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The administration of Simmons University has said that it is planning to close the school’s Department of Philosophy and end its major program.
Philosophy is one of several departments targeted.
“No decisions are final yet,” reports The Boston Globe, adding that “a final plan will be presented to the university’s board in October after university leaders meet with all departments.”
The university, which is women-only at the undergraduate level (but not for its graduate degrees), is facing financial constraints owed partly to what seems like a very bad deal it made with the online learning company 2U, according to which the company gets 50 to 62 percent of the tuition paid by each student in its online programs. According to the Globe, more than half of Simmons’ graduate students are in such online programs. The contract with 2U was made in 2013 and renewed (!) in 2018 for another 21 years.
Faculty were apparently instructed by the administration not to talk to the press. One professor, speaking anonymously to the Globe, says: “Cutting out the humanities and social sciences is like cutting out the heart and then seeing if the body will still walk.”
The current president of Simmons, Lynn Perry Wooten, has an academic specialization in “crisis leadership.”
The post Philosophy Threatened at Simmons University first appeared on Daily Nous.
The administration of the University of Kent is planning to lay off faculty in its Department of Philosophy and other humanities and arts fields.
Members of the Department of Philosophy sent along the following message:
We are writing to alert readers to the fact that the philosophy department is one of several Arts and Humanities departments presently targeted for compulsory redundancies by the University of Kent.
This is not on the grounds of quality: the philosophy department was ranked 3rd in the UK for overall student satisfaction in the most recent national student survey, and 5th in the UK in terms of GPA in the most recent research assessment (2nd for quality of research outputs). The reasoning is based on finances. We understand that the local union disputes some of the figures being used.
The first round of compulsory redundancies is due to take place in July, with more financial cuts planned for the next academic year.
The union has a petition here.
As well as defending jobs, it highlights a particular concern around an agreement they reached with senior management about redundancies.
We in the philosophy department would very much appreciate your support.
Last fall, Kent’s vice chancellor, Karen Cox, and the university’s executive group, had issued the following statement:
Karen and the Executive Group wish to provide a further specific commitment to all Arts and Humanities staff that there will be no compulsory redundancies as a result of the current review.
The petition provides further information:
The guarantee of no compulsory redundancies was made in October last year in response to UCU [University and College Union] opening a ballot for industrial action. The union did not pursue industrial action because of this commitment. Therefore this broken promise has prevented members from having the opportunity to defend their livelihoods.
The administration in February called for volunteers to retire in exchange for a severance package (details of which are unknown), and has is closing its Brussels campus. The administration cites the cap on tuition fees as a contributing factor, though these caps have not been newly imposed (they’ve been in place for at least five budgeting cycles), as well a “multi-million-pound impact from the number of students not staying with us to finish their studies”. It is unclear how many, if any, administrators in budgeting and marketing will be laid off.
As of the time of this article, the union’s petition, which is still open for signing, has approximately 1500 signatories.
The post Philosophy & Other Humanities Fields at Kent Threatened first appeared on Daily Nous.
The debt ceiling legislation would end the pause on student loan payments on Aug. 30 at the latest.
Written by Hazem Zohny, University of Oxford
Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die?
These questions sound like they have nothing to do with a government budget. These annual events are, after all, conveyed as an endeavour in accounting. They are a chance to show anticipated tax revenues and propose public spending. We are told the name of the game is “fiscal responsibility” and the goal is stimulating “economic growth”. Never do we talk of budgets in terms of sacrificing some lives to save others.
In reality, though, government budgets are a lot like those trains, in philosophical terms. Whether explicitly intended or not, some of us take those trains to better or similar destinations, and some of us will be left strapped to the tracks. That is because the real business of budgets is in distributing death and life. They are exercises in allocating misery and happiness.
Take the austerity policies introduced by the UK government in 2010 and the following years. Studies put the mortality cost of spending cuts between 2010 and 2014 at approximately 150,000 excess deaths. A more recent study suggested that 335,000 excess deaths could be attributed to the austerity of the 2010s.
These are contestable figures – and they cannot draw a direct causal relationship between specific austerity policies and number of deaths. But even if it is impossible to assign an accurate death toll to austerity, it should come as no surprise that reducing welfare spending will reduce, well, welfare. The same is true in reverse. An England-focused study suggests that by increasing healthcare expenditure by 1%, around 300,000 deaths could have been avoided in the wake of 2010 cuts.
This has a sobering implication: knowingly or not, a decision is effectively made to let 300,000 die if healthcare expenditure isn’t increased by 1%.
Similarly, there is a clear link between fuel poverty and premature deaths. It is difficult to derive a precise figure, but it’s almost certain that a government decision not to further subsidise energy bills will trigger otherwise preventable deaths.
There is a truism in all this: resources are limited, and decisions inevitably come with trade-offs and opportunity costs.
For instance, austerity was a response to a severe economic downturn. Recessions reduce how much revenue a government has to spend on services, which leads to the loss of lives and livelihoods. Even for those who don’t suffer in the extreme, life is generally less liveable for many of us. For all we know, the global financial crisis would have (eventually) led to tens of thousands of additional deaths no matter how the government responded.
Budgets are of course hugely complicated, but this is all to show that while it is true that they involve accounting, the morally relevant currency of what is being accounted for is ultimately our wellbeing, including its loss through death.
For instance, assume it is indeed true that 300,000 deaths could be prevented by a 1% increase in healthcare spending. Assume also that using these funds in some other way (such as on education and home insulation) would in the long term prevent far more deaths, or, significantly improve the quality of several million lives.
Suddenly, talk of fiscal responsibility seems to miss the point. We are faced with a much more philosophically loaded debate. It becomes pertinent to say, hang on, just how much extra wellbeing for some do you think can make up for the deaths of 300,000 others? And how sure are you about this?
It starts to become obvious how value judgments infuse and implicitly guide these fiscal decisions that, unwittingly or not, involve weighing up certain lives against others, present lives against future ones, and proxies for wellbeing (such as job creation) against others (such as preventing premature deaths).
The risk of the language of “boosting the economy” is that it gives these monumental decisions in ethics a veneer of being value-free budgetary exercises in “following the evidence”, stopping us from seeing how the economic sausage is actually made.
Of course, evidence-based policy is better than unevidenced policy. What is missing is values-transparent policy, and that starts with the philosophical task of laying bare the precise value judgments that go into constructing what we’re told are “good economic outcomes”.
While the Office of Budget Responsibility independently assesses the economic credibility of the budget, no corresponding institution works to uncover its ethical assumptions and value trade-offs. Welfare economists and ethicists need to forge a new relationship that initiates and guides the uncomfortable public conversation of how government budgets inevitably trade-off lives and livelihoods, now and against the future.
Equally crucial, by instituting norms that encourage uncovering all the value-judgments smuggled beneath the guise of sanitised fiscal and economic talk, we might reduce the chances of opportunistic politicians gambling with millions of livelihoods by redirecting the train in the name of one ideology or another.
Hazem Zohny, Research Fellow in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Chancellor will pledge in budget to create 12 investment zones in eight areas ‘to drive business investment’
Tech hubs clustered around universities in England will benefit from almost £1bn in extra funding as part of a range of measures in the budget on Wednesday to boost business investment in the regions.
The chancellor will make the pledge to create 12 investment zones in eight areas “to drive business investment and level up” the country, each backed with £80m of government funding.
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Programs in philosophy, theology and religion studies, history, mathematics, sociology, literature, and art would at Marymount University in Virginia would all be eliminated if a proposal from the administration is approved by the school’s board of trustees.
While all of the details of the program closures are not known with certainty, they would mean that no students could major in those subjects. Additionally capstone courses and senior seminars in those subjects would be unlikely to continue. Jobs may be on the line, too. One faculty member said, “The administration contends that the humanities will continue to be the foundation of a Marymount education. But without a program in which a professor is based, we don’t know what protections our tenure gives us. The faculty handbook specifies that tenure doesn’t protect faculty when a program is retrenched or eliminated.”
The justification for the proposal is unclear, as well. As one faculty member put it, “Our concerns are that eliminating these programs would only harm the institution (since students who want to major in the humanities wouldn’t come here) and there would be no net financial benefit. There are also reputational harms to the institution.”
This post will be updated with further details as they become available.
UPDATE: There’s a petition you can sign asking the board of trustees to “strongly reconsider the proposal to move forward with these program cuts” here.
UPDATE (2/24/23. 3:58pm): According to a faculty member at Marymount, the cuts were approved by the Board of Trustees today. “No more philosophy majors.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul presented a state budget that included proposals that would increase the number of charter schools, along with the funding they received.
Tesla has quietly raised the price of its best-selling Model Y crossover. As of Saturday, the automaker’s US website lists the Long Range and Performance models at $54,990 and $57,990, respectively. For the former, that represents a $2,000 increase from the all-time low it hit when Tesla dramatically cut prices in the middle of January. As for the Performance variant, it’s currently $1,000 more than it was after last month’s price adjustment.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, the price hikes come after the Biden administration this past Friday modified eligibility criteria related to the $7,500 federal tax credit to treat more vehicles as SUVs rather than sedans. Before the change, it was possible to get the full $7,500 Inflation Reduction Act incentive on the five-seat Model Y, but you had to configure the vehicle in a way so that it fell under the $55,000 sedan threshold. Now, all Model Y variants, including the Performance model, fall under the $80,000 SUV ceiling.
The automaker did not say if it increased Model Y pricing in response to Friday’s announcement. Following the January price cut, Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn said the move was partly an effort to ensure more of the company's cars fell under the $55,000 threshold. With the Model Y now comfortably under the $80,000 limit, Tesla has more freedom to price the vehicle as it sees fit.
Side view of a white Tesla Model Y, parked on the street, of a city. In the background a building.
Kentucky, United States - February 27, 2022: Side view of a white Tesla Model Y, parked on the street, of a city. In the background a building.
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