The sleepy city of Exeter has become the locus of the country’s fraught battle over universities. Three weeks ago ago, its local university announced plans to lay off 150 teaching and support staff. Managers are expected to escape unscathed; Stem teaching and research will largely remain intact. Eighty-five per cent of staff at risk of redundancy are in the humanities, according to the university’s union. Britain’s thinkers are upset. Rowan Williams has expressed concerns about the decline of “humanistic and cultural education”. Rory Stewart has called the situation “worrying”. A petition to stop the redundancies has received 30,000 signatures.
If the cuts go ahead, the university’s 60-strong English faculty will shrink by a third, according to one source inside the department. They claim that staff who remain have been told they will have to take on double their usual teaching load. Any decrease in research activity will cause a financial catch-22 for the university: successful researchers bring in external funding, the bulk of which they never see themselves. It might cost £10,000 to conduct a social sciences trial. Grant figures will have to inflate to cover a university’s “estate costs”, meaning building maintenance and bills, as well as “indirect”, or administrative, costs.
Exeter University says “this is still an ongoing consultation, involving colleagues across the university, relating to potential changes, and… that we hope to achieve these changes through voluntary measures. We are working closely with our community and trade unions to avoid compulsory redundancies wherever possible.” It told the BBC that were no proposals to close departments and that it would “continue to have one of the largest faculties of humanities, arts and social sciences in the UK”.
“It’s going to be harder for us to write [research] articles,” says one lecturer in the English department. “If our teaching schedule grows, there will be no time for those things. And our place in the Russell Group will be lost, and our contribution to the Ref [Research Excellence Framework, a metric for a university’s quality of research] will go down, and we’ll just haemorrhage money. So it doesn’t make financial sense.”
After an initial announcement, Exeter staff had to wait hours to find out whether they were up for redundancy. They’ll spend another two months awaiting a final decision. In the meantime, management will score staff against eight vague-sounding criteria: research excellence, research funding, research future strategic alignment, education excellence, breadth of educational delivery, education future strategic alignment, leadership and management, and citizenship. Managers have already begun to fill out assessment paper work on behalf of at-risk staff. Sometimes the forms are error-ridden, but many academics are refusing to correct the information about them. To do so would feel too much like a gesture of consent to their own redundancy.
The university’s decision to make cuts might look sensible to some. Britain’s higher-education sector is already shrinking at an alarming rate. There are redundancies and mergers almost every month. In May, the University of Hertfordshire said it would suspend multiple undergraduate humanities courses. New students will not be able to take up English and creative writing, history, philosophy and linguistics. A week later, the University of Nottingham announced it would lose 600 jobs, with 2,700 academic staff at risk of redundancy. In 2025, the university’s management suspended recruiting new students for degrees in music and foreign languages. Current proposals would see a permanent end to those departments. At Sheffield, minor cuts to chemistry, materials science and East Asian languages could spread to a broader group of humanities subjects. In the past year, the University of Sussex shed 528 members of staff, with plans to increase that figure by 200.
You can want better for the laid-off and still understand why courses across the country are being cut. Some courses are simply under-subscribed. An alarming number of British higher education institutions are running financial deficits. Brunel’s is £56m. Essex’s is £23m. Nottingham’s is £85m, although some of its University and College Union (UCU) members have ascribed this to unwise property investments rather than issues with recruitment or retention.
Successive governments have created a very difficult environment for sustaining universities. At £9,790 a year, the undergraduate tuition cap often isn’t enough to fund an undergraduate education. Universities are allowed to charge overseas students more. But dependence on international recruitment means British institutions are vulnerable to world events outside their control. There was an extreme example of this in 2024, when the Nigerian naira crashed and left several students penniless at the University of Teesside. Something similar may happen now the rupee is dropping against sterling.
Immigration-based angst has caused even more trouble. The Conservatives banned overseas students from bringing dependents to the UK. Some have linked this to a drop in international enrolment. The duration of a graduate post-study work visa will soon be cut from two years to 18 months, and from August 2028 universities will have to pay £925 a year to the government for each international student they recruit. While the levy is supposed to go back into higher education investment, the sector thinks possible tuition rises might cause another fall in overseas applicants.
Some government funding schemes are available to plug gaps, but nobody can trust they’ll still exist in ten years. One has already gone. Since 2012, universities have been able to apply for strategic priorities grants – extra funds for high-priority and high-cost subjects, distributed according to student numbers. These grants are tiered, with the highest sums going to medical and science courses, and the lowest to archaeology, computing, creative and performing arts, and nursing. Last week, Bridget Phillipson said she would axe funding for the lower rungs of the scheme.
Following recent headlines, an onlooker might assume all university redundancies are logical business decisions. But the Exeter case makes very little financial sense. The university is one of the more attractive institutions in the Russell Group. It is prestigious enough to serve as a viable Plan B for nervous Oxbridge applicants, and its humanities subjects generally rank highly in national league tables. Its financial report from 2025 shows that the university had an operating surplus of £8.2m and that there was a slight growth in income from research grants, and trumpets “a year of continued financial stability”.
The university is losing out on international recruitment, but has seen “continued strong interest” from domestic students. Recruitment for undergraduate English is stable, and student numbers are rising in several departments, including history and film. There’s little evidence to suggest that those numbers will go down. Infrastructural costs also fail to explain the target for cuts: English students do not need access to laboratories, gyms or arts facilities.
“I think these people aren’t being honest,” says Michael Flexer, an English lecturer and co-chair of the Exeter UCU, when talking about university management. “When we push on one justification [for the job losses], after a while, that folds, and they give us a different justification.” Flexer thinks that the motivation is “ideological” not financial, and believes that any savings from redundancy will only grow the university’s managerial caste. The highest band on Exeter’s pay scale, reserved for a “small number of professors who bring great prestige to the University,” is set at around £120,000. In the 2024-2025 academic year, Exeter’s vice-chancellor made £392,000. Exeter denies the plans have any ideological motivation: “The university has been very open about the financial reasons behind the proposals.” It also denies that cuts will not affect management-level jobs.
Exeter initially claimed in an internal meeting with English departmental staff that the job losses were in line with the government’s ten-year industrial strategy. A 2025 government report on the strategy does outline policy measures for higher education, including cuts to the lower rungs of the strategic priorities grant and additional funded facilities for “defence skills provision”. The report also boasts of the UK’s existing higher-education prowess, quoting statistics about its “world-leading” research, its creation of full-time jobs (385,500 in 2021-22) and its “education-related exports”.
A UCU member says the university stopped using this claim days after first making it, though the university refutes it has dropped its focus on industrial strategy, and adds: “There is a growing drive to push the sector towards greater specialisation. It is also clear that the government wishes universities to focus their research and teaching activities on areas where they can demonstrate genuine academic strength, as well as on those that align with the government’s industrial and skills strategies.” Flexer says that “local MPs and Kate Bell of the TUC, who is on the government’s [industrial strategy] advisory group, deny any justification for redundancies on the basis of the government’s industry strategy”.
At-risk staff aren’t supposed to know about each other’s redundancy status. But one lecturer found some comfort in a list of at-risk staff that was sent to her by mistake. There were impressive senior colleagues on it. “Geniuses,” she says. “Hugely eminent people.” In a cut-throat job market, redundancy proposals like these are the sole equaliser. You can do everything right, and someone will still find a way to get rid of you.
[Further reading: The downfall of the Oxbridge don]
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Subscribe here to commentI am now approaching 69 and it is over 50 years since I went to university in 1975. I loved history and thought about studying it but I could not work out a clear route to employment. As I was from a lower working class background I opted for my other favourite subject chemistry and chose to study biochemistry because I could see a path to gainful employment and the middle class which stll existed back then. To double down on improving my employment prospects I chose a sandwich course at the University of Bath. I have had no regrets. Bath put me on a track that led to a PhD and then a career in pharmaceutical and chemical industries. There were very few working class kids at Bath and I never met many during my career so I feel lucky I made some key decisions on very limited knowledge. Thatcher took over the year I graduated and I knew life was going to be tough no matter how well educated you were and I wasn’t wrong. She upended the UK industrial base and the working class communities that depended on those jobs. Education was not a nice to have for me but a necessity and I was studying in the good old days of maintenance grants, zero tuition fees and no global competiton from foreign graduates. Today it is much harder and education is an absolute requirement in the fast changing world economy where employees can be chosen from a global pool. Young people from whatever background excluding the super rich need to choose their subjects carefully. If you need to earn a living then let that requirement guide you in your choice. Life is hard and you need to play all the angles that will give you an edge. I aspired to a middle class that no longer exists but the more applied education you have the less sh*t you will have to eat.