bigideas

As you may already know, Liverpool University is considering closing a number of its departments, including Philosophy and Politics. This is a Bad Thing, and I think it exemplifies some of the muddled thinking that pervades current debates about education, especially in the Humanities.

Broadly speaking, a mainstream university department does two things: it produces research and it teaches undergraduates. There are three reasons why a particular kind of research might attract funding:

• It has commercial applications, and so is valuable to the private sector;
• It enriches the life of the nation in some way, and so is funded by the taxpayer for the general good; or
• It’s what we’ve always done and we don’t really know why.

There are three similar reasons why we might want to teach a particular subject or skill to undergraduates:

• The skill is demanded by employers;
• It enriches the life of the nation to have more people around who understand or appreciate or can do it;
• It’s what we’ve always done and we don’t really know why.

The Liverpool fracas throws our confusion about these different priorities into rather sharp relief.

Teaching or Research?

The Philosophy department at Liverpool university is allegedly facing closure because of its not-very-strong performance in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. John Pugh has pointed out some obvious problems with that measure as a guide to such extreme actions as closing down an entire department.

Yet the main complaint from commentators and, of course, the students is the loss not of a body of researchers but of a teaching institution. The quality of teaching — especially at undergraduate level — offered by a university department seems to me to be entirely uncorrelated with the “international importance” of the research being done there. Often enough, high-calibre researchers make poor teachers and vice versa.

People have called for the university to reverse its decision, and to invest more money, if necessary, to bring the department up to scratch. But if the university were willing to do that, what should it do? Blow the budget on a new professorial chair that will attract someone whose publications will likely get the longed-for 4* rating? Or spend the same money hiring two or three junior lecturers with interests that complement those of existing staff?

If you think the main tragedy here is the loss of a place in Liverpool where people learn philosophy, you might well go for the latter; if you think it’s all about the research you might go for the former. We’re about to lose what by many accounts is an excellent place to study philosophy because it doesn’t seem to have produced enough of the right sort of philosophy research. We need to make our minds up about which is most important, because resources are limited.

Training or Education?

There’s an old-fashioned view that I’ve assayed before in these pages that education enriches the individual and, by extension, the wider society. I believe this is true, and that it’s as true of a science education as of one in the humanities. I think it’s worthwhile for the taxpayer to subsidise this kind of education just as I think we should subsidise free entry to museums and galleries: because it contributes to the general quality of national life.

There’s another view of education, which is that it exists to prepare people for the job market. A degree isn’t necessarily a great financial investment but it’s useful for the whole country to have a workforce that isn’t on the dole, and to have a private sector that’s generating lots of tax revenue. So there’s something in this.

Yet we need to disentangle these two reasons for funding teaching and research and look at them as four possible decisions:

1. We want (or don’t) to fund the teaching of philosophy because it’s an in-demand skill in the job market (or not)
2. We want (or don’t) to fund the teaching of philosophy because it’s valuable (or not) for the nation to have people around who’ve studied some philosophy
3. We want (or don’t) to fund philosophy research because it’s commericially valuable (or not)
4. We want (or don’t) to fund philosophy research because it’s valuable (or not) for the nation to have people doing it

These are four independent positions and it’s possible to hold any combination of them without contradiction.

Here’s To Intrinsic Value

We need to stop hiding subjects like philosophy, for which (2) and (4) are clearly more compelling than (1) and (3), behind those like business studies and chemistry for which the opposite is true. If we want our humanities subjects to survive, we need to come out and say it: we think these subjects are intrinsically valuable.

Don’t pretend that philosophy is useful training for a job that doesn’t involve teaching philosophy. Don’t pretend that philosophy research contributes significantly to the economy. That’s not to say that philosophy can’t have instrumental value, which it certainly can; that’s just not primarily why we think it’s important. If you had a budget to spend on funding academic research, and your only brief was to create short-term economic growth, you and I both know you shouldn’t spend the money on philosophy. Arts and Humanities departments need to start banging the drum for study for its own sake, and for the wider, longer-term, less tangible benefits of the work they do.

In other words, let’s stop pretending that studying philosophy is in the same category of activities as studying Golf Course Management. Not everything we subsidise has to somehow benefit either the public or private sector. Some subjects are worth studying, and worth researching, in themselves.

To do this, we’d better have a good idea of what benefits the study and research bring to people who don’t engage directly in them. If there aren’t any, there’s a name for that kind of activity: it’s called a “hobby” and it doesn’t deserve public money. The purpose of an education can’t just be to produce a small elite who are privileged enough to have had a personally enriching experience that they keep to themselves. If that’s all it is, we can save some money here. It’ll be fun, like dissolving the monasteries.

I’m sure your local philosophy department is already out in its community running events, getting people involved, doing media spots, communicating the research interests of its staff-members. Isn’t it? It looks like at least some of the staff of the department at Liverpool did try to engage the wider world in what they were doing, but sadly there are no RAE points to be scored for doing that.

If you can, please get out there and help the Save Our Subjects campaign put pressure on Liverpool University on this specific issue, and when you do so please don’t be ashamed of the intrinsic value of learning new things, whether as an undergraduate or a specialist researcher, not only for the individual who learns but for the wider society they live in, too.

[EDIT: I removed a remark about open-access journals; that's a related topic but needs another post.]