Lecturer in Modern German Studies, University of Cambridge

CSaP-Government Secondee, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (2015)

The secondment in BIS caught my eye because it offered an unusual opportunity to see policymaking from the inside. My brief was to work on analysis of the ‘benefit and value’ of research in the arts and humanities. This question was debated by some inspiring speakers at the CSaP annual conference in April, and it could hardly be more relevant to my own day job – teaching and researching German literature, especially Goethe. One definition of research could be the attempt to understand something, with the ultimate aim of sharing that understanding with others.

The benefit of this, it is tempting to assume, is self-evident. Yet stepping in to BIS, especially in the run up to a Spending Review, made me realise that things are not always so simple. Robust evidence is required to ensure that public funds, including those allocated to research, are used wisely. This is an issue which has stayed with me, and which I try to address in the reflection below. The difficulty for the arts and humanities is that so much of their real value is beyond metrics.

That sounds like a cop out; it isn’t. The challenge, as I see it, is to find a framework for accountability which enhances, rather than obstructs, the good work that the arts and humanities do in society. That work cannot always be measured, but it can be traced and made visible. I do not presume to give a ready-made solution. My aim, rather, is to offer a few suggestions as to why the arts and humanities are deserving of trust. Literature is my own field, but I write in the deep conviction of the value of all the disciplines.

I also write in memory of my father, Stephen Lee, who died in July aged 69. He was a secondary school teacher, author of over twenty books on history, and, between 1987 and 1990, a principal in what was then the Department of Education and Science. A good deal of what I know about research as education, and education as public service, I learned from his example.

The arts and humanities change the way we think – literally. Research in linguistics and neuroscience has shown that the often strange and inventive language of literature ‘triggers the activation of unpredicted sensorimotor configurations and surprises the mind with its own imaginative and cognitive potentialities.’[1] So engaging with the arts can have a positive effect on the health and plasticity of the brain. In addition, the arts and humanities awaken us to other perspectives. Human life is built on diversity: members of the same family, even, can vary startlingly in their emotional and psychological make-up, and differences are magnified when two or more cultures come into contact with one another.

By inching into these differences, depicting them, debating them, the arts and humanities have the potential to make us more compassionate. None of us (academics included) manages this anything like all of the time, but these subjects can refine our understanding of human behaviour, enabling us to respond to life with a measure of insight and resilience. Music and dance, literature and film, painting and sculpture may make us feel better, or worse, or just different; but they move us, and they move us on.

Why research in the arts and humanities, though? Well, research keeps things live. Poetry, for example, is worth reading, but no one could claim to find it easy (if they do, they are probably fibbing). Scholars have to start from the beginning, like everyone else, whether it is in learning to read and analyse poetry, or to conduct a sensitive interview, or to find, in the jumble of events past and present, the thread which we know as history.

The French thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, observed that: ‘the philosopher is a perpetual beginner […] [and] philosophy must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter’.[2] Researchers likewise must learn their craft gradually and, moreover, they must adapt it so that it remains relevant and accessible to their own generation: so that we all might continue to learn from the accumulated wisdom (and mistakes) of humanity in other times and places, and that we might understand the needs of our own time.

‘Chunks’ of research can have strong and direct impacts: many individual projects have led to changes in policy, have stimulated the economy through the revenue on exhibitions and book sales, or have brought about tangible improvements in the lives of communities. And there is also a broader picture, about which we tend to hear less. For many academics, one of the most important outputs of their scholarly activity, taken as a whole, is their teaching.

A career in research is a life-long opportunity to get immersed in a subject, and lectures and seminars are among the most worthwhile conduits for the ideas generated in the process. In fact, students are often a vital part of that process, for they pique it with the questions they ask or the insights they offer. Teaching, in turn, enhances the ‘absorptive capacity’,[3] as it were, of individuals, training them in a discipline (in reading and responding to literature, say) until they are able to take it and use it, consciously and unconsciously, in their own changing lives – be that by using their sharpened semantic antennae to get at what their client or boss is really saying to them, or by finding a piece of writing which might offer solace to them or to a friend at a time when most words seem dead.

If education, this most important aspect of the job, is done effectively, it can set off any number of chain reactions, and that energy continues to be released far beyond the academy. Graduates with degrees in the arts and humanities go into every conceivable career, from journalism to accountancy to mental health support, and they take with them the skills that they have cultivated during their studies.[4] Knowledge exchange is not confined to the lecture hall or seminar room, either. As with teaching, outreach activity, about which many academics are passionate, might be directly related to their very latest research, or it might base itself more loosely on their work.

The school pupils I often visit are unlikely to be very interested in the nerdy details of my monograph on Goethe, but they might well be interested in Goethe as a person, in his scientific enquiry, or in his Faust, that most complex and intriguing of blunderers. Whatever its precise relation to the mainstream of the researcher’s activity, public engagement is an important means of disseminating scholarship – and, in the specific case of schools outreach, of widening participation, of encouraging talented young people from all backgrounds to study in greater numbers. It is they who keep academia sharp.

The most effective and appropriate framework for tracking impact will be one which captures the many different outcomes and offshoots of research activity taken as a whole: outcomes which might, individually, seem delicate in scale, but which are powerful in their cumulative effect. This framework needs to be developed through patient and open dialogue between academics and policymakers, and both parties need to listen to one another.

Good research in any discipline makes the heart beat faster: it fires innovation and pushes humanity to the outer reaches of what it can achieve. But research also requires the racing mind to slow down, and to strain for, as George Eliot puts it in Middlemarch, that ‘keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life’ which so often eludes us.