Glasgow Caledonian University is moving towards compulsory redundancies in subjects including economics and history, as well as student support, with staff expected to enter formal selection and scoring processes in the coming weeks.

But this is not simply a local staffing dispute. What is happening at GCU reflects a growing national crisis across UK higher education.

Across the UK, learned societies and scholarly organisations have begun sounding the alarm over course closures, shrinking provision and staff cuts. Organisations including the Royal Historical Society, History UK and the Historical Association have warned about the long-term damage being done to educational provision and disciplinary expertise. The British Academy has warned of emerging ‘cold spots’ in access to SHAPE disciplines, the social sciences, humanities and arts, where opportunities to study these subjects are disappearing altogether.

Those warnings matter particularly for post-92 universities like Glasgow Caledonian University.

GCU recruits some of the largest numbers of students from Scotland’s most deprived communities and has long presented itself as a university ‘for the Common Good‘’.  In cities like Glasgow, where older research-intensive universities continue to dominate access to elite higher education, post-92 institutions play a vital role in widening participation for working-class students, mature students and communities historically excluded from higher education.

Cutting subjects such as economics and history in these institutions does not simply reduce provision. It narrows access to social science and humanities education for students who are statistically less likely to enter highly selective universities only a few miles away.

The threat is not confined to academic departments. Professional services staff in student-facing support areas are also at risk, including within Campus Life services that support students through financial hardship, wellbeing challenges, transition into university life and broader pastoral needs.

For widening participation universities, these services are not optional extras. They are part of the infrastructure that enables students, particularly working-class students, mature students and international students, to succeed and flourishing within higher education.

Reducing both academic provision and student support at the same time risks undermining the very foundations on which widening access universities depend.

Subjects such as economics and history are not marginal disciplines. They help students understand inequality, labour markets, public policy, class, colonialism and social change. They provide critical ways of understanding the world and the structures shaping people’s lives.

That is what makes the current situation at GCU so troubling.

At the very moment learned societies are warning about the shrinking of humanities and social science provision across the UK, a modern civic university with an explicit social justice mission appears prepared to deepen that decline.

University leaders across the sector frequently speak about inclusion, civic responsibility and widening participation. But those commitments ring hollow if the institutions most associated with widening access are simultaneously cutting the subjects and support services that make meaningful participation possible.

Like many universities, GCU faces financial pressures linked to falling international student recruitment, rising costs and long-term sector instability. But scholarly organisations and professional bodies have increasingly warned that repeated retrenchment in the humanities, social sciences and student support services risks causing lasting damage to the intellectual and civic role of universities themselves.

Trade unions at GCU have engaged extensively throughout consultation processes and submitted alternative proposals aimed at avoiding compulsory redundancies. Despite this, management rejected every single proposal put to them and now appear ready to move towards compulsory job losses. 

What happens next at GCU should concern far more than those directly affected.

This is about what kind of higher education system Scotland wants to sustain and who it is ultimately willing to exclude from it.

The Scottish Government cannot continue celebrating widening participation while remaining silent as the universities most closely associated with that mission lose staff, shrink provision and narrow opportunities for the communities they were established to serve.