Monty Python
Are modern academics reworking a Monty Python sketch?
In the Four Yorkshiremen sketc, a quartet of comfortably off Yorkshiremen, drinking Château de Chasselas, seek to outdo one another in recollections of an impoverished childhood.
One claims to have lived in a cardboard box. Another immediately counters: “We used to dream of living in a cardboard box”. And so it goes on, ever more preposterous, through eating tar from the road, to getting up to work before you’d gone to bed. (Now that’s something many vice-chancellors can identify with.) And finally the flourish: “If you tell the young people of today that, they won’t believe you”.
The Guardian writer overhears the academics saying “We’re modelling 5% cuts”. Another intervenes: “5%, oh, we used to dream of 5%, we’re modeling 10%”; and then another, “10% – luxury! We’re modeling 15%”. And so it goes on, until someone says, without apparent irony, that they are modeling 25%.
Of course, all this might be going on, but is it real and is it helpful to parade it? The cuts to the system in the 1980s were 15%, from a higher baseline of funding, and the consequences were devastating. It took a generation to recover, and the current government should still claim credit for its unprecedented investment in the research base and its courage in legislating for (but not quite introducing) variable fees. The pall of the 1980s cuts hung over the sector for two decades.”