'Degrees marketed as preparation for artistic employment need to provide credible evidence of graduate outcomes. Yet, as Pierre-Michel Menger has demonstrated, artistic labour markets are characterised by precarious employment, highly unequal earnings, multiple occupations and unpredictable demand. UK data found only 42.1 per cent of performing arts graduates (a category that includes music) working full-time 15 months after graduating, compared with 56.4 per cent across all subjects. One in five of those working were in retail, catering or bar jobs, and even after 10 years, music graduates were earning a lower average salary (£31,300) than a typical graduate earns after five. As I argued in Times Higher Education in 2023, the advent of AI adds further uncertainties, especially for routine creative production, while increasing the premium on advanced technique and artistic perception. Some vocational provision might therefore be better delivered through specialist institutions, short courses or modular study. Scholarly education in the arts has a different purpose and need not be justified principally by direct entry to artistic employment.' timeshighereducation.com/dep…

'There are harder questions, too, associated with an increasing “vocational turn”. Courses principally preparing students for producing recordings, commercial performance, or musical theatre need professional experience much more than PhDs or academic publications. There are some staff who offer both (I like to think of myself in that category), but these are definitely the exception – and neither achievement alone guarantees teaching ability. Universities need to ask whether research-oriented staffing models are necessarily appropriate for this type of provision. All this matters to the defence of the arts and humanities. Growth in courses on music production or commercial performance – or in creative writing or commercial design – does not necessarily amount to growth in the scholarly study of music, literature or art. And the closure of courses or whole music departments supporting demanding historical and analytical work, such as Nottingham’s, is not offset because another university recruits more students to vocational courses. Tellingly, Nottingham plans to maintain some music-related research within its School of Computer Science.' timeshighereducation.com/dep…

‘As Alexandra Wilson [@amwilson_opera ] writes in her new book, Culture Vultures: When Activism Meets the Arts, “Young people tend to choose to study arts subjects at university because music, literature or drama is their personal enthusiasm”. But “why will anyone want to study an art form they are told is elitist or bound up with inequality?” Students interested principally in such questions might better choose politics, sociology or cultural studies, where they can encounter a broader body of knowledge, stronger theoretical and methodological foundations, and arguments tested across different subjects and settings.’

‘The pressures on scholarly music education also raise the question of how effectively the research community is defending its distinctive intellectual contribution. The Vanderbilt-Washington University music report offers an indication of changing disciplinary priorities in the US. It found mentions of canonical composers in meeting documents of the American Musicological Society (AMS) fell from 59.7 per 10,000 words in 2001-05 to 12.2 in 2021-25, and that 47.9 per cent of 505 papers at the 2025 AMS meeting were framed primarily in terms of political, social or identity issues, with only 8.5 per cent primarily formal or analytical. An equivalent investigation is needed in the UK. My own preliminary application of the report’s keyword tests to RMA conference programmes and books of abstracts, over a shorter period, gives a more mixed result. Between 2016-20 and 2021-25, vocabulary of social justice and activism rose from 1.5 to 5.7 occurrences per 10,000 words, gender and feminism from 4.7 to 7.7 and race from 0.3 to 1.8. But mentions of canonical composers also rose, from 19.4 to 21.2, and analytical vocabulary remained relatively stable. These are keyword frequencies, not classifications of individual papers, and a wider survey would be needed for firmer conclusions. Nonetheless, this evidence points to UK musicology having retained more of its core than its US counterpart, even if some of the vocabulary is moving in a similar direction. This makes it especially important that the discipline’s representative bodies make the case for that core. When weighed against other disciplines, the distinctive intellectual content of music serves as its primary justification, rather than its capacity to serve as a vehicle for wider social and political critique, amply offered by other disciplines.’

My latest for @timeshighered , the longest piece published with them so far. Here I look at the very difficult question of sustainability of some arts and humanities subjects, with music as a case study. This draws upon a wide range of HESA data, both publicly available and also obtained through special request for more granular analysis. ‘Having watched a range of UK music departments and programmes close over more than two decades, I understand the feelings. The losses are real, and universities’ claims of financial necessity need proper scrutiny. But the value of a discipline does not justify maintaining every existing department and programme. And while the fate of university departments is rarely decided on the basis of what the national health of a discipline requires, that does not entail that every closure is bad when viewed from that perspective. And it is a perspective that academics, as well as university managements, have to consider seriously. […] As a musician and musicologist, I want proper scholarly music education to survive. But this requires asking questions about how many students choose to study it, how thinly they are distributed, and what their courses actually contain. And the answers reveal a more uneven picture than a simple assault on the arts – and distinguish the preservation of scholarly enquiry from the expansion of vocational training. […] Nottingham recorded 80 undergraduate music FPE in 2024-25, the lowest number for any Russell Group department; Birmingham and Bristol each had 95. Even lower numbers were found elsewhere in that year, including Bangor (75), Kingston (65), Anglia Ruskin (60), Keele (50), Liverpool John Moores (40), Brunel (35) and Derby (25), most of them consistent with preceding years. Small cohorts do not by themselves establish financial non-viability but will always raise questions. […] This mix of scholarly and vocational courses means that when you are debating whether there is too little or too much provision, it is important to distinguish the two. As I have previously argued, musical scholarship and professional training can interact fruitfully but are not interchangeable in their purpose or staffing requirements. Interviewed by Ivan Hewett in 2024, Katharine Ellis, professor of music at Cambridge, bemoaned university managers for overlooking music’s connections with philosophy, science, history and religion. But this description scarcely captures the broader music HE sector. A separate analysis of more granular Hesa data on undergraduate entrants from 2016-17 to 2020-21, categorising courses by their titles and published descriptions, reveals how far provision has shifted towards the vocational. In 2020-21 university departments specifically (not private providers, conservatoires or the few others) admitted 7,072 students to music-related courses, of whom 2,337 were in production, technology and sound; 645 in popular, jazz, folk and commercial music; 1,509 in musical theatre; and 220 in other performance-related courses. Together, those students accounted for two-thirds of all music students by FPE. […] Even courses that are not explicitly vocational are not always guaranteed to feature sustained musicological study – meaning historical, analytical, critical or ethnomusicological enquiry, supported by engagement with scholarship and substantial assessed work. Many combine significant vocational and non-vocational elements. We must distinguish available options, compulsory scholarly sequences and the students who actually take them. A few contextual lectures or reflective commentary accompanying a practical project are not equivalent. […]’ timeshighereducation.com/dep…

My new long piece for @timeshighered . Asks some difficult questions about how many departments and courses we can really sustain in music and other arts and humanities subjects. Using extensive HESA data. timeshighereducation.com/dep…

My interview from tonight is at about 35’50” on here.

My interview from this evening on the independent inquiry into Jason Arday and Cambridge. Also with new information on my FOI requests to Glasgow and Liverpool John Moores Universities.

‘You genocidal cunts’. The context is Jewish children being mocked with talk of gas chambers