So much for levelling up – if you work in higher education, all you see is decline

Another day, another threat of redundancies at a UK higher education institution. This time it’s personal: nearly a dozen staff are at risk in my own creative writing department and the English department at Birkbeck, University of London, which is planning to cut up to 140 jobs by next summer – following in the footsteps of Roehampton, Goldsmiths, Leicester and Sheffield Hallam.

There goes our five star reputation, our “second in the country for research excellence”, our vibrant student body of adult learners, our excellent PhD cohort and all the collective knowledge this contains. Colleagues across the sector shudder and offer solidarity and wonder when it will be them. And in the middle of the maelstrom in this year of perma-crisis, we wonder what the hell the value of our institution, built on goodwill and openhearted principles, really is. How can it survive?

Like much that has been trashed in this country in the past 12 years of government misrule, UK higher education is just another to be added to the list – along with the health service, the justice system, transport, energy, business and schools.

Every little bit of the country has been sold off, privatised, asset-stripped and ripped off, until what remains is evidence everywhere of systemic private sector failure (perhaps most visibly – and disgustingly – in the sewage being pumped into our seas by water companies who, it seems, hoovered up profits rather than investing them in improving capacity).

And now we have the rot in HE. The sector has been forced – since the Tory government came into power in 2010 – to operate like a business which is now, 12 years later, bringing many great institutions to their knees.

The narrative we are sold from management is one of declining student numbers. Yet this is not what we see on the ground in our classrooms, where we’re once again oversubscribed. I teach and direct a course in creative writing: we’re meeting our targets for recruitment across English and humanities degrees. But there is a playbook at work, one we’ve become increasingly used to over the past 12 years of Tory “austerity”, which feels like it is a kind of psychological sleight of hand.

We saw it with the closure of libraries, the cutting of youth services, the salami slicing of arts funding. There isn’t enough money, it says, to fund “soft” subjects and we need an education sector fit for the future – except whose future, and on whose terms? This really is the moot point.

In the first breathless paragraphs of the executive summary of the government’s “levelling up” white paper, it mentions the “vibrantly creative arts sector” which contributes to the “unparalleled success story” of the United Kingdom, while acknowledging that “not everyone shares equally in the UK’s success”.

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It cites levelling up as a “moral, social and economic programme” – so you’d think the government, led by Michael Gove, would be beating a path to our door. We are after all the experts: for nearly 200 years, we have been the premier provider of adult education in London. But as is often the case, the government likes boasting about the arts as one of our soft exports until it comes to funding it – when it becomes a convenient target for cuts.

In truth, it’s a mess that will take deft and visionary management to counter. There is so much opportunity and potential at universities like mine; so many great teachers and illustrious alumni who have passed through our doors on their way to a career change or a life-altering period of study. In an environment where jobs are no longer for life, and upskilling and career changes are the new normal, postgraduate education offers a unique opportunity to deliver for the workers of the new century.

That’s it’s accepting a “managed decline” rather than confidently positioning itself as a model for future learning is the reason that these cuts must be resisted. As we learn when reading all the best literature, in times of crisis we need creative and critical thinkers to help us through the moral maze, to show us that there is always another way.

Julia Bell is a writer and senior lecturer at Birkbeck College, London where she convenes the MA in creative writing and is project director of the Arts Council-funded annual short fiction anthology ‘The Mechanics’ Institute Review’