The University of Exeter is one of several English universities consulting on plans to cut academic jobs in the humanities, as senior administrators across a financially distressed sector translate a little-noticed White Paper into strategies organised around government-determined “national priorities”, the valorisation of commercialisable research, and a narrow, economistic definition of usefulness.
According to the University and College Union (UCU), more than 500 staff have been placed at risk at Exeter, with around 150 academic posts expected to go. In a pattern now repeating across the sector, areas for which the prestigious Russell Group institution is especially well known – the humanities, arts and social sciences – are expected to take the brunt.
Publicly, senior leaders have pointed to financial pressures, changes in student demand and areas of activity they say are “no longer sustainable”. In one sense, no one who has followed the deteriorating condition of English higher education will find that language surprising. Universities are dealing with inflation, years of real-terms erosion in domestic tuition-fee income, and a more difficult international recruitment environment following government changes to student visa rules, including the January 2024 ban on most taught postgraduate students bringing dependants to the UK.
But when a university says that areas such as the humanities are no longer “sustainable”, what exactly is being measured? Immediate student numbers and contribution to central finances – even though UCU says Exeter’s reserves have increased by £188 million since 2023 – or a subject’s fit with the government’s increasingly explicit expectation that universities should support centrally determined industrial priorities?
It is a particularly pertinent question, since the current wave of redundancies at Exeter arrives at a moment when government policy is pushing universities towards a more brutally instrumental conception of their purpose. Public commentators have already flagged that the university is justifying cuts to the humanities internally as “in line with the government’s industrial strategy”. In one sense that is true. But it is the recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper that forms the policy bridge bringing this economic-growth logic directly into universities. Published last October, it makes clear that reforms will be “guided by our industrial strategy”, that universities are “central” to delivery of that strategy, and that they must now become “more specialised and financially sustainable” and “align with the needs of the economy”.
The White Paper likewise promises that universities will be “recognised and rewarded for demonstrating alignment with government priorities”. As to what those priorities are, the industrial strategy expressly identifies eight “growth-driving sectors”: advanced manufacturing, clean energy, creative industries, defence, digital and technologies, financial services, life sciences, and professional and business services.
In pursuit of its wider effort to “streamline” the sector and improve the “impact” of public investment, the White Paper urges universities to align themselves more closely with these priorities by concentrating on a smaller range of institutional “strengths”. “Over time,” the document adds, “there will be fewer broad generalist providers and more specialists”, including “specialists in teaching only”, research-focused institutions, and universities combining teaching with “applied research in specific disciplines”.
It is difficult to spot much room for the humanities as traditionally conceived in this emerging picture. In part, that is because the government’s stated national priorities are largely alien to much of what subjects in this area do, or should be expected to do. But it is also because the traditional Humboldtian ideal of research-informed teaching as a general university model is quietly being abandoned.
In that older model, pure and applied research could at least be understood as co-existing within a wider scholarly ecology without any necessary hierarchy. Whereas the former led to high-quality teaching, articles and forms of understanding whose value is not immediately practical, the latter led to spin-offs, products, and, yes, the attainment of governmental priorities. Now, however, the White Paper appears intent on arranging different kinds of research according to their economistic utility, with only some forms of inquiry reliably producing the sort of “product” government policy now says it will “reward”.
True, ministers insist they are “protecting and promoting” what they partition as “curiosity-driven research”. But the paper focuses far more heavily on two other priorities: “supporting the delivery of government priorities, missions and the Industrial Strategy”, and “providing targeted innovation, commercialisation and scale-up support to drive growth”.
So much so, in fact, that at times the language of curiosity-driven work is simply absorbed into a wider economic mission, as in the following breathless sentence listing all the ways the government will strengthen public research, which begins with the right intentions but ends up displaying about as much respect for intellectual value as you’d find in an accountant’s spreadsheet: “protecting curiosity-driven research and applied research and development, supporting priority sectors, driving knowledge exchange, start-ups, spinouts and research-intensive industries, and creating a highly skilled workforce”.
For disciplines whose value is not easily expressed in terms of commercial potential, productivity growth or graduate labour-market outcomes, such phrasing offers little reassurance that curiosity-driven work will remain distinct from “applied” research, or insulated from a system that places increasing weight on strategic alignment and economic relevance.
Would it surprise anyone, then, to find this logic already visible at Exeter? In June, the university announced £6.4 million in government funding through the Office for Students Defence Related Skills Funding Competition to expand advanced engineering, computing and defence-related skills. The investment will create almost 700 additional student places, new specialist laboratories and stronger links with employers in areas “critical to the UK’s future prosperity, resilience and security”, including advanced manufacturing, digital technology, energy, security and defence.
It is, of course, one of the perils of criticising institutional change that one risks being dismissed as a latter-day Matthew Arnold, hands clamped around a condemned fax machine in the administrator’s office, pleading with tears in one’s eyes for everyone to return to the old analogue world. But the point is not that there is anything wrong with advanced engineering or “stronger links” with employers in the defence industry, simply that the direction of travel is, as the redundancy plans announced around the same time suggest, glaringly one-way.
And so it goes, with research-intensive universities like Exeter facing the financial inevitability of closer alignment with the strategic direction of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the national funding agency that brings together the UK’s seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Speaking to Times Higher Education, John Womersley, former executive chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, recently said there was “a definite edge” to the White Paper. “It was saying, ‘We are going to make life harder for certain universities to continue what they’re doing’.”
Does that mean most university research “clusters” and “centres” are likely to become increasingly tied to specific funding streams, as institutions start to behave less like centres of independent inquiry and more like downstream delivery arms of national economic planning?
Womersley certainly suggested as much, noting that similar thinking was evident in recent speeches by the science minister, Patrick Vallance, and in talks by UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman. “UKRI funding is the lever that will be used to push through these changes,” he said, pointing to Chapman’s recent call for universities to do “fewer things but doing them really well” and his acceptance that the “nature of this shift” will have major consequences “for some people”.
The changes afoot at Exeter already suggest which departments, disciplines and academics may find themselves cast as this unfortunate “some people”, since this was never going to stop at research clusters.
As if on cue, the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wrote to the Office for Students on 6 July setting out guidance on the allocation of the Strategic Priorities Grant – an annual teaching grant that supplements the costs of high-cost courses. Having invoked the White Paper and described universities as “central to our Industrial Strategy”, she requested that, from this year’s £1.25 billion allocation, the OfS prioritise funding for high-cost courses in “specified strategically important subjects”, including laboratory-based STEM, technology and healthcare provision. Maintaining that focus would, she wrote, “necessarily require trade-offs elsewhere”, leading her to instruct the OfS to remove SPG funding from performing arts and creative arts courses, alongside others including archaeology, geography and history.
A Vice-Chancellor looking at this in isolation might say that where the SPG is removed from a studio-based creative arts course that is expensive to teach, it remains possible to cross-subsidise it from elsewhere, raise class sizes, or merge it into a broader school.
And perhaps that will happen in some cases. But the problem is that where funding, recognition and institutional rewards flow towards strategic alignment, departments and programmes rooted in less obviously “aligned” areas begin to look increasingly exposed. Suddenly, an annual funding cut, a dip in student recruitment, a weaker NSS result or a disappointing REF profile is no longer a temporary fluctuation of a kind to be expected in any institution, but an invitation to make existential changes: to rename departments, close courses and shed the research-active humanities staff whose work may still produce high-class teaching and four-star REF outputs, but no longer fits the new institutional strategy of obsequiously chasing government national priorities.
Each institution will inevitably have its own finances, recruitment patterns and internal history. But there are now worrying signs of similar, government-induced pressures at work elsewhere. At the University of Hertfordshire, for instance, plans have recently been announced to cut 200 jobs, following a decision to suspend recruitment to undergraduate courses in history, philosophy, English literature, linguistics and creative writing. More than 140 staff are also at risk at the University of Lincoln, where affected areas include humanities and heritage, social and political sciences, geography, design and architecture, and business, as well as the whole of the Politics and International Relations team. Curiosity-driven the affected scholars may well be – but unlikely, one suspects, to be “driving start-ups, spinouts and research-intensive industries” in clean energy, advanced manufacturing or defence any time soon.
Once curiosity-driven research is placed on its tiny reservation while a form of instrumentalism carries on colonising resources, power and institutional prestige all around it – on terrain it too once used to inhabit – the locus of freedom starts to shift from the individual academic researcher to the institutional employer; that is, from the scholar’s freedom to pursue inquiry to the university’s freedom to align itself with government priorities. And, of course, the forms of inquiry most vulnerable to this shift are often precisely those academic freedom is most needed to protect: pure rather than applied research; artistic and creative work that refuses to let what J. S. Mill called “dead dogma” harden into common sense; and teaching that treats the systems, norms and theories government would prefer to regard as inert resources as objects of critique.
Where university teaching and research become so closely bound up with government priorities, much of what that freedom enables is lost, not because of any direct curtailment or speech code, but through “organisational restructuring”, with all the attendant redundancies, broken careers and dismantled intellectual communities hidden beneath that euphemistic word.