Putting impact into context: The Janus face of the public value of arts and humanities research

The crisis in the humanities and the public value challenge

It was JH Plumb (1964) who first coined the idea of the ‘crisis in the humanities’ four decades ago, to voice a fear in the humanistic academy that the rise of the industrial society would render redundant society’s interests in arts and humanities education. Humanities and the arts are so profoundly different as academic pursuits from science, engineering and technology, that this difference casts them with a mark of Cain, destined to peripherality and suffering.

And as Belfiore and Upchurch (2013) reminded us 40 years later, a pervasive rhetoric of gloom has settled upon the academy, well backed up by academic evidence, included in the pages of this journal (e.g. Bérubé, 2003). For those that study arts and humanities scholars, it is clear that there is a new edge to this sense of gloom and crisis driven by increasing policy-maker demands for the creation of scientific and societal ‘impact’. Stefan Collini (2009) articulates most eloquently these fears when through the rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdum he hints at the risk of the historian reduced to cookbook seller.

Indeed it is true that policy-makers are increasingly demanding that academics justify themselves in terms of the returns that result from investing in their scholarly domains. Popp Berman (2011) has traced how the US blazed a trail in arguing that universities and science have reinvented themselves in terms of a market logic by persuading policy-makers of the benefits which research investments bring to economies more generally. But the quid pro quo of this reinvention was the promise by universities that their research would deliver clear societal benefits. And now policy-makers have internalised what once would have seemed a heretical belief, that the core purpose of higher education in general and academic research in particular is to bolster societal wellbeing.

This downside of this arrangement has become particularly evident in the last five years with the onset of the global financial crisis and its repercussions in the form of austerity pressures on government spending. Gone are the days of the science budget doubling in return for trebling societal outputs, as Canada once experienced (cf. Benneworth and Jongbloed, 2009). In its place has come an era of ‘doing more with less’, and for those that can offer nothing, comes nothing or worse, a worrying prospect for disciplines convinced that they are ‘useless’ or even that utility compromises their essential values. Indeed, Martha Nussbaum has come to represent the voice of the resistance to this trend when she argues that this might result in arts and humanities being seen as

useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula […] nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit making. (Nussbaum, 2010: 2)

But at the same time as Bérubé, Collini and Nussbaum debate the humanities’ seemingly inexorable decline into irrelevance, another set of voices is emerging in the debate. These seek to counter the internal rhetoric of gloom and perceived external hostility towards arts and humanities research by giving more positive examples of how this creates public value. Some have been funded by arts and humanities research funders, as they fight a political battle to justify the funds they receive (cf. AHRC, 2009; Bate, 2011, British Academy, 2004; Hughes et al., 2011).

Others have attempted to make the argument on more academic grounds, most notably Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities (2013) or Helen Small’s The Public Value of the Humanities (2013), to reclaim the distinctive contribution of arts and humanities research to society as being at least as great as that made by other disciplines. Likewise, Olmos Peñuela et al. (2012) recently analysed researcher behaviour in Spain and concluded that whilst social science and humanities researchers might be differently useful to society, their behaviour and orientations do not make them a priori less useful than science, technology and medicine researchers.

Towards more scholarly reflection on arts and humanities research and public value

But both these debates have been so normatively framed that they have often failed to acknowledge that to the public, the value or impact of arts and humanities research is an emergent and contextual problem, and have rushed to reify rhetorical absolutes rather than reflect that context dependency. Although sometimes the value of research might (following Bod’s line) take decades or even centuries to become evident, at the same time there is no reason why arts and humanities researchers might not produce more immediate impact. Although arts and humanities scholars might find it useful to set themselves questions rather than jump to the capricious whims of any charlatan with an eye for short-term profit, that does not make them resolutely opposed to the idea of being societally useful under any circumstance and wedded to the ivory tower.

I contend that in acquiescing to demands from policy-makers under pressure for clarity and simplicity, a sense of nuance, ambivalence and tensions has been lost from these public debates around the public value of arts and humanities research. And it is precisely to this urgent issue of restoring depth to public debate that this Forum of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education addresses itself. Each of the seven papers presented seek to cut across the normative absolutes to introduce a set of useful conceptual distinctions that can help to make sense of what impact can and should be for arts and humanities research.

Gulbrandsen and Aanstad (2015) provide a set of conceptual tools to help arts and humanities scholars situate their work in the mainstream of impact, reflecting on the relevance of the notion of ‘innovation’ for arts and humanities research and identifying ways in which humanities scholars can best frame the public value debate in terms of what matters to the academic community. Hazelkorn (2015) helps to allay perhaps the wildest of that community’s fears by charting the ways that different countries have responded to the demands for more impact by arts and humanities. She identifies that policy-makers are receptive to arguments of value that are acceptable to scholars, but that scholars need to be restrained in making wild claims about the seemingly limitless value of their research.

Benneworth (2015) offers a model for understanding and articulating the public value of arts and humanities research, in terms of contributing to societal conversations and solving wider social problems. Drawing on three examples of how humanities research had society-wide ramifications, he argues that more attention is needed to the social life of humanities knowledge as it flows within these wider conversations. Olmos Peñuela et al. (2015) provide a conceptual decision rule for addressing the question of whether arts and humanities research is a priori less useful or is simply differently useful, arguing that policy-makers owe it to themselves and their publics to use much better evidence bases in allocating science funding.

O’Brien’s paper (2015) draws lessons from past experiences in valuing cultural policy to explore how ideas of public value are implemented in practice and how those practices to which they are subjected can – or cannot – influence evaluators' value judgements and reference frames. This is complemented by Belfiore’s paper (2015), which explores how arguments and value claims around cultural policy have played out, highlighting a risk for arts and humanities research of an uncritical economism unthinkingly seeping into seemingly objective evaluative frameworks. To conclude, Molas-Gallart (2015) draws the threads together, noting that in the rush to measure impact, it is vital to not forget what matters, not just to those being measured, but to those doing the measuring. Measuring for self-knowledge and self-improvement or to take resource allocation decisions needs very different kinds of measures, and the debate about the wider public value of research would do well not simplistically to elide these categories.

The overall message of this forum is that arts and humanities research needs to take heed of the raging political debate and tread carefully yet firmly. Certainly, modesty is required in understanding that accountability demands that arts and humanities scholars account for the value of their research, and that it is simply no longer tenable to make intrinsic value or self-improvement arguments that can be rejected for their self-serving nature. But conversely, arts and humanities research scholars have much to be proud of and can be bold in seeking to demonstrate that – under the right conditions and with the right support –they can achieve just as much change in society as can their more technologically minded colleagues.

In making this case, it is clear that it is entirely appropriate for different kinds of scholars to play a range of different roles creating different kinds of relationships with a wide spectrum of kinds of end-users. There is still a vital place for fundamental blue-skies research, but it exists in conversations with other scholars who mobilise it in more useful ways, until these profound ideas achieve their wider realisation in the advancement of the human condition. For the former kind of scholars, what Gulbrandsen and Aanstad (2012) call ‘the Plato Crowd’, there is a duty to at least attend to the conversations that make their research open to more applied scholars. For those closer to society, Gulbrandsen and Aanstad’s ‘Aristotle mob’, they should demand more support from policy and society in ensuring their ideas can be taken up.

So a sense of deep-seated crisis within arts and humanities is unlikely to subside any time soon, especially given the extent to which the public realm has become depressed under the burden of enforced austerity. But even in the depths of this gloom, this Forum should provide a glimmer of hope that scholarship and research in the arts and humanities can enjoy a future as a valued and appreciated partner in building tomorrow’s knowledge society.