Michael Otsuka (UCL) writes about bizarre new rules at UCL and how they would have applied if Professor Rawls had taught at London:
John Rawls managed to write at least one book that deserves to be placed alongside Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, and Rousseau's Social Contract. He also devoted himself to the careful supervision of the doctoral work of a stunning proportion of the next generation's best moral and political philosophers.
Under the new professorial banding criteria that the Provost at University College London has just approved, Rawls would, however, have been consigned to the lowest (full) professorial rank and therefore would not have advanced more than £10,000 beyond the (full) professorial minimum. This is because he did not put the writing of A Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism, or the supervision of his doctoral students, on hold in order to find the time to meet at least two of the following three criteria:
(i) ‘Substantial engagement with national or international partners [e.g., Government Departments, NGOs, or the Media] in the public dissemination of information to the benefit of the community, or the population at large or to the commercial sector’;
(ii) ‘Active, ongoing leadership of review (or development of) the curriculum or teaching/assessment methodologies or the management of teaching within’ his university;
(iii) ‘A successful and effective contribution to the achievement of [his university’s] strategic goals beyond the area of research and teaching (for example in widening participation, in implementing the International Strategy, furthering equality and diversity or [his university’s] Capital campaign internally to [his university] or through negotiating complex partnerships, representing [his university] on matters of key importance overseas or in the local community or through fundraising)’.
At Harvard, by contrast, Rawls was promoted to the highest academic rank -- that of University Professor (of which there were only eight such professorships at the time of his
promotion in 1979).
In fact, the vast majority of the world’s best philosophers would be placed in the lowest professorial band at University College London unless they devoted significantly less time to their research and teaching (as opposed to the review or management of teaching) and more time to management and popularizing for which they have no special aptitude.
At a meeting, the Provost justified these criteria as a means of ensuring that the ‘selfish researcher’ is not able to rise up the professorial ranks. I guess Rawls’s problem was that he was just too selfish. All he ever did was write great philosophy and form the next generation.
Whatever one's view of Rawls (there are, as we have noted, dissenters), it seems utterly mad to substitute PR showmanship for academic excellence as a criterion for promotion, at least at a serious university. What do readers, in the UK or elsewhere, make of this development? Is this kind of foolishness spreading to other schools in the UK?
