Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

A Huge Cut in Postgraduate Funding for Philosophy in the UK?

Brian Leiter

Simon Blackburn excorciates a recent government proposal in Britain, whose implications are, indeed, ominous for philosophy:

I have been reading the Arts and Humanities Research Council document called the Delivery Plan, 2008-2011….

[T]he document reminded me of the brag sheet I once caught a glimpse of when a rather porcine business man left his laptop open and facing me on a train. It was full of sentences like “I have considerable experience of progressing hands-on product delivery serving a variety of stakeholders in a fast-moving and challenging commercial environment”, which I interpreted as meaning something like I drive a van in Gateshead. But after the joke had gone on a little long, it dawned on me that the delivery plan was serious. They actually do think in terms like “Fostering knowledge transfer by our researchers with an increasing range of partners to produce greater economic and social impact”, and yes, they do scatter bold type everywhere to show just how serious and forward-looking they are….

Mere lapses of taste can be forgiven, but as in the movies when the slightly unnerving character with the gold tooth and the unfortunate wig suddenly reveals that he is a cannibal, so the AHRC soon reveal the black-hearted villainy behind the clowning. The essence of its delivery plan (also in bold) is that “over 2008-11 we will, via the new Block Grant Partnerships, move the percentage of our postgraduate budget falling within strategic themes from a low base to some 50%… A large number of the studentships we fund will fall within our strategic priority areas, such as the creative economy and heritage.” Not only the creative economy and heritage, but also lifelong health and wellbeing, and living with environmental change, and, well, just heaps of things that make up the challenging drivers and value chains piloted with our partner stakeholders. Not classics, or history (unless it is heritage), languages, literature, law or philosophy, of course.

We heard last week that the number of postgraduate studentships is to fall next year from 1,500 to 1000, although it would then go back up to some 1,300. That seemed bad enough. But now take away half of the support for anything that most people in universities would recognise as a subject, and we are down to between 500 and 650 students a year in classics, philosophy, languages, literature and the rest. That might be defensible if there were any evidence that there had been gross overproduction of MPhils and PhDs in the years before. But the AHRC itself admits that this is not so. 55 per cent of current AHRC graduates take up academic appointments, and 45 per cent go to key positions in the public and private sectors. One wonders what the equivalent figures will be for those who have done a PhD in heritage studies.

How bad will this be?  Will it go through?  Comments from UK readers and other knowledgeable observers are welcome.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

11 responses to “A Huge Cut in Postgraduate Funding for Philosophy in the UK?”

  1. Michael Sedgwick

    As a British, final-year undergraduate who's looking towards further study, i'd just like to say thankyou. Firstly, to Simon Blackburn for bringing this to our attention. Secondly, to all those government ministers who have contributed to the continuation of the fine standards of academic excellence which they themselves experienced whilst in education. Their tireless effort on the behalf of UK students truly inspires me each time I consider it.

    Oh wait….

    Reply
  2. Thom Brooks

    In my view, the situation is at least as bad as Blackburn rightly notes. This problem with funding graduate studentships is just one part of a larger picture: funding for the arts and humanities more generally is under threat, with major cuts to research leave, etc.

    Without any doubt, the arts and humanities are under attack from the current British government. I do worry that things may get even worse before they get better.

    Reply
  3. Bryan

    I am not entirely familiar with the British system, but it seems the immediate impact will be to force Universities to shoulder the funding for postgrads…a similar trend developed in the US, decades ago, with schools taking on primary funding responsibilities for students instead of grads looking for funding from places like the Mellon Foundation (in the humanities, that is…the sciences are a different story)…Is there something about the financial structure of the British University that would make it difficult for schools to fund postgrads without support from the AHRC?

    Reply
  4. James Ladyman

    Simon Blackburn is quite right. The point is not merely that funding will be cut, but that the AHRC will make sure that the cuts do not undermine their absurd pet projects such as 'Beyond the Text' and 'After Scholarship' (sorry that one is made up but the first one is real). The AHRC should let the quality of applications determine the distribution of funding not play with 'strategic initiatives', and when cuts are made the core disciplines should be the last not the first to go. Unfortunately the AHRC is less concerned with disciplines than with the cult of interdisciplinarity. Finally note that the funding councils in the UK in general have taken pseudo-science to new depths. The professor who heads their umbrella organisation (RCUK) recently said that they are working towards an algorithm that takes the details of a grant application as the input and then outputs the economic impact it will have.

    Reply
  5. Mike Otsuka

    Thanks to Simon Blackburn for this brilliant indictment of the AHRC.

    Nobody who appreciates the humanities could have penned that ‘Delivery Plan 2008-2011’. There are a number of Professors of English, History, Classics, etc., who serve on the AHRC’s governing Council and the committees that advise them. So why do these professors let the AHRC spew forth such nonsense? More importantly, why have they let the AHRC get away with the savage cutbacks to research grants and studentships that fall outside of their banausic ‘strategic priority areas, such as the creative economy and heritage’? If these professors are not willing to resist these things, they should admit to themselves that they’ve given up the values of scholarship for those of bureaucrats and management consultants. Having come to such realization they should resign their positions in the AHRC so that they can be filled with scholars who actually care about and understand the humanities.

    It's noteworthy that, in the AHRC’s press release in which they mention severe cuts in research grants and studentships, there is no mention of any parallel cuts to their bloated and increasingly unnecessary bureaucracy. If, as they claim, 'the AHRC remains committed to funding world-class research', they should demonstrate this commitment by making cuts to their own bureaucracy commensurate with the cuts to their awards to researchers and students. With these latter cuts, the AHRC must now display an increasingly unimpressive ratio of money spent on their own administrative overhead versus money they award to researchers and students. I’d wager that this ratio is significantly worse than the ratio for the other research councils. Bad value for money, so perhaps it’s time to put the AHRC in receivership, to put things in terms to which they can relate.

    Bryan asks: ‘Is there something about the financial structure of the British University that would make it difficult for schools to fund postgrads without support from the AHRC?’ Part of the answer is that the practice of funding graduate students by hiring them as TAs is not (yet) nearly as prevalent in the UK as it is in the US. Another part of the answer is that the AHRC (or the AHRB, as it was then called) was conceived in the sin of ‘top-slicing’: extra money wasn’t devoted to the humanities in order to set up the AHRC; rather, existing money that used to go directly to universities for the humanities was diverted to fund the AHRC. That placed humanities departments under a financial strain that they could try to alleviate only by going cap in hand to the AHRC to try to get this money back. But when, as now, the AHRC’s budget is cut back, this money doesn’t get diverted back to the universities to fund the humanities more directly. Rather, there’s a net reduction in overall funding of the humanities.

    Reply
  6. David Slakter

    I have been a graduate student in both the American and British systems, and not only are there fewer TA positions to go around in the UK, but the pay is often far less, in real terms, than one might receive for comparable work in the US. Students can't hope to rely on them in lieu of funding.

    Reply
  7. Seiriol Morgan

    James Ladyman is nothing but an old fashioned stick-in-the-mud who can't see that we need to move with the times. Writing stuff down in books and articles so that other people can read it is so last year. From now on I shall be expressing my latest thoughts on Kantian ethics through the medium of dance, and I urge everyone else to get with the programme and start doing the same.

    Reply
  8. James Ladyman

    Interested parties may like to take a look at the composition of the AHRC Council of academics. It features a ridiculously high proportion of people involved in film, tv and theatre studies. The areas that they have decided are strategically important are highly correlated with this fact. To my mind this is scandalous.

    Reply
  9. Kyle Walker

    Has anyone ever tried to show what the economic impact of funding research in the humanities, especially in philosophy, actually is? It seems there might be a positive return on that investment.

    First, publishing houses generate quite a bit of economic activity. Second, the PhD. graduates who go on to work outside of academia are generally reported to be the best in their fields, often generating a lot of money for their companies, firms, research institutes, and government organizations such as 'think tanks' (based on the few articles I've read, which I can no longer remember citation information for). Third, the non-humanities students who learn from humanities professionals benefit greatly by expanding their reasoning and creative abilities. I presume these students go on to create and manage more effectively in their professional lives, thus generating revenue and impacting the economy.

    Who wants to bet that the whole of economic impact created by business students doesn't top that created by the percentage of humanities students who go into non-academic fields? Oh, and we can draw the line where it's cheating to count ideas that business people stole from us (e.g. logic, a lot of mathematics, IO psychology, creative leadership seminars, etc.) quite liberally I'd guess. Include the publishing houses and we're probably blowing them away.

    Did the AHRC, with their deep understanding of the progress function, take these factors into consideration? Did those representatives of the humanities on AHRC try to make such arguments? If not, someone please name them so we can ruin their reputations.

    Reply
  10. David Hyder

    In a certain sense, we went through this in Canada with the previous SSHRC regime. They had got the idea, as near as I could tell, from Europe, since this really is a form of academic dirigisme.

    The fellow responsible for these sorts of initiatives in Canada (name escapes me at the moment) was a sociologist. He tried to sell this to the community as an attempt to prove to the Liberal government that the Humanities were "useful", thereby increasing the pie for all. He also introduced "cluster funding" and a number of big-science style innovations.

    Anyhow, he's now been deposed, and it looks like we may get the "innovations" without the larger pie.

    So: This has to be taken very seriously. I'm just bitching about SSHRC, but then SSHRC is a pretty generous programme by UK or US standards.

    David Hyder

    Reply
  11. Jimmy Doyle

    From the Programme Specification for the AHRC's Strategic Funding Initiative 'Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects'. Keep reading if you can; the last sentence is a kiler.

    "The ideas informing the development of the Beyond Text programme were submitted in response to the AHRC’s 2005 consultation regarding its strategic areas. The programme recognises that today’s digital culture means that communication is more rapid and often more transitory than ever before; performances, sounds, images and objects circulate swiftly on a global scale only to be replaced by even newer versions. Who controls and manages this material and its dissemination is now a key political, economic and legal question. Yet these are not new problems but ones with long historical roots. Beyond Text will create a collaborative, multi-disciplinary research community to work with those outside Higher Education on these issues. The programme will help inform and inflect public policy and foster public understanding of the many oral/aural, material and visual forms in which creativity has been generated and used. Finally, in bringing together those who create works and those who preserve, display and study them, the programme will break down traditional boundaries between practice-led or practice-based research and other forms of investigation. The £5.5 million programme will run for 5 years until May 2012."

    Reply

Designed with WordPress