In 2016, I wrote a blog for the Palgrave Macmillan Campaign for the Humanities, reflecting on my book, History, Policy and Public Purpose: Historians and Historical Thinking in Government. ‘Public purpose’ was, for me, a vital umbrella term. It had the scope to harbour a diversity of historical practices too often held methodologically, morally, and intellectually separate: ‘public history’ as addressing wide audiences and collaborating with community groups or heritage organisations as distinct from ‘applied history’ as involving the expert use of historical evidence to inform decision-making in governments and businesses, for example.

‘Public purpose’ also drew attention to a wider problem: a political culture in which the arts and humanities were being pressed to prove their worth in narrow quantitative and econometric terms. The book was as much a challenge to that prevailing rhetoric as it was to my own discipline: a challenge to think differently about what history, historians and historical thinking could contribute – to the quality of policymaking in particular, but also to how we, collectively, discuss, deliberate and make decisions in the public good.

In the 2016 blog, I described a prevailing mood of defensiveness in the humanities. Even at that time, it was nothing new. In 2003, the then Labour Education Secretary, Charles Clark, had allegedly commented: ‘I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them’. Ironically, his father, Sir Richard Clarke, had been a prominent Treasury champion for a post-war experiment that aimed to capture past policy practice. At a time when Whitehall’s ability to navigate social, political and technological complexity was being questioned, departmental Historical Sections would help improve the quality and efficiency of decision-making by, for example, providing the ‘man at the desk’ with historical memoranda and adding chronological frameworks to his files.

The 2008-9 financial crash and the years so-called ‘austerity’ policy that followed only further narrowed the parameters of who and what constituted legitimate calls on public money – with dire consequences for the most vulnerable. Against this backdrop, a number of trends in higher education were already making humanities teaching and research more difficult. Funding policy was deliberately and incrementally concentrating research investment in a small minority of institutions, which were themselves collectively investing significant sums lobbying in pursuit of this aim. FoI requests provided newspapers a pipeline of reliably clickable content on ‘woke’ academics censoring reading lists to protect the supposed sensibilities of their students. The ‘mickey mouse degree’ provided popular bylines on a regular basis. Mostly, such op eds targeted already vulnerable courses in the arts and humanities.

Despite all this history, 2016 now looks like a gear-change moment when those trends accelerated. It was, of course, the year of the EU referendum, which has proved an unmitigated disaster – including for HE and its students and staff. But a number of other factors coincided to further erode the reach and status of the humanities. The removal of the student number cap in 2015/16 did much to realise the long-held (since the 60s) desires of the ‘more means worse’ contingent. It has undermined the viability of newer universities and particularly in those academic subjects deemed ‘ornamental’ rather than ‘essential’ to the economy. ‘Cold spots’ have emerged in UK HE provision, leaving many students from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as mature, part-time, and access-route students, with little opportunity to take arts and humanities courses. Implicated in the creation of these cold spots are many of the same institutions that had lobbied hard on research funding on the premise of being ‘top’ universities, and which were (and are) over-recruiting students in those subjects.

The cuts and closures in newer universities were often affecting the very courses that were teaching ‘history with public purpose’, as outlined in the final chapter of my book. They offered opportunities to collaborate with museums, archives, charities, community groups, businesses on projects with meaning and benefit in the wider world. Assessments such as policy papers, newspaper articles, exhibitions, podcasts, apps and heritage trails gave students the chance to develop skills in taking history to different audiences. These were HE offerings that could make a strong case for relevance with disciplinary integrity  rather than narrow instrumentalism.

The combination of historical modes of thinking with the ability to engage and work with different communities and organisations – practically, creatively, intellectually – is a potential super-power. Michael Gove’s claim during the EU referendum that the public ‘have had enough of experts’ prompted many angry and anxious panel and podcast discussions at the time, and understandably so. ‘Expertise’ (in a broad sense – it’s certainly not the sole province of academics) and ‘evidence’ (again broadly defined) have lost even more traction in the intervening time. For example, scrolling through the reports from the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory the disconnect between the ‘facts’ on the scale or economic impact of immigration and both public opinion and policy rhetoric on the issue is disturbingly, strikingly clear.

So, in many ways, the context into which my book sought to intervene has changed markedly within a decade. The chapter on integrating historical thinking into the policymaking process may, in particular, read as idealistic. But shifts in my work since then have given me some grounds for optimism.

During the pandemic, I co-led a collaborative project to collect oral histories from people running grassroots charities, support groups and community services in Colchester and north-east Essex. These interviews captured what it was like on a human level to keep that support going while Downing Street briefings gave us instructions and statistics: deaths first in the hundreds and then the thousands. The project was funded by local Clinical Commissioning Group, who saw the value in collecting the evidence of lived experience. When we shared our findings to the local multi-agency board, a senior County Council official responsible for big data wanted the stories to set alongside the numbers. I’ve since been involved in other projects with diverse organisations that have reinforced the impression that – at local level – there is recognition that History (the discipline) can offer insights missing from the evidence picture.

History will never issue instructions. It can’t tell you to pull this policy lever to get that outcome (and would probably say to be cautious of any expert or discipline claiming it can). In History, Policy and Public Purpose, I advocated for historical thinking within an ecosystem of expertise. Policy problems are inherently messy and multi-faceted so will always need us to pool different ways of deriving and analysing evidence, and different approaches to interpretating and translating that evidence into action. Even if HE has gone through a decade of crisis, that fundamental understanding remains relevant. But perhaps we have to think a bit differently about the contexts and the conversations in which such ecosystems can form and to which we, as historians or humanities scholars more broadly, can productively contribute.

Work done by organisations such as History and Policy and the British Academy to cultivate connections in and target interventions at Westminster and Whitehall (and, to a lesser extent, the devolved administrations) has to continue. These last ten years have, however, inescapably reshaped and reoriented my sense of ‘public purpose’. For me, it’s realised in close collaboration with organisations through mobilising their records as stories of human experience, proactively adding to collections where there are gaps and silences. The connection comes first, often from shared values, then the project. Simply practising as a historian through the collaborative process shows the value of historical modes of thinking within the project’s microecosystem of expertise.

Every historian can have their own version of what it means to do history with public purpose and the right to reshape and reorient it over time. As the book closed: ‘Redefining our public obligations as historians can be a task taken on, not as a reaction to external pressures, but as a powerful act of reimagination’.