Stephen J. Dunning

A few days ago, I began the long journey from Cornwall to the vibrant, faraway lands of East Africa on my first solo international research trip as a young academic. A trip I hope will be, for me at least, the trip of a lifetime. Yet, I travel with a broken heart, for a piece of my heart, along with my thoughts and prayers, remains with my academic colleagues in Devon and Cornwall who face the daunting prospect of losing their livelihoods.

Last week, the University of Exeter told over 500 members of its academic faculty they were at risk of redundancy and announced that approximately 150 of them would lose their jobs. Of those put at risk, 85% are in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

This will have a devastating effect on the teaching and research across the university, particularly in subjects such as History, Archaeology, Classics, Politics, Religion and Philosophy, English, Drama, Film, Media and Communications, Languages, Psychology, Environmental Science and Environmental Humanities. It will also decimate teaching and research at the university’s Penryn campus in Cornwall, where there is a thriving interdisciplinary approach to the humanities, arts and sciences.

The University of Exeter is a beacon of light for the humanities, arts and social sciences. It has built its reputation and national and global rankings on these subjects. It is the beating heart of humanities research and teaching in the South West. Our university motto is Lucem Sequimur, translated from Latin into English as ‘we follow the light’. As I travel overseas for my own academic research, this light is at risk of being extinguished. 

The university senior management claim they will not close departments or cut degree courses, and that they do not anticipate any changes to PhD supervision. Yet, they have placed entire departments at risk of redundancy. Even if they spread out the redundancies, many departments will be cut by up to 25% or even 50%. This means losing a quarter or even half of their academic staff. Not only does this mean people losing their jobs, but it also means extremely overburdened and unrealistic workloads for those that remain, especially if the university still expects a department to keep its promise to continue running the same number of degree courses and modules.

It also means that PhD supervision will be upended, with the potential for projects to lose momentum or be forced to start from scratch. Standard practice is that each PhD student has two professors who work together to supervise the PhD project. I am lucky in that my second supervisor is at a different university, but for most PhD students, their two supervisors are both at the University of Exeter, often in the same department. Given the number of planned redundancies, this means that almost every PhD student will lose at least one of their supervisors, and some may lose both. The university claims it has a process in place to reassign new supervisors for those students affected. What they are forgetting is that most PhD students choose the university they study with based on working with a specific supervisor because of their unique expertise. If that supervisor leaves, then why should the PhD student stay?

Let’s make one thing clear: the academic staff at the University of Exeter are not redundant. In fact, almost all of them are already overworked and struggle to keep up with demand. They continue to provide world-class teaching, with their degree courses being so popular that they are not only profitable but also often oversubscribed and overcapacity. They all have strong rosters of PhD students under their supervision and continue to make world-leading contributions to academic research that have real-world impacts and benefits for society at large. They already meet the challenges of tight budgets and limited resources with great ability to maintain excellence for the university. To claim they are ‘redundant’ is grossly misleading and frankly insulting.

Exeter has built its reputation on the humanities, arts and social sciences. As one of its renowned authors highlighted this week, humanities subjects are consistently the highest performing subjects at the university and are largely what justify Exeter’s Russel Group status. They consistently enrol large numbers of students, increasing every year, with almost every department operating at a profit. This results in regular humanities top 100 rankings for Exeter in the national league tables and QS World Rankings of universities globally. Indeed, several departments have climbed the rankings substantially in recent years. In fact, despite the national crisis in higher education funding, the fact that the humanities subjects consistently operate at a profit allows the university to subsidise more expensive subjects in other faculties. So, for the University of Exeter at least, the humanities are the goose that lays the golden egg. Except it seems that goose is for the chopping block!

The university’s senior management has failed to provide proper justification for these redundancies. In fact, its own financial data shows that they are unnecessary. The university has already implemented cost-saving measures and is currently operating with an annual budget surplus, all without the need for compulsory redundancies. So what justification is there for cutting jobs?

In the meantime, the university has massively increased the amount of money it pays its senior management. Over the last 5 years, the number of senior executives paid over £100k per year has increased from 157 in 2020 to 404 in 2025. That’s 404 people, each on a salary of £100k or more per year.

At the top of this financial ladder sits the Vice Chancellor, who is currently on a salary of £392,000 per year, having recently received a £31k pay rise. For context, that single pay rise is almost the same as the annual salary of an Associate Lecturer at the bottom of the ladder. Imagine receiving a single pay rise worth the same as someone else’s entire annual salary?

Taking the Vice Chancellor’s salary into account and taking a conservative estimate that the other 403 executives are on £100k per year each, that’s nearly £50m in annual expenditure on executive salaries alone. This money is spent on senior members of staff who do barely, if any, teaching and research, and whose jobs are exempt from redundancy. It seems as though the senior management, who sit at the top of the ladder, are determined to pull up the ladder behind them. Imagine if that money were instead invested in the salaries and budgets of the actual faculty of the university who do the teaching and research?

There are other universities across the UK that have had to make tough decisions, with several making large redundancies in recent years. Some may be justified, but many are not. It has also impacted across academia, with science subjects also hit hard at some universities. The University of Cambridge, traditionally strong in both the sciences and the humanities, has recently planned to substantially cut its biomedical science departments and institutes. Yet, for most universities, it is often the arts and humanities, already underfunded, which often get hit the hardest. This is especially true in the case of Exeter.

It is often claimed that humanities subjects are not relevant to the modern economy, with recent governments focusing on short-term industrial strategy that prefers science, technology, engineering and mathematics over the arts and humanities. This is frankly absurd. Humanities subjects teach us the critical skills we so desperately need and are relevant in every job sector. The social sciences help us understand society in new and insightful ways, often with meaningful benefits for public policy. The arts show us new ways of seeing and observing, and are what give human life meaning and expression. Without these subjects, our graduates and young people will be ill-equipped for the job market, the heart of academia will be dead, and humanity will be lost.

To borrow from a fellow student, when you cut staff, you cut possibilities. When you cut departments, you cut futures. When you cut the humanities, you cut away part of our collective humanity.

The light of academia shines bright at the University of Exeter, and there is some hope on the horizon. The Exeter branch of the University and College Union (EUCU) is determined to support its members and fight these unjustified and reckless cuts. They have the support of the university’s student community, both undergraduate and postgraduate, who stand in solidarity with the union and their academic colleagues, tutors, and mentors. A campaign is underway to raise public awareness and persuade the university senior management to rethink its plan for compulsory redundancies. A public petition has already reached well over 10,000 signatures and counting, with students, staff, alumni and colleagues from across the world adding their support.

I sincerely hope that the University of Exeter listens to its own professionals and experts, its students, staff, and alumni, and cancels its reckless and shortsighted policy of redundancies. As I travel abroad in the name of the institution to which I belong, I call upon the leadership of the University of Exeter not to extinguish the light.

#DefendExeterUni #HandsOffOurSupervisors #LucemSequimur