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Thematic Article
Introduction: the state of the university, the university and the state
Abstract
Today the purpose of a university education is under question. Should it provide technicians and workers for productivity and international competition? Should it be a liberal education, interdisciplinary and problem-solving, preparing informed subjects/citizens for democratic decision-making? Should it be private, focussed on vocational training, funded by tuition from the rich, in institutions founded by philanthropists or entrepreneurs? Should it be public, managed as a bureaucratic corporation, with a parafaculty of public relations and advertising specialists, a driver of global enterprise? Or should it be mentored like a guild or college by self-motivating and self-regulating professionals who have internalised the means and mechanisms of their disciplines? Have we moved from provincial institutions training local elites to global institutions recruiting international talent? From the perspective of the student, should it prepare for a professional workforce or prepare for a fulfilling life and a good society? Will it continue to prepare for both?
Ideological answers to these questions are rampant and global, not at all confined to Higher Education in the United Kingdom. As we go to press, a new government in the UK has offered détente on the Culture Wars and is attempting to reassure international students that they are again welcome. Yet such assurances arrive without the government committing to budgets for institutions ‘exiting the market’ (Hogan 2024, ‘UKRI plans for “scenario of a university exiting the market”’. Research Professional News/ Research Fortnight 4 September 2024). In October 2024, Fellows of the British Academy organized a private series of panels on ‘Recent Closures and Threats of Closure in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Opening Up’ with the goal of advising ways for universities to economise without losing essential aspects of education for a good society. Some of the presentations are collected here, with this Introduction providing some geopolitical, political economic, and historical contexts. This article is published in the thematic collection ‘On recent closures and threats of closure in the Humanities and Social Sciences’, edited by Regenia Gagnier.
Keywords
closuresglobalinterdisciplinaryliberalprivateproblem-solvingproductivitypublicuniversityeducationdemocracyAt least there is a tolerably general agreement about what an University is not. It is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings. It is very right that there should be public facilities for the study of professions. It is well that there should be Schools of Law, and of Medicine, and it would be well if there were schools of engineering, and the industrial arts. … But these things are no part of what every generation owes to the next, as that on which its civilization and worth will principally depend. … Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians. … Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses.
J.S. Mill, ‘Inaugural Lecture’ 1867
J.S. Mill wasn’t simply an eloquent epistemologist and theorist of liberalism and political economy, he was a practising politician, an MP for Westminster. In his inaugural address to the University of Saint Andrews (1867), the topic of which was the content and purpose of a university education, Mill proposed science, ethics (in which he included politics), and aesthetics, or the true, the good, and the beautiful. He specifically defined aesthetics as the education of the feelings through the culture of poetry and art. Mill claimed that commercial money-getting caused Britain, unlike Europe, to undervalue the arts. It was the British character to be moral in small things but to lack a noble purpose and a larger vision. An aesthetic education was needed that would inspire exalted feelings and the kind of idealism that would lift the British toward richer lives and a more harmonious whole than the business of getting on had to that point allowed. The function of aesthetics was to provide aesthetic feeling to soothe the mind and to harmonise humankind’s multiform needs and capacities as they became increasingly subjected to the demands of the marketplace (Mill 1984: 215–58).
Today the purpose of a university education is again under question. As we go to press, a new government in the UK has offered détente on the Culture Wars and is attempting to reassure international students that they are again welcome. Yet such assurances arrive without the government committing to budgets for institutions ‘exiting the market’ (Hogan 2024). It also appears that, after the previous government’s assault on the Humanities as ‘low-value courses’, A-level students’ interest may be rising again. Given that the new British government has more urgent funding issues—NHS, foodbanks and schools for children, care homes, housing—than universities, Fellows of the British Academy have had discussions about the futures of our disciplines during a time of economic constraints, whether due to tuition freezes and inflation or to a hostile environment to international students and their dependents leading to a decline in student visas. In October 2024, we met in a series of private panels on ‘Recent Closures and Threats of Closure in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Opening Up’ with the goal of advising ways for universities to perhaps economise without losing essential aspects of education for a good society. With a new government with an ethos of public service rather than hostility to Humanities and Social Sciences, we expect that students will return to these subjects. Demographic changes will lead to their growth, and anticipated revisions to secondary education level syllabi will lead to more study in subjects like global languages and literatures. Affiliations between the skills they instil and technology are at a premium, as are the skills of creative arts industries.
We offer advice to Vice-Chancellors, Senior Managers, Councils, Heads of units, and academics generally on how to secure Higher Education (HE) in times of economic constraint, even as we reassure students, parents, and potential students and parents that HE still has an essential role in democratic societies. When we must all be concerned about the rise of misinformation, wilful distortion, the lack of an agreed standard of fact, threats of oligarchy to public services and governance, and the decline of informed citizens/subjects in democratic decision-making, we offer unified, interdisciplinary, problem-solving support.
Before we turn to the articles deriving from the 2024 panels, we can confirm that ideological answers to the question of what universities are for are rampant and global, not at all confined to Higher Education in the UK. In the United States, forty-three of fifty states have disinvested in HE since 2008 and many are looking toward private online tutorials. (One former Chief Executive Officer of Coursera1 is optimistic that online courses will prepare everyone for serial jobs throughout their working life, with access to liberal arts ‘well into retirement’ ([Levin 2024]).) In the People’s Republic of China (PRC) 40 million students are enrolled in university, now 60 per cent of the college-aged cohort, on courses integrating the arts with science and technology. In India, where half of the world’s university-age population reside, 41 million students are enrolled, with increasing competition between the old public institutions and new privately funded institutions ‘deemed to be’ universities (Daedalus 2024: 7, 92, 136) with this still leaving 72 per cent or 71 million not enrolled at all. The PRC prefers the ‘whole-person’ approach; the US is experimenting with diversifying markets and services (Kirschenbaum & Raley 2024); India provides models for employment and for a liberal education. And such national projects are currently complicated by a new rhetoric on whether neoliberal ‘open economies’ can be reconciled with ‘social democracies’, or whether ‘authoritarian populist’ regimes and ‘illiberal democracies’ will undermine recent attempts to internationalise Higher Education.
There have been some noble ideals for public education in our histories. The Owenite Socialists in 1838 proposed that housework should be performed by children of eleven years or younger, when their sociability is strong and their energy high. The ‘production of wealth’ would be the responsibility of those aged between twelve and twenty-one, while its ‘preservation and distribution’ would be performed by everyone aged twenty-two to twenty-five. The ‘formation of the character of the rising generation’, that is, the education of the young, would be the responsibility of those aged twenty-five to thirty-five; at thirty-five community residents would shoulder the burden of government, which they would carry until middle age. At forty-five, however, they would be freed for artistic or intellectual pursuits, tours of other communities, and so on. At each stage, women would perform exactly the same tasks as men (see Gagnier 2000: 79–80, citing Taylor 1983: 52). Later, in preparation for the social transformation to a society of highly moral people focussed on the collective good, Lenin proposed free and equal access to education for all, specialised training, Marxist humanities, foreign languages, and physical education (see Frumin & Platonova 2024). Today, worrying about whether academic freedom will survive ‘authoritarian regimes’, Michael Ignatieff still believes that ‘Universities exist to teach people to think for themselves, in order to become autonomous individuals and responsible citizens’ (2024: 199). And the learning outcomes lauded by the private enterprise Minerva are self-management and wellness, interpersonal engagement, professional development, civic responsibility, and intercultural competence (282).
While for some years in the UK, the ideology has been that only STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) contributed to productivity and growth, the evidence has always been that students with humanities degrees do secure jobs with salaries comparable to those in science, engineering, and medicine. And humanities degrees are central to digital information technologies and culture industries in which the UK is prominent. This is demonstrated on the British Academy’s SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy/Environment) Observatory (2022). In the United States, the National Endowment for the Humanities is the only federal agency directly charged with funding research in the humanities, whereas science, health, and technology fields have the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 2022, the NEH spent $20 million; the NSF alone in the same year spent $7.16 billion (Krebs 2023). Nonetheless, the median annual earning of all Bachelor degrees in the US is $78,000 while a BA’s in English is $76,000 and that of all Bachelor degrees plus a graduate degree is $86,000, while a BA English plus graduate degree is $83,000. A high school diploma earns approximately $43,000 (ADE Ad Hoc Committee on English Majors’ Careers 2024). While there is no danger that we in the humanities are not preparing a workforce, the dream of a universal education for a good society is endangered. The question for the world is whether education is for a good society of informed citizens/subjects (democratic or not), or solely for a workforce.
The official and largest professional organisation for languages and literature study in the US, the Modern Language Association (MLA), is ringing the most alarmist bells to date about the decline of liberal education and the rise of authoritarian regimes. In the lead article of an MLA Newsletter entitled ‘Your Democracy Needs You (and the Humanities)’, the MLA’s Executive Director Paula M. Krebs writes:
Maryland in early 2022 started a disturbing trend by dropping its degree requirement for most state jobs. Twelve other states have so far followed suit, and some employers have done the same. … Both the focus on salary and vocationalism and the focus on particular skills feed a view of society that is profoundly cynical and profoundly anti-intellectual. And both cynicism and anti-intellectualism mark the current tolerance for a slide into authoritarianism in this country. … Who is served when a population is not trained to analyze ideas, to critique, to communicate effectively, or to understand cultures other than their own? … The only beneficiaries of the narrowing of the public’s expectations around higher education are those who see no value in the ability to understand and critique and those who are actively working to turn young people into passive consumers of goods and information rather than active interpreters or creators. (Krebs 2024)
As the US donors to its new President are currently interfering in the British public domain, we might recall earlier concerns about following US American models. At the same time as Mill’s Inaugural, another Victorian educator, Matthew Arnold, was composing his own tract on national culture as an antidote to anomie, anarchy, and class conflict, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869). For Arnold, ‘The central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty … but as feudalism dies out … we are in danger of drifting toward anarchy’ (117). A State was needed ‘to control individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals’ (117, see Gagnier 2010: 33–9). An intense observer of US American ‘progress’, Arnold felt that its celebrated spirit of democracy had degenerated to economic individualism, massification, the ‘fanaticism’ of religious sects, and violence. Similarly, in 1900, in an essay cited by US State Departments, the Uruguayan cosmopolitan José Enrique Rodó praised the North Americans for their freedoms, industry, and culture of work that had established the dignity of labour; their faith in universal education; and their optimism and confidence in the future. But he nonetheless concluded that they were not ‘destined to create the closest approximation of the “perfect state”’ due to their ‘drive toward material expansion in all its forms and the fervent pursuit of well-being that have no object beyond themselves. … their pallid and mediocre materialism’ (Rodó 1988; 1900: 78, 83, see Gagnier 2018: 200–1). This, combined with their leaders being self-interested seekers of profit, would limit them: ‘The political influence of a plutocracy represented by…the monopolizers of production and masters of the economy is undoubtedly one of the most significant features in the recent physiognomy of that great nation’ (84).
The panels on closures and threats of closure
In the UK, the panels reaffirmed public education accessible to all with specific strategies and case studies. They began by considering evidence from the Academy’s SHAPE Observatory, showing maps of endangered areas, where potential students cannot access specific courses within a commutable distance. During the discussion, it became clear that, in addition to formal closures, specific subjects could also be obliterated invisibly through the processes of departmental amalgamation or merger that many of us have experienced. John Barclay’s article focusses on precisely such dangers to small units within very large mergers.
Angela McRobbie (Culture, Media and Performance) gave a lucid account of how the artsy, shabby, intellectual powerhouse Goldsmiths University of London in the neighbourhood of Lewisham, which had attracted students and researchers from around the world and especially from the European Union, had been a victim of Brexit and bigger institutions’ branding, marketing, and competition for luxury student accommodation, leading to mass redundancies, closures, and demoralisation of surviving staff. McRobbie also referred to the impact of the media-led discussions about poor graduate outcomes for arts and humanities graduates that had informed student decisions, often backed up by parents.2 Julia Black (Law) picked up the thread of students as consumers with a full critique of the neoliberal model of HE as providing a private good to individual students and universities as market competitors. Black summarised her contribution to Universities UK’s (1 October 2024) ‘Opportunity, growth and partnership: a blueprint for change’. Rather than treating students as isolated economic actors paying for and consuming private benefits, she argued that universities produce public benefits, including considerable benefits to local communities and their infrastructures, as well as global benefits in terms of research and expertise. As they provide value for money to government and to taxpayers, Black specifically called on government offices to connect between the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; Department for Education; Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; and the Home and Foreign Offices to use the assembled resources of university teaching, research, and impact.
Referencing the casualties of an unbridled ideology of market competition, John Barclay’s article discusses how the expansion of large institutions often led to the decline of smaller ones. Within an institution, staff in small units might be dispersed among much larger units (someone commented how rarely we call them ‘departments’ now). Barclay presents some wise local tactics within specific institutions within larger strategic narratives to support small units and makes a compelling case for the research power and global public good of his own discipline, Theology and Religious Studies. His strategic suggestions include smaller units maintaining visibility by taking leadership roles, their cultivation of a distinct and coherent expertise and identity, and shared goals between the local and translocal. The tactical suggestions include overlapping curricula, development of postgraduate online courses for international students, and intensifying problem-based research.
Margot Finn (Early Modern History) then points out the disconnect between research excellence and closure, showing that many of the highest-ranking departments were precisely those decimated under recent restructurings. Finn also analyses the competitive ethos of the fungible student choice mantra of the previous government that served Russell Group universities that lowered tariffs and thereby undermined the social fabric of their ‘competitors’. And she discusses the opacity of budgets to most staff confronted with ‘artificial deficits’ impossible to track, while the Research Excellence Framework means less than it used to in this time of ‘overbuilding’ of student accommodation.
Building on the British Academy’s 2020 ‘Towards a National Languages Strategy’, Charles Forsdick (Modern Languages and Literatures) has been active in promoting languages across the education cycle and, most excitingly, is now leading a more inclusive movement beyond the traditional teaching of European languages to recognising the real wealth of multilingual Britain in South and East Asian and African languages at home. In case studies in interdisciplinarity, Helen Beebee and Simon Kirchin (Philosophy) spell out threats to Philosophy, but also show how programmes like University of Leeds’ IDEA (Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied) Centre, which sits within the School of Philosophy, Religion, and the History of Science, delivers applied ethics, sustainability, risk, and philosophical issues about AI teaching, research, consultancy, and training to engineering, maths, computing, business, management, medicine, and dentistry. And they discuss students’ appreciation of such courses’ creative and critical thinking. Similarly, in her role as Chair of the English Association, which also oversees English language and literature curricula from primary to Higher Education, Jennifer Richards (Early Modern Languages and Literatures) offers support and advice to departments at risk or threatened with closure, with hard data on jobs and skills throughout the UK. Her ‘practical offer for colleagues in departments at risk …’ should be consulted by Vice-Chancellors and Registrars contemplating reducing their academic workforces.
Academic values: informed, argued, debated (i.e., slow)
In Immediacy (2023), Anna Kornbluh analyses the rise of Creative Writing that corresponds to the decline of universities since the 1980s; the decline of autonomous tenure-track professionals with academic freedoms and job security; and the rise of the corporate, managed university with its buzzword of ‘creative economy’ (Kornbluh 2023). She is writing about the US, but the phenomena she describes may be taken as a warning in the UK. Analysing the speed of a specular society obsessed with self-imaging, with all our demands for instant gratification (‘anti-academic values’), Kornbluh comments on the resulting ‘miserable society’ (46) with its rampant mental health issues and the now widely lauded ‘therapeutic outcomes’ for humanistic study in MBA (Master of Business Administration) degrees promoting ‘self-managing individuals’ (89). (With respect to the UK and our proliferation of students with ‘mental health issues’ and ‘Independent Learning Programmes (ILPs)’, one of my colleagues in Medical Humanities has speculated that in our competitive, anxious-making, and under-resourced environments, students today often feel at risk and insecure, and that the only power they have is the power to claim vulnerability.) In the US, the growth in Creative Writing has coincided with dramatic downsizing in the publishing and journalism industries that has drastically reduced serious investigative journalism, ruinous declines in the percentage of instruction provided by tenured faculty, and the ubiquity of freelance writing entrepreneurs: ‘Professions without experts leave individuals flailing to auto-actualise alone in the society that does not exist’ (69), writes Kornbluh:
Autotheory comports as dexterous academic labor … projecting a fantasy that courting extra-mural audiences can make up for downsizing in the intellectual professions. Its vulnerability enkindles senior academics … imagining eager readerships in a great beyond, and ignites younger academics searching for openings in an economic and professional landscape of foreboding fore-closure; its elasticity bodes a space for young academics to create work and find recognition even though the university as an institution has largely expelled them. Gigification of academic labor crams academic production: manifest your individual take in your individual style with this short-term teaching contract here, this Substack subscriber there. … In this way, [academics] … with fair labor conditions like tenure encounter their dire lack of peer audience, and [those] without fair labor conditions hustle for crossover appeal to eke out a living. (161–2)
These are the material conditions of Non-Academic Impact: ‘Those accelerated university-press short books, along with open access journals, overnight cultural criticism, and administrative imperatives for “public humanities,” comprise new highways for circulable scholarship, while circulation pressures issue from anti-academic ideology and defunding of higher education, from “culture wars” and populist rhetoric, and from university mission creep.’(162)
The articles included here have not come from speed, market competition, fungibility, or fear, but from experience as Heads of units/departments, Deans, Vice-Chancellors, Presidents, and, more importantly, as public servants who love their disciplines, avocations, colleagues, and students. Hence their ‘aura’, defined by Walter Benjamin as ‘presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin 1936). Most academics in the humanities and social sciences tend to agree with Mill on ‘what every generation owes to the next, as that on which its civilization and worth will principally depend’, that is, that universities are for making thoughtful people, better informed voters, and better societies. Mill’s formulation can also apply to degrees, against single honours and for more interdisciplinary, problem-based learning. Again, most academics in the humanities and social sciences are receptive to such inclusive degrees and indeed are teaching on them. My own department, English and Creative Writing, has pathways in English literature, world literatures in English and in translation, creative writing, critical theory (defined as ‘the self-clarification of the wishes and struggles of the age’),3 ecocriticism and environmentalism, gender and sexuality, digital humanities, and medical humanities (Gagnier 2024). Elsewhere across the disciplines, as at Leeds in the article below, Philosophy, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science are coming together to explore and model how the mind works.
A peer reviewer of this collection suggested that it needs a response from a natural scientist. We would like one. As the humanities and social sciences incorporate interdisciplinary curricula, will the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine do likewise? While there have been wonderful exceptions, in my forty+ years of experience in universities, natural scientists tend to stay in their labs and apply for grants to maintain them. The corporate university now wants all of us to do the same in our offices, docile bodies generating income. The wisest Vice-Chancellor I know, a real Millian, once confided that V-Cs know that the troublemakers, those who challenge them and those on university picket lines, are overwhelmingly in the humanities and social sciences. Will the sciences respond that they too are in the service of well-informed, healthy, and just democratic societies, or will they serve as Mill’s professional schools for job training, disinclined to engage beyond their specialisms? We invite a response.
But by far the most important, and most urgent, issue for Higher Education—after decades of targeting a phantom ‘educated elite’ to distract from the real economic elites with power, and after telling the young that universities did not get them jobs—is now to attract potential students from groups who never expected to attend university and whose parents do not encourage it. This is the consensus of the teachers I know, that the urgent goal is less to broaden university curricula than to raise the aspirations of pupils who feel that they do not have the luxury of a few years of study. Who may never have had the opportunity at home to debate economic policy or to consider the real contributions—cultural as well as economic—that immigrants have made and continue to make to Britain, those who may never have been given the opportunity to feel part of a safe, flourishing, multicultural society. But this would require a society that supported education for all, and that would honour all professions and trades—Mill’s shoemakers, builders, artists, merchants, manufacturers, public servants. That would be a good society.
References
ADE Ad Hoc Committee on English Majors’ Careers (2024), ‘English major career preparation and outcomes’, MLA Newsletter, 56(1): 1–2.
ArnoldM. (1869), ‘Culture and Anarchy with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays’, in SuperR.H. (ed.), The Complete Prose Works, Volume V (University of Michigan Press) 1965.
BenjaminW. (1936), in ArendtH. (ed.), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Schocken/Random House). Translated Harry Zohn. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.
British Academy (2020), ‘Towards a national languages strategy’. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications/towards-national-languages-strategy-education-and-skills/
British Academy (2022), SHAPE observatory. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/policy-and-research/british-academy-shape-observatory/
Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2024. Advances and Challenges in International Higher Education, Volume 153(2) (Spring 2024).
FruminI. & PlatonovaD. (2024), ‘The socialist model of higher education: the dream faces reality’, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Advances and Challenges in International Higher Education, 153(2): 178–193. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02073.
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GagnierR. (2018), Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98419-3.
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HoganS. (2024), ‘UKRI plans for “scenario of a university exiting the market”’, Research Professional News/Research Fortnight. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2024-9-ukri-plans-for-scenario-of-a-university-exiting-the-market
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1
Coursera is one of the startup platforms that from around 2012 began to provide MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for universities. Unlike edX, a nonprofit joint venture of MIT and Harvard, Coursera was a for-profit startup founded by two Stanford professors. While virtual courses predate MOOCs by four decades (see the Open University on UK television from 1971), MOOCs offered famous professors from top universities, asynchronous attendance, massive scale, and low cost.
2
McRobbie’s talk was based on an already published Verso Blog entitled ‘A Goldsmiths Diary’ (5 April 2024).
3
At the first meeting of the seminar, each student names their own wishes and struggles. The tutors then devise a syllabus with the very best readings (from any time or place) on precisely these topics. Recently these have included climate change, mental health and work/life balance, global inequalities, political corruption, generational selfishness, gender roles and gender neutrality, and so forth. Students then discuss, research, and write on the wishes and struggles of their age, producing some of the best work in the degree. Critical Theory modules consistently show the highest student satisfaction.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a03
Published on: 20 March 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 1619
Article download count: 31
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Gagnier, R. (2025), ‘Introduction: the state of the university, the university and the state’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(1): a03 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a03Crossref
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Received
October 2022
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May 2023
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July 2023
Reflections on History closures Margot Finn
This intervention uses UK university History redundancies as an optic for exploring the broader issue of closures and restructuring in SHAPE (and STEM) subjects. (SHAPE stands for social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy, in contrast to the science, technology and mathematics subjects of STEM). It focuses on four topics. The first is the problematic nature of the data we have to analyse these developments. The second is the financial drivers (including perverse incentives) that shape redundancies and closures. The third is the ‘lumpy’ institutional impact of closures nationally. Finally, the intervention asks how these changes may affect student choice and the wider health of academic disciplines in the UK. This article is published in the thematic collection ‘On recent closures and threats of closure in the Humanities and Social Sciences’, edited by Regenia Gagnier.
20 March 2025
Editors’ Introduction to Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12, Issues 1 & 2 Fiona Williams, Elizabeth Edwards, Andrew Hadfield
The Editors reveal their ambitions for the newly relaunched Journal of the British Academy, including an explanation of the types of articles that it will contain in future. There is also a description of the contents of the double issue with which the Journal is being relaunched.
22 May 2024
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