This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Picture, if you will, a professor’s office in Oxford. You will no doubt imagine a sumptuously appointed room with a sofa and armchairs, floor-to-ceiling books, perhaps some priceless art and sash windows overlooking a carefully manicured lawn. This office, however, was at the city’s other university, so it bore no resemblance to stereotype.

Perhaps six-feet-by-eight, there was barely space for a desk, a filing cabinet and two plastic bucket chairs. But for 19 years it was my work “home”, and good things happened there. Books were written, undergraduates guided through their dissertations, PhD students coaxed over the finishing line.

I arrived at Oxford Brookes University as a music lecturer in 2005, steadily working my way up to being made professor in 2019. The School of Arts was in a 1990s building, quirkily constructed around the skeleton of the stable block of an old mansion that had formerly been the home of Robert Maxwell.

It was an animated, friendly place, and you never knew quite what zany art installation you might be confronted by when you went in. But by 2023 the building was not in the best state of repair. A toilet had recently leaked its contents into the room below, rendering a harpsichord unusable. In retrospect, that felt like a sign of things to come.

Last November my colleagues and I were summoned urgently to a video call we knew could only mean one thing: our undergraduate degree course was to be closed. In a subsequent face-to-face meeting, I was informed I would be in the first tranche of staff to be made redundant. Despite having done everything right — winning large external research grants, publishing prolifically, establishing a high “impact” profile, and teaching conscientiously — I had become an early casualty in the larger financial crisis that is currently sweeping our universities and the post-1992 sector in particular.

Shoebox-sized though it may have been, I had crammed an awful lot onto the three shelves spanning the length of the room, and in a space below a large fixed window sill. There were copious books and back issues of old journals I had saved from the skip when the library went digital.

Amongst an array of odd miscellaneous items were an unsolicited package from a stranger who had taken it upon herself to translate the entirety of my first book into German, and a bottle of Champagne the previous room occupant had left behind, which I had, ridiculously, never dared touch. It remains unopened: I imagine it may have lost a little of its sparkle.

There were of course also countless folders of notes and student work spanning my time at Brookes, but also from an array of previous jobs. Almost everything would have to be jettisoned, since I had no new office to take it all to and no easy way of removing so much material from campus. Before that, there would have to be a painstaking sorting process. Three piles: throw, shred, keep. Going through every sheet in every folder took weeks.

It was a tedious job yet also in a way illuminating, giving me a sense of what had changed in higher education over the last 28 years. It told me about methodological changes within my own discipline and broader shifts in pedagogy. And it made me think long and hard about what universities are — what they ought to do, what they used to do, and how they appear to see their remit today.

The oldest folder, from 1996, was from when I had first tried my hand at lecturing, as an MA student at Newcastle, teaching undergraduates who were only a year or two younger than me. These were simpler times. I had developed an interest in music history and I was passing my knowledge on to others who agreed it was a worthwhile thing to learn about.

Unfathomable as it seems to be to younger academ-ics today who insist “everything is political”, it was quite possible to study an arts subject then without it being politicised, and everyone seemed a good deal happier for it. It was also possible — indeed the norm — for a music degree to focus exclusively on classical music, something that is unthinkable now.

I don’t suppose everything was rosy then — older academics seemed disillusioned, and I was given the customary pep talk about there being no jobs. But things were undoubtedly in a healthier state than they are now, for students and staff. This was still a time when it was possible to do an arts or humanities degree simply because the subject interested you.

Many of us went to university without a clear idea of what we wanted to do afterwards, but there was no sense that if you studied the arts you would be compromising your employment options. Attempting to become an arts academic seemed a perfectly valid career choice, and although not everyone got a permanent job, a good proportion of those who stuck it out did. How times have changed.

The next two sets of teaching I undertook were strikingly contrasting — but each, in its own way, represented the best of what a university education ought to be about. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I supplemented my PhD funding by working for the Open University, teaching each year at summer school in Durham and tutoring a study group year-round in Reading. Students posted their essays to me, I posted written comments back, and we chatted regularly on the phone.

The students were an eclectic crowd, spanning all ages and backgrounds, and eccentrics abounded. There were people with challenging lives looking for a chance to start afresh. There was also a particular preponderance of military band personnel, keen to get to grips with sonata form or the essentials of Romantic style. (No inverse snobbery about classical music back then.) All were studying music out of a genuine love of it.

Undoubtedly the most poignant files in my office dated from this time. Out of the folders fell one handwritten letter and Christmas card after another, full of effusive words about how much the teaching had meant to them — changed their lives, even. The summer schools, in particular, were a “world apart”, proper Educating Rita stuff.

Everyone stepped away from normal life, immersed themselves for a week in studying and playing music, and made like-minded, possibly lifelong friends. From laughter over the first drinks in the bar to that bewitching long held note at the end of Stanford’s “The Bluebird” as the choir closed the end-of-week concert, summer schools were a life-affirming joy. It was a huge blow when the OU abandoned them.

In 2001, I took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford, albeit an unusual one, which came with a six-hour weekly teaching stint. Oxford tutorial teaching was the gold standard (and I did indeed have that inspiring 18th century teaching room, overlooking a beautiful lawn). Like OU summer school, but in an entirely different way, this model also had an intensity to it. Students and staff also inhabited what might be characterised as a “world apart”.

The students busied themselves — at least theoretically — with reading extensively around their subject in a system that treated them like adults and expected them to take the initiative. The curriculum stretched them, and conversations with such intelligent young people stretched me, too. Thankfully, this model of education endures.

The leap from teaching at Oxford to teaching at Oxford Brookes was of course a large one. Here I was sometimes lecturing to 50 or 60 students tightly packed into a room. (One good thing: such high numbers would have been inconceivable later on.) The teaching was mixed-ability, of course, but I always maintained that the best students were as intellectually curious as any I had taught at Oxford.

Here, too, the teaching was often stimulating. Best was the module “Opera and Politics”. (Think topics such as Verdi and Italian national unification, or 19th century operatic censorship, rather than the politics of today.) Most students were new to opera, and rather suspicious of it, but taking trips to the London Coliseum and seeing young people come away chatting animatedly about how good it had been was one of the great delights of my career.

Over time, things began to change, and not for the better. The government’s removal of the cap on undergraduate numbers meant that Russell Group universities were suddenly syphoning off the best-qualified applicants who would previously have gone to the stronger post-92s. High fees started to kill off the mature student market. Brookes made an error in scrapping its combined studies degree, removing a healthy pipeline of students with interdisciplinary interests that often included music.

The European exchange student market dwindled. Then there was the general decline of music teaching in schools, progressively worsening over the 2010s. Fewer A-level students meant fewer young people to study music at university.

A prestigious externally funded sabbatical, followed by an internal teaching buyout, saw me away on research business from 2018 to 2023. I returned to a profoundly changed department. The undergraduate course had been redesigned and our wonderful MA had been closed. “Market data” had guided the development of new types of course. Had the revamped offerings driven student recruitment upwards? Quite the opposite. What’s more, where excellence in research had previously been highly encouraged and prized, there was now suddenly a distinct sense that it was a frivolous luxury.

Numerous complex factors, external and internal, had led us and other universities to this place. Successive governments’ underfunding has wreaked damage on the HE sector, whilst the shocking neglect of arts subjects in schools is now having grave knock-on effects. But universities are also not always well managed. In many institutions, the number of academics is declining and the number of administrators vastly increasing, some of whom treat a university as if it were a business or a branch of local government.

There even seems to be a lack of consensus amongst lecturers themselves that more traditional areas, such as music history or Shakespeare studies, are worthy of a place on the curriculum, particularly now academia has become — for some — a branch of social activism. I am unconvinced that teaching every arts or humanities discipline through the lens of discussions about race, empire, gender and sexuality is what all students really want.

I have found myself thinking recently about a scene in a beloved novel, Brideshead Revisited, a book that has done a great deal to romanticise the very idea of the university, even if neither Charles Ryder nor Sebastian Flyte applied themselves to their studies. As Ryder’s college servant, Lunt, bemoans the introduction of dancing in Eights Week, the former observes: “For this was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the same as they had been in 1914.”

There seem to be fitting parallels here with where we find ourselves today, experiencing a palpable sense that life is just not the same in 2024 as it was a decade ago, before the great schism of Brexit, before Covid and before the so-called culture wars. Certainly, clearing out my office made me as nostalgic as Lunt, reflecting on happier times in higher education, when the arts were held in high esteem, when universities were run by people who had a genuine respect for learning, when we had more students, and when it was possible to teach and research topics simply because they were interesting and original, not because they fulfilled an agenda.

We must not be entirely gloomy. There are still excellent universities in the UK, and people within them who continue to value the university first and foremost as a place of the mind. Hopefully, those institutions, at least, will find ways to ride out the current storm. But some highly creative thinking is going to be required to get back to where we were even ten years ago. In the meantime, it is sobering to think of how much has been lost.