There is a national crisis in humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) in Australian universities. Cuts to staff, programs, courses, centres and disciplines endanger Australia’s national HASS capability. Whole areas of human understanding and meaning-making are for the chopping block, cutting off our students from opportunities for learning and isolating Australia from key global conversations. Budget cuts to HASS can no longer be regarded as a matter for individual universities.

Undermining HASS weakens our nation: HASS is widely recognised as critical to building citizenship, by fostering creative and critical thinkers whose skills are valued by employers across government and non-government sectors. Furthermore, our national research capabilities in HASS play a key role in grappling with issues as diverse as climate change, housing provision, social cohesion, and national and international security.

These cuts are the result of bipartisan government policy failure. The Job-ready Graduates scheme sent the message – a false one – that graduates were unlikely to get a job with their humanities and creative arts degrees. While students have continued to enrol in the HASS disciplines and the creative arts, and arts faculties are often the largest in their respective universities, HASS continues to face relentless discouragement from government in which university leaders are complicit. More recently, universities have responded to their reduced ability to recruit international students by introducing severe cuts in anticipation of future financial shortfalls.

Since 2020, we have seen one university after another engage in massive cuts to HASS. Sometimes, this has involved closing whole disciplines or greatly reducing support for them. Examples include the University of Western Australia’s cuts to Anthropology and Sociology, general cuts to HASS by the Australian Catholic University and the University of Wollongong and, most recently, plans for redundancies announced by the University of Tasmania, Western Sydney University, Macquarie University, UTS and the Australian National University – the latter, in spite of the National Institutes Grant that the ANU receives from the Commonwealth to support nationally significant research.

We are deeply concerned about continuing disinvestment from languages, music and the arts, which has serious implications for cultural capacities and the future of arts and music education, and creative industries.

These cuts amount to a shredding of research expertise and educational opportunity. Redundancies destroy academic expertise; discipline and course cuts kill disciplines, prevent Australians from studying core HASS subjects, and eliminate the prospects of generational academic renewal, new knowledge, and creative innovation.

We call on the Federal Government to launch an immediate inquiry into the nation’s HASS capabilities. This exercise needs to investigate which policy settings have produced a crisis in the sector, and which policy solutions will preserve the nation’s HASS capabilities. It should explore matters such as graduate destinations to kill the continuing disinformation perpetrated by both political ideologues and university managements about HASS employment outcomes and which they use as cover for cuts to HASS. Finally, the inquiry should work with the HASS sector to devise a national plan for the support of HASS research and education with appropriate funding instruments attached to it.

Australian universities should not be rewarded financially for narrowing the scope of HASS in a manner that undermines the national interest.