves. People who can go into the workforce, into society, and be flexible, thoughtful, critical, useful. Linking degrees directly to employment as a metric for subject success ignores the point of the degree, to give a student expertise, but also a method and approach they can take to other disciplines, other contexts. Humanities offers a space where people learn to pay attention. Yes, Simone Weil again, an argument for education as an ethical process, not a programming one. Once, the common wisdom was that education was good for you, a view which has slowly been eroded by the financialization of everything. If something has no direct financial value attached, then what is the point?

This question was asked by a student of mine – Joe Curran - struggling under the weight of accumulated BA debt. We spent a term together turning this issue over. What was his degree actually for? He answered this in a perceptive, coruscating essay called The Swizz where he detailed the mental effect of being a student mistaken for a consumer.

‘If new knowledge is simply something to be bought – then surely you can put your money to whatever outlet is selling the new kind of (un)learning you prefer? Perhaps some nut-job bro type on TikTok running classes that teach you how to get your body count up or get the body you deserve, or convince you to take the red pill?

You choose. The customer is always right.’

Here he is accounting for real lives that have been subject to the shrinkflation demanded by the spreadsheet. Education as a consumer product. Bigger classes, less contact time, gig-economy teaching contracts and hollowed out departments, fewer choices, rationalised provision, and where do you find yourself at the end of it? Tethered to the psychic leash of late capitalist control: debt.

But there have been some moves to look into these companies. In Australia, a series of scandals around inappropriate use of confidential information has put three of the ‘big four’ into the spotlight. Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino, in a consultation paper, said: ‘In recent years, we have seen behaviour from some large accounting, auditing, and consulting firms in Australia that is not fair and honest.’

The bigger question emerges: who is auditing the companies who audit?

Too vast to audit themselves, their reports are of increasingly questionable quality even as they inveigle themselves into the heart of governance. We’ve witnessed seven prime ministers in a decade, all repeating a fading photocopy of the same ideas. Austerity, debt, bond markets, financialization of our worlds from car parking to catering. Inside this churn, we live with a peculiar feeling of decline, but unable to quite put our fingers on who or what is responsible. The fraying of democracy comes not just from the streets, from social media, and the autocrats in Russia and America, but also from the bureaucrats, the horsemen of the plutocracy, influencing our lives in a kind of trial-by-accounting.

The real thing – the classroom – is actually pretty cheap to produce – a room with a window and some chairs in it, maybe a bit of tech, maybe a blackboard, an agreement between all the participants that there is something worth thinking about together. A syllabus, a structure, a bit of admin to make sure all the classes don’t happen at the same time. I agree with bell hooks that whatever else is happening in the institution, the classroom remains ‘the most radical space of possibility in the academy’.

The good news is that there is a concerted pushback. The union has declared a trade dispute with the university, with over 700 staff voting almost unanimously in favour, and the branch is threatening to ballot for strike action. There has been a lot of attention to the issue, including a petition with over 30,000 signatures. Perhaps because this is a moment where out of the miasma something suddenly clarifies in the public mind about what the sector is up against. The accretive effect of a particular set of ideas, and the people who promulgate them. A small cabal of senior managers who are paid astronomical sums – which could go into teaching and learning – who in turn pay consultants who are unregulated, bloated, overcharging, and often wrong. Zombie acolytes who would run everything by the distorted logic of the stock exchange.

But in the increasing chaos that this neoliberal (mis)management imposes on us, there lie many opportunities. To re-imagine things – to discuss the value of the subjects not from the spreadsheet, but from the future, to see what its citizens might need to understand to be able to deal with the polycrises we know are coming down the road. It might even be an opportunity to take the university outside of the university. Take the classroom back out on the streets, to the pubs and community centres, to what’s left of our commons. But for now, what really needs defending, promoting, and resourcing is what we already know works: knowledge exchanged at the pace of the human, and all that flows from that good.

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