Languages matter for the UK’s economy, society, and security. See, for example, The economic value to the UK of speaking other languages (2022) and the British Academy’s 2016 Born Global report.  

If language degrees are lost from the University of Nottingham, the entire East Midlands region will be a ‘cold spot’: it won’t be possible to take a language to degree level anywhere in the East Midlands. The region already ranks high in terms of educational deprivation – this decision will make that deprivation worse: 

• The pipeline for language teachers in the region will be affected, making it even more difficult to maintain language teaching in schools and limiting our local pupils’ opportunities, further disadvantaging them compared to others nationally. 

• There will be no language degrees available to students who prefer to study locally, undermining the University’s local and regional civic mission and at odds with the University’s own Civic Strategic Delivery Plan. 

The University of Nottingham presents itself as Britain’s global university. The university’s Strategy promises a vision “to be a university without borders”, to “solve problems and improve lives … through application to local and global challenges”. Without any modern languages degrees, the University instead shows a narrow vision and inability to embrace other languages and cultures. The University is already being referred to as the ‘University of Little England’ by the press and on social media. 

Cutting degree-level languages provision jeopardises expertise in many other disciplines too, including history, philosophy, literature, business, and law, which depend on high-level language skills and in-depth cultural knowledge. For example, many of Nottingham’s own leading historians rely on their advanced language skills to study the history across the globe (in Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese …). No languages, and you lose most of global history too, also philosophy, literature, as well as access to and appreciation of crucial trading partners and their ways of doing business.  

The University of Nottingham is a comprehensive research-intensive University, with a commitment to the Arts and Humanities. Languages have been a core part of the University since it was founded in 1881. Cutting language degrees would make Nottingham the only Russell Group (research-intensive) University with no languages in its Arts and Humanities and would damage its reputation and standing 

You might be thinking, hey, but AI can do all our understanding of other languages and cultures for us. That’s right, as long as you also believe that because we have calculators, children don’t need to learn to count and no one needs to study maths or computer science. It isn’t true.