UK universities face a “bonfire of the humanities” that must be resisted by the sector, according to Dame Mary Beard.
Speaking at this year’s Times Higher Education Awards as she accepted the THE Outstanding Achievement Award, the recently retired professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge warned that that the humanities must not be seen as “a vanity project that we only support when the going is good”.
The intervention came after a slew of job cuts and course closures across England led the University and College Union to warn that attacks on the arts and humanities were becoming “endemic”, and as the Westminster policy focus on graduate employment pushes institutions to prioritise the sciences for investment.
