Humanities and the Politics of Higher Education in 1980s Popular Culture

Abstract

The Conservative government in 1980s Britain made significant cuts to university funding for humanities. This essay examines how responses to these cuts resonated in contemporary television drama set in universities and treats this drama as an important source for interpreting the history of the humanities during the Margaret Thatcher era. The study is embedded in key points of the history of the humanities as disciplines troubled by government policy. It proposes that the points made about both government policy on higher education and the humanities in higher education are multifaceted and nuanced as well as immediate and contemporary, making this form of popular culture an important one for understanding how government actions toward the humanities resonated in popular awareness and how they were received and interpreted. While there was condemnation of government cuts in addition to concomitant defenses of the humanities, drama and its dramatists and producers also identified where exponents of the humanities were weak, sold out, or irrelevant.