Open Letter from CRMEP Students & Researchers on Kingston University’s Proposed Closure of the Department of Humanities

As of February 25, 2025, Kingston University management has proposed the closure of the entire Department of Humanities, including the world-renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), from which we, the undersigned, write today. The plans have been announced under the fig leaf of a rushed thirty-day “consultation” period, graciously directing students’ concerns toward a “dedicated email address” and “well-being hub.” The contempt displayed in their treatment of current MA, MPhil, and PhD students and researchers—who, despite an assurance that our studies will not be disrupted, are likely to be left without appropriate teaching, module provision, and thesis supervision—has been outstripped only by that displayed towards their own staff. Suffice to say, the Kingston branch of the University and College Union (UCU) regards the absence of any genuine attempt on the part of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to fairly and thoroughly consult those affected as unreasonable and unlawful. While citing nominally declining student numbers (notwithstanding the relative uptick and stabilization in recruitment for the 2024–25 academic year), and an increasingly competitive higher-education marketplace, management has refused to disclose in any detail the criteria driving these decisions. We think it perspicacious to note that—as applications to the Philosophy PhD were halted in 2024 and numerous humanities program were placed under financial review in a search for efficiencies—the multimillion-pound redevelopment of the Penrhyn Road campus, replete with “agile working hubs” and “collaboration spaces,” was completed. We also note that, in the financial year 2023–24, Vice Chancellor Steven Spier received a handsome pay packet of £411,000, including pension contributions. Such facts reflect poorly on the priorities of Kingston University, suggesting that management would prefer to dismantle the infrastructures that sustain critical thought than trim the fat of the administrative strata or moderate gratuitous capital expenditures.

Since its founding in 1995 at Middlesex University, the CRMEP has forged a distinct space for itself within UK higher education. Committed to a politically and socially engaged philosophy, one that probes the outer edges of the discipline in its relation to arts, sciences, and the wider humanities, it is one of a handful of institutions that offers an alternative to the analytic style predominant in most philosophy departments. As a widely recognized leader in the study of continental philosophy (Michael Hardt once remarked that he “can think of no other philosophy department in the US, UK, or Australia that rises to [its] level”),1 it is the site of a transnational community whose expansive output consistently chafes against an aggressively marketized and parochial university sector, and is thus at constant risk of elimination. Indeed, this is not the first time it has been faced with closure: threatened with disbandment in 2010 by Middlesex under a similarly imprecise financial pretext, the Centre was transferred to Kingston after an extended occupation by students and an international outcry in which an impressive range of voices—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler—rallied to its defense. First as tragedy, second time as farce, the SLT’s decision to abolish the Centre will leave their School of Art, of which we are formally a part, absent its intellectual engine; and deprive themselves of a “world-leading” and “internationally excellent” research center, which awards more PhDs per member of staff than any other group in the university, according to the latest national Research Excellence Framework. Moreover, we stress that the closure of the CRMEP is in contradiction with the stated aims of Kingston’s recent Town House Strategy “to marshal support to existing areas that are world-class and bring together expertise and innovation in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary ways to address existing and emerging issues.”2

Despite the specificities of the CRMEP, the situation it faces is in many ways a familiar one. It represents the latest in a series of assaults on the arts and humanities after similar terminations and redundancies at, to name but a few, the University of East Anglia, University of Chichester, University of Kent, and Goldsmiths University. Such losses are symptomatic of a general crisis across the sector after years of dwindling government support and rampant commercialization, a crisis evident in unsustainable levels of casualization and outsourcing among teaching and support staff, and the profound contraction of learning possibilities amidst the financialization of student debt and accommodation. Humanities departments in particular are vulnerable to a pincer move from neoliberal and reactionary-populist actors, in which the discourse of “value-for-money” coincides with a crusade against “woke culture.” One need only recall here former Prime Minister Liz Truss, a strident free-marketeer who also took time to bemoan the influence of Foucault’s “postmodern philosophy” in a notorious speech on equality and diversity policy in 2022.3 Or the Telegraph’s pearl-clutching “expose” on PhD research funded by the Techne consortium, whose crime appears to be that of employing taxpayer money through the sponsorship of the Arts and Humanities Research Council whilst investigating biopolitics and anthropocentrism.4 From this perspective, the putative commercial “uselessness” of such courses is seemingly confirmed by their critical orientation, thereby cohering the two dominant strands of modern conservatism through the construction of a shared enemy.

Furthermore, the shuttering of such programs not only constitutes an affront against a broadly humanist concept of education, in which the independence of culture and research from immediate market imperatives is precisely constitutive of their wider social value, but is also a matter of class, refracted through the particular stratifications of British academia. That the waves of restructurings have fallen so acutely on the so-called “plate glass” (University of East Anglia, University of Kent, etc.) and “post-92” universities (Middlesex and Kingston, amongst others), both of which emerged from postwar attempts to expand access to higher education, is significant. In addressing themselves to a broader social constituency, and freed from the hidebound intellectual cultures of the older institutions, such universities served as crucial sites for the importation of radical French and German theory from the mid-60s onwards. The development of interdisciplinary humanities programs in the polytechnics, of which Middlesex proved a shining example, thus helped provide “historical and literary culture to segments of the population that were previously excluded from them,” as the director of the CRMEP, Peter Osborne, reflected in an interview in 2010.5 The contemporary assault on humanities education therefore marks another episode in the decline of Britain’s postwar popular modernism, in which the establishment of public institutions, from Channel 4 to the Open University, furnished the conditions for innovative mass-cultural production. Their elimination portends the seclusion of such disciplines within the sprawling endowments of Oxbridge and other elite organizations capable of insulating themselves from the vagaries of the market, and, for the rest of us, the further reduction of education to the thin gruel of human capital.

For these reasons, we unequivocally condemn the proposals by the Senior Leadership Team to close the Department of Humanities. Its loss, including that of the CRMEP, would stain the reputation of Kingston University domestically and abroad, and signal a disdain for the research excellence it claims to espouse. The proposed redundancies are incompatible with the assurances made to current students that our “teaching and research” will continue “as usual,” so dependent are they on the specific skill sets of the staff and the distinctive academic environment they cultivate. If Kingston University ultimately wishes to reduce us to consumers, we may choose to respond in kind, and demand compensation for the “internationally renowned” teaching and research which we have been legally promised, but which their proposals evidently contravene. As students and researchers of the CRMEP, we are resolute in our commitment to challenging these proposals by a diversity of means, and call on all those concerned with the health of the global academy to stand with us in defense of an inclusive, expansive, and critical approach to philosophy, arts, and humanities education more broadly.

Sincerely,

MA, MPhil, and PhD students and researchers in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London

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