The loss of lit: more UK cuts to the humanities. From the editorial:

The study of literature allows us to glimpse universal truths as well as encounter the diversity of human experience in all its fascinating particularity. With expert guidance, an immersion in great novels, plays and poems can deliver a sense of spiritual headroom and wellbeing which lasts a lifetime. As Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Such benefits – intangible but very real – were sadly not enough to persuade Sheffield Hallam University to continue to offer a standalone English literature degree to undergraduates…. It follows a similar move by the University of Cumbria last year and mounting cuts to humanities provision elsewhere. In May, recruitment for all performing arts courses at the University of Wolverhampton was suspended….

The deliberate commercialisation of higher education is steadily reducing the value of a degree to the bottom line of what job and salary it unlocks. As Sheffield Hallam called time on English literature, it emerged that the number of graduates owing more than £100,000 in student loans rose exponentially over the past year….

Anxious that as many graduates as possible pay off their loans – for which the Treasury is ultimately on the hook – the government has focused on the virtues of Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Meanwhile, supposedly “dead end” university courses – those which fail to deliver an instant graduate premium in the job market – are coming under increasingly aggressive scrutiny….

After a decade of marketisation, a grimly utilitarian worldview is beginning to exercise a suffocating chokehold over much of England’s higher education sector. But the intrinsic quality and worth of a course cannot be fairly judged by reference to employment statistics and labour market outcomes. 

For other posts on UK humanities, see here.