Half-Remembrance of Things Past: Critics and Cuts of Old

Abstract

1.2 And hard times did come upon us. In early 1977, during a Labour administration, the BSA had set up a working party to examine the effects of education cuts on sociology and recommended to the forthcoming Annual General Meeting the following: ‘This Association, recognising that the actual and proposed cuts in education affects the discipline of sociology, endorses the recent action of the Executive in setting up a Working Party on education cuts in education budgets and in seeking a meeting with the Minister of State for Education. We instruct the Working party to continue the collection and analysis of data and the formulation of policies to promote the interests of sociology’. (Minute 373 – 25-2-77). The proposed meeting with the Minister proved difficult to obtain and I do not think it ever took place. 1.3 It should be remembered, of course, that sociology as a subject in the university sector had grown remarkably since the early 1960s. In 1961 there were 7 departments of sociology; by 1974 there were 34 ( Halsey 2004 : 126). All of this growth had occurred in the wake of the Robbins Report (1963) and the establishments of new universities in the UK. But now the economic climate was changing and the advent of the Thatcher Conservative administration in 1979 heralded an ideological change that was certainly hostile to sociology as a discipline. The political talk was of cuts in public expenditure and some universities were seen as candidates for closing – very different from the late 1980s when a sharp U-turn was executed and Polytechnics by political fiat were re-labelled universities. 1.4 Many sociologists, certainly of my generation, will be familiar with Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man . Its anti-hero was a sociologist working in a new university, who was amoral, deceitful and exploitative, skilled in deploying a left wing vocabulary to achieve his devious ends. The novel became a television series. I was told of a Vice-Chancellor who adjourned a committee meeting to go and watch the latest instalment. True or not it catches the structure of feeling at the time about the subject and its standing, later to be amusingly portrayed by Maureen Lipman in an advert for BT, when she tells her grandson who has only passed sociology in his exams: ‘well at least it’s an “ology”’. 1.5 But Bradbury also wrote a later satirical novel set in the mid 1980s, simply entitled Cuts . Its opening pages set the scene. ‘It was the summer of 1986, and everywhere there were cuts…… “cut” was the most common noun, “cut” was the most regular verb……They were reducing public expenditure, bringing down interest rates, eliminating over-production and unnecessary jobs….They were chopping at the schools, hewing away at the universities, scissoring at the health service, sculpting the hospitals, shutting down operating theatres….’ 1.6 Surveying the present scene there is a depressing familiarity with all of this. But taken together these two novels do provide indications of the temper of the times. This was the context in which the BSA was working and it offers a way of interpreting the words and actions of the Association at that time. These two things - the attack on sociology as a discipline, which was part cultural, part political, and the regime of cuts, especially in the public sector - were interwoven.