Is history under threat at the UK's universities?

Universities around Britain have announced staffing cuts to history departments in recent months, citing falling admissions and funding shortages. President of the Royal Historical Society EMMA GRIFFIN spoke to Matt Elton about the causes of the crisis

- EMMA GRIFFIN

Matt Elton: You recently sent out an email newsletter in your capacity as Royal Historical Society [RHS] president, highlighting the issue of university history funding. What do you, and the RHS, see as being the problem?

Emma Griffin: My sense is that things are bad, and getting worse. My predecessors as RHS president would occasionally hear from a department being restructured or closed down. Now we get these emails every couple of months. It was also previously the case that a history department at risk of closure was typically a small department in an institution that didn't have a very long tradition of teaching history. But we're now hearing from much larger universities that have had a large and thriving history department for perhaps 60 years, and with 30 or 40 members of staff, that are suffering really serious recruitment and retention problems. So we do think there is a real problem, and we do think it's connected with larger decisions about how undergraduates are funded in the UK, which have particular implications for disciplines such as history.

Are figures available for these cuts?

There is no real way of knowing how many historians, history departments or history degrees are being cut. However, as far as we can tell, there hasn't been a very large drop in the total number of students. Instead, we're looking at the clustering of lots of students in a small number of institutions particularly the 'Russell Group', whose 24 members include the UK's largest, oldest universities. They are suddenly making the decision to admit many more students than in the recent past. This means that other institutions - even those with very healthy, viable history departments - can't recruit enough students. Almost all of the funding for history departments comes from student fees, so if you're not getting enough students, you have a really serious financial problem.