Beyond Measure

In the aftermath of an unsuccessful student occupation and the impending closure of Middlesex University's Philosophy Department, a student-occupier advocates the tactics of immeasurability as a way of counteracting the terminal managerialism of branded universities

The best foundation for a competitive economy starts with an education and training system that gives workers the skills they need for the jobs of the 21^st century - this philosophy is at the core of Middlesex Organisational Development Network. - Middlesex University Website, 2010

With such a rationale it is hardly surprising that Middlesex management decided to close their philosophy department.ⁱ Like any other business, the production of workers for the jobs of the 21^st century means eliminating anything that does not contribute. The philosophy department, which, in their words, made ‘no measurable contribution', had to go.

The Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign responded, ‘we are measurable! And we measure up well! Look at the RAE ratings, look at the postgraduate numbers, look at all the big names who like us, look at all the little names on the petition, look at the number of hits on the site, look at the amount of articles in the Guardian...' But when you start speaking in numbers, you have already lost. Perhaps academics - in order to remain academics - have to do this. But those of us who will not find jobs on the other side of our studies have less to lose. We can refuse their limits and the people that guard them. We can counter them by refusing to be counted. We can be unmeasurable.

Image: students occupy the executive boardroom on Middlesex University's Trent Park campus

When, in protest against the closure, students occupied the main building on campus, we experienced moments of this refusal: defying security guards on the doors; telling the student union president to leave and resisting her attempts to ‘represent' us; refusing to give names; rejecting management's requests to be reasonable; expanding the occupation from one room to the whole building; forcing security to get out; climbing onto the roof; eating together in a lecture hall; hanging banners out of the windows; rejecting leaders, formal procedures and party politics. Every limit we broke made it easier to break the next one. And finally management capitulated and came to our door to beg us for a meeting. We rejected their offer and they ran to the High Court.

But let's not romanticise things: many limits remained firmly in place, or reappeared as we lost confidence. We allowed ourselves to be negotiated with, talked about excellence, big names, numbers, the media... At times, we even drifted into discussions over whether limits were there for a reason. After all, wasn't our health and safety dependent on counting people in and out, on having barricades that didn't block fire exits, on staying off the roof? And didn't our personal property depend on cordoned-off areas, guarded with bodies and locks? Isolated as we were from other struggles - at the end of term, on the edges of London, before cuts became national - it was difficult for people not to start doubting themselves. These doubts became fatal when we received the High Court injunction, frightening most people into leaving. Reduced to only 15, we felt we could no longer hold the building and left the next day. As the management regained control, the occupation went from being indefinite to being only 12 days long. It went from being our building to being their building. Our banners were taken from the roof, our barricades were thrown out and people went back to work.

Yet things weren't the same for us. The following weeks included a defiance of the injunction in a night-long occupation of the library, a camp outside the university headquarters in protest at staff and student suspensions, and a disruption of a Middlesex art show; all of which helped rebuild some sense of the power we had had during the occupation.

Then the tutors announced that postgraduates would have to move to Kingston University to finish their studies, while undergraduates would stay on at Middlesex. Management got exactly what they wanted: a splitting of the department, a moving of most of the troublemakers to another institution, and the reminder that, when it comes to numbers, it is the tutors and not students who make the decisions. The tutors even claimed that this move to the other side of London, losing a third of their colleagues and all of their undergraduates, was all a ‘partial victory', and that Kingston University proved that ‘another way is possible'. However, although Kingston might have been convinced by the department's measurability, might have seen this ‘world-renowned' centre as a good investment - without undergraduates - we are kidding ourselves if we don't think it is under the same pressure as Middlesex to drop departments once the prestige and money stop rolling in. True, Kingston might be slightly less brutal, and less brutally honest than Middlesex, but Middlesex managers are not just rogue bullies. They are holding the torch for an approach to education that stretches across the country - even, dare we say it, to Kingston.

There are times and places in which philosophy is profitable: in the Russell Group universities (an affiliation of 20 leading UK universities) it bolsters an elite who feel further justified in their power because they've read books apparently incomprehensible to everyone else; and at polytechnics, once upon a time, it did a good job of channelling potentially dangerous questions into benign grades. However, as the competitive economy becomes the answer to everything, such questions stop being a threat. The battleground shifts from one of ideas to one of practice: when the economy is in crisis, when work is increasingly hard to come by and resistance a rising possibility, those universities that are not reproducing the elite must produce workers that are as submissive, as measurable, and as controllable as possible.

Slightly repetitively, Middlesex prides itself on, ‘learning that provides a flexible learning experience that is delivered through work, in work, for work.' It has not only set up Middlesex Organisational Development Network - ‘the first UK university-led network focusing on engagement with employers' - but it has put millions into an ‘Institute for Work Based Learning'. This is used by businesses who want to ‘grow their staff quickly,' and workers who want to ‘catch their vision.' (What you do with a vision once it has been caught is unclear - presumably you kill it, cook it and eat it. What you do with your staff once they have been ‘grown' is also unclear - presumably you kill them, cook them and eat them too.) Middlesex also recognises that ‘more and more of our students will have a career that spans the world.' A true multinational, it was one of the first British universities to open campuses overseas - in Dubai's ‘Knowledge Village', in Mauritius and now in Delhi. You've got to give it to them, Middlesex management are putting the ‘philosophy' of the competitive economy into practice.

So we must recognise this new terrain and fight them at Middlesex, Kingston and elsewhere - not through graphs and numbers and negotiations, but through practical activity. We must stop trying to speak their language, to be measured in our response, to settle for their compromises and their limits. Even if the occupation at Middlesex gave us only a few moments of something else, it allowed us to see that we can go further and further still, as more and more people are drawn into these struggles. We must attack them in ways that hurt them most, by pushing beyond, by doing things that are unmeasurable, unlimited, uncontrollable, uncountable and unaccountable. And we must always ensure, as the Middlesex philosophy department has failed to do, that we make ‘no measurable contribution'.

For more Mute articles on struggle in education today see: Don't Panic, Organise!

Footnotes

i Although the university announced that the department will close and that there will be no further recruitment, they also decided that they would 'teach the courses out' for students still enrolled in the department.