I have written previously for The Critic about the closure of Music departments in British universities and it gives me no pleasure to be revisiting the issue. Unfortunately, the domino effect that started two years ago is gathering pace, and with one well-respected department after another facing the axe, this small subject is now in a state of existential peril. There are, I believe, still things that can be done to save Music as an academic discipline but the window of opportunity is narrowing.
Oxford Brookes University announced the closure of its Music BA in 2023, with some staff, including me, being made redundant the following year. (Others are currently “teaching out” the course for the last cohort of students.) Cardiff University, to the shock of many, then also threatened to close Music. Eventually it backtracked, but staff members remain in a state of uncertainty in terms of future course content and job security.
Now the University of Nottingham, which states that “we offer exceptional research-led teaching”, has announced that it will be suspending its Music degree. The Russell Group university has been teaching Music since it opened in 1881, its current degree programme is described by the Royal Musical Association as “one of the most attractive and appealing in the UK”, and the department acts as a hub for musical activities that benefit the wider city.
But there is yet more to come. The media has not yet picked up on the fact that Northumbria University has also now quietly closed applications to its Music degree. This is a new course, which admitted its first students only five years ago. Staff with excellent research profiles were appointed and I remember thinking this was a heartening vote of confidence for classical music in particular, an area that other universities were conspicuously sidelining.
Northumbria often recruits students from widening-participation backgrounds, some of whom have missed out on high-quality instrumental/vocal tuition or formal music education in school. Many want to give something back to society. Teaching opportunities are built into the course, and the department has been actively working to address an acute shortage of music teachers in schools in the North East.
No official statement on this proposed closure has been released but we can expect the same line from Northumbria’s management as from everywhere else. Universities say there are simply not enough applicants, that courses are not cost-effective, therefore programmes must close. Some of the blame for this can be laid at the door of successive governments, who have failed to support formal and informal music education in schools, thereby cutting off the pipeline of potential applicants. But universities, equally, have hardly been putting in much effort to make a positive case to the wider world about the intrinsic value of arts and humanities programmes.
With even Russell Group universities abandoning Music, it does not seem far-fetched to imagine that in a few years time it will be offered only by a handful of institutions: Oxford, Cambridge, perhaps Bristol, Durham and KCL. And even that may be optimistic. There will also be conservatoires, but their programmes are entirely different, providing high-level specialist training for future professional musicians rather than academic degrees that prepare graduates for a wide range of careers.
There is a sign over one of the doors in the quadrangle of the Bodleian Library in Oxford bearing the words “Schola Musicae”. Music has been discussed in British universities since Medieval times. It seems unthinkable that the contemporary higher-education sector may simply shrug and allow the subject to fade away. Low-grade, quasi-vocational courses in music technology, musical theatre or “the creative industries” will not suffice as alternatives.
So what is to be done? I know from personal experience that petitions and letters cut little ice with a determined management. Supportive statements from scholarly societies offer the welcome reassurance that someone has your back but rarely achieve much else. Threatened departments need something more. Leading bodies such as the British Academy, together with senior academics from our top universities, need to go to Parliament to address relevant All-Party Parliamentary Groups, to exhort sympathetic MPs and Peers to raise the matter in Parliament of the grave threat to small but important academic disciplines.
The current government purports to care about arts education. It has made a song and a dance about the steps it is taking to allow more schoolchildren to pursue subjects like Music and Drama to GCSE and beyond. But it needs to wake up to what is happening in universities. Does Bridget Phillipson know what is going on, including in her home patch of Tyne and Wear? If things carry on as they are, there will be very few opportunities for young people to study Music at university, and therefore hardly anybody training as music teachers, and the whole system will then be stuck in a virtual cycle of decline.
Sometimes all a struggling department needs to get things back on track is a little time, support and creative thinking
But universities have to be willing to do their part. Too many are run by faceless bureaucrats who seem inexplicably hostile to the life of the mind. Hubris has led many of them, including Nottingham, to embark on ambitious unaffordable building projects that are little more than Vice Chancellors’ vanity projects. Now that the foreign student market on which they have come to depend is contracting, many are having to find money in a hurry, and in order to do this they are scrutinising spreadsheets and striking a line through the “little subjects”.
For all the faux-regretful platitudes, nowhere does there seem to be much genuine remorse or accountability. Some universities have been underinvesting in arts subjects for years. Music’s decline as an academic discipline is not an inevitability. At UC Berkeley in the US, the fastest-growing major on campus is currently Music and demand is also exploding for Film Studies and English Literature. Sometimes all a struggling department needs to get things back on track is a little time, support and creative thinking. University managers need to be reminded forcefully of their core responsibilities and instructed by government to get their house in order. The approach, as regards threatened subjects from Music to Modern Languages, should be to fix, not to fold.
