Protevi on Philosophy at Middlesex University

Frequent CT commenter John Protevi has an excellent piece about the proposed closure of the the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University at IHE and the THES. For those who don’t know, the University administrators are proposing to close the Department despite the fact that it is the highest ranked department in the University according the RAE, and seems to be heavily in the black. Of course, that it is in the black turns out not necessarily to work in its favour: apparently, due to a quirk in the RAE system, the university will continue to receive its RAE money from Philosophy for the next 6 years even if it closes the department. Protevi explains:

Philosophy at Middlesex received the highest rating of any programme in the university in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, a periodic exercise conducted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which determines disbursement of government funds for research. Middlesex Philosophy had 65 per cent of its research activity rated “world-leading” or “internationally renowned”. This put Middlesex philosophy 13th of 41 programmes in the UK, at the top of all the other ex-polytechnics or “post-1992 universities”, and ahead of established heavyweights such as Sussex, Warwick, York, Durham, and Glasgow. To cut such a programme, while bragging on its website about its commitment to research excellence – that was just too much administrative hypocrisy for even many hardened American academics to bear.

When word got out that at Middlesex from 2008 to 2009 academic staff has fallen from 748 to 733, while administration has risen from 888 to 890; that the number of senior staff with total compensation above £100,000 increased from 7 to 13; and that total compensation for the VC increased from £223,000 to £246,000 – all these facts rang an all-too-familiar note with American academics as well. And it certainly didn’t help the administration’s image when people learned that consultant fees increased from £2,321,000 to £3,122,000 in that time period. (Details on these figures may be found here, in the university’s financial statement.)

Another outrage was learning that philosophy produced a yearly revenue of some £173,260 for the university from its excellent results in the 2008 RAE. Incredibly, the university will continue to receive that sum yearly until the research excellence framework, to be held in 2014 or perhaps even 2016, even if it has closed the philosophy programme! This was an all too blatant case of ripping off the labour of the philosophers. Then it came out that the “subject group” composed of philosophy (six faculty members) and religious studies (one member) contributed 53 per cent of its revenue to central administration in 2009-10 and was projected to contribute 59 per cent in 2010-11. The central administration requires 55 per cent, so it is willing to cut its most highly rated research programme for a temporary 2 percentage point shortfall. Veterans of penny-pinching, short-sighted, and arbitrary administrations winced with sympathetic familiarity at this sort of “reasoning”.

I’m not closely involved (to put it mildly) in UK higher education. But I have a number of friends in the system, some of whom are administrators. Universities in the UK are very highly dependent on a single funder (the government) and are therefore much more vulnerable to changes in government policy than universities in the US (where I am) are; it also seems to me that there is not much of a culture of having a clear sense of a mission of public service beyond responding to government whim, and this means that many high level administrators lack the inhibition from doing stupid things in the short term that such a sense of mission imposes on some good US administrators. (Two of my favourite books about American higher ed — Mission and Money: Understanding the University and Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered — are all about how administrators can interact with the market in a way that serves their mission, rather than allowing the market to overwhelm their mission — I’m very curious how much sense these books would make to UK administrators).

In the comments to the THES page you’ll see at least one person hoping David Willetts can be persuaded to come to the rescue. Much more likely, in my opinion, that he’ll make universities less dependent on government funding (if he can convince his new orange friends to let him). This would probably help lots of Philosophy departments, but its not clear to me that the Humanities as a whole would gain in the long run.