What’s the point of having a Philosophy department in an American University?

Harry: right on. But right now it’s so very difficult to make this argument institutionally because, especially in state schools, ‘having lots of majors’ is bureaucratic shorthand for ‘being useful to students who want to get a job when they graduate’. Having no majors must mean students don’t see any employment value added–at least to administrators who need to quantify outcomes to justify budget allocations.

Yet ironically, many of the same schools under budget pressure trying to reduce the value of a department to its worth in the marketplace also have some form of enrollment-based funding. So departments not only feel they need to have lots of majors, they also feel like they need to draw in as many non-majors to certain courses as they can. This effectively puts departments into competition with one another, not just for majors, but also for instructional units generally. And administrators often build this factor into their assessments as well: how many service courses does your department provide the school?

On this point Bok’s finding is therefore a bit questionable. What we really have in research universities is a two-tiered system: some courses for majors only (the ones with meat), and some courses that serve as gen eds or proficiency requirement courses for nonmajors. Some of these courses (like the sciences) are still substantive, but many of them are either taught at a level that should have been covered in high school, like composition and languages, or are mostly fluff, like the ‘Religion and Star Trek’ course a friend of mine in religious studies taught some years back while we were in grad school. And as it turns out, a department even with relatively few majors can hang on quite a while if their courses serve a large nonmajor population–like English/rhetoric, foreign languages again, and math.

But how many research universities require a substantial number of students to take a philosophy course as such? I don’t think our business students are required to take ethics in the philosophy department here at Illinois, and I think there is one ethics course for engineers there. I doubt that will suffice to protect them when our college starts to look for targeted reductions.

A number of philosophy courses meet general education requirements at Illinois, too–but they are options, because the way the school has written the requirement in question, courses in both history or philosophy can meet it. Many students spend four or more years here without ever taking a philosophy course. (Of course, I’m sure history loses seats from students who show up having taken the advanced-placement high-school exams in American and European history, just as political science loses seats because of the American Government AP exam. So there are not a few students who finish their degree without ever having taken a history or a philosophy course in college.)

It is entirely un-obvious why many departments should continue to exist (and some of the most un-obvious graduate huge numbers of majors)

Absolutely agree with this – there are sooooooo many terrible economics courses out there.

I think I will also join ogmb’s slight harrumph on #7 – business degrees may cover such mucky matters as the optimal scheduling of hamburger deliveries and the psychology of buying pants, but we are absolutely chocker with questions whose answers are not known with certainty by anyone and unless “higher order cognition” is defined specifically so as to refer to the abstract (which I don’t think it can be since education is just as intrinsically practical a matter as business), I think we have that too.

(I’d also tentatively venture that in several subfields of philosophy, the problem appears to be that absolutely everyone knows with absolute certainty that they’re right and all the others are wrong).

What I can’t tell is whether daniel is making fun of me at 8.

Responding to 7 and 10 (not the parenthesis, the only problem with which is the use of “tentatively” which is either disingenuous or naive….): I think that’s fair enough, and I really should have been more careful. I will say, though, that the many business students I talk to complain i) that they never write papers and ii) that they are taught a lot of information which they are expected to spit back in exams and iii) that group-based work is organised in such a way that a large part of the work often falls on the more diligent students. Some business students hate the uncertainty in my course, others love it, but most that talk to me say it is novel. That said, I’ve explored with them the group work that they do, and it always seems more interesting to me than to them, and I’ve learned a fair bit from talking to them about how to introduce more opportunities for higher order cognition into my course. So, apologies about that.

I don’t know what is typical, but I recently did a rough calculation that over the past 8 years more than 80 percent of the students I have taught have not been actual or prospective philosophy majors. My review of my department’s enrollments a couple of years ago (making various plausible assumptions) yeilded about 60-70 percent non-majors.

Well, I don’t teach business ethics (in fact hardly anyone does round here): they have an ethics requirement and can fulfill it in various ways: contemporary moral issues is much the most popular way of meeting it (causing my department lots of problems because demand is high, but we usually get no additional funding for expanding places to meet demand). One reason I don’t teach business ethics is my suspicion that that Daniel is right.

Absolutely agree with this – there are sooooooo many terrible economics courses out there.

As someone with a graduate training in economics, I have to agree. First of all, undergraduate training in economics is of very little use in modern-day graduate school. Knowledge of economics at an undergraduate level is so superficial to produce any meaningful training or understanding of economics. Some of the worse “economic” reasonings come from those attracted to the field after having only introductory or intermediate level economics.

formal logic in philosophy classes

I had forgotten this, but a working knowledge of predicate calculus and the tableau method enables you to burn through the “critical thinking” section of the GMAT business school entrance exam, embarrassingly quickly (no exaggeration – it was an hour-long section, and forty minutes is a looong time to sit in silence because you weren’t allowed to leave early) and with 100% accuracy.

Harry, shouldn’t the post be titled “What’s the point of having a Philosophy department [at an American] University?” since your explanation is so tied up with the major-minor system?

Hmm… second or third hand knowledge of business school ethics-related instruction sometimes makes it sound as if instructors occasionally say, “If you leave this class believing that the law says business people are required to shaft everyone they do business with, I will not have done my job,” and then proceed to characterize the law as requiring exactly that, in copious detail. Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem an adequate approach–it seems very confusing.

I’d be worried that there is a causal connection you might be missing. If your university did not permit students to major in philosophy, would you be able to offer mid-and-upper level courses, or would you be forced to offer only introductory level courses with no prerequisites? At most places, those mid-and-upper level courses are filled by interested non-majors (or minors), but the courses exist in part so majors can fulfill their requirements.

Understand, I don’t think the point of any major should be to prepare one for grad school, let alone philosophy. I guess I’m just saying that my reaction to this proposal differs based on whether I think the result is no philosophy major, but lots of students getting to take interesting 200-level and up class, or no philosophy major, and lots of survey courses designed to fill gen ed requirements. And I suspect the latter is more likely.

Philosophy can be a good minor even for those who don’t want to major in it, and those students would still need upper-level classes.

“It is entirely un-obvious why many departments should continue to exist (and some of the most un-obvious graduate huge numbers of majors); and one might have thought that it was a good idea even in normal times to review the justifications of their existence.”

Why? For what possible reason, other than creeping managerialism, should a long-standing university department like Philosophy have to justify its existence?

To forestall some possible objections ad hom, I’m not a philosopher. I’m not even an academic. But that sentence is a lot like a worker at a factory saying “Well, you know, normally we get a living wage. But have we justified that? The bosses need us to justify our existence, and surely once we participate in the process in good faith, they’ll see how useful we are.”

I really don’t know where to start on this one, and based on previous interactions I suspect that this is one of those CT topics that results in threats of banning. But this described interaction is all wrong. The university has a Philosophy department because otherwise, rightly, the public does not consider it to be a real university, and only students who can’t afford anything else go there.

A mission statement is different — though talking about “our mission” is creeping managerialism too — because it might result in some change, within the department, of the balance between courses for majors and courses for non-majors. But combining it with calls for justification is wrong. In 21st century America, things are only justified if management is seeking an excuse for cutting them. The athletics department will never have to justify itself.

Having a Philosophy professor be willing to justify Philosophy departments fills me with the same sense of confidence that I get from having Democratic leadership willing to look for bipartisan solutions with Republicans. Certainly, as a politically active person, my response to that within the context of state budgetary politics would be “All right, burn down the Philosophy department, I don’t care. Let’s use the money for someone who really wants it.”

It’s one of those tricky catch-22s, isn’t it? Philosophy, after all, is supposed to be a guide to life. Much as the study of literature was supposed, when it was introduced not so very long ago [compared to the study of philosophy] to help people capture some essences of modern life.

Every humanities discipline has, somewhere in its origins, the claim to be what one needs to understand to operate well in life. Yet for so many of their practitioners, the idea of justifying themselves has become taboo, apparently? A hostile observer could take that as many things, including a literally unjustifiable sense of entitlement, a disconnection from the real lives and concerns of the people they are paid to teach, and a near-dictionary definition of the term ‘up themselves’.

#12 the many business students I talk to complain (…) that they are taught a lot of information which they are expected to spit back in exams

Like dsquared I’m a bit jaded about those claims by instructors that their classes do in fact challenge students to think on their feet rather than “spit back” pre-approved packages of knowledge because I spent a significant part of my life in business schools (on both sides of the fence). But I don’t think this kind of self-serving attitude is exclusive to business schools, that’s why I advise against using this kind of argument to bolster claims of academic relevance. It’s just simply a rather vacuous statement and more often than not false even if made in full sincerity. The Thompson’s violinist thread was just a point in case, where the ostensible claim was that it should teach students to question their beliefs, but the not-very-well-disguised goal was to get a certain political point across. The step from there to punishing students when they “don’t get the point” is often a very short one. Quite simply, any instructor teaches a certain set of accepted tools and expects their students to apply this toolset to practical problems, and the philosophy department doesn’t differ in kind from business, engineering or law school in that regard. It might differ in degree, depending on the instructor’s willingness to accept alternative approaches, but that’s often something that depends on the individual instructor and not on the institutional environment.

#18 a working knowledge of predicate calculus and the tableau method enables you to burn through the “critical thinking” section of the GMAT business school entrance exam, embarrassingly quickly

Actually, the GMAT is still more demanding than the GRE, which largely depends on vocabulary testing for its verbal part.

What does a minor usually entail?

It varies a fair amount, but typically it involves about 5 philosophy classes or so total (as opposed to about 10 for a major). Some minors also have some sort of distribution requirements, e.g., you have to have a certain number of upper-division classes, or at least one ethics and one metaphysics/epistemology class. Most philosophy departments try to make the minor quite flexible so that students can easily opt for doing one around their major requirements.

Harry,

While I agree with much of what you say, I think your presentation elides an important distinction between different kinds, and different contexts, of demands for justification. As someone who’s taken a long and somewhat indirect path through graduate school, I’ve had numerous occasions to reflect on what is worthwhile about philosophy as an academic institution – both for myself and for those who are asked to pay to maintain it (esp students and taxpayers). To the extent that we altogether fail to reflect on such matters, we’re falling short both as educators and as philosophers.

But the attacks on the humanities (or academia more generally), exemplified by the developments in PASSHE you start with, are not requests for this sort of considered reflection. You gave only the last part of Dr. Slavin’s comment in the linked article. The prior paragraph provides the context – part of what makes the demand for justification such a slap in the face is that it is based on an arbitrary numeric criteria. Those who fall on the upper side of the criterion need not justify their existence, nor, apparently, do the administrators making such demands.

Such invidious distinctions change the question from, “Education is important business, so let us discuss together the what, how, and for whom we should be focusing our efforts,” to “Money is tight, and it doesn’t look like what you do is all that important – show me I’m wrong or hit the unemployment line.”

engels @33–

I believe Aaron Preston fairly demolished that view–the view that philosophy is completely otherwise to the fundamental question of “how should I live my life?”–in Analytic Philosophy: History of an Illusion. Questions of right living have been tied up with philosophy from the get-go: after all, what else was Socrates talking to Euthyphro about? (See also: Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and so forth.)

(s/b Mario)

The other big thing I found from philosophy classes was that after doing a year of moral philosophy, you become pretty good at inventing colourful but ultimately sophistic and tendentious analogies aimed at presenting a previously-decided conclusion to other people in as favourable a light as possible. Which is an amazingly useful skill in a management career.

Whatever else they are, colleges and universities are a means by which civilizations reproduce themselves in each new generation. From this perspective, the question becomes whether philosophy should be part of our cultural capital. Perhaps we would like to dispense with it. After all, philosophy probably doesn’t make people better workers, and it certainly doesn’t make them more tractable inmates of this minimum-security prison of a country. It encourages the belief that justice is something different than administration and that business and medical ethics might be something besides public relations, i.e. something obligatory rather than profitable. Along with the other liberal arts, it subverts the dominant value system by providing a non-economic basis for self-respect. You probably don’t wind up with Stoics immune to fate, but you may get people who simply don’t feel an imperative need to be rich.

I can only think of “If I didn’t, someone else would” as being a common business-ethics question with a genuine philosophical controversy attached to it?

Even ethical, non-corporate, flesh and blood persons often spend the best part of their days working to satisfy corporate needs, and can only behave ethically after work as a sort of hobby.

Does moral theory corrupt youth?

I’m not sure what your point is. I meant that arguably philosophy should be “owned” by academic philosophers–I’m less sure that literature or even history is best owned within academia, and for that matter it isn’t obvious that the total capture of science by universities would promote its advance.

The answer is that a university is supposed to expose people to a broad range of kinds of learning

I’ll play devil’s advocate here. I can get that by reading, say, the NY Review of Books. What (in most fields) I largely can’t get outside of the academy is at least the beginning of real mastery of a particular field of intellectual inquiry. The latter builds intellectual “muscles” that aren’t exercised at all by mile-wide-inch-deep “exposure”. And I believe those muscles can be of permanent value even for students who don’t go on to graduate study in their major. Therefore in my view the major IS by far the most valuable part of a university education, the most useful aspect of “exposure” coming in the freshman year as an aid to deciding what to major in.

In my state, Texas, we just revised the thresholds and the consequences for low-producing programs:
Associates and Bachelors levels: at least 5 graduates per year
Master’s: at least 3 graduates per year
Doctoral: at least 2 graduates per year

Consequences for being labeled “low-producing” include program consolidation and closure, as well as a chance to revise and improve the program, depending on circumstances and what the institution decides is the best course.

Given the budget cuts Texas is facing in the next biennium, it’s no surprise that there is a renewed interest in production standards. Gives everyone a reason to look closely at programs that have been on the books a long time, but produce little.

ogmb — I think my policy from now on will be that accusations and insinuations of bad faith are fine, but only when done non-anonymously.

engels is right.

I don’t have time to explain what I do in my course in great detail; but regular readers will have a flavour of it. We cover issues in the ethics of parenting, the ethics of education, the ethics of the gendered division of labour, abortion, all with readings and discussions that are aimed at getting students to think about trade offs in situations where something of value willl have to be sacrificed, both at the personal level and at the level of social choices.

I agree that some of the language I’ve used is sub-optimal, unnecessarily rude to other disciplines, and that I have limited evidence about what goes on in other disciplines. I am grateful to those of you who have pointed that out politely and without impuning my integrity (that’s aimed at you, ogmb).

I’m perplexed by what I take to be the implication that the state owes us a living just because we do philosophy (or literary criticism, or history, or whatever). I think that we have to serve some social purpose, and that in a society which has chosen to make university attendance more or less essential for getting to have an interesting and well-paid job, and in which one’s social origins have a huge impact on whether one gets to go to university, those of us involved in the enterprise (who profit from it — academics complain about their pay and working conditions, but most of us in flagship state universities have extraordinarily good working conditions, and incomes that many other people would be glad of) should be able to say something about why our jobs are worth paying for.

Well, there’s a sense in which I’m a worker. But if I couldn’t recognise the difference between my situation and that of a factory worker, I’m sure they could.

Everyone is owed a living at the average wage. Noone is owed a living above that.

I don’t want to derail the whole thread into what my personal conception of leftism is. The fact remains that I don’t think a narrow defense of one particular academic field as being broadening — or whatever you want to call it — can succeed. It either has to be a general defense of the university, or you might as well just give up and let people judge by number of majors. Particularist defenses of fields as being good for teaching people thinking, or as the only place where students get to write essays, or whatever always have to fail because every field can make similar claims.

And, more importantly, the discussion that you’re being drawn into when you’re asked to justify your field is not a good faith one. You can’t treat the question as if it just appeared out of nowhere, addressed to you by some ideal interlocutor and unconnected to what’s going on politically. Or well, maybe you can, but nothing good will come of it.

Engels is right? Well… OK, if we’re going to say more about this, I’ll say more. Thinking of yourself as a privileged person is an individualist view, within the U.S. academic system. In fact, fewer and fewer people are tenured, and more and more work is done by untenured lecturers, temporary teachers of various kinds, and grad students. If you average in those people, you’ll find all of a sudden that the academic life does not appear so lucrative. And of course they depend on the existence of “unproductive” departments just as much as professors do.

What I referred to previously as creeping managerialism is well along. Increasingly, what tenured professors are going to be asked to be is, in effect, middle management, supervising the people who do the bulk of the teaching and even in some cases the research, or managing the department in various ways. When you say that factory workers could recognize the difference between their situation and yours, you’re right — but perhaps not for the reason that you’re thinking of.

And the whole idea of “average wage” seems to me to fail spectacularly once the state intervenes to any significant extent. Once it does, it will naturally drive up the average. Then what?

I’m not saying that everyone has the right to a high-status job. That leads straight into _Social Limits To Growth_ territory. Most status is social status and consists of being “higher up” in some sense than someone else, so not everyone can have it — though people can be high up on different trees from each other, and you can try to maximize the number of trees. But the state could, in this specific example, 1) act to protect the university against stupid and destructive measures like making departments justify their existence locally as fields of knowledge against their number of majors, 2) act to reverse the trend towards de-tenurization, so that a greater percentage of the jobs in academia were good jobs, 3) make sure that the remaining lower-status ones were at least livable, which some of them are decidedly not over any long term.

“In the humaninities I think teaching has to be at the core of our contibution,”

As opposed to … math? science? business? What academic field does not have teaching as a core part of its contribution?

And does that mean that research, in the humanities, is a sort of non-essential frill? Isn’t it the responsibility of an intellectual to defend research in every field?

I don’t think that Philosophy needs to be justified. Given the general conception of what a university is, and philosophy’s history within it, entering into an argument that justifies philosophy as a part of every university is like making a public policy argument that torture is bad. At the end of the argument, all that you’ve done is taken a formerly barbaric position and legitimized it by making it one of two argumentative camps.

“If I posed as a “worker” most people would find that pretentious and slightly disgusting.”

Well… OK. But consider what the effect of that emotion is. It’s to separate you, isn’t it? Yes, you are white collar rather than blue collar. You are in a field that contains the remnant of various guild privileges. You are, in fact, a lot like many of the white collar government workers who remain once of the largest unionized populations in the U.S. If some government public works engineer referred to being in a union and said proudly that he was a worker, you wouldn’t find that pretentious and slightly disgusting, I hope.

I don’t think it’s an accident or an individual quirk that you feel this way. Actually, I think there’s been a deliberate campaign to make people feel this way. See up above, to comment 32, where alex unreeled some of the “pretentious academics” buzzwords — think they’re better than everyone else — entitled — disconnected from real life — he didn’t put in elitist, but some of the basic tropes of Nixonland are there.

Sure, you aren’t personally going to be hurt — maybe. But as the most visible and public part of the academic system, you have a responsibility to, to some extent, speak for the other people in it as well. And many of them are workers by any sense of the term.

Well, it’s always a nice touch if people reflect on what it is exactly they’re being paid for, but it seems incredibly naive to think that any “justification” one might come up with could withstand the brutal logic of capitalists (or sozialists for that matter) obsessed with “efficiency” and “usefulness”. I’ve seen McKinsey et al leave behind scorched earth so many times, that I think trying to beat them at their own language game is utterly futile and the only answer is to do your job well and tell them to eff off, because some things just cannot and should not be measured and quantified.

Piglet: The new Bachelor’s degrees in Germany are usually three-year degrees and are very narrowly focused, not only typically requiring course only within a single department but often concentrating entirely on one sub-field of a tradition area of study. The coupling of these narrow three-year terminal degrees with the reduction of the Abitur (award at end of Gymnasium) from 13 to 12 years means, in many cases, that German students with Bachelors will have both a less broad and less intensive preparation. It’s true that the foreign language training in Gymnasium is good, and math is often at a high level, but students typically have plans with 12 to 14 subjects, most of which are limited to two lessons a week, so that by the end of Gymnasium, with all the required review from year-to-year, a student may have had five years of Physics, say, but it is hardly, in sum, the equivalent of a year-long course in the US. Moreover, because Gymnasium is still mostly a class- rather than course-system, the expectation that entire classes move forward with the same schedule creates considerable drag on the overall achievement; and with the Gymnasium now the preferred school form for the majority of students (rather than the elite form as it was in the past, with the majority going to Haupt- and Realschulen), the overall level of expectations has also sunk.

As for the general thread here, there have got to be some universities in which the value of “service” courses to non-majors and the importance of limited-or-non-major-generating departments in insuring the “universal” aspect of a university education receives appropriate value in curricular and personnel planning. Deep Springs College aside, which universities do a good job of this calculation?

A pedantic addition to Magistra’s 71: the system she describes is the English, not the UK university system; undergraduates in Scotland do a 4-year degree of which the first 2 years are rather less specialised, before choosing a major. And some English universities have broader first-years: at Lancaster, where I teach, first-year undergrads take 3 equally-weighted subjects; I believe Sheffield has a similar system.

Incidentally: again I don’t know about the situation in the States, but in the UK, tenure is a myth. All it means is that you don’t have a ‘short term’ contract (like the majority of researchers, de facto). But make no mistake you can still be hired and fired, even if you are a ‘top Professor’.

The point is not whatever trinkets and glass beads you get thrown by the bosses. The point is to do with power, control and autonomy. And looked at from this position, the vast majority of people on Earth are workers (and even the richest college professor or surgeon is still dirt poor compared to the real money made by the capitalist class: the Bill Gates’s, etc.).

Of course there is a lot of ‘false consciousness’ about this especially from those who like to imagine that they have ‘worked their way out’ of the working classes and have now ‘made it’ and are now clever and classless and free.

But as the song says, you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

I haven’t fucked a peasant in simply ages…

Thanks, Hidari, for reminding us that Capitalism is Bad, I don’t know what I’d do without that valuable information.

I do know that entry-level salaries for UK university lecturers are more than double what they were 15 years ago. The trick, of course, is getting an actual job and not just an hourly-paid gig.

‘I do know that entry-level salaries for UK university lecturers are more than double what they were 15 years ago. ‘

You have a source for that?

I don’t know if they’ve more than doubled, but they’ve gone up a lot. When I first looked at academic employment in the UK around ten years ago, entry-level full-time teaching posts tended to pay around £18K, and if I glance at jobs.ac.uk today I see that it’s fairly common to find posts with minimum starting salaries of around £36K (though there are some lectureships in my field that start at, say, £28K). And this isn’t mostly an effect of inflation (it’s been a low-inflation decade); it’s a product of the way the pay-scales have developed over time, with the unions making quite a big deal out of poor pay rates for younger and less experienced staff.

‘Managers of large corporations own, as they say, the means of production.’

Er, no, they don’t. Anyway you really think that anyone who draws a salary, whether a brain surgeon, investment banker or a high court judge, is working class? That’s… interesting. It would kind of be more interesting to know what Rich thinks, though, since he was the one I asked.

Rich, to be clear, you would say that all the occupations I listed are working class (not ‘can be’ — ‘are’) on the grounds that they don’t own their means of production?

I’m denying that one’s occupation, by itself, is the determinant of whether one is a worker or not. Some doctors own their own practice (and are not effectively controlled by some insurance company). They are small businesspeople. Some don’t. They are workers, pretty much.

You added “high court judge” to your incredulity list. Are immigration judges good enough? This thread is in an American context, made explicit by the change in the post title, and in America, your means of defining work status by occupation would exclude a large part of the actual union organizing that occurs. It’s not some theoretical issue, it’s an issue with large consequences for the salaries and work conditions of actual white-collar workers.

Okay, then I didn’t really understand what you did say, I’m afraid. You said that ‘ultimately’ lawyers and surgeons are workers. You also said that CEOs ‘own the means of production’ which I don’t think is generally true. Other than this I thought you were answering ‘yes’ to my questions in #73 and #86.

(#90 was addressed to Hidari.)

Thanks for the lesson in false consciousness, Rich, I’ll bear it in mind. You seem to be attributing to me a sense of social superiority that I have not displayed and do not feel, but that’s your business. I agree with you that I have an obligation to use the advantages I enjoy to try and benefit others, and I think other academics do, too. I think Humanities research is all very well, and some of it genuinely contributes to the social good, but mostly through the teaching function (with teaching broadly conceived to include various forms of outreach). Research in social sciences and sciences can contribute more directly (and some of it does).
ogmb – well, I am clear in the post that the article doesn’t establish the permissibility of abortion. It does, interestingly, establish that the right to life plays only a small role in arguments that have any hope of showing abortion is impermissible. Read the article, and you’ll see that that is what the discussions of the violinist, Henry Fonda, and rape establish. That is not a political point (as far as I can see); but the introduction to the normative conceptual space in which the permissibility/impermissibility of abortion actually gets interesting.
I suppose you could say that the right to life is properly understood in such a way that it does, contrary to Thomson, include the right never to be killed by anyone and the right to whatever intervention is needed to maintain and sustain life. Of course, I discuss that option in class (there is no literature that defends that view, so I have to discuss it without the benefit of literature). In the spirit of reflective equilibrium we look at what the consequences of such a view would be, and nobody finds them palatable. I do not reject the option, and in fact I try to get them to take seriously a slightly weaker and more plausible view that we have very extensive obligations to aid needy others, which some of them do find plausible, and which does the job. Even if you take this tack, in which the right to life (or something like it) does play a big role, Thomson has established that you need to theorize, not just assert, the right to life. The assumption that I have not thought this stuff out and/or do not explain it to/elicit it from the students is what struck me as an insinuation of bad faith. But maybe it was an insinuation of incompetence. Anyway, you can see why I was irritated.
Our business school requires its students to take an ethics course, but does not offer an ethics course, so they only take what we offer. I think this is quite a good arrangement for the reasons you give; but a good bit of the thinking in the post is animated by facing the challenge of what good we can be doing in teaching these students and other non-majors who take our courses for breadth purposes. There is a view, which I have not in fact encountered in my own department, but in others, that these large lecture breadth courses should be introducing the discipline (as we conceive it) to the students for them to decide whether they want to go further. I guess the courses should do that, but it is a small part of what they should do – we should be thinking about what else they should be doing, for students who are not considering this as a potential major, or are taking it as part of a quite different course of study. I want people to think more than I see them thinking about what they are, and ought to be, doing with these classes — maybe they are already doing that thinking, in which case I want to hear and learn from what they are thinking. Mostly I conduct these discussions with students, because there is space to do that.

” I think Humanities research is all very well, and some of it genuinely contributes to the social good, but mostly through the teaching function (with teaching broadly conceived to include various forms of outreach). Research in social sciences and sciences can contribute more directly (and some of it does).”

I just think that this view is completely wrong-headed. I considered becoming an astrophysicist at one time (and have an ABD), so I know something about what scientists do. Is astrophysics only supposed to be contribute to the social good insofar as it (very rarely) produces technological developments? Insofar as it produces marketable job skills? Insofar as it produces popularizations that give ordinary readers a sense of their place in the universe, or something? Insofar as it teaches people basic things about the visible sky?

When someone writes an astrophysics paper with a null detection (there is even a convention in the literature for saying that you looked and found no X, you title the paper “In Search Of X”), or when a humanities professor writes about some obscure author, and in either case no one reads it except a few other specialists, the social good has been served. Believing otherwise leaves academia with no ground to stand on, once you follow it through. And it leads to the kind of society that I don’t want to live in, and that historically has not worked very well.

‘In at least that one additional case, academics who weren’t embarrassed to collectively bargain as workers (or “staff”, in this case) seem to have avoided the increasingly bad working conditions for untenured labor that are taking place in the U.S.’

Precisely. In any case it’s difficult to compare salaries of lecturers now and lecturers 15 or 20 years ago, not just because of inflation, but also because lecturers have to do so much more work now than they did 15 years ago (and also because the job is much worse in other ways than it was then: far greater job insecurity, far more bullying from management, lower possibilities of promotion: etc.). However insofar as it is a job that is ‘better paid’ that’s because of strong unions and collective action…and what’s wrong with that?

Likewise a lot of people on this threat seem to be living under the misapprehension that there is a largeclass of people (possibly the majority) who are living in some sort of paradise on earth, while a tiny minority of ‘workers’ slave and sweat and till the earth.

The reality is the opposite. There is a tiny minority of people at the ‘top’ who are doing pretty well (this is between 1 and 5% of the population depending on where you live). And the rest of us (and yes, it is ‘us’) face the pressures of work in a capitalist society common to the majority: de-skilling in our jobs, lower job security, more bullying, less possibilities of promotion, harder (in the sense of ‘tougher’) work, posts that need more and more years in education (hence, not earning) to obtain…and so on.

Moreover, even insofar as it is the casethat, for example, academics and doctors and lawyers constitute a ‘privileged’ caste….this is only in the ‘West’. There are many many many doctors and academics in Africa and South East Asia and Eastern Europe and Russia who ‘we’ would not hesitate to describe as poor…and yet the majority of people on Earth live in these places, not in the ‘west’.

And even in the West it’s just not like that. I know plenty of lawyers and doctors and academics, who are in a position to compare these jobs to what they were 40 years ago, and I know scarcely one who would say that the job has improved (and none of them are living la vida loca in any case). Yeah it’s true that back in the 50s and 60s being an academic, say, was a pretty cushy number. But the numbers of people who did it were tiny, and that was a long time ago.

Zamfir, I think that you (like Harry B) are confusing the explicit and implicit meaning of the call for justification.

In fact, factory workers don’t justify their work to management. Management hires them because management needs work done. Management, in effect, supplies its own justification. Yes, each individual worker may have an entrance interview, where they say that they personally can do the job, but the workforce as a whole, when it is formed, is “justified” by management’s plans.

The only time in which calls for justification from workers appear is when management wants to fire people wholesale. In countries where the workers have no right to organize or anything else, management just fires them. But in countries where they do, management calls on them to participate willingly in their own destruction. If they can be diverted into each individually writing up why they should be one of the people who stays, instead of organizing communally, it’s no effort to fire them.

The whole departmental-justification bit is the same thing on a larger scale, complicated by the U.S. right-wing-propaganda-encouraged attitude towards anything that smacks of public funding. Yes, the public can choose to defund a university — just as management can, in the end, choose to close a factory. But that’s not really what’s being talked about here, because politicians understand that U.S. states that do close their universities, effectively, are poor places and become poorer. So they want to get rid what they see as the non-productive people and keep only the productive ones. Well, they have to be told that the university is as organic unit and can’t be pared away down to a business and technology school without losing what makes it a university.

Useless but desirable tat. If only we could make critical thinking and clarity of self-expression somehow things that people actually wanted. But instead we get Sarah Palin. And BoJo, for us Brits [who is at least a classically-educated inarticulate buffoon, let it be noted].

I don’t believe that the working class is a ‘tiny minority’. I don’t believe that one’s class (or ‘work status’, whatever that means) is determined purely by one’s job title. And I don’t really understand why anyone would infer I believe these things from anything I did say or imply, which is just that I don’t believe that university professors (or company directors, surgeons, judges, etc) are working class.

But, as always, it’s been fun. And I leave you with Raymond Geuss on the purpose of academic philosophy:

I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable, partly because I don’t think, finally, that this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations which would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is an open area within which it is possible that some of these young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some minimal mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. The remaining 5 percent of my job, by the way, what I would call the actual “philosophical” part, is almost invisible from the outside, totally unclassifiable in any schema known to me—and quantitatively, in any case, so insignificant that it can more or less be ignored.

This may have been mentioned earlier, but in case it has not, it is important to remember that many colleges/universities have adopted a business model of how to operate an organization and are now attempting to remake their academic institutions into ones the represent good business practices. To accomplish this means that questions of efficiency and cost/benefit are going to be determinators in what will be offered, hence the need to justify ones position – a common practice in business. I also suspect that this means that in the future we will see an erosion of what has been traditionally referred to as a ‘liberal arts’ componet to eductaion as more and more students will simply want courses that enable them to gather skills to be successful in some ecomonic function – hence the increase in busiess schools and ‘universities like DeVries, Phoenix, Baker, etc. -over the years – in the quickest and least expensive format possible. Even though I spent thirty five years in business, I see this as a disaster, but it is a social/economic movement that is taking place and we are now only observingf the ‘tip of the iceberg.’

*without also appearing…

“The fact that there is so little reflection on the missions of departments is down, in part, to a failure of management; a failure that is just made starker by the demand that departments picked out by some arbitrary feature which, until this moment, they have been given no reason to think was a problem.”

I honestly cannot make any sense of the second long clause in this sentence–the one after the semicolon. Can “to pick out” be intransitive? Is it being demanded that the departments pick out (i.e. select) an arbitrary feature, etc.? Is there a missing subjunctive verb that would describe what the departments are demanded to do?

Engels: “Everyone is owed a living at the average wage. Noone is owed a living above that.”

Considering the amount of agreement this statement has received on the thread, it argues greatly for the teaching of basic mathematical principles in the university for humanities types who want to make wholesale changes in the economy.
Either you are arguing for the rather surprising idea that every single person in a state should get paid exactly the same amount, or the phrase ‘average wage’ when expressed as a floor makes no sense at all. ;)

More seriously Harry, could you point to the pro-life pieces you use? I’m curious about them.

On topic, I’m a conservative, so I have no trouble whatsoever with the idea that Philosophy departments are a well established part of university structures. As such, if you want to question their ‘justification’, a manager should have an excellent explanation for why they have been there in the past, and why those reasons no longer apply before he should be permitted to take the fence down.

Perhaps it is true that most philosophy departments believe that they are preparing students for graduate school. However, I was a Philosophy major at the University of Texas-Austin from 1972-1976, and then went on to get a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and I believe that UT did a very poor job of preparing me for graduate school.
Although I can think of individuals at UT who inspired me and gave me an opportunity to improve my writing, I received precious little feed-back during my undergraduate days. And, when I did go on to graduate school, I was less well-prepared than my classmates.
This caused me more than a little discomfort, and even today when I receive letters asking me to donate money to UT–let alone any sort of survey from the Department of Philosophy–I am prone to utter words which embarrass anyone within earshot.

Re the GRE, sadly it no longer has an analytic section. The GRE now tests only verbal and math skills, and the math skills required are no harder than those on the SAT (which has the effect of severely skewing the scores on the math section, since all the engineering/math/etc. students ace it).

I miss the logic games and argument analyses. At least there’s still the LSAT and GMAT.

Well actually I was suggesting that everybody should be paid the same. And Rich if there was no class struggle then it wouldn’t matter to me what class people are either.

Looking at the thread at Brian Leiter’s blog, it sounds as if the management theory being used to justify the reductions is something like “core competences.” The idea isn’t that, for example, email apps are a waste of time. The idea is more along the lines that Microsoft Outlook is sure to be the winner, and we are not, so we are throwing money away in the email app business. Or, a firm might determine “what we do really well is coming up with neat ideas and selling things, but as far as we know we’re no better than anybody else at implementing the ideas and making the things, so we will pay other people to do the latter, and repurpose manufacturing to vendor management,” I’m not sure how this could apply to academia, but it may make more sense together with @113 than otherwise.

Rather agree with engels on equal pay, modulo the points made by Harry at 65 and a corresponding positive allowance for people in shitty jobs. Sebastian, alex (et al?) … whatever your “grip on reality”, the claim that there are _pro tanto_ reasons to pay everyone the same shouldn’t be taken to mean that we should immediately pursue equal payment at the expense of all other values.

_there are pro tanto reasons for saying it would be nice if every day was a sunny day_

You think? Really?

Well, as far as it goes, wouldn’t it be nice to see the sun every day? Occasional showers are good too, as far as it goes; but, as far as it goes, what’s your answer to my substantive question? Right now I’m reading between the lines that it’s something like “I’m a socialist and that makes me better than you, so nyah.” And frankly, I’m not finding that very persuasive, so if you’ve got a better one, pony up.

I’m with CB on the weather. Both engels and CB (and I) could give arguments in favour of a much more egalitarian wage rate but that would be very far off topic from this thread. None of us are Stalinists in any sense — we do not believe that we have legitimate authority to impose egalitarian wage rates even if we had the power and know-how. This is something we think we have to argue and struggle over in a democratic framework. All of us (sorry to speak for you engels, and you can correct me if you want) think that there are good reasons to depart somewhat from an egalitarian baseline (dangerous, or crappy jobs, etc). And it is wage rate, not income, that we think should be equal.

“I would further point out that producing a society in which everyone accepts that everyone is entitled to have the same, and only the same, as everyone else,”

alex, you wrote that as if it was a response to me. That really makes no sense, as I had just written that social competition for positional goods would be heightened, not lowered or eliminated. I don’t agree with engels, and answering as if everyone to the left of you was the same person doesn’t get you anywhere if you expect an actual answer.

No, I don’t expect a society in which everyone is “entitled to the same”. I expect one in which everyone is entitled to, as I already wrote, the necessities of life. That’s hardly science fiction. The National Assistance Act, for example, started to be implemented in Britain in 1948. As it becomes cheaper to provide the necessities of life, I expect the conditionality of this kind of support on proving that one is seeking employment to be dropped, especially as people will want less competition for the high-status jobs in any case.

But people should organize and intervene beyond that, in areas where other interests in society have created structures that aren’t good for people to live in. For instance, industries that, under the profit motive, want to thoroughly deskill and temp-ify their labor force. Which is really what this move to make departments justify their existence or become teachers of non-majors only is all about.

The situation in Pennsylvania makes me a little bit nervous, given that the department I teach in wouldn’t meet such a requirement regarding majors. However, our existence could be justified along the lines discussed in the original post. The introductory courses we teach are full, and we sometimes are asked to add sections when the demand is high. While enrollment alone is not a sufficient justification, the experiences and opportunities provided by our department to students who will teach, go into law enforcement or health care or business, is very valuable. I would add that other faculty can benefit from having philosophers around for a variety of reasons, just as we benefit from them.

“I would think that the underlying issue here is that the concept of a “real university” no longer has much content.”

I pretty much have to agree with Bloix. In particular, I don’t think that the philosophy professors who have commented here (or posted, in Harry’s case) seem to have the concepts that I’d recognize about what a real university is. Mostly what I’ve seen is “I would focus on the service we do to students for whom the course they take from us is the only Philosophy course they take” and “I think Humanities research is all very well, and some of it genuinely contributes to the social good, but mostly through the teaching function […]”. (Those are both direct quotes, but feel free to correct me if they are not representative.) That’s not an argument for anything resembling a university, with courses taught by professors. You could perfectly well bring in someone who was interested in Philosophy as an undergraduate, or maybe even a grad student, and get them to be a temporary lecturer to teach those courses. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Harry, you were taking the university for granted while discussing a political proposal whose entire purpose is to destroy what was traditionally thought of as a university.

Do I agree that professors should teach people who take one Philosophy class, as well as people who major in Philosophy? Yes, of course I do. I think it’s quite valuable for students who aren’t majoring in philosophy to take a course in it — just as I think that students should have at least one math class, one science class, etc.

But no, you really don’t need a Ph.D. to teach that kind of class. A Ph.D., and the whole apparatus of professorship, is only justifiable if the person teaching is: a) expected to do research, b) expected to teach future experts.

And b) above depends on a), because there is no point in having experts in something if you don’t value research in that field for its own sake. That’s why I think that the entire academic humanities ends up collapsing if one takes the attitude towards research that your comment above takes.

A few points:
Regarding the desperate attempt to turn the humanities into pseudo-sciences in an attempt to preserve their importance in a world dominated by short term instrumentalism and “can-do” optimism. Following that logic the time has come to put up or shut up: either political philosophy has a direct practical use or not. Ditto political and economic “science” and “naturalized” epistemology. All of these are formalized systems of box-building that pose as sciences of the present. But they aren’t. Even the author of this post does a piss-poor job of defending the humanities, the job of which is specifically to produce morally conscious adults not technically proficient eternal adolescents. And again: proficient at what?

“No one would say that every single school in the U.S. has to grant a bachelor’s degree in recreation management. So why does every single school have to offer a degree in philosophy? ”

Many agree it would be better to for universities to extricate themselves from their partnerships with semi-pro athletic leagues, but maybe it’s time to do the same with marketing and business schools and schools of recreation management. Call MIT what it is: a technical school not a university.

The purpose of the humanities is and as always been to remind us of how stupid we are, how slim our imaginations, how subject to greed and cheap desire; and then to remind us to laugh at our stupidity as we try and mostly fail to be better. It’s the humanities not the optimistic sciences that teach us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I don’t have much sense of that understanding on this page.

The income of thousands of the most senior British academics has soared over the past decade, far outstripping growth in average lecturers’ pay, according to a Guardian inquiry. More than 80 university heads, generally known as vice-chancellors, now earn more than the prime minister, and some have seen their annual earnings double or even triple in 10 years. Some got 15% or 20% pay rises last year alone, compared with a 45.7% rise over 10 years for average higher education teaching professionals. The hightest-paid VC gets £474,000, and 19 get more than £300,000, including employer pension contributions. By contrast, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, gets £197,000 plus a pension.

Salaries of more, sometimes much more, than £100,000 are paid to almost 4,000 other academic administrators, consultants and scientists in Britain’s 150 university institutions, compared with only a handful at that level a decade ago. The Guardian has identified eight universities at the head of a league table based on a combination of chief executive pay and the proportion of high-earning staff. In order of vice-chancellor income they are: the London Business School; UCL; Liverpool; Imperial College; Nottingham; Oxford; Kings, London; and Bristol.