after the occupation

Middlesex, the Morning After

by "Joe Jack-Toe"

Since my post to Scurvy Tunes back in May (“The Struggle at Middlesex,” 14 May 2010), much has happened in the conflict between staff/students and management over closure of philosophy programmes at Middlesex University, and all in all the outcome has not been good.

The students occupying University buildings were served a writ and evicted. Further protests and occupations met with heavy-handed opposition from the management, who suspended staff and students for their involvement, and launched what was essentially a smear campaign claiming that the students had “broken bones” of a member of security staff during the occupation (something patently untrue). Several staff who sent public emails criticising management through the University email system were disciplined. On 28th May, the (sluggish) lecturer’s union (UCU) finally got involved, issuing an ultimatum to management to lift the staff suspensions or go into formal dispute. On 2nd June this dispute was declared, but on 8th June the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy announced that it had done a deal to move to Kingston University on the other side of London, effectively robbing the campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex of its gathering momentum.

    

To call this rescue of the centre a merely a “partial victory” (as CRMEP’s statement did) is rather an understatement of just how slim the achievement was. The good news about the outcome was that CRMEP, and its excellent and valuable work in the study of traditions of European and radical thought can continue, and this is, in the end, something to cheer for.

    

However, the form in which it has been saved is a much reduced one: only postgraduate teaching and research and no undergraduate programmes will move to Kingston; furthermore, two members of staff from the department have not been included in the deal, and now face an uncertain future of redundancy or redeployment. Had the management at Middlesex proposed such an outcome (job losses and axing of programmes) the reaction would have been indignation. In effect CRMEP have acceded willingly to a programme of “rationalisation” and downsizing of the sort that we should be vigorously resisting as damaging to the nature of education and to the rights of people to receive an education (and not just job training). Moreover, once the current BA students have finished their courses, there will be no philosophy at Middlesex University: the very thing which we fought against has now come about.

    

What the staff at CRMEP have done is understandable and the inevitable result of a rationality which is forced on them – both in terms of their individual careers, and (to view the matter a little more generously) in terms of their commitment to the continuation of a key institution in the dissemination of radical continental thought within Anglophone academic discourse. However, for the undergraduate students, and for other staff in the humanities at Middlesex it feels like something of a betrayal (especially to the undergraduate students who have placed their futures on the line by protesting, and the academic staff who have been picked out to be disciplined for their open criticism of management).

    

The students’ brilliant campaign – largely using “web 2.0” technologies – to save the department caused a storm of controversy, with a petition drawing over 18,500 signatures and a Facebook site with over 14,000 members. On the back of this, the international outcry of academic superstars raised coverage not only in the blogosphere but the national press. Shortly before the CRMEP announcement the management were beginning to look profoundly discomforted by all this negative publicity and cracks between the positions of different senior staff seemed to be opening up. (As Bruce Lee says in Enter the Dragon: “The enemy has only images and illusions… Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.” Debord could hardly have put it differently.) 

    

The success of this campaign, and the prestige of the Philosophy department offered a rallying point to those of us worried about the wider general tendencies within the University (and HE more generally) of which this was so obviously symptomatic - tendencies to cut humanities subjects, to yoke education to the vocational, to transform it from a right into a commodity and to subject it to calculations of profit so narrow as to make them almost arbitrary. The highly visible campaign was a battle within a larger struggle within the University, and CRMEP’s retreat to Kingston leaves those in other vulnerable (and less prestigious) areas feeling as if the rug on which their opposition was able to stand has been pulled out from beneath their feet. When smaller, less “important” departments are picked off in future, it will be much harder to mount a campaign against such cuts than in this case.

    

What also emerged clearly into the light of day in the controversies around philosophy were the highly irregular and arbitrary ways in which power is exercised in Middlesex: the general lack of accountability or safeguard procedures within the University and also the ability of management to ride roughshod over what few safety checks and balances there are. The decisions made over philosophy opened an opportunity to challenge these systems and procedures to which all of us are subject. The flight of the department means they will now be hard to challenge.

    

This lack of accountability may be a contributory factor as to why the protests at Middlesex have been so much less successful than in other recent cases in other Universities. (In older Universities, decisions to close down courses may need to go through an academic Senate, for example. A look through the biographies of the Board of Governors at Middlesex is also informative: they are all heavily invested in the marketisation of education.)

    

The management had other advantages at Middlesex. As a multi-campus University, the staff at Middlesex are more than usually dispersed and isolated. Divide and conquer has long been the order of the day: other departments that have been closed in the recent past have gone with hardly a splash in the consciousness of others, who are looking only after their own patch. Management at Middlesex, furthermore, have a stranglehold over the use of the University’s email systems so that only “official” emails can be sent globally to all staff. Many thus knew nothing, little, or only what management told them about the dispute. Perhaps the management at Middlesex were also just smart in the choice of when to announce the closure: at the end of a term, when staff were finishing teaching, and preparing to disappear to pursue the research projects which have increasingly been squeezed into Summer months by increasing teaching loads. This made organization (and industrial action) difficult.

    

The background of a lack of solidarity was exacerbated by the weakness of the Union. In spite of strong feelings from the membership, UCU officials seemed loathe to get involved in the dispute – partly, I think, because they are invested in a system of everyday local bargaining over small issues, and were slow to recognise this as a matter of a crisis rather than business as usual. Arthur Husk, the Branch Chair, talked of avoiding an “equal and opposite” reaction from the University administration, and voiced a belief that management was ready to negotiate as soon as they could without loosing face. This placatory attitude meant that Union involvement was slow to come. Perhaps if it had come sooner, it would have forced the matter to some kind of resolution before the move to Kingston was announced. Union caution is, however, understandable, with the general weakness of Unions under current legislation in the UK. In a recent ruling on a dispute in the HE sector, for example, a precedent was set upholding the right of employers to withhold all pay for even the smallest withdrawal of labour, as with “industrial action short of a strike.” The Student Union was even less involved. But then, when the SU proclaimed support of a sit-in on the art and design campus back in 1989, they were held liable for damages and were still paying the University back many years later.

    

All in all, this has been something of a gloomy picture I have painted. But are there grounds for hope too? What positive lessons can be learned from the Middlesex philosophy fiasco? First, off, of course, one of the achievements of the campaign is the rescue of CRMEP - perhaps without the strong campaign, this could not have been achieved, or would have been achieved on even less favourable terms.

    

Second, the creativity and energy of the students’ campaign is also to be praised, and stands as a positive model. Their technologically savvy but also grassroots strategies (drawing on the legacy of 1968 and the anti-globalization movements) were highly effective in drawing support and publicity, hitting the University in its most sensitive area, which is to say: its public image. During occupation, University buildings were transformed into temporary autonomous zones of creation, critique and festival: they were, that is to say, exactly what a University should always be…

    

Finally, even if Middlesex faces the inevitability of further rounds of cuts, and now without a philosophy department, so with an altogether less lively academic culture for that, I hope that what the campaign has brought about is an increased awareness amongst staff and students in the University of the threat hanging over them, of the need to take collective action (rather than minding their own patch), and of the possibilities of campaign. It was Rosa Luxemburg who saw the revolutionary defeats of the present and the past as preparing the ground for a future victory. I can only hope that the experience of increased solidarity which gathered around the Save Middlesex Philosophy Campaign, and the network of contacts with campaigners in similar situations in other Universities will remain resources in the coming months.

    

And in any case, is the campaign really over? Talking to some of its campaigners, they told me that they had suspended the campaign over Summer, but were looking to begin it once more when term starts again, with the aim of re-establishing a philosophy course at Middlesex, and with the aim of challenging the processes through which the courses were closed. Save Middlesex Philosophy may grow into a “Save Middlesex” campaign per se, just one cog in a larger machine of protest against the current policies of the marketisation of education and everything that this entails.

the struggle at middlesex

The Attack on the Humanities in British Universities: A Report from the Front Line.

By “Joe Jack-Toe”

Over the last couple of weeks, events in the British Higher Education sector have made me think again about the writings of Jean-François Lyotard, in whose work education was an important theme. Dense and abstract though his work is, it returns to me with a renewed and practical significance. Towards the end of his life, in the 1980s (once he had turned away from the earlier positions of, for example, his book on Libidinal Economies, which intimate that the forces of capitalism, in breaking up the old order of things, might in some ways start to allow the forces of the id to speak) Lyotard worried about the effects of the capitalist organisation of society on education, on our intellectual life, and on philosophical thought – and, of course about the effects of such a transformed world of thought on our social life. In The Inhuman and The Differend he envisioned capital as a totalising “monad in expansion,” a system which sought to extend its monological regime of discursive process throughout all spheres of human action, chaining desire, inquiry, and even the forces of anguish within a system of the production of “novelties” which can never amount to the true “event” of a radical break with what is. Such a regime of novelty echoes Benjamin’s vision of the capitalism of the Arcades – always producing new fashions, but only in order to ensure that nothing fundamentally changes. For Lyotard, such a regime, deeply entropic, involves a kind of a flattening of human potential, the death of what real “thought” might be. 

Though it will seem strange to some (especially those who are more familiar with his earlier works, or with the reputation he gained from these) to enlist Lyotard as a philosopher of “critique” in this way, such real thought, for the later Lyotard, was a matter of the agitation of that which cannot be spoken within a particular regime of discourse, the differend, that which fundamentally disagrees with the system, but which returns on it from outside, like the repressed, in the name of a certain freedom and liberation. This, argued Lyotard, was the importance of philosophy, of art and of intellectual work more generally, standing for that which has not yet been homogenised by the systems of capitalism, harnessed to its production of cheap thrills and petty innovations, and to the flattened, repetitive, and numbing spectacle of its realm of (media) representations. Thought – philosophy – was the pulse of a freedom which stood out against this realm, and which opened up the possibility of something else. The institutions of education and academic life were a vital part of what fosters such thought.

Lyotard thus bemoaned what he saw as the erosion of such a freedom of thought under the pressures of the marketisation of intellectual life. Since his death those pressures have only multiplied. He noticed the pressure, for example, on academics to continually publish in order to have their research quantified and graded by the state in order to ensure the continued influx of research funds, and noted that this leads to an impoverishment of thought where “novel” and publishable ideas are churned out rapidly, yoking thinkers to a mode of time usage which does not allow the space for properly new, radical or substantial ideas to develop. In this, he saw academia becoming a machine for churning out books and papers, and for keeping the funds flowing through Universities and publishing houses, rather than a means to think through issues of deep import. In the UK, Lyotard’s observations have been prophetic in terms of the unfolding implementation, since he wrote, of the “RAEs” (Research Assessment Exercises) which have been running periodically to assess, measure and then reward or punish Univeristy departments’ research outputs.

The discussions of education and philosophy in Lyotard’s late texts thus have a continued, and even increased significance for us today, where the logic of neoliberalism has only intensified under the regime of globalised capital, in spite of ostensibly “left-of-centre” governments such as that of the “New Labour” party which replaced the Conservatives in Britain in the 1990s. Under New Labour, and under the logic of marketisation, quite aside from the submission of research to quantifiable outcomes, the government has abolished student grants and introduced tuition fees. Universities have increasingly been asked to run as businesses rather than as public institutions, and, worse than this, such marketised education has increasingly been the object of manipulation through the ideologised manipulation by governments of the parameters within such a market is to function.

The questions of the nature of thought and education in the capitalist milieu comes back to me particularly strongly, however, in the light of current events in British education, and in particular within the University in which I work, Middlesex University. Readers of scurvy tunes may well be aware (to some extent at least) of the current controversy which has sprung up at Middlesex. On the 26th April, the University announced its perplexing decision to close its Philosophy department, a decision which shocked both staff at the University and the international philosophical community. The philosophy department at Middlesex can hardly, it would seem, be thought of as a failing department. In the recent RAE it was the department in Middlesex with the highest-rated score, and one of the top Philosophy departments in the country. Middlesex was formed in the 1970s first as a “polytechnic” institution (the Polytechnics in England were primarily vocational colleges and though they offered degrees did not have the prestige of a “University” education proper) and only in 1992 obtained the status of a University, so does not have many departments with serious academic research credentials, and Philosophy is the one beacon of real excellence which the University has. Its academics (Peter Osborne, Peter Hallward, Eric Alliez, Stella Sandford and Christian Kerslake, for example) have truly international profiles and their Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy – along with the journal Radical Philosophy which is largely produced at Middlesex – is probably the most important centre of “continental” (non-analytic) philosophy not only in Britain but in the English language. The CRMEP is also a key hub within the intellectual life of the humanities in London, with frequent and high-profile events bringing important scholars from around the world into the city. Philosophy at Middlesex has one of the largest Philosophy MA programmes in the UK and a healthy turn-through of PhD students (in fact, more PhD students complete with the Philosophy staff than the rest of Middlesex’s School of Arts and Education combined).

The closure has caused widespread protest, both within the university and also beyond it. The students on the course have occupied one of the buildings on the Trent Park campus and set up a Facebook site(now with over 11,000 members), a petition (with close on 15,000 signatures) and a campaign website. Staff in the University bombarded the School’s Dean, Ed Esche, with emails. Statements of support have come in from international intellectuals of the highest stature, such as, for example, Alain Badiou, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Michael Hardt. They also came from faculties across the UK and beyond, from the American Philosophical Association Executive Committee, the British Philosophical Association, and many, many other individuals and groups. Talks have been organised by the occupying students on campus, with speakers such as Tariq Ali (Sat 15th May) and Tony Benn coming up. A conference will be held at Goldsmiths, co-organised with the ICA, entitled, “Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?” on 19th May.

So why has the University decided to close this seemingly thriving department? The reply, to Philosophy staff, was that the department made no “measurable” contribution to the University. They stated, rather bizarrely, that courses at Middlesex are expected to contribute 55% of their income (beyond what they spend directly on their students) back to the centre of the University, whilst Philosophy in the coming year would only be able to contribute 53% – a shortfall of a whole 2%! Lyotard’s nightmare of what happens to thought (and education) when it is yoked to the logic of capital here is taken to its most perverse extreme.