Hertfordshire to Eliminate Philosophy from Its Curriculum

A shame…

The decision to close Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire is distressing and tragic, but it also serves as a cautionary tale about how fragile serious academic environments and opportunities have become in an era when universities increasingly operate as openly corporate entities.
Working with my colleagues at UH, especially Richard Menary and John Lippitt, we successfully built up a strong Philosophy unit there over the course of nearly two decades (I joined UH in 1993). I was appointed Research Leader for UH Philosophy in 1995 and, working with my peers and colleagues, served in that role until 2013. It is fair to say we built up UH Philosophy’s fortunes from scratch.
The UH unit was utterly transformed from its ex-polytechnic, teaching-focused beginnings, with very limited research capacity, into a highly productive and well-regarded philosophy unit in the UK with a strong research ethos and solid standing. This is a true rags-to-riches story – a tale of hard work, long nights, and burning candles at both ends. It is a tale of energy, drive, ambition, and institutional belief in potential. The key resource was not magic money or managerial slogans, but giving talented and ambitious researchers the time needed to conduct serious research.
Despite our best efforts to kick-start things, we only managed to get a 2 in RAE 1996 and the VC expressed disappointment in that result. Yet even then, there was recognition that the unit had genuine prospects. As Paul Coates noted at the time, Philosophy had already begun building substantial momentum in publications, conferences, and research culture, with every prospect of becoming “a significant impact at the national level.” The strategy depended on sustained support and continuity.
Our teaching loads and student numbers were high. We were averaging around 12–13 face-to-face teaching hours per week (out of a possible 18 hours), and our work was spread across two campuses, requiring constant travel. Yet, even under those conditions, the unit flourished because the university made a modest but strategically important decision: to invest selectively in research potential.
Following the disappointing RAE 1996 result, UH invested in Philosophy only modestly – circa £5k per annum. But the strategy mattered more than the scale. We used that funding tactically to relieve our strongest and most promising researchers from teaching in order to maximise the likelihood of producing high-quality research outputs. The underlying idea was simple: if institutions want research excellence, they must create the material conditions under which research can actually occur.
By employing this strategy – alongside networking, international collaborations, and external funding development – UH Philosophy moved from shaky and humble beginnings to achieve impressively stronger results in successive RAEs/REFs, including the remarkable leap of three grades in RAE 2001. It consistently punched above its weight and held its own with traditional universities. Eventually, Philosophy became one of the university’s recognised research strengths and, by 2013, sat among the university’s top-performing research units. This was an extraordinary achievement for a humanities discipline inside a traditionally STEM-focused institution.
The transformation was not confined to research. In 2001, the Philosophy programme was awarded a perfect 24/24 by the QAA after an enormous collective effort to redesign the curriculum and teaching provision from top to bottom. It was the first and only perfect teaching result achieved at UH. Research excellence and teaching excellence were not opposed to one another; they were mutually reinforcing outcomes of a strong intellectual culture.
A major turning point came in 2007, when UH committed to a substantial reinvestment in Philosophy and its developing research culture. That commitment emerged during negotiations surrounding an offer I had received of the Ferens Chair in Philosophy at the University of Hull, which I ultimately declined in order to remain at UH. The resulting investment transformed the unit: six new appointments (including Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Sam Coleman, and Craig Bourne), major expansion, and the recruitment of internationally recognised figures such as Luciano Floridi and Shaun Gallagher. Those appointments dramatically increased the unit’s international standing and intellectual reach.
By 2013, the Philosophy unit had grown from 5 FTE with no senior researchers to 8.4 FTE including 1 Reader and 5 Professors; HDR numbers had increased five-fold; international collaborations and projects had expanded substantially; and the unit had secured over £1.4 million in external research funding.
And yet, within little more than a decade, nearly all of that had disappeared.
Over the following decade, UH Philosophy gradually lost almost all of its professors, shrunk back to a very small team, and was absorbed into wider restructuring processes. In 2024 it was moved into the School of Creative Arts. Now, in 2026, the university has announced the effective closure of Philosophy and other humanities disciplines on financial grounds, with all philosophy teaching set to disappear within two years.
This is the cautionary tale.
The history of UH Philosophy illustrates that serious intellectual cultures are not built top-down through branding exercises or managerial strategies. They are built over decades by committed academics, local leadership, and the sustained grassroots efforts of passionate and strategically savvy individuals willing to invest extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and care into creating and protecting genuine intellectual communities.
Sometimes institutions recognise and support such efforts. Often they do so only after success has already been achieved.
But such cultures can still be dismantled surprisingly quickly through repeated restructurings, short-term financialism, managerial churn, and the erosion of institutional memory.
What took decades to build can be undone in just a few years.
And once such intellectual ecosystems collapse, rebuilding them is vastly harder and often impossible.