Abstract

I argue that philosophy department should be reorganised: they should be built up around strong research groups in restricted fields. Another way to think of this: departments should model themselves on research centres. Members of such research centres / departments would teach outside their area of competency. At the BA level teaching can remain as it is, but those teaching classes will often be teaching outside the area of expertise. That is not a problem. PhD supervision would be within the restricted fields that the department specialises in. In other words: I reject the zoo-model of academic departments where you get ‘one of each’, so that all classes can be taught by someone working on the topic of that class.