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

This story (via Leiter) concerns the requirement in Pennsylvania that any university department within the PASSHE system that graduates fewer than 30 majors over five years justify its existence. A theater and dance department chair is quoted as follows:

“This is an insult to many of our faculty who feel what they do is central to the life of the university,” said Dr. Slavin, who also is vice president of the campus chapter of the faculty union, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties. “Challenging them to justify their existence is really a slap in the face.”

It is odd that in “normal” times it is just assumed that the departmental units can carry on without ever having to justify or even reflect very much on their existence or what they are supposed to be doing? 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. 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.

The issue made it to Leiter because several of the Philosophy departments in those institutions fall into the low-major category. But is producing Philosophy majors the point of having a Philosophy department? In Our Underachieving Colleges (CT review still on its way: DD to blame if I never get round to it) Derek Bok claims that the standard assumptions within most departments in research universities is that the undergraduate curriculum is for attracting and then teaching majors, and, further, that our attention to the majors should be shaped by the aim of preparing them well for graduate school. This means that the curriculum is designed for a tiny minority of the students who take classes, and even many of them, probably, would be better off doing something other than going to graduate school (that’s me, not Bok, saying the last bit).

I don’t think of the curriculum, or the mission of my department in my institution, that way at all.

If I did I would campaign to remove our classes from the list of classes that meet breadth requirements and ask other majors not to require our classes. In most places, including in my department (even now, when we have a glut of majors, no doubt owing to the high quality instruction in my department and the newly found glamour in our field) most of the enrollments in Philosophy courses (as in most Humanities departments) come from non-majors trying to fulfill breadth, general ed, or other-major-specific requirements. If I were in the position of having to justify my own department’s existence, and was unconstrained by the comments of my colleagues, 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. For many Business majors taking an ethics requirement, this is the only course in their upper years that they will write a paper, and for most it is one of very few courses in which retaining information will be less important than exercising higher order cognition, facing up to questions to which the answers are not known with certainty by anyone. We serve ethics requirements for many majors, and what we do in those courses is NOT tell them what they ought to think about ethical issues, but introduce them to intellectual resources which, when used by people of good will, will help them to get closer to the truth concerning the hard ethical questions they will face as citizens, professionals, and in their personal lives. Like most Philosophy departments we have an informal logic/critical reasoning course, which teaches students how to identify various kinds of fallacious reasoning, and targets instruction to contexts which the students are likely to find themselves in in the course of their lives. We teach aesthetics, environmental ethics, and philosophy of religion, all of which courses attract students with other majors who want to think at a higher level of abstraction than their regular courses allow about what they are doing in their major.

Of course, all these courses also contain potential and actual majors. Those people teaching the courses are not just teaching a mixed-ability group, but a mixed-interest group, in which students have a wide variety of levels of prior interest, and of other knowledge bases and interests. Ideally we’d be attempting to provide every single student with the experience and resources which will be most valuable. In practice, in large classes and deciding under uncertainty, we can’t do this; we design our syllabuses and instruction with the aim of providing quite specific things to particular groups of students. For myself, in the large lecture Contemporary Moral Issues course which is the course I teach most often, and which I have taught to many many more students than all my other courses put together, I have two main aims – one is to get the students thinking more carefully and in a richer way about moral issues that will affect their lives or about which they will be called to deliberate as citizens, by providing them with resources that our discipline has developed; and to give some of the students a realistic insight into what moral philosophy is and why it might be interesting to them. Both are, I hope, good for the majors, and I do try to ensure that students who either will major in, or are majoring in, Philosophy, will get a realistic sense of what one small corner of the discipline is like from my class — but that’s a secondary, not a primary, goal.

Don’t get me wrong. I like having students who are thrilled about doing Philosophy, and the handful that I have helped on their way to graduate school have been among the students I have valued teaching most. But so have students who became, or are becoming, social workers, nurses, teachers, and who took one of my classes simply to fulfill a requirement or on a whim or because some counselor strongly suggested it (the most insulting — because the student fancied the counselor who suggested it). When I think about justifying the existence of my department and what we should be doing, it is those students, and the value we can produce for them, that I think of first.