Planned cuts to the University of Exeter’s prized humanities department show no job is safe in the UK’s current wave of redundancies, according to affected academics, who add that decisions are being made based on undergraduate students’ choices rather than research strength.
Around 150 full time equivalent jobs are set to go at the south-west England institution, with 115 of them in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, despite it being internationally renowned. The University and College Union (UCU) puts the number of at-risk staff at more than 500 with 200 roles being axed, when part-time positions are taken into account.
Exeter ranks within the top 100 global universities for humanities provision in Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. It was in the top 10 for subjects including history, Classics and theology and religious studies in the last Research Excellence Framework.
Muireann Maguire, a professor in Russian comparative literature and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, said she felt “existential terror” upon hearing the news, adding that the atmosphere has been “horrible” since the announcement last week.
Maguire said she has been overwhelmed by the support for Exeter’s humanities departments. “Something that I’ve noticed…is the number of people saying to me personally, or just commenting on social media, ‘I can’t believe this is happening at Exeter’, or ‘I thought Exeter at least was safe’.” A petition against the cuts has already gained more than 10,000 signatures.
