ceci n'est pas une apologie

The news from Middlesex University is not as positive. If I understand correctly, university management are still refusing to negotiate with student campaigners or faculty members. The justification for the decision to close the University’s best ranked department is, as it turns out, a rather crass economic one, having to do with the university’s business strategy (should universities be governed according to business strategies? I’ll leave that question aside for the moment, but no is the answer I think). Basically, philosophy students are cheap: they require a few books – not that many even – a couple seminar rooms, and a little bit of quiet to think. As a result, the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) allocates £3947/year per philosophy student, it is labeled a “Band D” discipline. Academic disciplines that might require a studio, lab or fieldwork project gets £5131/year per student, they are labeled “Band C” (this includes things like media studies). Disciplines requiring expensive equipment (chemistry, medicine, engineering) get more. Middlesex University calculates that by cutting the number of spots for Band D students and raising the number for Band C students, it can get more money out of HEFCE. So, it is an economically driven decision, but not of the type “we don’t have the money to continue to fund this programme” (after all philosophy departments are understandably cheap to run), but of the type “we think we could make more money if we cut this programme and free up spots for Band C students”. Sarah Amsler discusses this logic in her article on Opendemocracy.net (I don’t like the title of her article, in my experience philosophers are more likely to be suited and booted than most others in the humanities, but ok). If I have misunderstood the situation, I welcome corrections.

For the neo-liberally inclined amongst you (Guy) and the statistic lovers, here is a link where you will find a few (rather old, but I don’t imagine they have changed much) numbers on how well philosophy undergrads do.

For the New York Times faithful, here (and here) are two articles from the American newspaper of record on how philosophers fare in employment. They are from some time ago, but I think that being published prior to the global finance industry being exposed as largely inhabited by greedoholics with little common sense, and ethics and long-term thinking being rediscovered as perhaps helpful attributes of people in general and those handling very large sums of money in particular, makes these articles all the more pertinent. I find that professional philosophers are often loathe to discuss philosophy as good training for other things as well for philosophy itself – when people ask what is the point of philosophy, the proper answer is that philosophy is its own point. It is seen as demeaning the proper activity of philosophy itself to conceive it in instrumental terms, and many academics resent – rightfully – constantly having to do so in order to protect their discipline. But as has always been the case, most of those who study philosophy at university will not go on to be professional philosophers, what an education in philosophy provides them are the intellectual tools (logical reasoning, critical thinking, argumentation, and writing) to contribute in many ways to the communities they live within, no wonder they are so employable.