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In more good news for British universities, “woke waste” is now gaining traction in the UK media, and firmly in the firing line are mad-sounding research projects at the taxpayers’ expense. According to a joint investigation by The Sun and the Taxpayer’s Alliance, millions of pounds are being robbed from the pockets of hard-working citizens so that academics can investigate “TikTok dancing, ‘queer animals’ & pro-trans robots”. Over on Charlotte Gill’s Substack, we find industrial levels of outrage about such projects as “Glitching cisgenderism” (£185K); “The Europe that gay porn built” (£840K); and “Re-Indigenizing Victorian Studies” (£34K).

A big target of Gill’s personal ire is UK Research and Innovation: the body that oversees discipline-specific university funding. UKRI is an organisation as familiar to the modern academic as desk rejections from journals and the seething resentment of colleagues. “Many Brits will have never heard of it despite being charged £9 billion per year for its work”, Gill writes, as if she is Warren Beatty uncovering the shady conspiracies of the Parallax Corporation.

Though she is willing to concede that UKRI funds “important medical, scientific and technological research”, the problem is that “its value tends to be let down by its more fluffy wings, such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research Council”. Now, while “fluffy wings” conceivably sounds like it could be the subject matter of an AHRC-funded project in its own right, it is still a little harsh to cast the total research outputs of history, philosophy, languages and linguistics, theology, music, archaeology, classics, economics, psychology (etc.) from our finest universities in such a withering light — for these are some of the disciplinary areas funded by the AHRC and the ESRC between them. Gill is unmoved, though — according to her, we should defund the AHRC altogether.

It’s not that there aren’t stupidly ideological projects out there getting too much money — the critics are right about that. I’m actually surprised that Gill and co. haven’t had more fun with the £805,000 heading to researchers at Roehampton, in order to study “marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays”. This will apparently culminate in a production of Galatea by the 16th-century playwright John Lyly, first performed in front of Elizabeth I in 1588; a play which has been described by the grant winners as “exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives” and depicting the “celebration of a queer and trans marriage”. (How the Virgin Queen felt about her early exposure to 21st-century liberation politics is not recorded, though it is rumoured several courtiers may have taken the knee.)

Despite such tomfoolery, and with a hostile narrative now clearly building against the humanities generally, it is worth emphasising that a lot of non-ideological, scholarly, and fascinating research is still taking place in UK universities. And it also has to be acknowledged that quite a few of the targets of current ridicule — including The Sun’s main target, “Ontology and Ownership of Internet Dance” at Coventry University (£199,922) — are trying hard to be anti-elitist in a way that Sun readers might normally appreciate, by applying analytical tools to everyday entities rather than particularly highbrow ones.

But it is also true that funding bodies like the AHRC are at significant fault — though Gill and the others seem to have a shallow understanding of why. The biggest problem is not (just) that they give away too much money to intellectually shallow projects larded with the words “queer” and “decolonise” like it really means something, but that they have built whole systems that incentivise that kind of expensive and vacuous application, and which are bound to end up putting them at the top of the pile.

Consider that there once was a time when, in order to do your research in a discipline like philosophy, you could sit in your office or library, read books, think a bit, then write things down. The odd bit of conference or archive travel aside, overheads were minimal. You didn’t have to chase the latest intellectual fashion trend, or try to desperately grab press headlines with your findings.

Then, about 20 years ago, the then Labour government tried to adopt a purely quantitative approach to university research assessment for cost cutting reasons. In the furore that followed, it climbed down and partially replaced the idea of metrics with that of “pathways to impact” — broadly speaking, insisting that academics should demonstrate to the taxpayer some positive benefit of their prospective research for wider society, and not just for fellow academics or students. Suddenly — and highly ironically, given the way things have gone since — everything was about demonstrating value for money. Research councils built impact sections into grant applications, or just insisted on it being mentioned throughout; and the Government made direct funding to universities partly dependent on the submission of “impact case studies” from each department.

A whole suite of jobs was created for “impact officers”; and a whole world of hell was opened up for humanities scholars, and probably most of all for philosophers. This, after all, is a psychological type for which some of the most thrilling opening lines of the 20th century include: “1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.”

For, unlike those in science or tech departments, we couldn’t boast of new polymers or find cures for cancer. Instead, we had to desperately fish about for some angle in epistemology, aesthetics, or the philosophy of science that might conceivably interest a passing non-specialist. In my time at that particular coalface, I had serious discussions with colleagues about whether the ontology of holes could be applied to the 2000 US election controversy about “hanging chads” in Florida; worried quite a lot about whether the impact score of departmental research on Heidegger would be reduced by his being a Nazi; and tried to show willing as a slightly desperate impact officer asked me whether my work might conceivably cover the question of whether the next Doctor Who could be a woman, metaphysically speaking. With such experiences writ large in the humanities, it’s scarcely surprising that ambitious people eventually started to jump on any passing bandwagon to get out of there.

Scarcely anyone of an intensely reflective mindset positively wants to do these things — they are forced into it by the system. The set of people who love thinking for hours about abstract ideas and really enjoy managing teams, writing budgets, and talking to the general public is not very large. The more bureaucratised and professionalised the university environment becomes, the less it attracts the pure thinking types — and that’s a huge pity.

The result in many cases is worthless — utterly superficial research by trend-obsessed strivers, whose conclusions are gerrymandered from the start to fit transitory public moods and fashionable politics, and which barely anyone ever engages with outside academia anyway. As far as I can see, the most economical thing that university funders could do now would be to stop encouraging academics to think they have to demonstrate the monetary value of their research to the general public, and let that extremely costly side of things fall away entirely. And unlike others I can say that now, because thank God I never have to apply to the AHRC again.

Original article: UnHerd