From http://savemdxphil.com/
Posted on 8 June 2010
<http://savemdxphil.com/2010/06/08/announcement-8-june-the-crmep-is-moving-to-kingston-university/>
by aletheiaticverse <http://savemdxphil.com/author/aletheiaticverse/>
The campaign to save our philosophy programmes has just won a partial
but significant victory: Kingston University
<http://www.kingston.ac.uk/> in south-west London announced today that
it will re-establish our Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy <http://www.web.mdx.ac.uk/CRMEP/> (CRMEP) at Kingston, by
employing the four senior staff in Philosophy at Middlesex (Eric Alliez,
Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford). Our MA and PhD
programmes (full-time and part-time) will be re-launched at Kingston
this September, and all current post-graduate students will be invited
to move along with the staff. Institutions in France and Germany have
also made significant new proposals for collaboration with the CRMEP,
which may allow it to expand the European dimensions of its work
considerably in the near future.
This remarkable turn of events would never been possible without the
extraordinary local and international campaign that began six weeks ago,
to save our philosophy programmes.
Like Middlesex, Kingston is a post-1992 university, with a commitment to
widening participation in education. Unlike Middlesex, Kingston is
expanding rather than cutting back its provision in humanities subjects,
and it is investing in research in these areas. In addition to taking on
CRMEP staff, Kingston will be making a number of other high-level
appointments over the coming months, and is launching its own London
Graduate School in conjunction with colleagues from several other
Universities internationally. We believe that Kingston will provide an
enthusiastic and supportive base for the activities of the CRMEP.
Although we have not won all the demands made by our campaign, the move
to Kingston is a major achievement. We have found a way to keep all of
our postgraduate programmes open, and to keep most of the CRMEP staff
together in a single unit. We have preserved a place in London for the
unique academic community that has built up around the Centre and its
distinctive research interests, and this will continue to be a place
where the criteria for entry and participation remain as open as
possible. The campaign has directly refuted the line that Middlesex
managers have repeated for many years now – a variation of the line that
‘there is no alternative’ but to follow the neoliberal way of the world,
and to close down small academic departments in favour of large
vocational ones. The campaign hasn’t merely proved that ‘another way is
possible’: it has helped to indicate what needs to be done to make such
a way a reality, and shown that there are universities in the UK and in
Europe that are willing to embrace it.
We hope that the campaign will continue, evolving to become one of
several contributions from a range of institutions across London and the
region to a broader and deeper struggle in support of philosophy, the
humanities and public education more generally. Some of the protestors
who made the biggest impact in our campaign came from supportive
universities such as Sussex, KCL, SOAS, Westminster and Goldsmiths. This
emerging network of education activists isn’t going to disperse, and is
likely to play an important role in the struggles that will soon affect
the entire sector. Although the closure of Philosophy at Middlesex is
yet another indication of the ongoing commercialisation of education in
the UK, our campaign, along with other recent mobilisations at
universities up and down the country, has helped change the balance of
power across higher education. The campaign to save philosophy at
Middlesex has already made a powerful intervention in the fight for
public education in general and for endangered humanities programmes in
particular. The future looks challenging but there is now much to build
on, at Middlesex, at Kingston and across the UK.
/Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford/
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