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No “personal enrichment” courses while in grad school

Brian Leiter

A philosopher elsewhere forwards an e-mail sent recently to graduate students at a top department, which said:

Just a reminder that your funding is for your program of study. It does not pay for you to take classes of mild interest or for the purpose of personal enrichment. 

My correspondent added:

The email advises students to check with the DGS for special cases, so it's nice to see that there's some way to get around this (it's hard to see how one would do a specialization in philosophy of science or ancient philosophy without that), but suggests that tuition for non-philosophy courses will not usually be covered. It strikes me as dismaying almost to the point of absurdity that something like "personal enrichment" would be explicitly discouraged for philosophy graduate students.  It seems to me that graduate students of any discipline ought to be encouraged to explore and study as widely as possible, and that this is particularly true for philosophy grads.  A policy like this breeds insularity, which something that professional philosophy struggles with in the best of cases. 

I'm curious what others think.  Are policies like this common?  How is "personal enrichment" interpreted?

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16 responses to “No “personal enrichment” courses while in grad school”

  1. Anonymous ABD

    I took a graduate level cognitive neuroscience course during my second year of graduate school. This made sense, given my research interests and dissertation topic. It was covered by my graduate funding, but it did not count toward any of my course distribution requirements. It shows up on my transcript, and the units are counted among my total units. I was not discouraged from taking the course, but you could say that I was warned that it might make it harder for me to complete my coursework on time. The message was essentially "this is okay, but we don't really recommend it, and don't make a habit of it."

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  2. A midwestern grad student

    I know several people in my department who have taken courses/audited courses outside the department. Now, they do have to get them approved by the DGS, and to do that they basically have to show why the outside course is relevant to their research/whatever, but we are certainly not discouraged from taking outside courses!

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  3. Keith Whittington

    I've been the DGS in a political science department for quite a while now. As a general matter, we encourage students to take courses in other disciplines. But I would sharply distinguish that from classes that don't contribute to a clear "program of study" or that look like mere "personal enrichment." Fortunately, I've only encountered a couple of graduate students who hadn't quite gotten out of their undergraduate mindset and were looking at the university's course catalog with an eye toward classes that seemed "interesting" rather than classes that might help prepare them for their professional career or advance their research agenda. I've never felt the need to send out a mass email of this type, but I've offered something like it as advice to individual students who seemed stuck in "general studies" mode rather than developing scholarly expertise.

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  4. Justin

    A few things: First, I wouldn't be surprised if this were a university or graduate school, rather than departmental, policy. Second, this policy won't stop students from auditing or sitting in on courses in other departments. They may be discouraged from doing this for other reasons (e.g., having to do with completing the degree in a timely manner – more on that below), but a policy of not paying for courses in other departments itself won't prevent this kind of thing. Given that, at least for most philosophy jobs, whether or not the course is on your transcript won't really matter, this seems good enough. Finally, even if it is a departmental policy and even if students are discouraged from even sitting in on many courses in other departments, that doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. Departments have an interest in making sure their students can spend enough time on their philosophy courses, dissertations, free-standing articles, etc. to (i) finish in a timely manner, and (ii) have a reasonable chance on the job market; taking a bunch of courses outside of philosophy will at least often conflict with this.

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  5. kurt

    i did a phd in philosophy at a prestigious midwest university; we were told exactly the opposite, and encouraged to take courses in other departments. indeed, our requirements were set up to facilitate doing so, which allowed me to take courses in classics, the divinity school, and various other departments. i felt, um, "enriched" by having that opportunity. and was exposed to world-class faculty to whom i otherwise would not have been.

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  6. anon junior

    I agree with your correspondent.

    Most departments have distribution requirements. If students aren't meeting them, they're generally not getting funded. If they are, why shouldn't they (maybe in conjunction with their advisors) decide for themselves what is and isn't relevant to their interests?

    The only case I can think of where it would make sense for a DGS to say something like that is if there was a larger trend among grad students to take questionably-relevant courses in other disciplines INSTEAD of philosophy courses. But if that's the case, then it seems incumbent on the faculty to ask themselves why their courses aren't that attractive to their grad students. (This is especially true given that that department in question is a top department.)

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  7. David Hilbert

    I find the policy slightly odd. The tuition and fee waiver that comes with fellowships and TA positions in our program covers whatever courses a student registers for (and the policy is university-wide). The mechanism for ensuring that students pursue a coherent course of study isn't via funding but rather a requirement that the DGS approve what courses a student takes. Although taking a course that had no relation to philosophy or a student's research is often discouraged, students are strongly encouraged to take courses outside the department if related to their research (and excused from some of the philosophy requirements when they do). When I was DGS I did have a student who wanted to take a dance class and a couple of students who wanted to take photography. I approved all of these with the understanding they didn't count towards the philosophy degree requirements, were in addition to the philosophy courses that did count, and should be dropped if they interfered with the student's work in philosophy. It's a balance between recognizing that students are people with diverse interests and helping them get through the program in a timely way. Perhaps, as Justin suggests, there is some institutional policy behind this. At my institution there is no such policy and it would be very difficult to interpret and enforce a policy requiring paid tuition for courses for personal enrichment.

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  8. Anonymous

    God forbid grad students take a class or two in coding, business, and the like so they aren't completely out of luck when they are squeezed out of academic philosophy.

    Letting grad students take classes outside philosophy programs, even the top ones, is the least a department ought to do as far as preparing their grad students for the likely reality of the private sector.

    Reply
  9. MA Student

    I'm working on an MA thesis in (essentially) history & philosophy of biology, and so I took several courses in the life sciences department. I was encouraged to do so. I can't imagine why anyone would discourage such things.

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  10. Grad student who's only somewhat enriched

    I'm a grad student in the department in question, and who got that email along with all the other grad students. I just want to clear a few things up. First, though it is true that we cannot take "personal enrichment" courses, this is, as Justin suspected above, a policy of the university and not of the department. I've worked as a TA in a couple other departments over the years and in each and every case my TA contract said only coursework contributing "toward your Ph.D. degree, including a relevant certificate program" would be covered by the tuition waver.

    Second, though a class on digital media design won't count as contributing towards a philosophy PhD, folks here have taken, with tuition waived, classes outside of the philosophy department that do. In particular, people have taken courses in the linguistics, psychology, computer science, history, and religious studies departments. (I think one student also took a class in mathematics, but I'm not sure about this.) In each case, the student would have had to make a case to the DGS explaining how the non-philosophy course "contributed towards" their degree, but for my part, provided I wasn't falling behind in the completion of the required coursework, I never had any trouble doing this. I suspect that this is true at most other departments as well, that grad students can take classes outside of the philosophy department only if they contribute towards their degree and doing so won't cause them to fall behind – is it not? It would be weird if it wasn't, since then a university would essentially being paying for the hobbies and various casual interests of its grad students or allow them to take their sweet time in completing their degree. (Edit: David Hilbert's comment suggests that this sort of thing is not uncommon, but the way it is executed, whether by way of a written policy or some other mechanism, varies across schools.)

    Third, though the university/department will not waive the cost of courses taken or audited bearing on your hobbies or casual interests, it wouldn't stop you from sitting in on them (again, provided that you are not falling behind, in which case you will be strongly discouraged from doing so). I myself have sat in on two classes over the years that had nothing to do with my research or degree. (One was on web design and the other on social media – don't ask). I have also sat in on three classes outside of philosophy that do bear on my degree. So it is not the case that the kibosh is being placed on anyone wanting to explore their interests; it's just that no one is going to pay for it. Of course, the drawback to this situation is that it is to the discretion of the professors of these courses whether or not they let you sit, and I'm sure some professor are more than happy to tell students "No". But I've never encountered one of these anti-sit-inists (terrible term, I know), nor have I heard of anyone who has.

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  11. S.T.

    The Graduate School at my university (PGR top 30) requires all graduates to complete a graduate minor during their course of study, and as far as I know the constraints on what you are allowed to minor in are fairly loose. So, some universities would seem to recognize the benefits of branching out during doctoral studies.

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  12. Charles Pigden

    Thank God I have never gotten over that undergraduate mindset and for the last thirty-eight years have continued to read & learn about subjects not directly related to my professional career or my official ‘research agenda’ which (when I was young) was all about meta-ethics. As a consequence of this policy, both my professional career and my research agendas have been vastly enriched. I have published papers on Dostoevsky, the philosophy of mathematics, the Milgram experiments, Hume, Derrida, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, the Philosophy of Religion (touching on among other themes, Luther, Erasmus, Gibbon and Aquinas plus neo-Heglianism in the late Victorian era), metaphysics, (truthmaker theory, modal realism and the analytic-synthetic distinction) Jane Austen and Sensible Knaves, metaphilosophy, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of conspiracy theories (a topic which qualifies as both the philosophy of history and applied epistemology). The reason that I could write confidently about conspiracy theories is that I have been a life-long student of history and politics which meant that I had plenty of examples to cite. (I discussed inter alia, the Watergate Affair, Procopius’s Secret History and the court memoirs of Lord Hervey. An interest in Shakespeare was also of some use in this connection.) As for meta-ethics, an early interest in Cicero was of use in arguing against Anscombe whilst my ongoing determination to be logically literate – despite the fact that I have no gift for symbolic reasoning – has helped enormously in my work on Is and Ought. The grounding that I gave myself in the philosophy of science has also been useful in all sorts of ways, in a particular in a recent paper critiquing the idea that it is possible to prove synthetic identities between moral and natural properties by means of empirical enquiry. If I had developed the kind of mindset that Professor Whittington evidently regards as both mature and as a precondition for successful graduate study, I would have been at most half the scholar (and half the teacher) that I am today.

    The flaw in his advice is that, certainly if you are a philosopher and probably if you are a political scientist, there is virtually nothing that might not turn out to be relevant to your work. By focusing solely on what might ‘prepare your professional career’ or ‘advance your research agenda’ you are making it highly likely that your research agenda be narrow and over-specialized, and that the research itself will be both narrow and ill-informed and probably of no interest to anyone except a few similarly narrow specialists.

    A while back I had a rather ferocious dispute with Dan Kaufman who claimed that philosophy as a discipline, is a balkanized affair characterized by narrow specialists. I argued against him on the ground that his generalization did not conform to my experience, my Otago colleagues being men and women of broad culture and wide interests. But if attitudes such as Professor Whittington’s are common amongst directors of Graduate Studies in Philosophy then perhaps my experience is atypical and narrow specialists are more abundant than I supposed. If this is true then it is not a Good Thing. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it does not follow that it is a wise policy to officially smother it in graduate students. ‘Abandon your other interests all ye who enter here’ sounds like the signage for an academic hell.

    Reply
  13. Anonymous

    You forgot the Authoritarianism and Fascism Alerts tag.

    Reply
  14. Charles Pigden

    Here’s the comment from Keith Whittington to which I was responding and which I omitted to reproduce in my last post:

    ‘Fortunately, I've only encountered a couple of graduate students who hadn't quite gotten out of their undergraduate mindset and were looking at the university's course catalog with an eye toward classes that seemed "interesting" rather than classes that might help prepare them for their professional career or advance their research agenda.’

    To continue my critique of this joyless vision of postgraduate study, I am reposting something that I wrote in 2011 in response to the following query: Is it better (given the choice) to go for a generally Leiterrific Program or to go for a program with special strengths in your particular Area of Specialization?

    Here's a reason for going for the top school rather than the school which is tops in your proposed AOS. Generally speaking, the meta-ethicist who is just a meta-ethicist won't be much of a meta-ethicist, the metaphysician who is just a metaphysician won't be much of a metaphysician, the epistemologist who is just an epistemologist won't be much of an epistemologist and so throughout most of the subdisciplines that constitute philosophy. And though the historian of philosophy who is JUST a historian of philosophy may succeed in making a contribution to history, she is unlikely to amount to much as a philosopher if she knows nothing more than the great dead guys who constitute her field of expertise. Thus if you want to do good philosophical work, even in your preferred AOS, you are more likely to do it if you give yourself a broad philosophical education, indeed, a broad education generally. The best way to do this is to go to a place where there are lots of talented and ambitious philosophers so that you can learn from them by talking to them about their work. This will tend to mean the top school rather than the school which is only tops in your preferred sub-discipline. Out of pure dumb luck, I ended up in the early eighties as a graduate student at La Trobe in Melbourne, at that time the biggest and, I think, the best philosophy department in Australasia. There were no taught courses, but the knowledge that I gained from gossiping in the tea-room about all sorts of topics from logical theory to the finer points of anarchism has stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. It didn't just benefit me as a philosopher – it benefited me as a meta-ethicist (which is what I was officially supposed to be). I am not suggesting the sacrifice of depth to breadth – rather I think that as a philosopher, if you don't have breadth you are likely to have not depth but only the illusion of depth.
    That's the research side of the argument. But there's a teaching side to it too. Unless you wind up in a large department where people can afford to specialize, you are likely to have to do a fair bit of teaching that is outside your comfort zone. At Otago, where I work, the philosopher of biology teaches critical thinking, the meta-ethicist teaches logicism and the Tractatus, the metaphysician and the philosopher of time both teach ethics and the ethicist teaches the philosophy of mind. And this sort of thing is not uncommon in small-to-middling departments. Thus if you want to make yourself saleable as a teacher you are probably better off going to a top school rather than a school which is tops in your speciality since you are more likely to pick up the expertise necessary to teach a wide array of courses. When it comes to undergraduate teaching, versatility is a decided plus and unless you are very lucky indeed the chances are that you will have to do a lot of undergraduate teaching.

    Here ends the quote. But led me add a couple of observations relating to the current question:

    1) It is not just that the meta-ethicist who is just a meta-ethicist won’t be much of a meta-ethicist – the philosopher who is just a philosopher is unlikely to be much of a philosopher. Thus confining your classes to those that might help ‘advance your research agenda’ is a recipe for being a subpar researcher.
    2) At a great many institutions you will find yourself being asked to teach into interdisciplinary programs of one kind or another (Environmental Studies, Bioethics, Cognitive Science Philosophy, Politics and Economics etc etc) . If you are not in the habit of finding out about subjects that are no in you AOS or even in your discipline, you are likely to be lot less use as a teacher than those who have not allowed their intellectual curiosity to be squeezed out of them.

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  15. David Wallace

    Actually, I think it's fair enough not to pay for classes that have no relevance to any area of philosophy, like… um…

    Reply
  16. Charles Pigden

    My responses and David Wallace's provide the long and the short of it.

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