Essex university has announced it is cutting positions equivalent to about 150 full-time roles, potentially affecting over 500 staff, BBC News reports.
The staff being lost are “disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy are based”. It is not surprising; the role of education in the humanities, once the main form of higher education, has been strongly questioned in today’s world. What is the use of knowing ancient history, or English literature? What is the point of learning obscure languages? How will that help society?
Yet I would argue that it is actually essential to society. People with a humanities education are absolutely necessary for our society as a whole, and especially to Christian churches. The humanities teach ways of thinking that enable us to work through complex problems with fine nuances. Learning the humanities teaches us about ethical thinking. They teach skills basic to learning and understanding God’s Word. There is hardly any aspect of Christian maturity that would not be helped by some background in the humanities.
‘People are... difficult to live with and bothersome’
I have been watching videos by Cecilia Blomdahl, a woman who lives on Svalbard, a Norwegian island in the Arctic …