In recent years, the UK has seen a drastic decline in English and literary courses across secondary and higher education. Universities such as Canterbury Christ Church and Sheffield Hallam have already axed their courses, with Leicester and Nottingham having also announced plans to cut various humanities offerings, which has doubtlessly contributed to approximately 29,000 fewer students selecting the subject at A-level.

Such scrapping inevitably raises questions as to why this pattern is occurring – why are arts and humanities courses considered more dispensable and superfluous to investment allocations compared to other STEM-centred courses? Of course, under the current socioeconomic strain placed on universities nationally, all courses are suffering funding reductions. But we can’t help but feel that these drastic cuts are made at the expense of arts and humanities.

This gap is only emphasised by the simultaneous rise in STEM discipline uptake. The juxtaposing popularity of mathematics for instance, which broke a record of over 100,000 higher education applicants in 2024, not only underlines the vocational trajectory toward securing roles in a technology-driven economy that students are increasingly prioritising, but also corroborates how pupils remain unaware of the potential for cross-over and indispensable links between literature and mathematics.

From my experiences having studied English literature for the past three years as an undergraduate, and having confirmed my plans to teach mathematics post-graduation, this is an issue close to my heart. These ostensibly antithetical subjects in fact share a range of interesting links – one need not look far into the blank verse of Shakespearean drama to hear the mathematical influence on the shifting balance of the lilting iambic pentameter rhythm…

To unravel and explore the aforementioned alarming trends, I recently produced the ‘Mind the Gap’ podcast, focused on reconciling these institutional divisions and their implications. These current educational splits were presciently warned against by the 20th century academic C. P. Snow, and have since been reaffirmed by Marcus Du Sautoy, Simonyi professor at Oxford University and an expert in prime number theory, who was inspired by Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture and contemporary G. H. Hardy to write multiple publications on the interrelationships of the sciences and humanities.

By interviewing Marcus, I hope to combat the disparities visible in A-level subject uptake by enabling greater access and engagement to a digital platform where we discussed the profound connections between seemingly trivial and diametrically opposed disciplines for students in specialised subjects, and explored how they are dynamically ingrained in everything we do.

The reality that the surprising crossovers between maths and literature, for instance, are often overlooked is a disservice and hindrance to our collective sense of research and innovation in higher education.

From the encoding of early Sanskrit arithmetic formulae into poetry to be passed audibly down generations, to the prime numbers involved in the time signature shifts of Radiohead’s music, STEM and the humanities have always shared a reciprocal relationship of informing, shaping and influencing each other.

However, this cross-over is not restricted solely to mathematics and literature, as Du Sautoy’s recounting of his own experiences of his own mathematical workshop on Mozart’s comic opera ‘Die Zauberflöte’ with the Royal Opera House testifies to. This Pythagorean-based session on operatic music, which I was lucky enough to attend as a nine-year-old, demonstrated to Du Sautoy how the pooling of diverse knowledge of music aficionados and libretto specialists helped “break down those natural barriers” and frame his creative mindset in constructing his own advanced theses on prime number theory.

Yet whilst similar collaborative endeavours at UoB’s Institute of Advanced Studies have yielded substantial impact, for example in Prof. Kraftl’s latest geography-psychology research into children’s relationship with plastics report, this interdisciplinary work is unfortunately yet to become a commonplace practice amongst humanities and STEM undergraduates.

Therefore, I ultimately hope that the ‘Mind the Gap’ podcast can be a stimulus both for students to explore subjects beyond the perimeters of their degree, and the corresponding development towards an environment where inter-college student collaboration is routine. Cross-over collaborations can both elucidate and champion disciplinary differences, helping to reconcile the current divides in the siloing of our educational model, replacing Snow’s binary ‘two cultures’ with a unified interdisciplinary culture. The ‘Mind the Gap’ podcast is available to listen to here.

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