Article written for Gair Rhydd, published 11th October 2010:Cuts are everywhere, but the arts and humanities have their head against the block. With plans to cut its funding by as much as 25%, they are treated as an expensive luxury rather than a vital part of our national life. I’ve just returned to university to study for a master’s degree in English Literature, so I’ve obviously got a horse in this race, but I find this attitude very short-sighted. The arts in Britain do contribute massively to our economy, as does the study of humanities to a degree. The arts employ 2 million people, and contribute £16.6 billion to our exports – not bad value for 0.08% of the national budget. But that’s not the main reason we should protect them. If they are reduced simply to a price tag, we’ve already lost our souls. “Impact” is the latest buzz-word in the Higher Education quangos that govern our universities. Doing high-quality research isn’t enough any more; universities have to prove it has “impact” on society if they want to good assessments and continued funding. This is fair to a point; if tax-payers are funding university research, they want to know what they’re getting out of it. The problem is a narrow focus on money and headlines as the criteria of success. Rewarding academics for getting their ideas in the papers or on television won’t deliver good research, just sensationalism. Academic study by its very nature is specialised. You can’t expect it to make good 10-second soundbites. And while humanities subjects don’t typically deliver a direct economic benefit in the way that, say, science or engineering do, there’s much more to life than just economic competitiveness. The humanities are valuable precisely because they don’t typically have much direct economic value. They teach us there is more to life than the bottom line. Understanding our culture, past and present, really matters. We need people who have a deep understanding of language, literature, history and so on. We need to support the creation of art – painting, music, theatre, literature and all its other myriad forms. We need voices that will both preserve and pass on, confirm and challenge, our values, culture and heritage. No society can function for long without creative vision and a humane sense of value and purpose. While science, technology and engineering tell us “how” to do things, it takes the arts and humanities to tackle the questions of “what” and “why”. Neglect the questions of art, the wisdom of the humanities, and you are left with a technocratic society that may be efficient, but has no clear purpose. The point is not to set the arts and humanities against the sciences. Both sets of disciplines are necessary for our well-being. But we need to resist the idea that science and technology are the “real thing” and philosophy and ethics, literature and theology, are airy abstractions. We need to fund not just those areas with “survival value”, but ones that give value to survival. A good humanities degree not only teaches critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding of our cultural heritage, it teaches us how to be human. Art as its best enlarges our understanding of the world and of other people. The arts and humanities may or may not help you get a job or fix the economy, but they certainly help you get a life.