The recent spate of university History department redundancies and closures provides a prompt for reflection on wider trends and problems in the UK (and especially the English) higher education sector at this time. As an academic trained and employed as an historian, I have an obvious vested interest in the health of my discipline. But although the precise details and the specific drivers of declines in History differ in some respects from conditions in other SHAPE subjects, my predominant interest in this brief paper is in using History to think across institutions and the university sector as a whole rather than to make the case for defending History per se. I focus here on four topics: first, data (or their absence); second, financial drivers within universities’ planning systems; third, the emergence of an increasingly ‘lumpy’ landscape of History provision; and, fourth, the consequences of these changes for so-called ‘student choice’ and for the health of disciplines and their practitioners.
To begin then with data. Notwithstanding recent initiatives such as the British Academy’s excellent SHAPE Observatory and the hard graft of many learned societies and subject associations, we lack reliable public data on the number of academic units within universities that function to instruct taught students in History, to train PhD students in the discipline and to undertake and publish original historical research. As David Kernohan has recently argued, publicly available lists of UK undergraduate courses are thin on the ground and publicly available lists of UK postgraduate courses are non-existent (
Kernohan 2024). If we take the simultaneous presence of those three core functions as vital to the acquisition and reproduction of disciplinary knowledge at sector level, both the data deficit and the data disconnect are strikingly obvious. On the one hand, we have good data on changes over time in the number of students studying History at GCSE and A level. We can also count the number of courses the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) lists under the ‘History’ or ‘History and’ rubrics: at present, that figure stands at 2220 undergraduate courses from 1513 providers—figures that at first blush might suggest rude good health (
UCAS 2024). The launch in November 2024 of the beta version of the British Academy’s ‘Cold Spots’ maps has provided a new tool for assessing changes in availability of undergraduate course provision from 2011–12 to 2022–23 (
The British Academy 2024). At the other end of the spectrum, data from the UK’s two most recent Research Excellence Framework exercises, REF2014 and REF2021, suggest a research-active population of History researchers (excluding PhD students) within the higher education sector of between 1786 and 2361 FTEs (full-time equivalents), working at between eighty-one and eighty-three institutions (
REF2014 2015;
REF2021 2022). In England, universities’ Solomonic division in government between the Department for Education, on the one hand, and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, on the other, has been inimical to the collection of data that recognise the connections between education, research training and research. In this context, simply identifying how many academic units in universities perform my three chosen functions—much less tracking changes over time in their number, type or location—proves more than challenging. Anecdote is easy to come by; evidence is at best fragmentary, often incompatible and at times highly partisan.
Acknowledging the limits of available data, we can note some definitive closures in History: Kingston, Southbank and Sunderland have all terminated their History programmes in the last few years, while Chichester, Goldsmiths and Oxford Brookes have experienced significant redundancies. Each of the three top-performing History departments in REF2021—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. Without privileging the threats at these three institutions over others or equating REF results transparently with research excellence, the cases of Kent, Lincoln and University of East Anglia (UEA) showcase the apparent disconnect between high-calibre performance in History, on the one hand, and their institutional viability on the other.
What financial drivers within universities help to explain this radical disconnect? Two arguably stand out: cross-subsidisation (a mechanism that operates across UK universities) and (in England) the removal by George Osborne in 2015 of student number controls, an unexpected decision analysed in the Higher Education and Policy Institute (HEPI) Report 69 (
Hillman 2014). As independent organisations, universities can and do apply the great bulk of their tuition fees or funding as they see fit, cross-subsidising more expensive disciplines with income generated by teaching conducted in less costly subjects. As the University of Sussex’s Vice Chancellor observes, ‘A rarely spoken truth is that universities’ research, teaching, innovation, and civic activities are based on fundamental financial interdependence and cross-subsidies’ (
Roseneil 2024). Although denominated differently in different institutions, the ‘central charge’ levied on academic departments and faculties—essentially the university equivalent of council tax—varies widely within institutions rather than only between them. Creating a mechanism for transferring funds not only from academic departments to central services but also to more expensive subjects, this mode of calculation and extraction has seen ‘deficit departments’ proliferate as inflation has risen and the value of fees and teaching funding has shrunk. Because these central charging calculations are shrouded in institutional mystery, they operate as a black box. Within any one university, staff responsible for the health of disciplines have no effective way of testing these calculations, nor can meaningful comparisons be made across the sector for any one subject area. (In History departments located in England, for example, anecdotal evidence suggests that central charges minimally span from 45–50 per cent at some institutions, to over 70 per cent at others, but we lack evidence on either the full range of values or any norms.)
Institutional behaviour within England in the aftermath of the removal in 2015 of student number controls would, however, suggest that History is a relatively inexpensive subject to teach. Faced with the declining real value of tuition fees, a softening of undergraduate application numbers and new restrictions on M-level international student recruitment, several higher-tariff universities have turned to History (among other SHAPE disciplines) to shore up their finances. Increases of over fifty students per department in annual cohorts have not been exceptional in these History departments in the past five years. Institutional behaviour during the UCAS Clearing process also illustrates this shift: History units that previously eschewed Clearing, now enter it not simply to meet but to increase their student numbers, under pressure to shore up shortfalls elsewhere within their institutions (
Rowsell 2024). For lower-tariff universities, the consequences of this scramble appear clear: the brunt of compulsory redundancies has been carried by these institutions, as higher-tariff programmes hoover up additional students. 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 absence of good data makes tracking the consequences of these developments exceptionally difficult, although going forward the British Academy’s ‘Cold Spots’ maps are designed to assist such assessments (
Cullen 2024). My preliminary, admittedly impressionistic, analysis is that the landscape that is evolving is increasingly ‘lumpy’, in multiple senses. Most obviously in History, several large Russell Group universities have significantly increased their History undergraduate intakes, making serious inroads into recruitment at lower-tariff programmes both within and outside the Russell Group. ‘Lumps’ of students matriculated without the parallel appointment of additional staff pose obvious challenges to student welfare and pedagogy, to the career development of precarious Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and to established academics’ research, while the failure to recruit sufficient students poses existential threats to History programmes at nearby institutions. Post-92 provision of History—which has been a real strength of our discipline in the past few decades in terms of access, innovation and quality—appears to have suffered most in the first instance, but the examples of Kent and UEA are an obvious reminder that this phenomenon had wider reach even before the advent of this year’s restrictions on visas for masters students’ dependents further deflated the recruitment of the international students whose fees have hitherto kept the Titanic afloat (
The Royal Historical Society 2024).
If this market is efficient, we are bound to ask, ‘efficient for whom?’ The mantra of successive Conservative university ministers was ‘student choice’, and advocates of Conservative funding policies such as HEPI’s Nick Hillman continue to wave this flag, celebrating the ‘buyer’s market’ of 2024 in which students enjoyed ‘more choice and more options than expected’ (Hillman, cited by Dimsdale
2024). In this view, the use of Clearing to ‘trade up’ and the ability of students to attend higher-tariff institutions that are recruiting larger cohorts both figure as self-evident consumer ‘goods’. Absent from this view is any effort to assess the impact of lumpy recruitment on student learning, retention rates and well-being. The possibility that the exercise of maximum student choice might degrade student experience is simply not on the table. Nor are either policymakers or universities openly discussing the impact of uncontrolled, ‘lumpy’ recruitment cycles on staff performance and welfare, on postgraduate and postdoctoral training or on the medium- to long-term health of the disciplines. Given the extent to which cross-subsidisation pervades the university system, moreover, the question of what happens when lower-cost programmes of study such as History are squeezed out of many providers is of great significance for higher-cost STEM subjects. Addressing the UK’s university crisis will require additional funding. But the patterns discernible in the discipline of History suggest that both much better, joined-up data and strategic collaboration beyond the SHAPE disciplines will also be essential. As David Cameron told the Tory conference in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, ‘We’re in this together’ (
BBC News 30 September
2008).
