Sherine Elbanhawy
Doctoral Researcher, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham
Founding Editor, Rowayat · Board Member, Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI)
Board Member, Alliance of Inclusive Muslims (AIM)
sxe528@student.bham.ac.uk

25th September 2026

Professor Adam Tickell
Vice-Chancellor
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT

Dear Professor Tickell,

Re: Academic and Cultural Extraction: The Cost of Disregarding an Entire Culture

My name is Sherine Elbanhawy. I’m the founding editor of Rowayat, a literary magazine and press that publishes diaspora writers and Arabic writing in translation, and a board member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and the Alliance of Inclusive Muslims (AIM). I have spent my working life arguing that Arabic literature deserves serious institutional attention. That is why I am writing to you rather than simply signing a petition.

I am a doctoral researcher in the Arabic section of the Department of Modern Languages. My research focuses on Arab feminist anthologies and editorial labour as a form of knowledge production. I selected this programme over many alternatives, including programmes in Canada, where I reside, because of my supervisor’s expertise in Arabic, French, and English, as well as in translation, creative writing, and gender studies. This multidisciplinary approach is uncommon and renders the programme exceptionally rare. My research is impossible without this combination of activism, regional knowledge and the academic credentials necessary to supervise research that crosses linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. 

What is being removed is not simply one or several posts, but the University’s capacity to help bridge gaps in Western academia’s knowledge production about the Arabic-speaking world. This is particularly alarming given that, across both the Dubai and Edgbaston campuses, the University has only one research-active member of staff in languages and literature with this expertise, and that member of staff is affected by the proposed redundancy.

In May 2026, the University announced plans to close its postgraduate translation and interpreting programmes. On 11 September, the University of Birmingham confirmed it is proceeding with compulsory redundancies for five members of the Translation and Interpreting staff, targeting specialists in Arabic, Chinese and Italian. The University has publicly stated that this is in response to “a sustained reduction in demand.” This contradicts my personal experience, in which I have encountered a large number of multidisciplinary PhD students from the Arab-speaking world, more than in any other department. So far, no information or figures have been shared with staff or their union. I am asking you, as Vice-Chancellor and guardian of the University’s academic integrity and its commitment to equality, to halt these redundancies. They raise serious questions of discrimination. They disregard students, staff and an entire region, and they undermine the University of Birmingham’s commitment to diversity and academic excellence at a time of devastating political and economic upheaval in that region. You have the authority to stop them.

I am not writing only for myself. The effects on students, former students, alumni and colleagues of the Department of Modern Languages, and on the wider community of Arabic letters, are immediate and concrete. Programmes do not simply stop; they are handed down. Students who came to Birmingham for expertise in Arabic translation and interpreting will find themselves taught by staff without that specialism, on a degree still marketed under the same name. Whatever the financial case turns out to be, the students did not make it and should not be the ones to absorb the consequences.

The University owes its students what it publishes and promises: a genuine commitment to education, not a poster. Arabic is not one option among many on a curriculum list. It is a language of scholarship across more than twenty countries and of the religious life of nearly two billion people, with a continuous scholarly tradition that predates this University by a thousand years. Removing its specialists is not a timetabling adjustment, nor is it the closure of one programme. It affects researchers across the University in linguistics, literature, gender studies, history, and much of the humanities who depend on Arabic expertise through co-supervision.

Closing the programme is a statement about whose knowledge the institution considers load-bearing. The timing compounds the issue. Our region is in political and economic crisis. Students and scholars from our region carry burdens most of their classmates do not. What a university does at such a moment is visible and remembered. Solidarity would have cost Birmingham very little here and would have shown that the University acts on its principles and values, enacting the decolonial principles it so readily claims to uphold.

A question about Dubai

There is a question here that I think the University of Birmingham should be willing to answer publicly. The University operates a campus in Dubai and maintains partnerships across the Arab world. It recruits students from the region, collects their fees, and uses the region’s culture and architecture in its prospectus. In Birmingham, it is removing the specialists who train translators and interpreters. How, then, does the same University justify diverting its budget away from that region’s language, letting go of its Arabic specialists, and handing their teaching to staff without that expertise? This invites the conclusion that the University’s presence in the region is performative rather than rooted in any real regard for Arabic language and culture. Taking a region’s students and fees while cutting its language looks less like partnership and more like extraction.

As a financial decision, it signals a lack of respect, commitment, and support for any student who wants to study and research Arabic and Arabic translation, since language underpins all the other humanities. Instead of expanding the department, recruiting specialists, and becoming a hub of knowledge and expertise, the University is turning its back on a region it chose to partner with. This outright discrimination shows that the alliances with Dubai and in the region are simply showboating and have no real grounding in appreciation for the language or culture of the Arabs. This is no different from other exploitative practices, except that, instead of oil, the University engages in academic and cultural extraction, with little regard for consequences and little respect for an entire culture.   

Students and the public are entitled to know the Arabic budget at the Dubai campus, and to ask the UAE Ministry of Education how it reconciles its stated commitment to promoting Arabic language and culture with partnerships that reduce or remove Arabic expertise. They are equally entitled to know what share of the University’s investment in the region is directed toward the region’s language, set against the income the University earns from students, parents, and alumni from the Arab world. If the answer is that the University’s presence in the Arab world is not accompanied by serious investment in Arabic, while Arabic expertise is being cut in Birmingham, then the University should say so plainly, because that is a position, and it is not the one the prospectus describes. An institution cannot present itself as a partner to a region while treating that region’s language and culture as the first thing it can afford to lose.

A process that has not met the University’s own standards

Before any argument about value, there is a question of conduct, and it is the one I would ask you to answer first. On the Union’s account, which the University has not publicly contested:[4]

— The consultation ran from 4 June to 3 August. The University rejected every alternative the affected staff proposed, including teaching out the distance-learning MA in Translation and taking on teaching in other modules and new MA programmes, without providing any figures or evidence. The University refused to provide workload modelling for the teach-out and produced a financial case with no figures.

— The University rejected every formal grievance without a hearing, contrary to its own Ordinance.

— Staff were told that Council would consider the outcome on 14 October. Instead, the University Executive Board considered the outcome on 10 August, and the proposal went to Council by written resolution from 17 August, immediately after consultation closed, by email, without a meeting, and before the union’s members could respond collectively. Four weeks later, neither the staff nor the union had been told in writing what was decided.

— The equality impact assessment has been withheld from the affected staff and their union.

A consultation in which alternatives are rejected without evidence, grievances are dismissed without hearings, and the decision is made by written resolution before members can respond collectively is not a consultation. It is a decision dressed as one. I would ask you to say plainly whether you consider that an accurate description. If not, please publish the figures and the workload modelling that would show otherwise.

The human cost

Doctoral researchers and taught students who came specifically from other continents for the University of Birmingham’s Arabic programs and its practice-based PhDs have spent the summer unsure who will supervise, teach, or examine them. We do not know whether the supervisor we have worked with for years will see us through to graduation. We do not know whether the degrees we enrolled in will still exist in the form we were promised. As international students, we do not know whether years of work, securing grants, and considerable fees (for many international students, a family’s savings) will count as intended. For those of us from the Arab world, this uncertainty adds to the crisis at home. 

This is happening at a university that has been under a Health and Safety Executive notice of contravention since December 2025 for failing to manage work-related stress, with corrective measures due by 30 September 2026.[6] Students cannot learn well in an institution that treats its professors as disposable, and staff cannot be asked to care for others while being denied the basic assurance that they themselves are valued. The University speaks of belonging and wellbeing. I ask what support and what humanity it has extended to the students and staff whose futures it has placed in doubt.

The equality question the University has not answered

This is the sixth redundancy round at Birmingham since July 2025 that has affected UCU members. In five of those six, most of the staff placed at risk were migrants or from minority ethnic backgrounds. In this round, all of them were. Colleagues who taught on the same discontinued programmes but did not share those background characteristics were not placed at risk. This raises serious questions about discrimination that the University has not addressed.

In February 2026, the University was awarded a Silver Race Equality Charter, one of only eight institutions in the UK to hold it. Such a stark distribution at a university holding that award cannot be left to stand on the assertion that it is coincidental. The equality impact assessment should be released to the affected staff and their union, and it should be extended to nationality and national origins, which section 9 of the Equality Act 2010 includes within the definition of race.[7]

What is actually being removed

On 4 March, at the British Academy’s SHAPE conference, you described the closure of language courses across the country as “a national catastrophe.”[8] Sixteen days later, you wrote to all staff that “suggestions that some areas are in the firing line are simply untrue.”[9] Ten weeks later, five colleagues in Modern Languages were in the firing line. I do not raise this to score a point. I raise it because the gap between those statements and these redundancies is precisely what makes the University of Birmingham’s commitment to modern languages difficult to believe and because you, more than most, will understand what is lost.

I therefore ask you to:

1. Halt the compulsory redundancies while the process is independently reviewed.

2. Publish the financial case, the enrolment figures behind the claimed fall in demand, and the workload modelling for the teach-out.

3. Release the equality impact assessment to the affected staff and their union, extended to nationality and national origins.

4. Meet with affected students and staff, and set out in writing how supervision and teaching in Arabic will be guaranteed.

This letter is open, and I intend to publish it because I care about the University of Birmingham’s reputation, especially its support for its diverse academics, cultures, and languages. I believe you can not only eliminate these redundancies but also make Birmingham a hub that reflects the diversity of its city, with programmes that enrich, interact, and are truly representative.

I came to Birmingham for the scholarship and the expertise in the Arabic section, and I have sent writers, translators and readers to it. I would like to keep doing that honestly.

What happens in Modern Languages now sets the pattern for everyone who comes after. I hope the University of Birmingham will choose to be answerable for it.

Yours sincerely,

Sherine Elbanhawy

Doctoral Researcher, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham

Founding Editor, Rowayat · Board Member, Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI)

Board Member, Alliance of Inclusive Muslims (AIM)