George Lapshynov responds to the University of Exeter’s considerations to cut Humanities staff and calls for safeguards to religious education.

Nearly a year on from Theos’s open letter calling for urgent action to safeguard Theology and Religious Studies (TRS) in higher education, news last week that the University of Exeter is considering significant staff cuts – affecting disproportionately the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences – reminds us that the situation has not stabilised. If anything, it has gotten much worse.  

Among those affected, and calling for TRS (and her and her colleagues’ jobs) to be saved, is Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a prominent public intellectual and leading scholar of religion. 

Disciplines like theology, religious studies and philosophy are precisely the disciplines that help us understand meaning, belief, culture and human difference. They gave us Renaissance Humanism, the Enlightenment, and the intellectual foundations of human rights and liberal democracy. The fact that another Russell Group university is now considering shedding them should alarm us. It is a sign we are losing, or perhaps choosing to ditch, our collective capacity to understand belief and worldviews critically and rigorously. 

Exeter is not an isolated case; this moment has been a long time in the making. TRS in UK higher education has been in sustained decline for over a decade. Student numbers have fallen sharply since the early 2010s, driven partly by high tuition fees and a narrow ‘value for money’ logic. Departments have merged, fragmented, and closed; centres of expertise have been dispersed or lost. Two decades ago, there were more than forty TRS providers. Today, that number has roughly halved. An entire academic community is hollowing out. 

But why should we care? 

It might be tempting to see TRS as a niche, confessional subject, attractive only to the dwindling number of practising religious Britons, dispensable when difficult financial choices must be made.  

Thinking this way would be a profound mistake. 

First, the loss of TRS impoverishes the university itself. The study of religion is embedded across the humanities and social sciences, offering distinctive historical, sociological and philosophical approaches to understanding texts, cultures and human behaviour. Well beyond the mere promotion of belief, TRS gives us the tools to look critically, historically, and comparatively at some of the most fundamental and ancestral aspects of human life. This is only made evident by the fact that some of the most prominent scholars in the field – such as Professor Stavrakopoulou herself – are very openly atheist. Additionally, students in TRS mingle with students in other disciplines and cross–pollinate. Debates from different disciplines bleed into each other. Remove it, and the university’s intellectual ecology, including its other humanities and social science subjects, is diminished. 

Second, this erosion reflects a wider fragility in the humanities. In an era dominated by STEM and business, these disciplines are often dismissed as less valuable. This is ironic as it is precisely scientific discoveries and rapid technological change, such as artificial intelligence, that are forcing us to confront now more than perhaps ever before questions about meaning, agency and responsibility. TRS and the humanities are essential to the intellectual infrastructure we need to ensure that technology serves human ends, rather than the other way round. 

Humanities graduates remain also highly adaptable, bringing communication, creativity, and analytical skills that employers actively seek. UK humanities research is globally leading and disproportionately impactful. To weaken it is to undermine one of the country’s genuine strengths and sources of soft power, and our ability to contribute to world culture. 

But the most serious consequences lie, arguably, beyond the university. 

We live in a world shaped (often decisively) by religion and belief. From geopolitics to local communities, from healthcare to education, questions of faith and worldview are ever–present. Yet, as Theos’s Beyond the Classroom report highlights, our collective ability to navigate these realities is uneven. Critical religious literacy, the ability to understand, interpret and engage with different beliefs, is unevenly distributed. Where it is weak, empathy and cohesion suffer, and misunderstanding grows. 

TRS provision helps directly address this. It forms not only more religiously literate citizens but also the specialist RE teachers who shape the next generation. The shortage of well–qualified RE teachers, closely linked to weakening TRS provision, is already a recognised challenge, and will get only worse. 

What is perhaps most striking is that all this is happening just as the need for religious literacy is increasing. Government policy increasingly emphasises “faith and belief literacy” for social cohesion and national resilience. Public services are encountering growing religious diversity and recognise the need for better training. Globally, religion continues to shape political and social realities in ways early–2000 ‘end of history’ supporters could not have conceived. 

In other words, just as demand for expertise grows, we are dismantling the structures that produce it. 

The loss of TRS capacity would therefore be catastrophic, not only for the discipline but for the wider ecosystem of education and public life. Universities lose intellectual depth. Schools lose a pipeline of specialists, even as RE looks set to gain status in the National Curriculum. Public services lose access to essential expertise. Above all, society becomes less able to understand itself. 

Nearly a year ago, Theos and many others called for urgent action. That call remains unanswered. Policymakers, universities, and civil society must recognise what is at stake and act together. Financial pressures in higher education are real – there is no denying it. But if we allow them to quietly dismantle the very disciplines that help us understand ourselves and one another, we will pay a far higher price. 

The questions Exeter and other institutions are answering for us – whether or not they are aware of it – are about the kind of society we want to be, about deciding whether we still value the knowledge needed to live together well in a diverse, complex world. If we do, we cannot afford to let Theology and Religious Studies, and the wider humanities, wither. 

If we wait until the last TRS department closes up shop to act, it will be too late. 

Image credit: Photo by Álvaro Bernal on Unsplash

Interested in this? A more detailed resource on the importance of TRS will be available this August. You can also watch Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s interview on The Sacred podcast here.

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