Do the Arts and Humanities need to justify their existence?

There has been a recent controversy in the UK over proposed cuts to university Arts and Humanities budgets (see here, here, here). These cuts are to the scale of £600 million by 2013 and are joined with a call for stronger ties between universities and business. There are also moves to make research funding depend upon the 'impact' of previous research in that university department (see here). The moves have been very unpopular with researchers in Arts and Humanities and prompt questions about whether it is right to measure these areas in terms of their contributions to the world.

In my view, the Arts and Humanities must ultimately be judged in terms of what they bring to the world. The money that is spent on these fields could instead be directly saving lives if spent on the health budget, or advancing science and technology and we do need a positive reason to spend it on the Arts and Humanities. That being said, the Arts and Humanities as a whole have delivered an immense amount of value. They have helped to let us think about big issues, to learn from the past, and to foster deeply important social change such as women's liberation.

However, the real problem is that such benefits are very diffuse and difficult to measure. The impacts take place over decades or centuries and are not traceable to a single invention. This means that simple attempts to measure 'impact' will often push researchers to look to short-term measurable approaches rather than core research and it is quite unclear whether this will actually produce more impact. It may well just distort the field, making it more self-concious and less beneficial to the public in the long run.

Researchers in the Arts and Humanities should thus oppose the details of the measures but not the central idea of striving to add value to the world in the long run.