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| Looking Back - Sam Richards |
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An old friend of mine, a bit of a firebrand, used to tell me that if you were on the left or genuinely radical you’d better get used to supporting lost causes because you’re bound to lose more than you’ll win. On the other hand, he’d add, lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for. And that’s how it is now with the Dartington College saga.
We lost. The Save Dartington College Campaign lost. Period. There are some optimistic souls out there who don’t accept it, but alas it’s a fact. I wish they could convince me otherwise. The small, experimental, innovative, world famous arts college set up in 1961 is now on the way out. It shouldn’t be, but it is. A merger with University College Falmouth took place on April 6th. UCF is a very new, very sexy, funding friendly metropolitan style campus in Cornwall, an Objective One area for European funding. I’m not keen on the clinical architecture of the new campus but, who knows, it may be OK as a place. What I do know, along with thousands of other people, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Dartington College of Arts. Everyone knows that the Dartington courses – music, theatre, writing and so on – will either be significantly altered or scrapped, as, indeed, has already started to happen. I don’t really have it in for the Falmouth people. They’re in business (it used to be called university education) and they saw a good opportunity and took it.
You really can’t transplant the ethos of one college and roll it into another that’s big enough to swallow it up before breakfast - especially when that one college is Dartington. We’ve gone over these arguments for a year and a half, and most people know – or have intuited - the truth that for whatever reasons the college as it then was was no longer welcome on the Dartington Hall Estate and the Combined Universities of Cornwall was waiting with jaws open and an appetite like a killer shark on Weight Watchers. It was a stitch-up.
What’s left to do? If you believe, as I do, that telling the truth creates a certain ethical capital – which is a good thing in itself - then that’s what you have to do. You have to root out the truth and tell it and tell it and tell it again. You have to make sure that history isn’t always on the side of the victors.
And the basic truths about the demise of Dartington College are twofold. First, the Dartington Hall Trust – the college’s landlord – realised that it had been screwing up its own affairs for years, loosing or selling off its businesses and assets, haemoraging money and eventually seeing the red light flashing. Its new CEO, Vaughan Lindsay, arrived aware of the job he had to do in digging Dartington and the Trust out of the shit. Annually baling out the college was no longer an option, so instead of continuing to reluctantly support its pet lame duck the Trust insisted that the college would be welcome to stay if it were independent and self-financing – knowing, of course, that in the immediate sense this was impossible. Never was a death threat put so reasonably. The second factor was the aforementioned killer shark – the Combined Universities of Cornwall (CUC) in the form of University College Falmouth. The grand plan to create what in one website article I called a “University of the Spectacle” (pace Guy Debord) was too juicy to ignore for the likes of John Bull, ex-Vice Chancellor of the University of Plymouth, Chair of the Dartington College Board of Governors, accountant and general influential bigwig in the Ed Biz. For all I know he may have been one of the brains behind the new empire which, incidentally, isn’t only about Cornwall. It includes Devon’s two universities – Plymouth and Exeter. Against these two powerful enemies – the Trust and the new empire - the College had no hope – ever.
The most symbolic moment in the whole Campaign came in the summer of 2007. We had taken our case higher and higher up the political hierarchy until we wrote to Tony Blair who was then Prime Minister – a kind of Peasants’ Revolt of the 21st century. Blair’s reply read as if it could have been written by Andrew Brewerton, then Principal of Dartington College and a key figure in the Falmouth plan. The phrases in Blair’s letter were familiar. The arguments were the same old tired ones we’d heard like a cursed mantra. When, at that same meeting, it was announced that Brewerton was Vice-Chair of the Prime Minister’s Initiative Higher Education Advisory Group a deep sigh went round the room. A single thought was in everyone’s heads. Could it be that Blair had run our letter of protest past Brewerton who had told him what to say in reply? Of course, there was no way we could prove this, and an outsider might smell a conspiracy theory. For my part I smelt a rat. Well, we all did. Brewerton at one point said that in situation like this conspiracy theories tended to fly around. That’s because, Mr. Brewerton, people don’t like secrecy, don’t like being ignored, don’t like being treated like numbers to be shuffled around, don’t like “facts” not adding up, don’t like it when the publication of essential reports is held up, don’t like bullying and a feeling of powerlessness. And they’re not very keen on arrogance either.
Many times during the campaign I recalled that famous old right jab that Harold Wilson delivered during the 1966 seamen’s strike – “a tightly knit group of politically motivated men who are determined to exercise backstage pressures”. But the Destroy Dartington mafia was far better organised, far more influential, and far surer of its ground than John Prescott’s motley crew of militant seamen back in that distant era when negotiations actually took place. Brewerton was ubiquitous. Apart from chairing Blair’s committee, he turned up on a committee of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE); he’s a board member of the Higher Education Statistics Agency, and is now Chair of Arts Council England, Southwest – which recently voted a considerable sum to the Dartington Hall Trust. Professor John Bull, ex-Vice Chancellor of the University of Plymouth and a prime mover and shaker in the fate of Dartington, struck most of us as the Godfather. It always seemed so apt to have a Chartered Accountant as the Chair of the Board of Governors of an arts college.
This tightly knit group of politically motivated men (well, some women too) has a deeply Masonic feel to it. They stick together, disregarding the feelings, opinions and elected representatives of all those around them. Ask the Regional Development Agency for a meeting and they’ll tell you the version of the “facts” you’ve heard already. Ask the newly appointed Labour Minister for the Southwest, Ben Bradshaw, for a meeting and he’ll tell you it’s nothing to do with him. Ask him again, politely pointing out that as a huge upheaval which is happening in the region he has been given charge of it certainly is something to do with him and he’ll ignore you, preferring to do a bit of vote catching defending a local theatre in Exeter where he’s MP. Ask David Noyce of HEFCE for a meeting and he’ll refuse – twice.
Ask the college executive if you can present them with a well thought out plan which might save the situation and thus be worth considering and they’ll make you feel like something on the bottom of their shoes. (This happened to two local businessmen whose plan had the assent of the Duke of Somerset.) Write to Danuta Hübner, European Commissioner for Regional Policy, and you’ll not a get a reply. (I did this.) Ask to speak again, on the eve of crucial funding decisions, to the Regional Development Agency and they’ll bug the meeting and tell you that the decision they’re about to make is driven by facts that turn out to be not facts. (This happened to three members of the Save Dartington College Campaign.) When they meet again to reconsider in the light of the not-facts that have come to light they make the same decision. Express your frustrations in the form of website satire and you’ll be summoned to kangaroo courts made up of Dartington College appointees, and be given the sack – as happened to me. Ask members of staff to join you in your campaign to save their college and they make crosses at you and throw garlic in your face.
And yet – and this really is the crucial point – ask the parish council, the local town council, the district council, the county council, and the local MPs what they think and they’re outraged. A loss of c. £5 million to the local community can’t be ignored. The will and wishes of people who cast votes in local and general elections surely ought to count for something. The devastation of the cultural life of an entire area, the unanimous support the Campaign had from shopkeepers and local businesses, the incredulity you still find on the streets, in the pubs – surely these are not inconsiderable factors. Well apparently they are. If regional unelected power elites decide that something’s going to happen the rest of us can all go to hell.
Whatever the merits of the case – and one should not be blinkered or sentimental about Dartington College of Arts – the most alarming thing it proves, under the microscope as it were, is just how phoney our democracy can be. Let’s be clear about this. We were not dealing with a matter on which opinion was divided. Outside the power elite it has been impossible to find anyone – that’s right: anyone at all – who believes that closing the college is a good thing. Nobody that we have spoken to believes that anything of the Dartington ethos will transplant down to Falmouth. Everyone believes that the college could have been saved with goodwill and determination all round. Everyone I speak to believes it was an almighty stitch-up involving powerful people, loadsamoney, and no real educational principles. Support for the campaign came from artists worldwide, from academics, ex-students, and luminaries of the arts such as Peter Brook and Gavin Bryars – both of whom were furious when their letters of protest were cynically quoted out of context in the 2007 college prospectus. The picture is bleak. Total opposition to a total loss. Quangos, unelected officials, accountancy masquerading as policy, ignorance of local, artistic and educational needs.
We wonder why the turn-out at elections leaves something to be desired. The government has been floating the idea of making voting a legal obligation punishable by fines. But that’s like acknowledging the cheers of the crowd before you’ve started the marathon. If there were anything worth voting for, if there were any democracy that really worked and couldn’t be fairly dismissed with resigned references to “they” doing precisely what they want whatever you and I think – along with all the alienation, suspicions of corruption and ethical bereftness this implies - then, without doubt, voting figures would rise. As it is, those of us who’ve always been cynical about such a prospect have, alas, been vindicated once again, as have a few year’s worth of Dartington students.
To tell the truth – that’s my plan for now. One truth is that Dartington College never reached its full potential, although it certainly had its peaks and troughs. If a man who is a poor lover gets his balls cut off he’ll never have the chance to show what he could really have done. Dartington College wasn’t exactly a poor lover, although it could be fickle, infuriating, cloyingly middle class and not great at employer relations. But it did have immense potential and it has had its balls cut off. My long term pet project will be to write a history of the college. I guess that’s one way of trying to tell the truth.
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