English Degrees Help English Students Change the World*
It seems at the moment that each week brings news of at least one more university entering into a ‘restructuring’ exercise intended somehow to craft a sustainable financial position out of a fundamentally unsustainable financial model. In the process, arts and humanities subjects have often found themselves at the sharper end of ‘difficult conversations’ that threaten to disrupt disciplines that have evolved over many decades to meet contemporary needs and to accommodate their ever-growing subject matter.
Persuaded as they are by agents that push growth narratives around the same small number of subjects to all universities, it has become more difficult to convince hard-pushed executive teams to see what disciplinary practitioners and employers have always known: that arts and humanities subjects are integral to economic growth and good employability prospects. In its recent series of exemplary reports, the British Academy has shown time and again that not only are job prospects excellent for arts, humanities, and social science graduates, but that those graduates are also fulfilled in their work.
Frustrated by the increasingly large gap between these data and public perceptions of our disciplines, arts and humanities groups, including the umbrella organisation the Arts and Humanities Alliance, and its sister organisation in Scotland, have been working to bust some myths about our subjects and to get those messages to land. Within English, frustrated by writing ever more letters on behalf of excellent departments faced with significant cuts, the subject bodies (the English Association, Institute of English Studies, and University English) have been cooperating on a series of initiatives designed to let people know who we are and what we do, and more practically to offer help to departments in trouble.
Recently, we’ve turned to campaigning: the English Association has launched Choose English, aimed at 14-16-year olds, and University English is aiming its #EnglishCreates campaign at 16-18-year-olds, their teachers, and supporters. Formerly perceived as being perhaps ‘too big to fail’, English has since the Gove-led changes to GCSE English in 2015, seen a decline in take-up, but our campaigns are trying to change that. Colleagues across the UK have been sharing material, student stories, events, and their time in order to work for the discipline, eschewing institutional competition for the larger goal of enabling young people to have a better sense of the choices that are open to them at 18. We hadn’t realised until this week that this might also include national service!
Benefiting from the guidance of the not-for-profit PG group, Campaign Collective, and the generously given help of local press offices, we’ve put together campaign material and branding that have been circulated to university departments throughout the UK, and to thousands of teachers and schools through our generous partners the English Association, English Media Centre, and the National Association for the teaching of English. From 3-7n June, we’ll be running an #EnglishCreates events week, open to all, with sessions on careers for English graduates, the place of arts and humanities in climate education, what it means to be a reader, reading novels during the pandemic, oracy – high on the Labour Party’s list of educational priorities, and much more besides.
#EnglishCreates is amplifying what most of us do as academics – collaborate, appreciate and learn from each other – and building it into the fabric and the message of the campaign in order to offer young people not only information about what an English degree can be, but a model of working that draws on the creativity, critical thinking, and communication that English teaches.
*This article, co-authored with Gail Marshall, was published by wonkhe.com
Andrew McRae is Dean of Postgraduate Research and the Exeter Doctoral College and blogger on issues effecting HE and the English discipline. Read Andrew’s blog on many of the recent issues effecting HE and studying English.
