The humanities in UK universities are under attack on two fronts. The first is economic. A new government orthodoxy has emerged: the New Labour target for increasing participation in higher education led to too many young people attending university. Arts and humanities courses at lower-ranking universities have come under scrutiny for offering students a poor return on their financial investment and for contributing little to economic growth. Current policies or proposals to reform higher education look to divert demand away from these ‘low value’ courses: the lifelong loan entitlement, allowing adults to study short courses flexibly or build up to a full degree over time; minimum grade requirements for student loans; lowering the threshold for repaying those loans; and cutting funding for arts courses.

The second front is cultural. The humanities have been dragged into a culture war, driven partly by the shift in the Conservatives’ electoral base towards the older, non-university graduates who voted for Brexit, especially those who occupy the ‘red wall’ seats gained from Labour in 2019. According to the crude caricatures deployed in this war, the overexpansion of higher education, and especially of the ‘low value’ humanities degrees, has exposed young people to ‘woke’ ideas. It has birthed a generation consumed by identity politics and its language of ‘preferred pronouns’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘decolonising the curriculum’. The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph have often used Freedom of Information requests to inspect university humanities syllabuses for evidence of trigger warnings, ‘cancelling’ white authors, or national self-flagellation about our imperial and slave-trading past.

To humanities lecturers, particularly those in former polytechnics fearful for their jobs, these attacks can seem scarily unprecedented. In fact, they draw on resilient themes, rehearsed in various iterations for more than sixty years. Since the 1950s, powerful and vocal groups have lobbied against mass higher education, and governments have tried to redirect higher education’s priorities away from the arts to science, technology and vocational subjects. At first, these critiques were separate; opponents of university expansion wanted to preserve the humanities against the dominance of science and technical subjects. From the late 1960s onwards, the critiques began to align: opponents of expansion began to focus on the over-provision of arts subjects at less prestigious institutions. Today’s educational culture wars also have their roots in the late 1960s, when radical student movements emerged. As student numbers expanded and universities assumed more prominence in British public life, they became caught up in wider debates about education, the state of modern society and the future of its young people.

英国大学的人文学科在两个方面受到攻击。首先是经济方面。一种新的政府正统观念出现了：新工党提高高等教育参与度的目标导致太多年轻人上大学。排名较低的大学的艺术和人文课程受到审查，因为学生的金融投资回报率很低，而且对经济增长贡献甚微。当前改革高等教育的政策或建议旨在转移对这些“低价值”课程的需求：终身贷款权利，允许成年人灵活地学习短期课程或随着时间的推移获得完整学位；学生贷款的最低等级要求；降低偿还这些贷款的门槛；并削减艺术课程的经费。

第二条战线是文化。人文学科已被拖入一场文化战争，部分原因是保守党的选举基础转向投票支持英国退欧的年长非大学毕业生，尤其是那些占据 2019 年工党获得的“红墙”席位的人。根据在这场战争中使用的粗俗漫画，高等教育的过度扩张，尤其是“低价值”人文学科学位的过度扩张，已经让年轻人“觉醒”了思想。它催生了被身份政治及其“首选代词”、“白人特权”和“课程去殖民化”的语言所吞噬的一代人。每日邮报和每日电讯报经常使用信息自由请求来检查大学人文课程大纲，以寻找触发警告、“取消”白人作家或对我们的帝国和奴隶贸易过去进行全国自我鞭挞的证据。

对于人文学科讲师，特别是那些担心自己的工作的前理工学院的讲师来说，这些攻击似乎是前所未有的可怕。事实上，他们借鉴了有弹性的主题，在各种迭代中排练了 60 多年。自 1950 年代以来，强大而有声望的团体一直在游说反对大众高等教育，政府试图将高等教育的优先事项从艺术转向科学、技术和职业科目。起初，这些批评是分开的。大学扩张的反对者希望保护人文学科免受科学和技术学科的支配。从 1960 年代后期开始，批评开始一致：反对扩张的人开始关注在声望较低的机构过度提供艺术科目。今天的教育文化战争也起源于 1960 年代后期，当时激进的学生运动出现了。随着学生人数的增加和大学在英国公共生活中的地位越来越突出，他们陷入了关于教育、现代社会状况和年轻人未来的更广泛的辩论中。