Petition: Save undergraduate Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire

Please do sign the petition below and defend undergraduate humanities studies!!

The University of Hertfordshire’s Humanities Department has been the home and occasional sponsor of the OGOM Project from the beginning, deriving from Dr Sam George’s research and teaching there along with other colleagues such as Dr Ivan Phillips, and fostering a group of brilliant and inspiring PhD candidates.

Many scholars at UH in English Literature, History, Folklore, Philosophy, and other disciplines have done outstanding research, earning international acclaim, with high REF ratings and recognition of their impact; OGOM research scored highly here (though such rating is part of the problem!).

Now, the University is scrapping the undergraduate teaching of humanities. This teaching, too, has been widely acclaimed. We must stress that the research and the Masters and PhD programmes will continue, so current and prospective postgraduates need not be anxious. But this is a terrible action, nevertheless; the knowledge acquired from a humanities education can play a significant part in the development of a healthy, critical member of society. Many of OGOM’s postgraduate researchers emerged out of the undergraduate English Literature programme at Herts, and Sam’s Gothic modules played a central part here.

Facts, facts, facts

The case for defending the humanities involves far more than just producing employable graduates with ‘critical thinking’ skills. Authentic critical thinking in the humanities disciplines is crucial to understanding what it is to be human. Engaging with literature, language, history and philosophy subverts the dominant Gradgrindian ideology which sees only brute facts and not the living interpretation of them. It treats culture and even human beings as means rather than ends in themselves; it is an ideology that corrupts social life and threatens the world itself. We must resist the neoliberal transformation of higher education into an industry that demeans creative thinking in the sciences as much as the arts and humanities.

Much of our research at OGOM has turned towards an inquiry into a neglected aspect of Gothic literature and art: a Gothic enchantment that, in transforming the otherness repressed by utilitarian rationality, reveals a world emancipated from its disenchanted state. This is a utopian (in its positive sense) vision; it is a carnivalesque circus of the imagination, though not without the thrill of terror. Through this we hope to develop ways of critiquing the instrumental reason which threatens to turn everything into things for manipulation and exchange, uncovering instead the potential for new ways of being.

Petition here:

https://c.org/KQRsB6TKt4

Please sign and share widely!