UK’s University of East Anglia to cut more than three dozen arts and humanities jobs

The University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, UK, plans to cut 36 academic staff posts with most of the job losses due to fall in Arts and Humanities. According to the BBC, the University and College Union said 31 of 36 cuts at the university’s faculties are due to be implemented in Arts and Humanities. A spokesperson for UEA says there are no proposed redundancies in the History of Art department.

The spokesperson says that in order to secure UEA’s future financial stability the university needs to make £30m savings by September. “As part of the wider cost saving plans, the university is proposing to reduce staff numbers by a total of 113 staff in addition to those leaving through voluntary severance. We are looking at proposed staff reductions of 77 staff in professional services and faculty professional services and 36 proposed staff reductions in faculties.” She declined to confirm if the 31 posts in Arts and Humanities would be cut.

The writer Jonathan Coe wrote on Twitter: “UEA has one of the finest Humanities faculties in the country. Many of its brilliant teaching staff are now to be made redundant because the university is in financial crisis. The people losing their jobs will not be the ones who caused the crisis.”

The spokesperson adds: “All subject areas in the faculty of Arts and Humanities at UEA will be maintained: for example, our internationally renowned Creative Writing courses… the faculty of Arts and Humanities will continue to be supported to produce internationally excellent, creative, and innovative research both within and across disciplines.”

The aim is to achieve proposed staff reductions through a targeted voluntary redundancy scheme and redeployment opportunities, she says, adding: “The university has been very clear that compulsory redundancies remain a last resort. We are committed to supporting the impacted members of staff during this challenging time.”

UEA alumni include the art historian and columnist at The Art Newspaper, Bendor Grosvenor (PhD, 2009), gallerist Philip Mould (BA, 1981) and Andrew Bolton (BA, 1987), curator in charge of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In May, the University of Brighton announced it was closing the Brighton Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), saying it had faced “very significant challenges” in terms of funding including “the near decade-long freeze in undergraduate tuition fees” as well as “generationally high levels of inflation and soaring energy costs”.