Nina Power writes over at The Guardian on the closing of Middlesex’s Philosophy department. Middlesex has an excellent Philosophy department that far exceeds its modest reputation as a university, and was particularly important for its specialisation in continental philosophy, which brought some much-needed pluralism into British academic philosophy.
One can’t help but agree with Richard Seymour over at Lenin’s Tomb that this is an inevitable consequence of neoliberal market-models colonising higher education. But it is not merely a case of efficiency drives and downsizing. It is merely one aspect of a now ingrained neoliberal way of thinking that views as pointless any enterprise that doesn’t immediately yield empirically quantifiable results. And it is exactly this sort of ingrained thinking that philosophers ought to challenge.
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The Philosopher's Eye 