Closure of the Philosophy and Politics departments at Liverpool University

An interesting development in the cyberstalking case. For some time, one of the preferred outlets of the stalker has been the Philos-L mailing list, which is run out of the Philosophy department at the University of Liverpool. Despite the fact that no bona fide member of that list ever confirmed any of the accusations of the stalker, or said that they had been defrauded by me, the list owner, a Professor of Philosophy at Liverpool, continues to give the stalker free run of the list to spread his or her falsehoods anonymously or under assumed identities. Albeit I submitted early on evidence to the list owner that conclusively disproved the stalker's made-up claims, I am still blocked from responding on the list.

Today now, the “Guardian” newspaper reports that the Philosophy department at the University of Liverpool is to be closed because of poor showings in the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE):

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/liverpool-rae-closures

An article has also appeared on the “Times Higher Education” website:

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=405704&c=2

The research in that department, which runs a mailing list called “Philosophy in Europe”, is of national interest at best, according to the RAE results (a nation-wide peer-review exercise carried out, in this case, by other UK philosophers). This at a university that claims “international excellence” as a whole. The department and its professors are “under-performing” in the words of their own university management. They face “realignment and repositioning, transfer of activity to another higher education institution, and closure”, according to information circulated on Philos-L.

My purpose here is not to gloat about the misfortune of others (or just a little). For me, it is neither here nor there whether there continues to be a Philosophy department at the University of Liverpool (or the mailing list, for that matter). It remains to be hoped, though, that the experience of being at the receiving end of a highly public negative assessment of their own activities and (life time's) work will give the Philos-L owners pause and cause them to think about their active and instrumental role in degrading and vilifying me and SCIS.

Despite their forlorn attempts to explain away the RAE findings, and whatever one may think of that exercise, certainly the RAE assessment is based on significantly more facts and a more objective “truth” than the defamation campaign that has been permitted to go on on that mailing list.

Sadly, a former Senior Research Associate of SCIS, Prof Joseph V. Femia, may also be affected by the developments at Liverpool, as the Politics department equally stands to be axed. The author of an earlier (and more limited) book on anti-democratic thought, Joe Femia (Professor of Political Theory) would have been my doctoral supervisor had I decided, in 2005, to take up an offer to do my doctorate at the University of Liverpool, rather than at Sussex.