Are We Forgetting How to Read? The Extinguishment of The Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

As of October 2026, the University of Nottingham announced its plans to terminate its Department of Music, a faculty that had been operating for upwards of a century. Yet this termination is not contained to Nottingham, with an epidemic of creative extinguishment spreading across UK universities. The London Metropolitan University has planned to cut over one hundred jobs across creative faculties, and the University of Bristol has opened a voluntary severance scheme in its departments of humanities and modern languages.

While these cuts stem predominantly from turbulent economic conditions facing British universities, we may be led to question why it is that the creative faculties are the first to be withdrawn?

The answer could lie in how we have come to define the purpose of higher education.

In today’s world, universities are becoming increasingly expected to produce measurable economic outcomes, whether that be through graduate employment rates, average graduate salaries, or research income. With this logic, the value of a degree becomes determined less by the way a person thinks and more by how quickly their skills can translate into a quantitative statistic. While, of course, the prospect of a graduate job is important, the value of the creative arts becomes somewhat lost in this utilitarian vision of education; the value of reading a novel, composing a piece of music, or studying a language cannot be simply reduced to a salary figure.

To complicate matters further, we are entering an age of artificial intelligence in which an image can be generated from a sentence, an essay can be written in the click of a button, and a musical composition can be produced without an instrument. Does this not mean that creative thought should be becoming more important, instead of increasingly overlooked? When a machine can imitate the human voice, should we not be encouring young people to engage with and preserve authentic creative expression?

Now this article is not to disregard STEM and its importance, nor to present the arts and the scientific world as competing disciplines. Society needs, and will perpetually need, scientists, doctors, engineers, and mathematicians. Yet in adapting to harsh financial realities, universities should not be presenting STEM as a priority. STEM itself depends upon creative thought: every scientific breakthrough begins with someone capable of questioning established thought patterns, and even the most sophisticated of modern technological breakthroughs are products of human creativity and innovation.

With this in mind, perhaps we should be asking ourselves not whether the arts are lucrative enough to survive in higher education, but what kind of society we are fostering if they do not? If UK universities become institutions where we study only what can be monetised, the generation of tomorrow may come to understand education as transactional, measured by quantitative potential instead of cultural awareness, intellectual freedom, and imaginative capacity.

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