How Not to Save the Humanities

Paul Gustav Fischer, “A fire on Kultorvet” c.1900

Eric Schliesser, over at NewAPPS, has an interesting post up regarding a dispute between Marcus Arvan and Jason Brennan over the ethics of promoting the study of philosophy by citing empirical data about the success of philosophy majors. For those outside the discipline of philosophy this may seem a tempest in a teacup, but I think it warrants a closer look. For where one reads ‘philosophy’ in these discussions one could almost, in every case, substitute the name of another humanities discipline with no damage at all to the logic of the arguments in play. In the same way, I’m writing this post as a philosopher, but my guess is that a good deal of what I say here could probably be said just as well (if perhaps more eloquently) by my colleagues in, say, English or Communications.

Arvan’s main claim is that, contrary to popular opinion among students and their parents, philosophy is a highly “employable” major. As evidence for this claim he cites a number of statistics about performance on standardized tests like the GRE and the MCAT, and several examples of recent articles and posts in newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times that contain anecdotes from employers praising the qualities of their new hires from among the ranks of philosophy students. Says Arvan,

In short: we are useful, and we give students and parents what they want — they just don’t know it.  If parents and students did know how useful a philosophy degree is, we just might be able to steer more students our way, have more majors, more donors, and more academic jobs.

Brennan’s challenges, insightfully discussed in Schliesser’s  NewAPPS post, turn on the familiar observation that correlation is not identical with causation and that there is no basis for the claim that studying philosophy will make one more intelligent or conscientious in the way that employers seem to want.

Good arguments. Good counter-arguments too. But what I find myself wondering is why we’re all buying into the idea that the solution to the woes of philosophy is more (or better) marketing in the first place.

When I run into my former philosophy majors and minors, they often tell me that the value of philosophy was not that it connected them to jobs but that it improved their lives, either by empowering them to think for themselves or giving them the courage to question authority. Still others tell me that they chose and then stuck with philosophy because they found the challenge of it intellectually pleasurable and rewarding in ways that previous courses (or majors) were not. They found that the critical thinking and communications skills that they learned were valuable in a sense that outruns the merely vocational. Having heard them over and over again over the years, I very unscientifically infer from anecdotes like these that test scores and favorable omens of employment matter a lot less to the kinds of students who major in philosophy or become philosophy minors than we tend to think.

Most of the students who wind up being majors or minors after a class or two, in my experience, are looking for something different than they are getting in their present major. They feel constrained by the constant drone of vocational urgings from practically everyone else and have a nagging sense of skepticism about the premise that their future earnings are the only measure of success that matters. They’re relieved when they encounter a tradition of inquiry that both encourages them to question that premise, and refuses to force another into its place. In a discipline like philosophy, when that discipline is taught well, students are free not just question the values of the dominant culture, but also accorded the respect to determine and argue for their own values.

All of these considerations, for me, suggest that the question of “how do we advertise philosophy” is a troubled one to begin with. It is troubled because it presupposes that students only want employment, and not the kinds of goods described above. Worse yet, the question capitulates to what seems to me to be a highly questionable view of how academic disciplines ought to function within a university. The analogy is familiar enough: The university is a classically competitive environment (a “market-place of ideas”) where philosophers compete with makers of other commodities (academic disciplines) for market-share (enrollment in major programs). If one buys into this analogy then it comes as no surprise that the solution to the woes of philosophy so envisaged seems at first blush to be better marketing. A second look, however, ought to show at least two reasons for thinking that this line of reasoning is flawed.

First, the internal competition amongst disciplines is far from fair in the sense supposed in the analogy. To take just one familiar example, it is well known and widely reported that STEM disciplines are disproportionately funded, subsidized and supported in comparison to humanities disciplines like ours, both from within the university and from without, by governments and corporate sponsorships. In economic terms, we’re a Mom and Pop outfit competing with the new K-Mart just across the road. We have to pay our taxes and fees. They moved to town on the promise of having such inconveniences waived for the next ten years. The handwriting really rather is on the wall in situations like this, marketing efforts notwithstanding.

A second reason to doubt that marketing can save us is because it pits us against a larger culture outside the university that is increasingly distant from humanities disciplines not just in terms of what it values, but in terms of what it understands. To be sure, the culture doesn’t really understand science or mathematics either, but it understands that science and mathematics are necessary for things like cars and medicine, and that making cars or medicine makes money. Money is good, therefore studying science and math is good. Can’t make a car with philosophy. Therefore, you can’t make money at it. Therefore, it sucks. QED. Let’s watch “Desperate Housewives”. It takes more time and attention on the part of the audience to make the kind of case to the general public that Arvan suggests than they’re willing to invest in hearing it. In essence, we’ve lost them at “hello”.

All of this leads me to believe that a better response to enrollment problems in philosophy might be to question the merits of the economic analogy to begin with–and I don’t mean just amongst ourselves or in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Instead of asking how can we be more competitive, why not ask why we, or anyone else in the university should be competing in the first place. As individuals we have no problem forming alliances for research across disciplinary lines, whether it is with our colleagues in STEM disciplines, social sciences, or other humanities. Argumentation theory is an excellent illustration of this. Why then do we allow departments in our own universities and colleges to be pitted against each other in this way? Why do we capitulate to the demands of administrative regimes that treat what we do like shoveling so much coal or selling widgets?

I think the answer is that resisting requires the kind of work that almost none of us likes to do. It requires things like committee service, running for and holding office in the faculty senate or our AAUP local and taking semi-administrative posts like department chairperson. It requires us to attend meetings, and do things like forging interdisciplinary alliances with colleagues we may not know or like personally. These things take us away from the things we love best, our research and our students. They seem to be distastefully political, and in many instances they are. When we have to do it, we bear them as necessary evils, to be engaged in but never embraced or entered into fully. That needs to change.

Of course, the moment this sentiment is voiced, it invokes the familiar refrains about resistance being futile, and how we’ll all be assimilated, and how any sentiment to the contrary is self-destructively unrealistic. Those refrains might well be right, but for my part I’d rather know that resistance was futile because I tried to resist, than simply

“Resistance is Futile!”
by Law Keven via cc 2.0-sa license

assume that it is, give in, and spend the rest of my career wondering if things would have been better if I’d stood up for the values I say are so important. (Bonus points for spotting the “teachable moment” for us here given the current political context, for those of you playing along at home.)

Let me be clear here to stave off a couple of likely misunderstandings. I’m not saying economic or business concerns are wrong or stupid, or that people shouldn’t want money or the lovely things it buys like food and shelter. Money’s great. I love food and shelter too. Nor am I saying the hard sciences are bad for soaking up all the funding. I don’t think that either. In fact, I’d love it if the sciences got their mojo back too and started standing up for the important research they wanted (and we really need them) to do, rather than focusing on the research for which they can get ready funding. They suffer for many of the same reasons we in the humanities do, but their suffering comes in a different form. For instance, how many great mathematical minds are being wasted on “big data” right now? How many brilliant biochemists are working on the next erectile dysfunction pill when they would rather be working on treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease?  We’re all in the same boat, just on different benches pulling different oars.

I suppose that what I am saying here is that the current set of business values, however well they may work in the context of business, are inappropriate for the university. This isn’t because they’re bad in themselves, but because they’re the wrong values for scholarly work. Going along with them just reinforces the mistake. Humanities like philosophy are in trouble, but the solution isn’t to buy into the very model that causes that trouble. The solution, if there is one at all, is to give the university back its soul. To do that, we’re going to have to start practicing some of that rhetorical citizenship we like to write and talk about.