Pro-war protest 2

The threatened closure of departments of Middle Eastern, African and Asian studies, despite healthy student intakes and widely acclaimed research, is ill-judged given the events in the Middle East.

Policy-makers need to take seriously the contribution these departments make in promoting understanding. The loss of these subjects will be a loss to academia as well as to society as a whole.

John Canning
Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
University of Southampton