Dummett on impact
Well, not actually. But whilst reading Frege – Philosophy of Mathematics the other day, I was struck by the following in the introduction. Written in the early 1990s, it nonetheless speaks to the current idiocy over impact, as well as to the recently announced cuts in HE spending:
British universities are being transformed by people who misunderstand everything about academic work. The transformation is of course merely a part of a transformation of society as a whole. The official stance of the ideologues is that they do not believe in any such thing as society; in point of fact, however, they do not believe in anything else. They are concerned, for example, with the performance of ‘the economy’: not with whether individual people are prospering, but with the economy as a distinguishable system on its own. The successful performance of the economy will grossly enrich some, and deprive others of all hope or comfort: but the aim, if one is not to take a cynical view of it, cannot be either to reward those who scramble to the top of the economic mountain or to punish those who are cast on the scrapheap at its foot, but simply to ensure efficient functioning of the economy as such. The vision which the ideologues have of the successful functioning of the economy or of any other social mechanism is that it works well only if operated by human beings engaged in ruthlessly biting and clawing their way to the top, where they will be able to obtain a disproportionate share of limited rewards. For this purpose, the people so competing with one another should not be encouraged to believe in the good of anything but themselves as individuals; if they were to believe in society as a whole, they might form ideas about protecting the weak or unfortunate that would clog the efficiency of the system. A glance at the universities as they used to be revealed a social sector not functioning in this manner; it therefore obviously could not be functioning efficiently, or justifying the money spent on it, and hence must be transformed in accordance with the model decreed by ideology.
And what Thatcher began, Mandelson seems intent on completing.
