Universities face financial crises, but cutting Geography raises concerns about short-term thinking and the long-term consequences for research, teaching and public understanding
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This month, I was invited to sign a petition to save Geography at the University of Leicester. There is a proposal to dissolve Geography into a School of Chemical, Earth and Environmental Science, with the likely impact being the end of Human Geogrpahy teaching and research.
This would be a sad loss to the discipline, take away an opportunity for a new generation of students to benefit from outstanding teaching,and put careers at risk. In the sub-fields of creative, critical, economic and health geography, Leicester academics have been at the forefront of international scholarly debates. There is a world-class reputation for teaching GIS skills and raising awareness of queer geographies that would be sorely missed.
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My own experiences of the University of Leicester are two-fold. First, as an early-career lecturer, I participated in a brilliant workshop on the geographies of food. Hosted on the pleasant green campus, I spent a great day debating everything from artisanal cheese making to the role of Tesco in everyday life. Taking the long train journey home with a group of London-based academics, we were all impressed with the vibrancy of the host institution. This experience, in part, spurred me on to do future research on food that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Secondly, as an undergraduate, I worked at a series of summer camps hosted at Leicester. These projects brought secondary school kids from disadvantaged backgrounds on to campus.
They stayed in halls of residence and got a taste of the university experience, with bite-sized lectures in disciplines ranging from Archaeology to Zoology. This widening participation project showcased the breadth of Leicester’s curriculum. Then, and now, the institution offered comprehensive higher education – one which in 2013 led the excavation of Richard III. Closing Geography at Leicester would narrow this horizon gravely.
I was surprised to receive this petition because of Leicester’s reputation, but it is well known that many universities’ finances are a mess. A combination of two decades of bad policy-making at a national level and some poor management choices at the institutional scale have created very real challenges, but is closing successful departments the answer to these problems? I can’t help being sceptical of some of the choices that are made and who they are serving. What is beyond dispute is this decision is not based on feedback from the students. In the 2025 National Student Survey, Human Geography at Leicester was 1st for overall positivity in the UK.
The mantra ‘don’t let a good crisis go to waste’ seems to chime with some of the decisions in higher education. At King’s College London, we under-recruited by 0.7 per cent. To me this seems as if we are actually ‘on target’ and stands in contrast to the enrolment challenges faced by many universities, but locally all the talk is of having to cut costs, try harder and improve to avoid ‘difficult decisions’, yet surely a well-managed institution should not be knocked off its financial course by being within a whisker of a target?
I do not have an inside line on the institutional politics at the University of Leicester, but it looks as if there are efforts to cleave off the work in earth and environmental sciences to retain the physical geography parts of the discipline that capture the most research income. Yet as the petitioners argue, in doing so, the University loses the capacity to link environmental change to the social and spatial systems through which climate impacts are produced, managed and experienced. The proposal dismantles the only discipline that is capable of addressing the intersections between migration, inequality, digital infrastructure, governance and environmental change’.
Seventy-five years ago, Harvard shut its Geography Department. A new book, Let Geography Die, by Alison Mountz and Kira Williams, tells the story of the loss. In that case, dysfunctional decision-making rather than any academic failing led the programme to be closed. A policy of purging queer people from campuses, which included key geography professors, and a university president ill- disposed to critical social sciences, killed Harvard Geography. Maybe drawing this example alongside Leicester’s plight seems far- fetched, but elsewhere, university colleagues are under comparable attacks. I’m aware of one American department that has rebranded its work in climate science as a more apolitical ‘weather studies’ to pre-empt action from the Trump administration.
Retaining human geography is essential to meet the social and cultural challenges of today. To educate another generation of critical thinkers that can use environmental data to inform policy, to raise issues of social justice, such as the geographies of sexuality, and tackle topics that draw together natural and cultural systems, like the politics of food. Let geography live and help society thrive.
