To Debra Humphris and the Senior Management of the University of Brighton,

We the undersigned urge you to reconsider the mass redundancies recently announced at the University of Brighton (400 members of staff within the university are threatened with redundancy, with 110 jobs to be cut). Moreover, we ask you to rethink your apparent drive towards fatally undermining humanities teaching within this university. Although the selections for potential redundancy have been made across the university, the School of Humanities and Social Science has been hit particularly hard. The Humanities Subject Area, located within that School, has been hit even harder: every single member of its teaching team has been selected for potential redundancy.

The academic provision within the Humanities Subject Area is well established and well recognised. It delivers interdisciplinary courses that combine politics, history, literature, cultural studies and philosophy as means of engaging critically with pertinent contemporary issues. It has been in operation since 1988, and it has been highly successful throughout this time, as attested by successive cohorts of appreciative students, the reports of External Examiners, and graduates’ employment successes. 

The number of planned cuts from within this Subject Area risks rendering its continuation impossible. Its closure, were it to proceed, would end the concentrated provision of philosophy, cultural studies and history at the University, and would severely diminish the teaching of literature. Undermining the Humanities in this way would deprive the University of Brighton of elements of teaching and scholarly research that are centrally important in the very definition of a university – as well as losing a resource of significant value across the institution.

The forced collapse of Humanities teaching at Brighton, and the harm done to the lives and livelihoods of your employees throughout the University, is entirely unacceptable. We urge you to reverse this course of action.