A few years back when I was doing my Masters, the English department was going through cuts. It’s a fairly routine process, as I understand it, in the sense that I could be describing just about any English department anywhere in the world over the past few years. They were going through cuts – and the faculty banded together to make some plans about how they could survive. Plans were tabled for possible new courses. A linguist suggested doing a needs analysis, and a literature lecturer protested. Someone else floated a course on fantasy novels, and one of the poets scoffed “I don’t think we should retreat into fantasy.” It was all standard university politics, with market pressures pushing against the entrenched idealism of the ivory tower. As best I remember they ended up with some new initiatives, some new funding options, and some creative leave-taking to tide things over.

It’s an ongoing process, of course – it’s all still something that’s evolving and maturing. In this past couple months, the department has announced a Masters in Creative Writing, which seems like a positive initiative, but has caused rumblings in certain quarters. Associate Professor Paul Tankard has recently taken to the pages of the local paper to complain about it. His 15th October opinion column, ‘I’m an ardent supporter flying a flag for the arts’, broadly complains about the state of literature and art – it’s very much an old man shouting at clouds. To set the scene, he opens by bragging about how an MC at a school competition referenced one of his passing comments:

“When I went recently to the local schools’ Shakespeare competition, I was asked at the door, in a chatty way, who was I ‘here to support?’

I thought for a second, wondering what was meant, and said, ‘I’m here to support Shakespeare!’

Most of the audience, I realised, had a child or grandchild or sibling performing. Mine was clearly such an original perspective that the lady at the door, who was one of the comperes, mentioned it in her opening remarks.”

Just for my readers who aren’t from New Zealand, which is most of you, Paul was attending the Sheila Winn Shakespeare Festival, a local competition where high school theatre kids act out scenes from Shakespeare. Most of the performances are bad (especially the ones I was in), and most of the audience are family members who figure they may as well wait around after dropping off their spotty teenagers. Paul turned up to that high school theatre competition and announced he had come to support Shakespeare, and then he wrote about it in the paper. Truly a patron of the arts. He continues by bragging about going to some concerts (“the Calefax concert, a little Baroque concert, a Haydn Mass at Knox Church, and the Southern Consort of Voices”), and roasts one of his students, who turned up to a concert for the wrong reason (to support her boyfriend). He’s smug and rude, and he makes you wish the arts would hurry up and die.

All of these antics are roughly in keeping for Paul. I heard him lecture on Harry Potter, I think, where he complained that J.K. Rowling wasn’t quotable (an insane claim when people are selling Not Me Not Hermione merch on Etsy). He has some strong opinions leading off in weird directions. It’s disappointing, because I tend to share his initial concerns. The arts struggle. Rates of reading decline. We saw a report just yesterday on reading in the UK: only some 35% of children say they enjoy reading in their spare time. I’m increasingly worried about the effects of ChatGPT on writing and literacy, especially in an education environment. Students are openly using chatbots to write their essays. I agree there’s a problem, but I don’t think the solution is judging your students for attending concerts.

After those opening comments, Paul moves on to attack the creative writing program. It’s clear that he sees it as capitulating to market pressures, as a further erosion of the ivory tower:

“Increasingly, my own English department, in the school of arts, also teaches potential practitioners. Many of our students have not developed at school a taste for reading books as a pastime. But they do want to become writers, and few students (or their creative writing teachers) seem to have quite registered that without readers there will be no need for writers.”

You can see how this thinking grows out of the context of budget cuts. Declining enrolments are interpreted as a cultural decline in the art of reading. The department’s choice to pursue commercial viability through the creative writing program is seen as capitulation: instead of standing on their principles and insisting on the value of reading, the department compromises their values by chasing the money. The real solution, Paul seems to think, is to simply lecture the public until they come to their senses and start enrolling in English courses in greater numbers. Stand your ground, and shame the students who turn up to choirs to support their stupid boyfriends. He’s really annoyed me with that comment – it feels like a misuse of power. You shouldn’t be writing about a student in an identifiable way, even if it’s only the student able to identify herself. That’s not appropriate. The quip about the creative writing teachers is inappropriate also: these are professional peers, colleagues, people who work down the hall. Paul writes that without readers, there will be no need for writers. Fine: but without contemporary writers, there won’t be anything new to read. Does he want us all stuck reading Jane Austen forever? Why is he so concerned with writers from the past?

Here’s the thing. The classics aren’t great because of their past. They’re great because of what they mean to us now. If, like me, you don’t know much about music, you might at first lump together Schubert and Beethoven in the undifferentiated category of classical musicians. In reality, the two belonged to completely different social worlds. The essays collected in Schubert’s Vienna regularly insist on the difference between the two: Beethoven moved in aristocratic circles, while Schubert was middle class. In the afterword, Ernst Hilmar writes that “to be a musician in Vienna meant to stand on a low step of the social ladder, without special privileges, without real social importance – and with an income commensurate with such lowly status.” That brings Schubert to life. He’s just a guy trying to make his way, making art and music around his working hours. I get that. That’s the reason I care about Schubert: he speaks to me now. Ford Madox Ford similarly has a portrait of a poet-cobbler named Tockson in the fifth chapter of The Soul of London: “I really believe that Posterity might be none the worse if it ever come to read some of the verses that, with his own hands, he printed at odd moments on grocers’ bagpaper and stored in the back of his shop.” Tockson, we learn, was never published, and was run over by a brewer’s cart. We connect with stories like that – or at least I do. That connection is the basis of everything. It’s what makes these artists meaningful. We connect with them. Sometimes that connection is facilitated through family, through friends, through romantic partners. Sometimes it’s through parents dropping off their kids at the Sheila Winn festival and sticking around to see the show. Shakespeare isn’t in the past: he is here, today, or at least back in April when the festival was on. We read today, and we write today as well. Does our present moment bring challenges? Yes, certainly. But it’s not productive to scorn the fact that art is built on community. Shakespeare doesn’t exist except at the Sheila Winn festival. He doesn’t exist except as manifested through our communal being. If people are writing, let them. They write in communion. Let people support their kids, or their boyfriends. Art lives between us. We’re not helped by scorning that connection.