Dear Vice Chancellor,
Forty-one years ago, almost to the day, I was
instructed by my 6th Form tutor to take one of the last appointments
available for a visiting Careers’ Officer for Leicestershire Education Authority.
I had little hope of anything coming of the meeting, as I had little idea then
what I wanted to do with my life. After a long and seemingly fruitless
discussion, the Careers’ Officer asked me if I did any reading in my spare time.
I said I’d read Alex Haley’s Roots, his family story of American enslavement,
and several of James A. Michener’s American historical epics, including Centennial,
Chesapeake, and Hawaii. “Maybe you could do American Studies at
the University of East Anglia,” the Careers’ Officer suggested. I had no idea it
was possible to do such a thing, so that Careers’ Officer opened a door to a
world that I never knew existed. I resolved from that moment to do American
Studies at what I soon learned was the highly rated School of English and
American Studies at UEA. I was delighted to get an interview with Richard Crockatt
that December, a man who kindly persisted in questioning me on what I was
interested in, bringing out the best in me—a model of constructive kindness that
I have tried to emulate ever since—and who told me in the end that he thought I
would “thrive” at UEA. I was elated and more determined than ever to fulfil
what was now a dream of doing American Studies UEA. My A Level results weren’t
that great, an ACD (despite my excellent teachers' best efforts), not quite the BBC they asked for and pretty much the lowest
in my entering class, as it turned out, but they let me in anyway. Perhaps Professor
Crockatt remembered our interview and recommended me. And I did thrive there. EAS
at UEA took in a first-generation student, the son of a lorry/van/taxi driver
and an auxiliary nurse from the east Midlands, and taught me, inspired me,
encouraged me, and helped me graduate in 1987 with the highest First they had
ever awarded at that time.
EAS and UEA had only increased my passion for all things American,
but most especially with its early history, and with that First, and with a year
at George Washington University in Washington DC (organised by UEA) under my
belt, I started my PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1988. (UEA also helped me
get into other top universities too, and after long talks with my UEA teachers,
such was their interest in my future, I chose Hopkins—which turned out to be perfect
for me). After that I taught at Towson State University in Baltimore, Swansea University
in Wales, beginning in 1992, and since 2014 I have been Professor of American Civilisation
at Jean Moulin University in Lyon, France. In the meantime, in 1998 I had the pleasure
of returning to UEA as an alumnus interviewee for the Teaching Quality
Assessment exercise in 1998, for which EAS was awarded the highest possible score (a well-deserved 24 out of 24, if I remember rightly). Over the years since my
time at UEA and Johns Hopkins, I have published numerous articles, many of them
in the leading journals in my field, co-edited an eight-volume collection of
documents on the American Colonies and the British Empire with my former PhD
supervisor, Jack P. Greene, and published three books, with a fourth, on the
Declaration of Independence, to be published by the University of Virginia
Press in 2025, just in time for the 250th anniversary of that Declaration.
I have been to countless international conferences, organised some myself,
and, as current President of the European Early American Studies Association,
have begun organising one to take place in Lyon at the end of next year. I have
become a known and (I hope) respected scholar in my field. And all that began with a Careers' Officer recommending that I do a degree in American Studies at the University of East Anglia.
My story is merely one of hundreds of those who began
their university educations in UEA arts and humanities in 1983, one of thousands
who did so before and have done so since. That’s thousands of lives changed immeasurably
for the better by UEA, and through which the university has earned its reputation
for excellence—a reputation that prompted my and no doubt numerous other
careers’ advisors to recommend UEA as a place to study. I expect the vast majority
of alumni have, as I have, happily advocated for UEA since their graduations,
enhancing its reputation and thereby ensuring its future, inspiring others in
turn to seek their own educations at this wonderful institution. Or at least we
have done so until now.
I hope you can imagine the dismay and anger of me and these
thousands of others at learning that 31 out of the 36 academic redundancies to
be made at UEA are to be in arts and humanities, and presumably most of the
administrative redundancies too. This apparently entails the halving of American Studies from 16 faculty to 8 and the virtual destruction of the famous
Creative Writing programme, one of the first and most renowned such programmes in the UK and thus an emblem of the institution's tradition of intellectual innovation, energy, and of its enormous cultural value. And it is no use taking the old
line that VCs take about supporting subject areas even while slashing the number
of faculty who teach them. There is no way that arts and humanities can retain its
standards and reputation after the destructive cuts you are proposing.
I understand that UEA has significant financial problems,
but there are much less damaging ways of making savings. First, reductions in managerial
staff numbers and salaries may help avoid all but destroying arts and humanities
and may help avoid compulsory redundancies. UEA and UK Higher Education quality
depends on its front-line academic staff, not on managers who rarely if ever
see students, and those managers, including VCs, do not need the vast and
vastly increasing salaries they have received over the last two decades—certainly
not at such appalling costs to academic or administrative staff and students. And claims
that these high salaries are necessary to attract the best people are best not
made, given the state that UEA and the rest of UK Higher Education is
in.
Spreading the cuts across all academic departments
will also help. I know there is a tendency today to see science and engineering
degrees as enhancing “employability” and “value for money” for students,
encouraging universities to focus most on STEM subjects and less on others. But I am
sure you are as aware as I am of the fact that arts and humanities degrees train
students in critical thinking and communication skills that are valuable and indeed invaluable in all
kinds of careers and walks of life. And, in any case, higher education is not
and should not be seen merely as a financial transaction between individual students
and institutions, but instead as a wider utility that enriches society as a whole in countless and immeasurable ways.
Even if you are unconvinced by these arguments, however,
you must surely be aware by now that all but destroying arts and humanities by forcing
those departments to suffer almost all the costs of previous financial
mismanagement will not help other departments at all, STEM ones included.
These cuts will not leave UEA with a reputation for excellence in science and
engineering, as if nothing else matters. It will in fact destroy those other
departments’ hard-earned reputations for excellence by making UEA an emblem of
academic and intellectual vandalism. I’m sure you are aware of the adverse publicity
from various people, including famous Creative Writing alumni, including indeed
Tracy Chevalier, who spoke against your cuts on the Today Programme yesterday—that
is, the author of the novel and inspiration for the film Girl with a Pearl
Earring. It is immensely harmful to us all as a society that the department
that helped to produce her and so many other great writers should face virtual
destruction, and that would be correspondingly harmful to the reputation of UEA.
You will no doubt also have seen that the Guardian recently published an
article on the crisis in UK Higher Education that began with the story of the
proposed UEA redundancies in arts and humanities, complete with a photo of the
UEA campus (picture above, article below). As things stand right now, then, UEA, a once great and renowned
university, has become literally a symbol of everything that is currently wrong
in UK higher education. You can either make that symbolic status permanent by
proceeding with the redundancies as planned, or you can avert that permanent
damage to UEA by changing those plans. I urge you, as many others have, to take
the latter course. I implore you to do so, not only for the sake of staff and students
in arts and humanities and other UEA subjects, not only for the sake of arts
and humanities education at UEA and in the UK, but also for the sake of the
reputation of the university that so many of us love; a reputation for which you are currently personally responsible.
Yours sincerely,
Steven Sarson
