There is obviously no scholarly discipline of “social thought,” which is why the earlier post (which linked to an article that lauded the Committee) prompted two different readers to email and ask: what is this entity? The Wikipedia entry is not bad about its origin. It offers undergraduate and PhD degrees. It has a lot of money (by humanities standards), but its PhD outcomes are not great: according to Chicago’s own data, only 38% of graduates secure tenure-track jobs by five years out, and the reason is obvious: “Social Thought” is not a field. All (or almost all) students in the Social Thought PhD program have to affiliate with and earn a degree in an actual field (e.g., Philosophy, History, English etc.), and they typically seek jobs in the cognate discipline.

At one point in time, the Committee was notable mainly as a place where thinkers “on the right” (like Straussians) could land. The last Straussian (Nathan Tarcov) recently retired, although Robert Pippin (who was a student of Stanley Rosen, who was a student of Strauss) got hired by the Committee more than thirty years ago at the initiative of Allan Bloom in part because he was perceived as at least Strauss-friendly (as well as being an important Hegel scholar, of course). (Pippin is 77, and has withdrawn from supervising PhD students in philosophy, so who knows how longer Strauss-friendliness will have any presence in the Committee.) The Committee’s membership is less clearly titled to the right than it was historically, and it has included a number of notable philosophers (including the recently departed Jonathan Lear).

The Committee, by its own description, is premised on the idea that,

the serious study of any academic topic, or of any philosophical or literary work, is best prepared for by a wide and deep acquaintance with the fundamental issues presupposed in all such studies, that students should learn about these issues by acquainting themselves with a select number of classic ancient and modern texts in an inter-disciplinary atmosphere, and should only then concentrate on a specific dissertation topic.

Robert Hutchins, the UChicago President at the time and a champion of the “great books” approach, also championed formation of the Committee. My sense, confirmed by PhD students I’ve talked to, is that the Committee is rather “clubby,” and that faculty who are clearly expert in “classic ancient and modern texts” and are “interdisciplinary” are not part of the Committee if they are not part of the relevant “club” (e.g., Martha Nussbaum is not on the Committee; nor was Michael Forster or Moise Postone, for example).

The Committee does attract some excellent PhD students, many of whom then do a “joint” degree with Philosophy (I’ve certainly enjoyed having a number of them in seminars). It does seem a shame though that the substantial financial resources of the Committee are not shared more widely with humanities programs that could benefit from them, but that is presumably due to the terms of the endowments that support it.