Transforming Universities?

Several readers have e-mailed me about this piece.  The author is Columbia religion professor Mark C. Taylor (yes, the Derrida apologist and postmodern "theorist").   Here's a taste of the careless rhetoric:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

In fact, many graduate programs produce PhD graduates who secure tenure-track teaching positions, and many of whom (the majority of whom?) do so without acquiring any debt.  There are "Chrysler" PhD programs that should close, but that's no basis for smearing all graduate programs--though perhaps Professor Taylor is inadvertently telling us something about his department (I hope the Columbia Provost takes note!). 

Professor Taylor goes on to lament specialization (one can understand why pomo intellectual tourists might do so), though he would do well to read Weber.  But he is certainly correct that the size of many graduate programs is dictated more by the needs of universities for cheap labor than by academic considerations:

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

Professor Taylor concludes with the following recommendations, that range from the juvenile to the perhaps worth experimenting with to the naive and dangerous:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural....

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water....

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

Part of what underlies this is the fact that Taylor has no specialty or discipline of his own, and so would like every other unit to follow suit, and "specialize" in intellectual superficiality across many topics.  But the proposal regarding tenure is really reckless and naive.   Tenure means faculty can be termined only "for cause."  Universities are undoubtedly too timid in initiating termination proceedings where they would, in fact, be justified, but the remedy for that problem is not the elimination of tenure, which does, indeed, protect academic freedom (and the First Amendment rights of state university professors), but also acts as an essential form of non-monetary compensation for faculty.

Thoughts from readers on Professor Taylor's article and his proposals?  Signed comments only:  full name and e-mail address.

Comments

[Alexus McLeod]

A number of things in Taylor's article seemed to me downright silly. In addition to the points you mention, I'm just not seeing how some of the stuff Taylor suggests is supposed to be helpful. Take his #4, for example. How in the world is using "new media" to create dissertations going to help anything at all? So if I had created a video game instead of writing a dissertation, this would somehow save money for a university and improve the state of my field? How? Taylor thinks it's problematic that "there's no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation". When, however, was there ever a market for them? Sure, many more people will buy video games than will buy academic press books, but why predicate academic success on market success? If it's essential for our work to attract a large market, we might as well just give up doing philosophy now and start working on some exciting thriller and romance novels.

[John Gray]

It would be nice to see graduate programs take some initiative on Taylor's #5. Frankly I think it is irresponsible for programs (especially ones that know that they do not draw the highest talent) to not prepare their students at all for the outside world in case one should strike out in academia. This would, of course, require some arrogant tenured professors to get off their high horses about the nobility of their cloistered status.

[David Pulliam]

You last comment, "the remedy for that problem is not the elimination of tenure, which does, indeed, protect academic freedom (and the First Amendment rights of state university professors), but also acts as an essential form of non-monetary compensation for faculty." Would you mind expanding on the thought that tenure protects the first amendment rights of state university professors?

I have not heard of anyone taking that approach to defending tenure, and it sounds interesting.

[A. Chatterjee]

There is already a very good response to this badly argued and thought out "op ed" piece in the comments section of nytimes. The response is from Prof. John Kingston of the UMass linguistics department. I encourage people to read it (I'm including the link below).
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?s=3

[Jon Cogburn]

Oh Jesus. We really should now be past this phase of administrators proposing "interdisciplinarity" as the cheap solution to everything.

It's ontologically suspect from the get-go, as if you could have relations (interdisciplinarity) without relata (actual disciplines)! Maybe, just maybe, Whitehead and some (Graham Harman excepted) Heideggerians can make sense of that in some deep way, but it certainly a complete disaster when applied to social institutions.

Does the author really want the entire university to repeat the experience of various grievance studies departments from the 80s and 90s? The educational danger is so acute, that I can't imagine a stupider idea.

Actual disciplines such as Anthropology for the most part have over time evolved rigorous methodologies and substantial bodies of knowledge that are imparted to undergraduates and graduate students. These were not, and could not be, designed by fiat by administrators and would-be educational reformers. They have evolved due to complicate selective pressures, most of which in the American University system select for truth and wisdom, at least to the extent that these things are measured by Nobel Prizes.

But when you combine five or six disciplines and subject students merely to a watered down pot pourri (which is inevitable in the vast majority of such cases) they never get competent in anything! And faculty incompetence often then follows what is being taught.

A lawyer friend of mine has an MA in philosophy from Pitt. The other day I asked him to what extent it had helped him with law. His answer was astute. He said his roommate in law school had an MFA in music theory, and as far as he could tell the help for law were similar. It wasn't that my friend specialized in philosophy of law (he hadn't) but rather that just learning a worthwhile subject matter with a rigorous methodology gave him a foundation from which to think analogically that other students did not have. His music theorist friend got the same thing from his MFA.

Education theorists stressing interdisciplinarity without disciplines and the older Deweyan idea that everything has to be practical (also, of course, endorsed by Taylor, and which is in fact extremely impractical when our students will be changing skill sets throughout their careers), always miss this simple point about the functioning of human intelligence. Successful creative people usually have a very deep just-the-facts and methodological mastery of some area. Disciplines have evolved to make this possible. That's why in graduate school we take candidacy exams before writing the dissertation.

Taylor's reforms would, by administrative fiats, absolutely destroy the way university departments have evolved to produce first rate research and students whose deep foundations in a discipline's fact and methodology both enrich their lives and make them able to confront a job market where they will change careers multiple times.

Finally, (and this is unrelated in so far as "interdisciplinarity" is usually something that administrators push as a way to justify their existence without having to dispense meaningful resources) Taylor's "reforms" would result in the faculty filling out vastly more insultingly useless paperwork of the type currently dreamed up in management schools, forced on second and third tier institutions by accreditation agencies, and zealously enforced by administrators and their no-longer-researching flunkies as a way to justify those administrators making five to ten times the normal faculty salary (and their flunkies doing no research). People in top Leiter programs might not be suffering under this particular form of administrative hegemony, but the rest of us can attest that it is grueling and obnoxious. [E.G.- Write a long report every year to some committee showing that you are assessing how your majors write in each class. Write another report each semester showing that student answers to your exam questions in your General Education Class fulfill four of the five GEC desiderata. Update your yearly book-like "assessment matrix" with its hundred odd "time bound performance indicators," none of which can involve the department getting more resources (but which somehow presuppose that every department on campus can be getting more majors even though the student population is fixed). Every five year write another book for "external review," whose advice will be ignored by the university, etc. etc. etc. etc.] If Taylor's system were in place, this growing facet of academic reality that has colonized part of our lives that should be devoted to teaching and research would in fact become a complete empire of suck.

No thanks.

[Note: I'm not putting down things like the MIT Media Lab, which is awesome. But its educational methodology is actually directly modeled on Architecture, and it is also extraordinarily selective; as a result of both of these it is so rigorous that the students in no way succumb to the problems that currently beset interdisciplinary degrees in the vast majority of American Universities. There is no way you could generalize it to all students at MIT let alone at all universities, and let alone recreating it every seven years in different guises.]

[Paul Schofield]

What is so bizarre about this article is how possibly reasonable claims are juxtaposed with wild overstatement. So we get the suggestion for "constantly evolving programs [that] have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed." Sure. Maybe we could use some of those. And how does he label this suggestion? "Abolish permanent departments"! Sorry, Physics. You didn't make the cut this time around. . .

Or "Expand the range of professional options for graduate students." Hey, that doesn't sound too bad. Who doesn't want more options? And why do we want more options? "Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained." MOST grad students will NEVER hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. NEVER.

[Billy Junker]

I want to note first that Taylor's claim that "[m]ost graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market" is not contradicted by Leiter's claim that "many graduate programs produce PhD graduates who secure tenure-track teaching positions". It may very well be the case both that "many" graduate programs place their graduates and that "most" of them do not. Professor Leiter no doubt has a better idea than I do of the percentage of PhD programs in philosophy in America that consistently place their graduates. I would be surprised if this percentage were greater than half, and I imagine it is rather closer to twenty to thirty percent. This is just a guess, though; I wonder if Professor Leiter has the actual numbers handy.

In any case, it seems to me that those graduate programs that do not place a large percentage of their students in tenure-track positions need a reason to justify their continued existence. Does such a reason exist beyond the need that these programs (and their universities) have for "underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching"? Probably not. Is there anything we can do about this? Sadly, in the absence of a restructuring of the economic system that produces this need, probably not.

Also, both Alasdair MacIntyre and Stephen Greenblatt have criticized the notion that a 200-400 page dissertation should be required for the completion of graduate study. As far as I remember, though, they suggest the writing and submission of one or two substantive articles in place of the longer dissertation rather than the designing of a video game. No doubt this may be attributed to their ludditism.

Finally, as a graduate student who is finishing his dissertation, I applaud Professor Taylor's call for the immediate enforced retirement of all those professors who happen to work in my field.

[harry b]

Paul -- "most", "never". Sounds right to me, at least within the humanities. In the humanities most graduate students in PhD programs are trained very narrowly in their discipline, and have do not learn key skills like how to collaborate effectively with other people in tasks which have short-to-medium time horizons. In language departments students leave fluent in some other language, but usually they entered pretty much fluent in it. I don't have statistics, but I would guess that whereas a majority of people who get PhDs finally land jobs in their field, a majority of ABDs don't even get PhDs (and therefore are ineligible for jobs in their field). So, yes, I'd guess that most grad students never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.

I agree with Brian about tenure (it has lots of bad effects, but it also has good effects, which probably outweigh the bad). What about mandatory retirement ages?

[Brendan Hogan]

A. Chatterjee is right to point to Prof. Kingston's excellent response in the comments section after the article, #23. There is also a pretty delicious piece in today's NYT coming from an interview with a CEO who discusses the intellectual qualities he looks for in job candidates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26corner.html?em
Almost every single one of the qualities this CEO calls for comes from serious educational training in the humanities. Indeed a first-tier design school I taught applied ethics at for 8 years in Manhattan restructured its entire curriculum in order to include a much stronger liberal arts/humanities core, at the behest of leaders in the business community! These leaders wanted critical thinkers, effective communicators, who could write and come to judgments independently. Technical skills like the one Taylor calls for a) change very quickly and so college education is often outmoded by the time the graduate applies for the job and b) can be taught to people with basic intellectual skill and ambition to learn them.
I would just point out that the Dewey Jon Cogburn is talking about would have nothing to do with the kinds of regulation that Taylor is talking about with regard to tenure and contracts. Also, Taylor mentions almost nothing about the critical function of the university in a democratic society. A society which would be much less democratic in spite of the universities failures in this regard.
What Dewey means by 'practical' has almost nothing to do with what Taylor is suggesting. Dewey spent his life fighting the idols of 'efficiency' and 'job applicability' in education that reduced learning to what met the markets' needs. Yes, he focused on problem solving, but one of the problems to solve is the kind of discourse about education that passes itself off as 'thought' exemplified by Taylor's piece.
Dewey railed against a different kind of Taylorism in his day and its mind numbing effects on laborers, and would fight against this new version as vehemently.
Finally, one of the joys of getting a phd in the humanities is that you can almost be assured that whatever job you get when your tenure track options fail, from school administration , to high school teaching, to non-profit work pay as much or more than the salary of tt asst prof at small liberal arts colleges across the US. Granted, there is less vacation, but there are less people so out of touch with reality as the author of the op-ed under discussion.
Keep assigning those video games , Mark!

[Rob Rupert]

Harry B is right to point out the high rates of attrition among graduate students; but do we have any reason to think the attrition rates will be lower in the kind of program Taylor envisions? Assuming these are rigorous, worthwhile programs, I have my doubts. And if these doubts are on track, Taylor's newfangled programs will enroll lots of students who will never hold jobs in their field. Point is, attrition might simply be a fact about serious academic endeavor. Lots of students, for whatever reasons -- personal, motivation-related, cognitive, etc. -- don't finish the programs they start, and we should not automatically take this as evidence that the programs in question are flawed.

[Stephen M (Ethesis)]

Critical Mass pointed me to this response to the essay: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bousquet/more-drivel-from-the-new-york-times

I'm glad to see the points made here as well as well as the comments. I did not realize that most of the "losers" in the tenure search would make more than the winners until I reflected on what I've seen vis a vis Brendan Hogan's comments.

A nice sub-note would be to have Professor Leiter reprise about the employment opportunities of the bottom half PhD program graduates (i.e. those who graduate from the third and fourth tier programs in Philosophy and their chances of getting tenure track jobs teaching Philosophy).

I would note that "an essential form of non-monetary compensation for faculty" can actually be measured in what it takes to pay people to accept the same job without tenure as a job with tenure and the dollar difference is amazingly substantial. Tenure probably saves universities more than 30% on what they pay faculty.

[harry b]

RR -- attrition is fine if people are learning in their program skills and knowledge that are valuable after they leave. I'd guess that's the point. I think that, eg, in Philosophy, students who leave before the PhD usually have developed valuable skills. I know they usually have in Economics and Sociology and some of the other social sciences. I doubt that is true in some other (humanities) disciplines.

[Victoria]

In regards to David's question how tenure protects the first amendment rights of professors, this was in France, but I think it still applies. A professor was fired because of questioning the official version of events surrounding September 11th. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXI5WaGc-ZQ

In theory this couldn't happen here, but I could see some school admins trying to pull it off. That's the only real world example that I can think of off the top of my head.

[Robert Johnson]

One important flaw in Taylor's "reasoning", related to his ignorance of points you mention made by Weber, is that he isn't thinking from the perspective of research. Universities do research. By doing research we learn new things. When we learn new things, graduate students learn new things. When graduate students learn new things, they teach new things. That's why we're not all still teaching vitalism and phrenology.

[ABDer]

It's true that a lot of philosophy Ph.D.s won't end up as philosophers. And it's true that as a result of their education, they have a bunch of skills that employers should value. But it's also true that this is rarely discussed. The ethos in graduate school (at least in my experience) is that getting an academic job is the only kind of success. You're a failure if you don't. I'd like to see faculty encouraging students to use their careers service, so that they can think about a plan B if academe doesn't work out. If the day ever comes when you have to abandon the academic route, it's nice to have some idea of what to do next. The narrow focus in graduate school can easily make it seem that getting any job outside of academe is selling out.

[lisa]

"So we get the suggestion for "constantly evolving programs [that] have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed."

In order to avoid specialization, why don't we just turn the university into one department: The Department of the Next Seven Years. That would eliminate the need to restructure and keep us abreast of current educational needs.

[CharlieH]

Setting aside Taylor's dramatic recommendations, it is worth considering whether the Humboldtian structure of the modern university is well-adapted to contemporary needs in higher education and research. I'm skeptical of any comprehensive reform, since I think the issue is frankly too complex for us to figure out, but some intelligent and risky experimenting might pay off.

[harry b]

I agree with ABDer. But there's a tightrope walk from the faculty point of view. One does not want to imply that a student does not have the ability to write a good dissertation, get a job, etc, and should quit, because that would be demoralising (and because it would be false -- if it were true one should say it straight out). If your advisor started saying "Oh, you should be thinking about other options" even you might not take that to be neutral about your quality as a potential philosopher. The fact that most faculty(esp. in Philosophy -- the other discipline I am in is different)have relatively little experience of other professions doesn't help.

[Carl Seaquist]

Brian,

I disagree with your view that tenure "acts as an essential form of non-monetary compensation for faculty." It's easy enough to monetize the value of tenure for a faculty member. Now that mandatory retirement isn't enforced, colleges are increasingly buying faculty out of their tenure contracts. Let's say I take an assistant professorship this year, and plan to retire in 30 years. Let's say my initial TT salary is X, and I can expect an eventual buyout of twice my final-year salary (which is X, plus tenure and promotion raises, plus cost of living adjustments which are euphemistically called "raises" in higher education). The present value of that buyout is easy to calculate, and from that we can get Y, such that X+Y is my expected salary without tenure.

The reason tenure will continue to exist is that colleges need it. Without tenure, all the best professors will bail when a school selects a weak president or provost, whereas now faculty know they can wait out a bad administration for 5-10 years. That means there won't be sufficient institutional memory among faculty, and force colleges to monetize jobs like committee work that now are done by faculty largely on the basis of good will. A few colleges are doing away with tenure, but deep down most know they need to keep it because they don't have an alternate business model in place.

BTW, Stephen M guestimates the monetary savings of tenure at ~30%. I think it's much lower, maybe ~3-5%, based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did a couple of years ago when I interviewed at a school that doesn't offer tenure. What does that indicate, if I'm right? That, in a free market, senior faculty don't value their tenure too highly. I think that's interesting. It also supports my view that tenure is ultimately more important to colleges than to faculty: if this wan't the case, tenure for new hires would have gone away more than a decade ago.

[CJ]

I find Jon Cogburn's reference to "grievance studies" vague and confusing. Which departments/programs is he willing to tar with this description, and which of them have disappeared since the 80s and 90s?

I am not for the abolition of disciplines. I found much of what Taylor had to say unhelpful. But Mr. Cogburn seems to be at the other extreme, unable to see the place for interdisciplinarity.

It is not the case that being in a "____ Studies" department means a watered-down education with no specialization. It is, as far as I can tell, not possible to go to graduate school without specializing in something. What good interdisciplinary depts/programs offer is, it seems to me, an experience of specialization within one or a few disciplinary streams that is nevertheless informed and enriched by what other disciplines have to offer, all the while with a focus on the meta-specialty of a certain general subject area. I wonder if people who decry "grievance studies" are also pining for the abolition of Classics.

Note also that many of us who choose to get a degree in a traditional discipline such as Philosophy naturally seek after something like the experience I've just described, on the basis on our interests within the field. On any expansive list of the subdisciplines of Philosophy, the areas that do not invite specializers to be in contact with intellectual life outside Philosophy are in the minority. Indeed, it is often improper to see a very sharp line dividing practitioners who have ended up in a Philosophy department from their colleagues in departments related to their subfield. In my view, the areas without unmistakable interdisciplinary implications and connections are not intrinsically better or worse than the ones that do have this linkage.

[MPot]

Taylor's essay is a mixed bag of reasonable ideas and baseless nonsense. Thus, I worry that some people will see only the positive, some only the negative. For what it's worth, here's my two cents (and, really, it's worth considerably less than that):

The disciplinary silo approach to curricula hasn't worked in quite some time, if ever it did, and the term "discipline" isn't particularly useful (as philosophers should know, there being no end to the debate over what constitutes philosophy). There have been some attempts to experiment with different structures, and Taylor's might be promising. But it's difficult to tell, since he provides no information about how it would work. Restructuring curricula doesn't necessarily involve the abolition of specialization, but rather different approaches to specialization. For instance, one could specialize in topics -- say, social justice -- and the curriculum could involve approaches to that topic from a variety of angles, utilizing a variety of methodologies and theoretical approaches. Students could specialize in particular methodologies and theoretical approaches as they advanced through a program. The curriculum could be structured, then, around asking questions and learning ways in which to find/develop/create answers. Similar to that taken in Inquiry learning.

Of course any widespread structural change to university education would entail a critical mass of faculty taking a responsible, scholarly approach to teaching and curriculum development. hardly likely.

Taylor's recommendation of increased collaboration between institutions is fine, though there are logistical challenges involved in making that happen. There are reasons to believe, too, that face-to-face learning has advantages over online/distance learning (the NSD research only shows that distance learning is about as effective as lecturing -- which is much like saying that Don Rickles is just as pretty as Walter Matthau).

The abolition of tenure is an astonishingly stupid idea -- especially in an increasingly conservative world. As Leiter says, it makes much more sense to push universities to be less timid in initiating termination proceedings.

[Mark S]

The term "professionalization" acquires a rather ambiguous (if not favorable) status in Dr. Leiter's discussions (at least that's the impression I get). But can't "professionalization" be seen in a more ominous light?

In several books following in the steps of the likes of Bruno Rizzi's "Bureaucratization of the World", James Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution", Milovan Djilas' "New Class", Dr. Donald C. Hodges points out that the new "postcapitalist" society (see also Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, Peter Drucker, etc.) is dominated by the new "professional" class (see "America's New Economic Order") which is a kind of "fascism...without fascists" (see "Class Politics in the Information Age").

This all follows the rough line of argument Mikhail Bakunin pursued when he criticized Marx's vision as a society ruled by "experts" (or "savants" as he also termed them somewhat derisively, those with "heads overflowing with brains"). Bakunin concluded: "It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptous of all regimes. There will be a new hierachy of real and pretended scholars and scientists, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of the ignorant ones."

Additionally, I notice Max Weber gets mentioned (another prophet of the coming "bureaucratic society"), and I read the linked article by Dr. Leiter. But wasn't Weber's point regarding this "inescapable...historical condition" extremely pessimistic in the evaluative sense (Dr. Leiter's article leaves me with the impression that Weber's point is more neutral or even upbeat)? Maybe I'm just misreading.

[Brian Leiter]

Mark S.: you've misread me. Professionalization and specialization are facts, visible in Weber's own day, and even more so now. Absent radical changes in the economics of higher education, they are here to stay. Specialization has some virtues, many vices, but that wasn't my point, or Weber's.

I didn't deny that the value of tenure was monetizable, just that, as things stand, it is a non-monetary benefit of an academic career. As to its monetary value, I suspect Professor Seaquist's estimate of its monetary value is way too low--what really needs to be calculated is what academic jobs would have to pay to attract individuals who, given education and intelligence, could earn greater sums elsewhere, but who may value the potential job security.

Regarding B. Junker's post about "most" and "many": in context, from a claim about "most," Professor Taylor draws a general conclusion about graduate education tout court. That makes no sense, when many (not a majority, but a substantial minority) of PhD programs in fact deliver on academic careers for their graduates.

Tenure helps protect the First Amendment rights of state university faculty by making it more difficult--through imposition of procedural safeguards and burdens of proof--to terminate tenured faculty. Professor X has offensive political views is not "good cause" for termination.

[Carlos Ruiz]

Some schools keep their philosophy department ranking up through what I suspect is retaining really old professors that at one time had something in them. If a professor is productive, that's great; but some schools, *cough*Berkeley, I'm worrying might have more prestige through tradition and past influence than in something practical and contemporary. However, making the decision to not rehire someone after 7 years or to force a retirement is a very difficult decision that could hurt more than help the institution unless put into very delicate and knowledgeable hands. Who would be qualified enough to assess the value of what particular professors are doing?---to a certain degree, this is possible, but a considerable amount of philosophy, seems to me, to spring forth from a sort of cluttered randomness...perhaps?

[Kevin Schutte]

I would prefer that philosophers encourage multidisciplinarity rather than interdisciplinarity. (Spell check suggests those aren't real words.) Since a large number of those who begin graduate school in philosophy will not finish it with a Ph.D., and since a bachelor's degree isn't a normal stepping stone on any other career path than to become a Philosophy Professor, it seems to me that all philosophy departments should recommend to its students that they complete a second, more practical, major as a fallback/backup.

I also think that, in a way, philosophy is already too interdisciplinary. I think most existing programs would be more effective at preparing students for careers if they reduced the breadth of their expectations. I think degrees specifically in ethics or logic or history of ideas or metaphysics and epistemology would each be better than the broad philosophy degrees given now. More specific programs of study would better ally graduates with non-academic employers. Those with degrees in ethics might be sought to contribute to the accounting, auditing, and consulting professions, those with degrees in logic by those seeking computer programmers or teachers of mathematics, and programs in the history of ideas could get certified in subject matter competence for the teaching of history in high schools. I think philosophy is presently so broad that no employer (who doesn't have a degree or two in it) can easily identify the skills that a particular department of philosophy has given its graduates. (Because different university departments have VASTLY different focuses.)

I can't see the problem with this restructuring, and maybe this is just a personal fault. It would bring together researchers who work on similar topics, but it likely wouldn't reduce the breadth of any of those topics. Ethics departments, for example, would still need a course each in critical thinking and some kind of intro to metaphysics/ontology, just like every social science department has its own statistics course. Statistics is important enough to have its own field, but that doesn't mean it can't also be a part of another field. Subfields of what is currently known as philosophy are just the same, and ought to become more independent from each other.

[Enzo Rossi]

Taylor's interdisciplinarity amounts to little more than a reduction to the minimum common denominator. Put another way, Taylor would like to reduce a variety of complex academic life forms to some sort of pseudo-intellectual amoeba.

[Christopher Tricarick]

This Taylor is clearly misplaced. How somebody with the soul of an advertising executive and the mind of an overgrown thirteen-year-old got to be the head of a department at Columbia would make for a fairly depressing mystery. But his article is worth thinking about, insofar as anyone involved in higher education ought critically to examine the role and purpose of his field. The first bizarre thing about Taylor is the juxtoposition of an extreme disdain for his own profession and a naive trust in the government beaurocrats who, we are to suppose, would 'regulate' academia if Taylor had his way. Among all our sins we can at least say of ourselves that we have a field of higher learning which is independent, where work is not constantly judged according to short-term results. That Taylor finds this deplorable is unfortunate, but even supposing that 'regulation' from outside would be a good thing, what in the work of government beaurocrats gives him the idea that they would do a good job at it?

Secondly, his opposition to tenure places him, as far as I am concerned, very much on the wrong side of history. We in America are addicted to the idea that nobody will do a good job at anything if he is not constantly terrified of losing his job. This has not been, until recently, the European or the East Asian way of doing things; in those countries--Japan in particular comes to mind here--a businessman, until recently, was pretty much assured of lifetime employment and a slow progress up the ladder of honours; one would have to do something pretty egregious to get fired. I cannot see that in the post-war decades when this was the case, the quality of their work was lower than it is now that American-style stress and insecurity have been introduced. Taylor surveys the American landscape, sees one group of people--tenured university professors--who are exempt from the world of fear--and shouts that they too should be afraid for their jobs just like everybody else. In Confucian terms he is simply inhumane.

Thirdly, he uses cliches and cant phrases which reveal an utterly uncritical attitude towards the ideas which he is supposed to be discussing. Even if the quality of a professor's work does need to be evaluated, I should think that someone motivated by a love of learning itself would not use such phrases as "This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills." "Evolve"--why are we cursed with a world in which change is loved for its own sake? Is a Chaucer experts who constantly changes his opinions of Chaucer better than one who does not? And "productivity"--how is this to be measure, especially in a world where our universities are regulated by technocrats? But Taylor despises his own supposed profession. That is the only explanation for a sentence such as "After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising." Leverage--it's the same philistine hatred for the site of people who cannot be controlled in some way. And notice the same stupid cant about "encouraging a professor to continue to develop professionally"--what does this mean? And does he really think that "administration" is a higher responsibility than scholarship? When he talks about "making room for young people with new ideas and skills", is there any other way to read this than that he is revelling in visions of some conservative sixty-year-old expert in Horace being canned because room needs to made for the young Derrida-quoting post-modernist whose work is 'relevant'?

Fourthly, this leads me to the underlying disease in Taylors "thoughts"--the utilitarian streak. He is incapable of disguising the fact that in his new system only the immediately useful fields of inquiry will be honoured. In describing his "water" program, he makes a highly pathetic and self-serving bid for the inclusion of his own field: "These vexing practical problems [water shortages and the like] cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs." But surely even this buffoon can see the likely result. In the hands of the technocrats who would be likely to be in charge of such a system, it would be the engineers who would dominate. Sure, for the sake of cultural window-dressing, the occasional "religious studies" professor would give a talk about the use of water as symbol in religious texts or something of the kind; then the serious people would get down to work in a way that left very little room for contributions from the non-technical. I hardly see where a professor of Greek poetry would fit here.

Finally, that he finds a website or a video game to be an exciting improvement on the dissertation suggests an adolescent mind. The little speech which he proudly concludes by quoting himself as giving to his students: "Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” is the same kind of perpetual adolescent stuff. In other words, instead of doing the job of the academic--to analyse the presuppositions underlying popular culture in an attempt to see where our unrecognized prejudices may be leading us astray, he is engaged in all the naive uncritical revelling in our popular cant of a junior executive in an advertising firm. But for all that there is something singularly old-fashioned here; this advertising executive sounds like he is coming out of the 1950s. The trust in government programs, the naive belief in progress, the adolescent delight in new technology and the mistaking of technology for subtance, all suggest someone whose ideas were formed when Robert Moses was in power. Haven't those people done enough damage already?

[Chris Collins]

Looks like a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Although many of his observations and complaints are valid, his solutions are either already being implemented widely, or are so absurd that he must be including them for shock value. Whatever...He got in the papers, and the controversy will guarantee him a job for the next decade.

suggestions 1,2&3 are basically the same thing.
Interdisciplinary research is great, but doens't require that we dissolve departments. Interdisciplinary progams with practical goals are widespread, but almost always exist as collaborations between well defined departments. there is no interdisciplinary without disciplines. I'd hate to be the first graduate of a pilot Ph.D program in "mind", or "time". Also, after we abolish specialists, what use will it be to have a bunch of "generalists" collaborating, since they will all have the same shallow level of knowlege the same topics.

If you don't like being sequestered in an insular department, then don't be. Walk down the hall or to the next building and introduce yourself. Go to a seminar in another department, Invite outsiders to your seminars (bribe them with snacks if necessary, I guarantee this will work!). I promise you won't be ostracized.

Point 4 is begging for a flood of flavor of the week fluff projects that will age very badly. The half-life of technology is very short compared to the written word.

Multimedia projects are often used in coursework, and many, if not most dissertation projects involve the use of technology to some degree. But technology for the sake of technology is pointless. Also, a website or video game is not a stand alone contribution to ones field, even in computer science. You still need to write a well reasoned dissertation explaining the background and current state of ones field, and how your project contributes. If a student can't write such a defense of their work, perhaps it's not so much "relevant" as it is "trendy".

5. I Totally agree. Students should have mandatory meetings with career counselors, and attend seminars on career options, preferably lead by a combination of faculty and non-academic professionals. Academic faculty should not be expected to be experts about non-academic career options.

6. This a dangerously appealing idea for freshly minted Ph.D's or those about to enter the job market. the temptation to prune the "dead wood" to make room for new faculty positions seems like a good idea, until you get a faculty position and realize that now you are on the chopping block because of a bad grant cycle or a publishing gap. Living from adjunct position to adjunct position is no way to build a career. The benefits of tenure have been well defended by previous posters. I also wonder if he'd be willing to give up his tenure track gig. Didn't think so.

[Carl Seaquist]

"I suspect Professor Seaquist's estimate of its monetary value is way too low--what really needs to be calculated is what academic jobs would have to pay to attract individuals who, given education and intelligence, could earn greater sums elsewhere, but who may value the potential job security."

I think I recall correctly a discussion on your law blog where you say that new law professors make relatively more money than humanities profs because they are choosing academia over private practice, which pays far more. But over time the pay differential decreases, as law profs are less able to transition away from academia. If my memory is correct, then wouldn't this type of argument apply here as well? A smart undergrad philosophy major could go to professional school and earn far more than a professor. But many of those opportunities are more difficult to achieve after earning a PhD in philosophy, and in fact the alternate career for a lot of academics is closer to Starbucks than to high legal practice. Sure, some newly-minted PhDs go on to law school, but a lot of high-paying careers that were possible for newly-minted undergrads are pretty much impossible after the PhD.

Consider consulting and investment banks. When McKinsey was recruiting grad students at Penn a few years back, they brought an analyst who had a philosophy PhD. So it's possible, but I think he was the only one they had with that kind of training, and it's hard to generalize from a population of 1. Generally consultancies and investment banks take people out of b-school or grad school who spent a couple of years in the industry after college, and even in good economic times it's hard for MBAs to move between industries, so it's not unreasonable to assume that it's harder for Philosophy PhDs.

Admittedly, there are other well-paying career paths besides the ones I've mentioned, but to get an estimate of the value assistant professors actually set on the possibility of tenure, you'd really have to compare professorial salaries to the average of salaries in alternate careers, weighted for the likelihood of each outcome (placement in a particular career path). And my guess is that academia pays reasonably well by this measure, even without an adjustment for the monetary value of tenure.

Another issue to consider is the personality and skills of a particular Philosophy PhD. The ones who go to law school after grad school: are they as likely to pick high-paying careers in law (which would include what, corporate law or helping people get out of DWIs?), or are they more inclined towards less lucrative and more "philosophical" specializations (constitutional law?). If they end up going for the money, how many have the ability to really excel as compared to the folks who had a single-minded focus on making big money from the time they arrrived in college?

[Matt Margolis]

Listen to you egg-head dweebs drone on and on. Obviously advanced degrees should be subject to market forces and if they don't contribute to GDP they are worthless by deffinition. Communists like Obama haven't taken over everything yet!

[Brian Leiter]

Mr. Margolis: Thank you for stopping by to share your "thoughts". You might find the category on this blog called "the less they know, the less they know it" illuminating or even a source of some self-insight. Also, Karl Marx co-authored a book called "The Communist Manifesto" which might prove worth reading as you seek to develop a more nuanced picture of President Obama's agenda.