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Philosophy in the university 30 years hence?

Brian Leiter

A colleague elsewhere sent me the following dystopian reflections, suggesting I open them for discussion:

                    Report of the APA Committee on the Status of the Profession in 2043

                                            Executive summary

 In the US, there will be 15-20 Ph. D programs, each producing 5 Ph Ds per year.  Most of those will be departments currently in the Leiter top 20. In the UK there will be fewer Ph. D, programs; every five years the government will assess the programmes and promote/demote some from premiere status.  In the US the invisible hand will rule.

There will be 30-50 three year graduate programs  producing MAPhT  (MA in Philosophy Teaching) students.  The programs will integrate two years of course work of the familiar kind with a year of training in teaching with practice.

Most remaining colleges will have a philosophy department of three long term faculty with Ph. D.s, one each in history of philosophy, value theory and core analytic (critical thinking and philosophy of science and technology).  Philosophy majors will be scarce and will complete their degrees in three years.  They will spend the last year taking capstone courses in residence after two years of online work. The department will provide courses for thousands of students online managed/taught by a staff of part-time MAPhTs. The long term faculty will teach the capstone courses, select online material for courses and oversee the hiring and teaching of the part-time faculty.

(People will have realized that the magic number “4” is an irrelevant average and degree programs will vary from 3 years in areas such as philosophy to 5 years for engineering.  Engineering students will need to spend the last two years on campus because they will require experience in actual physical simulation laboratories.)

Logic will only be taught in advanced courses; Excel-Logic will provide translations of natural language premises and conclusions into logical notation and evaluate arguments (with more accuracy than students currently possess six months after taking a logic course). It will include the capacity to evaluate arguments requiring tense and modal logic, and will indicate when an argument is valid in S4.2 but not S4.  When ambiguous sentences are entered, it will query the user as to which logical structure is intended. Critical thinking courses will emphasize identifying premises of arguments, a subtler skill. 

History of philosophy students will not be confined to texts but will watch holographs of Socratic dialogues.  Ethics students will be engulfed in holographic virtual reality trolley disaster simulations.

All publication will be self-publication online.  Journals will have become extinct except for the top two which will expire as soon as they publish their backlog which grows every year.  Status of publications will be determined by Zagat-Phil using a complex algorithm based on the number of ratings, the rating numbers and the pattern of downloads, citations of the paper, and status of the citer.

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7 responses to “Philosophy in the university 30 years hence?”

  1. Kenny Easwaran

    Some of these reflections don't seem dystopian to me. Fewer PhD programs is probably a good thing (though 20 is likely to be too few, assuming that this person's thoughts about the downsizing of other departments don't happen), and the idea of a graduate degree that actually includes a year of training in teaching with practice sounds like an improvement (provided that we can find a way to effectively train people for teaching!)

    The role of online teaching and in-class teaching is definitely something where big changes are likely to come, but I suspect that if the changes are as disruptive as this person speculates, they're likely to be disruptions in a direction orthogonal to the ones that everyone's thinking about, which could just as well increase the amount of time people spend in class as decrease it. (Consider how automobiles increased the time spent commuting, and computers increased the amount of printed paper produced and discarded, and recordings increased the number of people making a living as musicians.)

    The thoughts about publication and journals are an interesting thought. It may be fair to say that journals as dead-tree entities run by for-profit publishers will be extinct. But "journals" like Philosophers Annual are likely to proliferate. The Zagat model of publication status is interesting, though it could just as well go the way of Yelp or Amazon or Reddit or Slashdot or any number of other online sites that aim to aggregate the opinion of a community. There may in fact be multiple parallel metrics of this sort. (And it's more likely to be an outgrowth of PhilPapers than an intrusion by a for-profit company like Zagat.)

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  2. harry b

    My comments echo Kenny's. ZReduced number of programs seems like a benefit; institutional attention to improve the quality of instruction through properly training teachers seems like a huge gain. Sounds utopian really — because I don't see wha social pressures abound that will shape/trigger this sort of outcome.

    The one dystopic feature — a few permanent faculty coordinating and hiring short term faculty — doesn't seem sustainable over the long term to me. It is much more stable and efficient to have full time faculty dedicated to teaching. But, in philosophy, what pays of the whole enterprise is undergraduate teaching — we don't get millions of dollars a year from fed agencies. In general, an equilibrium in which higher status academics who bring in no resources control the loves of lower-status academics who in fact bring in the resources, is unstable. Look at Spanish and portuguese departments where this is standard practice, but only for now….

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  3. Richard Baron

    I wonder what would happen to research in philosophy, in this kind of future. There will be plenty of topics for research, just as they are now. It will also be important to the health of the discipline, that plenty of research goes on. If the discipline is reduced to the teaching of a fixed body of knowledge, it will fossilize and lose its interest. But who will be doing the research? Does the imagined future allow for enough academic positions, with sufficiently limited teaching loads?

    Actually, I am optimistic about this. There may be a shift in the balance, with a greater proportion of worthwhile philosophical research being done outside university departments. It is perfectly possible to conduct research in philosophy, or in many of the other humanities, while earning one's bread in some other way. All one needs is a job which makes enough per hour to limit one's hours, access to libraries, and access to fora in which one can mix with, and share ideas with, people who are good at philosophy.

    There is a difficulty here. The best people with whom to mix, tend to be those with university jobs, because they have to be good at philosophy to get those jobs, and to have any decent career prospects. If there are not many universities with philosophy departments in which research is conducted, access to fora of the requisite quality may be limited. But on the positive side, the ways of measuring quality mentioned in the scenario and by Kenny Easwaran may make it much easier than it is now, to go through work done outside university departments and sort the wheat from the chaff.

    On an unrelated point, not teaching logic to everyone would be a disaster. Of course computers are useful, when arguments get long and complicated. But anyone who has not solved problems themselves, with old-fashioned pen and paper, in all of the logical systems upon which they will rely, simply won't understand what goes on within formal arguments, or how they should (and should not) be used to establish philosophical conclusions.

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  4. John Schwenkler

    I don't agree that it would be good to have so many fewer research-oriented PhD programs, unless this were offset by a corresponding increase in the number of programs offering (funded!) terminal MAs that focused on research as well as teaching. Among other things, having too narrow path to a PhD means excluding students who are late bloomers or — as noted a while ago by Eric Schwitzgebel: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/10/sorry-cal-state-students-no-princeton.html — went to less prestigious undergraduate institutions, as well as those who are very gifted but have idiosyncratic interests. None of this is to deny that the backlog of PhDs is a problem; it just seems that it should be addressed *during* graduate school by identifying students who won't make it and helping them find a different path, rather than making it even more difficult even to give the PhD a try.

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  5. Kenny Easwaran

    This recent post on Language Log discusses some of the ways the idea of the journal has been changing in different disciplines: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9174
    (Basically, in computer science, journals have been irrelevant for years; in math they're still in transition; in chemistry the journals are still everything, even more than in philosophy, where many of us already discuss working papers and cite them long before they're published. Economics and linguistics are in different sorts of transitional phases.)

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  6. David Horacek

    Well, nobody expected an APA committee to be great futurists. A classic mistake in amateur futurism, also made here, is to confuse the future you desire for the future you expect, based on some sort of nebulous expectation of future collective rationality (or benevolence). As harry b. mentioned above, there are no social mechanisms that would pressure dozens of universities to abolish their Ph.D. programs. Even a program with a 40ish Leiter ranking adds prestige to its host university, and almost certainly pays for itself, all things considered. Even to people who don't care about philosophy, a research university that cancels its Ph.D. program appears in decline.

    Another factor ignored in the prediction is the unprecedented growth of the global middle class, which will inevitably inflate the global demand for a "proper" university education. The universities that will meet this demand will initially be staffed by philosophers who were trained in Anglo-speaking departments. In time, universities in China, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, etc. will be educating most of their own future faculty, but in 2043, a great proportion of them will still educated overseas. As these universities increase enrollments and compete for students, they will make an effort to deck themselves out with the archetypal symbols of academic respectability and privilege. Among these are pseudo-Greek columns, English lawns and philosophy departments. So I think that in the next 30 years, the global customer base for philosophy professors will grow far faster than the population. That's another reason to expect that US Ph.D. programs won't disappear or unilaterally reduce enrollments.

    It's much harder to predict the effect of massive online courses on philosophy departments. But even if it were to shrink the size of teaching-college departments and lower the demand for faculty, I don't see how even this would cause a university board to recommend canceling its philosophy Ph.D. program. Surely they would plummet in ratings, lose their best faculty, alienate some alumni, and plant a seed of doubt in the parents of prospective students. Just consider how many US universities have expensive football programs. Many of these lose a great deal of money, and very few graduates go on to the NFL, but they're not going to be cut. The same incentives will keep philosophy Ph.D. programs open. Most of the graduates may be screwed, but it's not for their sake that the programs will persist.

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  7. Jack James

    Traditional education structures for marketing philosophy are inadequate. Without improved marketing of philosophy as a subject of enquiry, these dystopian visions will likely come to fruition in some form. Why doesnt someone create a grant that brings together philosophers and marketing specialists to solve this problem? This in turn will surely create more grants than the cost of it.

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