Salaries of more, sometimes much more, than £100,000 are paid to almost 4,000 other academic administrators, consultants and scientists in Britain’s 150 university institutions, compared with only a handful at that level a decade ago. The Guardian has identified eight universities at the head of a league table based on a combination of chief executive pay and the proportion of high-earning staff. In order of vice-chancellor income they are: the London Business School; UCL; Liverpool; Imperial College; Nottingham; Oxford; Kings, London; and Bristol.

“No one would say that every single school in the U.S. has to grant a bachelor’s degree in recreation management. So why does every single school have to offer a degree in philosophy? ”

Many agree it would be better to for universities to extricate themselves from their partnerships with semi-pro athletic leagues, but maybe it’s time to do the same with marketing and business schools and schools of recreation management. Call MIT what it is: a technical school not a university.

The purpose of the humanities is and as always been to remind us of how stupid we are, how slim our imaginations, how subject to greed and cheap desire; and then to remind us to laugh at our stupidity as we try and mostly fail to be better. It’s the humanities not the optimistic sciences that teach us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I don’t have much sense of that understanding on this page.

1. Rich is mistaken. I think we—as philosophers and other academics—have a perfectly good idea of what a university is, namely, that essential social institution whose mission it is to engage in the production, dissemination, and ongoing critique of knowledge; to query regularly and meaningfully what counts as knowledge for a given discipline, to advocate for the value of knowledge in all its forms—scientific, sociological, psychological, philosophical, literary, aesthetic, etc.—and to instill in our students as well as encourage in our colleagues that value.

If we have failed/are failing to achieve something here, it’s that we are not making clear enough to our STUDENTS—regardless whether they are majors, our majors, or whatever—this mission. Part of what we therefore MUST do, in my view, is enlist students to this mission, recruit them to the values of higher education—not just to psychology, sociology, the sciences, or philosophy, but to the value of contributing to knowledge as a citizen thinker. In other words, what I think we need to do much more is not merely teach students the desiderata of our disciplines, but teach them why they should CARE. If they cannot be persuaded to care, we are left with little more that Fish’s destitute and elitist vision of not just education—but knowledge production more generally—and we we all be diminished by that thin vision.

2. We need to solicit our institutions administrators—especially presidents and provosts—for unequivocal, publicly accessible, commitments to the humanities and the social sciences. We need to get them on record in support of a REAL university’s mission.

3. We need to speak out publicly in venues that reach people more generally—not just on philosophy Blogs—about the value of what we do. I know the refrain—it’s just too much work to make them understand (or it’s their job to do so)—especially in the current anti-intellectual neo-conservative ideological climate. But I am more and more convinced that once we concede to this—once we concede to the notion that the Glen Beckian masses just can’t be made to understand—we have already lost. We MUST make ourselves more clearly heard—not because the public at large should get to decide whether the university any longer has a place in the society, and not because we do or do not owe that public an explanation of what we do, but because they’re young adults are our allies.

So, here are a few of my suggestions. Each of them involves work beyond what’s in any of our contracts. each of them is potentially risky, and probably requires a tenured professor to carry out. But tenure’s not just a recognition of what we have accomplished; it’s a responsibility for what we represent if the idea of the university is to be meaningful in the future. it takes significant expertise to teach and teach well, but it takes even something more to see that TEACHING—regardless discipline—cannot be replaced by the technologies, the on-lines, the distance-eds that some might regard as adequate substitute. Nothing can replace the value of the spontaneous in a classroom, and that in itself involves a kind of expertise.

Do I agree that professors should teach people who take one Philosophy class, as well as people who major in Philosophy? Yes, of course I do. I think it’s quite valuable for students who aren’t majoring in philosophy to take a course in it—just as I think that students should have at least one math class, one science class, etc.

But no, you really don’t need a Ph.D. to teach that kind of class. A Ph.D., and the whole apparatus of professorship, is only justifiable if the person teaching is: a) expected to do research, b) expected to teach future experts.

And b) above depends on a), because there is no point in having experts in something if you don’t value research in that field for its own sake. That’s why I think that the entire academic humanities ends up collapsing if one takes the attitude towards research that your comment above takes.

If you think it takes no expertise to teach the kind of things I’m talking about well then, yes, you could just have it done by people who are at the beginning of their careers and have no kind of career structure. I know that some very smart people who are excellent teachers and would be excellent scholars if given the right circumstances teach as adjuncts, and I know (only too well) that some of our graduate students are both more talented and more accomplished teachers than I am. But that’s the exception, and in general this is a more skilled task, requiring wider experience than the leaders of these institutions and you seem to think.

Wendy—thanks for coming over here to comment. Your comment made me laugh because it is absolutely right. That’s why I think philosophers have an important intellectual and political role to play in the resistance to these moves. Tell us if there is anything practically useful that we can do.

I pretty much have to agree with Bloix. In particular, I don’t think that the philosophy professors who have commented here (or posted, in Harry’s case) seem to have the concepts that I’d recognize about what a real university is. Mostly what I’ve seen is “I would focus on the service we do to students for whom the course they take from us is the only Philosophy course they take” and “I think Humanities research is all very well, and some of it genuinely contributes to the social good, but mostly through the teaching function [...]”. (Those are both direct quotes, but feel free to correct me if they are not representative.) That’s not an argument for anything resembling a university, with courses taught by professors. You could perfectly well bring in someone who was interested in Philosophy as an undergraduate, or maybe even a grad student, and get them to be a temporary lecturer to teach those courses. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

I also don’t for a minute deny that there are difficult and thorny questions to be addressed about the particular aims of specific departments—and that answering these questions depends on a number of variables. But I want stalwartly to resist the claim that any institution of higher learning without a philosophy department can call itself an institution of higher learning. For whatever else a philosophy department is, it is a reminder of the vital value of both conceptual connection among the disciplines and the critical thinking with which to evaluate what they do. Indeed, I would argue that to query the existence of any program demands its institution’s philosophers because it demands the attention of those whose profession it is to see the ethical, conceptual, aesthetic, and epistemological linkages between the programs in question and the rest of the university’s mission.

At one time, universities had a “core curriculum” that required every student to master certain material that was considered essential to the life of an educated person. Those days are gone. As far as I know, there are only two schools in the US that still have core curricula – Columbia College of Columbia University, and Reed College.

The rest have some sort of mushy distribution requirement scheme that results in virtually no commonality of education, or nothing at all. So you can get a degree from a university without having read a word of Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Marx, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Locke. You don’t have to know when the Crusades were or what happened during the French Revolution. You can be entirely ignorant of the periodic table, the role of DNA, the structure of the atom, the theory of relativity. And you certainly don’t have to be able to comprehend a complex abstract argument and to judge whether its reasoning is sound or fallacious.

In a world without core curricula, who is to say that philosophy is more important or central to the role of the university or otherwise more “privileged” than, say, recreation management? No one would say that every single school in the U.S. has to grant a bachelor’s degree in recreation management. So why does every single school have to offer a degree in philosophy? Because if they don’t, there won’t be any philosophers wearing floppy hats in the commencement parade?

alex, you wrote that as if it was a response to me. That really makes no sense, as I had just written that social competition for positional goods would be heightened, not lowered or eliminated. I don’t agree with engels, and answering as if everyone to the left of you was the same person doesn’t get you anywhere if you expect an actual answer.

No, I don’t expect a society in which everyone is “entitled to the same”. I expect one in which everyone is entitled to, as I already wrote, the necessities of life. That’s hardly science fiction. The National Assistance Act, for example, started to be implemented in Britain in 1948. As it becomes cheaper to provide the necessities of life, I expect the conditionality of this kind of support on proving that one is seeking employment to be dropped, especially as people will want less competition for the high-status jobs in any case.

But people should organize and intervene beyond that, in areas where other interests in society have created structures that aren’t good for people to live in. For instance, industries that, under the profit motive, want to thoroughly deskill and temp-ify their labor force. Which is really what this move to make departments justify their existence or become teachers of non-majors only is all about.

Wait. Does it really make no sense for, say, more than half of the population to be making a given “floor” living wage, and the remaining slightly-less-than-half to be making more? I mean, that kind of distribution doesn’t guarantee that the wage received by the first half would be a fair living wage, etc, but it’s not a theoretically impossible / incomprehensible distribution. (On the other hand, there’s only so much time it’s worth investing in hashing this out, and I’ve probably passed that, especially since engels has already clarified. Sorry…)