CHE has two essays this week attacking philosophy (what else is new from CHE?): one, by Lee McIntyre, says that philosophy "needs to matter", while the other is a thinly veiled advertisement for what members of the philosophy department at the University of North Texas do under the guise of being a philosophy department. (Note: if you can't afford to advertise in CHE, you can always write an advertisement framed as an opinion piece bashing what other philosophers do.) Let "a thousand flowers bloom," including the one blooming at UNT: but why in God's name think that everyone else should be doing that?
I am puzzled though how CHE let pass the claims in McIntyre's piece and the UNT piece about declining enrollments in philosophy. Mark Schroeder (USC) observed on Facebook (he gave me permission to repost this here):
At USC, our majors are up 83% in the last three years. American Studies is down 40%, History down 22%, Religion down 46%, Comparative Literature down 21%. We're a more populat major than Sociology, Anthropology, History, Mathematics, and all of American Studies, Classics, Comp Lit, East Asian Studies, French and Italian, Gender Studies, Slavic Languages, and Spanich combined. I have to admit, our growth is slightly behind that of kinesiology, so we could be doing better. Perhaps that's what they had in mind. It's good to have high standards.
Is that anomalous? Not really. Fortunately, a commenter on McIntyre's piece comes to the rescue to point out that the factual predicate of the piece is bogus:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of philosophy and religious studies majors was 8,149 in 1970-71 (.9% of total degrees of 839,730) and 12,444 in 2008-09 (.7% of total degrees of 1,601,368). That is an increase in absolute numbers of majors, even though it is admittedly a decline in terms of percentage of total degrees offered (where big increases in numbers of degrees and percentage of degrees are in areas such as business, biomedical sciences, communications, computer science, visual and performing arts). BUT it is still an increase in the total number of majors. Moreover, in 1998-99 the total number of philosophy and religious studies majors was 8506 (.7% of total degrees of 1, 200, 303) and thus has held steady as a percentage of total degrees since 1998. Moreover, the total number of degrees increased from 1,200,303 in 1998-99 to 1,601,368 in 2008-09 (2008-09 total degrees = 1.33% of 1998-99 total degrees), while the number of philosophy and religious studies degrees had a GREATER RATE of increase: 8506 in 1998-99 to 12444 in 2008-09 (2008-09 phil/relstud degrees = 1.46% of 1998-99 phil/relstud degrees).
Just to put all this in perspective, education, by contrast, has both a decline in absolute numbers and a decline in percentage of degrees offered; it goes from 176,307 in 1970-71 (21% of total degrees of 839,730) to 101,708 in 2008-09 (6% of total degrees of 1,601,368).
CHE editors, where are you?
What's most disheartening about these anti-intellectual pieces is that they represent the American version of what's befallen the British, where every field of intellectual pursuit has to justify its "market" value in virtue of its "practical" applications. It's ironic that in the week a New York Times blogger is defending the value of law schools producing legal scholarship regardless of its practical utility, we have philosophy teachers calling for philosophy to be subjected to essentially that "cash-value" metric.
What do readers make of all this? Comments on the particulars of these pieces are welcome. Signed comments only: full name and valid e-mail address. Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.
UPDATE: I apologize for closing comments to this thread, but it has now been infested by people with very different axes to grind (perhaps because of the recent release of the PGR). One of the great virtues of the Internet is that it allows you to draw on the expertise of people in disparate parts of the globe; one of the great vices is that it permits every marginal freak to air their grievances as well. I am disappointed that the many philosophers who wrote to me in outraged terms about these silly columns didn't surface for the discussion.
