The renewed debate about staff redundancies in the higher education sector in the UK, which are likely to take place sooner or later regardless of opposition, could also be regarded as a positive development.
The Office for Students now models close to half of higher education providers in England running a deficit in 2025-26, and warns that the projected recovery rests on recruitment forecasts it considers persistently over-optimistic. Analysis of Russell Group accounts for the same period found that twenty institutions let go almost 7,000 staff, at a cost of £124.6 million in compensation for loss of office, while the median base salary of their vice chancellors rose by five per cent to £350,500. Nearly 4,000 courses have closed at UK universities since 2024. At the University of Surrey, the local union counts some twenty programmes suspended or closed in recent months, against a normal rate of two or three a year.
The mythical academic lifestyle
The fact that there are hundreds of applicants for entry-level positions does not appear to make academia any less attractive. People are willing to endure lengthy selection processes, temporary contracts, relocation, and existential crises for the privilege of entering the academic world. And who can blame them? Once inside, the prevailing belief is that the struggle is over. The mythical academic lifestyle awaits: flexible hours, intellectual freedom, the ability to work from anywhere, as well as external appointments such as consulting and speaking engagements, some of which provide additional income. Over time, this image of academia as a desirable refuge has generated its own set of contradictions.
How many choose to remain in academia despite having long reached retirement age and accumulated sufficient means, yet still feel no inclination to vacate their position for someone desperately attempting to secure a tenure-track role? The question is never posed in such direct terms, perhaps because the answers would prove inconveniently varied. Or, worse still, how many have cultivated precisely the right professional networks so that, upon retirement and a carefully timed change of heart, they find themselves able to return, prompting, with remarkable efficiency, the drafting of an advertisement that happens to match their exact profile?
This is the first argument that academics do not sufficiently care about the status of their sector, let alone more junior colleagues. When concern is articulated, it is expressed in the language of institutional anxiety, yet seldom translates into anything that requires personal cost. Sympathy for those attempting to enter the sector tends to remain abstract, expressed in the same tone one might use for a weather system: unfortunate, unavoidable.
This is also, inevitably, framed as a matter of ethics. The topic is mastered through either the lived experience of having once been junior oneself or newer institutional doctrines concerning fairness, diversity, and equal opportunity. All are carefully professed while sitting comfortably alongside arrangements that prove resistant to change in practice. It is not that the principles are insincere; rather, they operate at a level of abstraction that allows them to coexist with whatever the current structure happens to require. Ethics, in this sense, becomes a parallel curriculum.
This prompts the question of self-censorship, with two aspects standing out. The first concerns the choice of topics. Despite the formal promotion of critical thinking in syllabi, many academics have found it more expedient to go with the flow and avoid anything that might be interpreted as controversial. The humanities and social sciences are particularly vulnerable in this respect. Topics such as gender, diversity or genocide, amongst others that may invite external scrutiny and institutional discomfort, can carry consequences that extend beyond the seminar room and into employment itself.
How many colleagues have offered solidarity, in one form or another, to those under attack for teaching what they believed was right? How many have openly challenged the prestigious positions held by colleagues who have served causes hostile to humanity, or lent legitimacy to figures such as Jeffrey Epstein despite being aware of his crimes? The result is a subtle recalibration of intellectual ambition. In this light, and this is an even more controversial question, if the humanities and social sciences have, in part, abandoned their mission, why should their current number of programmes and academic positions remain intact?
The second aspect concerns academics’ self-censorship in relation to senior management. On countless occasions they have remained silent, whether when colleagues were mistreated or when leadership pursued policies that were plainly detrimental to the institution (and, by extension, the sector as a whole). Silence, when framed as prudence, reflects the wider culture of fear in academia.
What makes this culture effective is that it seldom requires direct enforcement. Promotions, sabbaticals, contract renewals, and committee appointments all depend, to varying degrees, on maintaining functional relationships with those who exercise institutional authority. Most academics become adept at anticipating institutional preferences long before they are explicitly voiced. They learn which conversations are better conducted behind closed doors, which criticisms are safer expressed in private than in public, and which battles are simply not worth fighting.
In practice, this results in a system in which academics frequently enable senior management to act largely as it pleases.
Those who manage
Admittedly, many senior administrators and governing council or board members are former academics, some with distinguished scholarly records, others with rather less convincing ones, yet all are familiar with the unwritten rules that govern academic life. Others, however, enter academia from outside the sector, bringing experience from industry, consultancy, or the wider public sector. Together, their presence raises several questions.
The first is whether they genuinely care about the disciplines they are charged with managing, and on what basis they decide which deserve investment and protection. This is not to suggest hostility, but distance. Universities are complex institutions whose value cannot always be captured through financial returns, recruitment targets, or performance indicators alone. Disciplines that thrive on criticism and intellectual debate often sit uneasily within managerial frameworks designed to reward predictability and measurable outcomes.
The question, therefore, is not whether external managers are competent administrators. Many undoubtedly are. It is whether they regard the humanities and social sciences as intellectual communities worthy of cultivation, or simply as organisational units requiring efficient administration. The distinction is consequential.
The second issue concerns the extent to which senior administrators are prepared to defend the interests of academics when dealing with external actors whose business models depend almost entirely on academic labour. Scholarly publishers provide perhaps the clearest example. Universities encourage, and often require, their staff to publish in prestigious journals. Academics write the articles, review manuscripts, and serve as editors, almost always without remuneration. The same publishers then sell that work back to universities through subscription packages that cost institutions millions each year.
It is an excellent arrangement, provided one happens to be the publisher. Needless to say, something is fundamentally wrong with this chain of value. It is difficult to imagine another profession in which such an arrangement would be accepted not merely as normal, but as a marker of professional and intellectual prestige.
The third concerns self-perception. In periods of financial uncertainty and announced redundancies, to what extent do senior administrators consider the relationship between their own remuneration and that of the academics upon whom the institution ultimately depends? In many universities, executive salaries exceed those of lecturers and professors by a factor of ten. The issue is not simply one of pay, but of proportionality and shared sacrifice. When departments are asked to absorb cuts, workloads increase, and colleagues lose their jobs, it is reasonable to ask whether those making such decisions perceive themselves as participating in the same crisis.
Leadership is frequently described as carrying greater responsibility, but responsibility, one might assume, should also imply greater exposure to its consequences. More specifically, under what circumstances would senior administrators and university council or board members consider stepping aside, not merely from their current role but, if necessary, from the sector altogether? Such expectations are hardly unusual elsewhere. In many professions, accountability is measured not only by success but also by a willingness to accept the consequences of failure. Universities, despite their commitment to evaluation, performance, and excellence, appear curiously reluctant to apply the same principles at the very top.
At the University of London, the vice-chancellor resigned in April after an eleven-month suspension, alleging that she had been treated detrimentally following whistleblowing disclosures about governance and financial management; the chair of the board and two further trustees departed within weeks. Whatever the merits of the individual case, now bound for a tribunal, the episode is instructive in how such disputes tend to end: quietly, with an interim appointment made permanent and the institution moving on. Nor is this a British peculiarity. Writing in Liberal Education, Margee Ensign describes a broader crisis of university leadership and asks what the sector might learn from institutions that have had to defend their independence under far greater pressure.
All of which invites a broader question: are the redundancies the problem, or its most legible symptom? Seen as a budgetary problem, they are a response to a frozen fee, volatile international recruitment and rising costs, and they will be managed accordingly, through consultation, voluntary severance and portfolio review. But seen as a symptom, they describe a sector that grew for three decades, and substituted expansion for mission. Hence severance is based not on mission or purpose but on financial expediency.
The Purpose of Universities
The university, however, was never merely an economic institution. Liberal education and liberal democracy grew up together, and the connection was never assumed. Newman’s The Idea of a University defended an education that formed judgement rather than technique. John Stuart Mill, in his 1867 inaugural address at St Andrews, insisted that universities exist to make capable human beings rather than capable professionals: men, as he put it, are men before they are lawyers or physicians. Dewey went even further to make the claim structural in Democracy and Education, arguing that democracy is less a form of government than a mode of associated living that must be renewed in every generation, largely through education. Over a century later, Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit restated the argument defensively: a citizenry unable to criticise authority, imagine another’s position or reason through complexity will not remain democratic for long, whatever its growth figures.
If that lineage holds, the disciplines least defensible on a spreadsheet are precisely those most implicated in democratic maintenance. This is an uncomfortable argument to advance while they are being closed, and it is made no easier by the earlier observation that parts of the humanities and social sciences have not defended their own mission with as much vigour and courage as they should. The case for the humanities is not a case for their present condition. And the erosion of public confidence in universities is not simply something done to the sector; it is partly something the sector has done to itself, by defending its budgets more loudly than its purpose.
Then there is the question the sector is least prepared to answer. Artificial intelligence is already dissolving the assumptions on which teaching, assessment and a good deal of academic labour depend. If a model can produce a serviceable literature review, a coursework essay, a first draft of a lecture and a plausible peer review, the question is no longer whether universities will change but who will set the terms. A few institutions have made the move already. Surrey has redesigned every degree programme to embed discipline-specific AI across the curriculum, which is at least a position. Many others are still legislating about AI-induced misconduct while the ground shifts beneath them.
So, are universities willing to change, or will they be changed? The pressure will come from employers already reporting that graduates struggle to adapt to the workplace, and from students who can obtain a passable version of the product elsewhere and at little or no cost. Institutions that have spent a decade optimising for risk management are poorly placed to respond, because responding well requires precisely the dispositions the culture described above has been selecting against: independence, non-conformity, and a willingness to be wrong in public.
There is a more hopeful reading though. If AI absorbs the routine, what remains is disproportionately what liberal education always claimed to do: human judgement and ethical discernment, disagreement conducted well, the slow work of forming people. But that argument can only be made by institutions confident enough to say what they are for, and it cannot be made at all by those whose first instinct is self-preservation.
Recalibration
What we are seeing, as a result, is a higher education sector that increasingly appears trapped in its own institutional logic.
Recalibration, if the word is to mean anything, has to reach the culture rather than just the headcount. That would mean institutions willing to state, publicly and clearly, which of their commitments are not for sale. This does not require new money, but a willingness to be inconvenienced by one’s own principles. Many universities are doing this already.
