MAYDAY

The sad truth about art education today is that New Labour has finished what Thatcher started.

Forty years ago, some 25 students in Nanterre, protesting at conditions at their university, set in train events that would not only affect universities in France and in much of the rest of Europe and beyond, but would also change politics forever. In London it was similarly a protest at local conditions, in particular at Hornsey College of Art, which kicked off the wider protest movement. As David Briers points out, in his review of Lisa Tickner's authoritative account of the sit-in that followed, 'Analysis of art education nationally and the relations between artists, designers, and society' inevitably 'opened onto political territory'. Last month's Editorial wondered what it would take, given the vastly changed political conditions today, for students to take to the barricades like their peers did in 1968. Judging by the volume of correspondence AM has received in response to the editorial, and to the publication in the same issue of Graham Crowley's timely letter, 'Can't get no satisfaction', concerning the current state of fine art education in London, it might not take much. And, as in 1968, students are likely to find themselves marching shoulder to shoulder with staff, this time in protest against the increasing corporatisation of education since New Labour came to power in 1997.

This process began much earlier: in his letter, Colin Maughan points out how, since the 60s, the recommendations of various consultative bodies have been repeatedly ignored in favour of reducing and homogenising art education. However, there was one exception that proves the rule: in 1983 the aptly named National Advisory Body (NAB) was set up to 'rationalise' fine art provision in Britain in line with prime minister Margaret Thatcher's belief that art education should return to its 19th-century role of providing designers for industry. After a period of so-called consultation, NAB recommended the closure or amalgamation of several fine art courses, a recommendation that was immediately implemented. One of the forced mergers was that between St Martin's School of Art and Central School of Art and Design in 1989 which, with the addition of several more institutions including, despite sustained protest, Camberwell School of Art, eventually led to the creation of the London Institute that, in turn, was to become the black hole that is the University of the Arts. Finally, in 1992, came the government initiative to convert polytechnics into universities, which absorbed most of the remaining art schools into the academic system. The alacrity with which art schools surrendered their autonomy in return for the spurious prestige of university status played right into the hands of the Conservative government whose initiative had nothing to do with elevating the status of polytechnics. On the contrary, it was about reducing the status and privileges of the semi-autonomous older universities and, ultimately, of all universities. Thatcher saw universities as bastions of resistance to Conservative reforms aimed at cutting funding and putting universities, like other publicly funded organisations including the Arts Council, onto a more 'business-like' footing, effectively turning education into just another commodity that could be mass-produced and subjected to quality control. In its vigorous, but ultimately unsuccessful campaign against funding cuts, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) quoted Derek Bok's memorable defence of the cost of education: 'If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.'

Ironically, Thatcher's plans for factory-style education were only to be truly achieved under New Labour. It was the setting up of the dreaded inquisition, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), by the first New Labour government in 1998, barely one year after the election, which made the institutionalisation of what Stephen Lee in his letter aptly describes as 'educational Taylorism' possible. The QAA, and its spawn, the Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA), became the means by which the product, broken down into bite-sized pieces as a result of the imposition of American-style modularisation, could be tested. Since the government had already begun to refer to the arts as the 'creative industries', a term first coined when Labour was still in opposition, this must have seemed like a perfect fit between the so-called 'aims' and 'outcomes' of an art education.

As if this were not bad enough, worse was to come: the QAA also begat the ghastly Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), set up to 'monitor' what it is pleased to call 'measurable research outputs', including fine art research, according to a points system: the higher the score (up to a perfect five starred rating), the higher the funding awarded the university through the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), later Council (AHRC). This process (See Editorial AM261) is both demeaning and divisive: demeaning because the meaningless external criteria require that art researchers, as Michael Crowther reveals in his letter, are forced to 'bend' their work out of shape to fit them, thereby creating the 'unbearable fictions' referred to by Crowley; divisive because, as Peter Suchin writes, 'woe betide the lecturer whose practice doesn't generate research points or whose strengths lie in teaching and little else'. Fine art departments now compete against each other to attract high-profile artists to boost their RAE rating and thereby attract more students to their courses, particularly full fee-paying foreign students - the milch cows of the system.

As Crowley also pointed out, the money and time wasted on administering this whole bureaucratic nightmare would be better spent on teaching. The bureaucratisation of education under New Labour has become Kafkaesque. The imposition of management culture on the academic environment has had a debilitating effect on art education, and has caused a complete split between the managers and the managed. Education cannot be easily quantified, but managers only value what can be quantified and thus measured. If an 'output' is not measurable, then it is literally of no account. In such a climate, the arts are particularly vulnerable: the very nature of creative endeavour precludes predictable outcomes.

At the root of this division is lack of trust. Suspicion of art and artists is nothing new, but this atmosphere of distrust extends to any form of expertise or professionalism and dates back to Thatcher, whose distrust of intellectuals and experts of any kind included not just academics, but the 'mandarins' of Whitehall and other specialist advisers. Under New Labour, this distrust has increased: why trust anyone with experience or expertise when you can turn to a focus group for advice? It is vital to resist the further encroachment of management culture on art education, and one strategy of resistance, as Lee suggests, is to reject the language of corporatisation: 'When one culture colonises another it imposes its jargon by replacing the existing culture's language with its own.' This is a form of thought control and he is right, it should be resisted. There is, too, still some dissent within the government: John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, recently told the Guardian: 'To me, education is not a commodity. It is a public good, essential to any society with a claim to being civilised.' Unfortunately, he does not represent the majority, and the government seems bent on expanding the university sector along even more corporate lines, so in the end it may be necessary take to the barricades à la 1968: 'Pouvoir Populaire!' 'Power to the People!'

This editorial was originally published in May 2008/ Issue 317, p12.

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