Subjects such as textiles and business studies are not often thought of as natural bedfellows, but Heriot-Watt University nevertheless intends to stitch them together into one administrative unit as part of cost-cutting efforts that are being replicated across UK universities.

The university is proposing to merge its School of Textiles and Design with its School of Social Sciences – which includes its business school, as well as psychology and languages – in what a spokesperson described as “an exciting opportunity to bring together complementary disciplines”.

The merger – which remains subject to approval by the university’s governing and academic oversight bodies – will preserve “the School of Textiles and Design’s distinctive academic identity” while “strengthening interdisciplinary education and research – hallmarks of��Heriot-Watt��University’s global reputation”.

But this is not the only unlikely merger that is under way in the UK’s cash-strapped university sector, and many observers see cost savings, rather than interdisciplinary aspiration, as the real driver behind them.

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On top of the wave of redundancies that is sweeping the nation – which the University and College Union (UCU) estimates could total 10,000 in this academic year alone – universities are transforming their internal structures to “streamline” educational offerings and student services. And while this has gained less attention than the job cuts, which have prompted industrial action in some universities, academics are also pushing back against the creation of what they deem meaningless and unwieldy institutional “blobs” that will dilute academic identity and voice, diminishing the student experience.

In another cited example, a planned merger at Queen Mary University of London will bring together its schools of history, geography, and politics and international relations into a mega-school incorporating more than 150 academics. And at Keele University, staff are set to take strike action over a planned merger of its schools of humanities and social sciences, which will incorporate history, English, creative writing, film studies, media, criminology, international relations, education, politics, sociology and philosophy.

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Meanwhile, at Cardiff University, staff threatened a marking boycott this summer over jobs cuts and structural changes that include the creation of a “global school of humanities”, which will subsume, among others, its schools of Welsh; English, communication and philosophy; and history, archaeology and religion. All industrial action was called off last week after the university agreed to avoid compulsory redundancies this year, but the subjects merger will still go ahead.��

Speaking to ̽����Ƶ, academics described such schools as “marriages of convenience” that lack any intellectual coherence. One academic at Queen Mary, who will be a member of its new history, geography and politics school, said that the combination of subjects being merged does not make “any meaningful sense. Taking the disciplines as a whole, they don’t mesh together well, and particularly on the physical [geography] side, it’s really hard to see how the kind of proposed synergies and benefits of this merger are actually going to manifest.”

The merger forms part of a course and module redesign at Queen Mary – where a voluntary redundancy programme is currently in place; the School of English and Drama and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film were merged last year into a new School of the Arts.

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Heriot-Watt is not alone in speaking of its mergers in terms of boosting the interdisciplinarity agenda, which has risen to prominence in recent years. Indeed, departmental mergers can lead to fruitful interdisciplinary encounters as “it’s much easier to collaborate with someone who’s down the corridor than in a building potentially half a mile away”, said Steven Jones, professor of higher education at the University of Manchester. Bringing subjects into closer contact with each other “does create some kinds of synergies”.

And no academic grouping is perfect. Some disciplines have historically “always been a bit homeless”, Jones noted: psychology is sometimes placed within humanities departments, while at other providers it is in a science or social science school. Meanwhile, linguistics can be found in humanities or a science department, depending on the university.

Campus resources on interdisciplinarity in higher education

Moreover, any attempt to push historically separate academic units into closer alignment��is likely to raise hackles. That happened, for instance, when the Research Assessment Exercise’s 67 units of assessment were reduced to 36 as it morphed into the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014. This was in response to universities’ complaints about the RAE’s complexity and bureaucracy, but it required that disciplines that had previously been assessed individually were merged into larger groupings.

Some of the merged units consisted of naturally aligned subjects, such as cardiovascular medicine, cancer studies, infection and immunology, and the other hospital-based subjects, which merged into a single clinical medicine unit. Others, though, were less obvious fits, such as communication, cultural and media studies, library and information management. This resulted in units of assessment that spanned several disparate university departments – and therefore, in some cases, resulted in more than one submission from the same university to the same unit.

In Jones’ view, though, merging REF units was a “sensible” move, and if universities were merging their departments to match those units, “that would be a kind of strategic rationale for what’s happening”. However, he added, some of the schools now being created in UK universities could be eligible to submit to as many as five different REF units.

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“I think we all know that the reason for these odd combinations is ultimately to do with balance sheets and bottom lines,” he said. “If these mergers were being undertaken for more strategic reasons, perhaps with the consent and approval of the people involved, then they wouldn’t be seen so problematically.”��

It is precisely those savings – and especially job cuts – that appear to be setting academics against mergers. For instance, Owen Clayton, UCU branch chair at the University of Lincoln, which downsized from four colleges (including its business school) to two in 2023, said: “We don’t oppose mergers per se unless they lead to job losses”. But he noted that Lincoln lost more than 200 staff through a voluntary severance scheme last year, and a further 285 roles are at risk this year.

Kate Cushing, acting chair of Keele University’s UCU branch, takes a similar view. She conceded that “in principle, a well-designed, larger department might actually contribute to more integrated interdisciplinary teaching and research”. But Keele’s merger of humanities and social science “seems to be a pretext for a reduction of academic staff”; the institution aims to cut staff costs by £1.85 million – equivalent to about 24 full-time equivalent jobs.

Keele was approached for comment.

“There’s a huge administrative cost to having departments,” Jones said,��because of the number of academic and administrative functions that they entail, and the separate premises they require. “So the temptation will always be to standardise, centralise or merge in order to save money. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because that means you prevent a couple of redundancies, but the danger is that managers go too far and take away the disciplinary identity completely. Academics are tribal creatures, and those tribes tend to form around the discipline.” Hence, “department identity matters greatly”.

The Queen Mary academic concurred, arguing that unnatural disciplinary combinations are a fundamental threat to disciplinary identity, independence and boundaries: “People identify as a geographer, [so] not having somewhere called ‘geography’ or ‘geography and environment’ significantly weakens us as an institution.”

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Such combinations are also a potential threat to recruitment, the academic believes. UK universities are increasingly facing greater competition in domestic student recruitment, amid falling international enrolments and the declining value of student fees and government teaching grants. But moving towards a more standardised curriculum, with more co-led modules, could “cheapen our educational offering”, the academic said.

“Instead of saying to prospective students, ‘Come to study geography at Queen Mary, where you’re going be taught by a team of geographers who are experts in the field’, we’ll be saying: ‘Come to this newly merged school, where you will be taught by geographers who are expert in their field, as well as some politics [academics] and historians, who are also experts in their field but it’s not a field that you’re studying.”

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Cushing said the Keele merger has been preceded by an “accelerated curriculum review and redesign”, which has seen it move towards “a lot more compulsory, fewer optional modules”. This standardisation amounts to a move away from the idea of research-led teaching, she argued, because the lack of optional modules means that many academics are no longer teaching their specialisms or their research.

She also sees the fact that departmental consolidation is mostly happening in the humanities as an indication that such disciplines are increasingly seen by universities “as a bit of an add-on”. A Royal Historical Society survey of 66 UK universities published last year found that 32 had lost history courses since 2020. In Wales, Cardiff’s new Global School of Humanities will scrap music and modern foreign languages, resulting in some languages no longer being available to study in Wales. Kingston University announced earlier this year that it is closing its humanities provision entirely, including its acclaimed philosophy centre.

“We’re losing the ability to teach people how to think. It’s all about task [and] skill,” Cushing said.

Meanwhile, a lecturer from Queen Mary’s newly merged School of the Arts said that staff are increasingly being pushed by management to create and redesign courses around digital and AI skills: “From my perspective, [the restructures indicate] a management of a university giving up on its commitment to the humanities because it is convenient for them to do so.”��

The anxieties about academic identity blend into wider anxieties about academic voice and agency in an academic environment that has “totally changed” in recent years, according to Jones.

In Queen Mary’s School of the Arts, for instance, the lecturer said that the merger was “amplifying all sorts of other effects”, which has left staff “feeling increasingly isolated and disempowered” as they become smaller voices in a much larger administrative unit.

Liesbeth Corens, a committee member of the Queen Mary UCU branch, said “there will be even less input from staff” in how the merged schools are run: “In mega-schools, you can’t meet with 150 members of staff and give them all a voice; office holders are working at cross purposes in their disciplines. So that’s a further removal of staff buy-in into the university.”

Nor, critics allege, are mega-mergers good for students. Corens, a senior lecturer in early modern history, was not alone in noting that the most “immediate” impact of the mergers were cuts to the professional services that benefit student primarily.

“Literally some people’s lives have been saved by being able to knock on the door of a student support officer,” she said. “Academics are not therapists. We are not the people who can actually talk someone down from a crisis.”

The Queen Mary merger will also see the number of postgraduate research support officers almost halved, noted Corens, who devised the UCU’s infamous “” list detailing all the redundancy processes under way across the country.

Queen Mary was approached for comment.

Another issue that has been exacerbated by mergers is workload. Academics in merged schools say they have been obliged to take on additional work to make up for any shortfalls in professional service provision, on top of having to design new interdisciplinary courses while teaching out old ones.

This is creating an “unmanageable workload”, according to the academic at Queen Mary’s School of the Arts, particularly because of the difficulty of devising common curricula across disciplines that employ not only different course content but also different methods. “You could arguably have some sort of joint methods training, which would cover history and geography, and that can make sense in a spreadsheet world if you’re just looking at module titles,” the academic said. “But, in reality, the methods that we employ are necessarily different across different disciplines.”

Moreover, workloads are currently so heavy that “it’s very difficult to take up the interdisciplinary opportunities” offered by departmental mergers, undermining the stated academic rationale for them. As for their financial rationale, Jones cautions that such one-off savings in universities’ internal costs will ultimately be futile unless the UK’s various creaking university funding models are reformed.

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“All these measures…are just messing around at the edges of spending,” he said. “You can merge a couple of departments, you can create a superschool or come up with some brilliant new structure and you’ll get an immediate saving. But it doesn’t really solve the long-term problem that student funding is falling and there doesn’t seem to be any public appetite for there to be greater public spending on universities.”