James Ladyman, professor of philosophy at Bristol University, has launched a petition on the No. 10 website urging Gordon Brown to reverse the policy of HEFCE, the government’s funding body for higher education, to “direct [research] funds to projects whose outcomes are determined to have a significant ‘impact'”.
HEFCE’s Research Excellence Framework, which will replace the unmourned Research Assessment Exercise, identifies three “key characteristics of research excellence”: “outputs”, “impact” and “environment”. It’s the implications of the second of those criteria, “impact”, that are most worrying. “Significant additional recognition will be given,” the HEFCE policy document reads, “where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life. Impacts will be assessed through a case-study approach that will be tested in a pilot exercise.”
Ladyman’s petition points out that whilst arts and humanities disciplines, like his own, philosophy, do have such an impact, that effect is often hard to quantify and is rarely, if ever, discernible in the short term. And it’s not only the humanities that would suffer from this grotesquely utilitarian formula either: what, for example, are the “demonstrable” economic benefits of string theory or the more arcane regions of the higher mathematics?
There’s nothing unprecedented about all this, of course. Universities have long been the crucible of a massive managerialist experiement, ever since Thatcherism began its destructive march through Britain’s institutions. But the emasculation of higher education does seem to be gathering pace. I understand that several post-1992 universities are planning to close their philosophy departments on economic grounds. It’s not at all clear that the hollowed-out, technocratic institutions that will remain could properly continue to call themselves “universities”. As Brad Hooker, president of the British Philosophical Association argued this year, when the philosophy department at the University of Liverpool was threatened with closure:
Any university without philosophy will lack a forum for studying some of the most profound and pivotal questions. For philosophy is the discipline that addresses questions about what knowledge is; about how human beings should behave individually and collectively; about whether there are sound arguments for religious belief; about the nature of truth and beauty; about which forms of reasoning are valid; and about the underlying presuppositions of other subjects, from history to psychology to biology.
Content from our partners
Related
