It turns out that UK unis are just as broke as their students. Even the boujie Russell Group unis are in financial trouble in 2024. A deeply concerning amount of UK unis are sacking staff or starting voluntary redundancy programmes from their humanities departments in order to cut costs. A few UK unis are ditching some arts and humanities degrees altogether. Of course, what use to society is history or English or music? Cries in the corner with my Classics degree
So, here are all the UK unis which are cutting arts and humanities subjects.
Canterbury Christ Church University
This uni announced on 4th November that it’s giving up on English literature degrees. Apparently running the course is “no longer viable in the current climate”.
Current literature students can finish off their degrees, but freshers won’t be able to start the course there in 2025. Anyone studying doing literature as part of a foundation year right now will have to pick a different subject.
A second-year English and history Freya Hodge has started a petition to reverse the decision. She said scrapping literature was a “betrayal to the city of Canterbury”. The city is “bursting with heritage” since the generic English GCSE staples Christopher Marlowe and Geoffrey Chaucer originated there.
Cardiff University
The uni is not living, laughing or loving right now. As of January 2024, Cardiff Uni has a financial deficit of £12.7 million. Yikes.
In March, Cardiff announced plans to scrap ancient languages modules. The Uni couldn’t afford to run classes with so few students in. A petition gained 1,550 signatures, but doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
The students who started the petition were unimpressed that Cardiff was just scrapping ancient languages altogether, instead of looking into ways to make the course more popular. Apparently ancient languages were only offered to ancient history and religion students, and there weren’t very many of those in the first place.
University of Chichester
A group of 14 students at Chichester are suing the uni for breach of contract and discrimination after it scrapped the Master’s course in African history. Students part-way through the programme can finish it, but people who the course had been advertised to can’t start it.
The University of Chichester explained it had decided to cut the course because over six years, the course had cost £700,000 to run but only made £150,000 in tuition fees.
Goldsmiths, University of London
So, over 400 students at Goldsmiths are currently threatening legal action against the uni for cutting arts and humanities modules. They claim the uni breached its contract with them by not informing the students when advertised modules were scrapped. One of the axed modules is the groundbreaking Queer History course.
Uni staff went on strike in the spring to protest against Goldsmiths making cuts to the Black British Literature and Black British History Master’s programmes.
Oxford Brookes
Oxford Brookes is one of the many unis in deep financial trouble. The uni is using voluntary redundancy schemes to cut back on staff in many of the humanities departments, including anthropology, history, film, English and architecture.
Brookes is also scrapping the music department altogether. Students are pretty unimpressed with this. Obviously, the decision sucks for people who wanted to study music at Brookes. But the music department also organised lots of societies and activities for other students.
The music students organised protests in the spring. They played their instruments loudly in the main Brookes building to literally demonstrate that they wouldn’t stay silent about this issue.
A petition to bring back the course has gained a whopping 11,700 signatures.