Philosophers don't need to make an impact. Tom Stoddart/Getty Images
In more good news for British universities, “woke waste” is now gaining traction in the UK media, and firmly in the firing line are mad-sounding research projects at the taxpayers’ expense. According to a joint investigation by The Sun and the Taxpayer’s Alliance, millions of pounds are being robbed from the pockets of hard-working citizens so that academics can investigate “TikTok dancing, ‘queer animals’ & pro-trans robots”. Over on Charlotte Gill’s Substack, we find industrial levels of outrage about such projects as “Glitching cisgenderism” (£185K); “The Europe that gay porn built” (£840K); and “Re-Indigenizing Victorian Studies” (£34K).
A big target of Gill’s personal ire is UK Research and Innovation: the body that oversees discipline-specific university funding. UKRI is an organisation as familiar to the modern academic as desk rejections from journals and the seething resentment of colleagues. “Many Brits will have never heard of it despite being charged £9 billion per year for its work”, Gill writes, as if she is Warren Beatty uncovering the shady conspiracies of the Parallax Corporation.
Though she is willing to concede that UKRI funds “important medical, scientific and technological research”, the problem is that “its value tends to be let down by its more fluffy wings, such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research Council”. Now, while “fluffy wings” conceivably sounds like it could be the subject matter of an AHRC-funded project in its own right, it is still a little harsh to cast the total research outputs of history, philosophy, languages and linguistics, theology, music, archaeology, classics, economics, psychology (etc.) from our finest universities in such a withering light — for these are some of the disciplinary areas funded by the AHRC and the ESRC between them. Gill is unmoved, though — according to her, we should defund the AHRC altogether.
At this point, I should declare an interest. Fifteen years ago, the AHRC bagged themselves an absolute bargain/spaffed £28,000 up the wall (delete as appropriate) in order to give me a year off from teaching to investigate the urgent topic of “The Nature of Imaginative Responses to Fiction” and write an extremely technical book about it. I out myself about this now, partly to avoid the future public head-shavings when Gill is inevitably put in charge of the UK version of DOGE by Prime Minister Farage. But equally, I’ve seen the research funding landscape from the inside, both as a beneficiary and as a head of department. And things are a bit more complicated than they first appear.
It’s not that there aren’t stupidly ideological projects out there getting too much money — the critics are right about that. I’m actually surprised that Gill and co. haven’t had more fun with the £805,000 heading to researchers at Roehampton, in order to study “marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays”. This will apparently culminate in a production of Galatea by the 16th-century playwright John Lyly, first performed in front of Elizabeth I in 1588; a play which has been described by the grant winners as “exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives” and depicting the “celebration of a queer and trans marriage”. (How the Virgin Queen felt about her early exposure to 21st-century liberation politics is not recorded, though it is rumoured several courtiers may have taken the knee.)
Despite such tomfoolery, and with a hostile narrative now clearly building against the humanities generally, it is worth emphasising that a lot of non-ideological, scholarly, and fascinating research is still taking place in UK universities. And it also has to be acknowledged that quite a few of the targets of current ridicule — including The Sun’s main target, “Ontology and Ownership of Internet Dance” at Coventry University (£199,922) — are trying hard to be anti-elitist in a way that Sun readers might normally appreciate, by applying analytical tools to everyday entities rather than particularly highbrow ones.
But it is also true that funding bodies like the AHRC are at significant fault — though Gill and the others seem to have a shallow understanding of why. The biggest problem is not (just) that they give away too much money to intellectually shallow projects larded with the words “queer” and “decolonise” like it really means something, but that they have built whole systems that incentivise that kind of expensive and vacuous application, and which are bound to end up putting them at the top of the pile.
Consider that there once was a time when, in order to do your research in a discipline like philosophy, you could sit in your office or library, read books, think a bit, then write things down. The odd bit of conference or archive travel aside, overheads were minimal. You didn’t have to chase the latest intellectual fashion trend, or try to desperately grab press headlines with your findings.
Then, about 20 years ago, the then Labour government tried to adopt a purely quantitative approach to university research assessment for cost cutting reasons. In the furore that followed, it climbed down and partially replaced the idea of metrics with that of “pathways to impact” — broadly speaking, insisting that academics should demonstrate to the taxpayer some positive benefit of their prospective research for wider society, and not just for fellow academics or students. Suddenly — and highly ironically, given the way things have gone since — everything was about demonstrating value for money. Research councils built impact sections into grant applications, or just insisted on it being mentioned throughout; and the Government made direct funding to universities partly dependent on the submission of “impact case studies” from each department.
A whole suite of jobs was created for “impact officers”; and a whole world of hell was opened up for humanities scholars, and probably most of all for philosophers. This, after all, is a psychological type for which some of the most thrilling opening lines of the 20th century include: “1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.”
For, unlike those in science or tech departments, we couldn’t boast of new polymers or find cures for cancer. Instead, we had to desperately fish about for some angle in epistemology, aesthetics, or the philosophy of science that might conceivably interest a passing non-specialist. In my time at that particular coalface, I had serious discussions with colleagues about whether the ontology of holes could be applied to the 2000 US election controversy about “hanging chads” in Florida; worried quite a lot about whether the impact score of departmental research on Heidegger would be reduced by his being a Nazi; and tried to show willing as a slightly desperate impact officer asked me whether my work might conceivably cover the question of whether the next Doctor Who could be a woman, metaphysically speaking. With such experiences writ large in the humanities, it’s scarcely surprising that ambitious people eventually started to jump on any passing bandwagon to get out of there.
These days, it’s even worse. Cash-strapped universities are yet more reluctant to fund research internally, and they also like to make your employment and promotion prospects depend on how much grant money you win. Meanwhile, bodies like the AHRC won’t fund you to write a book when you could be managing a team of postdocs, patenting an app, writing a weekly blog, running a travelling exhibition, constructing school teaching materials and writing a book, all at the same time. Your budget for such a horrifyingly complicated project has to cover all direct and indirect costs of such things, including cover for the regular teaching of everyone involved in the project, and all overheads. Things therefore get expensive quite quickly.
Scarcely anyone of an intensely reflective mindset positively wants to do these things — they are forced into it by the system. The set of people who love thinking for hours about abstract ideas and really enjoy managing teams, writing budgets, and talking to the general public is not very large. The more bureaucratised and professionalised the university environment becomes, the less it attracts the pure thinking types — and that’s a huge pity.
The result in many cases is worthless — utterly superficial research by trend-obsessed strivers, whose conclusions are gerrymandered from the start to fit transitory public moods and fashionable politics, and which barely anyone ever engages with outside academia anyway. As far as I can see, the most economical thing that university funders could do now would be to stop encouraging academics to think they have to demonstrate the monetary value of their research to the general public, and let that extremely costly side of things fall away entirely. And unlike others I can say that now, because thank God I never have to apply to the AHRC again.
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SubscribeGet rid of DEI statements attached to research grants.
Reduce PhD student numbers by 50% (at least in my institution).
Support the remaining PhDs to tackle big questions not the current salami slicing
Stop the p hacking – it is discrediting academia and we all know its happening such is the pressure on citations/reviews.
Reinstate the Higher Education Freedom Act as originally.passed in parliament; an important signal of intent.
The question is not ‘are these funding decisions right or wrong?’, but ‘who is making them?’ The voice of the taxpayer is barely heard in any of these deliberations.
Yes, we want a permanent solution: for at least decades.
I am sure that I heard that, somewhere in the infrastructure, that the guidelines are that proposed research needs to follow the traditional avenues. Does this mean that it still needs to be woke, or just keep on the strait and narrow, like Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Supersymmetry, which haven’t shown any promise for years?
I inferred that it was due to decision makers not having the appropriate knowledgew2, but that couldn’t happen, could it?
Head of UKRI is Ottoline Leyser.
KS raises an important question but does offer an answer. Given that in all disciplines research grants are very often spent on pointless self-serving projects and, yet, at the same time ‘blue skies’ research woth no apparent value turns out (often decades later) to have great value, the question is a hard one.
Please indulge my fanciful stolen idea but doesn’t Elon Musk have this process whereby he cuts processes from a business until an employee comes to him and tells him that they shouldn’t have cut that last process.
So, cut all funding except that for specific projects paid for by businesses, the military, philanthropists and any cash that the university stumps up for itself and then try to figure out what’s missing and fund that with taxpayers money.
Mind, marking my own work, even if this is a good idea, there’s nothing to stop the same problems arising again.
This is more specific https://oswald67.substack.com/p/how-to-long-march-through-the-canadian?r=2r3au
This is a more detailed set of recommendations https://oswald67.substack.com/p/how-to-long-march-through-the-canadian?r=2r3au
The grifting listed here would put Megan Markle to shame.
Dr. Stock is in her finest mode of high snark and self-deprecation here. An enjoyable version of a depressing read. To the degree that I can grasp the UK context or relate to it through U.S. academic parallels: holy cow what a waste and hear hear! Dr. Stock. My stubbornly optimistic side would like to remember that this is at least being called out and subjected to open ridicule in a way it wasn’t before. A step toward sanity, which nearly everyone should be able to get behind.
Don’t urge mobs to torch time-honoured (or even newish) centers of higher learning for the follies of some, during a generation or two. Not yet anyway. Call for the chaff to be sifted, and have the nerve to call out the worst from inside when possible. Like Stock showed herself capable of before Sussex showed her the door. I hope that soon there will be too many on the inside pointing and laughing to sack or silence. A few more exposes of a sober and empirical sort are needed too. This involves a willingness to praise studies that are not a joke or a waste. (Some here might appreciate “Bookworms vs. Nerds” (2006) for which Jordan Peterson was among the authors, or “Microagression and Moral Cultures” (2014), which is insightful and decidedly non-woke. Don’t know the price tags for the research though, or whether any grants were involved).
“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”*
*GBS. ‘Man and Superman’.
Many of the famous music composers were composers, performers … and teachers. Still true today – a lot of musicians need to teach to make ends meet. Some of us were lucky enough to have had teachers who were fantastic performers.
And those who can’t teach work in universities.
Precisely, but I was too circumspect to say that!
Oh I had it as “those who can’t teach, teach teachers”.
Or better “those who can’t teach, teach Geography”
‘And those who can’t teach, teach gym.’
Woody Allen, Annie Hall
Those who can’t teach, teach the teachers.
Those who can’t teach the teachers, teach the teachers who teach the teachers.
Those who…
These days the thieves are respectable and wear a suit and tie. They engage in their thievery of the taxpayers’ money with a pen and paper, or with a click of a mouse. But it is a knavish thievery, nonetheless ….
The list the Taxpayers’ Alliance produced of ridiculous research grants awarded to UK universities totally £250m. Surely our government can find a better use of our taxes?
Institutional elites set themselves up for this so much so it’s like parity. If it were a comedy movie it would not get made as the producers would find it too far fetched…
Many of these research subjects sound only too similar to the nonsense activities our Foreign Office subsidises with our hard-earned taxes described as “aid”. Very few genuine recipients of this aid that I can find.
The dead hand of bureaucracy never fails to ruin anything it touches, including the academia.
John Major’s*doubling or was it trebling the number of so called universities ‘overnight’ was a catastrophe.
Suddenly quantity replaced quality, and we are now living with the consequences.
*In a vain attempt to pretend he was Lady Thatcher.
Was that actually his personal wheeze or was it merely implemented on his watch, with the groundwork in place before Lady T was ousted? I seem to recall a poly-bound school friend who had bungled his A Levels noting that he would, in fact, graduate from a ‘new university’. This was in 1991 as I recall and before Major’s GE victory. Terrible idea, anyway, even if my friend did make a lot of money off the bat of his applied science course.
I heard that Major asked one of the civil servants what could he offer at the 1992 GE that didn’t cost much (in the short term
), and the reply was as we experienced.
I can’t imagine that any thought of the consequences was considered.
That was my understanding of the debacle.
Yet we still have Major (and many other useless ex-PMs) poking their noses unwanted into current affairs while current Ministers in power try to get round the mess they left behind when booted out.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. Either way he should have ‘stopped’ it.
Culprit appears to be Clarke in his capacity as Education Secretary 1990-1992. Gained Royal Assent before the 92 GE. Bloody awful idea.
‘Hush Puppy Ken’, I might’ve guessed!
Thank you.
I’d have loved to read what Wittgenstein would’ve written in his “impact” statement.
Hopefully, he’d have listed it under 0.0 or perhaps -1.0 whilst referencing his “whereof one cannot speak…”
“The world is the totality of genders not of sexes” perhaps.
Hoping that Prime Minister Farage will consider Kathleen Stock to head up UK DOGE. Charlotte Gill for deputy.
Years before this became government policy there was a push to make research “more relevant to the community”. Even then it was clear this meant more political and ideological.
If it’s pure Science Research, it won’t be demonstrable, will it?
We don’t have Informed Discussion like we used to, driven by curiosity.
While I totally agree that most academic research is a total waste of taxpayers’ money, it’s very difficult to know what research is most useless and what might turn out to be essential.
I know a little mathematics and centuries ago Euler, de Moivre and others started playing with imaginary numbers, you know, those involving the square root on minus one. They did it for fun. There were no practical applications at the time.
Bring on the twentieth century and electronic engineers trying to model complex circuits developed some neat differential equations. Guess what? They could only solve these equations using imaginary numbers.
It’s a great story, and while I fear I don’t know much about electronics I believe such modelling is essential in making modern tellies.
Such unexpected developments may be especially found in pure mathematics (I’m biased) but I suspect that this is often true in other (lesser) disciplines.
I haven’t taken us one step closer to a solution to a serious problem I’m afraid.
Imaginary numbers are also used in quantum mechanics.
Not sure if it was clear that the indented bit was quoted from the article. I’m more for the role of curiosity purely for its own sake.
Thanks for the example, I’m afraid I’ve tried to avoid thinking about physics since school, though I confess I enjoy the videos of Sabine Hossenfelder.
From Sabine’s videos physics might be the discipline most guilty of wasting taxpayers’ money.
The classic example is the entirely frivolous quaternion, invented (or discovered if you’re a Platonist) by WR Hamilton in the mid 19th century, but then becoming invaluable to the Knabenphysiker of the 1920s and their revolutionary quantum theories.
Is this an accurate picture though? Are these thoughtful, reflective people, forced to be woke or feminist or anti colonialist against their better wisdom? Do they really have no agency in the matter? Is all their political and ideological posturing just a front to make their research grants convincing.
Are we really to believe that if the funding bodies change their tune academics will let out a collective sigh of relieve and go back thinking for a living. And even if they do, what kind of people does that make them?
“These things” here refers to “managing a team of postdocs, patenting an app, writing a weekly blog, running a travelling exhibition, constructing school teaching materials and writing a book” from the previous paragraph.
KS wants universities to attract more “pure thinking types”.
Not all, but I am sure a lot would change if they could. You dredge up more or less imaginary impacts because you need that for the grant, and you select an area of study that seems fundable. And then you try to do your science along the edges. There are also the true believers, of course, who are successful when the trends are with them and can form self-sustaining bubbles. Others can be characterised by this remark, heard at a biochemistry conference back during the AIDS crisis: “It is all very well al this work on AIDS, but we should not forget that this is also an opportunity to do some good science“.
The way to sack the universities as once were sacked the monasteries is to apply a full freeze on foreign student visas.
That would also help the immigrant crisis as each foreign student brings in as many as 7 “dependants” for us to support.
The overall average ‘dependent per student’ rate in 2022 was 0.28, not 7. The highest average rate per country of origin was 1 per student, from Nigeria. Migration Observatory has the data for you (if you are interested?). Rates will have declined after the Jan 2024 graduate definition changes.
“As many as” is not the same as “average”.
‘Utterly superficial research by trend-obsessed strivers, whose conclusions are gerrymandered from the start to fit transitory public moods and fashionable politics.’
This so nails it.
Surely we don’t need any further research in queer theories or the 57 genders?
Return to pre 1920. All people entering university to pass a paper in Greek and Maths ( Pre 1988 A Level standard ).
A gentleman knows Latin and gentleman and a scholar knows Latin and Greek, Gladstone had double first in Greats and Maths.
Or
50% undergrads to be in engineering and applied science; 25% in pure science with priorities in physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences.
Bring back O Levels( maths taught to include calculus), A Levels and S levels of pre 1988 standards. A levels offered of 1960 vintage. no sociology, media studies, etc, Three streams Classics- Greek, Latin and Classical History, Modern Languages , Latin and History or Maths( separate papers in pure and applied maths) , Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Earth Sciences. Pupils to sit 10 O levels, some can be taken a year early. Art and music to be available. All must compete in sports rugby, cricket, boxing, rowing, hockey. Return to Athenian training of mind and Spartan training of body.
Entry to university to be the average of the top five university departments in order to achieve universal high standards .
Historically pre WW2 many university colleges used the University of London Extra Mural Exams and Engineers sat the exams of the Institutions of engineering of which Civils, Electrical and Mechanical were the main ones. Proof of the effectiveness – Cam- Hurricane, Mitchell- Spitfire, De Havilland – Mosquito, Wallis Wellington, Bouncing and Earthquake bombs, Chadwick- Lancaster, J Smith – Hurricane, Whittle- Jet engine. .
Britain created modern commerce, Agricultural and Industrial revolutions because of the rigour of the education and training.
The above approach means most administration could be undertaken by people with 5 decent O Level and management could start with three decent A levels, say Latin, French and History.
This would reduce cost for students and enable them to enter the work force and earn money earlier.
Exams could be taken early. This approach enabled people to earn degrees at 20 years of age and doctorates at 22 years of age, for example William Penney, rector of Imperial.
William Penney, Baron Penney – Wikipedia
County scholarships would be awarded for those reading engineering and medicine provided they achieved two S Levels Grade 1 and half scholarships for two S Levels Grade 2 but they had to become Chartered Engineers and or MRCGP otherwise they repaid the money.
Much of the above is the pre 1960 education which produced very high standards. Name any other country where someone could attain a degree of the standard awarded by Imperial College at the age of twenty years?
The greatest resource a person has is their life. The earliest they can attain the knowledge and skills to be constructive, the greater the use they are to themselves and society. No matter how is someone, they cannot buy time.
My approach would reduce the income of universities and many teachers and academics by pursuing quality not quantity.
Shakespeare finished education by the age of eighteen years, Dickens by the he of fourteen years and none of the greatest women novelists such as J Austen went to university; Newton, Faraday, Clerk Maxwell , Darwin, Rutherford, JJ Thompson, Chadwick all contributed to the World’s civilisation , much, if not most of academia does not.
If only . . . but high standards are not what any of our political parties want, they all want profit, economic growth and a compliant and useful workforce. Neo-liberal economically and socially communist, we’ve been collectivised, I’m sorry to say.
Very perceptive , Neo- liberal economic and socially communists.
A very satute academic said to me ” Middle managers of large organisation are the same whether communist or corporations , they are given resources and told what to do “.
So all university education is STEM related? no humanities?
That tells it like it is!
I remember our HoD leaving a meeting early saying sourly that she had to attend an ‘impact lunch’, and wondering if it would be a ‘buffet’ … or just a train wreck.
It was obvious in advance that the whole ‘impact’ concept would result in humanities research being captured by shallow activism.
Post modernism was rampant 20 years ago in American universities and has gained total control in most it would seem. Here anti-colonialism has the same grip, especially in museums. The long march has ended in triumph.
Hopefully, the Long March will be ending with Trump.
The Rufo/Musk delving into the Department of Education has already found over $1bn of cuts, and they have only been at it a few weeks.
It needed to be said! And insightfully and forcefully said. The challenge will be to get governments and universities to actually pursue this. And yes the PhD – piled higher and deeper. Quantity over quality. Pink Floyd The Wall! A return to the philosophy of natural sciences has merits. And yes PhD 68.
Impact evolved in the middle of my PhD studies – around 2010 – and I well remember my doctoral supervisor’s disgust with the whole process. Luckily I was self-financing, so it didn’t affect me. I just got on with my own project, which was the motivation, definition and defence against its two intuitive objections of a very sane and sensible theory of modality, viz. counterpart theory without possible worlds.
I wouldn’t last 5 minutes in wokiversity now, of course. Some disgusting little woke fascist scumbag would google me and get hold of my social media commentary, and have me drummed out of the place in no time.
Why should the state fund research? It didn’t use to do so, certainly before WW2.
The drive for research devalues teaching at universities, as the administrators keep requiring academics to demonstrate the value they bring in new grants.
For subjects like philosophy (I’m a fan) or history (did the tripos at uni so I’m a fan of that as well), why do we need the state to fund this? Don’t the undergrads and post grads fund this? it isn’t as though the teaching per se is expensive – academics don’t get paid very well. For areas with commercial application, why not get industry to sponsor? Why is the state needed, at all?
Perhaps some of the money squandered on grants could be used to pay academics better.
academics don’t get paid very well.
Maybe not in Britain but that is not the case in the States. Six figure salaries for professors, and certainly for administrators, are far more common that one might think.
Now be fair those administrators need big salaries to compensate them for all the stress arising from all that backstabbing they have to do
After WW1 it was realised Germany( due to Bismarcks;s policies ) had moved head of Britain in industrial research. Also by 1919 many universities were bankrupt. I think it was the Haldane Committee which said in order to improve industrial research , the universities which were charities , had to accept taxpayers money to fund research which resulted in them being taken under state control, largely through the National Research Councils.
For anyone interested in the history of the deliberate degradation of Higher Education (1979-1999) under Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, this paper by Richard Gombrich (son of Ernst) is worth reading;
https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/mem/papers/LHCE/uk-higher-education.html
1979?
Wasn’t that when Comprehensive Schools increased in number, due to Labour’s legislation on the subject?
That’s Secondary Education not Higher.
Sounds like the UK needs its version of DOGE. Whatever one thinks of either Trump or Musk, one would expect a normal person to be outraged by the obvious squandering of their tax dollars. And when these discoveries are made within USAID or the British uni system, the rational reaction is to ask what’s going in the agencies where the real money lies – Defense and HHS here, the NHS and other bureaucracies there.
While everyone remembers the part of Eisenhower’s speech warning of a military-industrial complex – which is real – very people remember the other half. In that, Ike also warned of a growing nexus between scientific research and govt funding of that research. He correctly predicted that the people providing the money would have a vested interest in the outcome and that research findings could be skewed toward a specific result that was in govt’s interests.
“are trying hard to be anti-elitist in a way that Sun readers might normally appreciate”
I do no agree that Sun readers are anti-elitist. It just seems that they to have better vision when it comes to spotting the Emperor running around starkers
The first step is to reduce the university sector and hence number of researchers. Second step is to ensure that university researchers are of the highest quality. The third step is to employ properly trained university teachers who are not professional researchers. (This does not prevent researchers from some teaching, or teachers from some research.) the fourth step is to raise expectations of the students, academically, in work habits and in personal focus on learning not political activism.
Could we start by turning all the ex-poly “universities” back to training colleges for useful trades, carpentry, plumbing, plasterers, electricians, etc? Then perhaps universities can get back to being seats of genuine “higher learning” rather than the every expensive “teaching” of totally useless subjects which improve neither the mind nor wallet of the students.
Ah, yes, the utility of learning – the end of all learning.
First off I don’t know why one has to be a philosophy professor to then be a philosopher, second my understanding is that it has usually been like this, many professors in history I am aware of that contributed substantially first wrote books exploring philosophical ideas and then became professors.
Also we have to acknowledge that the university system of academia has always been broken, the greatest kind of the 20 century Albert Einstein couldn’t get a job.
Here’s what I see the problem is, people have been confusing the tail for wagging the dog, they see individuals that have made great leaps forward in science or great breakthroughs in their field and noticed that these people are professors, and so they assume that therefore professors produce these breakthroughs. What they fail to realize is that these individuals went into a professorship and a academia because it was the easiest way to find free time to pursue what they wanted. The individuals who make great breakthroughs are the people that would’ve devoted time and effort to their field regardless of their occupation, simply because they were so obsessed with the subject.
That is what produces breakthroughs, individuals who love and are obsessed with their subject to the point of working on it even when they don’t have any reason to or others are hostile to them, and here’s the problem, academia now provides no value for those individuals and are struggling for relevance. With the rise of the internet you can now communicate with all the foremost experts and most obsessed individual in any given field of interest, practically instantaneously, with archivx almost all research is published as soon as it is completed. Couple.this with the iron law of bureaucracy and you know have an academia that can do little to help actually research instead of providing real value academia now simply becomes a new credentialed priesthood for those that want to asset their superiority, but the fact is we are all becoming increasingly aware the the emperor is wearing no clothes, and the fact is reality doesn’t care about their credentials, and so even someone as unassuming as a swiss patent clerk can make ground breaking discoveries.
I have one last question many of the project the author talked about don’t actually require facilities or resources found exclusively in a university environment, in fact most of them seemed to require nothing more than sitting around and writing and reading which anyone can do whenever and wherever especially in today’s society. So why the flip do they need funding in the first place, it seems if someone was really that passionate about it they’d get a job that provides enough for them without taking an inordinate amount of time and then spend all their free time writing and reading about their focus rather than wandering around begging for money so they can sit around and think about things.
A long retired director of an MRC unit when reflecting on his contributions attributed his two major discoveries ( still in medical practice and saving millions of life years) to being encouraged by the then MRC secretary to ‘ fly some kites’ . O tempore, O mores!
Those sorts of research programmes are generally funded by medical charities like British Heart Foundation, who spend millions a year on them.
While agreeing with the general thrust of Kathleen’s argument, and equally despising the ‘woke waste’, I have some reservations about research always having a clear, immediately demonstrable utilitarian outcome. Reflect on all those bespectacled nerdy 20th Century students, deep in, say Amazonia, researching as part of their Entomology studies some obscure insect. What’s the point in that? Until we discover, perhaps decades later said insect has some ‘magical’ medical contribution to make, or insight into the breeding pattern helps us stave off x or y. Sometimes knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge can have unimagined benefits other than for the simple curious.
I am not a fan of political screening of research proposals, even if that means that some weird and wonderful stuff gets through the funding net. My concern would be with the imposition of political views on the university community, and that is where wokeism is a real danger.
This really hits the nail on the head. Its depressing reading.
I think the furor is not really because humanities professors are self indulgent – they always have been. I think there are two things the public have become quite aware of: 1) humanities departments are not turning out thoughtful young graduates. In fact they are turning out binary thinking ideologues who hate their own society and (bizarrely) support things like the gang rape, torture, and murder of Jewish women and children. So it isn’t so much that people are upset about waste – it is that we are getting a profoundly negative dividend from this spending. 2) university education has become much much more expensive. The days of paying for it with a summer job are long gone. These grants are symbolic of how poorly they manage taxpayers money.
I could almost say I love the humanities—I certainly read a lot of books that count that way, but I do wonder what they have to do with universities. It seems to me that most people worth studying at university level didn’t go to university themselves (Socrates, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Dickens, Yeats (art school), Orson Welles). Chekov was a doctor. Wittgenstein studied engineering, so did Norman Mailer. Saul Bellow graduated with a degree in Anthropology and Sociology. (“He originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department was anti-Jewish.” [Wikipedia, the site seems to have eaten the link.] Plus ca change.) Even Tom Holland, perhaps the most celebrated contemporary historian, has a degree in English. What are the humanities supposed to teach? Everyone who was or is any good either wasn’t taught at all, or was taught something else. Want to learn the humanities? Go to an effing library like the Self-Taught Man in Sartre’s Nausea.
Oh, come on. When I was at university, there was a joke that the two cheapest departments were Maths and Philosophy. Maths only needed writing materials and a waste-paper bin, and Philosophy didn’t even need the waste-paper bin. And around 110 years ago, Yeats wrote “All think what other people think” in his poem “The Scholars” (it’s not letting me put a link in). No one “chase[s] the latest intellectual fashions” — thinking is much more a group activity than is commonly acknowledged. At least Newton knew he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” Academics in the Humanities, like the followers of Brian, think they’re all individuals, but generally they’re just repeating what someone else just said.
Anyway, I’d be perfectly happy if all university Humanities funding were cancelled tomorrow (apart from the libraries, obviously; they can stay). My advice to anyone who wants to write a book of philosophy is: have a breakdown, then ride a motorbike around the USA with your son. It gives one time to think.
afaik Albert Einstein sat at a desk to research and develop his various theories of relativity, etc without ANY funding from the public purse. So imo, if Albie can change the world without a government grant then so can anyone.
If Unherd wants to go all DOGE on UK universities then they might wish to find someone other than an embittered, failed academic to do it.
Just a suggestion.
Somebody has to do it.
Decolonising Palestinian Queer Gender Green Policies in Marginalised Multicultural Communities of Mayfair.
Hiw much do I get?
What an excellent and sad eye-opener.
What I find totally mind-blowing is how progressive activists have so utterly captured every institutional facet of western democracies. The Woking Class stranglehold is ubiquitous, toxic and relentlessly destructive.
Since the research university was invented by the Prussians during the early 1800s, I think that experts can agree that it led to German nationalism and the Kaiser and Literally Hitler.
In other words, anyone in a university is a regime-adjacent fascist. I think the Road to Canossa is indicated for all academics.
Well, come the day, Farage won’t have far to look to save a few quid.
Academics waxing fat on this public largesse had better make hay, as the sun won’t be shining quite so brightly in 4 years time.
Right on, as usual! Hopefully, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of folks who will start their dissertations on what the hell happened to academia in the last 25 years and this article would be a great place to start. Uni’s in both the UK and Us both turn out great work and bullshit at the same time. And it is some Bullshit. I am of the mind that the great majority of these BS “grants” went to connections/friends or they were political payoffs. The danger is that in the zeal to clean house, the good will be thrown out with the bad.
I have experience with non profits in the US and I would say at least 60% are BS and are funded in the Friends/Connections/Payoff manner, which is under attack and it will be fascinating to watch how it unfolds. All of the Zuckerberg, Clinton, and Bezos foundations are where they place their mansions, jets, yachts, and the like with minimal grants or donations to organizations.
However, there are wonderful and necessary non profits that actually serve their communities and it would be a shame to shackle them. Uni’s are in this group and there will be a massive defunding if they try to keep the status quo, as they will lose in the courts.
Thanks again for a wonderful article and I am heartened that Kathleen won’t have to shave her head in public!