Another month, another of our great universities making brutal cuts. At Exeter (motto: lucem sequimur, ‘we follow the light’) over 500 members of staff have been notified their jobs are at risk in a process to eliminate around 150 people. Most shockingly, 85 per cent of those who received the grim warning are in the faculty of humanities, arts and social sciences.
Well, who needs these interpretive disciplines, the tech bros ask? We are off to Mars in rockets and Stem will lead the way. Except, without the humanities, once the human race arrives on the red planet its residents will find we rank among the least interesting or self-aware specimens in the galaxy.
We live in an age in which technology – for all its wonders – is on the cusp of blunting our ability to distil the precious from the dross. And we are choosing this moment to dismantle our understanding of how to think for ourselves
Society constantly reinforces the mantra that science drives progress and progress is destiny. But it forgets that the past is the instruction manual for the future. History, politics, law, religion, ethics and the full cursus of the humanities are the rear-view mirror, and a critical crucible for winnowing evidence from assertion. We live in an age in which technology – for all its wonders – is on the cusp of blunting our ability to distil the precious from the dross. And we are choosing this moment to dismantle our understanding of how to think for ourselves. With no redoubts built from the humanities we open the door wide to the illusory in the everyday.
The humanities are vital for distinctly human skills, including judgment, proportion and the ability to approach problems that have no empirical answer. There is no future in which these skills are not vital. Yet take just the example of history. From 2020 to 2024 – only four years – 39 history departments in the UK imposed staff cuts, and 32 withdrew history degrees and courses.
Knowledge is power, and in our new hard-power world, the attacks on knowledge are proliferating. In October 2023 the British Library suffered a cyberattack from a suspected Russian or Russian-affiliated group that effectively torpedoed use of our national centre of learning for over a year. It was followed by repeated attacks taking down the Internet Archive, a vital resource which makes millions of books available to power research globally. These mounting salvos against knowledge and memory should be putting us all at cultural Defcon 1. Knowledge is a battlefield. Erasure of an enemy’s sense of self is a military win.
On Monday all eyes were on a Russian warship unexpectedly conducting live-fire exercises 40 miles off Plymouth. The usual anxieties around our diminishing naval capacities heaved into view. The government needs to take on board that our resilience in culture and knowledge is equally vital. The castles of thought garrisoned by the humanities are as much a part of our security as a bevy of new frigates or a hundredweight of drones. If Britain does not understand Russia, China, Islam, empire, nationalism, propaganda or the history of global conflict it reduces its ability to be relevant in the world. Contrast with India and the Arabian Gulf, where humanities faculties are expanding.
Scything into the humanities is generational self-harm that will become civilizational if it continues. Skills and expertise will go and not be replaceable. Absurdly, decisions on university redundancies are being made on the basis they allow money to be better deployed. Yet money is a tool that has proved singularly and consistently useless at understanding or measuring cultural value. Finance departments are the last places we should be trusting with these societal decisions.
The skills nurtured in the humanities are not an optional extra. They are critical for us to remain ourselves. They are also, of course, where we learn to communicate, a skill we hand over to AI word salad at our peril. People give words intention. The founders of the University of Exeter chose its motto as ‘We follow the light’. The day cannot come soon enough when universities go back to doing exactly that. For the time being the horizon is darkening.
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