Save Middlesex Philosophy

29 April 2010

Dear Professor Driscoll,

I write in my capacity as current External Examiner for the MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory at your University. I was extremely shocked and dismayed to hear of your extraordinary decision to close all of the Philosophy programmes at your institution. As an Examiner I am well aware of the excellence of Middlesex’s current philosophy provision and of the exceptionally high calibre of students attracted to its MAs. Equally, as an academic working in these areas, I cannot help but be obviously impressed by the remarkable international reputation for scholarly achievement that your staff in philosophy have built up over several years, and in not always easy circumstances. These facts make your decision all the more bewildering and remarkable.

As one of your External Examiners, employed to monitor the academic standards of your institution’s programmes, I have obvious concerns about the effect that this will have upon your current students, but I would also strongly urge you to consider, more generally, the damage that this course of action will do to Middlesex’s international standing in a number of fields. What message does it send out to the rest of the HE world, not to mention your own staff and students, about your future as a serious academic institution – committed, so you claim, to ‘research excellence’ – when you make the decision to shut your own highest research-rated unit, only a year after it has earned the University such impressive funding from the RAE?

I strongly and passionately urge you to reconsider this staggeringly misguided decision on the part of the University Executive.

With regards,

Dr David Cunningham
(External Examiner, MA Aesthetics and Art Theory)
Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells St, London W1T 3UW

29 April 2010

Dear Vice-Chancellor,

I am shocked and angered by your decision to close Philosophy at Middlesex University.

In itself philosophy is a discipline that lies at the heart of any university worth the name, teaching students skills that are central to a university education such as critical, self-reflective reasoning. In that respect, to close a philosophy department is narrow-minded and short-sighted, signalling a contempt for the very values on which a university education rests.

However, beyond that the Department of Philosophy at Middlesex is a world-renowned centre of excellence. Over the last decade and a half (at least) it has contributed significantly in a number of ways to the development of the discipline of European Philosophy, and it has had a major impact on the Humanities and cultural and artistic practices both nationally and internationally. The world-wide recognition enjoyed by the Philosophy Department, and its significant success in the two most recent RAEs (in which it outperformed many Russell Group Universities), make it a beacon subject at Middlesex University. Consequently, the decision to close Philosophy at Middlesex shows a disregard for research excellence, for the contribution that a University makes to culture and society, and a contempt for the effort and abilities of staff and students.

I was an undergraduate at Middlesex from 1986 to 1989. I majored in English Literature but also studied Philosophy. It was Philosophy that made the greater impact, however. After graduating I went on first to take a PhD in Philosophy and then to teach it. I am certain I am far from the only former Philosophy student from Middlesex who is now teaching the subject at university. I was always proud of having studied Philosophy at Middlesex, and whilst I will always be so, remembering my tutors with admiration and fondness, I can no longer say that I retain much fondness for the University or take any pride in its current actions.

I would urge you strongly to reconsider your decision.

Yours faithfully

Dr. Keith Crome
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
Manchester Metropolitan University.



29 April 2010,

Dear Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellors and Dean,

I’ve just found out that Middlesex University is planning to close its  Philosophy program. This is a bewilderingly stupid decision. For many  years, but particularly in the last decade, Middlesex has become a  Philosophy department of great distinction and innovation and a hub  for novel and cutting edge philosophical activity. I am chair of the  Philosophy department at the New School for Social Research in New  York. We have many graduate students and when they think of Philosophy  in the UK, they think of Middlesex and are reading work by members of  your faculty.

I would urge you to reconsider this decision. rather than closing a  successful program, you should be finding imaginative ways of  investing in it. It is a jewel in the crown of your University. If you  don’t realize that, then you’re clearly in the wrong line of work.

yours truly,
Simon Critchley.

29 April 2010

Dear SaveMDXPhil

I am appalled by this action by Middlesex University executive. The Middlesex philosophy staff and program are globally recognised as among the strongest in the world; the projects, programs and research done by the staff at Middlesex are indeed agenda-setting for those interested in continental philosophy anywhere. This closure is at once frightening and disgusting, and I hope the executive is strongly encouraged to rethink its decision.

Regards

Dr Justin Clemens
University of Melbourne

29 April 2010

I was deeply disturbed to learn of the decision to terminate the philosophy program at Middlesex University, one of widely recognized excellence and surely a source of enrichment for students and for the intellectual environment of the University generally.  I hope very much that this unfortunate decision will be reversed, for the sake of the university, the intellectual life of the UK, and not least the future of this ancient and indispensable discipline worldwide.

Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor (retired)
Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy
MIT
Cambridge MA USA

29 April 2010

Dear Professor Driscoll,

I was deeply shocked to learn of the decision by you and your colleagues to close all Philosophy programmes at Middlesex University. The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy has a truly global reputation. I have interacted intellectually with some of its leading members for many years now and I have a very strong sense of the quality of their work. I was particularly struck by the reported remark by the Dean of the School of Arts and Education, Ed Esche, to Philosophy staff, that he ‘acknowledged the excellent research reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but … it made no “measurable” contribution to the University’. If I may say so, this reveals a profound misunderstanding of the nature of universities. Much of what is most valuable in what happens at universities, both in teaching and in research, may not have a quantifiable cash-value, but nevertheless contributes to the self-development of individual students and to a more advanced understanding of the world in which we live. It is unbelievably short-sighted to judge departments simply from the standpoint of the bottom line.

I appreciate that these are very difficult times financially for universities. My own institution is experiencing a considerable upheaval at the minute. But I know from that experience that decisions taken out of a sense of economic urgency can do lasting long-term damage. If you close down Philosophy, you will put a stain on the reputation of Middlesex University that will prove very hard to eradicate. You must, in the short term, expect a storm of protest, both nationally and internationally. I appeal to you to think again, and reverse your extremely ill-judged decision.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Callinicos

Alex Callinicos
Professor of European Studies
French Department
King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS

1 May 2010

Dear Professor Driscoll, Professor Ahmad, Professor House, and Professor Esche,

I am writing to express my dismay at your decision to close Middlesex’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

The Centre has achieved international renown and is widely recognized as a beacon of academic excellence. I count myself fortunate to have worked there as a Research Fellow from 2002 to 2008. Your claim that the Centre has made no “measurable contribution” to Middlesex is spectacularly ludicrous when one considers its outstanding performance in the most recent Research Assessment Exercise and the remarkable success of its graduate programmes, which consistently attract students from all over the world.

Your decision to close the Centre effectively advertises your complete disregard for academic excellence and will prove ruinous for Middlesex’s credibility as an academic institution. You may not care about these things, but rest assured that the vast majority of prospective students do, not to mention the international academic community, in whose eyes you have now utterly discredited Middlesex.

You can still salvage Middlesex’s reputation by reversing this astonishingly short-sighted decision. I urge you to reconsider.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Ray Brassier
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
American University of Beirut.

3 May 2010

To: Michael Driscoll

I’m afraid you are going to understand very soon that the huge national and international reputation of a department can make a devastatingly “measurable” contribution to a university playing in such an absurd way against itself.
Jean-Claude Bonne
directeur d’études
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
75006 Paris
France

30 April 2010

To:  Michael Driscoll (Vice-Chancellor)
Waqar Ahmad (Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research and Enterprise)
Margaret House (Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic)
Ed Esche (Dean, School of Arts & Education)

From: Iain Boal (Retort), Berkeley, California

News has reached California of your decision to axe all the Philosophy programmes at Middlesex University and to shut the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. The grounds for this decision, we learn, are that the Philosophy Department “made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the University.” This is an interesting case of a statement that, by its mere framing, brings disgrace upon the institution and its executives – a kind of Goodmanesque self-exemplification (though you might need a philosophy department to construe the meaning of this). Your accountants will be puzzled, offended even, to find out how many know the name of Middlesex University for no other reason than that it houses a philosophy department acknowledged around the globe as a beacon flaring in the darkness of late modernity’s knowledge factories.

Growing resistance to the wave of Bologna-style structural adjustment now breaking over the universities of Europe and beyond – with its close-to-market, fit-for-purpose deliverables, and the rest of neoliberalism’s grisly ontology – will only be further fuelled by your decision. As specialists of the bottom line who have thumbs on the windpipe of the body social, you have at least clarified one thing: the very possibility of sites of radical reflection depends now on a transvaluation of values, or else a collective exodus and the creation of social spaces where we can renew the task of building an ample life in common. Among the first acts would be the founding of a program of critical metrology, investigating the history of what modernity has chosen for its yardsticks, and what it chooses to regard as “unmeasurable”, rightly perhaps but for contemptible reasons.

3 May 2010

Dear Dean,

I wish to add my voice to those who have protested against the threatened closure of Middlesex philosophy department. You may say that it is unsurprising that a philosopher should object to this move, but this goes beyond Trades Union solidarity to the heart of what a university needs to be.
As the world shrinks and international cooperation becomes ever more important, the humanities are crucial to our futures. We cannot act together with others without understanding their culture, their ideas, their ethics, their religions and their politics. Without communication the alternatives are conflict and destruction. The humanities educate us into at least some understanding of these things, and among the humanities philosophy is most directly concerned with them. We must also give others some understanding of the ideas that animate our own culture, and this means first identifying and testing them ourselves. It is the special responsibility of philosophy to keep alive that investigation and the critical and analytic spirit that it requires. This spirit was first identified in Socratic Greece and has infused the whole history of the West for more than two thousand years. Nothing worth calling a university can be crass enough to think that this spirit is dispensable, in the name of materialism or economic progress.
It is not apparent why the philosophy department was singled out, given its place at the top of the research profiles of your faculties. One must hope that the decision was not taken in awareness of the size of the stakes and the catastrophic example it offers to the rest of the world.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Simon Blackburn, FBA, FAAAS
Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge