Large-scale social and economic changes inevitably leave their mark on higher education systems, and the pressure everywhere is for universities to enrol ever larger proportions of the age cohort and to become more ‘relevant’ and more employment-focused, jettisoning curricula that some see as reflecting the tastes of a cultivated or learned class from an earlier era. There is ample evidence from across the globe of the transition from having a market economy to being a market society, a development that encourages a move away from conceiving of people as citizens, members of a community who collectively share the burdens and opportunities of life, and towards conceiving of them as consumers, a series of individuals who pay for what they want and don’t pay for anything else….
This places the emphasis on higher education as a private good: an individual ‘invests’ in it (by paying fees) and then reaps the returns on that investment by getting a well-paying job. Casualties of this emphasis include a failure to comprehend the multiple functions of universities in deepening, curating and transmitting increased understanding of the human and natural worlds, as well as any grasp of the wider benefits to society of having a well-educated population….
If you rapidly expand the number of university places to the point where some universities become desperate recruiters rather than discerning selectors; if you arrange things so that all but the major research universities are overwhelmingly dependent on student fees for their income; if, in the early years of the uniform fee system, you expand your intake in humanities subjects because they are cheaper to run than science courses and so contribute more ‘profit’ to the universities’ coffers; if you then remove the student number controls for each institution, resulting (predictably) in the more highly thought-of universities increasing their intake at the expense of less highly regarded institutions; and if you surround all this with a loud government and media campaign insisting on the desirability of studying STEM subjects and the need for courses to be directly linked to employers’ needs: then whenever you get a fall in the intake for particular humanities subjects you are bound to see a panicky financial response from universities, immediately reducing provision in those areas. The system leaves no room for strategic thinking….
Decisions to close or to gut particular departments have little to do with intellectual quality: they are invariably managerial choices about the quickest way to reduce an actual or predicted budget deficit….
Among the major humanities disciplines, the most obvious casualty of such pressures in recent years has been modern languages. Even on the most conservative estimates, the losses in the past decade or more have been nigh-on catastrophic. According to a 2025 report from the Higher Education Policy Institute, ‘since 2014, 17 post-1992 universities have lost their modern languages degrees, bringing the total closures to 28 and leaving modern languages in just 10.’…
Little cheer is to be had from looking at developments in other humanities subjects. According to one count, more than a dozen music departments have closed since 2004, most of them in the past decade, with several more eliminating or reducing degree teaching. Classics provision shrank in the 20th century but, even so, has reduced further in the past 25 years: the Council of University Classical Departments estimates that only between 20 and 25 universities now offer a full degree in classics (the exact number depending, as ever, on definitions)….
English has long been one of the ‘big battalions’, even at times the most popular subject in some universities in the mid and late 20th century, but it, too, has been feeling a chill wind for some time. In England, numbers for A-level English literature have been falling, from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023…. A fall in the numbers taking the subject at A-level means a drop in the numbers applying to read English at university, which in turn leads to rushed decisions to close courses and sack staff. Following the removal of controls on student numbers, large, well-regarded Russell Group universities have hoovered up an even greater proportion of the pool of applicants, leaving mid-range universities and, especially, post-1992 institutions to reduce or eliminate provision….
More concerning is the possibility that English will before long be in the situation experienced for some time by subjects such as classics, music and art history: namely, that of being largely confined to the so-called ‘elite’ universities that still overwhelmingly recruit from the advantaged middle class….
Less visible, but in the long run no less damaging, are those cuts which mean that although a discipline may survive in a particular institution, it does so in a sadly reduced form. In many humanities disciplines, the teaching of anything that is not ‘modern’ is dying or on life support in all but the most selective universities; in literature programmes, courses on pre-19th-century works (apart from Shakespeare), once universal, are starting to become rare. In the interests of survival, disciplines are urged to discover new, more ‘relevant’, roles, but in practice that can easily involve distinguished scholars filling service duties for more fashionable subjects as the traditional core of their discipline is hollowed out….
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