Surviving without art
Author and academic Noreen Masud on what the strangulation of British universities means for literature
Rhythm is the canary in the coal mine. Two years ago, teaching poetry, I realised that my students couldn’t hear words any more. Not in the way students once could: as objects with weight, distributed in a specific and tactile way. It used to be the case that metre might be scary – set patterns of rhythm in a poetic line, iambs and trochees and anapaests – but rhythm was familiar: because if you can clap you can hear rhythm, if you can dance you can hear rhythm. If you speak, you can hear rhythm, because English depends, for meaning, on stresses falling in a particular place. You can hear the difference between dessert and desert because of where the stress falls; a record player and a recording artist.
So we started with exercises meant to be reassuring: what’s the difference between ‘present the medal’ and get a ‘present’? Between ‘wanting to rebel’ and ‘being a rebel’?
‘What do you mean,’ a student asked, ‘when you say a stress?’
‘That you put emphasis on that syllable,’ I replied.
‘But what do you mean by that? Do you mean that you say it louder?’
I floundered. I realised I had no explanation for this: that I didn’t know how to make visible the skeleton on which my entire understanding of language had been built, wordlessly, since I’d been a baby rocking.
I did some more research. I introduced new exercises. Can you hear where the stresses fall in your own name? Are you Rachel or are you Rachel?
Sometimes this worked. Often it didn’t.
‘I say it either way,’ students said. ‘They both sound right to me.’
*
My students are wise and brave. They were born knowing that this world had no space for them: that they’d have to fight for any semblance of a livable, bearable life, as the drawbridge went up on the world’s wealth. Life was a battle through chaos and noise. If you gave yourself up to that chaos, you’d be lost: doom scrolling, drifting, distracted. So Gen Z has very sensibly put up the blinkers and the bumpers, to charge through, towards the livable life which might (if they are lucky) await them at the other side of their education.
At 18, I had no smartphone shouting in my pocket. Language was something I felt safe to swim in, which sent its pulses through me. I could make myself vulnerable to it. Now it’s something to be touched very gingerly with fingertips – don’t go into the river. The first thing to be lost is texture, sensation.
As the cost of living rises, my students work all hours. Often night shifts. They sleep through their classes. Attendance is perhaps 50 percent, often worse. When they come, they are exhausted, they are anxious and depressed. Teaching during lockdown involved addressing a grid of black squares on the screen, as student after student turned their camera off. There is something of the same feeling even now. Something has shut off. Something isn’t there. They have drawn into themselves, to protect themselves. There is so much stimulus, everywhere all the time, that it starts to feel like pain.
And how can I tell them to be vulnerable; to make mistakes; to take risks? Nowadays, anything less than a 2.1 and they might as well have no degree at all. No wonder they are risk-averse. No wonder they exhaustedly put something on the page and ask me: will this get a first? I tell them how they can structure it better, argue it better. But what I really need to say is: for it to be better, you need to be more interested in it. I don’t, because then they will ask: how do I make myself be interested in it? And I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know how we even got to the stage where that question is on the table.
Because I’m no better than they are. I have no attention span. Before I got my permanent job, I couldn’t think or focus because most of my brain was taken up with the chanting, revolving question of how I would pay my rent and feed myself the following year. Now I have the job and all I can think of is the warming world and the waves of redundancies in my sector. I look at my work. How do I make myself be interested in it?
*
I say I have a permanent job. But we don’t call them permanent any more. We’re instructed to call them ‘open-ended’. That’s designed to ensure we know we can be made redundant at any time, depending on the university’s fortunes. Looking at the higher education landscape, I think I probably have five years before redundancy comes for me.
When the coalition government raised university fees in 2012, this shifted the responsibility for funding from government on to students. Students are now paying customers. The only way for universities to survive is to attract students, more and more and more. They pile them up in neighbouring towns and in classrooms. But even this isn’t enough. Fees have been kept frozen at £9,250 for years. According to some figures, universities make a loss on every domestic student they take. And increasingly hardline immigration policies keep out the international students whose higher fees have kept the show on the road. So everything is expensive, and nothing works.
Alongside all this comes a crisis of purpose. Nobody knows what universities are for. Least of all universities. Because nobody is sure what the arts are for. As billionaires sequester more and more of the world’s wealth, questions of the good life – how we should live, what fosters human flourishing, how we make choices about what is right – become marginalised in favour of questions around how to fight for what few crumbs fall from the tables above us. The arts teach critical thinking, grappling with complex ideas and systems, and questions of justice. These are at best useless for flourishing in a deeply unequal world. At worst, they challenge the premises of that world – making the have-nots unhappy, destabilising the haves. Of course the wealthy hate the arts, beyond their function as a status symbol. Of course they valorise STEM, undermine humanities courses as ‘woke’, and drive down salaries in the arts sector.
So everyone in academia is flailing. How can we please our institutions, when – like large angry babies – they have no idea what they’re screaming for? Perhaps they want research excellence: we write articles. Perhaps they want engagement with the public: we write trade books. Do they want research money? We spend months and months perfecting applications for research grants. Do they want us to be great teachers? We revamp our courses once again. In the midst of all of this, there’s no time to read and think. But ultimately it makes no difference. Kiran Grewal, at Goldsmiths, was made redundant in July for poor performance on the basis of the very same CV that got her promoted to professor just months before. Edge Hill made Kerri Andrews redundant for not doing enough admin – because she’d won one of the research grants that universities nag and nag at their staff to get. Everything becomes equally worthless. It all sounds the same, either way.
I have hacked this system by having no children or partner and no social life to speak of. In other words, academia is a good life if you strip everything out of it that makes you a human in society.
*
This is not meant to be special pleading. All jobs have got worse. Schoolteachers used to have active community lives beyond their careers. Now teaching eats evenings and weekends, is underpaid and undervalued. Everyone is driven harder and harder, for less. We float exhaustedly on the surface, where we used to swim.
Faced with colleagues who have no time to read, and students who have neither time nor inclination, I wonder: what is the point of fighting for novels and poetry at all? Who actually wants to read them – who experiences them as more than a source of weariness and guilt?
Perhaps, in the end, we’ll find we can survive without art. The parts of our soul which needed it will wither up and drop off. Everything will sound right to us. And we’ll feel almost fine, inasmuch as we’ll feel anything, at all.
Noreen Masud's critically-acclaimed debut book, A Flat Place, was published by Penguin in 2023