Higher education is stuffed with overpaid administrators squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of lecturers and focusing on the ‘profitable’ areas of science,technology, engineering and maths. Are the humanities at risk of being wiped out?A war is being waged within the cloistered world of academia, and a war whose repercussions will be felt down through the generations. Long one of Britain’s global success stories,our universities are under attack by an austerity-obsessed government looking to maintain the excellence of our institutions at a fraction of the cost. The dictates of the market economy gain been unleashed upon our once-sacred seats of learning, and academics wear the haunted looks of the terminally battle-scarred. With the threat of further cuts to arrive whichever side wins the general election, or none of the major parties promising to stand in the way of the corporate colonisation of education,the debate has reached an unseemly head, with many academics in open revolt and professional publications full of bilious fulmination.
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Source: theguardian.com