https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n10/stefan-collini/squadrons-of-pigs
7596 words

Britain’s​ ‘world-leading’ university system is in deep trouble. There are, inevitably, conflicting diagnoses of the malady, but the indicators of deteriorating health are too ubiquitous to be ignored. When a substantial number of universities are in serious financial jeopardy, with some hinting at possible bankruptcy in the short term (according to the Office for Students, some 45 per cent of ‘higher education providers’ will face a deficit for 2025-26); when the viability of universities is heavily dependent on attracting large numbers of international students whose fees make up between a fifth and a third of their income and whose recruitment is vulnerable to the slightest twitch of governments’ anxieties about immigration; when nearly every week brings news of fresh closures of courses and redundancies among academics, especially in the humanities; when some of the subjects that have long been regarded as among the staple offerings of any university worthy of the name are now in danger of becoming extinct or confined to a handful of privileged institutions; when one in four UK physics departments are thought to be at risk of closure and when research council funding of the physical sciences may in some cases be reduced by as much as 30 per cent in proposals that are said to threaten ‘generational destruction’ in those fields; when undergraduates are taught in very large groups, with limited opportunities for personal contact with an established member of academic staff and only the most minimal requirement to produce written work; when the bulk of undergraduate teaching in some departments is done by people on poorly paid short-term contracts with no possibility of career progression, a precariat shamefully exploited by cash-strapped universities; when there is a growing fury and sense of injustice among graduates (and their parents) who realise that the student loans they were compelled to take out, loans that are subject to punitive interest rates and whose terms are retrospectively variable, will condemn them to paying what is in effect a higher rate of taxation for almost their entire working lives; when all these laments have become so familiar that they simply elicit a weary shrug – then it becomes difficult to deny that something has gone badly wrong with higher education in Britain. (Or, at least, in England and, with significant variations, in Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland, having retained a large measure of direct government funding for education rather than the fees system, has experienced some of these problems rather differently.)

Needless to say, each of these claims might be contested, but the simple juxtaposition of them ought to suggest that the problems are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent (and all this is without reckoning the still unfathomable impact of AI, a challenge across all areas of society but likely to have particularly dramatic consequences for teaching, assessment and research in universities). Yet political and media discussions remain at an almost wilfully superficial level, largely focused on whether the current loan system is ‘unfair’ to students. To go deeper, we need to examine the premises underlying that system and to look at the transformative effects they have had on universities in the past fourteen years.

As a result of the withdrawal by the Tory-led coalition government of 2010-15 of the greater part of direct funding for higher education, nearly all universities in England aside from some of the bigger research-intensive institutions now get the larger part of their income from student fees; for some this proportion rises to almost 80 per cent. In the years since 2012, this income has failed to keep pace with inflation and other rises in costs: the fee was capped at £9000 until 2017 and then at £9250 until 2025. According to the present government’s own calculations, ‘domestic per-student funding has fallen in real terms by approximately 25 per cent since 2015-16’ (and, it seems, by around 40 per cent since 2012). Even so, ministers (from both governing parties) have tended to brush aside criticism by emphasising that many more young people now have the opportunity to go to university. That is true and in its own terms constitutes a welcome educational enfranchisement, but it fails to question the changes in universities brought about by expansion based on the present funding model and whether students are actually getting the excellent education they are promised – and indeed whether UK universities are still genuinely ‘world-leading’.

Many of the problems besetting universities are, of course, not confined to the UK. 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. But these forces work themselves out in different ways in different societies. At one extreme, universities in the United States have for some time been demonstrating the impact of ‘consumer demand’ by axing any number of traditional courses, to the point where articles with such titles as ‘The death of the English major?’ have been a staple of op-ed pages for decades. By contrast, some continental European countries try to hold fast to a more civic, even republican, conception of the role of (free or heavily subsidised) higher education in forming a democratic citizenry, a purpose that gives an honoured place to some of the established scholarly disciplines.

As in so many other matters, Britain falls somewhere between, though its current method of funding higher education has moved it decisively closer to the American model. 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. But there is also a purely quantitative dimension to the current situation, as Britain has attempted to make an accelerated transition from an elite to a mass system of higher education without reckoning the consequences of such a huge structural change. Fifty years ago, following nearly two decades of expansion, the total number of students attending UK universities was around 280,000; today the number is approximately 2.8 million, of whom around two million are undergraduates, meaning that the number of postgraduates alone is now almost three times higher than the total of all students fifty years ago. Not only are there more universities (around 140 on a conservative definition, compared to around forty in the 1970s, though there are now also a further eighty or more ‘other providers’ certified by the Office for Students), but individual institutions have grown out of all recognition. In the 1970s, most universities had between 4000 and 8000 students. Today, University College London has more than 50,000 students, Manchester 46,000, Birmingham and King’s College London each 40,000 and so on.

While undergraduate numbers have expanded dramatically enough, numbers taking taught postgraduate courses (essentially master’s degrees) have gone through the roof. UCL has no fewer than 20,000 students on taught master’s courses, though it is not just the best-known names that have recruited on this scale: the Higher Education Statistics Agency has recorded that, to take a different kind of institution, the University of Hertfordshire has 19,000 master’s-level students, and in nearly all cases international students are either a large majority of these cohorts or a very substantial minority. At UCL, an astonishing 52 per cent of the total student population of 51,793 are international students. Inevitably, the explosive growth in this category in just a few years has transformative effects on an institution and its use of teaching resources, as well as raising questions of quality control. Even so, recruiting still larger numbers of international master’s students (who of course pay much higher fees than home students) is what passes for strategy in some universities, though, as we have seen recently, tweakings of policy by immigration-phobic governments can lead to sudden falls in overseas recruitment, revealing once again the unwisdom of building on such fragile financial foundations. Fees that don’t meet ever rising costs; significant falls in the number of international students; sudden drops or worrying fluctuations in the size of the intake in some subjects: these are the stuff of nightmares for universities’ chief financial officers.

But​ it is the assumptions on which the current funding system was built that have really come back to haunt higher education in the UK. The coalition government, the chief architect of this system, aimed to create a market among ‘providers’ which would be driven by the choices of students as ‘consumers’, with the aim of breaking the so-called ‘producers’ cartel’ that had, allegedly, for so long enabled universities to protect their traditional practices. The mantra, repeated ad nauseam in those years, was ‘competition drives up quality,’ an assertion that anyone looking at, say, the privatised water companies or privatised train companies might greet with a hollow laugh. In practice, for all its financial engineering, that government only succeeded in creating what economists call a ‘quasi-market’. The facile assumption that, in a system dependent on student fees, universities would ‘compete on price’ was almost immediately dispelled by the entirely foreseeable decision of almost all universities to charge the maximum permitted fee. Moreover, higher education cannot function like a genuine market, where consumers can try out one brand of soap powder this month and another next month. Going to university is, for nearly everybody, a one-off decision: it’s more like getting married than going on a date. The official ideology of the time had it that universities should be governed by consumer demand, even though few seventeen and eighteen-year-olds are either sufficiently experienced or informed to know in advance which routes to enlarged understanding of the world they should ‘demand’. Inevitably, universities’ attempts to market themselves to potential students tended to encourage a concentration on amenities such as stylish en-suite accommodation, a lavish new student union building or a state of the art sports complex. In the past ten or fifteen years even cash-strapped universities seem to have found the resources to build shiny new monuments to ancillary services while cutting back on the defining activities of teaching and research.

Discussion naturally focuses on publicly funded universities, but another effect of the funding system introduced in 2012 has been to provide rich pickings for private institutions. The key steps for such organisations are, first, to obtain degree-granting powers (which were once so jealously guarded that even many public institutions had to endure extended periods during which the degrees their students obtained had to be conferred by a longer-established university), and, second, to have their students recognised as eligible for the government-backed loan system. For example, Arden University, which obtained degree-granting powers in 2014, may be the biggest UK university you’ve never heard of. This private, for-profit institution offers a ‘combination of distance and blended learning’, with eight campuses in Britain and currently more than forty thousand students (up from 5700 in 2017) eligible for the student loan scheme; it also has a campus in Berlin. It offers no courses in the traditional sciences or humanities, but does offer such vocational degrees as ‘human resource management’, ‘marketing’ and ‘project management and supply chain and logistics’. The university’s promise is to ‘help our students start a journey that sees them break free of limitations, work hard and become the best they can be’. In July 2024, the Office for Students put Arden University on an improvement notice for its low rates of degree continuation and completion. According to its most recent filing at Companies House, Arden University Ltd, a subsidiary of Global University Systems, headquartered in the Netherlands, recorded a profit before taxation of £87 million for the year ended 31 May 2025. Turnover for the year was £241 million, representing year-on-year growth of 27 per cent. In July 2025 it was announced that the US private equity firm Brightstar Capital Partners had bought a 50 per cent share in Arden, for which it is said to have paid more than a billion dollars. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, private equity firms usually know where exceptional profits are to be found.

Where public universities are concerned, it has not taken long for the weaknesses of the present system to play themselves out. 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.

One piece of collateral damage from the marketisation frenzy that gathered pace from the 1980s – and, where higher education is concerned, reached its peak under the coalition – was the loss of any organisation responsible for taking a strategic overview of the health and distribution of academic disciplines in British universities. The Office for Students is, explicitly, not such a body: it is a regulator tasked with upholding consumer interests, along the lines of other industry regulators. The absence of a body with the capabilities of the old University Grants Committee, which exercised this function from 1919 to 1989, is damagingly apparent in a time of what senior management teams like to call ‘financial stringency’. (The present administrative dispensation, in which oversight of teaching is assigned to the Department for Education but responsibility for research to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, is a further impediment to joined-up thinking about the multiple functions of universities.) Market orthodoxy dictates that if the University of Loamshire finds student numbers in, say, two particular subjects to be low or unreliable, then it is economically rational for it to cease to offer those subjects. A similar logic concludes that if the neighbouring University of Brickville finds itself in the same situation with regard to those particular subjects, it must likewise cease to offer them in order to balance the books. But a more strategic view might suggest that if Loamshire continued to offer one of the subjects and concentrated the resources and applications of both universities to do so, while Brickville did the same for the other subject, then precious capacity could be sustained for the system as a whole. That is obviously a very stripped-down model, and there would be several hurdles to get over, not least the thorny question of the transfer of staff between universities. Nonetheless, it highlights the essential point, namely that there needs to be a mechanism for taking a holistic view of subject provision across the country.

Instead, what we see at present is a depressingly familiar sequence. The University of Loamshire announces an impending budget crisis which will necessitate widespread staff cuts, including the closure of a whole department. Academics from around the country sign a letter of protest, pointing out how vital that particular subject is to a proper conception of a university and how highly esteemed the Loamshire department is. The vice-chancellor of Loamshire issues a statement, emphasising how profoundly he agrees with the signatories about the value of the subject and in what high regard the colleagues in the doomed department are held. It is therefore with the greatest regret that the university is taking these steps, but the present deficit requires hard choices ... and so on. Just occasionally, a well-organised campaign of opposition can have some effect, since senior management teams hate a big media fuss and so may give a little ground to kill off the issue. But usually protests, whether from outside the university, in the form of petitions and letters to the press, or inside it, in the form of now largely redundant senates or other bodies representing academic interests, come too late. If the right people can be in the room when the question of how to meet a potential budgetary shortfall is first raised then they may have some hope of channelling discussion in a less damaging direction. But once the issue has been framed as a question of which subjects must be cut to save money, then it is difficult for considerations of a different order to make headway. A more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger press release about the university’s current budget deficit nearly always doubles as a death certificate for some subjects and the relevant academic staff.

Gloating discussions in right-wing media like to suggest that it is ‘weak’ or ‘under-performing’ departments that are being cut or closed, but the evidence makes clear that this is not the case. To take just one telling example, a recent survey of the state of history departments in the UK noted that ‘each of the three top-performing history departments in REF 2021 [the most recent Research Excellence Framework exercise] – Kent, Lincoln and the University of East Anglia – has been threatened with and/or experienced at least one cycle of permanent staff redundancies since their REF results were announced’ (and Leicester, which by some measures, belongs in the same group, is similarly threatened with life-threatening cuts). 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. Such examples also underline that, for all the labour and stress that goes into meeting the demands of each REF cycle, the contribution to a university’s finances made by a strong performance is in many cases now relatively modest, and anyway does not flow directly to the departments which have earned it (in nearly all post-1992 universities ‘quality-related’ research funding resulting from REF performance is 1 to 2 per cent of total income). As the survey of history departments concludes, ‘REF income, proportionately much lower in value than fee income in England and also freed from discipline-based hypothecation, provides no barrier to redundancies and closures in this context.’ The REF is a depressing example of a mechanism that was initiated as a way of distributing research funding most productively (principally in the sciences) but which has now morphed into a hugely expensive, attention-engrossing status marker. Few things would improve the intellectual culture of universities more quickly than the complete abolition of this flawed and coercive exercise.

Public and media​ attention, as I mentioned, tends to be focused on the question of the ‘unfairness’ of the student loan system, but this topic is plagued by misunderstandings. The announcement in last November’s budget statement that the earnings threshold at which graduates who took out loans between 2012 and 2023 (Plan 2 loans) have to start making repayments would be frozen for three years from 2027, and that graduates who took out loans after 2023 (Plan 5 loans) would have to keep repaying their loans for up to forty years rather than thirty (though the rate of interest would be reduced), generated a renewed spasm of indignation about the loan system, spurred by the consumer champion Martin Lewis condemning the changes as not ‘a moral thing’ to do. These and related tweaks may have grabbed headlines, but the defects of the present funding arrangements have been plain to see since 2012.

The system is in practice more like a poorly designed graduate tax than a genuine loan arrangement. Once accepted by a university, a student can obtain a loan to cover the cost of the fees, currently set at £9535 for 2025-6, which is paid directly to their university (in addition they can take out a maintenance loan which can range from approximately £9000 to approximately £14,000, depending on circumstances, though inflation has so eroded the real value of such loans that many students from low or modest-income families experience considerable hardship). From the moment students start their course, a heavy rate of interest begins to increase the capital sum owed. Repayments start when, after graduation, annual income exceeds a stated threshold, which at present is £28,470 for Plan 2 borrowers and £25,000 for Plan 5 borrowers (in both cases well below the national median income). Thereafter, graduates pay a 9 per cent tax on all earnings above that threshold, until either the whole sum is paid off or the limit of thirty years (or in Plan 5 forty years) is reached, at which point any remaining ‘debt’ is wiped. As many graduates have discovered in recent years, the rate of interest can increase the capital sum owed faster than repayments can reduce it. Although psychologically this scheme is experienced as a ‘debt’ hanging over the graduate, that is in some ways a misleading analogy. During the working lifetime of many graduates, it will not really matter what the capital sum ‘owed’ is: assuming they are not going to be able to pay it off in full during the term of the loan, what matters is the 9 per cent tax, since that remains the same whatever the size of the outstanding capital sum. In those circumstances, it is what you earn, not what you ‘owe’, that determines what you pay.

One of the more iniquitous features of this loan system has always been the way the government has reserved the right to change the terms of the loans retrospectively, which means that someone signing a contract for a student loan at the beginning of their course has no guarantee that the terms may not be changed for the worse some years later. As Lewis and others have pointed out, this is something no commercial lender would be legally permitted to do. The response by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to complaints about the measures introduced in her November statement suggested an attempt to make political capital out of what was essentially a revenue-raising exercise. Her defence of the changes was to say that it was ‘not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so’, echoing (as so often in statements from this government) the kind of ‘anti-elitist’ sentiments weaponised by Reform. It’s hard to tease a meaning out of this statement that is relevant to the proposed measures, but it looks as though she intended to suggest that unless graduates were made to pay even more, non-graduates would be left to pick up the bill.

But the first and most obvious thing to say is that graduates are already taxpayers and thus contributing to the public coffers even before their loan repayments are factored in. And second, a substantial proportion of those who do not go to university end up paying little or no tax anyway. Tax revenues are heavily dependent on those in the better-paying jobs, a slice of the population that is increasingly made up of those who did go to university. There are questions to be asked about the social and economic conditions that shape who gets to go to university in the first place, but it is simply not the case that non-graduates are bearing the brunt of the costs involved, and anyway it is arguably more equitable for wealthy non-graduates to make a slightly enhanced contribution via taxation than for relatively poorly paid graduates to foot the bill through increased loan repayments. Beyond that, for Reeves to say that without her recent measure, non-graduates would be bearing ‘all the cost’ of others’ higher education is clearly nonsense. The great bulk of the costs are met by, first, repayments on the loans, and, second, income tax to which graduates already make a disproportionate contribution. The general perception of Reeves’s changes was that the government was trying to squeeze even more money out of students by making the terms of their loans more onerous.

A further symptom of the growing antagonism to the loan system was the ludicrous, indeed demeaning, sight of Kemi Badenoch, the leader of what’s left of the Conservative Party, complaining that the terms of repayment for student loans taken out between 2012 and 2023 are ‘unfair’, when it was her party that devised, implemented and continued to justify those arrangements throughout its period in government. Even though such a move is nothing more than cheap electioneering, it signals a calculation that public discontent with this funding model has mounted to the point where it can be turned into a political asset for a party that denounces that model (without having at present to take responsibility for coming up with a replacement). It is particularly contradictory for a party that is always attempting to accuse its opponents of being profligate with public finances to make this criticism, since, according to official estimates, only some 20-35 per cent of graduates are, as things stand, expected to pay off their Plan 2 loans in full within the thirty-year cut-off. This means that the longer those terms were in place, the larger the public subsidy would eventually become. And, of course, should the economy take a turn for the worse (what could possibly cause that to happen?), the proportion of graduates failing to find sufficiently remunerative employment to pay off their loans in full would increase. As the date for the remaining ‘debts’ under the first Plan 2 loans to be written off gets nearer, so anxiety about the colossal financial liability to which this scheme exposes the government will increase. By contrast, the calculation is that, under the new terms of Plan 5, approximately 50 per cent of graduates will repay their loans in full, which will eventually represent a massive reduction in public subsidy. Widespread discontent with the whole system has prompted the government into further tinkering in recent months, but the truth is that both ministers and vice-chancellors are locked into a financial model whose premise is misconceived and whose side effects are profoundly damaging for higher education.

This, then, is the structural backdrop to the (usually rather under-informed) news stories about course closures. 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.’ Even formerly strong pre-1992 universities such as Nottingham, Cardiff and Leicester are, according to various reports, now proposing either complete elimination or a drastic reduction in degrees in modern languages. All that remains in some places is a ‘language centre’, equipped with the latest technology to help beginners achieve some basic fluency. The full range of modern language teaching grounded in the literatures and cultures of the respective countries is increasingly available only in a select number of more confident institutions. When trying to identify the causes of the decline, which in this case include but are clearly not confined to the funding system, one obvious culprit is the decision of the Blair government in 2002 to make a foreign language no longer a compulsory school subject after age fourteen. The result of this and wider cultural changes is that, at university level, only Spanish of the modern European languages can be said to be in even a minimally healthy state: French is ailing but alive, German and the so-called ‘smaller’ languages are mortally wounded and have in many places disappeared. Mandarin is now the fastest-growing foreign language – a salutary development, no doubt, but not one that improves the plight of staff in traditional departments of modern languages.

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). It is particularly difficult to track the situation in philosophy, since in many places philosophers work within one or other kind of interdisciplinary programme (PPE, medical ethics and so on) and so do not show up in surveys of philosophy departments. Still, the headlines make bleak reading, as even universities such as Kent and Kingston that traditionally had some reputation in the subject have recently announced the complete closure of their philosophy departments.

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. The changes made to the GCSE and, to some extent, A-level syllabuses in English when Michael Gove was education secretary between 2010 and 2014 almost seemed designed to put schoolchildren off studying English at university, so restricted and unimaginatively traditional are the set texts and the emphasis on formulaic answers. 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. The announcement in late 2024 that Canterbury Christ Church University would stop offering its degree in English literature (‘in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe’) provoked a flurry of commentary suggesting English would soon be following the steep decline seen in modern languages. In December 2025 the Times reported that there had been a 19 per cent drop in the number of students enrolled in English degrees in the past five years. There is talk of a ‘death spiral’ in this and similar subjects: decline in the number of applicants leads to redundancies in university departments which leads to widespread adverse publicity which in turn encourages a further decline in applications. As one respondent to an English Association survey put it in 2025, ‘our staffing numbers have been halved. I am leaving. It has enormous personal repercussions as well as a catastrophic reduction of student opportunities and diminishing of the subject’s status. It’s devastating.’

That comment speaks to the personal suffering and waste of accumulated learning and talent involved, but, even so, in the case of English, matters are not as straightforward as media discussion tends to suggest. There is a particular problem with the official statistics for this subject, in that they tend to aggregate, or not consistently discriminate between, numbers doing English literature, English literature and language, English language, creative writing and even in some cases English as a second language. An analysis undertaken for the English Association and other national bodies suggested that, insofar as the figures can be disaggregated, the picture is particularly bleak for English language courses but somewhat less so for English literature. Moreover, the constant insistence by the media and unsympathetic politicians that studying English leads to poor employment prospects and lower earnings is simply not borne out by the facts, since English is roughly in the middle of the pack, below the celebrated high-earning subjects such as economics and maths, but well above a raft of more obviously vocational subjects that are not always well regarded by employers and lead to lower than average earnings. 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. English in post-1992 universities was one of the great ‘access’ success stories of the late 20th and early 21st century, opening up cultural vistas to first-generation working-class students, particularly women, but it is in precisely those institutions that the most savage cuts have been made in the last few years.

Although the axe has mainly fallen on the humanities (and to some extent the social sciences), the natural sciences have also suffered from the corrosive effects of the funding system and of misplaced commercialism. Undergraduate degrees in chemistry have fallen by 25 per cent since the 2019-20 academic year, according to a Financial Times analysis of official OfS figures; several universities have entirely closed their chemistry departments in recent years partly because of a shortfall in student numbers. The cuts to research funding in physics mentioned earlier are among the consequences of a new policy announced by UK Research and Innovation, the umbrella body for the national funding councils. The body which is to bear the brunt of the proposed cuts, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, funds basic research in such fields as particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy, including the UK’s contribution to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, where some of the most important breakthroughs in understanding the physical properties of the universe are being made. But that counts for little when the government has ruled that all public organisations must henceforth make economic growth their overriding goal. According to a report in the New Scientist in February on UKRI’s decision:

The organisation’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, said in a press briefing on 5 February that the organisation was now focusing more on commercialisation. ‘We’re a public body, in service of the UK public. The public should expect us to make those hard choices to make sure we make the biggest impact to the country, to grow our economy,’ he said.

Apart from threatening to force the UK to renege on existing international collaboration agreements, it is claimed that the cuts would practically eliminate funding for the next generation of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in these fields. As one physicist commented: ‘These proposed cuts are going to be devastating for our community ... If this goes through, the impact on the core programme will be catastrophic.’ Or as another put it: ‘Unless these cuts are reversed, it’s difficult to see how we can recover ... Jobs will be lost, and physics departments will close.’

The outright closure​ of a department is only the most extreme of a whole raft of measures that reduce provision. One of the most common is to merge several departments into a single ‘school’, shedding posts along the way. For example, where once a university had departments of history, philosophy, theology and classics, with perhaps sixty staff altogether, it undertakes a reorganisation that abolishes separate departments and creates instead a ‘school of historical and critical studies’ with maybe forty staff or fewer. A new head of school is appointed from outside the university to enforce a new culture; at the same time and for a mixture of reasons, priority has to be given to getting external research funding and generating links with outside bodies or communities that can be used to demonstrate the university’s ‘impact’. Interdisciplinary projects become almost mandatory. The old model of inducting students into the craft mysteries of a single discipline is replaced by transdisciplinary courses addressing ‘major societal issues’. As part of the ‘rationalisation’, the four long-serving departmental administrators are made redundant or redeployed, leaving the new school reliant on the shifting personnel of the central administrative services division. The loss of outstanding teachers, the loss of accumulated intellectual capacity, the loss of expertise, experience and sense of identification effected by such changes impoverish the culture of this part of the university, though all that is deemed of little consequence if it means that ‘line management’ is ‘streamlined’ and the balance sheet looks healthier. But students recognise what is happening and are, understandably, not happy about it. According to an analysis by the Office for Students in late 2025, around 40 per cent of the students polled perceived impacts of cost-cutting measures on ‘access to academic resources and the quality of teaching’, and 46 per cent ‘expressed concern about the potential closure of their course or department’.

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. It may, for example, be prudent for a German department to emphasise the value of a command of the language for those likely to be engaged in some forms of European business, but that doesn’t help it to retain any member of staff capable of teaching a final-year course on Goethe and Schiller. English literature has even been touted as a valuable way for student nurses and doctors to develop empathy and expression, but while that alliance may provide some employment for those marooned on the shrinking island of single-subject honours degrees in English, it’s hard to imagine the wards are going to echo to declamations of The Faerie Queene or Paradise Lost.

Matters are not helped by the adversarial culture which is the result of the managerialism to be found at the higher end of some university administrations. Adopting the cruder versions of the now dated business school dogma of the late 20th century, vice-chancellors and pro vice-chancellors are often brought in from outside a university on the premise that insiders will be unable to wield the axe ruthlessly enough. Where the occupants of such roles were once members of the institution’s professoriate serving for limited terms, there has now developed a separate career trajectory for those destined for the upper ‘managerial’ positions. A track record of having slashed a budget and made staff redundant at one university becomes a prime recommendation for appointment at another. Members of the academic staff cease to be regarded as colleagues whose co-operation should be solicited; instead, they are treated as a disaffected workforce liable to make trouble if given a hint of the cuts being prepared by the senior management team. In England, senates, once powerful bodies determining academic policy, have mostly been bypassed or abolished. Only in Oxford and Cambridge are versions of participatory self-government still occasionally effective; it may seem paradoxical that those two universities, usually seen as the most traditional and hierarchical, have the best claim to have preserved elements of internal democracy, but their peculiar history and structure makes them relatively resistant to an aggressively top-down style of management. It would be pleasing to think that the adversarial culture festering in so many UK universities now might be reversed or at least modified by such measures as the effective revival of senates or the election of vice-chancellors by the academic community (as is the practice in many continental European universities), but we’ll see squadrons of pigs in the sky before that happens.

Positive changes in institutional culture would in any case be slow and uneven, and meanwhile time is running out for some colleagues and their areas of teaching and research. Can anything be done in the immediate future to staunch the bleeding? Better-targeted trade union activism on campus can be one first line of defence, involving solidarity across subjects, in acknowledgment of a common interest. It can be important to stir up protests in the media over closures, not least because I suspect many people are simply unaware of the scale and speed of the damage that is currently being done. Parent power, if it can be mobilised, is a force to make MPs tremble, so parents need to be encouraged to see that the shoddy deal they believe their offspring are receiving is part of a wider pattern.

But such responses are largely reactive, complaining about decisions that have already been taken. What is also needed is some way to have a voice earlier in the decision-making process, to help frame the range of possibilities. After all, vice-chancellors and their senior management colleagues do not want to be butchering disciplines and then having to face down the ensuing storm of criticism. Some collaborative advice at an early stage about other options might be welcome. There are signs that the major national academies, such as the Royal Society and the British Academy, representing research and scholarship across a whole category of subjects, as well as national subject associations representing particular disciplines, such as the Royal Historical Society, University English, the Institute of Physics or the Royal Society of Chemistry, would be ready to provide information and advice if asked. At present, such bodies either feel that they are constitutionally bound not to interfere in the internal affairs of particular universities or that they come on the scene too late. But what if, instead of being seen simply to criticise decisions already taken, they could present themselves as able to help those institutions to grasp the larger national pattern, foresee trends and broker various kinds of agreement between institutions? They could, for example, chart the availability of subjects in certain regions of the country, with a view to not letting some areas become ‘cold spots’ as far as provision is concerned, an increasingly important consideration when economic pressures are leading more students to go to a university near the parental home. The British Academy has already done useful work charting the changing geographical picture where the humanities and social sciences are concerned; the next step is to try to feed such information into decision-making processes at an early stage. But as things stand, it would need government action to allow universities and related bodies to collaborate on this scale. Beyond that, extremely modest sums from the Department for Education might enable a process of sensible rationalisation. More ambitiously, a central fund to which universities could apply for a loan to help tide them over short-term fluctuations in student numbers in a particular subject might actually save money in the long run. Dozens of objections to all such schemes immediately spring to mind, though pointing to drawbacks in a new proposal should not automatically lead to its being dismissed when the status quo suffers from even more damaging weaknesses. At present, British universities are haemorrhaging staff and courses: better to explore measures that might moderate the losses than to let the rigid institutional individualism of the present system wreak permanent damage.

Universities are obviously not a priority of this government. The White Paper on ‘Post-Sixteen Education and Skills’, published in October 2025, says comparatively little of substance about them, and what it does say is depressingly focused on ‘meeting the needs of employers’. But buried among the usual clichés about ‘promoting economic growth’ and ‘expanding opportunity’ is a stated desire to see a ‘much more collaborative system’ in which individual universities can work with each other to sustain particular fields rather than competing in a mutually destructive game of chicken. So far those are merely warm words, but they may signal a welcome shift away from the manic emphasis on competition among institutions promoted by Tory or Tory-led governments since 2010. If that is so, this could be a good political moment for university leaders and other representatives of the sector to come up with some imaginative proposals.

Both ministers and university senior management teams have to recognise that it is in everyone’s interests to replace the current individualistic practice of lopping off random branches of the tree whenever a wind blows with a collective long-term concern for the balance and shape of the tree overall. However, that would take not just political will, but an acknowledgment that the value of certain intellectual and educational activities transcends narrowly economistic accounting systems. More ambitiously, it would require recognition that the task facing a mature society is to adapt its methods of financing universities to sustaining the purposes for which such institutions exist – rather than, as at present, the other way round. Unless and until significant steps are taken in that direction, the present pattern of dilution, damage and decline seems likely to continue.