David Morgan-Owen

@dmorganowen.bsky.social

Senior Lecturer in IR @ St Andrews | Historian of War | next book strategy & seapower in the FWW | own views

I’ll be force feeding my piece down your throats bit by bit for the next few days. This is about why loss of research capability in universities isn’t just a linear bit of market forces but a messy process of universities sometimes doing panicky short term cuts

You might think these research cutbacks in universities are the exercise of market forces, with the strongest departments surviving. But it is more complicated than that because of the complex cross-subsidies within higher education. Financial instability is largely driven by the drop in high-paying international students and the erosion in the value of tuition fees by
inflation over the past decade. Caught up in the crossfire of this instability and through no fault of their own, some of the top-ranked humanities research departments are closing, while our analysis shows the number of early-career academics in the humanities has fallen by 20 per cent over the past decade.

This phase of the British Academy's SHAPE Observatory project focuses on academic staff, analysing trends since 2012/13 to explore how staffing levels vary by subject, region and employment characteristics. The data lag: the 2025-26 redundancies you've been reading about are not yet captured. 1/3

Loss of academic staff and "cold spots" for humanities and social science degrees threaten strategically important skills for UK, says British Academy

A new data map released today shows a sharp and widespread decline in opportunities for university staff in the humanities, social sciences and arts subjects in 2024-25. The data shows a precarious la...

thebritishacademy.ac.uk

EThOS platform restored! 'Following restoration work, all metadata records previously available on EThOS have now been restored, along with an additional 14,000 records added since the service was taken offline' - more to come https://www.bl.uk/stories/news/ethos-records-restored

EThOS records restored

We are pleased to share that EThOS (E-Theses Online Service) is now available again following restoration work after the cyber-attack.

bl.uk

So it turns out the "contract" teenagers signed for their student loans wasn't actually a contract at all, the government always had the right to retrospectively change the terms, and at no point was this explained to those taking out the loans... www.newstatesman.com/politics/edu...

Government mis-sold student loans to a generation, report finds

A new Treasury Committee report has found that the state did not sufficiently communicate the terms and conditions

newstatesman.com

‘Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, said that her organisation agreed with the committee that the costs of undergraduate higher education should be shared more equally between graduates and the state, since both benefited.’ www.thetimes.com/article/11ff...

Scrap freeze on student loan repayment threshold, government told

A cross-party committee of MPs said there was a ‘moral obligation’ to honour the promises made to graduates when they took out the loans

thetimes.com

Yesterday 142 academic staff at the University of Lincoln were put at risk of redundancy including the entire Politics and International Relations team. This follows cuts since 2024 which have already seen over 500 people leave the university. This is the 'University of No Regrets'.

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🚨 PLEASE SHARE WIDELY 🚨 If you are an Exeter alumnus, and wish to express your horror at the proposed cuts to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, please sign the Google Doc petition below. Not an alumnus? You can still help by signing the Exeter UCU petition at c.org/msXfsb2g5b 🗃️

Alumni petition against the cuts to the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Any Exeter alumni who wish for their names to be added to the petition below should please complete the form at this link: https://forms.gle/SpdYvmmsCaJbmZft6. If you are not an alumnus, but still wis...

docs.google.com

Never has your ticket to an international political history of the Space Age and military space strategy come at greater value!

Hurst Publishers@hurstpublishers.bsky.social · last mo.

📚 Now in Paperback ‘A comprehensive and thorough account.’ — @foreignaffairs.com 'Original Sin' by @bleddb.bsky.social is an eye-opening account of a world order shaped by spacepower and the threat of space warfare. Get 20% off w/code ORIGINAL20 ➡️ tinyurl.com/4errmtyz

Against a purple background is the book mock-up of 'Original Sin' by Bleddyn E Bowen. The title and author name are visible as well as the subtitle ' Power, Technology and War in Outer Space'. The cover shows a dark view of the earth from space.

“An empire in decline is always at its most dangerous - and we’re seeing that already.” On the new episode of The BREAK–DOWN podcast we're joined by author and Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter, Laleh Khalili