“I ask nothing more from you than to do what you have actually been doing. Head out into the fray and keep reading,” was Percival Everett’s suggestions when he attended to graduating students at Wesleyan university in Connecticut last summertime. Fitting words from a prize-winning novelist, at a time when betting has actually ended up being a more typical pastime in the US than checking out a book. In the UK, too, issues are growing about the decline of reading, partly due to common screen-based entertainment. Last week, parliament’s education committee required the National Year of Checking out to be encompassed a years, to instill the routine in children and young people.All scholastic disciplines use books to communicate information, but for literature and the liberal arts more widely, they are an essential currency. As the 2026 graduation season wanes, and robes and mortarboards are put away for another year, there is growing anger that these subjects are under attack from university administrations searching for ways to conserve cash– while ministers look away.Analysis of 2024 data for the Guardian revealed nearly 4,000 task cuts in Forming(the acronym for social sciences, liberal arts and arts). All however 110 were in non-Russell Group universities, which have lower entry requirements and recruit more socioeconomically disadvantaged students, causing issues that some courses may become the preserve of an elite. However liberal arts cuts are not restricted to one type of institution. Exeter plans to cut 150 full-time posts. Nottingham expects to become the very first Russell Group university to withdraw all its contemporary foreign language degrees.Prof Susan J Smith, president of the British Academy, just recently described the scenario as “an emergency situation, threatening all topics
“, and singled out the problem of “cold areas” where some disciplines are at risk of vanishing. It is unclear that the evaluation of higher education which the academy wants would supply an option. However she is best to highlight the negative results of fragmented decision-making. To accounting professionals, some courses or departments might be viewed as cost centres. But to speakers and trainees, and the places in which they are based, they are cultural resources– repositories of knowledge developed over decades, a few of which will have a specific, regional character and relevance.No one argues that no course should ever close. But the choices that students make are partly driven by changes even more down the education system. The rising popularity of Stem(science, innovation
, engineering and maths) is partially due to the Conservative policy of promoting them; the fall in teenagers selecting literature is linked to an unimaginative GCSE(certainly something that a new prime minister with an English degree could fix). Universities make their own choices about what and who to teach. However ministers should be in advance about the constraints in which they run. An expected ₤ 100m cut to mentor grants, integrated with the introduction of a worldwide
trainee levy, mean that a years-long monetary capture is set to carry on. In such an environment, standing up for the worth of literature and the humanities ought not to be left to well-known novelists. Do you have an opinion on the concerns raised in this post? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be thought about for publication in our letters area, please click on this link.