Queen's University vice-chancellor Patrick Johnston stated in the Belfast Telegraph on 30th May 2016 the following: "We are also stopping single honours sociology and anthropology, but intend to strengthen those subjects by allowing them to partner with other subject areas which actually make their relevance more connected. Society doesn't need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyse things, understands the tenets of leadership and contributing to society, who is a thinker and someone who has the potential to help society drive forward. I don't talk about producing graduates, I talk about producing citizens that have the potential for leadership in society." We the undersigned as longstandstanding experts and teachers in these fields fundamentally refute the misrepresentation of arts, humanities and social science disciplines, in this article, as not engaged in equipping students 'to analyse things' or to become 'thinkers' and 'leaders.' We ourselves as active intellectual leaders and as extensive contributors to civil society and cultural life are the products of these arts, humanities and social science disciplines - as are thousands of graduates globally in recent decades. It is truly a situation of deep intellectual crisis and anti intellectualism in Irish Universities if we have to defend the very legitimacy and correct such misinformation about the purpose of subjects like medeival history, sociology and anthropology to University leaders.
