In talking with the CHE reporter for the article about Penn State, one question that came up was how seriously philosophy of race was taken at top PhD programs. (This did not make it into the article, alas, but it is perhaps of interest, since Penn State churning out PhDs in the area is not going to have the same impact as top PhD programs investing in the area.) I did a little investigating, and was struck by the fact of how many top PhD programs have added senior faculty in philosophy of race over the last decade: NYU, for example, appointed Anthony Appiah from Princeton; Michigan hired Derrick Darby from the University of Kansas; Harvard Philosophy cross-appointed Tommie Shelby from its African and African-American Studies Department; Columbia hired Robert Gooding-Williams from the Political Science Department here at Chicago; the CUNY Graduate Center hired Charles Mills from Northwestern (Mills also had an offer from Yale) (Hunter College also appointed Linda Alcoff, who works partly in philosophy of race, from Syracuse, and she also now as an appointment at the Graduate Center); and Wash U/St. Louis added Ron Mallon from Utah. A number of PGR-ranked PhD programs also added junior faculty who work in whole or in part in philosophy of race during this period. Prior to this investment, there was relatively little work being done in philosophy of race at top PhD programs: Howard McGary at Rutgers, Bernard Boxill at North Carolina (now retired), Appiah at Princeton, Sally Haslanger at MIT, Michael Hardimon at UC San Diego, and I think that was it.
We may now be at the point where philosophy of race is better-represented at the leading PhD programs in the U.S. than feminist philosophy (let alone Marxist philosophy, itself very telling), an interesting development. Of course, philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and Marxist philosophy are all dwarfed by the investment of leading PhD programs in, for example, metaphysics! I suspect that, given the shape of the job market, and where the jobs are, that approach is going to prove unsustainable.
ADDENDUM: Elliott Sober (Wisconsin) writes with "an additional detail about philosophy of race": "Many philosophers of biology, myself included, include a discussion of race in their classes on philosophy of biology."
Recent Comments