Theology under Threat

Ruinous plans to slash Theology and Religion at Exeter will have serious implications far beyond Devon

Dr Jon Morgan

For those who work in or follow the undulations of UK Higher Education, last week brought some familiar-sounding news. Yet another swathe of proposed cuts impacting a department teaching Theology and Religious Studies was announced, this time at the University of Exeter. Exeter’s provision in Theology and Religion stands to lose 28% of its staff in a move that will see cuts of between a quarter and a third to subject areas across the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: History, English, Classics, Politics, Philosophy, Sociology, Education, Modern Languages, Drama, Film; the list goes on. The cuts proposed by the leadership at Exeter are of a truly shocking scope and devastating depth, and yet they are also keenly targeted.

There is little doubt that the Higher Education sector is in a mess. Thirty years on from New Labour’s rallying cry of Education! Education! Education!, complete with Tony Blair’s vision of 50% of school-leavers to going on to university, and the introduction of a system of private tuition fees, the legacy of those policies has been entirely predictable.

UK HE is now a sickly marketplace saturated with providers under significant economic strain as a result of disastrous central decision-making. Public investment has consistently drained away, and already astronomic fees fail to cover costs. Government policies over the last two decades have seen vital links with Europe severed, the maintenance of a ‘hostile environment’ that has made it difficult for universities to employ international scholars, and – as a quick-fix handbrake for immigration numbers – a crackdown on the number of international students being allowed to enter the country.

University staff everywhere acknowledge that these are real challenges. However, what is especially sobering about what is happening at Exeter is that, despite the insistence from management that they are necessary, the cuts announced are not seemingly in response to an emergency financial situation. Staff have not yet been shown data that comes near to justifying such a drastic pivot – on the contrary, the available numbers indicate that the University remains in (and projects) a surplus and holds healthy cash reserves. Instead, the proposal appears part of a strategic move away from offering courses in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Science simply because they are not seen as having the potential to generate sufficient revenue in an institution whose top 16 executives take home combined salaries of £4m and in which the number of management earning over £120k per year has increased sharply over the past decade, despite restructuring and multiple rounds of redundancies among the wider staff.

The subjects being targeted are not those in which big tranches of private funding are likely to be secured, valuable intellectual property rights potentially on offer, or in which commercial partnerships with wealthy industries might be secured to boost the coffers. Nor is it possible to teach a dynamic and diverse syllabus in these areas that provokes creative, careful, and critical thought, or offer rigorous feedback on the close reading and nuanced interpretation of texts and imaginative responses to source material, at a mass scale that saves on salaries – at least not while maintaining high quality and valuing students as whole people and not just a mostly-anonymous clutch of customers.

Of course, the social impacts of this decision to prize revenue above all else and pivot away from arts and humanities provision will be profound. Exeter is in a region with high levels of social deprivation, where preserving local access to an education in these areas is especially important for first-generation and low-income students who are more likely to study close to home. The proposals would constitute a big stride towards a situation where the ability to study subjects like History, Politics, Theology, and French will become ever more restricted to a wealthy few.

It seems clear that this shift away from arts, humanities, and so-called ‘soft’ sciences is connected to culture-wars criticism of these subjects as constituting silos of ‘wokeism’ that generate graduates who lack the skills to secure ‘good’ jobs upon graduation. The fact that, in a political culture rife with hollow charisma, corruption, and careerism, politicians and their paymasters wish to disrupt formation in critical thinking and price out students from non-elite backgrounds is no more surprising than the fact that successive governments have looked to blame universities for a graduate employment crisis that springs directly from the politics of austerity.

The cuts proposed at Exeter will be devastating, not least because, if they are allowed to go ahead, they will likely be seen as a blueprint for other similarly positioned universities. They are terrible news for everyone who cares about the many and varied aspects of society that are fed by arts and humanities graduates; but they are particularly bad news for Christians, especially those with a progressive stripe.

Both in terms of the normative metrics used within Higher Education (teaching quality, research excellence, student satisfaction, etc.) and in terms of the material scope and influence of the research undertaken by its staff, Exeter’s Theology and Religion unit is without question one of the UK’s best. Alongside strong offerings in biblical studies, ancient languages and culture, systematic and constructive theology, church history, and theological ethics, Exeter boasts internationally recognised research expertise in the role of theology and religion in many of the key issues facing contemporary society: AI ethics, climate adaptation, migration, cultural heritage, public policy, healthcare and more. And yet the axe is still poised. While the proposal would not mean the loss of all Theology and Religion at Exeter (at least not immediately), a reduction of nearly a third in an already small unit that offers considerable specialism, and where individual contributions to teaching and research are not simply interchangeable, will take a substantial toll.

As one of the only significant TRS units left in the south west, the proposed cuts would exacerbate the effects of what is already recognised as a ‘cold spot’ for the discipline, reducing access to students from the region looking to study close to home and adult learners exploring part-time study, but also having a palpable impact on churches in the region. Furthermore, given the wider national context and the general mood music, there are mounting concerns from beyond Exeter that the proposed cuts there could have an existential impact on Theology and Religious Studies nationwide.

With all due apologies for preaching to the choir, I pause here to briefly rehearse the importance of the academic discipline of Theology and Religious Studies to churches. High-quality theological scholarship helps churches to interpret scripture, tradition, history, and contemporary issues with greater care, reducing the risk of shallow, misleading, poorly-resourced, and damaging teaching. Universities provide a context where theology is tested through rigorous research and dialogue with other disciplines, which in turn equips the church and its members to engage confidently with society, and helps ensure that Christian contributions to public debates are intellectually honest and credible. Academic theology develops future church leaders and educators: many clergy, lay leaders, chaplains, teachers, and theologians receive their formation through UK universities. Supporting excellent scholarship helps to ensure that future leaders are well-equipped to serve the C21st church; conversely, the erosion of that scholarship risks reducing further the theological literacy apparent in church leadership. Academic standards help to protect teaching and research from being overly shaped by ideology or predetermined conclusions; churches benefit when scholarship seeks careful evidence, critical reflection, and openness to scrutiny, especially when the findings are challenging. In short, there is a lot to lose, and all the more if this blow proves one too many for the sector.

Those in Theology and Religion at Exeter suggest that anyone motivated to help convince the management to rethink this badly-conceived, poorly justified, hugely wasteful, and profoundly destructive programme of cuts could do the following:

1. Join the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, several top scholars in TRS in the UK and around the world, and a great many other friends, colleagues, former and current students, and other supporters in signing an open letter to the University leadership (found here).
2. Circulate that link to others who are invested in TRS, encouraging them to also lend their support.

3. Anyone who represents a scholarly society or professional association could also consider sending a separate letter on behalf of that organisation to the senior leadership – via the Vice Chancellor, Lisa Roberts, president@exeter.ac.uk. Anyone doing that is asked to also copy in the department (theology@exeter.ac.uk) to help them in their efforts to demonstrate how many people are invested in their work and to bolster the message about how damaging these redundancies would be.

4. Sign a petition set up by the Exeter branch of the Universities and Colleges Union advocating more widely for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Exeter, which can be found here.

5. Anyone who has a public platform of any kind – a podcast, a blog, a social-media presence, a news letter, a video channel – please consider highlighting this latest assault on the discipline. Social media posts can be tagged #DefendExeterUni .

Dr Jon Morgan is Associate Research Fellow in Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.