Philosophers don’t need to make an impact. Tom Stoddart/Getty Images
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.
By Kathleen Stock
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.
By Kathleen Stock
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.
Get 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 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).
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 dead hand of bureaucracy never fails to ruin anything it touches, including the academia.
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.
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.
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…
Hoping that Prime Minister Farage will consider Kathleen Stock to head up UK DOGE. Charlotte Gill for deputy.
academics should demonstrate to the taxpayer some positive benefit of their prospective research for wider society
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.
Scarcely anyone of an intensely reflective mindset positively wants to do these things — they are forced into it by the system.
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.
“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.
‘And those who can’t teach, teach gym.’
Woody Allen, Annie Hall
‘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.
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