radical philosophy

A is for apocalypse

David J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame , Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099 578 6.

Amidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent of the …

Subscriber Offer on The Great University Gamble

Radical Philosophy and independent progressive publisher Pluto Press are happy to offer a promotional discount to all our Full subscribers for The Great University Gamble by Andrew McGettigan.

Andrew has been a regular contributor to Radical Philosophy, writing in recent issues on the changes to Higher Education in England and Wales. To celebrate the launch …

Lines in class

Andrew McGettigan’s analysis of the financial transformations of higher education (‘Who Let the Dogs Out? The Privatization of Higher Education’, RP 174) is important for comprehending the complexity of the changes universities are undergoing and their implications. As he argues, ‘it is mass higher education in England’ that is now under attack and …

The Right To Protest

As Quebec erupts over plans to increase tuition fees by the equivalent of £200, and twelve people (including Professor Joshua Clover) who protested against a campus bank at University of California–Davis begin a trial that could see them imprisoned for eleven years and fined $1 million each, what of the scores of people …

Who let the dogs out?

In April last year, I framed my article on ‘New Providers’ in relation to the delay surrounding the publication of the government’s White Paper for Higher Education (HE). That was caused by a combination of factors, but chiefly the need to fix a hole in the proposals for student loan financing; and additional …

Pirate Radical Philosophy

Pirate … from the Latin pirata (-ae; pirate)… transliteration of the Greek piratis (pirate; πειρατής) from the verb pirao (make an attempt, try, test, get experience, endeavour, attack; πειράω). … In modern Greek… piragma: teasing [πείραγμα] …pirazo: tease, give trouble [πειράζω].1

Much has been written about the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and the associated events known, …

Of course… however

Michael Bailey and Des Freedman, eds, The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, Pluto Press, London, 2011. 200 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 74533 191 1.

Matthew Charles

The conceptual poles that orient the collection of essays edited by Des Freedman and Michael Bailey in The Assault on Universities are, …

Student problems (1964)

What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?* Essentially, the Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour. Marx applied these principles in the analysis of …

Philosophy for children

A well-orchestrated public relations campaign led primarily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reasoning’ a central feature of the National …

‘New Providers’

At the end of 2009, the Labour government commissioned a review panel, led by John Browne, formerly chief executive of the London-based oil and gas multinational BP, to report on the financing of higher education in England. Its basic remit was to devise a funding scheme that would open up more undergraduate degree …

Against Education Cuts

Reports from the protests by those campaigning against the cuts to educations, including Nina Power on the centrality of women.

The performative without condition

‘Responsibility’ and the homonymy of autonomy

‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford.1 Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like this by Valérie Pécresse, French Minster for Higher Education and Research, in January …

Dossier On Universities

The University and the Plan: Reflections from Vienna

The immediate causes of the current protests by students, lecturers and academic researchers in Europe are contingent; they are directed at individual educational institutions or administrators, and the demands they make are capable of being met over the short term.* But on a second level, one that …

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education

Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the art market. The articulation of the question in …

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had always ʻhauntedʼ him, this, he said, took …

Strategies for language?

All their play becomes fruitful

The central tenet of Charles Fourierʼs theory was the promise of universal happiness and social unity through a radical revision of manʼs relationship to labour. Vehemently opposed to both the violence of mass insurrection and the hypocrisies and corruption of burgeoning industrial capitalism, he dreamed of a pacific cultural revolution that would emerge …

Compulsory downshifting

Women philosophers and the RAE

Dearing revalued