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Being philosophical may be limited to 'leisured' classes
26 November 2009
Post-1992s scrap courses as students avoid 'non-vocational' subject. Hannah Fearn reports
Philosophy is in danger of becoming the preserve of "leisured gentlemen" as post-1992 universities scrap courses because of dwindling student numbers.
Three new universities have decided to close philosophy courses in the past two years, while others have axed plans to introduce degrees in the subject.
The closures are significant as less than a third of new universities - just 19 out of 64 post-1992 institutions - ran undergraduate philosophy programmes last year.
The University of Bolton decided to close its BA in philosophy in 2007 because of low application rates.
University College Plymouth St Mark & St John scrapped its course for the 2008 intake, citing a "lack of interest in the subject".
Roehampton University announced recently that it would no longer accept new students for its single honours course in 2010, and the University of Gloucestershire has pulled the plug on plans to launch a BA in the subject.
Paul Hartley, deputy vice-chancellor (academic) at Gloucestershire, said the decision had been taken on the basis of market research, which "concluded that the potential student pool was not sufficiently large to merit investment".
Helen Beebee, head of the department of philosophy at the University of Birmingham, said the closures risked limiting the subject to a small, homogeneous group of students.
"It would be a real pity if the study of philosophy was restricted to the standard 'old-university' demographic - white, middle class, with good A-level grades," she said.
Julian Dodd, professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester, agreed that single honours philosophy was increasingly the preserve of old universities.
He said: "It's less easy than it was to admit students from unconventional backgrounds."
Professor Dodd, who previously taught at Bolton, said the introduction of tuition fees had caused problems for philosophy courses at new universities. "The bottom just dropped out of the market when fees and loans came in. That very local, mainly working-class market contains those people who do not like to be put into debt."
Stephen Mumford, professor of metaphysics at the University of Nottingham, studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Huddersfield, which was then a polytechnic.
Huddersfield withdrew its philosophy major in the early 1990s.
Professor Mumford said the research assessment exercise had briefly "democratised" the subject, "in that someone who had graduated from Huddersfield could get a job if they had sufficient publications behind them".
"But it was a very brief window for people like me," he said. "I have no doubt that if I were young now, from a working-class background, having to take a big student loan would prevent me from studying philosophy because of the sense that it's non-vocational."
He added: "We could end up back in the days when it was only the leisured gentlemen of the country who could afford to do it.
"As many employers realise, philosophy graduates are some of the best graduates. The country needs people who can think analytically and who are not going to be fazed by a dense piece of argument."
hannah.fearn@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
Good points, though it is arguably only the leisured middle class people that can comfortably afford it even now. I'm flat broke after years of studying at higher levels on the way to gaining my phd, sometime soon..., and many people from my background just dropped out on the way. In fact, on my BA even, there were barely any genuinely working class people, maybe 5 out of 60. In my entire village, which was a sprawling council estate, no one else went to University at all, for years either side of me starting. The fact is, for one, philosophy can be vocational, in that a degree can only help your chances of getting a job and a 2;1 or first in philosophy does have applications in the media world, creative industries, civil service, banking and so on. Though it being vocational does not make it any easier for the non-Oxbridge set, who, admittedly, may have to struggle for years before finding suitable work. It seems some people just don't want to struggle, and this is eventually - at higher levels - the undoing of many middle class academics too, because academia IS a struggle and you need a lot of grit and determination to succeed. I'll even add that working class students are ultimately better cut out for this than middle class ones, if they get that far. Two, really it's a subject that you have to love doing in order to do it, and in that case, if you are from a poorer background, you may have to struggle doubly in order to be able to do it, in respect of the financial difficulty involved, but you should damn well struggle anyhow, otherwise the ranks of academia will carry on being filled with people lacking the life experience and gumption to really push philosophy forward. If you don't want to struggle at all, then this field will become even more the preserve of the middle classes. Great, you can do a vocational media industry degree and forever wonder 'what if?', as you're sent daily to fetch the Xerox paper from the basement by your upper class boss, who probably studied Classics at Oxford, whilst, elsewhere, some hooray henry monopolises the debate on Heidegger, or whoever...
I'm not too surprized, given that the only justification offered for state-funded education these days is that it should offer training for work. Hence philosophy departments still try to justify their existence in terms of developing vocational "critical thinking" skills and so on, as if graduates from other subjects don't have those. They do, I'm afraid. If we want to defend subjects like philosophy we have to say why money should be spent on them, why they're worth preserving. Insisting that philosophy grads are in high demand in the job market doesn't cut it, because they're not. That's why the courses are closing.
Courses, like organisms, are subject to natural selection. Either they adapt or they are wiped out. It is dramatic to see this happen in such a crucial field as philosophy, but only the narrow-mindedness of the universities is to be blamed. The insistence on an analytical vision of philosophy (which, fortunately, doesn’t persist in continental Europe) is an expressive example of this suicidal conservatism.
If the all the lazy tossers like Plato, Socrates, Democritus, Aristotle and so on had got off their lazy philosophical bums and got on with some real work - growing crops or going off to war - perhaps we;'d all be a lot better off now!
Perhaps those 'leisured gentlemen' of yesteryear were studying philosophy because they had nothing else to do. After all, they had money, weren't worried about future employment prospects - so could afford to study whatever they wanted even if it had no practical use. Those of us who are paying for our higher education, and are undertaking it in order to better our lot in life - don't have that luxury.
But that's what I'm saying - if we're not allowed to, they shouldn't be.
@Ryan Curtis - hang on - I wonder if you've made the best investment choice in life? - if you're undertaking higher education to better your lot in life, well, it's a lot of money... you did get a decent contractual arrangement, hedged with guarantees, didn't you? - I mean, you didn't just hand over your money to some dodgy shyster who said "oh yeah - bound to get a decent job wiv one o' these degrees, mate; yeah, bound to be loads o' demand for qualified thingies 5, 10 years from now"? Whereas philosophy, well - I know it gave us virtually every other discipline now studied, but, - when was the last time you looked at a burst pipe and though "better look through the yellow pages for a 24 hour philosopher..."? Nah, on the way out, mate, all that thinkin stuff. You'd be much better with "skills"
Just had an idea: given the prevailing zeitgeist, why don't we invite certain key universities to focus wholly on technical skills? - we could upgrade them to a different kind of establishment; we could give them a new name: "PolyTechnic", which is a hybrid word I've just made up to describe how these new establishments would form an elite educational grouping that offers certificated employment-oriented skills training. Naturally, organisations would have to meet stringent criteria in respect of the practical (rather than simply virtual-on-a-PC) training facilities and equipment. Since most universities have binned all these facilities in their rush to prove that their graduates would hope never to have to get their hands dirty in the course of gainful employment, only a few well-capitalised establishments could possible hope to achieve "PolyTechnic" status, and these would likely be the wealthy older universities, Oxbridge and suchlike. The remaining institutions that couldn't make the grade would have to make such non-vocational offerings such as Philosophy and Acting (possibly combined) and Management Philosophy, and would aim to produce graduates suitable for the demands of the call-centre, or fast-food delivery industry. This trend is already in evidence - there's a saying: "how do you get a philosopher off your doorstep?....simply pay him for the pizza". I think my ideas here are exciting and revolutionary, offering terrific opportunities for Consultants Who Specialise in Change to bring about wholesale changes across the sector, relocating all those fuddy-duddy older (over 30) staff to less challenging duties, bringing in younger, fresher and cheaper staff who aren't burdened by received wisdom (or any wisdom at all) and are just grateful for a job. Poloticians can make their living out of incoherent and incomprehensible pronouncements about Good Things, and Jeremy Paxman can make his living out of pretending to take them seriously.
Past Philosophers are overrated. Our new degree programme in Social Engineering and Traffic Management draws on the finest cutting-edge modern philosophies, some less than 3 months old. We are training the next generation of elite Parking Scheme Enforcement and Design Agents, and cluttering their heads up with the tormented ramblings of past generations of misfit philosophers would do more harm than good.