Pedantry and philistine parsimony

The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) was established five years ago to support research and postgraduate study within the UK’s higher education institutions. But to read its website or its voluminous guides to applicants is a depressing experience – even if it is only to familiarise oneself with the hurdles colleagues have to jump to get a bit of money most would not need if they were properly paid in the first place or did not have their creativity consumed by overlarge student bodies and by work assessments of various specious kinds. I am deeply sorry for younger academics today, who will never know how wonderful it used to be to work in a university.

Of course, the AHRB is not the only instance of the degradation to which academics and real scholars have now to submit. The periodic Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) are an insult from beginning to end, run or acquiesced in by the very people – professors and the like – who should have known better from the start.