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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Wisconsin-Stevens Point planning to eliminate the philosophy major

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 5–LINK FIXED, AND MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

Political theorist David Lay Williams (DePaul) writes:

I'm writing to let you know that my former home university, The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point has just announced that it plans to eliminate its Philosophy major (along with 11-12 other majors, mostly in the liberal arts) in order to free up resources for an MBA program, among other new majors that offer greater "value in opening career pathways."   I taught in the Philosophy and Political Science departments there for 11 years.  I saw many first-generation students there find themselves while studying philosophy — students who went on to great success in all corners of society, including law school, grad school, medical school, public policy, small businesses, large businesses, etc.  This is not a done deal yet.  I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the ability of rural students to find their passion in Philosophy to register their objections with administration. The chancellor, Bernie Patterson, can be reached at bpatters@uwsp.edu / 715-346-4841.  

https://www.uwsp.edu/ucm/news/Pages/Repositioning18.aspx

https://www.stevenspointjournal.com/story/news/2018/03/05/uw-stevens-point-plans-cut-12-majors-add-expand-16-programs/395613002/

This is basically a proposal to wipe out the liberal arts offerings in favor of vocational offerings.  It also appears faculty jobs are at risk.  I suspect the changes to tenure rules in Wisconsin that we've covered in the past are going to permit this mischief to go forward much more easily than it would have under the old financial exigency standard.  More information welcome in the comments.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Steven Nadler (Wisconsin/Madison) sends along a copy of the "strategic" plan "explaining" these moves:   Download Point Forward

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17 responses to “Wisconsin-Stevens Point planning to eliminate the philosophy major”

  1. Peter

    “Offering value”. Such gross neoliberal newspeak.

    Reply
  2. V. Alan White

    One additional factor unmentioned in the links is that UWSP has been forced to absorb two 2-year campuses of the soon-to-be-defunct University of Wisconsin Colleges under an arrangement devised by the President of the UW System (without consultation of anyone, either faculty or administrators). One of those two campuses has suffered a loss of over half of its students (once numbering close to 2000) in the last 10 years, putting even more financial stress on UWSP. So one hidden story here is that this situation could easily lead to closing that campus as well.

    It's an open secret that many in state government here wish to contract the UW System, especially in areas of traditional liberal arts, which they myopically view as inimical to gainful employment. As you know I fought hard as a vocal member of the "Tenure Task Farce" to retain some semblance of protections for faculty against politically-motivated advocacy of discontinuation of programs for "educational considerations". I failed. But I hardly would have thought then that barely two years after that travesty would tenured faculty begin to face its consequences.

    Reply
  3. Don S

    As someone who works in a Fortune 50 company and has hired college graduates into internships and roles, I have found that Philosophy majors have been some of the most successful with clear abilities to adapt and become excellent thought leaders. Shame on WI to believe that vocation 'trumps' liberal arts. This is part of the problem we suffer today with the continued fracturing of our society. If we lose those with liberal arts backgrounds I fear for the worse….

    BL COMMENT: I just want to confirm that the author's self-representation is accurate, and I thank him for weighing in.

    Reply
  4. Chris Surprenant

    As someone who is a faculty member at a state school who was worried a few years back about the same thing happening to him and his department (and not worried about that now), I'd strongly encourage them to look at the language in whatever relevant documents are applicable connected to program elimination. Usually they can't simply eliminate programs (and fire tenured faculty) without some motivation like financial exigency, low-completion, etc. I'd be curious to see the relevant documents in play here and happy to pass on anything I learned from my own work investigating these issues (in another state).

    Reply
  5. Ethan S

    This is most likely rooted partially in the Wisconsin's state government, which in both K-12 and higher education has been pushing for more vocational training with direct paths to jobs. Coincides with the vast budget cuts to education from the Governor.

    Reply
  6. Laurence Houlgate

    Many years ago the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) discovered that a high proportion of its graduates were having trouble holding jobs. At the time the Cal Tech curriculum was entirely devoted to technology, with very few opportunities and zero requirements to take courses in the liberal arts. Someone there had the bright idea to change the curriculum and include a heavy dose of liberal arts courses, including philosophy. The experiment worked. Later surveys showed that Cal Tech graduates were thriving after graduation.
    We had something like this situation at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. When I joined the faculty there in 1979, there were very few general education requirements for liberal arts courses. In fact, any proposal to make philosophy a required G.E. course was met with hostility from the technical profs. But we had the great good luck to hire a new president of the university (Warren Baker) who had been a Notre Dame undergad prior to getting his Engineering PhD. He told us that engineering majors at ND were required to take at least two courses in philosophy! He was convinced that he benefited from this and gave his full support to the Cal Poly philosophy department and to a curriculum in which every student at the university must now complete a rigorous liberal arts general education course in order to graduate.

    Reply
  7. Rollo Burgess

    I don’t have any specific information about this plan, which sounds like an all-too-familiar exercise in philistinism.

    But, like Don S, I’m involved recruitment for a major commercial organization, in a fairly robust industry, and we hire, and value the academic background, of many colleagues with backgrounds in the humanities and arts. I myself graduated in philosophy and did postgraduate studies in political theory before going into business and I genuinely think that philosophy, with a strong emphasis on clarity of thought and argument, is an excellent mental training for almost any pursuit. (Quite apart from, as should be more important, enriching one’s life by bringing one into contact with uncommon ideas, whether brilliant or daft).

    Vocational training is of course critical if one wishes practice medicine or build (literal) bridges, but most business activities benefit from intellectual diversity in a workforce.

    Reply
  8. V. Alan White

    Here is the link to System policy that will be followed (one hopes at least lip-service is paid) in the UWSP case, which is found in the first link Brian posted:

    https://www.wisconsin.edu/regents/policies/procedures-relating-to-financial-emergency-or-program-discontinuance-requiring-faculty-layoff-and-termination/#II.FacultyLayoffforReasonsofProgramDiscontinuance

    I wish to thank Brian not only for this post, but his unflagging support for those of us in UW over these recent turbulent years.

    Reply
  9. David Williams

    One can't help but notice how the UWSP proposal reflects Governor Scott Walker's greatest wishes for the university system. A few years ago, he attempted to change the UW System mission statement, regionally famous as the "Wisconsin Idea." The original statement, going back to 1904, established that "Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth." Walker surreptitiously tried to change this to "The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs." When people noticed this change and began to complain, he claimed that this was a "drafting error." Subsequent journalistic research confirms that it was no drafting error. And now the university is being re-made very precisely to cater to his vision.

    http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/scott-walker-sought-changes-to-wisconsin-idea-emails-show-after/article_268eb62f-d548-5a2d-a2f0-ca977dac2346.html

    Reply
  10. David Williams

    I should add here that in my 11 years of teaching in the Philosophy Department at UW–Stevens Point, we always had a healthy number of majors. It's been a while, and I don't have the actual figures handy anymore, but the majors were usually somewhere between 50-100 with about five full-time faculty members. And, of course, we did significant service teaching. Intro sections regularly had as many as 80-100 students. Beyond this, the Environmental Ethics courses were extremely popular, given the presence of the College of Natural Resources on campus. Those classes, originally conceived and taught by Baird Callicott, also held 80-100 students. I haven't been teaching at UWSP since 2011, so I can't speak to recent numbers, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Philosophy remains at least as popular as it was when I was there.

    All of this is to say, it's unclear to me that the elimination of the Philosophy major (and quite possibly some of the other targeted disciplines) is strictly about the numbers. There may be other variables at play.

    Reply
  11. Sean McAleer

    I know this is serious business, but this snippet from Point's Academic Master Plan (thank you for link to it, by the way) made me laugh out loud: "we will reimagine traditional liberal arts majors for students seeking applied learning to improve their career potential." When eliminating something can be recast as reimagining it, the possibilities are endless! It's a world of pure (re)imagination — and the lyrics to that song barely need to be changed at all:

    Come with me and you'll be
    In a world of pure [re]imagination …
    We'll begin with a spin
    Traveling in the world of my creation
    What we'll see will defy explanation

    Frankfurt is no doubt correct that each of us does their share re: bullshit production, but whoever came up with this ‘reimagination’ stuff is going above and beyond. I always thought bullshit came in bushels, but I now see that it's more complex: there are ten bushels in a provost of bullshit.

    Reply
  12. V. Alan White

    Sean (if I may)–

    Great post. When my institution was deemed redundant in UW, we were just completing the three-year exercise of "reimagining the curriculum". So this sort of BS has been part of System administration lingo for some time.

    Since I'm here, allow me to clarify what's happening with UWSP and the 13 campus 2-year UW Colleges, where I spent my 36 + year career. These campuses were partners with counties all over the state each of which provided facilities that were staffed by (mostly PhD-holding) UW faculty. The Colleges were an important part of the Wisconsin Idea, extending the reach of the university in providing top-quality liberal arts education throughout the state and acting primarily as a transfer institution to the other campuses as well as offering associate degrees. We allowed lots of place-bound undergrads and adult students to at least start their UW education locally and at the lowest tuition in UW System. Our collective freshman-sophomore enrollment once was second only to Madison. Recent years saw fairly drastic enrollment losses due to various factors political and demographic, and that’s resulted in the termination of the Colleges as a separate institution effective July 1, imposed by the President and the Regents absent any input from any UW institution. Now those 13 campuses will be extensions of certain 4-years. UW–Milwaukee will, for example, receive two campuses, and my campus (UW–Manitowoc) will be one of 3 attached to UW–Green Bay. The fate of our campuses will entirely depend upon the good-will and stability of the receiving campuses–mine will likely be ok, but 2 affiliated with Stevens Point are not in such a good place.

    Reply
  13. UW System Philosopher

    I just wanted to add a few comments that perhaps will help to clarify the situation.

    (1) In the past few years, it has been my impression that the UW System is particularly bad at being transparent with its faculty. Faculty on my campus received some details regarding the proposed program cuts at UWSP from administrators on my campus, which speaks positively to the integrity of those administrators. Yet the strategic plan document shared here by Prof. Nadler was not shared openly with us. I often find myself learning about changes in System from this blog and newspapers, rather than from information openly shared with faculty by System administration.

    (2) The erosion of shared governance on UW System campuses is certainly not helping – either with regard to institutional transparency or with allowing faculty input into major curricular decisions, such as the one proposed at UWSP. The role of faculty governance structures (e.g. faculty senate, faculty committees) in institutional decision-making seems to vary across campuses: some administrations seem to value faculty input more than others.

    (3) The situation at UWSP does not, at this time, generalize to all UW-System campuses. At my own campus, another regional comprehensive (not Madison or Milwaukee), we have been assured that there are no similar plans in place at this point in time. We have also been assured that our campus is actively working with enrollments, budgets, and so forth to try and prevent the kind of situation that led to the "reimagining" of the arts, humanities, and social sciences at UWSP.

    Reply
  14. Sean McAleer

    Also in today's IHE, from a good friend, fine poet, and bad ass blues guitarist: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/education-oronte-churm/guest-post-jon-loomis-changing-idea-wisconsin-higher-ed

    Reply
  15. David Williams

    Still more pieces on the UW–Stevens Point debacle today:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/willarddix/2018/03/13/its-time-to-worry-when-colleges-erase-humanities-departments/2/

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/03/liberal-arts-christian-colleges/

    And my own public lament: http://host.madison.com/ct/opinion/column/david-lay-williams-mourning-the-death-of-the-liberal-arts/article_c6108fb9-0954-5107-8bd5-be0c1b9f41ee.html

    Reply
  16. David Williams

    And one more piece — from the American Political Science Association: http://www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/Advocacy/APSA%20Letter%20to%20University%20of%20Wisconsin-Stevens.pdf?ver=2018-03-14-110412-047

    Does anyone know if the APA has such a letter in the works???

    Reply
  17. David Williams

    Some data from the UWSP Philosophy Facebook page:

    "The Philosophy department at UWSP currently has 96 majors (including our Religious Studies and Environmental Ethics Concentrations). That's more than Eau Claire, La Crosse, OshKosh, and Whitewater combined.

    For context, here are the Philosophy majors at other UW's:

    – UW Eau Claire: 16
    – UW La Crosse: 22
    – UW OshKosh: 25
    – UW Whitewater: 31
    – UW Milwaukee has 51 majors (with 20,000 students)
    – And UW Madison has 108 Philosophy majors (with 30,000 students)

    The Philosophy department at UWSP has grown 38% in the last four years, a particularly impressive fact as we are the only Philosophy department in the state to increase its majors over last year. (The data above was taken from the Offices of Institutional Research and Effectiveness on each campus.)"

    So it seems clear enough from all this that the elimination of the Philosophy major is not really about the ability of the department to recruit and graduate majors. By that standard, the department has been a model of success. On the most charitable reading, administration is eliminating Philosophy because, unlike Marketing or Finance, for example, relatively few students will arrive on campus with a declared Philosophy major. The overall administrative strategy appears to be to boost enrollments by creating majors that will capture the attention of first-generation college students and their parents.

    All of this is worrisome for anyone teaching where first-generation college students make up a significant portion of the student body.

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