Philosophy among the humanities

I usually try to avoid commenting on these sorts of things, but I'm feeling surly this morning...

Jason Stanley, a philosopher at Rutgers, has an article in Inside Higher Ed bemoaning the fact that philosophy is alienated from the rest of the humanities. This is a distillation of various complaints Stanley has aired in recent years on Brian Leiter's blog (which writings can be perused here). He forwards three bits of evidence for this sorry state of affairs:

1. Philosophers don't win the big prizes in the humanities -- MacArthur grants, Guggenheim fellowships, ACLS New Faculty fellowships -- at the same rate as historians and other humanists. (The numbers with which he backs this up are questionable.)
2. "Most American humanists are unclear about how the debates of philosophers are supposed to fit into the overall project of the humanities. We are ignored at dinner parties, and considered arrogant and perhaps uncouth." (I'm not sure why Mr. Stanley's unpopularity at dinner parties is an interesting topic for IHE.)
3. "To add insult to injury, the name of our profession is liberally bestowed on those teaching in completely different departments." (By which he means, horror of horrors, that "Many academics use the term "philosopher" not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time [i.e., the time of academic philosophers like Mr. Stanley], but rather as a certain kind of honorific [for anyone] who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline.")

As is clear from these rather odd complaints, the title of Stanley's piece ("The Crisis of Philosophy") is misleading. The crisis of philosophy is not a crisis in philosophy. Professional philosophy in the Anglo-American world is doing just great, thank you very much. The crisis of philosophy is rather a crisis in the humanities. As Stanley makes clear by his insistence that Nietzsche and Zizek are the outside of a line of continuity running from Aristotle through Spinoza and Kant and up to Saul Kripke and David Lewis, and his further contention that the six MacArthur fellows in philosophy (Rorty, Scanlon, Cavell, P. Churchland, Kolakowski, and Shklar -- he ignores the six philosophers who have won MacArthurs under other headings [Vlastos, Cartwright, Kristeller, Fox Keller, Hawkins, and Moses]) are "an odd group," the real complaint is that humanists don't pay attention to or honor the sort of philosophy that Stanley considers central to the profession.

That may be. But I think it is weird for Stanley to complain about it, or to think that this is a defect in the humanities. Does the work of Lewis or Kripke or Frege have any relevance for your average humanist? As Stanley admits elsewhere, the philosophers he knows tend not to be humanists themselves, or to have "wisdom and insight about the human condition." He explicitly includes moral philosophers in this judgment. As he writes:

It's clear to me why (say) someone working in metaphysics is not likely to have more insight into the human condition than the average mortal. It's because many people working in metaphysics are captured principally by the problem of working out the consistencies of an abstract problem space with only dubious connections to how we live our lives. Moral philosophers tend as a whole to be exactly the same as metaphysicians, except they have chosen a somewhat different problem space to explore the logical relations between theses.

What is there for a humanist to take interest in here? Why should the logical relations among theses in a problem space be of any concern to a historian, anthropologist, or student of literature?

My own feeling is that the way in which many philosophers -- and, in particular, your run-of-the-mill, mainstream, analytic philosophers -- pose their problems and lay out the theses to be examined is utterly disconnected from anything that is a recognizable part of my day to day life. The problems defined by previous generations of (mainstream academic) philosophers have spawned partial solutions which have given rise to sub-problems which have been formalized in various ways and this continuous process has resulted in a rather arid and extremely technical set of "problem spaces" that do not seem to an outsider to hold any potential for yielding "wisdom and insight about the human condition." Now I don't necessarily have a problem with that; taking anything seriously for very long is bound to give rise to technical and obscure issues. But it is truly bizarre to complain that humanists don't appreciate the inner workings of professionalized philosophy.

Less bizarre but more problematic is Stanley's penchant for speaking on behalf of "we" philosophers. (Leiter does this all the time, too.) On the one hand, Stanley wants to insist that mainstream analytic philosophy is absolutely open and diverse because, for example, it "clearly does not place any limits upon the conclusions that can be defended in its journals." On the other hand, this very formulation maintains the substantive notion that philosophy is all about a neutral and universal methodology (a set of logical and argumentative tools) that is merely applied to different ends. I look at the history of philosophy, and at the current crop of professional academic philosophers, and I don't see a "we." I see a host of fundamental disagreements, not so much about conclusions as about what sort of activity philosophy is in the first place. Aristotle and Hobbes did not agree about a neutral methodology while disagreeing about conclusions. Same goes for Heidegger and Lewis. That's what I like about philosophy -- nothing can be taken for granted, it's open conflict on all possible fronts, including meta-fronts and meta-meta-fronts.

In other posts, Stanley is much more open to these sorts of issues. What he seems consistently to elide is the difference between philosophy as a profession -- as an academic specialization or "discipline" -- and philosophy as this possibility of open conflict on all fronts. Despite his claim, philosophy is not the oldest discipline, because it is not a discipline at all. Philosophy has only very intermittently been captured by the academy. It happened for a while in Medieval Europe. It happened for a while in Enlightenment Germany. It has been the rule during the 20th century. There is no reason to expect that it will remain the rule for very long.

Stanley and Leiter systematically confuse the academic profession of philosophy (within which they, unlike me, occupy elite positions within the mainstream) with philosophy as such (within which they are, like me, just johnny-come-lately epigones and amateurs). When they say "we philosophers" they are speaking as elite academic professionals but think they are speaking as philosophers as such. And when Stanley complains about humanists lack of concern for the former, he has no one to blame but himself.

Univ. of Louisiana-Lafayette to Lose Philosophy BA

The Louisiana Board of Regents is recommending terminating the degree program in philosophy at the "second ship" University of Louisiana. It is one of a mass of "low-completer" degree programs facing the axe. The Committee of Regents agenda is here (WARNING: PDF). The University recommended keeping the program unconditionally:

The B.A. in Philosophy is one of only three such programs in the state. Philosophy, by its very content and essential relationships with other disciplines, is fundamentally a core discipline in any comprehensive, doctoral granting institution. As the Board of Regents Academic and Student Affairs Committee staff stated in its report at its meeting of August 25, 2004, regarding the then low-completer status of the Philosophy Program at UL Lafayette: The staff notes that ULL is ranked by the Carnegie Foundation as [a] Doctoral Intensive Institution; hence, the B. A. in Philosophy program should probably be considered as a core undergraduate offering for the University. Accordingly, the staff recommends that the program be maintained unconditionally.

The University recommendation also notes that the number of majors has tripled since 2003-04 (the last time the program was under review for its low-completion record. There are also a number of considerations of the program's instrumental value: It's cheap! It raises LSAT scores! Professional ethics!

But the Regents aren't buying it:

The staff is sympathetic with the University desire to retain this program; it is, indeed, a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and sciences institution. Yet, one cannot help but recognize that Philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students. This is reflected in decreasing numbers not only in this program, but others across the country. The issue is not whether Philosophy as a topic of study is an essential component of a broad undergraduate program of studies, but whether a separate and distinct degree in Philosophy is needed. To that question, the staff cannot ignore the statistics. This B.A. program has been a low-completer four out of the five times over a twenty-two year period. Repeated past efforts by the University to enhance student enrollment and completers, while well-intentioned, have not been successful and there is no compelling reason presented here why that pattern should change in the near future.

Accordingly, the staff recommends immediate termination. Currently enrolled student shall be allowed to complete their program of studies within a reasonable frame of time.

Yikes!

I notice three things:
1. One of only three philosophy BA programs in the whole state! (Tulane and LSU must be the others.)
2. The Regents completely ignore the statistics--which do indeed show an increase in enrollment and in majors, both at ULL and nationwide--in order to say that the centrality of philosophy has "lost some credence" among the students.
3. On the other hand, the University doesn't help by hanging its case so heavily on instrumental and service functions. The Regents want to turn Philosophy into a purely service department, so the University is just helping them make their own case.

Istvan Berkeley, of the ULL Philosophy Department, suggest the following:

I politely suggest that the Board of Regents be made aware that their assessment of philosophy, as a declining academic discipline, is incorrect. Any other related thoughts might also be useful. Probably the best method of doing this is to send messages to Dr. Sally Clausen, who is the Commissioner of Higher Education. Her e-mail address is sclausen@uls.state.la.us. The last time they tried to take away our major, we were able to generate a petition with over 1,500 signatures from people around the State of Louisiana. This time we do not have the time to organize such an effort. So, support from philosophers around the world would be very much appreciated. However, as the time is short, please act as soon as you can.

There you go.

Things I didn't know (part of an infinite series)

If the rejection letter I just received is to be taken at face value, Philosophy and Social Criticism is currently experiencing a glut of papers devoted to Marx and Marxism.

UPDATE: For the record, the ratios of the number of articles on Marx and Marxism (NB: based on little more than a perusal of article titles) to the total number of articles published in Philosophy and Social Criticism over the last five years are as follows:
2004: 0/43
2005: 1/45
2006: 1/39
2007: 1/42
2008: 1/44
To be sure, my essay might suck, and P&SC has fulfilled their one article per year quota of Marx and Marxism for 2008.

Exclusive Responsibility vs. Exclusive Work

It seems that the big hang-up in the current negotiations between AGSEM (the TA union at McGill) and the McGill administration is the question of whether or not the work assigned to the TAs on their workload forms is exclusively theirs or not. If it is exclusively theirs, then no one else can do that work should they go on strike. If it is not, then the course instructor can step in and do whatever needs to be done during a work stoppage.

That this would be a deal-breaker for the union makes perfect sense to me. If the union were to agree that TAs had no exclusive function, then striking seems to go out the window. Or, rather, striking would cease to be a confrontation between the TAs and the administration and would become instead a confrontation between TAs and their supervising faculty. If my TA goes on strike that means I have to do a bunch of extra work. No union wants to to get its members into that sort of bind. The line of confrontation must be between workers and management, not between two groups of workers.

Why the University should be equally adamant about this issue is a bit harder for me to see (unless one wants to attribute purely cynical motives to the administration, and that is never very satisfying). Here is the rationale the Provost has put up on the website:

Since the start of this unfortunate strike, professors have sent me a consistent message on this matter: do not compromise on this principle. Let me quote you one such particularly eloquent message:

The idea of exclusivity is absolutely unacceptable, and the university's proposed revisions to the workload form are clearly needed. The more AGSEM insists that it does not view the exclusivity question as closed, the more important it is that it be settled somehow, and the workload form is a good way to do it. Exclusivity is not simply a matter of TAs' working conditions; it is a matter of faculty working conditions, too. Exclusivity would mean a serious impairment of professors' pedagogical autonomy, and a serious infringement of our ability to meet our responsibilities as educators.

A colleague I respect said something very similar to me just yesterday. Frankly, I just don't get it. I don't see how my autonomy or responsibility as an educator is affected one iota by me being unable to take over my TAs conferences or grading in the case of a strike. I would still make the syllabus and delegate tasks to the TA. I would still bear final responsibility for checking and rectifying grades, for determining the form and content of the course, for setting the standards by which student work is to be evaluated. In short, I would still have ultimate responsibility for the course. But that doesn't mean I should be able (or required) to step in and do everything in the case of a strike. The Provost's position just seems like a non-sequitur to me.

There are other employment situations in which a similar distinction must be drawn between work and responsibility. Nurses, for example, have work that is their own, even though doctors have ultimate responsibility for patient care. And, in fact, the University seemed to recognize such a distinction early on during this strike: no one asked professors to run conferences the last week of classes.

Can any one explain the University's position to me in small words that I might understand?

Victim-Heroes, Now and Then

Jonathan Chait, on the hilarity of George Will coming to the defense of the common man:

Blue-collar whites now occupy the same position in American politics that people of color hold in the smaller political subculture of academia: a victim-hero class whose positions (usually as interpreted by outsiders) enjoy the presumption of moral superiority.

The victim-hero class is the object of competitive flattery and the subject of mutual accusations of disrespect. You can't read a Peggy Noonan paean to real America--"a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality"--without thinking of a junior faculty member extolling the dignity of Guatemalan peasant women. Bill O'Reilly's or Tim Russert's endless invocations of their working-class backgrounds are the equivalent of the campus activist who introduces every opinion by saying "As a woman of color . . . ." (The one difference being that the latter really is a woman of color, while the former are multimillionaires who retain only the most remote connection to blue-collar life.)

The academic left, however, has engaged in a 20-year-long self-critique of identity politics. The anti-academic right has attacked the identity politics of the left, but never its own. The junior faculty members and campus activists who appear in Chait's characterization are figures of the past, ghosts of yesteryear.

Can You Spot the Differences?

Frequently Asked Questions (distributed by the administration of McGill University, 4 April, 2008):

1. My TA says that if they go on strike I cannot grade exams and assignments.
That is incorrect. Grading is part of your function. It is not exclusive to the function of TAs.

Frequently Asked Questions (as posted on the McGill University website sometime in the last week--I first noticed it on Thursday, 17 April):

1. My TA says that if they go on strike I cannot grade exams and assignments. Is this true?

That is incorrect, unless you have fully delegated that task to a TA. Grading is part of your function. It is not exclusive to the function of TAs. If you have fully delegated that function to a TA, please bring the matter to the attention of your Chair.

I sense trouble for the University's legal argument...

Strike On

AGSEM strikes! Refuse work!

Here's AGSEM's announcement--PDF!

TA Strike at McGill?

AGSEM, the TA union here at McGill voted overwhelmingly (79% in favor) to authorize strike action in their ongoing contract negotiations with the University. Obviously, with only a week and a half to go in the semester, this is a point where a strike might be highly effective. Still, since the union has to give 7 days notice (I believe), the window for a strike is fairly narrow. If we get through the next week or so without hearing that a strike is happening, then I would guess there won't be one--a strike that doesn't start until the middle of finals period has only marginal leverage. Therefore, I presume (hope) AGSEM is right on the verge of a breakthrough with the administration. Strike authorization should be enough to tip the scale by itself, and if it doesn't, then the union leadership has to be willing to move very quickly and decisively.

UPDATE: Never mind on the 7 day notice. I have just heard that this is not required. That makes the situation much more flexible. The union could declare a strike anytime before the first couple days of the finals period and have a pretty big stick. We've got up to two weeks of pins-and-needles.