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King’s College, London Will Require All Humanities Faculty to “Re-apply” for Their Current Positions

Brian Leiter

News story here.  This was alluded to in earlier items, and in the comments on earlier threads, but it deserves special notice, since it means the KCL bloodbath may be far from over.   Administrators who think that "Digital and Visual Cultures" are academic growth areas are going to decide whether every scholar in the humanities is worthy of his or her role–including, I take it, faculty who have devoted careers to KCL.  Will KCL go the way of the "Trade School at Sussex" (formerly known as a "University"), and decide that no more early modern history is needed?  Will internationally distinguished scholars like Mary Margaret McCabe and David Papineau really have to apply for their own jobs?   (KCL Philosophy is a remarkably consistent unit in terms of strength, so it is an insult that any member of staff should have to re-apply for his or her job.  Indeed, we can go much further:  it is an insult and an outrage that any professional hired with an expectation of permanent employment absent gross dereliction of duties should have to re-apply for his or her job.)

Besides the ugliness and cruelty of this whole business, it is clear the KCL administrators didn't consult any economists, for they might have learned that this whole maneuver will end up costing KCL much more money over the longterm.  Here's why:  if academics are not going to receive compensation in the form of job security, they are going to have receive it in the form of money.  This effect won't be immediate, and, of course, KCL can dodge the consequence altogether if it decides that it doesn't want to compete at all in the major academic disciplines, or it decides it doesn't care who it appoints.  But if KCL imagines it can remain part of the Russell Group, and get RAE results more to its liking, then it will have to appoint serious academics, and no serious academic will go near King's without either guarantees of job security (which won't be credible after this fiasco) or much higher compensation.

So the KCL cost-cutting strategy will actually have a predictable effect:  either it will result in KCL dropping off the map of serious research institutions in the Western world or it will require KCL to pay much higher salaries than it pays currently in order to retain reputable staff.

Perhaps someone can explain this to someone with decision-making authority at this clearly dysfunctional institution.

And will this insanely destructive behavior spread to other schools in the U.K.?

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18 responses to “King’s College, London Will Require All Humanities Faculty to “Re-apply” for Their Current Positions”

  1. Urizenus Sklar

    "Administrators who think that "Digital and Visual Cultures" are academic growth areas are going to decide whether every scholar in the humanities is worthy of his or her role"

    Maybe the plan is to hire avatars like me. Don't you see? All those KCL professors are made of out of meat! That is so pre internet 3.0.

    Reply
  2. max stirner

    Maybe I am just off, but it seems letter writing is not going to help here. If faculty are serious, they should consider a work-action.

    Has anyone broached that possiblity?

    Reply
  3. Mark

    This may be utterly naive, but isn't the process of making all academic staff re-apply for their jobs, and evaluating those applications, going to be expensive?

    Reply
  4. Leandro

    Here is an article from the Guardian with some interesting remarks by Peter Mandelson (business secretary) and some further alarming consequences of the budget cuts:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/07/job-losses-universities-cuts

    Reply
  5. Anonymous UK postdoc

    I dare say that KCL's management are treating the economic crisis like a very convenient Reichstag fire.

    Reply
  6. TJ

    Perhaps not an exact parallel, but an ancient useful practice nonetheless. "Then, in 1209, scholars taking refuge from hostile townsmen in Oxford migrated to Cambridge and settled there." http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/history/records.html

    Reply
  7. Alastair Norcross

    "Perhaps not an exact parallel, but an ancient useful practice nonetheless. "Then, in 1209, scholars taking refuge from hostile townsmen in Oxford migrated to Cambridge and settled there." http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/history/records.html"

    So that's how they tell the story in Cambridge? Doesn't that leave something out? In Oxford, we were told that the reason the townsmen in Oxford were hostile was that the scholars had been convicted of murder. This makes Cambridge a sort of academic Australia 🙂

    Reply
  8. David Hyder

    "Besides the ugliness and cruelty of this whole business, it is clear the KCL administrators didn't consult any economists, for they might have learned that this whole maneuver will end up costing KCL much more money over the longterm. Here's why: if academics are not going to receive compensation in the form of job security, they are going to have receive it in the form of money."

    A normative fallacy. You have excluded the middle: academics receive no compensation whatsoever, programs are permanently eliminated.

    Reply
  9. Jeff H

    You mean, the possibility Brian first mentioned in the very next sentence?

    Reply
  10. Bruno Verbeek

    "But if KCL imagines it can remain part of the Russell Group, and get RAE results more to its liking, then it will have to appoint serious academics, and no serious academic will go near King's without either guarantees of job security (which won't be credible after this fiasco) or much higher compensation."

    Brian, your prediction about the economic costs of the KCL craziness assumes that other universities will not think of ways like this to cut costs. But if anything in Europe has taught us so far is that all universities are feeling the recession and are looking at ways to cut costs. The same sort of "arguments" that the KCL administration gave, have been given elsewhere. So I doubt that these terrible decisions are going to cost KCL its reputation as a decent employer since all other universities will one after another become subject to the same "logic".

    It is depressing, but the humanities as a whole are in deep s*t in Brittain and Europe and, from what I gather, things are not much different in the USA.

    Reply
  11. Grahame Lock

    Brian, I sympathize with but am sceptical about – dare I say the "impact"? – of trying to *explain* such consequences to someone with decision-making authority.
    I think the time has gone in Britain when most decision-making authorities at higher levels listened to that kind of truth (cf. Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power). Now – with a few honourable exceptions – it's power that counts, not sound arguments. "Armis et verbis" still applies only in the sense of twisting people's arms on the one hand and smoke-and-mirrors-and-hype-and-spin on the other.

    Reply
  12. Eric Schliesser

    The European academy is fast becoming a bottom line institution–those that bring in money (through grants or by being charismatic teachers) will be paid upper-middle class salaries. The rest will find it increasingly hard to survive with dignity (financially and status-wise). (And we lack a mechanism like the gourmet report that inflates salaries throughout the supply chain.) These developments are due to factors many of which are outside control of academics. (Basically universities are being moved frommedieval Guild system to Weberian bureaucratic institutions. In Europe this is known as 'Bologna process.' This is often described in terms of markets, but that is silly because these are state funded andcontrolled institutions competing with each other–it is close to how Lange envisioned Market Socialism.) But a few factors are in academics' control, and it is worth noting these: a) lack of solidarity among academics; b) European academics are really disciplinary specialists who don't develop any regulative ideals about the university; c) the European university is perceived to be a zero-suminstitution–one person's gain is another's loss (etc), there are few tit-for-tatters in Europe.
    The folks in power all like a future in which the state controls all social institutions through incentives of various sorts. They think this is the secret behind China's success and a nice counterweight to the perceived injustices and lack of predictability of the American approach (blah, blah, blah).

    Reply
  13. Jon Cogburn

    I don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but how does one responsibly build research in "Digital and Visual Cultures" (something, like Urizenus Sklar's wetware half, Mark Silcox and I have published a decent amount on at this point- Minds and Machines, British Journal of Aesthetics, American Philosophical Quarterly, and a book with Routledge) while destroying a world-class research group in computational linguistics? This is *at best* first class idiocy, and the thought that David Papineau, for God's sake, has to supplicate such morons is the most depressing thing I've heard all week.

    Maybe we should snail-male the administrators Orwell and Frankfurt's "On Bullshit"? What a minute, maybe they've already read those books as how-to guides.

    I realize that this inconsistency pales compared to: (1) that of building up trendy interdisciplary stuff while gutting the core strengths of the university, and (2) refusing to grab a plane to California to see how they are dealing with worse cuts without making great universities toxic through exigency and dumb hamfistedness (such as the enforced servility of the reapplication process). But it's still telling.

    I also want to second Verbeek's comment above. My friends in France and Germany have told me that there impression is that the humanities are taking a pounding throughout the E.U. There and in the United States the end result of rule by technocratic experts that have no expertise in anything other than bullshit (thank you Frankfurt!) contentless areas like "management" or "education." In this regard, I highly recommend Mathew Stewart's readable new best seller "The management myth, why the experts keep getting it wrong." He also strongly supports the study of philosophy. Outside of finance (and we see how that went) far more CEOs have degrees in the humanities than in business, and people of comparable SAT scores without MBA degrees have the exact same lifetime earnings as people who got them. But the same kind of people running financial firms, who don't know anything but manage to ride the management myth and often conman personal virtues coming from innate psychopathy (there's good empirical research on this; see Allison Denham's philosophical discussion), have taken over large chunks of the educational/industrial complex as well. And they want to redesign higher education so that it produces more people like them.

    Reply
  14. anon

    Can I draw your readers attention to this article in the Guardian about palaeography at Kings?

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university

    Reply
  15. Fredrik Stjernberg

    Jon Cogburn wrote:
    Outside of finance (and we see how that went) far more CEOs have degrees in the humanities than in business, and people of comparable SAT scores without MBA degrees have the exact same lifetime earnings as people who got them.

    I'd be very interested in seeing figures for this – in the only country I know well enough to judge things (Sweden), this definitely doesn't hold. But it would be very good news for people trying to get people to study humanities.

    Reply
  16. Jon Cogburn

    In reference to Fredrik's question, The most important paper is by Jeffrey Pfiffer and Christina Pfong from Stanford and Washington, and can be found on-line at http://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp . Money quote from the intro. "What data there are suggest that businessschools are not very effective: Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success, results that question the effectiveness of schools in preparing their students. And, there is little evidence that business school research is influential on management practice, calling into question the professional relevance of management scholarship." It's a pretty impressive article, and shows just how vast are the wasted wealth and resources the United States and European Union dedicate to this kind of education (again, unless the point just is to reproduce the class of conmen elite that ran financial firms into the ground and who are increasingly in charge of much of the educational/industrial complex in the United States and Europe).

    There is also other stuff cited in Stewart's book (cited above) that some reviewers mentioned. I haven't read the book yet, so I can't be more specific than that. But check out the linked to paper.

    Reply
  17. Fredrik Stjernberg

    @Jon Cogburn
    thanks! I'll take a look at it

    Reply
  18. Alex Callinicos

    I am lucky enough to teach in the Arts & Humanities School at King's and so am having to reapply for my job. It's good to see the anger our plight has caused across the world. You might be interested to know that the King's branch of the Universities and Colleges Union voted this afternoon to ballot its members over strike action against the redundancies.

    Reply

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