by Soo Tian Lee
Presented at the Birkbeck School of Law Postgraduate Conference in May 2011.
With the passing of the Tory-LibDem fee cap hike by Parliament on 9 December 2011, higher education in the United... more
With the passing of the Tory-LibDem fee cap hike by Parliament on 9 December 2011, higher education in the United Kingdom entered a state of affairs akin to a gun battle in the dark watches of the night. It is uncertain from which direction bullets will come streaming, and no-one knows who will survive; one thing, however, is abundantly clear: there will be casualties. The overture to the new wave of marketisation of education in the wake of the economic crisis rang eerily in the air a year ago when Middlesex University decided to close its acclaimed philosophy department, ostensibly due to financial considerations. On 31 March 2011, Greenwich University announced that it was axing the upcoming intake of single-honours philosophy BA students for reasons that, once analysed, seem to flout any form of reason. And in late April this year, London Metropolitan University announced the closure of 70% of its courses, with the hardest hit area of study being the arts and humanities. What ties these three incidences together is the fact that they are all courses and departments in post-1992 institutions which appear to be out-of-step with the dominant discourses prevalent among the managerial class of their respective universities. It can be argued that these discourses can be unified under a single name, that is, marketisation. Nevertheless, there are various elements that muddy the waters, from pedagogical ideology to theoretical politics. This paper attempts to theorise the nature of these departments as ones existing at the limits of the post-1992 universities they inhabit. These faculties, although working in the spirit of the pedagogical tradition of access to education which was the assumed driving force of these new universities, have revealed themselves to be at odds with the ideas presently dominant at the central regions of the institution, invigorated as these powers are by the new spirit of marketisation which is already shaking our windows and rattling our walls. The universities are, indeed, a-changin', and it is time we found some kind of way out of this ominous darkness around us.
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