CHE: Where are your fact-checkers?

CHE has two essays this week attacking philosophy (what else is new from CHE?):  one, by Lee McIntyre, says that philosophy "needs to matter", while the other is a thinly veiled advertisement for what members of the philosophy department at the University of North Texas do under the guise of being a philosophy department.  (Note:  if you can't afford to advertise in CHE, you can always write an advertisement framed as an opinion piece bashing what other philosophers do.)   Let "a thousand flowers bloom," including the one blooming at UNT:  but why in God's name think that everyone else should be doing that? 

I am puzzled though how CHE let pass the claims in McIntyre's piece and the UNT piece about declining enrollments in philosophy.  Mark Schroeder (USC) observed on Facebook (he gave me permission to repost this here):

At USC, our majors are up 83% in the last three years. American Studies is down 40%, History down 22%, Religion down 46%, Comparative Literature down 21%. We're a more populat major than Sociology, Anthropology, History, Mathematics, and all of American Studies, Classics, Comp Lit, East Asian Studies, French and Italian, Gender Studies, Slavic Languages, and Spanich combined. I have to admit, our growth is slightly behind that of kinesiology, so we could be doing better. Perhaps that's what they had in mind. It's good to have high standards.

Is that anomalous?  Not really.  Fortunately, a commenter on McIntyre's piece comes to the rescue to point out that the factual predicate of the piece is bogus:

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of philosophy and religious studies majors  was 8,149 in 1970-71 (.9% of total degrees of 839,730) and 12,444 in 2008-09 (.7% of total degrees of 1,601,368).  That is an increase in absolute numbers of majors, even though it is admittedly a decline in terms of percentage of total degrees offered (where big increases in numbers of degrees and percentage of degrees are in areas such as business, biomedical sciences, communications, computer science, visual and performing arts). BUT it is still an increase in the total number of majors. Moreover, in 1998-99 the total number of philosophy and religious studies majors was 8506 (.7% of total degrees of 1, 200, 303) and thus has held steady as a percentage of total degrees since 1998. Moreover, the total number of degrees increased from 1,200,303 in 1998-99 to 1,601,368 in 2008-09 (2008-09 total degrees = 1.33% of 1998-99 total degrees), while the number of philosophy and religious studies degrees had a GREATER RATE of increase: 8506 in 1998-99 to 12444 in 2008-09 (2008-09 phil/relstud degrees = 1.46% of 1998-99 phil/relstud degrees).

Just to put all this in perspective, education, by contrast, has both a decline in absolute numbers and a decline in percentage of degrees offered; it goes from 176,307 in 1970-71 (21% of total degrees of 839,730) to 101,708 in 2008-09 (6% of total degrees of 1,601,368).

CHE editors, where are you?

What's most disheartening about these anti-intellectual pieces is that they represent the American version of what's befallen the British, where every field of intellectual pursuit has to justify its "market" value in virtue of its "practical" applications.   It's ironic that in the week a New York Times blogger is defending the value of law schools producing legal scholarship regardless of its practical utility, we have philosophy teachers calling for philosophy to be subjected to essentially that "cash-value" metric. 

What do readers make of all this?  Comments on the particulars of these pieces are welcome.  Signed comments only:  full name and valid e-mail address.  Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

UPDATE:  I apologize for closing comments to this thread, but it has now been infested by people with very different axes to grind (perhaps because of the recent release of the PGR).  One of the great virtues of the Internet is that it allows you to draw on the expertise of people in disparate parts of the globe; one of the great vices is that it permits every marginal freak to air their grievances as well.  I am disappointed that the many philosophers who wrote to me in outraged terms about these silly columns didn't surface for the discussion.

Comments

[Michael Kremer]

At the University of Chicago the Philosophy major has experienced rapid growth in the past decade. Some of this is attributable to growth in the undergraduate College, but that doesn't account for all the growth in the major which has outstripped the general undergraduate population. We have close to 150 majors and double-majors out of about 5400 undergraduates, and are the second largest major in the Humanities after English.

[Carolyn Dicey Jennings]

It strikes me that McIntyre's numerical claim is accurate: "When adjusted for total enrollment, numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics show a 20-percent drop in philosophy and religion majors from 1970 through 2009." In other words, there was a 20 (well, 22) percent drop (from 9% to 7%) in philosophy and religion majors from 1970 through 2009 with respect to total enrollment.

I think some of the claims in the paper are good, but disagree with the following claims: "Over the last 20 years, income inequality in America has grown to unsustainable levels, genocide has devastated Rwanda and Serbia, modern slavery exists in Sudan, child prostitution is rampant in Southeast Asia, and 9/11 brought terrorism to American shores. Yet to look at the history of the philosophy of language, mind, science, metaphysics, epistemology, or even ethics, one would hardly know all that. Consequently, outside of philosophy no one cares much what philosophers have to say to one another—and I'm not sure we can blame them."

It is not true that people outside of philosophy do not care what philosophers have to say to one another and even politicians regularly quote philosophers. It also does not appear to be true that the world is on the whole more violent now than in the past (at least, according to Steven Pinker and others) or that the quality of life is on the whole worse now than in the past (e.g. http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20110203/1astandardofliving03_cv.art.htm). Why is that? I would argue that it is due, in part, to philosophers, academic and otherwise, who have come up with ideas that have changed the way we live for the better. Moreover, a better life involves not only changing the physical conditions of life but our understanding of the mind and language. To understand these is to understand our connection to the world and society, and what could be more humanly interesting than that?

That more students are not interested in philosophy than other fields is likely a problem of cultural concern rather than a problem for our discipline, just as the decrease in numbers (again, compared to total enrollment) for students in science, math, and technology is a culture-wide problem (http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/02/what-are-americans-studying/). On the other hand, we probably could do more to emphasize good teaching and to take the bulk of the teaching load off the shoulders of part-time and /or temporary employees. But is this problem really special to philosophy?

[Steven Hales]

It's all part of turning colleges and universities into corporate farm teams. At least, those schools still beholden to (some) public funding are headed in that direction. The wealthy privates can still carry the flame. The chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, which comprises 14 universities, including my own, sent out a system-wide email today. Here's some salient parts:

"the reality that state revenues are not recovering, means that we are facing several more years of difficult financial pressures...in some cases, fewer adjunct faculty have been hired. In others, class sizes have increased. Vacancies have not been filled and many lower-enrolled programs have been put in moratorium or discontinued... We are advocating for legislation which will, among other things, permit all PASSHE universities to offer applied doctorates and give our faculty and staff new opportunities to be entrepreneurial."

Yep, applied doctorates aimed at making us entrepreneurial. I'm sure they will enable us to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

[Matt Brown]

I am very much in favor of the types of philosophy being recommended here: public, engaged, practical, socially relevant, policy-focused, passionate, Socratic, general, etc., etc. I think there should be more of it, and I think the discipline ought to give it the recognition it deserves. And I think all of us could stand to ask what public, social, or practical value there is in our work, so long as we have an expansive conception of those values. But it is not clearly the case that most philosophers should be doing the kind of work being recommended, and it is clearly not the case that this is all that philosophers should do.

I think there is some legitimacy to the feeling that the discipline is under threat, given what we've seen in the last year or two with universities threatening to shutter their philosophy departments, PhD programs being cut, and so on. But the threat does not come from declining enrollment, lack of student interest, or lack of social value being produced; it comes from narrow-mindedness on the part of administrators, politicians, etc. on just what is valuable.

[Eddy Nahmias]

My response to these two pieces was not so negative. Rather, it was something like: "Yeah, someone really should be doing all the stuff the authors are begging for ... but should it really be philosophy departments?" Instead, it seems like philosophy departments should be providing the sort of training to undergraduates that would allow them to be better at going out and fixing the world--as lawyers, politicians, journalists, activists, etc. If academic philosophers could manage to do research, teaching, and service, and also do more political work, column writing, activism, that would be ideal, but we can't do it all. And sacrificing rigorous--and yes, specialized--research does not seem the best way to go. (I do wish we had more public intellectuals, including philosophers--maybe if Rick Perry is elected...)

To me, the best way to increase much-needed philosophical (i.e., rigorous, open-minded, fact-based, well-defended) thinking in our society would be to have more people take philosophy classes, even "old-fashioned" ones. Attracting more students to these classes requires interesting intro classes and maybe some more cool-sounding philosophy classes. But really what we need is philosophy classes in high schools.

[Tim]

Here is an April 2008 NYT piece that I show to my intro students on occasion. It reports significant increases in the number of philosophy majors at several top schools within the last decade, as well as an overall increase in the number of schools offering philosophy programs in the same period.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.html?pagewanted=print

[John Schwenkler]

This is implied in Mark Schroeder's comment, but surely the relevant statistic is neither "Total number of philosophy majors" nor "Percentage of the overall student population who major in philosophy", but rather "Percentage of *humanities (or liberal arts) majors* who are philosophy majors". I'd be very surprised if the first two numbers haven't declined significantly in recent decades, but if we don't separate that from the overall decline in the humanities as pre-professional majors have taken off (I know it's happened at my institution ...), then we've failed to identify anything meaningful about philosophy per se. Surely the numbers are out there for someone with the time!

[Carl Sachs]

I, too, would love to see philosophers take up obligations as public intellectuals and as cross-disciplinary researchers, adopting and modifying the model provided by such 20th-century philosophers as John Dewey and Theodor Adorno. I can agree with Frodeman and Briggle to some extent, in that we don't seem to have a very good way of institutionalizing rewards for those activities, especially the former. On the one hand, Frodeman and Briggle do strike me as having an overly narrow conception of what public intellectual engagement and cross-disciplinary research look like; on the other hand, that narrowness should be taken as an incentive to develop other conceptions.

I would like to point out one serious problem in the Frodeman-Briggle narrative: that it express an uncritical reliance on the narratives offered by Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and McCumber's Time in the Ditch. Jay Rosenberg's "Philosophy's Self-Image" and George Reisch's review of McCumber in Philosophy of Science are, I find, immensely helpful correctives.

I would, however, like to register my dissatisfaction with Brian's hasty characterization of their CHE article as "a thinly veiled advertisement for what members of the philosophy department at the University of North Texas do under the guise of being a philosophy department."

It is true that the philosophy and religion studies department at UNT concentrates on environmental philosophy, philosophy of ecology, religion and nature, etc., and there's room for debate about whether the narrowness of focus is most conducive to an intellectually vibrant community.

However, Brian's dimissal is unfair to the members of the UNT department, both faculty and graduate students, who are doing interesting work in ecological politics, environmental justice, urban studies, environmental hermeneutics, and other sub-fields that draw on more 'mainstream' philosophical concerns. It would be unfortunate if the problematic claims made by Frodeman and Briggle were to cast a negative light on the department as a whole, many of whom are engaged in what would be recognizable as high-quality, even if narrowly focused, philosophy in any department.

[Full disclosure: I was employed as a lecturer at UNT from 2007 to 2011.]

BL COMMENT: I didn't dismiss what UNT is doing, I just questioned the hubris of suggesting that what the rest of the discipline is doing isn't worth doing. And can we please stop the nonsense about philosophers not being "public intellectuals"? There are tons of philosophers in America who are, in every meaningful sense, public intellectuals and who write on issues of public concern: Philip Pettit, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Allen Buchanan, Elizabeth Anderson, the list goes on and on. The problem is that America is a thoroughly anti-intellectual culture, and so the main impact of the work these philosophers and others do is mostly in other countries.

[Tom Hurka]

It seems Carolyn Dicey Jennings is right and the numerical claim in McIntyre's piece is completely accurate. The quoted commenter from the CHE tries to answer it by citing an increase in the absolute number of philosophy and religion degrees 1970-2009 while grudgingly acknowledging that it involves a decline in the percentage of such degrees. But McIntyre's claim was explicitly ("when adjusted for total enrollment") about percentages. If we claim to be so good at critical reasoning we should not be mixing up absolute-level and percentage claims.

Maybe McIntyre's claim is out of date and misses more recent developments (congratulations USC). And maybe a complete survey of those developments (though USC is just one case) would paint a different picture. But none of us has that complete survey, as against anecdotes, and the data McIntyre cites in his article are not "bogus."

I think we philosophers do ourselves no good at all by responding to criticisms from outside by in effect saying our discipline is in great shape, no significant changes need be contemplated, the critics just show their ignorance, etc. I'm sure it strikes administrators as self-satisfied and arrogant because, frankly, it is.

Are there no ways our increased focus on hyper-sophisticated research has detracted from our undergraduate teaching? Philosophers' applications to multidisciplinary granting committees often do badly, in part because the non-philosophy members can't understand the proposed research. Is that just those members' fault or could we philosophers perhaps be doing a bad job of explaining what we do and relating it to other people's interests?

I think a little humility in response to outside criticism would both serve us better and be more appropriate than immediate charges of "anti-intellectualism."

BL COMMENT: Tom, your contrarian inclinations have really gotten the best of you here. McIntyre's claim is not "completely correct," it is, as the commenter said, misleading, since it is meant to imply bad fortunes for philosophy. But as the commenters points out: "in 1998-99 the total number of philosophy and religious studies majors was 8506 (.7% of total degrees of 1, 200, 303) and thus has held steady as a percentage of total degrees since 1998. Moreover, the total number of degrees increased from 1,200,303 in 1998-99 to 1,601,368 in 2008-09 (2008-09 total degrees = 1.33% of 1998-99 total degrees), while the number of philosophy and religious studies degrees had a GREATER RATE of increase: 8506 in 1998-99 to 12444 in 2008-09 (2008-09 phil/relstud degrees = 1.46% of 1998-99 phil/relstud degrees)." In other words, why isn't that evidence of philosophy's improving fortunes? Well, because that wouldn't fit the narrative. If you have really convinced yourself that the two pieces at issue here don't sound anti-intellectual notes, then I'm sure I am not going to persuade you. But sometimes the right response to pernicious anti-intellectualism, based on misleading data, isn't to say, "Thank you, please smack me on the head some more."

[Mark Schroeder]

In full disclosure, USC's total number of philosophy majors reflects not just the standard "philosophy" major that we offer, but also a new, "philosophy, politics, and law" major that is only about two years old. But the numbers for the other departments also reflect, in many cases, multiple majors offered in those departments. In our case, what is striking is not just the growth, but the contrast with other humanities.

[Jen Rowland]

I share some of Dr. Leiter's misgivings about the piece by Dr. Briggle and Dr. Frodeman. However, I disapprove of Dr. Leiter's note regarding departments unable to afford an ad on CHE. Not only should this not be a factor in one's assessment of an argument (unless ad hominem arguments are acceptable when parenthetical), it seems out of place next to Leiter's own criticism of market-value justification of one's work.

Disclosure: I am currently a UNT graduate student, and Adam Briggle is a member of my dissertation committee.

BL COMMENT: It wasn't offered as an argument (ad hominem or otherwise), but as a joke, given the poor quality of the piece and the fact that it's bottom line was: "Everyone should be more like North Texas."

[dankaufman!]

i have an idea: why don't we agree not to let this type of stuff bother us so much that we wind up calling more attention to it than it deserves. if a couple of people at north texas want to tell us that what we're doing is irrelevant or in need of practical justification or whatever, then, well, whatever. these discussions make me soooo sleeeeeepy.
xoxo

BL COMMENT: That was my inclination, except lots of philosophers e-mailed calling out for comment!

[J. Britt Holbrook]

I suppose if you keep repeating your charge, it has a good chance to stick. However, I don't see Briggle and Frodeman arguing that everyone should be more like North Texas.

If anything, what they argue is that not everyone should try to be more like, say, the Philosophical Gourmet Report's top 5 programs in philosophy.

That may be heretical, but it's not hubristic.

And yes, I am also from UNT philosophy.

BL COMMENT: I acknowledge that you do not think that's what your colleagues were arguing. I think the top five programs in the PGR are rather good philosophy departments, but I also think the top 20 and beyond are all rather good. I think David Schmidtz, an important environmental philosopher at the University of Arizona (#14) in PGR is rather good. So "let a thousand flowers bloom," as I said. And I'm glad to know that is *actually* the view of your colleagues, appearances notwithstanding.

[Jeremy Pierce]

You don't have to think philosophy has no reason for being without this practical focus to think philosophers should be doing the things in these articles. I'm fully behind philosophers doing these things, and I've insisted on doing them. I wrote my dissertation on the metaphysical status of race, which I consider applied metaphysics in the same sense that the ethics of abortion is applied ethics. I also am very interested in purely theoretical metaphysics, such as material constitution, persistence through time, and even completely hypothetical questions such as time travel. I think such questions are worth engaging with for their own sake. But I think it's unfortunate that philosophers are not engaging with the broader practical questions on the popular level. It would improve those discussions, and it would achieve more good in the world than service courses do, which is not negligible but is usually smaller in impact than helping a large audience of blog-readers, say, to think better about important matters, and service aspects of service courses are also in many cases not much more than tangential to the philosophy.

[Brian]

By the way, we're done with posts from members of the UNT Department. I hope they flourish, and I hope they can do so without pissing on the rest of the discipline.