This is amazing. We now have some actual empirical evidence that "diversifying" the syllabus does not affect female interest in continuing with philosophy, and yet this doesn't stop the APA blog. I hope that all philosophy teachers will prepare their syllabi with an eye to the intellectual content and pedagogical value of the material, and nothing else. That the APA Blog would promote any other approach is a "sign of the times," I guess. Re: "the times," see this earlier discussion.
UPDATE: A reader who teaches philosophy to undergraduates writes with two objections that deserve a response:
First, I detect from the tone of your post, perhaps wrongly, the implicit view that there is something crazy about undergrads giving professors advice about what to include on syllabi in the first place. If that's your view, I disagree. I think it's awesome for students to give respectful, constructive criticism to their teachers—and I think what Taylor writes certainly counts as that—as long as it's allowed to be a two-way conversation, and professors have the courage to defend what they teach, as well as of course the ultimate right to make the decisions. Would we really rather have students who always just passively accept our curricular choices? To me criticism can be a sign that students are taking responsibility for their own education. Our role should be to take their criticism seriously, help them to articulate it better, and then respectfully disagree—or, if appropriate, to take their advice! We should be trying to encourage this sort of conversation, rather than shut it down. If we were more committed to actually teaching students how to have this sort of debate well, maybe we would end up with (a) better, more interesting philosophy courses and (b) fewer puerile, easy-to-dismiss lists of demands. A win-win! (I certainly don't mean to lump Taylor's piece in with the latter category, by the way.)
Of course, we already have a way of getting feedback from undergraduates, namely, course evaluations, and student evaluations, at all levels, are useful I've found, especially if one pays attention to recurrent criticisms or worries. The value of feedback from undergraduates has nothing to do with whether a professional association's blog should provide a platform for advice that is based simply on speculation about the effects of "diversifying" the syllabus for which there is no known empirical support.
Second, although I couldn't agree more with your view that philosophy teachers should "prepare their syllabi with an eye to the intellectual content and pedagogical value of the material," I don't think that that's necessarily in tension with Taylor's concrete suggestions. There are, uncontroversially I believe, lots of intellectually valuable works that for whatever reason aren't often included on philosophy syllabi even where they might be relevant—and I think it's a fine thing for professors to be prodded a little to be creative in this regard. And purely anecdotally, I can say that the experience that Taylor describes of her response to Astell, Conway, etc. seems typical. In my experience, all my students—both women and men—are excited to learn about relatively marginalized figures in the philosophical tradition and to put them into dialogue with more canonical ones. Ultimately, I think that if a text gets students excited and interested in philosophy (even if that is, to begin with, just because of contingent facts about who wrote it and where), then that counts towards its pedagogical value. I think that holds regardless of what research suggests about the effects of syllabus composition on female interest in continuing in philosophy. (I confess that I don't really care that much about whether my students go on to major in philosophy; primarily I want them to have a transformative intellectual experience in my course.)
I have little quarrel with most of Ms. Taylor's concrete suggestions; I quarrel with the reasons she gives for them, which are not sound and which if accepted as legitimate will ultimately degrade what is taught in philosophy classrooms as identity politics gradually trumps intellectual and pedagogical considerations.
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