Dear all,

You may have seen AHRC's recent announcement that they plan to cut the overall number of funded PhD studentships, AND that a number of the remaining ones will be ringfenced for CDTs on applied and potentially STEM-adjacent themes:

https://www.ukri.org/news/update-on-ahrc-future-doctoral-provision/

The Arts and Humanities Alliance - which consists of representatives from UK learned societies across the humanities - is having some concerns about (among other things) the impact of these changes on equitable access to non-applied humanities subjects.

Together with other AHA members, I'll be attending a meeting next Tuesday 3 October with AHRC leadership (Chris Smith, Jaideep Gupte). Please let me know if there are points you would like me to raise - I will feed back to the LAGB membership via this forum after the meeting. Even better, you can use the "reply" functionality on this forum to respond so that we can have a bit of a collective discussion in the next week or so before the meeting. Thanks in advance!

To hopefully stimulate some replies: What do we, the linguistics community, think of the reborn CDTs' aim to "generate the most impact by targeting funding against evidence-based skills shortages that address the greatest challenges facing our society and communities today"?

Best wishes,

Yuni

I think this is happening across all the research councils (seems to be the case in the ESRC too). My question is really why DTCs are a better way of providing training than DTPs, which seem to have been working successfully, especially in providing the kind of training that prepares students for future careers both in and outside of academia. What are the advantages for students (not the AHRC!) in doing this, and what is the evidence that DTCs are a better way of providing training? Another way of asking this is why they are reducing the emphasis on partnership as a model.