by LEE MCINTYRE
IMAGE/Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle review
In March administrators at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas announced that, because of budget cuts, the entire department of philosophy would be eliminated. Philosophers rallied, the administration flinched, and within a month the crisis was averted. So all is well, right?
Not so fast. Unless systemic changes are made within the profession of philosophy over the next several years, we can expect that within a few decades, the entire discipline may be threatened.
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Yes, we want our students to learn to think critically, to write analytically, and to express themselves with logical precision—there is clearly a crying need for that. The sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reported in their book, Academically Adrift (University of Chicago Press, 2011), that in the first two years of college, 45 percent of students they tracked made no significant improvement in critical-thinking or reasoning skills. Of course we want our students to learn those things, but surely not just to turn out more people who “do” philosophy. There aren’t enough jobs for them already. Rather the goal—especially at the undergraduate level—should be to help students recognize that philosophy matters. Not just because it will improve their LSAT scores (which it will), but because philosophy has the potential to change the very fabric of who they are as human beings.
We need to show our students that—when it is done right—philosophy can help them to be better, more critical thinkers and communicators in their jobs. It can teach them to be skeptical of political rhetoric and advertising. It can help them to consider what is worth caring about and so perhaps to begin to make the world a better place. And it can even be meaningful to them in their personal lives. I am reminded of Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale, the 1992 vice-presidential candidate and sometime philosophy student, who was tortured and held prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton” for seven years during the Vietnam War. He later wrote that his survival during that time was due to reliance on the precepts of Stoicism, which he had learned in a philosophy course while studying international relations in graduate school. For the rest of his life, he called himself a “philosophical fighter pilot.”
A good way to start might be to share with our students why we ourselves care so much about philosophy—how it has helped us in our own lives, as citizens or even personally. But how many of us actually do that? We extol Socrates, but how many dare to follow his example? Of course some philosophers are out there making philosophy matter, and we should talk more about them to our students: how Martha Nussbaum’s political philosophy has influenced her work with the poor in India; how Peter Singer’s theoretical ethics has informed his advocacy for animal rights; how Kristin Shrader-Frechette has defended the norms of good scientific reasoning in her watchdog focus on the nuclear-power industry.
Most of us, however, prefer to keep a lower profile. We lament teaching the same old courses year after year, hoping for a reduction in our “load” so that we might get back to our “own work,” turning out obscure essays that may be read by 10 other scholars with whom we are already on a first-name basis. Meanwhile the world burns.
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(Thanks to reader)