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A reader comments on Paul’s words in the previous post:

“…there is something of a history in the UK of management doing precisely this. Whatever departments earn from the RAE is frequently viewed as, in part, university earnings and the cut taken can give a new meaning to creative accountancy.”

Just to clarify, I’m not against all administrative autonomy with funds. Sometimes academics talk as if the problems always get worse the higher up the chain of command you go. And it’s surprising that they would say so, since surely everyone knows of situations where you’re stuck in a horrible department but have a great dean, or something along those lines.

In fact, individual departments quite often degenerate into cliquish, bullying little fiefdoms conducted under the psychological rein of terror of single sneering Troll Master. And I do think administrators need some leeway to break up those fiefdoms.

However, to have the right to shut down an entire program while milking the very rewards for which it is responsible for a period of some years seem so disgustingly cynical that I’m surprised it’s even legal. And in this case also disturbingly foolish, given that universities generally don’t close their own highest-rated and most visible programs. A number of letter writers said that if the decision is not revoked, then Middlesex is effectively forfeiting the right to be called a university. And I don’t think that’s going too far– not if you’re closing you best Department not for academic or even financial reasons (see the Alenka Zupancic letter), but simply as an exercise in market speculation.

And as many people have noted by now, there is the additional cynicism (and possibly illegality) here that switching from Band D to Band C students in order to get more funding neglects the fact that the increased funding is supposed to be spent on the increased costs. Technically, as I understand it, there should be no net financial advantage in catering to any of the Bands. Unless, of course, the plan is to cut corners on the Band C programs and earn a nifty little institutional profit on the expense reimbursement.

If I were an ambitious administrator at a London-area institution right now, and had some spare funding (granted, there may not be such a person in these times), I know what I would do right now. I would say: “Middlesex doesn’t want this department? Fine, we’ll take it off their hands.” I would then offer to hire the Mdx Philosophy faculty en bloc, and bring in all the students as well.

Not only would this be the ethically best course of action, and a solid academic decision, it would also be a public relations field day.

The unspoken background condition to this whole crisis, of course, is that academics can’t just find new jobs at will. Not anymore. Lingis told the story of his time at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, early in his career. (And I may be misremembering this slightly.)

There was some sort of perennial crisis involving a fight between the phenomenology people and the traditional Catholic philosophers, whose numbers were deadlocked. The dean favored the traditionalists, and one day hired an additional faculty member of his own accord to break the deadlock in their favor.

The phenomenologists were outraged, and resigned en masse. It made page 1 of the New York Times, I am told. This was the early 1960’s, and they could get away with a mass resignation because there was a faculty shortage in those days. They all had good jobs immediately: Lingis at Penn State, Manfred Frings at DePaul, etc.

Now, we are mostly at the mercy of our current jobs in this profession (in the humanities, I mean) with the exception of a handful of lucky ones. Resigning in protest has become the rarest of luxuries.