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16 hours ago
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“I ask nothing more from you than to do what you have been doing. Go out into the fray and keep reading,” was Percival Everett’s advice when he addressed graduating students at Wesleyan university in Connecticut last summer. Fitting words from a prize-winning novelist, at a time when gambling has become a more common leisure activity in the US than reading a book. In the UK, too, concerns are growing about the decline of reading, partly due to ubiquitous screen-based entertainment. Last week, parliament’s education committee called for the National Year of Reading to be extended to a decade, to inculcate the habit in children and young people.
All academic disciplines use books to convey information, but for literature and the humanities more widely, they are an indispensable currency. As the 2026 graduation season draws to a close, and robes and mortarboards are put away for another year, there is growing anger that these subjects are under attack from university administrations looking for ways to save money – while ministers look away.
Analysis of 2024 data for the Guardian uncovered nearly 4,000 job cuts in Shape (the acronym for social sciences, humanities and arts). All but 110 were in non-Russell Group universities, which have lower entry requirements and recruit more socioeconomically disadvantaged students, leading to concerns that some courses might become the preserve of an elite. But humanities cuts are not limited to one type of institution. Exeter plans to cut 150 full-time posts. Nottingham expects to become the first Russell Group university to withdraw all its modern foreign language degrees.
Prof Susan J Smith, president of the British Academy, recently described the situation as “an emergency, threatening all subjects”, and singled out the problem of “cold spots” where some disciplines are at risk of disappearing. It is not clear that the review of higher education which the academy wants would provide a solution. But she is right to highlight the negative effects of fragmented decision-making. To accountants, some courses or departments may be viewed as cost centres. But to lecturers and students, and the places in which they are based, they are cultural resources – repositories of knowledge built up over decades, some of which will have a specific, local character and relevance.
No one argues that no course should ever close. But the choices that students make are partly driven by changes further down the education system. The rising popularity of Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) is partly due to the Conservative policy of promoting them; the fall in teenagers opting for literature is linked to an unimaginative GCSE (surely something that a new prime minister with an English degree could fix).
Universities make their own decisions about what and who to teach. But ministers must be upfront about the constraints in which they operate. An expected £100m cut to teaching grants, combined with the introduction of an international student levy, mean that a years-long financial squeeze is set to carry on. In such a climate, standing up for the value of literature and the humanities ought not to be left to famous novelists.
