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Are Philosophy Departments Being Targetted for Cuts or Elimination More than Other Programs? And, if so, why?

Brian Leiter

A couple of readers have raised versions of this question in recent weeks.  Of course, this blog, for the obvious reason, disproportionately reports news about affected philosophy departments, so I don't really know if philosophy is more often or less often the target of cuts–someone reading this blog will, needless to say, get a somewhat distorted picture of where the cuts are.  We did cover the assault on foreign language study and classics at SUNY Albany, but my guess is there are many more cases like this, where philosophy survives unscathed, but other humanities fall to the chopping block.  (Links in the comments to more information on the issue of how philosophy fares relative to other disciplines would be welcome.)   At the same time, of course, research universities have been heavily invested in philosophy–Rutgers and Arizona, for example, have largely sheltered their excellent departments from the worst of budget cuts; Texas was recently awarded a million dollar Chair to fill; Chicago has expanded its philosophy faculty with a flurry of junior hiring; and so on.  But, of course, most jobs are not at research universities, but liberal arts colleges (I haven't heard any stories of draconian cuts at these places) and private and state universities focused on undergraduate education.   So what's happening out there?  And why would philosophy be especially vulnerable?  Signed comments preferred, of course.

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25 responses to “Are Philosophy Departments Being Targetted for Cuts or Elimination More than Other Programs? And, if so, why?”

  1. Unnamed Junior Faculty Member

    I teach at a small religious liberal arts college where it was just announced that several majors and minors in foreign language and classics are being frozen, while a number of pre-professional programs are being designated with a special status that will give them funding priority for hiring, scholarships, marketing, etc. The humanities faculty (who make up about half of us) are shocked. In our case the philosophy department is not going to be frozen, because we have a sizable major and also serve the seminary and general education curriculum, and it looks like the decision to target foreign languages is largely numbers-driven. But of course the decision to refocus funding priorities is a very big deal, and suggests a significant change in our institution's self-conception.

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  2. Jonathan Webber

    In the case of the closure of the Philosophy degree programmes at Keele University, part of the plan is to retain the same number of students in the university overall by redistributing the Philosophy numbers across other departments without hiring more staff in those other departments.

    This is possible because the Philosophy programmes are quite small at Keele. (This is not for want of applicants: Philosophy is very popular among the youth in the UK.)

    So in this case, part of the reason Philosophy is being picked out is that it is relatively small compared with other disciplines.

    More info on the Keele closure, along with a link to the document outlining the university's reasoning, is here: http://tinyurl.com/4nhwxjd

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  3. Bill Wringe

    It may be worth saying that a few years ago Keele was apparently trying to shut its Physics program (but didn't because of significant pushback). And I believe it did close French .

    (Both these thing have been mentioned by current students on the wall for the Facebook page for the Save Keele Philosophy)

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  4. Bill Wringe

    I'm also wondering whether PEAK in particular is suffering from knock on efects from wider economic troubles: according to Ian Brassington (writing on the BMJ blog – Jonathan Webber's link), at one point it apparently brough it 2 percent of Keele's overall income. I'd imagine, though, that one area where firms will be cutting back in a recession is on sending people for Professional Ethics training. (And come to think of it – public service providers – health professionals etc eill have been a large part of PEAK's customer base.)

    So at least some of those involved in philosophy at Keele (the philosophers who are part of PEAK – I count at least 6 people there with PhDs in philosophy) are the victims of their own success in going out and finding sources of income that aren't linked to teaching undergraduates.

    I don't know how widely that's likely to be replicated elsewhere in the UK, or outside it. And of course it doesn't show that there isn't some more widespread animus against philosophy among university adminstrators.

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  5. Greg

    Echoing Unnamed Jr. Faculty Member and Jonathan Webber's comments above, the offical, stated rationale at UNLV for singling out the Philosophy Dept. and Women's Studies Dept. for elimination is that these two departments have the smallest number of majors in the College of Liberal Arts. So if philosophy departments tend to attract less majors, they may well tend to be targeted for elimination. (Thus, the recent thread here about famous philosophy majors is pertinent, since it could help departments looking to boost their number of majors.)

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  6. bhtphilo

    I wonder if some of the cuts at smaller liberal arts colleges are done in such a way that seems minor, but given the shear number of departments at schools such as these is actually rather significant.

    My alma mater for example scrapped the philosophy major and now only have a minor. In this particular department it's likely not going to lead to faculty cuts as the philosophy positions often teach in the religion department and all students are required to take an upper level ethics course to graduate.

    But, if enough schools make this sort of seemingly minor change, one less position here one less there the launching pad for budding young philosophers dries up awfully quickly.

    -and I don't only consider philosophy in this situation.

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  7. Harry Brighouse

    We need data to really know much. History and English are large disciplines, which are aggressive in self-protection, and simply because of their size supply plenty of administrators who are inclined to value them. Area studies people protect and value each other. But, typically, Philosophy teaches many credits per faculty member (and many more are taught by actual faculty than in, say English) and administrators with origins outside the Humanities value that. It is also cheap. An administrator concerned with saving money would go after art/music/theater etc before Philosophy because they are expensive (low salaries, but very low student loads), and area studies because they also tend to have low enrollments, and the enrollments they do have are so clearly the result of GE requirements of dubious value, and disliked by students (3 semesters of a language at an age when its already too late to learn it, taught by graduate students with little training or experience, eg). My sense is that, in fact, area studies are more threatened than the other arts and humanities, but that is just an impression.

    All the humanities are in a crisis though, and it is not going to go away when things improve financially. I find the "what we do is intrinsically valuable, essential to the mission of the university, at the core of a true education" defense, which I hear all over the place, extremely weak, and so do the administrators I talk to (more at other universities than my own, but here too). I'd like to hear: "We take undergraduate teaching extremely seriously, we have mechanisms for continuously improving our instruction, we only admit graduate students whom we have confidence will teach well, and we train them carefully, and our courses help to develop valuable skills X, Y, and Z in our students, and here is the evidence that they do that" much more often, but of course only when it is true, which is not always.

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  8. Joseph Garvin

    My former university has made various absurd demands of the philosophy department (Do more research, but we don't want to fund book purchasing anymore! No, we won't make Dr X [not real name] a Professor, even though the Labour Court made a binding decision that we have to!), but it is other departments that have suffered the worst of it. One language department had its medieval *that language* graduate course closed – without informing a foreign graduate student who was coming to do her doctoral thesis.

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  9. Ken Aizawa

    At Centenary, we will be eliminating 22 of 44 majors, by and large moving the college to be more like a liberal arts college, rather than a comprehensive university. Most of these eliminations were due to low enrollments in courses and few students graduating with those majors. In this category would be any number of professional music majors, education majors, along with German, Latin, Spanish, and Physics. Other eliminations, however, were apparently driven by "centrality to mission". Lack of "centrality" apparently explains the elimination of the (very popular) health and exercise science major, along with accounting and finance. Philosophy, however, did survive as being central to mission, but also having good enrollments and a solid number of majors. The draconian cuts at Centenary, however, were not merely the result of the economic downturn. For a very long time the college was running significant deficits, so that the struggling economy forced inevitable changes to happen sooner, and more painfully, than later.

    Part of the challenge for foreign languages and physics, I believe, is that the majors are relatively "hierarchical". Students have to take a fair amount of introductory level work before they can make their way into the upper division courses. This makes it harder, it seems to me, to develop student interest in the major. By contrast, after one or two philosophy courses, students are better able to take on upper level courses that may be of interest to them. This makes it a bit easier for students to discover that they like philosophy.

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  10. Michael Rosen

    I’m in the lucky situation of not being close to this latest round of attacks on philosophy departments but I can’t help thinking back to something similar that happened in the U.K. in the late seventies and early Thatcher years.

    Several apparently self-respecting universities (Bradford, Exeter, Newcastle) shut their philosophy departments, while others came very close (including, or so I was told, both Reading and Sheffield). The decisions were the outcome of academic politics at its worst – a mixture of bullying (picking on small and apparently vulnerable subjects to shield one’s own interests) and philistinism (people thought it was a good idea to sacrifice a subject with no obvious direct economic value to demonstrate ideological alignment with the ethos of the time).

    What is funny in hindsight (at least, to those of us with a somewhat dark sense of humour) is how misguided those decisions now look. Not only did the universities in question lose reputation and an intellectual focus for a lot of their activities (what is political theory without philosophy, for example?) but philosophy has flourished since then far more than the vice-chancellors and deans of the day expected. One need only look at the Reading and Sheffield departments, now two of the strongest in the English-speaking world. Students have turned to philosophy in large numbers (no one knows exactly why, but I’d like to think that it was at least in part a reaction against the sterility of British “A-Levels”) and, as vice-chancellors have belatedly come to recognize, philosophy is relatively cheap to teach.

    Unfortunately, British vice-chancellors and university administrators today are no less philistine and mediocre than they were thirty years ago and the academic self-government that might once have checked them has been pretty much destroyed. All of this has been extremely ably documented by Ian Pears in connection with Kings College London.

    The truth, of course, is that a university in which philosophy doesn’t play a strong role is really just a technical college by another name. I hardly imagine that it is necessary to spell out the case for this to the readers of this blog and I am pessimistic how far the gang of mediocrities and opportunists who are so excessively rewarded for running British universities will take heed. Still, the argument is overwhelming and, I guess, it’s time for those of us who care about the subject (and about the educational system in Britain) to be prepared to defend it publicly.

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  11. Ian Rumfitt

    Regarding Keele:

    It may be worth remarking that the Keele Philosophy Department was dissolved some years ago (ca. 2000, I think), when the applied ethicists were moved into PEAK (under the aegis of the law school) and the remaining philosophers were put together with politics and international relations to form a department called SPIRE. I know nothing of the recent politics of the university, but these arrangements have obviously been far from optimal in protecting and promoting the interests of philosophy.

    The current proposals are to wind down PEAK, and to cease teaching philosophy. There are powerful reasons against the latter proposal, at least, even though Keele does not offer a single honours philosophy degree. Keele is unusual among English universities in having a very high proportion of its undergraduates read for joint honours degrees; and philosophy, promoting as it does general critical reflection on goals and methods, mates with many other subjects to produce coherent joint degrees. So one can fairly argue that the education available to Keele undergraduates will be seriously impoverished if the university no longer offers philosophy.

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  12. Margaret Atherton

    Well but, Harry, the devil is in the details of "valuable skills x, y, and z." In many discussions these turn out to be completely vacuous, like critical thinking or problem solving (which for some reason in these contexts is preferred to solving problems), and not in any sense achievable particularly through philosophy. My hunch is that you are not going to be able to say anything meaningful until you are willing to abandon skills talk for something that is willing to take on board the issue of content in the disciplines. I am really afraid that hitching our wagon to skills is a pathway to being eliminated and not a way to avoid it.

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  13. John

    It seems to me that foreign language is under at least equal assault. The grad program in Romance Languages at Boston College is currently on the chopping block.

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  14. Jenann Ismael

    As a faculty member at Arizona, I can attest we've not been sheltered from the cuts. I wish it were so.

    BL COMMENT: I'm sorry to hear that, I had drawn that inference from some of the continued hiring and retention the Department had done in the past 24 months, but perhaps the Freedom Center has been making up the difference.

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  15. Ken Taylor

    This is a little off topic, Brian, so I will understand if you don't include it in this discussion.

    One thing that can possibly save philosophy is the fact that its intellectual agenda, taken as a whole, is sweeping, making it a natural for teaming up with other disciplines as part of interdisciplinary programs of various sorts. That gives us potentially many different ways to reach out to and a play a significant role in the education of students who are not straight philosophy majors.

    Philosophy is almost destined, because of the structure of American High School education, to be a relatively underpopulated major in comparison with most other majors. That's because although students can learn that they love and have an aptitude for literature or history or music or science or mathematics in most American High Schools, they'd have a hard time learning that it's really philosophy at which they excel and that truly speaks to their heart's desire. For the most part, we have to win them over once they get to college, by meeting them as Freshman or Sophomores and using our best teachers to turn them on, mostly for the first time, to philosophy. It's certainly possible to do, but we no doubt start at a serious deficit.

    That's why I think it's important to go at them every way we possibly can and participation in interdisciplinary programs is one important way to do so. Here at Stanford, for example, philosophy department faculty play major roles in the Ethics in Society Program, History and Philosophy of Science, Symbolic Systems, the Program in Philosophical and Literary Thought, a joint major in Classics and Philosophy and a joint major in Religious Studies and Philosophy.

    We also participate heavily in the Freshman Seminar program in our (probably disappearing) Introduction to the Humanities Program. And though IHUM is probably being phased out, it will be replaced by something that we will want to be an important part of.

    Bottom line, to the extent that we just rely on majors and or people taking our intro courses to justify our existence, we will, I think, have a much harder time justifying our existence to bean counting type administrators. We need to find creative ways, through multiple channels, to have more of a stake, if even not the "major" stake, in the education of more students.

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  16. Anon

    I am a junior member of a philosophy department at a small public school. Our major was targeted for cancellation a couple of years ago, though we saved it by increasing our numbers over the next year or two. The rationale of the administration then had nothing to do with importance, but rather with our low enrollment numbers. Physics and Theatre were also targeted, even though along with Philosophy, these were the top majors at the university in terms of average GPA. My best advice to anyone who is worried about philosophy departments being closed would be to go out and recruit more majors (there was a thread on LR about how to do this at one point, if I recall) as soon as possible. The administrators here at least only understand the category of quantity, and arguments about quality or substance or relation elude them.

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  17. Matthew Pianalto

    Maraget says: "In many discussions these [valuable skills] turn out to be completely vacuous, like critical thinking or problem solving (which for some reason in these contexts is preferred to solving problems), and not in any sense achievable particularly through philosophy."

    I think there's some truth in this (that such claims can be, or at least seem, vacuous), but there's also a question to be asked: if philosophy weren't better at teaching skills like critical thinking and problem solving, then there must be some other reason why philosophy students largely outperform other majors on various standardized exams which ostensibly assess critical thinking (like the LSAT, etc.). My hunch is that there's something about the study of philosophical content which is also relevant here, and perhaps if someone could figure out how to identify that, it could be used as a non-vacuous reason to drive the argument: "If School X values training students in critical thinking, then there are reasons to encourage (even require) the study of philosophy for which acquiring the desired critical thinking skills is not separable from the kind of content studied in philosophy courses."

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  18. Adam Phillips

    As someone who studied only science and mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled in a terminal MA philosophy program as a graduate student, I can attest that I couldn't reason to save my life before I studied philosophy–although I could solve fancy math problems.

    Since every school claims to teach and value critical thinking skills, appeal to critical thinking skills is a core justification for the instrumental value of philosophy.

    The cheap and easy way to show that philosophy is central to teaching critical thinking skills is that, well, only philosophy teaches courses solely dedicated to critical thinking and logic–and that logic is a central branch of philosophy.

    And, of course, that we actually succeed in teaching critical thinking skills is reflected in our students' LSAT scores and so forth.

    The more substantive way is to argue that while other disciplines teach you to reason about their subject matter (how to conduct good experiments or to solve mathematics problems), no other field teaches you to reason well about any subject matter whatsoever. Logic applies universally.

    Another way to argue that critical thinking is uniquely central to philosophy is that logic and argument are our primary tool to resolving our problems–whereas in other fields, it's primarily close reading of texts or empirical research. We're good at it because reason and argument is all we've got when it comes to abstruse metaphysical or ethical problems.

    The bad thing about this kind of argument is that people who've taken several philosophy courses will realize that it's true; but people who haven't will find it arrogant. "I've never taken any philosophy courses, and I can assure you that I reason just fine!" This is why, for example, scientists often both reason poorly outside of science and react with incredulity at the claim that maybe a little philosophy may be of use to them.

    Finally, there's another key instrumental justification for philosophy. Every school claims to produce ethical citizens–and, well, ethics is our turf too.

    So what philosophy teaches–ethics and critical thinking–are things that every school claims are central to its mission and things that only philosophy teaches well. Furthermore, as much as I like math, most people aren't even going to use high school algebra on a daily basis. But you can't avoid reasoning and making practical decisions. So philosophy almost uniquely teaches skills that are so general as to be unavoidable on a daily basis.

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  19. C. Sistare

    One problem is that everybody thinks they teach or can teach critical thinking, and a great many think they can teach ethics or 'values' or some such.

    I has occurred to me that offering faculty workshops – and inviting the Provost – o critical thinking and/or ethics might be a good way to gently demonstrate the differences between what we teach and what those other folks are teaching. Of course, this would have to be carefully managed, but if a college claims to develop critical reasoning skills, it is reasonable to suggest that those who teach courses devoted entriely to those skills might have something to share with their colleagues.

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  20. Amy Lara

    I agree that a lot of people outside philosophy think they already teach critical thinking and ethics, and don't realize that philosophers have anything to add to the discussion. My land grant university recently settled on 5 core learning outcomes, with critical thinking and ethical reasoning as two of the outcomes. In discussing how to define and assess critical thinking, philosophy faculty weren't even invited to be on the committee, and the committee was headed by non-academic administrators. They literally browsed the internet to find a defintion of critical thinking, and it did indeed turn out to be vacuous. Fortunately, we were invited to be on the ethics committee, though still in a small role.

    However, we do have support from other departments on campus, if not directly from the administration. The support comes from interdisciplinary work we've done with the sciences, guest lectures on logic and ethics and philosophy of mind that we've done for other faculty, inviting others to our talks and going to their talks, etc., etc. All the usual "service" work that is very time-consuming and that doesn't necessarily pay off in the short term. I think we're going to have to do more of this kind of work in order to make ourselves stand out on campus, and the most important thing departments can start doing is giving serious credit to this kind of work. It takes a lot of time and energy, and the message I got as a junior faculty member was that it would only count as "service" and wouldn't help me with tenure at all unless I could somehow parlay it into a genuine research paper in a top philosophy journal (preferably single-authored). That's hard to do with interdisciplinary work, particularly if the other disciplines you're working with on your campus happen to be mediocre. So, I'd say: if you have people in your department who enjoy reaching out to others on campus to discuss curriculum, collaborative research, etc., be grateful and reward them for the work rather than making them feel like they're inferior philosophers because they aren't doing enough pure research.

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  21. Eric Lawton

    Like Adam Philips, I had a deep education in science and math before taking a year of philosophy, and found I had huge gaps in my abilities to reason about the more difficult topics. Rocket science, I found, is not rocket science when compared with, say, ethics.
    On the other hand, especially when I followed up that first year with a graduate year in a less prominent University, I found that too many academic philosophers had painted themselves into tiny corners and had little to say that was of any value outside their very narrow specialties. And they had equally huge holes in their ability to reason, since they knew almost nothing of science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
    Your best bet, as academic philosophers, is to have people like me outside the academy who fully support the need for philosophy education and will be prepared to pressure the politicians who manage the budgets. I am deeply grateful for the opportunities which philosophy has given me and I tell everyone who will listen that while my technical education in Computer Science was obsolete within a couple of years of acquiring it, my philosophy education is used every day, forty years after I finished my last formal course.
    And the best way to do that is to make sure that there is some relevance in your courses. No need to dilute the rigour, just show a few examples of how the methods of thinking which the great philosophers use can be used to solve the problems of everyday life or at the least how they can be used to question the more dubious reasoning they may encounter from others.

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  22. Adam Phillips

    "Critical thinking" is a very vague term and can just mean something like "make sure the sources you consult are reliable" and "don't just accept what you hear."

    On this definition, many faculty can claim that they teach critical thinking.

    Philosophy, by contrast, teaches how to construct and evaluate arguments. Fewer faculty can claim that they teach this.

    (Most probably would have trouble defining soundness and validity, for example, or even properly distinguishing between deductive and inductive. The real problem, I guess, is that philosophy is rarely taught in high school, so not very many people are quite sure what philosophy even is.)

    Similarly, "ethics" can mean "don't be a bad person." And most faculty can say they teach their students not to cheat, to appropriately cite sources, and so on.

    By contrast, philosophers are somewhat shy of claiming that learning about ethics will improve your moral behavior. Rather, we teach how to evaluate ethical and political arguments. We teach students how to reason about ethical/political controversies.

    Maybe by being a little more clear about what exactly we do will help.

    I tend to think that philosophy has a rather massive PR problem. It seems hard to avoid that conclusion if it's really true, as I claimed, that we teach fundamental skills that are unavoidable in daily life and yet very few recognize that that's what we do.

    I do my best to follow Eric Lawton's advice to include practical examples in my teaching.

    In general, I view my introduction to philosophy and ethics classes as purposely trying to avoid all the traditional stereotypes about philosophy–abstruse, irrelevant, and antiquarian.

    I try to make constant reference to current real-world controversies and to use empirical research where relevant. (That's really easy to do with ethics, questions of God's existence naturally invite examination of evolution and cosmology, and the philosophy of mind has obvious connections to neuroscience.)

    I also try to avoid focusing on philosophical ideas that normal people will find, well, batty–like Berkeley's idealism, or Humean inductive skepticism, or Platonic forms. I'm sure many will disagree. But my major goal in teaching intro courses is that students (1) learn how to reason well and (2) see how philosophy is interwoven in almost everything else, which will hopefully leave a good impression of philosophy with them. Just my two cents.

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  23. Adam Kimberley

    Please visit the Save Keele Philosophy website! http://savekeelephilosophy.webs.com/

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  24. Alan Martin

    I cannot speak to the national situation, but here is how things have developed at the University of Florida. In April 2008, two senior professors, David Copp and Marina Oshana, announced that they were accepting senior offers at the University of California, Davis. They took three graduate students with them, and a few more graduate students may have decided to leave the field as a result. At the end of the semester, Dean Joseph Glover (now Provost) announced a series of budget cuts that were mandated by the university though it was up to him what to cut. One of the cuts was the elimination, which later became the three year suspension, of PhD admissions. No one was laid off in our department, however, as happened in other small departments. Glover's layoffs were very discriminatory, and he has been very out of touch with students, faculty, and working people as Provost.

    In 2007, I entered a department with 16 professors and 31 graduate students. We now have 11 professors and about 12 graduate students. The main drop occurred in 2009, when we saw a record number of students graduate or otherwise leave and there was no incoming class. Our last PhD class was admitted for fall 2008, with three graduate students (two are still here). Five new students, all admitted as terminal MA candidates (though they may ultimately be able to get their PhD here) joined this fall, and one new (tenure track) professor was hired. Our department was hardest hit in ethics and political philosophy. When I joined, we had six specialists in this area; we now have two. One of these is Thomas Auxter, who is head of the United Faculty of Florida and thus too busy to work with graduate students. The other is new hire Jaime Ahlberg.

    I left the program in August 2010 and will be going to law school this fall. While the philosophy department is not as bad off here as some other departments, the struggles continue. Florida is facing a wave of anti-labor legislation, including a bill that would decertify all labor unions effective July 1 unless they reach 50% membership. The United Faculty of Florida and Graduate Assistants United (of which I am a former member) are struggling to reach this level. The humanities are well unionized – about 80% of English graduate students are in the union, compared to less than 10% in the sciences, engineering and the professional programs.

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  25. Robert Allen

    I'd cut undergraduate philosophy programs too if I were a money grubbing, power mongering, philistine of an administrator. The last thing I'd want is intellectual types running around my university telling students that there is more to life than shopping and watching sports.

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