After Keele, Who’s Next?

anyone concerned about the situation at Keele should join this facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_200915196594313
sign this petition
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savephilosophyatkeele/
email this address
savekeelephilosophy@groups.facebook.com

The senate meets in early April and the departments may yet be saved so your intervention may prove decisive.

Many thanks,
Liam

This seems a rather bizarre approach.

Would a university consider closing down their math department as not being directly applicable to industrial needs?

Philosophy is a foundational subject. The modern understanding of computing comes directly from work done by Russell et. al. at the turn of the 20th century. The World Wide Web was heavily influenced by post-modernism.

There could be an argument for not offering philosophy at a third tier ‘university’ that can’t attract an appropriate faculty or students but Keele used to have ambitions of becoming a top tier player.

I know I have posted this before, and I know it is specific to the University of Glasgow, but it still seems to cut to the chase: the way that un (indeed, anti) democratic technocrats, their eyes dazzled with whatever the latest lunatic fad from Chicago might happen to be, have effectively hijacked most British Universities and are now taking advantage of the Great Recession to ram through ‘shock treatment’ (cf Naomi Klein) which will fundamentally alter the structure and purpose of British academia (for the worse).

‘“In practice, the powers of both Court and Senate have been eroded by the emergence of executive management groups, within which strategic decisions are made in the absence of widespread consultation,” the letter states. “These decisions are then reported to the governing bodies with limited supporting and background information.”

The academics go on to warn of the “substantial increase” in the proportion of university funds being spent on administration.

“Decisions, whether strategic or managerial, are increasingly made without appropriate consultation, and are, in effect, top-down decisions from a senior executive management group,” the letter adds.

“Consideration should be given to academic elections or confirmations in respect of key administrative posts. The academic body should, by vote, be able to confirm the appointment of the principal.”

The submission also calls for a review of the salaries of senior managerial staff with a view of capping salaries in future.

“Universities … exist for the public good, not as profit-making organisations. As such, they have charitable status. The high salary levels currently commanded by senior management are not compatible with this status and further alienate management from the academic body.”’’

http://www.heraldscotland.com:80/news/education/academics-in-bitter-attack-on-university-management-1.1087967

@Clay I think the point might be made better if “capricious” were substituted for “benevolent”. What’s changed is not so much the presence or absence of benevolence (Thatcher, for example, was anything but benevolent, both in general and as regards universities) but an acceptance on the part of government that, as Ingrid says, universities are a longstanding source of public good, and that attempts to impose short-term priorities on them are likely to lead to disaster.

I think the tendencies are clear. If you are teaching/doing research in a field/discipline that can not easily show (quantitatively, please!) to policy makers & bureaucrats that you will make a significant positive contribute to economic growth, your very existence is at stake.

The case of KCL Philosophy doesn’t readily fit this narrative, given the administration’s targetting of two of the Philosophy Department’s members — Shalom Lappin and Wilfried Meyer-Viol — as part of their baffling plan to “divest” themselves of “computational linguistics”. See, for example, this from Steven Pinker’s letter of protest against the attempt to fire Lappin:

Speech and language understanding are among the next frontiers in the world of computing; the PC or laptop that you will be using in five years will bear the marks of research in Lappin’s area. So will the very practice of science, as more and more fields cope with the torrent of scientific publication by using data‐mining techniques that automatically understand the text in tens of thousands of publications. One of the reasons that in the past progress in this field has been so halting is the lack of a deep understanding of the mathematical and logical problems inherent in understanding language. That is the foundational work in which Lappin is a major contributor.

Chris — Perhaps KCL Philosophy is an unusual case. But my understanding is that, rather than internal allies, it was external pressure from people of standing in the relevant fields who could testify to the high quality of the research of those the administration was trying to sack that persuaded them to back down from plans to fire three members of the Philosophy Department. The case was made that nobody, no matter how outstanding his or her research, would regard a job at KCL as secure if, e.g., someone who was soon to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy (Lappin) could be sacked for falling outside of the field of ‘Vision for Arts & Humanities’ that a senior manager had drafted in an ‘Arts & Humanities Restructuring Consultation Document’, and that this would irreparably damage recruitment and retention. I believe that these letters made a difference.

Mike – obviously, you may be right about KCL, and we are all in the position of generalizing from a few cases. However, in other cases (including Bristol) where management have played the “we need to save money and are therefore divesting from areas on strategic grounds” card, arguments such as you mention have cut no ice (I’ve put them myself). I also know what it is like to be on the management side, in receipt of multiple emails from alumni etc.

Mind you, most managements aren’t so stupid as to try to sack a prospective FBA. Mid-career Dr Muggins at 2nd tier institution, with a reasonable publication record and loved by students, isn’t going to get the same support as Lappin did.

Are we allowed to be anti-EU here? You do realise that’s the side with Daniel Hannan on?

“If you are teaching/doing research in a field/discipline that can not easily show (quantitatively, please!) to policy makers & bureaucrats that you will make a significant positive contribute to economic growth, your very existence is at stake…”

I think this is an absolute myth. It’s a caricature of what some academics wish the government was saying, rather than what they are.

Take the UK, I don’t like Lord Browne. But the guy clearly values the non-economic benefits of science for humanity, and the Browne Review explicitly says the sciences should be funded because of their social returns (in spite of their often low private returns). For contrast we can compare other subjects which clearly do make a significant contribution to economic growth, like accounting, which are not going to be funded – as they have low social returns and due to their private returns can self-finance.

“Either someone on the market should be willing to pay for what you’re doing, or else you are at mercy of the benevolence of your government”

Really? Medical humanities, for example, have always been very well funded thanks to the Wellcome Trust’s £14bn endowment, and that’s not going anywhere.

I think the humanities and the social sciences deserve public funding. But to say that sciences are being funded because of their economic contributions and that policy should be changed is completely the wrong way of arguing for this. They’re being funded because of their social returns and the humanities and the social sciences should be funded because they have social returns too. Academics aren’t doing themselves any favours by starting from the basis that policy makers are being driven by an argument they haven’t publicly accepted.

(Emerging temporarily from behind my usual CT ‘nym’, if that’s OK by Ingrid)

Before this thread gets trapped into the usual narrative of how philosophy departments can’t pay for themselves, its perhaps worth noticing that as well as shutting philosophy, Keele are also planning to shut the professional ethics centre, PEAK, which has apparently (per the BMJ’s blog) been a big external revenue generator in the past (and iirc doesn’t have undergraduates of its own).

Also: I’m not sure why, but I’ve noticed that people seem (here and over at Leiter) to be treating this fatalistically as a fait accompli, in a way that didn’t happen with either KCL or Middlesex (or slightly longer ago) with Birmingham.1 I don’t think that that’s much help to the people whose jobs are at stake;

1 all of which battles were won, to some extent.

They also tried to shut down physics at Keele a few years back, I believe.

This is probably a bad policy, but I don’t think there’s any way you can characterize higher education as a “public good”. It is, after all, both excludable and rival. So knowing the distribution is necessary for determining the merit: if the cut here means some other cut somewhere else is averted, then it’s impossible to know whether this cut represents a good or bad choice without knowing what the other possible cut would be.

Sorry, my remark says somewhat more abstractly some of what Chris Bertram pointed to in his comment at 03.19.11 at 9:19 am.

I’m sure all the researchers who are supporting Professor Lappin and the others are right that his work is crucial, but it does seem unusual to me that a philosophy professor’s specialization would be described as “computational linguistics.” It has been a long time since I’ve been in contact with anyone doing university level work on this, and my only knowledge of this is from (mostly popularizing books), but I understand “cognitive science” as embracing philosophy, while “computational linguistics” is more concrete both in the kind of work it does and the kind of mathematics it involves. The first sentence of the abstract to an article that comes up in a search, “The tension between expressive power and computational tractability poses an acute problem for theories of underspecified semantic representation,” certainly seems correct,” and likely to be the kind of area where a philosopher could help out, and Pinker is surely right that cognitive science (especially the parts closest to computer science) would benefit from a knowledge of Kant’s work on the categories of all thought. I don’t know enough to say whether it makes sense to have a philosopher working in a technical field at a university that may or may not have anyone else working in that area. On the other hand, it seems strange that computational linguistics would be cut in the name of the need for more commercially useful research. It seems odd enough that it raises the question of how military funding in the area might be related to the issue.

Meaning that the term can be used loosely without being completely unintelligble.

As kidneystones reminds us, ressentiment should never be underestimated as a force in politics.

Hi Walt, Thanks for the reply.

Are you arguing that the root cause of the pay crisis is that the great unwashed don’t want to pay academics’ bills because we keep reminding them of how stupid they are? That’s only part of it. I spend a lot of time around bright people who don’t work in academia and wouldn’t. Those who can…etc.

I’m wrong too frequently to feel smug about much. One could fairly accuse me of feeling smug about that kernel of self-discovery, I suppose. Perhaps too many of us are just too darned right too often for our own collective good. Makes it hard for the little people to remember how lucky they are to have us explain things to them.

When will they ever wake up?

Universities in the UK, particularly, produce functional illiterates at the graduate level.

Some statements, as when a clock strikes fourteen, are not only wrong, but let you know that every other piece of information coming from the same source is also likely to be wrong.

Consider how the luminaries on this site would respond if any of their graduate students announced over coffee that Sarah Palin would make a much better president than Clinton or Obama or McCain? Or that Maggie Thatcher was right to crush the unions.

Could you be more specific please as these two cases are not equivalent; the second statement (“Thatcher was right to crush the unions”) is one about which there is plenty of scope for sensible debate, albeit that I doubt that our “luminaries” would mark down a graduate student for taking either side. The first, however, is another clock-strikes-fourteen case; over coffee or otherwise, someone who made the claim that Sarah Palin would make a much better President than Obama or Clinton would either be joking, making some convoluted contrarian point about the ineffectiveness of the modern Presidency, or indeed revealing themself to be more or less culpably ignorant.

Kindred Winecoff

What if we knew the closure of the Philosophy Dept meant more scholarships for poor students to pursue professional degrees? That would, in effect, be a redistribution from the relatively affluent (those who tend to pursue philosophy degrees) to the relatively impoverished. That might still be objectionable, but it would at least be defensible and understandable.

I’m not saying that’s actually the dynamic at play. But then we just don’t know, do we?

We do know whether this is the dynamic at play. It isn’t. No-one at Keele is proposing this.

What’s being proposed is for Keele to stop teaching philosophy students and take more students in STEM subjects.

Also: I’m not quite sure what you mean by professional degrees. But it’s worth noticing (as I pointed out earlier) that Keele is also closing it\s professional ethics centre, which doesn’t teach undergraduates, but does teach professional diplomas and postgarduate degrees.

Ingrid @ 22: I’m glad you’ve signed the petition. But that wasn’t really the point I was making. The point was this: when the announcements about KCL and Middlesex were made, people were making practical suggestions of ways of showing solidarity (write to these people, email these people etc ). I don’t know if these actions made a difference. But something did.

With Keele, what’s happening is that people have used it as an opportunity to write reflective think pieces about ‘what it all means’, which then leads to conversations about ‘how we’re all doomed’ (and in some cases, like kidneystones ‘why this is a good thing’). I guess that there’s a time for that kind of post and that kind of conversation. But I don’t think a couple of days before the Keele Senate votes on these particular proposals is the best time to have that conversation.

(Before anyone asks: no, I’m not one of the people employed by Keele who might lose their job if these proposals are voted through. But I’m not a completely detached observer either. And if anyone asks why I’m crying over this particular drop of spilt milk, the answer is – because I foresee quite a lot of similar milk being splashed around in the UK in the next few months.)

D squared: oddly enough, this post isn’t about any of the issues that seem to exercising kidneystones. Is it really worth abetting his/her attempts to make the conversation all about him/herself? I’d rather see more about things that can be done to support the folks at Keele.

@ 39

‘I’m not saying that’s actually the dynamic at play. But then we just don’t know, do we?’

This should have been italicised: I’m not asserting it, I’m quoting it. As I say, I think we do know that this isn’t the case

bianca steele @ 40: well, here’s a fairly topical example of just the sort of thing kidneystones is talking about:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/03/18/provost_designee_withdraws_at_kennesaw_state_amid_controversy_over_journal_citation_of_marx

Wait, what’s that?

pgbb:
The thing is, it was pretty obvious what the OP was about, and it had absolutely nothing to do with politics. It also had absolutely nothing to do with class war/culture war type things such as we have in the US, especially in particular parts of the country, where the university is perceived as “liberal” both in the sense that it accepts scientific progress and Enlightenment and in the political sense of trying to build governmental and non-governmental institutions that use the best recent science [1]–and “we the people of the United States,” to use a Constitutional phrase that might be welcomed by the Tea Party, are considered to be all right-wing, all conservative Christian (evangelical or Catholic), all proudly non-intellectual and opposed to everything modern. Literally nothing Ingrid Robeyns has said has suggested there is a similar dynamic in Belgium or the EU generally.

The concern of the OP was with the non-political, though surely elitist, research and teaching carried out by departments of humanities, including philosophy. The university as a public good is perceived–not as a collector of knowledge that can be distributed to private-sector persons and institutions who form relationships with it–but as the place where an activity happens that many people think is worthwhile, but that the market wouldn’t ordinarily pay for: a leisure time activity that brings prestige to a society, and involves some kind of education that is of ultimate use, but has no real use in itself. This traditional activity is now the property of all people, on both right and left (though one issue that has been brought up is whether it is really only the property of the wealthy who can afford to spend their time in pursuits that will not lead to a decent job), and universities now seem to think they would be better off partnering with business. And I’m sure there are other concerns about the direction of European universities–but it’s unlikely they have anything to do with Sarah Palin.

kidneystones — I can’t understand why dsquared is being so easygoing with you. Maybe someone slipped xanax in his coffee.

Just to be clear — as a graduate admissions chair I have admitted students whom I could tell were libertarians, whom I could tell were Christians (one has subsequently become a minister, I was proud to be at her ordination), and a couple I could tell were Republicans (it is hard to tell normally, as it should be, and neither of them came here). I have never admitted someone I knew to be an evangelical Christian, but I did do a great deal (well, she reads, so she can comment) to support the one student I’ve had with aspirations to Graduate School in her ambitions (she’s in a top ten program, and they knew she was an evangelical Christian because I said so in my letter, because it was extremely relevant to her intellectual suitability for the program).

But, yes, if someone told me that Sarah Palin would be a better President than Obama or McCain, I’d laugh. If someone said McCain would be better I’d disagree but take them seriously.

Almost all of my colleagues are atheists or agnostics, the vast majority are Democrats (I’m an exception), most are on the left (I’m not an exception) and none (I think) would consider political or religious beliefs or practice relevant to whether we admit, mentor, or teach a student.

When it comes to undergraduates – -I teach large courses on contemporary moral issues (eg abortion) and it is essential for me to do that well that I do not convey my personal opinions about the issues, or my general political outlook. Of course, anyone who cared could figure out the latter (and the former r.e. some, but not most, issues) with a few minutes of googling. That’s ok — but on the whole they don’t. Even students I get to know well… a few months ago I had a group of seniors whom I’ve known since they were freshmen over for dinner. One of them (who knows me well and does know my politics) tested a couple who came over early about my politics. The initial part of each response: “Well, your definitely not a socialist….” (wrong) and “I’d have said you were kind of conservative about lots of things….” (not entirely wrong, but not really right).

This is much, much more common than you seem to think. Dare I say that in my experience professional philosophers (who as a group tilt left more than in most disciplines) take particular care to keep their personal politics from infecting their pedagogy? This is one reason why people like you should be especially distressed to see Philosophy targeted. (Keele, after all, was once home to the extremely right wing Anthony Flew, and also to the eminent Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne)

This Inside Higher Ed story today is relevant.

bq. Two studies being released today provide more evidence that bias is not the cause — and the studies provide some additional evidence to back the theory (put forward last year by one of the authors of the new work) that “self-selection” is the primary reason so many academics are liberal. … One of the new studies was an “audit” of the reactions of graduate program directors to initial inquiries from potential graduate students who said something to indicate their political leanings. The research found no evidence of bias.

bq. The second study used a longitudinal database that had information on how thousands of individuals thought about politics and the launch of their careers. This study found that those who pursue academic careers are far more likely to be liberal than conservative — again countering the idea that conservatives are being turned away from doctoral programs, or that a leftward shift is a price of success in Ph.D. programs.

bq. The study of how graduate directors respond to inquiries was conducted by Gross; Ethan Fosse, a graduate student at Harvard University; and Joseph Ma, an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia. Posing as undergraduates getting ready to apply to doctoral programs, they sent e-mail messages to graduate program directors in top departments of sociology, political science, economics, history and English. The inquiries were similar in describing their academic preparation, their undergraduate institutions, and their interest in applying. Some of the e-mails made no mention of politics, but some mentioned having previously worked on either the Obama or the McCain presidential campaigns. … In a few cases, the researchers found “traces” of a political impact, but “no statistically or substantively significant evidence of bias.”

bq. … limitations to their study. … looked at an initial stage of contact between candidates and departments, not the crucial admissions decision, when bias might also surface. Further, they note that all of the publicity over alleged political bias might make graduate directors censor themselves and not reveal their biases. … At the same time, however, the authors cite “research on stereotypes and social biases in general, as well as on political bias and the associated affect specifically [that] suggests that, when present, biases operate primarily in the domain of automatic cognition.

bq. The second study is by Fosse, Gross and Jeremy Freese, chair of sociology at Northwestern University. This study makes use of the Add Health database, which was created to track the long-term health behaviors of 90,000 adolescents, but which also includes questions about political orientation and educational/career plans. … These figures match (generally) data on the political leanings of young professors. “These numbers strongly suggest that much of professorial liberalism is indeed a function of who goes to graduate school: filling job openings in academe with a random draw from the pool of graduate students would still produce a distinctly left-leaning occupation,” the study says.

bq. Further, other data show that while a significant minority of those studied became more liberal in their doctoral programs, so did a significant number of those who didn’t go to graduate school. In addition, doctoral students were slightly more likely than those who stopped their education after their bachelor’s degrees to become more conservative than they had been earlier in their lives. These findings generally cast doubt on the idea that professors are liberal because they are socialized that way in graduate school. … notably, the study found no relationship between either materialism or early marriage and a disinclination to go for a doctorate. (These findings rebut theories put forward by some observers that conservatives’ desire for more money than young professors tend to earn, motivated either by greed or family obligations, explains the scarcity of right-wing academics.)

Ingrid

Perhaps it’s too late to come back to this, given the horlicks I made up above. But there is one point that I want to make that seems applicable to Keele, will almost certainly be applicable elsewhere in the UK, and may be true across the EU.

It’s this: it became fairly apparent in both the KCL and Middlesex cases that a very large part of what was driving the impulse to cut philosophy was not that they weren’t generating income, but what I think can only be described as ‘managerial fuckery pursued under the pretext of economic necessity.’

As far as KCL is concerned, I think that’s been fairly well documented by various people, such as Ian Pears.1At Middlesex it seems even more obvious: what the university effectively wanted to do was hang on to the next few years’ worth of RAE money which had been generated by CRMEP, while sacking the people who had generated that income.

Now, the Keele situation hasn’t been documented in anything like the detail that those earlier cases were. And this is a pity because it looks as though there’s a certain amount of evidence, documented by Nafsika Athanassoulis, that there’s managerial fuckery going on here too:

http://savepeak.blogspot.com/2011/03/nafsika-athanassoulis.html

A couple of points from here letter that stood out for me are 1) that PEAK was prevented by university adminstrators from submitting to the British RAE in either philosophy or health related areas (which is where its main expertise lies), and is now in trouble for not generating research income and 2)that it was set up specifically to teach professional postrgraduate courses, which it was then not permitted to advertise separately from general undergraduate teaching; and that it is now being told that it does not teach enough undergraduates. (There’s more, but those are the easiest points to get across).

Now – you may say these Keele-specific points are irrelevant to the ‘bigger picture’ you are trying to set out. But I think that when taken together with what happened at KCL and Middlesex they are a very important part of the bigger picture in the UK. The picture I see is at least in part that it is strong departments, not failing ones, that are being threatened; and not because of their economic failings but because of bad – and in some cases almost incomprehensible managerial decisions.

It’s possible that the structure of universities elsewhere in the EU protects them from this sort of fuckery. I don’t know: I’ve worked in universities in Britain, and now work in one in Turkey, but never in continental Europe.

But if it doesn’t, then I think that the best strategy is not for people in philosophy to beat themselves up about how modern universities are becoming unsuited to them; but to document the extent to which even when philosophy department meet the sorts of criteria that management sets them, they get messed with by management changing the goalposts without warning – and certainly without giving them time to adapt to the new criteria they are being judged by. (And I would also add that as someone who’s been keeping the fate of philosophy in the UK over the last 20 years, it strikes me that one of the lessons of the RAE in the UK was that despite their reputation for being hidebound philosophy departments are actually quite good at adapting. But that’s another story).

1 at http://boonery.blogspot.com/