A humanities staff member in the UK writes:
The University of Roehampton (London) has just announced staffing cuts of £1.6 million to be made in the Humanities school (it’s £3.2 million for the two Arts and Humanities schools together) by the end of the academic year. Roughly one third of Humanities faculty will be made redundant; that’s roughly 25 from 75 faculty in a school that has excelled in scholarship and research. This has been announced after many staff had accepted management’s ‘offer’ of a temporary 10% pay reduction in order to offset losses related to the pandemic. We don’t know yet how these cuts will be imposed across the school; a review of the degree programmes in the different subjects is underway.
The student intake this year at Roehampton was disappointing in many Humanities subjects. But this is to a large degree a direct result of a government decision in August (during the fiasco concerning the grading of A-levels in the absence of examinations) to reverse a policy that would have prevented the bigger, more prestigious institutions hoovering up domestic students in order to mitigate the financial impact of falls in international students paying higher fees. The situation now is perfectly irrational: some of the normally very selective institutions have more students than they know what to do with this year (their disgruntled staff will tell you that) while institutions like ours (which traditionally have offered working class students a way into higher education) do not have enough. This is not bad news for the government, of course, which clearly wants to see some institutions go to the wall, and thus fewer students attend university, particularly in the Humanities subjects.
There is a petition here.
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