Their espresso is best passed over in silence, but that’s probably only to be expected. What I hadn’t really bargained for was just how depressing the view out to the square is now. Even on a bright autumn morning, it looked as scruffy and run down as the coffee shop. This was never a very wealthy place: but there was once some small domestic grace to the surrounding mostly nineteenth century buildings. But now many of them are quite disfigured with the gross shop-fronts of cheap shops, and others look unkempt. There’s a particularly vile effort by the HBSC bank, which gives a special meaning to “private affluence and public squalor” — only an institution with utter contempt for its customers and their community could plonk such a frontage onto a main street. Where once even small-town branches of banks were solid imposing edifices in miniature, with hints of the classical orders here and a vaulted ceiling there, now they are seem to take pride in having all the visual class of a here-today, gone-tomorrow betting shop. How appropriate.

And the square itself (like so many other urban spaces in England) seems to have been repaved on the cheap, with the kind of gimcrack blockwork that always seems, a few years in, to settle into random waves of undulation. The bleakly open space cries out for more trees to surround it, and inviting wooden seats. But no, on non-market days it is just the inevitable carpark.

Next to coffee shop, still on the square, a horrible looking cafe is plastered outside with pictures of greasy food. I walk a little further down the road before driving on. It is a visual mess. Even Marks and Spencer manages a particularly inappropriate shout of a shop-front, as sad-looking charity shops cringe nearby. Could anyone feel proud or even fond of this street as it now is?

A couple of hundred yards away there are lovely water-meadows by the bridge over the river, and fancy residential developments. On the outskirts of town the other side, as the road leaves towards Cambridge, there is a lot more quite expensive-looking new housing (though heaven knows how it will seem a few years hence). But the town centre itself is in a sorry state. “Most things are never meant,” wrote Larkin when he foresaw something of this in ‘Going, going’. And we — I mean my generation, for it is we who were in charge — surely didn’t mean this, for the hearts of old country towns like St. Neots (or the larger next town,  Bedford) to become such shabby, ugly, run-down places. But it has happened apace, all over the country, and on our watch.

Academics will study the “big society” as a priority, following a deal with the government to secure funding from cuts.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) will spend a “significant” amount of its funding on the prime minister’s vision for the country, after a government “clarification” of the Haldane principle – a convention that for 90 years has protected the right of academics to decide where research funds should be spent.

Under the revised principle, research bodies must work to the government’s national objectives …

Cue a great deal of angry comment about the dirigiste ambitions of our paymasters (not to mention comparisons with Stalinist direction of research in the eastern block).

Cue in turn a vigorous if not entirely literate rebuttal from the AHRC:

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) unconditionally and absolutely refutes the allegations reported in the Observer … We did NOT receive our funding settlement on condition that we supported the ‘Big Society’, and we were NOT instructed, pressured or otherwise coerced by BIS or anyone else into support for this initiative.

Ok, suppose that they’ve not been coerced. Still, off their own bat, they seem to have rather enthusiastically gone along with talk of the Big Society. Far from keeping at arms length from the passing whims of a making-it-up-as-they-go-along government, the AHRC’s Delivery Plan 2011-15 repeatedly refers to the Big Society (you can search the PDF). Thus …

The contribution of AHRC plans to the ‘Big Society’ agenda are described in section 2 …

In line with the Government’s ‘Big Society’ agenda … the AHRC will continue to support …

And so on. Their website also hosts a document called ‘Connected Communities OR “Building the Big Society”’ quite explicitly headlining quotes from Cameron.

A spokesman rather pathetically says that the delivery plan had referred to the Big Society ‘to help policymakers understand the concept of Connected Communities’. Really? And are we really to believe that the connected communities project would be looking just the same if Labour were still in power?

I’ve not myself had direct dealings with AHRC apparatchiks (except for a storm in a teacup over some past remarks on this blog, which didn’t impress me). But those I know who are rather closer to such things, at one level or another, have often expressed exasperation or contempt. I’ve heard few good words. And the recent chatter on facebook and twitter and in comment threads suggests that, very widely, the AHRC is indeed held in pretty low esteem.

Now that might, for all I really know, be all terribly unfair (I’ve better things to do than spend a lot of time thinking about the AHRC, the REF, and the likes). Maybe the AHRC really are trying to make the best of a bad job, without undue pandering to their political masters. Maybe. Let’s be really charitable (humour me!). But still, how can the AHRC apparatchiks not know how very low — unfairly or otherwise — their standing is among the academics whose interests (or at least, the interests of whose subjects) they are supposed to serve? And if they do know, how can they not have realized that spattering talk about the Big Society through their documents would only serve — unfairly or otherwise — to confirm the prejudices of all those who already are primed to regard them as toadying third-raters with brains addled by management-speak? Only by being politically dim to a rather staggering degree.

So even taking the most charitable line (which to be honest I don’t), this doesn’t bode too well for us.

PS: I’ve just noted that the always estimable Iain Pears has added his thoughtful two-pennyworth on all this.

When we lived in Sheffield, we were spoilt by being able to go to see the Lindsays in their prime (and we also got to see other quartets visiting the series of concerts they organized, from the likes of the Tokyo Quartet, down to new young ensembles just starting out). Coming to Cambridge we missed all that a great deal. We tried early on going to see the Endellion, the quartet in residence here, but really didn’t enjoy the experience. But perhaps we were disposed to find fault and find them over-rated: and perhaps we were too swayed, as well, by the marked differences between the Sheffield occasions and the Cambridge concert in ways that were no fault of the quartet — the very much less intimate setting of the concert hall here, the stiffness of the antique audience.

Well, a fair number of years further on, with various people encouraging us to give them another chance, we went to hear the Endellion again last night. The audience was as stiff as before. And as for the music? … “lacklustre”, said Mrs LogicMatters. You can tell she is kinder than I am.

They played the Haydn Op 33, no. 1, lacklustre indeed at the outset, and only just about getting into it by the last movement. Then Shostakovich’s 8th quartet (which is a quite startling piece, and admittedly their best effort of the night — but Mrs LM had heard the Takacs Quartet play this quartet while we were in NZ, and she thought them in an entirely different class). Then after the interval the First Rasumovsky. Sigh. This was really pretty thin and unconvincing stuff (especially from the leader), with even the aching slow movement failing to grip the soul. If they’d been a recording they’d have been switched off long before the end.

Or is this unfair? I’ve just been listening again to the Vegh Quartet playing the Beethoven; heart-stopping eloquence. And within reach I’ve more stunning recordings by the Busch Quartet and the Hungarian Quartet, and equally stunning newer recordings by the Lindsays in two versions and the Takacs (not to mention three or four other pretty good versions). So is it that, those paradigms having become so  familiar, I’ve just become primed to expect almost impossibly much from a live concert? (Does the easy availability of the best performances of the last seventy or more years tend to spoil our ability to enjoy anything but the extraordinary?)

I really don’t think it is that at all. I’ve been, for example, to concerts by young quartets who perhaps have quite a way to go, yet which have been just wonderful — where you are swept along for a couple of hours by their vision of the music, by their intense desire to communicate with their audience, by the sense of a shared journey. But last night was not even close to that. The Endellion remained at a distance, bowed stiffly in their tail coats, and walked off-stage just leaving me deeply disappointed.

I gave my usual six word response: “No proper fee, no proper report”.

Of course, if the proposal had been bang on topics that I currently am tolerably up to speed on and from someone whose work I already know well and admire, I’d no doubt have done the job (it would have been a very much quicker task, and might help keep up activity in areas I really care about). But then, if that’s other people’s policy too for selecting when they are prepared to write reports, grant awarding bodies are getting a pretty skewed set of  views on proposals. I’d have thought they would have wanted reports written with a bit of distance. They should be prepared to pay decent fees to get them.

Still, that’s not why it is proposed that the department be closed down. It hasn’t anything to do with reputation, supposed research quality (a good score on the last RAE), student numbers, or the like. Indeed, philosophy is the top-rated subject in the university.  No, as a letter from members of the department says,

The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close the programmes was ‘simply financial’, and based on the fact that the University believes that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources to other subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.   …  In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent research reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the University.

So now you know. It indeed seems the ‘latest example of mindless behavior by out-of-control academic bureaucrats’ (to borrow the words of Leiter Report, where you’ll find more info), acting in such a way to destroy the very sense of a university as a self-governing academic community.

Sides have to be taken. In this fight I’m with the Bullshit Brigade.

Q: So, it’s the most obvious question to ask really: what exactly is philosophy?

A: 99% of people who call themselves philosophers are employed by universities, in the UK. And they’re really employed to teach the history of philosophy or the theory of philosophy but they’re not philosophers as such, they’re commentators on philosophy that other people have done, on the whole. …

What utter ignorant bollocks. When my colleagues wrestle as it might be with the philosophical foundations of set theory, or how we manage to think about the non-existent, or the foundations of political liberalism, or on the nature of moral judgement (to pick a few local enthusiasms), they are doing philosophy, trying to get it right, trying to push things on. Of course they engage with what others have said, but not as commentators-from-the-sidelines but as fellow participants in the ongoing conversation of philosophy. They are most certainly philosophers as such.

At a time when humanities disciplines are depressingly undervalued and misunderstood, and indeed under some threat, it does my blood pressure no good to have the likes of the crashingly ignorant de Botton trying to piss on us as well.

Inside the front cover, there’s still the June 1970 pencilled stock date of Heffers (the wonderful warren of a bookshop that used to be in Petty Cury), and the price, 149 shillings. I guess it is, relatively speaking, the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. Going by the retail price index, that’s about £87: relative to academic pay, rather more. But it is a unique classic (and already established as such when I bought it a few years after publication); it is almost 500 pages; and the costs of production must have been enormous.

Zip forward to the present day. My young colleague Ben Colburn has just published an elegantly written and exceedingly interesting slim volume Autonomy and Liberalism. In pages, it is about a third of the length of Hartley Rogers, in words very much less than that: and the production costs were minimal given Ben had to send them an electronic file to their detailed specifications. Routledge are charging a quite absurd and shaming £70 (yes seventy pounds).

Which is, as the youff say, simply taking the piss.

The content of the meeting (the take-home message, as they say ) could have been put in a five line e-mail.

If members of the university admin staff — of course, the one conspicuously growing body in the university — stood in King’s Parade tearing up tenners*, academics (and everyone else) would rightly be incensed. So why the hell do we put up with this kind of thing?

*For my mystified non-UK readers, a tenner is a ten pound note!

Ye gods, what is the world coming to?

Once upon a time, when the world was a bit younger, there was a comfortable tea room in the basement, with proper wooden furniture, and proper tea, and proper home-made cakes (made, it seemed, by proper grannies). There you could while away the time, and meet friends, and talk philosophy, or plot the revolution, or flirt, or all three, as the occasion demanded.

But then the tea room was moved and it all went plastic. And the coffee-flavoured beverage became vile, and the cakes beneath description. Now even the Earl Grey has to be drunk out of horrible paper cups. What was a place of some homely comfort — a happy escape from the Borgesian infinity of bookstacks above — now has all the bleak charm of an airport waiting room in one of RyanAir’s more unlovely small destinations. No doubt it saves pennies. But it means you just no longer want to pop over to the Library for tea — and so those chance meetings, those happenstance conversations, those quick browsings, that leaven the academic grind and spark new ideas, won’t happen.

Heck, I’m coming over all Roger Scruton.

As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: “What or who is an atheist?” If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group.

Eh? Where on earth has that “or meaning” come from? In what coherent sense of “meaning” does an atheist have to deny meaning?

It gets worse. Eventually a lot worse.

If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion? The first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America separates church and state. Why are their beliefs exempt?

That is so mind-bogglingly inept it is difficult to believe that Ruse means it seriously. Does Ruse really, really, think that the separation of church and state means that no scientific fact can be taught if it happens to be inconsistent with some holy book or religious dogma?

Ruse is upset by the stridency of Dawkins and others, and there is indeed a point to be argued here. But it is ironic that philosophers often complain that Dawkins misrepresents too many practising Christians (or Muslims, or whatever). For related misrepresentations — if that’s what they are — are to be found in more or less any philosophy of religion book. I blogged here a while back about the Murray/Rea introduction, and remarked then about the unlikely farrago of metaphysical views it foisted upon the church-goer, views which have precious little to do with why you actually go to evensong or say prayers for dying, and which indeed deserve to be well Dawkinsed.