Keele Philosophy Fights Back

Keele Student Union

A success story or a sign of worse things to come? Let’s say both, just to be on the safe side. In what must have been a whirlwind week for the Department of Philosophy at Keele University – the story having only been broken by national news sources less than ten days ago and calls of victory already ringing out this weekend – staff, students and alumni of Keele and elsewhere successfully united to overturn the decision to remove Philosophy from Keele as part of a cost-cutting exercise. After the first signs of movement, regarding the September 2011 intake of philosophy students, in which Brian Leiter quite rightly detected an as-yet-provisional tone, an official statement from the university has indicated a significant shift in the right direction:

Middlesex closes its Philosophy department

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.