Students and staff at the University of Kent are protesting today against the “tragedy” of planned course closures.

The university announced its consultation at the end of January on plans to shutter nine courses and lay off up to 58 staff, across both the Medway and Canterbury campuses.

A crowd of about 200 students and staff marched around the campus and to the Registry building where university management is based.

They chanted “no cuts, no losses, take it from the bosses” and placards with slogans highlighting their grievances over the plans.

Organiser and student Oli Sturdy, 23, told the LDRS: “It’s the university executive board which are definitely to blame.

“People are pretty angry as you can see, everyone’s quite passionate about it, everyone loves all of our lecturers - people are angry and sad."

Mr Sturdy is a second year anthropology student - one of the courses proposed for the chop.

“I think it’s pretty dire, I think [Kent] probably won’t be a university anymore."

Emeritus Professor of social policy Peter Taylor-Gooby OBE also attended, telling the LDRS: “I’m very concerned about this plan and what it will do to the image of the university.

"We’re axing a lot of humanities and subjects in social sciences - we won’t seriously be able to claim to be a real university.

"A university covers the universe of knowledge – that’s the traditional definition and we won’t be able to do that.

"I don’t believe that we’ll be able to attract students, particularly overseas students, in the same numbers that we have in the past, and that will be a disaster for us."

Buildings at the institution’s Medway campus are set to have their leases transferred to the University of Greenwich, which already operates out of some on the site.

Speaking ahead of the demonstration at the Canterbury campus, senior lecturer in political and social thought Dr Charles Devellenes said the root cause of the problems is the university’s ailing finances.

“The funding that we get - mostly from student tuition fees - is not adequate to provide a university education,” he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

The maximum a university can charge for an undergraduate degree is set by government at £9,250 a year - increased from £9,000 in 2017.

However, due to inflation, £9,250 in 2024 is worth the equivalent of £7,217 in 2017.

Dr Devellenes continued: “For me and for a lot of people here there's no question that management has failed to address the seriousness of the situation.”

He pointed out the university’s most recent accounts published in 2022 predicted it would have only 26 days worth of cash reserves in the bank by July 2023.

“To be honest that's catastrophic,” added Dr Devellenes. “It should never have got to that situation.

“We're in a catastrophic financial situation and this has been under the current leadership since the vice chancellor arrived I think in 2017, so that's over six years in the post.”

The courses to be phased out include anthropology, art history, comparative literature, English language and linguistics, health and social care, journalism, modern languages, music and audio technology and philosophy and religious studies.

“It's a tragedy really - these are core subjects,” Dr Devellenes argued.

“A subject like philosophy which has been offered at universities since the middle ages is being closed, and in a period where we still need to think philosophically about important social events.”

The staff consultation is set to end on February 29, with management accepting alternative proposals from staff until then.

“They should have been working on this for the past few months, and now they're just asking us in a period of 30 days to come up with a miracle solution,” Dr Devellenes argued.

“There's a feeling of despair to be honest, that there is very little that we can propose that will save those 58 jobs.”

But university bosses have stressed the current financial situation is not related to recent capital projects and costly new buildings which have been the “result of fundraising campaigns, grants and donations and not university spend”.

A spokesman said: “Like many in the UK Higher Education sector, we are responding to a number of financial challenges including the fixed tuition fee - which has broadly stayed at the same level since 2012 - rising costs and changes in student behaviour.

“Tuition fees make up the bulk of most universities' income so all of us in the sector are having to adapt to make sure the courses we offer match what future students are looking to study.

“At Kent we are working on a number of plans to get ahead of this, from changes to the shape of our academic year so that we can better support students to bringing in closer links with industry to help students build their careers post-university.

“This includes looking at changes to the courses we offer so that we are well-placed to grow in priority areas like computing, law and biosciences in the future.

“The current proposals also include phasing out recruitment to some courses where numbers have been decreasing and where national student number projections show fewer people are looking to study them.

“This is not a reflection on the quality, value or teaching of any particular course, and under the proposals we will keep a broad portfolio across areas - there are just some courses where student numbers mean we no longer think we can be competitive in the future.

“The proposals are about future recruitment to courses, so all students who are currently enrolled will be supported to complete their studies and graduate as planned.

“Our focus initially is on supporting staff being consulted with on the plans and preparing detailed information for students once final outcomes are confirmed.

“In doing this we will be working to our Redundancy Avoidance Agreement to ensure we prioritise voluntary redundancy, vacancy review and reduced hours as far as possible.

“We know how much staff, students and the wider sector care about their subject areas and fully respect their right to express their suggestions and concerns on this, through getting in touch with us or through peaceful demonstration.

“We also know that students on these courses will be worried about what it means for them and that staffing changes during your degree can be concerning – we’ll be doing all we can to minimise the impact on their studies and will have detailed information on the options available to them at the end of the consultation.”