The STEM-ification of Art (What Happened to Art Schools (2))

n 2013 Jose Ferreira, founder of Knewton, 'the world's leading adaptive learning company', posted a piece entitled 'Don't defund the humanities: they're crucial to the economy too'. The post draws on analysis of funding trends in U.S. education which, at that time, favoured STEM subjects (science technology, engineering, mathematics).[1]

Ferreira urges caution in relation to the STEM-ification of humanities subjects, arguing that the humanities should not be devalued just because they produce individuals with relatively hard to measure skills, such as 'communications skills, critical thinking skills, and multicultural proficiency'.

Ferreira at least attempts to explain what makes the humanities operationally valuable in society, but he also writes from a position in which certain power relations between corporations and citizens are taken as given. His post draws comment suggesting some enthusiasm for a status quo in which the majority of citizens are constrained by the self-serving machinations of powerful commercial and financial players; a status quo in which an ambitious student would necessarily expect their education to help them to a share in such power.

In his analysis, Ferreira cites a U.S. factoid: 'over 65% of [U.S.] elementary school students will end up in jobs that don't yet exist'. To extrapolate, conversely: student choices everywhere, at many levels, must be influenced by jobs markets that are bound to fluctuate between enrolment day and graduation day. Such fundamental uncertainty is problematic for any highly instrumental education policy.

Real-world uncertainty can also be convenient for advocates of humanities disciplines not focused on specfic vocational outcomes, but on endowing students with quailites deemed generally advantageous. It's often easier to show that humanities graduates can be broadly sucessful 'in many walks of life' than to show what their success has to do, specifically, with the discipline they studied at university: what is it about 'Shakespeare' that makes a 'good' civil servant? How does a Fine Art degree make a good lecturer?

Humanities graduates might succeed as much by learning to navigate the selectivist social fields around their disciplines as by the mastery of a specialist disciplinary knowledge ("knowledge" for the humanities being more varied in form and function than the scientific or technical knowledges associated with STEM subjects). Some advocates of the humanities are happy enough with this kind of settlement, especially, perhaps, if they achieved success themselves via a fuzzily-defined socio-disciplinary route.

But what if, today, societies are at a juncture where a greater number of STEM-trained people really are required to administer essential functions? Should we still defend the generalist humanities against encroaching STEM-ification?


I remain attached to the ideal of education for education's sake; or for the sake of increasing the number of educated people in society, whatever their socio-economic roles. Whatever the predictions for future social needs, changes in art education disturb me. This is partly for personal reasons, including a nostalgia for a time when art schools epitomised what today might be seen as a luxurious liberalism. I've commented on this personal/political overlap elsewhere in this blog.[2]

Notwithstanding the limitations of my own perspective, let's imagine that U.K. art education is altered in order to incentivise course applications in the present STEM-friendly culture, perhaps by universities marketing educational packages that appeal to current student choices (however these may be informed). In a decade or two, we could have a U.K. art education no longer loosely aligned with multiple purposes - as it has been for decades - but targetted at students seeking predefined roles in various artistically-inflected industries (music, film, television, games design, advertising) many of which, in their own ways, encourage the STEM-ification of art.

I note that this is a possible outcome; I speculate about whether or not it's to be desired.


In 2014, the U.K. government launched an initiative to encourage enrolment in STEM subjects in UK universities. Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan described the kinds of education required for Britain 'to succeed in the global economy' and for 'the British workforce of tomorrow [...] to have the skills and knowledge to compete [in the future]'. In her speech, Morgan presented the interests of the country as concurrent with those of the generation entering higher education in 2014 and beyond, arguing that STEM subjects would maximise their chances of finding rewarding roles in future society.[3][4][5]

Some of the comment following Morgan's speech exposed a tendency for advocates of the humanities to squeal in non-specific anguish at any hint of an instrumentalist education policy. However, the ability to counter such instrumentalism with a strong argument for the humanities seems almost as out of reach for some, today, as it was for literary critic F.R. Leavis in 1963.

Leavis was famously outraged by C.P. Snow's 1958 lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, in which Snow states (amongst other things) that the lives of the poor might be more radically improved by science and engineering than by modernist literature.[6] Leavis was condemned and mocked by the ascendant liberal left for his over-personalised response to Snow: Two Cultures: the Significance of C.P. Snow.[7] Having studied that text in detail, I find Leavis's attacks on Snow, with their incidental account of an emerging 'publicity created culture' around the arts, more coherent than his advocacy of literature.

I believe there remains today a tendency for advocates of the humanities to band together according to fellow-feeling, rather than strong argument, and thus to perpetuate the impression that those who find a social role in relation to artistic practices are a tribe apart, bound on terms that they cannot readily explain to the outsider or the sceptic.[8]


Often it seems that the science/humanities debate takes place in terms that are either so narrow as to be of little interest in wider society, or so obvious as to not matter very much. In the case of Nicky Morgan's arguments, it is obvious that many selectively-trained, computer-literate people will be required in order to carry out many of the tasks that future societies will depend upon: around energy supply, medical services, various aspects of infrastructure, and so on.

There remains, however, the important political question of the context in which such highly specialised work will be done. For instance, will future engineers and scientists serve in a realm which is largely privatised, or state-regulated? Will they be able to apprehend the common good and exercise judgement in its interests, or will they have to serve the interests of corporate masters whose ethics are vaguely yet unquestioningly bound up with the supposed natural morality of markets?

While ever debates around contemporary art are pursued within narrowly defined social fields, art will have difficulty in credibly claiming that its virtues, values and gains are aligned with the common good. Here art begins from an especially weak position. The outcome of artistic debates is less important, in an immediate material sense, than is the playing out of specialist knowledges in, say, a genetics laboratory, a large hospital, or a nuclear power plant. And society at large might justifiably have little interest in the intellectual culture around art if it is primarily dedicated to authenticating and legitimating art practices that few pursue and even fewer can make a living from.


I drafted this post in 2013, in response to a flurry of debate about independent (and perhaps temporary) art schools not affiliated with universities.[9] Here, it was suggested that the massive hike in U.K. student tuition fees in 2010 had focused minds on what art education, especially, is for. Fees of £9K and above do seem particularly onerous in return for any kind of course that a student might want to take up for its own sake, rather than for a job in an established (supposedly creative) industry.

STEM-ification may serve as a survival strategy for fine art in U.K. universities, especially those at a greater geographical and social distance from the metropolitan art world. STEM-ification is also about fitting in with a state-supported system which government has recently sought to change, in order to 'create a level playing field that will enable private providers to compete on equal terms with public universities'. (One government-sanctioned alternative to public universities in the U.K. is the mega university run by private equity firms[10]). In this context, enrolling on a short, unaccredited course in a private or temporary art school, to engage for a short time with artists and academics who are unconstrained by institutional dictat, might seem like a good idea to a free-thinker.

Whatever the arguments for the STEM-ification of art, it seems possible that fine art in universities has become stranded between some long-established disciplinary territories. Personally, I fear that the unique interplay of the aesthetic and the intellectual in art is too easy to downplay in the name of skimming fine art for aesthetic strategies, tactics and skills for use in other disciplines.

Meanwhile, aesthetic tactics are routinely used in the affirmative culture around neoliberal capitalism. This returns us to art's weak political position in the wider world, for the art market is part of the neoliberal game in which capital flows are bound to be privileged over the sharing of artistic culture. The art market has for decades imposed an anti-progressive orthodoxy on artistic practice, artists being encouraged to repeat themselves (to downplay their intelligence) for however long a signature artistic gesture holds its market value. Public institutions, including academies, are drawn in, protocols of evaluation becoming skewed as repetitious artists are actively authenticated for the canon: a quasi-intellectual process which, under scrutiny, seems antithetical to the idea of progressive knowledge gain definitive of an academic discipline.

In terms of upholding ideals, no-one but the broker comes out of such arrangements looking good.

It has long been routine, then, for artistic work to be resituated in contexts very different to those experienced by the young artist engaging with their discipline at art school. STEM-ification threatens resituating effects within the art school, but is, nevertheless, one aspect only of a longstanding political problematic that can be encapsulated in the following questions: Who says what art is for? How are artistic work and its outcomes to be capitalised, and by whom? And: Which ideals should guide us in addressing such questions?


I acknowledge that the social fields around many artistic practices are problematically exclusive. But I also hope that art education can introduce people to practices that constitute a thinking space for individuals in society; a space that is not sustained merely via its favourable relations with the most powerful economic and institutional forces. I believe that living among citizens who are able to think critically about such forces is almost as important to my quality of life as living among skilled clinicians, data processors, or engineers.


[1] Jose Fereira, 'Don’t Defund Humanities: They’re Crucial to the Economy, Too' http://www.knewton.com/blog/ceo-jose-ferreira/stem-vs-humanities/
[2] What Happened to Art Schools? An Accidental Manifesto. This blog:
http://thismoaning.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/what-happened-to-art-schools-accidental.html
[3] 'Nicky Morgan speaks at launch of Your Life campaign'
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nicky-morgan-speaks-at-launch-of-your-life-campaign
[4] 'Education Secretary Nicky Morgan tells teenagers: Want to keep your options open? Then do science' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-nicky-morgan-tells-teenagers-if-you-want-a-job-drop-humanities-9852316.html
[5] 'Last week's poll: STEM vs humanities, and what education's for', The Engineer, 11 November 2014
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/poll/last-weeks-poll-stem-vs-humanities-and-what-educations-for/1019472.article
[6] C. P. Snow, Stefan Collini, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). (first publ. main text first given as the 1959 Rede Lecture, Cambridge 1959)
[7] F. R. Leavis, 'Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow: Being the Richmond Lecture, 1962 By F. R. Leavis', in Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962.), pp. 27-50.
[8] Paul Smith - Move over, Stem: why the world needs humanities graduates http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/19/humanities-universities-global-stem
[9] David Batty, 'Alternative art schools: a threat to universities?'
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/21/alternative-art-schools-threaten-universities
[10] Stefan Collini, 'Sold Out'. Review of: Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, by Roger Brown, with Helen Carasso and The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, by Andrew McGettigan. London Review of Books 35.20 (2013): 3-12. 24 Oct. 2013 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out

Time-Vampirism at the Free University of Kafkashire: a Cry for Help

f you read this, please send help to the Free University of Kafkashire. Help save FUK from a devils' compact: between Higher Education executives with a mania for top-down control, and I.T. wonks offering ways to exercise it.

The University is becoming sclerotic with process, its once noble purpose overwhelmed by the myriad ways of accounting for every institutional activity in minute detail, without addressing the deeper quality of its human outcomes. The Information Technology revolution has accelerated this life-threatening condition. The creation of imperfect systems to manage almost all University business now outstrips critical discussion and possible rejection of those systems.

This communiqué aims to show the kind of thing that is happening via the example of timetabling at FUK.


The timetabling software used at the Free University of Kafkashire is provided by EduFarm. Here is an extract from their self-appraising online statement: [1]

University timetabling software and resource allocation solutions from EduFarm enable universities to optimize service provision, reduce operating costs, and improve staff and student motivation [...]
With close to 500 users in 25 countries and across 5 continents, EduFarm is a world leader in the provision of software solutions for complex resource scheduling problems. The innovative and dependable scheduling solutions assist in securing vast improvements to student and staff retention, resource optimization, and timetabling challenges.

All staff and students at the Free University of Kafkashire are expected to check their FUK/EduFarm timetables every week. The system allows – and the rule insists – that personal timetables be retrieved regularly, at the cost of unrevealed user-hours. [2]

Rage impotently at why it is necessary for thousands to check their timetables every week.

Once, course activities were more or less known at the beginning of a semester and could be written down in a diary, and subsequent changes would be agreed among colleagues with open diaries. Today, all must regularly consult the innovative and dependable scheduling solution, adopted wholesale by the University in place of direct human interaction. They must do so, especially, because the scheduling solution cannot alert its users – by email or any other means – of any changes that might affect them.

Everyone must bend to the process, and to the imperfections of the process.


Notwithstanding the existence of any rule, many will not check their online timetables every week as long as the following conditions pertain.

In a standard diary or calendar, hours, days and weeks are laid out sequentially in a grid. This form is so familiar now that little or no effort is required to understand its principles of organisation. It is widely understood that scanning such a grid is analogous to scanning a period of time, and when clearly laid out it leads the eye and the mind directly to its contents, rendered in abbreviated everyday language.

With a FUK/EduFarm timetable, time itself is rendered in a such mind-bendingly unintuitive way that the whole point of consulting such a document is confounded.

The FUK/EduFarm system offers a choice between two layouts: 'list' and 'grid'. 'List' shows information in fields: Activity, Module, Type (of activity) Start, End and Duration (of teaching sessions),  Room (in which an activity takes place), and Week (in which an activity occurs). This sounds comprehensive.

Unfortunately, the date on which any scheduled activity is to take place is not shown. Dates are only alluded to in terms of the 'weeks' in which they fall. These are Academic Calendar Weeks, which are numbered independently from real-world ones (although this is not the fault of FUK or EduFarm). The activities shown in 'list' format are not always in chronological order.

This is not really a timetable, because time is not the clear organising principle.

In 'grid' format, much of the information you would expect from a timetable is written in various codes, in tiny print inside plain graphical boxes. The boxes represent blocks of time allocated to teaching sessions in particular rooms. These sessions seem to be correlated with the hours of a (non-specific) day, in a (non-specific) week... until you factor in the tiny-print Academic Calendar Weeks inside each graphical box.

A single box might refer to a single session, or to any number of sessions in the same room: you have to read the tiny-print numbers to work that out. Again, these are the numbers of Academic Weeks, not real-world dates that a person could transcribe at a stroke into a normal diary. However, they are the key representation of how the activities shown in the grid are distributed over a period of time.

The visual order of things in the FUK/EduFarm 'grid' is not governed by the order in which they are scheduled to occur in the semester. If a user requests information for a particular course over, say, an eight week period, the grid will likely show all the information requested within one graphically aggregated "week". This is obviously not like the real world, where weeks occur one after the other, not simultaneously or on top of each other.

This is not a timetable either, again because time is not the clear organising principle. It is an aggregation of information packed within a graphical object connected to the idea of a working week.

It is always possible to work out the date on which any FUK activity is scheduled to take place. The (separate) FUK Academic Calendar shows Academic Weeks correlated with real-world "week-beginning" dates. So, if an activity occurs on Thursday in Week 32, one only has locate Week 32 on the Academic Calendar and count four days from its real-world week-beginning date in order to work out the date on which it should take place.

Such calculations, involving two or three documents, each carrying slightly different information codified in a slightly different way, would be unnecessary were the University to use a standard calendar form, and real-world dates for its affairs.

Today, an already complicated, but manageable, reality has been re-imagined by EduFarm. Returning to their corporate statement: the system described here may or may not reduce operating costs, as its creators claim; but it is difficult to see how it could improve staff and student motivation, unless it is the motivation to express despair. It's a shame that the innovative and dependendable scheduling solution cannot inform its users of changes that might affect them; although it's obviously true that a person forced to carry out several tedious calculations in order to discern every instance of course activity relevant to them is, in a sense, being very definitely 'retained'.

Also, in a manner of speaking, 'scheduling solution' is a well-chosen term for EduFarm's concatenations of form and information that are really not timetables. But 'TimeVampire' would also be a good term. I dream that I hack the EduFarm email servers, where I discover a jokey in-house version of what will become their earnest mission statement:

With an EduFarm TimeVampire, retrieving a daily schedule exercises your mind in new and innovative ways. Every bit of information you might want has been delightfully transformed. The essentials of your world are reborn as Byzantine arcana, with many fascinatingly complex numerological and graphical diversions to keep your mind bright and alive in the workplace. (CEO comment: are these products inspired by the games enjoyed by our programmers, which they wish they were designing, rather than deadly-dull time management sytems for cost-conscious Higher Education farms? Only joking. Strike this part in brackets before publication).


At the Free University of Kafkashire the frustrations of self-organisation can only be increased by the calendars found in the personal sections of the separate online 'FUK-space' sub-system. These remain empty unless individuals manually enter content. But timetable content (for instance) is not then automatically updated when changes affecting it are instigated. The calendars are therefore useless as a way of checking for new things that might affect a personal schedule.

In a similar vein, lecturers may obtain personal Work Plans from their line managers. But these are not 'plans' in any normal sense of the term. They are lists of separate teaching commitments that do not show when or where any of the activities are scheduled to take place. To work this out the alphanumerical codes for every course or module listed on a Work Plan would have to be reconciled with alphanumerical codes on a so-called timetable; which, as I've shown, is itself a kind of Rosetta Stone which has to be translated in multiple dimensions in order to make sense as a timetable.


To summarise, the following invidious systemic factors impinge on all staff and students at the Free University of Kafkashire, at the basic level of organising their time:

- Timetables are designed according to principles which differ from any standard diary or calendar used in the wider world;
- Any person's timetable can change, without their prior knowledge and without their being informed. It is deemed the responsibility of every individual to check every week just in case something has changed on their timetable;
- Timetable checking requires the user to enter the conceptual universe of a timetable designer, read information encoded in a variety of ways, and translate it into a form usable in the real world;
- Individuals are provided with online tools for organising their time, yet these are not integrated with the sources of information most vital to that process of organisation;
- There is a strong suggestion that if anyone fails to grasp the intricacies of any part of these proprietary systems, they are to blame, not the designers of the systems, or their advocates.

The fact that these processes take so long to describe is an indication of just how complicated they have become. Perhaps this is a consequence of different managers needing to represent their own interests, in their own terms, within the University as a whole; tribes and fiefdoms demonstrating their heft within the corporate body, and hence within the scheduling solution.

I speculate that the Free University of Kafkashire is also the victim of an emergent species of computer programmer. I envisage a certain kind of young man, diffused globally, self-dramatised by his sense that multitudes are being made to conform to his own perverse rationalism, regardless of any specific tasks being carried out, or the particular abilities that might make a "scheduled person" valuable (say, to a University).

Whatever the explanation, the result is like a managerial equivalent of the worst post-modern theory: guaranteed to make all who encounter it feel either stupid and inadequate for failing to understand its intricacies, or enraged at having their time wasted on inane and flawed reinventions of the bloody obvious.


Finally, to extrapolate, to imagine:

Entire I.T. sub-systems exist within the Free University of Kafkashire for many purposes besides timetabling (equipment booking; payroll, pension and tax information; library business; etc.). Many FUK employees have to deal daily with several of these sub-systems, each in its own idiosyncratic terms, before they engage with any student or teach anything.

Everyone bending to all those processes, and all those imperfections.

It raises questions about institutional priorities.

The turn to micro-management-by-I.T. suggests that the executive mistrusts its staff. Coincidentally, the instigation of onerous rules for everyone, which are bound to be broken by many, opens a way for the executive to evade censure when the systems it introduces in the name of controlling everything prove inoperable or inefficient.

Can't we call this what it is: control mania and managerial I.T. bloat, inimicable to academic discourse; inimicable, in fact, to a civilised life?

The portals of Hell are agape. Please send help to the Free University of Kafkashire.


[1] This P.R. statement is real (in 2014), but the name of the company has been changed to something  that more transparently represents its theatre of operations.

[2] Quite possibly, EduFarm's sheduling solution logs all the minutes and hours of online engagement, regardless of their usefulness. No doubt this proves that staff and students are "present" – in the same way that EduFarm's two thousand Twitter followers "show" that their products are valued in the wider world.