Katherine Stiles

My latest for @timeshighered , the longest piece published with them so far. Here I look at the very difficult question of sustainability of some arts and humanities subjects, with music as a case study. This draws upon a wide range of HESA data, both publicly available and also obtained through special request for more granular analysis. ‘Having watched a range of UK music departments and programmes close over more than two decades, I understand the feelings. The losses are real, and universities’ claims of financial necessity need proper scrutiny. But the value of a discipline does not justify maintaining every existing department and programme. And while the fate of university departments is rarely decided on the basis of what the national health of a discipline requires, that does not entail that every closure is bad when viewed from that perspective. And it is a perspective that academics, as well as university managements, have to consider seriously. […] As a musician and musicologist, I want proper scholarly music education to survive. But this requires asking questions about how many students choose to study it, how thinly they are distributed, and what their courses actually contain. And the answers reveal a more uneven picture than a simple assault on the arts – and distinguish the preservation of scholarly enquiry from the expansion of vocational training. […] Nottingham recorded 80 undergraduate music FPE in 2024-25, the lowest number for any Russell Group department; Birmingham and Bristol each had 95. Even lower numbers were found elsewhere in that year, including Bangor (75), Kingston (65), Anglia Ruskin (60), Keele (50), Liverpool John Moores (40), Brunel (35) and Derby (25), most of them consistent with preceding years. Small cohorts do not by themselves establish financial non-viability but will always raise questions. […] This mix of scholarly and vocational courses means that when you are debating whether there is too little or too much provision, it is important to distinguish the two. As I have previously argued, musical scholarship and professional training can interact fruitfully but are not interchangeable in their purpose or staffing requirements. Interviewed by Ivan Hewett in 2024, Katharine Ellis, professor of music at Cambridge, bemoaned university managers for overlooking music’s connections with philosophy, science, history and religion. But this description scarcely captures the broader music HE sector. A separate analysis of more granular Hesa data on undergraduate entrants from 2016-17 to 2020-21, categorising courses by their titles and published descriptions, reveals how far provision has shifted towards the vocational. In 2020-21 university departments specifically (not private providers, conservatoires or the few others) admitted 7,072 students to music-related courses, of whom 2,337 were in production, technology and sound; 645 in popular, jazz, folk and commercial music; 1,509 in musical theatre; and 220 in other performance-related courses. Together, those students accounted for two-thirds of all music students by FPE. […] Even courses that are not explicitly vocational are not always guaranteed to feature sustained musicological study – meaning historical, analytical, critical or ethnomusicological enquiry, supported by engagement with scholarship and substantial assessed work. Many combine significant vocational and non-vocational elements. We must distinguish available options, compulsory scholarly sequences and the students who actually take them. A few contextual lectures or reflective commentary accompanying a practical project are not equivalent. […]’ timeshighereducation.com/dep…