Sam Cooke tackles the tensions of the academic world.

This spring, my university proposed the closure of my department. It’s a recession, I am prepared to accept that some departments may be financial dead weights and should be cast off. That, however, was not the issue the University took with my department, but instead was one which is systemic to the academic institution in Russell Group universities – of which York is not one, but I can’t imagine the counterpart 1994 Group stands in any better stead. The problem is a stifling demand for research from the administration, and demand for research for the sake of research. However, this is not to be a polemic against the institution, but a detail of my personal experiences.

I am an undergraduate in Philosophy at Liverpool University, and I am also president of the Philosophical Society for students. This sounds more prestigious than it is: the position is nothing more than a liaison between student body and department, and the title is ‘something for the CV’ as one of the part-time lecturers put it. It does mean that you spend a lot of time with your Doctors and Professors, however, and a lot of time listening to them complain about the situation they’re in. One tweed-clad Buddha scholar, a lovely (if inhumanly pedantic) man who eventually fled to the Orkney islands, told me of his gripes throughout my first year; he wanted to write books, but this would take longer than the University was willing to fund him for, as they required a steady stream of papers to be published from all staff.

I remember a meeting in an office in which every table and desk was packed with paperwork from administration, as being a member of the full-time staff obligates you in a tripartite workload of admin, teaching and research. I’ve never met someone who’s achieved a PhD in Philosophy without having at least one obvious oddity, and there appears to be no upper limit to the level of insanity achieved by the faculty while remaining un-sectioned. These are people who have run over their own briefcases, who spend their evenings building ramps for their elderly cats, and who only speak in languages that are either dead or formal1. These people are not suited to administration.

However, I digress. In the spring of this year, the minutes for an upcoming university senate were released to selected members of the campus-wide faculty: this selection was of heads of department and professors. Within these minutes was a “proposal for a consultation” of closure of the Philosophy and Politics Departments, the reason given being that the university needed to “continue investing in excellence”. Hiding behind the words, closure was proposed because both Philosophy and Politics failed to meet the expectations the university had put forward for the 2008 RAE, or ‘Research Assessment Exercise’, a now defunct government assessment of the quality of research.

The news broke (though it shouldn’t have; the minutes for the senate are confidential) when a professor from the History Department made a gesture of sympathy to one of the Politics staff, the Friday before the Wednesday senate meeting. The lecturer was unsurprisingly shocked, and swiftly informed the students he taught, who swiftly formed a group of opposition, led by the Philosophical Society and its Politics counterpart. By the Wednesday, there were hundreds of students and staff outside the senate building protesting the closures, and media coverage had gone national the day before. The Vice Chancellor Howard Newby, who issued the closures, referred to us as “the noise outside”.

Maybe a word is required on Sir Howard, a man who is preceded by a reputation acquired at the University of the West of England, at a job he left after sixteen months. He proposed a restructure of UWE in ignorance of the previous one four years before, and it was at UWE was where his buzzword rhetoric really started to show: transforming higher-education facilities into “centres of knowledge exchange” with “blue sky thinking exercises”. His “realignment” of UWE made use of a company named ‘Spirit of Creation’ set up by Shelia Watt (the maiden name of Shelia Newby), who was also appointed to Assistant Vice Chancellor of UWE. Controversies ensued, and were met by a further string of seemingly senseless buzzwords from Sir Howard when asked about Shelia’s duties: she was working on a project involving “employer engagement”.

So, at his next (and current job) at Liverpool University, he was met with suspicion by staff, and rightly so. The attempt to close the Philosophy and Politics departments was eventually brought to a halt by widespread opposition throughout nearly every department in the University. An official statement criticising Newby’s decision to shut a philosophy department was released, with the signatures of the heads of every philosophy department in the Russell group, and the pressure from the UCU (the University and Colleges Union) provided enough external opposition for the closures to be thrown out. This is not to say that damage had not been done – a number of premature retirements (or voluntary redundancies) and changes of leadership within Liverpool’s Philosophy Department have followed since the official closures were rejected in summer.

I’ve been trying to think about what the moral of this story is, but I don’t think there is one to find. Newby isn’t the antagonist because he runs universities like businesses, nor because he tried to close my department – in the long run he’s doing what he thinks will provide the best future for the university, and maybe he’s mistaken in his method. What I gained from this whole unsavoury affair, apart from a distaste for academia and the ‘something for the CV’ mentality, is a notion that as students, we are at the bottom of the pyramid in a university: we’re both the foundation and the furthest from the top. We have no power within the system because we bring nothing to the table apart from our tuition fees, something which I suspect makes the upper echelons consider us like raw materials or cattle, something to be brought in and shunted through. Because of this, it is difficult to use the system to our advantage. Even now, the relationship between the Philosophical Society and the Department has reverted back to the way it was – they do not answer to us within the system, so unless we can offer some motivating force, they’re our opposition. The only reason that we had any success in our endeavours with the closures is because we went outside the system – the media attention, the petitions to people with power, and the physical presence with demonstrations. There is no moral, but there is a reassuring example that the system that constrains us can be circumvented.

1 – all true stories.