English Association Report on the ‘State of the Subject’ 2025-26
Professor Antony Rowland FEA
In summer 2025, we sent a survey to Fellows of the English Association about the changing structures of research, developments in teaching delivery, the impact of redundancies, AI and the current state of the subject. This exercise was a follow-up to the 2022 and 2024 reports in collaboration with University English and the Institute of English Studies on the impact of the pandemic on English departments. It is expected that the survey will now take place annually, as it has allowed the English Association to track important trends and changes in the discipline since 2020.
The responses to the questions in 2025 can be summarised as follows:
- The majority of the Fellows lamented that a combination of internal research allowances, sabbaticals and research funding for conferences had been cut considerably.
- Respondents commented on the increasing workload for teaching, as well as an upturn in curriculum redevelopment. These remarks contrast with the responses to the 2024 survey, in which the emphasis was on a return to face-to-face teaching, and what one Fellow referred to as the ‘sticky campus’.
- Several respondents referred to the ‘death spiral’ of the subject, due to departmental closures, lack of job opportunities for postgraduate students and errant perceptions of English studies. Redundancies within English departments were universally lamented. However, there was less reflection than in 2024 on the causes of the contraction of the subject—such as the reforms to the GCSE and A-level a decade ago—and more emphasis on the tangible effects of the current crisis in English studies.
- The impact of AI was mostly regarded in a negative light. However, tutors agreed that colleagues will have to learn how to work with AI, rather than fighting against such technological developments. Others referred to the positive uses of such technology, and the way in which AI could provide a powerful counternarrative for why students should study arts and humanities subjects at universities.
- The most impassioned responses were contained in the ‘state of the subject’ section. They ranged from despairing appraisals of the current crisis to robust proposals about future advocacy, and how the subject might reclaim its ‘swagger’.
Has the structure of research changed within your university over the last year in terms of, for example, research allowances, sabbaticals or internal research funding?
Just over a quarter of the responses to this question reported that there had been no changes whatsoever in research allowances, support for conference attendance and the frequency of sabbaticals. Indeed, two respondents reported that the situation had actually improved slightly: they now had more access to internal research funding and promotion schemes. Three respondents noted that their research support systems were under review, but they were confident that ‘other budgets will be squeezed, but not research, not yet’.
In contrast, the majority of the Fellows (73%) outlined cuts in research allowances, sabbaticals and support for conference attendance. The following responses were typical:
research allowances decreased; sabbaticals withdrawn; internal research funding decreased.
We lost all conference funding and much support due to funding cuts, based on apparently erroneous claims about difficulties with the university’s finances, but probably based in reality on mismanagement.
10% of the Fellows reported that their sabbatical schemes had been cut entirely. Others criticised a decrease in sabbatical funding: one member of staff recorded that research leave has ‘become more limited, with applications from productive (and senior) staff turned down if not linked to a grant application’. One of the tutors complained about the budgetary difficulties in arranging for teaching cover:
I was awarded a period of research leave in semester two, but did additional teaching in semester one to enable this, and there was no funding for any teaching cover, so this was managed by distributing remaining workload amongst other colleagues.
Several respondents noted a trend in which research strategies at university level were adversely affecting departmental research. A respondent from Northern Ireland reported that ‘funding for curiosity-driven projects is no longer going to be available, with research units hoping to obtain funding being required to demonstrate alignment of the proposed projects with the province’s social/economic goals’. Another noted that support for research had ‘been funnelled sideways into a fund for large grant holders, allocating them a small percentage of the value of their external grants in additional internal funds to be used for research, as an incentivising scheme’.
One response commented on the lack of funding for research despite the department’s successful submission to the last REF:
We did well in the REF2021, but have not seen that QR money come to our team; instead it has been used centrally by the university. It makes me wonder what the point of doing well in the REF is – it’s not worth people sacrificing their mental and physical health to strive to do well in when we see very few benefits of that hard work. We have been through redundancy processes since the REF and that result did nothing to protect us. When our excellent REF result was announced, the university did not celebrate it – it was very strange. It felt as though other people in the university were embarrassed that we had done so well (and they hadn’t) and that people knew the redundancy announcement was coming, so it made them look foolish.
20% of respondents declared that their research allowances had been cut or ‘clustered’ due to the prioritisation of teaching timetables. One of the Fellows stated that ‘there are major changes in the pipeline that are likely to reduce everyone’s research allowance to zero, with the onus on individuals to then accrue research allowances by demonstrating acquisition of external funding. This is likely to create powerful disincentives to effective REF entries’.
Have there been any changes in the delivery of teaching over the last year?
23% of the respondents related that there had been no significant changes in the delivery of teaching over the past academic year. Two of these tutors conceded that they just had to ‘spend more time explaining assessment, and are supposed to create “screencasts” regarding every assessment task’. They also described how ‘the University has mandated that all modules must include an element of AI assessment’. Other tutors conveyed that the teaching processes have not altered, but that ‘module enrolment is closely watched and seminars with few students will not run’.
Whereas the questionnaires in 2024 focused on the issues of hybrid teaching and a return to the ‘sticky campus’, the majority of respondents this time (77%) testified that there had been significant changes to teaching delivery in terms of individual workloads and curriculum review. Problems with class sizes were often remarked: ‘due to a reduction in our staff base following voluntary redundancies, class sizes have increased somewhat, and at least one usually team-taught core module was delivered by only one colleague last year.’ 10% of colleagues narrated an increase in workload, as in the following example:
We now have reduced hours for module leadership for single credit modules (15 credits) and reduced time to mark work. We have to deliver one hour per level four module per week which receives no prep time in our workloads in order to boost contact time for recruitment purposes. The university is currently looking for ways to combine modules with other subjects in the faculty as an efficiency measure.
Some of the respondents recounted an increase in curriculum review: ‘we have substantially redesigned and revalidated our programmes’ declared one tutor, ‘including significant changes to the format of modules and patterns of delivery.’ For one of these Fellows, the ‘entire curriculum structure’ had changed for the third time since they began working at the institution. In this instance, there would be a shift to modules with fewer credits, ‘a pedagogically unsound move that can only be designed to cut admin costs and ultimately reduce staff’.
Responses often indicated growth in broader, more interdisciplinary modules and an increased workload for teaching. Tutors asserted that their university was creating ‘fewer, broader courses that can be team taught, rather than giving the students choices of individually-run research-led courses’. In addition, they stressed that ‘In the coming year our teaching will move from 30% to 50% of our time’. The reduction in modules would restrict student choice; in one instance, this process would lead to students taking units in other programmes, such as Film and Media. Accordingly, another tutor stated that there was:
a general move to greater stress on interdisciplinarity and a general sense that colleagues from other disciplines can teach English literature at BA level without a discipline-specific background or specific interdisciplinary teaching/research training/experience.
Two of the Fellows also gave an account of cuts to the budgets for associate lecturers and guest speakers. They reported that ‘every member of staff is fully workloaded before any teaching opportunities can be made available to others on an hourly-paid basis (often the route to teaching for PhD students).’
There have been many more cases of redundancies announced in English departments in 2024-25. What do you think the repercussions will be of a contraction of the discipline?
The phrase ‘death spiral’ was repeated numerous times in the responses to this question. Many of the responses related the ‘profoundly damaging’ effects of redundancies and voluntary severance schemes in their own departments:
We have already lost a few people to voluntary severance (50 across the university) and now they want over 400 to leave before August next year.
Our courses have been cut from 4 to 1. Our staffing numbers have been halved. I am leaving. It has enormous personal repercussions as well as a catastrophic reduction of student opportunities and diminishing of the subject’s status. It’s devastating.
My wife was made redundant three years ago and since then has had a number of short-term or part-time contracts, and nothing for next year. Apart from the financial hardship this is causing us, and the emotional turmoil she has faced as a successful academic suddenly out of a job at the age of 50, it also means that she is unable to apply for funding to do her research and develop her career, or even get access to libraries and databases. It is cruel, but it is also undermining our discipline.
Compared to 2024, there was less reflection on the causes of the contraction of the subject, such as the GCSE and A Level reforms led by Michael Gove. The emphasis instead was on describing the current crisis in English studies. One of the Fellows summarised the impact of such redundancies on the subject as a whole:
The impact will be felt all around the discipline: – a devaluation of English study across the board; – increased competition for UG intakes; – negative impacts where class sizes must increase; – further degradation of those areas of the discipline that were already under pressure (e.g. premodern studies); – an uneven distribution around the country of where English can be studied at degree level; – fewer job opportunities for current PhD and EC staff.
Overall, this ‘death spiral’ was attributed to the repercussions of under-recruitment and the declining reputation of English studies. ‘Under-marketing’ and a decrease in time to promote the subject were also regarded as contributing negatively to the ‘visibility of our degrees’. Such ‘feedback loops’ were also making the subject less attractive to postgraduate students. For those who still chose to begin a PhD, the employment prospects were bleak: ‘with hardly any jobs being advertised, the average age of English academics on permanent contracts must be increasing, which does not bode well for the future of the discipline’. One of the Fellows described the ‘desperation’ felt by some postgraduates when considering ‘the rubble and detritus of the academic job market’.
As in 2024, some of the responses (20% this time) worried that English was becoming a ‘two-tier subject’. One of the Fellows commented that the subject was turning into a ‘remnant within humanities platforms’ across the whole sector, as opposed to the persistence of large departments at Russell Group universities. They regretted that ‘formerly strong departments’ outside the Russell Group were ‘struggling to maintain coverage and will eventually succumb.’ Many of the Fellows cautioned against the subject becoming a ‘niche pursuit’, and thereby ‘suffering the fate’ of Classics, Philosophy and History of Art that are ‘concentrated in a handful of “elite” institutions’. As in 2024, the class politics of such a contraction was remarked: a ‘decrease in the number of working-class students accessing the subject through post-92 institutions’ would result in the arts and humanities becoming accessible only ‘to those with money’. The increase in geographical ‘cold spots’ was also noted, and the effect this would have on wider participation and students ‘who can only consider studying at the local university’.
Some of the Fellows related their frustrations about the perception of English studies as an ‘area that is not worth studying, and that does not really offer good employment prospects any more’, even with commonly available statistics that suggest the opposite. Despite the advocacy of subject associations, ‘an acceleration of suspicion among university leaders’ continues in relation to the perception that ‘English continues to be on the slide, with doubts about long-term viability being raised constantly, in HEIs of all kinds’. In summary, the subject was in danger of following the decline in modern languages provision in UK universities.
However, a few responses were cautiously positive. One of the Fellows asserted that it was too easy to imagine a ‘death spiral’, whereas in fact ‘trends and fashions are fickle and we may see a resurgence of interest in the subject.’ (However, they also addressed the ‘broader issue’ of whether anyone ‘realistically wants to teach in modern HE these days.’) One respondent applauded the potential for English studies within adjacent disciplines and cross-disciplinary teaching and research:
The need to show how ‘useful’ and monetary an English degree is leads to a greater emphasis on elements such as writing for wellbeing. Also taking English to other disciplines to enhance their teaching or research, e.g. joining with Nursing to explore the usefulness of linguistics for terminology, fiction and poetry for emotional insight and healing, and creative writing for wellbeing. Or working with scientists to open up abstract concepts.
What impacts have you already noted, or anticipate to see, on teaching and research with the increasing use of AI?
Overall, the responses to this question were not quite as negative as in 2024, and included a slightly higher ratio of reactions (10%) that considered the ‘creative [and] positive use’ of AI. The majority of tutors acknowledged that ‘AI is here to stay and we need to learn how to work with it’.
As in 2024, tutors emphasised the need to change assessment practices in the wake of AI, although there was less discussion this time of the possibility of a return to formal exams. Fellows agreed that ‘the worst thing that teachers could do’ is to continue to ‘do things as we always have, in the hope that we can somehow get through this without dramatically changing the way we operate’. Many responses agreed that they could not foresee ‘how the conventional essay will survive as things stand.’ Instead, ‘we need to learn more about AI to try to find ways of using it in areas where it could be beneficial.’ The following response suggests building on classroom activity as a form of assessment:
Currently all our assignments can be produced by ChatGPT. There will need to be a revision of classroom activity, with more focus on debate, somewhat formalised, and on writing and reading in class. Assignments will have to follow the classroom activity closely to produce individual work that clearly comes out of long-term personal activity. More severe penalties for non-attendance (currently extremely lax) would necessarily follow, if the focus is to be on activity in the classroom.
Other measures that could be taken in response to AI included ‘requiring first-year students to engage closely with specific secondary sources, rather than having to verify their own independently found sources (which in some cases may be fabricated).’ In addition, there should be ‘an increased emphasis in assessing the process of learning and reflection on learning, rather than attaching the grade wholly to a finished output’. Such, and similar, proposals might be communicated more widely to the subject community, that, as yet, has not ‘done very much to actively address the issue, let alone come up with genuine answers’. Future discussions in the subject associations should reinvigorate pedagogical delivery and ‘find new ways to teach’.
One of the responses outlined how teachers should focus less on trying to be gatekeepers in relation to AI, and how they should learn more about how students use AI to engage with the world:
I have learnt a lot this year about how students use AI and feel more confident in how to talk to students about AI. Institutions need to be so agile to keep up with what our students understand digital engagement to be.
One of the respondents asserted that the ways in which AI might make other, more data-driven subjects obsolete will ultimately emphasise the value of a degree in the arts and humanities:
Universities scrambling to keep up. Attempting to welcome the technology as part of the discipline, without much idea of how this can work. But AI revolution could work to our advantage. Subjects like Law, Business and Accounting have perhaps more to fear, since they are less interpretive and more data driven.
Overall, however, the Fellows’ response to the increasing use of AI was still negative. In contrast to the quotation above, another response lamented that ‘AI’s ubiquity in the culture will have a profound effect on the viability of the discipline.’ 40% of respondents referred to an exponential increase in plagiarism and academic misconduct cases. The following quotations are illustrative:
AI might have advantages for research in English in terms of its ability to process raw amounts of data. However, it poses threats in terms of plagiarism and is already consuming enormous amounts of staff resources because of the exponential growth of cases of suspected plagiarism.
I have seen little to no impacts of AI on research practice in my field. Teaching is another matter as here the impact has been large and largely negative, especially in UG: – high levels of suspected AI plagiarism cases that remain difficult to prove; – eroding of student skill levels in a range of areas (independent research; citation; argument; capacity to longer-form reading; telling fact from fiction, truth from lies); – devaluation of human intelligence as the source for literary texts.
As in 2024, the ‘huge drain’ of the time on module tutors in dealing with academic misconduct cases was emphasised, alongside the attendant lack of administrative support, and imprecise assessment criteria:
Big increase in time taken for staff to write referrals about suspected AI use, and the subsequent anxiety and anger expressed by students (when we are trying to ensure a fair experience for all).
A push from the university to encourage us to use and teach about and with AI, when most members of the team are alarmed by the environmental impacts and impact on creative communities and writers.
Some of the Fellows declared that the use of AI in essays ‘is easily spotted, as the essays often contain fabricated research and quotes’, whereas others asserted that it was ‘very difficult at present to prove’. Some students report that ‘everyone’ uses it, and ‘many students prioritize the qualification over the subject knowledge that it should reflect.’ One tutor even asserted that their students are not reading set texts, but instead utilising AI to ‘digest’ the books. The negative responses to the ubiquity of AI are summed up in the following quotation:
AI produces UTTER bullshit and it is depressing just how many research papers start with a less-than-witty “I fed this into a AI machine and look what it did” bullshit start. I have no idea why people still do this. Every time we use AI, we legitimise it. I know colleagues who are doing AI-led assessments, in the study of literature and language, and it breaks my heart, it really does. Being a critic of an AI-produced text of bullshit is not the same as learning to be a critic of a work of literary art. In my view (and I am hiding behind anonymity here) if a lecturer uses AI to generate their slide deck for a lecture, they need to leave the profession. I worry about this, a lot.
Do you have any specific comments that you’d like to make on the current state of the discipline?
Many of the responses to this question returned to the themes of the third section, and the ‘profound dejection’ concerning the impact of redundancies:
I am in a RG institution that is comparatively safe, but we too are feeling the pressure. I worry that the race to the bottom in English and in the Humanities gains its own momentum in university leadership around the country, and that this will become its own self-fulfilling prophecy. I worry that university leaders won’t have the guts to stand up and defend English studies and the Humanities as a great good in its own right. I worry that even the most eloquent of subject advocates don’t stand a chance against the ill-formed arguments of financial gain and efficiencies of delivery.
One of the Fellows outlined that ‘It is disheartening that the over-emphasis of STEM education under the Conservative government has not (to my knowledge) shown any significant signs of being reversed under a Labour government. This suggests that arts and humanities subjects cannot rely on any allies in government’. Many of the responses argued that English was ‘thriving nationally by any intellectual standard’ but that the subject is being slowly squeezed out of universities ‘by cuts to research and teaching, and by a GCSE and A Level curriculum that seems intentionally designed to put students off applying to study English at university’. Unless English is respected at school level, added another Fellow, ‘the future of English Studies at FE and HE levels is bleak’.
As opposed to the current sense of crisis, another academic outlined how the subject had flourished in previous decades. They concluded that ‘It’s extremely depressing. When I took an English Literature degree in 1986-8 it was an elite subject and rightly respected. The subsequent three decades have not been wise nor kind. I’m not hopeful of change’. An early-career researcher simply stated that ‘I wish I’d been born about three decades earlier’.
Other responses explored potential ways to avoid a ‘death spiral’. One of the Fellows commented that the ‘decline in student numbers is unstoppable’, but the subject ‘needs to rethink its status within the humanities, and deal with the new landscape’. They argued that this landscape was driving change in terms of public engagement: ‘Research is already changing, away from the monograph and more firmly linked to public engagement – which is no bad thing. To my mind, the critical tradition post-1945 was becoming exhausted, with commodified “turns” (the institutionally new label) often intellectual empty or quickly losing status’. Other responses returned to the potentially positive effects of AI on the discipline’s future: ‘As education increasingly pivots towards the technological, scientific and career-oriented, the value of English to those students who choose it will become heightened’.
Whereas some of the responses in 2024 were convinced that the ‘worm has turned’ in terms of the adverse perception of English studies, the current set of questionnaires emphasised that ‘We’re finally holding our own, but it feels like a difficult time’. Advocacy on behalf of the subject, that includes emphasising employability and the ‘usefulness of the skills we teach in our discipline’ was reported to be ‘a full-time job’, and ‘colleagues in other disciplines are not hearing our message’. Nevertheless, such advocacy could result in English studies
presenting itself as a key discipline for society in terms of the publishing industry but also of the ability to develop highly applicable research and analytic skills. There should be a concerted effort to engage with policy and law makers as well as further collaborations with other areas of the arts and business.
‘It is imperative that the subject survive,’ added one of the respondents, ‘because it is crucial to culture and global responsibility. The ability to think, critique, explore new ideas, question, innovate, experience different truths and realities – all are vital to a global civilisation.’ Other responses were decidedly upbeat about the subject’s ‘Big Drum’, arguing that colleagues need to work together to lobby government and work with the media, rather than ‘competing with one another’ so that ‘the rich are swallowing the poor’. Many respondents emphasised that we should be proud of our discipline, and strive to build a more cohesive community in order to find solutions to the current crisis:
We need to stop following and copying other discipline’s values and skillsets, as if they are our own. We need to be much clearer about what we are about, and be loud and proud about it – our subject needs some SWAGGER […] Literary and language criticism is now more important than ever – our awareness of the importance of expression, the corrupting potential of rhetoric, our suspicion of ideology, our scepticism about truth claims, our knowledge of performance and play, our deep comprehension of ‘story’ in all its guises and applications, our study of the ways the past and tradition is engineered by the evolving concerns of the present, and indeed our sense of human decency – our discernment about what makes good art, and what is just genre nonsense – all of these things are VITAL to our culture, our economy, our planet. […] We have a Big Drum and we need to bang it much louder, somehow. I love the clear fact that bodies like the EA now works so closely with other bodies like UE, NATE, Literacy Trust and so on – that’s a massive strength of what would otherwise be a fractured and fragmented community. Long may that continue!! All power to the EA.
Antony Rowland
January 2026
Antony Rowland is a Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of seven books of criticism, including the co-authored book Virtual Holocaust Memory (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He has been involved recently in two AHRC projects: a Leadership Fellowship on the legacies of modernism (2021-23), and an Impact Follow-on project on immersive technologies in Holocaust museums (2023). Antony is also the author of four collections of poetry, including Caldebroc (Arc, 2023) and M (Arc, 2017). He has been a Fellow of the English Association since 2012, and a member of the Higher Education Committee since 2015.
