The University of Nottingham, one of the most prestigious Russell Group universities, is preparing to close its languages department, as well as 48 undergraduate courses across music, nursing, agriculture, theology, microbiology and education. It seems strange that at an institution which claims to be a ‘global university without borders’, students will no longer be able to study French, German, Spanish, Chinese or Russian.
My reaction to this news is one of head vs heart. My head tells me that in order to survive and provide high-quality education, universities need to be solvent, and so perhaps this is a pragmatic decision – a hard one, but one that reflects our hard times.
Nottingham University is in a terrible financial position: it has already reduced budgets, frozen staff recruitment, threatened to cut over 250 jobs, removed £40 million from its planned spending, and committed to reducing the size of its estate by 20 per cent and selling King’s Meadow Campus. It will be under even more pressure given the recent clampdown on student visas (around a quarter of its intake are international students).
The University of Nottingham’s University and College Union has accused the university of severe mismanagement, citing costly blunders such as Project Transform (‘a disastrous attempt to overhaul student administration, at a cost of £82 million’); Unicore (‘a £35 million flawed finance and HR system’) and Campus Solutions (‘a students records system plagued with technical failures’ which drains £16 million a year.) The university is clearly an over-managed, bloated, bureaucratic mess.
At the same time, educational institutions cannot be everything to everyone, and if they are to function as corporate enterprises, run by market forces, then it makes sense to make cuts in the name of efficiency. The sad reality is that UK applications for undergraduate language degrees have fallen significantly (down more than a fifth from 2019 to 2025: fewer than 3 per cent of A-level entries for summer exams in 2025 were for foreign languages).
And yet, and yet, and yet. This may make commercial sense, but my heart says this is a pitiable and philistine decision. This short-sighted logic does more than just balance budgets: it strips young people of opportunities for intercultural cooperation and exchange. It starves our classrooms of future linguists by fuelling the recruitment crisis amongst language teachers. It further undermines and undervalues the humanities and arts, perpetuating this false narrative that Stem is the only dependable route to employment.
This decision helps to actively shape a society that is culturally narrower, poorer and less connected to the wider world: precisely the opposite of what universities are supposed to achieve. We need outward-looking, culturally-aware graduates who can communicate effectively in international contexts; we need language experts for trade, business, and national security. In June, then Foreign Secretary David Lammy expressed concern about the UK’s ‘profound lack of confidence in how to deal with China, and a profound lack of knowledge regarding China’s culture, its history and – most importantly – its language.’ I don’t often say this, but he’s right.
Language departments are easy targets
It doesn’t have to be this way. The slow erosion of student numbers could be an anomaly rather than an inevitability: with a bit of imagination and drive, universities could bolster their student intakes in these subjects. For example, they could offer more opportunities to study languages from scratch (thereby opening up these courses to more state school pupils who would not have had the opportunity to study, say, Arabic or Russian at school). They could form regional alliances to share teaching or resources, or promote the relevance of their courses to societal issues and future employability. They could offer language modules alongside other courses (for example, History), or promote more joint honours degrees. They could counter this assumption that technology – not academics – will break down language barriers: no matter how proficient AI translation becomes, it can never substitute the cultural understanding and personal rapport that learning a language offers.
Critics of this proposal argue that the problem is not one of unsustainability but of under-resourcing. Language departments are easy targets because they tend to be relatively expensive to run, as they usually offer a large amount of contact hours and need comparatively high levels of staff. Yet the skills and intellectual rigour they foster are worth saving. As Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy argues, we need to ‘safeguard’ our language provision: ‘It would, for example, be geopolitically unwise to find ourselves without capable Russian or Chinese speakers. While it’s easy to turn off the tap, it’s much harder to turn it back on.’
Foreign language degrees may not be the most traditionally lucrative, but do we really want to be a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing?
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