UK Humanities Departments, RIP
 

The prospect of massive cuts in UK higher education are already taking affect, with news that the philosophy department at Middlesex University is to close, alongside similar closures planned for philosophy departments at Liverpool university and Kings College in London. These are being taken as the first wave of a far more dramatic programme of closures that'll affect arts and humanities departments across the UK.

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Infinite Thought

Necessary Agitation

This won't be of direct interest to most, but should definitely serve as an ominous warning to anybody currently studying or working in arts or humanities departments in UK universities.:(

Fucking hell! And also: Bollocks.

I heard somewhere the other day that philosophy degrees are a pretty new invention (something like the last 100 years) which is to say that none of the great philosophers had philosophy degrees and the philosophy degree is of negligable importance to the history of philosophy

It's been a less than a year since I first read Ray Brassier.

Depends on what you mean be degree. An undergraduate qualification in pretty much anything isn't important. PhDs (and you'll note what the Ph stands for) makes quite some odds though.

You're right though, but you're talking about a time when degrees dealt with the liberal arts rather than single avenues - there's probably very few writers with English Lit degrees. Having said that, you've probably heard of Sartre, who studied philosophy.

Karl Marx and Martin Luther, I believe, both had degrees in philosophy.

Yeah, they would be in quite a worse position if they discontinued the doctorate in the subject. Curiously enough, though, I get the sense that the "Philosophy" in the PhD is under-appreciated.

The point isn't about philosophy in particular but the way in which this recession is clearly being used as an opportunity by university administrators to cut the very kinds of non-vocational humanities/arts based departments that they've been reluctantly servicing for decades now. Universities are being told to cut costs but not the areas where the cuts have to be made. It's therefore their choice to put the squeeze on already woefully underfunded English lit, Philosophy, Music, History and Fine Art departments, while leaving more commercially viable, broadly science-based ones relatively untouched.

Quite right but there's no greater example of this point in Middlesex saying that their philosophy department "made no 'measurable' contribution to the University" despite the subject being the highest rated by the RAE.

Evidently, Middlesex means something very specific in terms of measurable contributions and something more self-interested than its student body.

The RAE thing is being ignored by most universities as they increasingly focus on student numbers rather than the actual quality of teaching/research. At my uni, any department that can't guarantee 100 plus students per module is now vulnerable. I taught a course on Modernism last year which had fifteen students on it. It received excellent feedback from the students and produced some excellent coursework. However it's now been scrapped in favour of a new 'mega-module', focusing on employability - which none of the students I've spoken to say they want.

It's odd - they could measure tuition fees; they could measure the number of students putting money into the local economy; they could measure the books sales of the high number of very publishable philosophers there; they could measure the number of times Middlesex is advertised for free everytime it's mentioned in an article.

As Herr Rail says, it's not just a problem for philosophy, it's for the whole humanities. There's a very narrow perception of the benefits of university education. Bradders and I both have a degree in philosophy, and I think we'd both agree that it's not directly served us in the job market. However, I blagged my way into IT thanks to knowing Boolean logic; while there, I was known as a good peacemaker, thanks to analytic philosophy; I was known as a good and particular communicator, thanks to philosophy essays. The problem - and I suppose this runs deeper than just Universities - is that the merit of learning is measured only in terms of direct profit or explicit titles. I know a few people who are well out of their depth in the jobs they've got, thanks to their MBAs.

It's not that I object to 'profitability' being used as the prime marker of value in the economy; it's that that profitability is incredibly short-sighted.

My undergraduate 'employability' lessons were laughable - derided by everyone concerned, but obligatory, and useless. In my course at the moment, there's one module which has a single student. MAs are a slightly different matter - they're much more profitable-per-student - but any class with more than 10 people in is an utter waste of time in educational terms. Universities needn't be exempt from market forces, but their prime focus should be on education. University of Bristol is currently axing something like 1 in 10 staff from humanities. Meanwhile, the administration is a sprawling wreck of disorganisation. You see this in banks, too - people holding the purse strings get rid of not that which is least efficient, but that which is least understood. Marketing departments are notorious for being money-haemorrhagers, but because there's a transparent in-out to the cashflow, they don't get job cuts. I'd bet Middlesex is keeping whatever Business qualifications it offers, regardless of their educational merit.

"As I look back on it now, it's obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics. ... Logic is the subject that's helped me the most in picking stocks, if only because it taught me to identify the peculiar illogic of Wall Street."

That's seriously scary.

Actually, you may be interested in attending this:

• INVITATION TO THE THIRD ANNUAL PSS WORKSHOP: ONE-DIMENSIONAL UNIVERSITY: NEOLIBERALISM, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE

• Dear all,

• I am writing with news of an an exciting open workshop on the relationship between University, knowledge and neoliberalism, to be held in the Department of Sociology (12 Woodland Road) on the 5 May from 2-6pm (followed by a drinks reception), here in the University of Bristol.

• A fine panel of speakers, from a number of different disciplines, has been assembled to share their insights on contemporary developments taking place in the Higher Education landscape.

• The speakers are:

• Susan Robertson (Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol) 'The business of universities: four tendencies in the transformation of the higher education sector'

• John Holmwood (School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham) 'Disciplines, interdiciplinarity and the neo-liberal University'

• Mark Fisher (Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths) 'Eliminating Business Ontology from the University'

• Harriet Bradley (Department of Sociology, University of Bristol and Vice-president of the UCU at Bristol) 'What is to be done: unions, collectivism and resistance to neoliberalism'

• Each of the speakers will provide a short talk on the subject from their own perspective. We hope that these talks will then provide a basis for a broad discussion about the content and the political implications of the ongoing changes as well as the possibilities of response and action. The event is open to all students and members of academic and support staff and we very much hope that you will be able to join the discussion on Wednesday 5th May.

• Best wishes,

• The Philosophy of Social Science Study Group

• For more information visit the One Dimensional University blog or join us on facebook: Philosophy of Social Science (PSS) Study Group

I would've been there with bells on, but I'm in essay world at the moment. As you can see, because I'm on SYG.

i think the world would probably be a better place if philosophy was taught as a compulsory subject in secondary schools.

anyway, i kind of wonder if this is going to be the beginning of a trend of universities closing departments and could hopefully lead to the massive overhaul of the university system that is needed in the UK. Probably it won't, but you can still hope.

Not that I'm hoping that humanities departments will be closed, but that our University system is crap and needs to be completely done over.

I absolutely agree that the university system in the uk is in need of an enormous overhaul. I just fear that the overhaul it's going to receive is likely to make things a helluva lot worse than they already are.

Well this is extremely depressing. So instead of universities being centres of education they're becoming centres of training.

demonrail and Bowels, what specifically do you think we need an overhaul of the university system for? I have got a lot of complaints about how my degree is taught...

The first thing for me would be to return former polytechnics to their previous status. It's ridiculous that 'officially', a degree gained at Thames Valley or its equivalent is considered equal to one gained at somewhere like Cambridge. They should abolish tuition fees and return to the old grant system, which would lower the amount of students doing degrees to a more manageable level. The whole drive to get 50% of the population into higher education has been a disaster, with far too many school-leavers being pushed into universities regardless of how useful a degree would be to them, or how suited they are to actually doing a degree in the first place. There's something deeply immoral about universities happily taking tuition fees off of students it's clear aren't able to cope with the subject they're meant to be studying.

Those factors don't account for all the problems but I reckon they're the root cause of 90% of them.

Not sure if I agree with that...sounds reasonable though. Would help protect the prestige of the good unis, and prevent homogenisation.

I agree with this. It's good to educate and create a more sophisticated population thus improving democracy but it's gone too far. I can't believe how many complete morons are at my uni, and the department I'm studying in (despite it being fairly well rated in the rankings). In the Netherlands they have a system (or they did) in which it's free to go to uni but if you take longer to complete your degree because you failed modules, then you have to pay the fees. This would put off some of the dossers.

It's more about restoring the prestige of the former polytechnics, which used to have a great reputation in their own right, but which are now seen as little more than third grade universities.

Ah good point. So it's a win win situation.

what are the issues you mention having with your degree, btw?

There's only 8 hours teaching time a week, which is not enough considering how much we're paying.

Vast amount of reading but nothing is dealt with in depth. I'm studying English, and I know we're meant to be reading a lot, but if you're doing something like a novel a week per module how can you develop deeper thinking about literature? It's very superficial.

There's also a flaw in the structure of the degree in that we read loads of literature, and the odd bit of pretentious, useless lit theory, but never any actual literary criticism. We have to reference lit critics/scholars in our essays but you're not going to learn anywhere near as much as you would if, say, they put some of the great/significant works of literary criticism on the course so we can really understand what the discipline is about.


The lecturers often don't seem to find literature interesting for what it is, as pieces of art, that might be beautiful, that might have something deep to say about life. They only really look at the surplus, less interesting, less important aspects of literature. The lecturers really are, generally, quite tedious people and I really can't work out how you can go from having a passion and love of literature to the sort of interests they have. Not that what they do is valueless, it's just that the most important thing is left out.

The are just generally quite bad. I had one lecture last semester in which the lecturer spent about 15mins explaining what a allegory was, clearly padding out his lecture to make up the full hour.

The quality of the other students is really low which is quite depressing. Though if I had made sure I had got into a better uni I might not be complaining about that.

I'm sure there are other things...

i'd like to see the american system of majors and minors in the UK, mickey mouse subjects like PR and hotel management can would be got rid of unless someone could prove beyond all doubt that there are things you can learn from doing a hotel management degree that you can't learn on the job.

another thing I would like to see is an end to navel gazing culture of academia, people writing articles about articles about articles, no point anyone makes is valid unless the refer to about 50 other essays first, etc.

anyone who has at any point in the last 60 years extolled the virtues of critical theory would be executed, and so would their family.

i had a housemate who went to oxford and he got as much one on one teaching time in a week as i got in an entire term, so i'd like to see that disparity sorted out

also holiday time, 3 months in the summer, plus one at Easter one at Christmas is ridiculous. having all that holiday time drags out the length of time it takes to get a degree, i.e. it drives up the overall cost of university for the student.

I read another opinion on Middlesex saying that this is precisely what the university is attempting to do, return to its poltytechnic roots.

Yes. Nurses shouldn't be trained in universities either. I'm inclined to thing that business studies should be taught in separate institutions too.

[quote=Toilet & Bowels another thing I would like to see is an end to navel gazing culture of academia, people writing articles about articles about articles, no point anyone makes is valid unless the refer to about 50 other essays first, etc.[/QUOTE]
Yes, that sort culture is what I was trying to get at. It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. How do these literary scholars justify the time and effort they spend on writing these almost pointless journal articles that hardly anyone will read? But then you need academics to be publishing work for their tenure as a quality control on the lecturers universities hire. And there's also the fact that important academics do use the work of the lesser academics, so in that way these lesser academics may have some small value.

As far as my very limited knowledge of this field goes, I agree with you.

What are you/did you study at uni?

No! you use that time to read! It's needed.

I think on this point, you are doing a literature degree, not a literature appreciation group. I expect your lecturers are dull as piss - they often are in lit departments - but I think the idea is that you're trying to do a whistle stop tour of literature as a culture; as such, the actual books themselves take a bit of a backseat. Have you ever read Pierre Bayard's 'How to talk about books you've never read?' He's a literature lecturer, and he makes some really interesting points about the finer dynamics of literature in universities (i.e., that's it's often more about how to not read).

If it's any consolation, I'm did a degree in a crap university, and my experience was much the same. Mr & Bowels went to a very good university for his subject, and I seem to remember he hated it. University is, unfortunately, very often crap.

Landfill academia is criminal; critical theory is not this. I could understand why some might think it's all shit, because a lot of it is, but I wouldn't write it off for a second. I'd also never talk about it here - this forum is barely baroque in terms of its understanding of the world.

i had the same experience with tutors at art college, it seems tedious & talentless people have colonised universities and transformed them into a safe haven for their grey faced brethren where they can conduct the dogmatic oppression of imagination, inspiration, and balls.

Good by reputation, not in practice.

I don't know much about literature departments but I suspect they've gone the same way as most other departments in the humanities: using whatever topic they're meant to be discussing as a vehicle for trying to justify some vague political point. So novels, films, paintings merely become reproducers of 'ideology'. This is a valuable point but one that really only takes about an hour to explain. The fact that so many departments stretch it over three years is just padding to the point of absurdity.

And anyone not studying either psychoanalysis, psychiatry or philosophy should ever be expected to read Lacan.

Fine art

Yeah, true. I'm not really talking about appreciation though. To have good knowledge of, and a lot to say about, a piece literature you need to spend more time on it I think. It's mad speed reading loads of books when you're not really getting much out of it. I do think they could maybe slightly reduce the reading, or at least increase the teaching, either of these would improve this problem.

No I haven't read that book, I'll seek it out. What do you mean how not to read? Being selective in reading the required reading?

Yeah, I'd probably be whining about my degree whatever I studied, wherever I studied it. What uni did you go to?

I actually I take back my previous statement on that. I can think of at least one example of what I think is good crit theory.

No I think it's fine to teach business studies in university, you just need to enforce that all business studies students also study the arts & humanities, in the hope the they are not unleashed on the world as a useless mindless cunt


Also, from what I understand nursing students are generally "up for it"

Exactly! Obviously not all are like this, but I do get the impression from my lecturers that they're sheep crowding round each other for protection. And how none of them seem ready to criticise each others' work/ideas and yet they're working in academia!