People often assume that Oxford is awash in cash. Alas, not in MML, although we compete with universities that are. At the postgraduate level, we can keep up with major US institutions on many points, and certainly on the quality of the supervision we provide. We have a rich depth of library resources, and both in the Faculty and across the university we have a thriving intellectual scene that makes for an exciting postgraduate experience. But on the funding front we are very far behind our international competitors, with only a handful of funding opportunities each year. From 2026, with changes in the way the Arts and Humanities Research Council distributes funding, that situation will become even worse. The future of humanities in the UK depends on adequate postgraduate provision: without it we can’t train future generations of polyglots, and we risk becoming a finishing school rather than a thriving research hub.
Each year, we look to fund two sorts of study: MSt (1 year) or MPhil (2 year) work, which allows students to hone their skills and to try out advanced research, and DPhil (3-4 years) doctoral work, which trains the scholar-teachers of the future. On the doctoral front, the Faculty draws on generous funding from the Dieter Schwarz endowment for German; in any given year, a few colleges are also able to help out, and we are very grateful to those who do. (Colleges – but only some of them –have deeper pockets than the Faculty. Sometimes the Faculty is able to split costs with a college, to make the money go further, but currently we’re so financially stretched that we’re unable to do that.) We are usually also able to make a couple of awards from the Clarendon fund administered by the university and some other similar schemes, but that money is not securely within our gift. And in the last several years, we have been very successful – pound for pound, we’re proud to have beaten English! – at competing for the AHRC studentships that are given out to promising candidates across the humanities. But that money is soon to disappear as the AHRC changes its funding model. This year we will manage to fund around eleven new places across all languages, probably about half of our new DPhil students, but in future years we fear that number will fall. Our students who self-fund frequently take longer to finish and start their lives as young scholars with massive and crippling debt. We want to do better by them.
The situation is worrying at the PGT (post graduate taught) level, too. In the humanities, you have to do a one or two year masters before going on to the doctorate. So it’s crucial that we can fund brilliant students who would not otherwise be able to continue at the masters level – if we can’t do that, then only students from wealthy backgrounds are able to continue on to doctoral work. The Faculty is lucky to have some big-hearted donors for masters funding: each year Lidl, for example, funds one masters student in German, and as with doctoral funding, a few colleges also help out. This year we were able to make nine funding offers at the PGT level (7 MSts and 2 MPhils), for an entering class of around sixty students.
At both masters and DPhil levels we go up against other Humanities departments for central university schemes like the Clarendon and also for the terrific opportunity of the Ertegun scholarships, which bring scholars across the humanities together in a
special seminar and workspace. But those opportunities are highly competitive – for Ertegun, only about 1 in 100 students gets funded. Some students are eligible for funding from foundations tied to their national origins, such as the Hill Foundation for nationals of the Russian Federation. We are also able to match funds with a central university graduate access scheme called Academic Futures. We take access and diversity seriously when we think about postgraduate funding, and it is crucial to our hopes for the future of the academy.
Cruelly, we’re really challenged by something that should be a strength: our internationalism. Overseas students cost a great deal more than UK ones, and so it’s very rare that we can fund them. Oxford’s internationalism is not just a sign of our intellectual strength, but a crucial factor in it, and we will be diminished as a place of learning if we can’t support it. It’s getting harder and harder: since Brexit, we have more applicants than ever counted as international, and less chance of funding them.
I’ve been in charge of MML’s postgraduate funding for the past three years. It’s a mixed job: a real joy to discover the range of work students want to do, but a grim task to have to tell the world’s most brilliant students that we can’t help them study here. It is our loss. These uneven funding opportunities do not reflect the strengths of individual applicants: we often have to turn away students we have ranked very highly indeed.
The humanities have a rocky future without better postgraduate funding. We believe that the stories our young scholars tell about our polyglot world, past and present, are crucial to the future not just in academia but also beyond it. It’s urgent that we find a better way to support them.