The Arts Council’s jobs board recently featured an advert seeking a ‘bright and enthusiastic Research Intern’ to work at the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). As well as a website featuring articles and videos ‘from the world’s leading thinkers,’ the IAI runs HowTheLightGetsIn, a festival in Hay-on-Wye (no relation to the famous literary festival, except for a shared date in June). Alongside recorded debates on ‘the universe, fixity and flux’ and ‘the crisis of the West,’ the IAI website features some bombastic promotional copy, according to which its aim is nothing less than ‘rescuing philosophy’ from an ‘intellectual crisis’ caused by the ‘paradoxes of postmodern culture’. The job description in the advert, describing a role programming speakers for HowTheLightGetsIn, is no less emphatic: ‘Bringing together leading thinkers and theorists across a range of disciplines, you will have the opportunity to engage in and change the public conversation about the big ideas of our time.’
HowTheLightGetsIn is typical of a relatively new kind of weekender: as well as music performances, punters can attend a programme of talks on various bookish topics. If you want to catch Yuval Noah Harari, Aaron Bastani and a DJ set by one half of Groove Armada in a single weekend, then HowTheLightGetsIn is for you. The programme is almost exhaustively capacious. There’s a slot on ‘The Life and Philosophy of Matt Hancock’ – featuring the man himself. Alternatively, you can hear the thoughts of disgraced former Energy Secretary Chris Huhne on the theme: ‘In Search of a Cleaner World.’ But amid this infinite variety, one name crops up repeatedly: Hilary Lawson. In one of several debates which he hosts or participates in, we’re invited to hear ‘post-postmodern philosopher Hilary Lawson lock horns over logic, language and truth’ with highly credentialled academics.
Lawson is the founder and editorial director of the IAI and a director of its parent company, Television and Film Productions plc (TVF). He has something of the air of an ageing rocker: craggy features, thick locks of hair, occasionally sports a leather jacket. According to the careful wording of his Wikipedia page, he ‘began’ a philosophy DPhil at Oxford, but doesn’t seem to have graduated. In fact, if we use Wikipedia as a way to try to find out more about Lawson, one of the first things we notice is that his page is remarkably well-groomed. There’s a lot on there about ‘closure,’ his pet philosophical theory, which apparently ‘shifts the focus of metaphysics away from language and towards an exploration of the tension between openness and closure’ (a review in Philosophy Now of Lawson’s book on the topic, Closure, judged it ‘a quasi-rational concept with little value and no future,’ although Lawson is cited in numerous reputable works of academic philosophy). The discussion page for Lawson’s Wikipedia article, meanwhile, is full of editors complaining that the article is ‘clearly too promotional in character,’ and that it cites too many third-party references which turn out to have been written by Lawson. In response to a request for comment for this article, a representative of the IAI protested that ‘the Wikipedia page is the outcome of many different editors over the years’ and that ‘it would be surprising if someone had not referenced books by Hilary Lawson on his Wikipedia page.’
A more mixed picture emerges from the anonymous employee reviews of the IAI on Glassdoor. The company’s average Glassdoor rating of 3.6 out of 5 isn’t bad, and most of the reviews are glowing: ‘The team is very friendly and welcoming,’ we are told, and ‘The salaries are pretty generous.’ But it’s hard to ignore the more colourful contributions: ‘I felt compelled to do my civic duty to warn you against working here unless you treat your mental health with disdain,’ one reviewer writes. ‘My experience was one of incompetent, vainglorious men and poorly paid, highly capable women running around clearing up their mistakes,’ claims another. Some of the comments complain about Lawson’s leadership, which could allegedly be capricious and overbearing.
The accuracy of the reviews is hard to verify. The IAI’s representative maintained that some of the negative Glassdoor reviews were written by an axe-grinding former employee. On the other hand, some sources alleged that they had felt pressured to write Glassdoor reviews almost as soon as they began work. To that allegation, the IAI’s representative responded that ‘to the company’s knowledge no member of staff has been asked to write a positive review,’ and that a company email reminding employees to write one ‘clearly states that employees should ensure their review is a genuine reflection of their own views.’
Curious about the wide range of opinions on the IAI, I started getting in touch with former employees. As it turns out, there exists a sort of shadow guild of post-IAI people, mostly in their late twenties or thirties: think-tankers, journalists, writers and PhD students, now dispersed but bonded by their collective experience (a recurring theme of their testimonies is a sense of camaraderie between veterans). In the end, I heard from more than 20 former employees who worked at the IAI or its sister organisations between 2012 and 2019. I wanted to find out how a slick outfit, co-signed by national newspapers and a line-up of luminaries, apparently with plenty of perfectly happy employees, could end up being the subject of a whisper network of former staff claiming to be faintly (or sometimes seriously) traumatised. Some say they have been waiting a long time for their alleged experiences to be made public; one said they remained a member of a group chat of former employees that they joked was a ‘support group’ and that they had been waiting ‘for years’ for someone to report on their allegations about the company.
The IAI was recently afforded the necessary permission from Companies House to use the word ‘Institute’ in its name (they applied only after I asked them about it). According to official guidance, that title is reserved for organisations with special public ‘pre-eminence’ and ‘status’; all the more important, then, that they should be transparent and accountable. So, to illuminate the clamorous online debate about the IAI, who better to ask than the people who worked there?
The life cycle of an IAI hire begins with an internship interview at the company’s Islington office. Candidates are mostly young, mostly from elite universities and all desperate to work in the arts. ‘I was living outside of London and was commuting in for interviews, as I was keen to get an arts or humanities-related job,’ one candidate, Sonia*, told me. Interviews open with curve balls: ‘What is reality?’; ‘What would you say if I asked you if numbers existed?’.
