Richard Drayton richard.drayton@kcl.ac.

uk 25/2/2011 1/2

Richard Drayton
for CRASSH- "The Arts and Humanities- An Endangered Species?"
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1590/
February 25, 2011

at this event fourteen of us were asked to speak for 7 minutes on the current
predicament of the arts and humanities in Britain in the wake of the 100% cut in state
grant funding and its replacement by a new high fee regime. This was my
contribution:

My name is Richard Drayton. I was born in a colony in the Caribbean during what we mistakenly
call 'the end of empire', and am now Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at Kings College
London.

Imperialism is a regime through which external entities derive maximum gain from the labour and
resources within a territory. It is a regime where the local collaborators allow foreign interests to
extract maximum rent from local work and consumption. Where neither government nor economy
are really disciplined by popular democracy, anti-union laws limit worker's ability to prosecute their
interests vs. employers, so wages, pensions, and social protections are suppressed. Taxes on
business are kept as low as possible, so most profits are paid to offshore shareholders, and the costs
of reproducing society -- -- childhood and aging, health and education --- are paid by taxing the
squeezed wages and consumption of labour. Little public support can then go to cultural life, and
learning and the arts are the preserve of the wealthy.

Imperialism, in its 18th, 19th, or early 20th century forms, constructed a global relationship of
centre and periphery, with an opulent and civilised 'mother country' living off its colonies. The
tentacles of the City of London for centuries sucked rent out of the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa,
which as private and public wealth supported the magnificent extension of urban life and civility
and culture in Britain. Around 1948, for example, the Anglo-Iranian Oil company, paid less than £7
million to Iran for its oil, but paid £28 million in British corporate taxes, and divided another £40
millions among its shareholders, much of which also ended up in the coffers of the Treasury. It is
this bounty which made possible great advances in public health, education, and welfare.

Imperialism in its late 20th and 21st century forms, however, has no physical metropolis, no real
place or human society to which wealth harvested from 'onshore' life is directed. The old imperial
powers are now the colonies of a system. Those who know what 'structural adjustment' meant in
Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s -- that is to say a wholesale
attack on the power of governments to engineer social and economic development, will recognise
what is being applied now to Britain in the name of 'austerity'. It is true that more of the blood
sucked from the world economy still trickles down to the citizens of the old imperial powers, but
real power and profit is organised in a symbolic space only virtually anchored in London on the one
hand, and Monaco, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, or Barbados, on the other. A nomadic global pirate
class buys 'onshore' services from prostitutes and politicians, journalists, mercenaries and
academics, and a cultural space is engineered in which this 'best of all possible worlds' is
represented as the only alternative. Academic superstars may even choose to fly the skull and
crossbones.
 Richard Drayton richard.drayton@kcl.ac.uk 25/2/2011 2/2

This is the environment in which the humanities have, in some ways, become an endangered
species. They are not in danger absolutely, for the wealthy will continue to support the humanities
as a form of luxury consumption, a status good, and as source of social power. The already
privileged will know that the humanities are at the core of what the medieval university understood
as the 'artes liberales', the liberal arts, 'the arts that make men free', those disciplines which teach
mastery over language, rhetoric, logic, and sensitivity to music and the structure of nature, and
which empower citizens with a capacity to intervene in society and culture. The better-off will
encourage their children in these paths. Those with independent wealth will, also, feel more free to
take the risky road to an academic career in these disciplines, in which salaries will be low, and
where universities will reduce their permanent staff to a minimum, and instead have an increasingly
large body of lecturing helots on short-term contracts who may be hired and fired with the ebb and
flow of demand. My own discipline History will continue to prosper, for it is valued by the rich and
understood by those eighteen-year old perfectly informed consumers of Lord Browne's imagination.
But newer and more experimental approaches to the human experience, with small student
numbers, will shrink or be cut by philistine administrators.

The ecological variety of the university will be thinned, and the favoured races which are most
likely to prosper in the struggle for survival will be those which are best responsive to that offshore
regime of social power. While in theory the ideas of lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit -- the academic
freedoms to teach and to learn --- will survive, scholars will come under visible and invisible
pressure to work for the pirate class, or at least to perform for their entertainment. And so, those
who know the fate of the humanities in the United States may agree, academics can sometimes
become a kind of intellectual lap dancer, gyrating to excite the attention of the rich and to provoke
small tips. In quiet ways university hiring and promotion committees can be wary of those who
might scare the givers of gifts, and scholars learn to censor themselves and to wear the mask of the
geisha.

This process was of course well underway in Britain long before the December 2010 education bill.
But the new regime of humanities funding, where high fees based on high personal debt replaces
public grants based on progressive taxation, dramatically accelerates the slippage away from a
democratic idea of the humanities, of the university and learning as the property of all citizens,
accessible to all, and entrusted to scholars who are not afraid to read and write and speak as they
conscience moves them, and on whatever they find most excites their curiosity. What is remarkable
is that most British scholars have made only token opposition to these changes. The British
Academy has offered cowardly handwringing when it should have lead a public campaign of
opposition, when it might have invited the Royal Society to join it in defending the liberal idea of
the university. Vice-chancellors and many administrators have been active quislings, merely asking
how they can best adapt to the new order.

What is ultimately at risk are not the humanities, but democracy itself. For the new regime will
tend to discourage poorer citizens from taking paths which lead to the fullest development of the
personality and powers of communication. The pirates and their fellow travellers in business class,
on the other hand, will tend to convert their economic power into cultural and political power. A
global oligarchy, recruiting some of the most able in each generation to its numbers, will cement its
dominance. If the humanities are to serve humanity and not oligarchy, it will not be enough for
scholars in Britain to cultivate our disciplined gardens. Like our colleagues right now in Wisconsin
and Puerto Rico we will have to join our fellow citizens in political activity, and even in the streets.
The democratic challenge of the twenty-first century is how to force offshore wealth and power
back onshore, how to liberate all of us from the empire. In that struggle every human gift and
potential is at risk.