She said there feels like there is a âsplitâ between academics and management, and that academics feel âcheatedâ as âweâre very successful in terms of what we were hired to do: delivering research outcomes, writing booksâŚbut the managers arenât concerned with those metricsâ. Instead, âtheyâre concerned with student recruitment and reaching particular targets, so itâs like weâre speaking two different languages,â said Maguire, who herself is at risk of redundancy.
David Miller, a former head of marketing at Exeter who now works as a consultant, highlighted how undergraduate numbers studying history at Exeter have dropped by a quarter and languages enrolments are down by 37 per cent. âIf anything, Exeter has made the call to reduce staff numbers in these subjects later than other universities. All they are doing is aligning resources with demandâ, he said on
LinkedIn.
But Maguire said she believed that the government could be doing more to protect humanities subjects, and that governmentâs own strategic priorities could be fuelling the cuts.