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Divorcing a philosophy faculty from a “Department of Philosophy and Religion”?

Brian Leiter

A reader writes:

In many state colleges and universities philosophy programs are housed in one department with religious studies. In some of these cases, philosophy faculty would prefer to be in self-standing philosophy departments. To make this change, philosophy faculty must persuade administrators that philosophy programs should be housed in autonomous philosophy departments.  

These philosophers need arguments and data. Here are the questions. What are the particular ways in which the "Philosophy and Religious Studies" combination is problematic? What are the most effective arguments against that combination? (The arguments must appeal to Deans and Provosts.) 

Regarding data, it would help philosophers in this position to know which other philosophy departments around the country were once in combined departments, and it would help to know when the split occurred. Finally, it would also be helpful to know the ways in which those philosophy programs have improved after the separation (perhaps in major recruitment, faculty recruitment and retention, research output, and so on).

Advice/insight/data from readers? 

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4 responses to “Divorcing a philosophy faculty from a “Department of Philosophy and Religion”?”

  1. C

    My department is a combined Philosophy & Religious Studies department. This is most difficult when it comes to tenure decisions, as the criteria for scholarship in the two disciplines are very different. This can raise equity issues. E.g. when a junior religion colleague of mine went up for tenure review, the only tenured members of our small department were philosophers, so she was judged entirely by them. They were professional in their judgment and it all worked out, but with different personalities involved, it might have been otherwise.

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  2. George Rainbolt

    Until 2005, The Department of Philosophy at Georgia State University housed the Program in Religious Studies. In 2005, we became two departments with respect to academic matters (e.g., tenure decision, curriculum, faculty hiring) but we remain one department for most budgetary matters (e.g., we share a copier, staff). This arrangement has worked very well for us. So well that we have refused offers from the administration to become two departments for budgetary matters.

    In getting permission for this arrangement from the University, two points were key. First and most importantly, we promised that the split would not increase costs *in any way*. Although it was somewhat difficult, we have kept that promise. Keeping this promise might well require sacrifices. For example, it might require that two dept chairs split one chair stipend. Second, we argued that, all else being equal, both Phil and Rels could hire better faculty if they were two departments for all academic matters. I think this is true. Our experience was that once we were able to convince the University that the split would not cost anything, they didn't require much in the way of proof that it would be beneficially. They basically took our word on that.

    Should anyone be interested, I'd be happy to talk to anyone who is facing this issue. You can just email me. grainbolt@gsu.edu

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  3. Justin Fisher

    You might draw relevant data from Sociologist Kieran Healy's studies on Philosophical Gourmet Report rankings. (http://kieranhealy.org/categories/philosophy/) I'm not sure whether he's looked for correlations between departments' rankings and being paired with a religious studies department, but if he hasn't, he might potentially be easily convinced to do so. I do remember that he calculated correlations between overall rankings and specialty rankings. Unsurprisingly, being ranked higher in "core" areas like M&E is correlated with getting a higher ranking overall. Perhaps more surprisingly, being ranked higher in Philosophy of Religion was correlated with being ranked *lower* overall. That negative correlation provides at least some empirical support for your claims that (most / "core") academic philosophy is quite distinct from religion, and that it would professionally benefit your department, at least as it is perceived by many philosophers, to extricate itself from academic study of religion.

    (Of course, there are differences between Phil Religion and Religious Studies, your university may or may not be interested in making your department look more like highly ranked philosophy graduate programs, and you might wonder whether the fact that a minority subfield is quite negatively perceived by many philosophers is really a compelling reason to exclude that minority from one's department. So I'm not saying this is a decisive argument, but it might be one part of a larger case.)

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  4. Jon Cogburn

    As far as convincing deans and administrators of anything, here's yet another place where the Philosophical Gourmet Report is your best friend. Find how many of the schools in the top fifty are combined programs (obviously very few) and report that. If those schools are out of your league, it helps to also do the same comparison with another set of schools that the administrators would be likely to view as peer or aspiration institutions. Showing that most of them are not combined departments (along with the PGR numbers) is pretty convincing.

    Another thing that might help is the numbers about philosophy majors and the LSAT. If you can convince the administrators that a stand alone philosophy program will make a much better pre-law program, it could be convincing (though you need to make sure that this doesn't step on the toes of any other departments who have a pre-law thing going). Hopefully the Religion folks can come up with something analogous for their program.

    Negatively, let me say that I think that one of the most important considerations if you are thinking of splitting apart is how many majors you will have separately. In many states numbers of majors is the determining factor when deciding which programs to cut during times of financial stress.

    In Louisiana if you don't graduate at least ten students a year you are "low completer" and the Board of Regents can dissolve your program and fire everyone without having to declare exigency. This only becomes a credible threat during financial crises, but the booms and busts of the oil industry as well as periodic self-inflicted funding crises (due to unsustainable tax cuts) creates more than one such crisis a decade here. So at LSU students can get a degree in Philosophy with a Religious Studies concentration without having to take any philosophy classes. But if we didn't do this Religious Studies probably would have gone the way of most of our Foreign Languages.

    We've been lucky not to have problems with tenure because there is a very strong culture in the department of not getting involved in the other sides cases. If philosophy is tenuring someone the lion's share of the work is done by the philosophers as a special committee, and that committee votes prior to the full department vote. In the full department vote Religious Studies respects the decision of the philosophers. And it works in the other direction with their promotion cases. It's also really important that the chair give as much autonomy as possible to the side of the department that she's not a member of. We've been pretty lucky in this way. I think it would be pretty miserable if we didn't treat our unitary status as merely de jure.

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