Save Philosophy at Keele

Keele University the Latest to Propose to Axe Philosophy

In the latest disastrous development in British Higher Education, due no doubt to the Government's ill thought out proposal to transform (and rudely marketise) the process of University funding, Keele University has asked its Senate to consider a proposal to close the Philosophy program there. Philosophy at Keele boasts an impressive roster of past philosophers including Jonathan Dancy, David McNaughton, Jonathan Dancy, GAJ Rogers, and Ian Rumfitt, Anthony Flew, Andre Gallois and Richard Swinburne, and an excellent crop of current ones.

The management at Keele proposes that the department, which teaches about 200 undergraduates, should be wound down without further admissions. The decision to axe philosophy will have adverse consequences for the academic reputation of Keele, and for the education of its undergraduate students. It is another case of a University being prepared to sacrifice its academic values, its educational vision, and the intellectual coherence of its course provision, in order to make relatively small short term saving of £300,000. (Relatively small, for example, in relation to the £188,000 per annum salary of its Vice Chancellor, Nick Foskett, an avowed academic expert in the Marketisation of Education, and The interface of government policy and the management of educational institutions.) The closure of philosophy at Keele will also betray the intention of the founder of the institution, Alfred Dunlop Lindsay, former Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow and Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

This drastic measure is proposed on the basis of bleak forecasts about future earnings of the philosophers there, and on a forecast of its high staff cost to earnings ratio.It also seems that PEAK's vulnerability to closure seems was brought about in part by poor management decisions, such as the decision to split it from philosophy, and then not to submit the research of its members to the 2008 RAE.

Whatever the forecast of staff cost to earnings are, one questions the wisdom of this decision. Staff costs cannot rise that high, since the program is small, and philosophy is cheap to teach. The earnings potential of philosophers is tiny compared to that of social scientists, whose subjects are funded by the Government through the Research Councils to the tune of 35 times more than are humanities subjects. Meanwhile, it is the wrong time to make any financial forecasts, anyway, since no-one is in a position to make a reliable forecast about what will happen after 2012, as the new system of undergraduate funding beds in.

I doubt that the financial forecast cited by the management at Keele is the real driver - to use the crass lingo beloved by the new cadre of managers - behind the decision. If it is then, so much the worse, because economic considerations are not the only grounds for making decisions in academic organizations. Or they should not be. Educational and intellectual considerations should also figure prominently. My suspicion is that the axe has fallen on philosophy partly because it is small in relation to Politics and International Relations, the other components of the School - SPIRE - which makes it administratively easier to axe. (Perhaps the writing was on the wall when the 'p' of philosophy did not feature in the Acronym.) This is the time for colleagues in Politics and International Relations to show some solidarity with their colleagues whose jobs are under threat. They will not remain unaffected by the closure. Political theory and politics at Keele, as well as research in that area, will be adversely affected by having its links with philosophy severed.

Recent history shows that decisions to close philosophy departments tend to backfire. In the 1990s several universities, including Bradford, Exeter, Newcastle, closed their philosophy departments, while others including Reading and Sheffield and York, considered doing so but decided not to. With hindsight it is clear how misguided these decisions were. The universities that closed down their philosophy departments suffered a loss in reputation and intellectual coherence. Meanwhile the subject of philosophy flourished in defiance of the expectations of the vice-chancellors and deans who forecast its demise. Reading, Sheffield and York departments are now among the strongest and largest in the English-speaking world, with deserved international reputations, while Exeter and Newcastle were obliged to reinstate their philosophy programs.

More recently history repeated itself, the second time more farcically than the first, when Middlesex closed down philosophy, the only 5* rated department it had, while Liverpool, like Aberdeen and Birmingham a few years before, considered that option, but eventually drew back from the brink and decided to renew and expand their philosophy provision. Needless to say the departments at Birmingham and Aberdeen are now thriving. Meanwhile, obloquy rained on Middlesex University from all over the academic world, and a competitor institution, Kingston University, seized its opportunity to poach the renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

In the last several years philosophy has been among the fastest growing subjects at A Level. More students than ever before want to study it at University. Moreover, philosophy graduates are increasingly in demand from employers. If Universities such as Keele really value and want to foster the skills of critical thinking in its graduates, as Keele claims to do on its website, then it should promote the study of philosophy, a discipline in which critical thinking skills are part of its very content, as well as its method and approach to other questions. (The fact that philosophy does this better than other disciplines is borne out by evidence such as the scores consistently obtained by philosophy students taking their LSAT examinations, an aptitude test that graduates applying to U.S. Law Schools are required to take.)

Philosophy, because it promotes critical reflection on goals and methods, and couples well with other subjects to produce coherent joint degrees, which are valued not only by those who study them, but by employers also. Removing it from the University will deprive Keele’s students of the opportunity of developing these skills to the high-level at which philosophy graduates are able to acquire them. All these reasons weigh powerfully against the proposed decision to axe the philosophy program at Keele. Let us hope that they reconsider it, and that Keele goes the way of the Universities of York, Sheffield Reading, Birmingham and Aberdeen, rather than the way of Middlesex. I know which group I would rather belong to.

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