Maverick Philosopher

Universities as Leftist Seminaries

'Seminary,' like 'seminar,' is etymologically related to 'semen,' seed. 

seminary (n.)

mid-15c., "plot where plants are raised from seeds," from Latin seminarium "plant nursery," figuratively, "breeding ground," from seminarius "of seed," from semen (genitive seminis) "seed" (see semen). Meaning "school for training priests" first recorded 1580s; commonly used for any school (especially academies for young ladies) from 1580s to 1930s. Seminarian "seminary student" is attested from 1580s.

The universities today are places where the seeds of leftism are planted in skulls full of mush.

See Harvey Mansfield, The Higher Education Scandal.

"Today’s liberals do not use liberalism to achieve excellence, but abandon  excellence to achieve liberalism."

Related articles

'Leftist,' not 'Liberal'

The Decline of American Liberal Education

LInda Chavez here reports on a study, What does Bowdoin Teach? put out by the National Association of Scholars a few days ago. Chavez:

Bowdoin College is a small private "liberal arts" school in Brunswick, Maine. Its admissions standards are demanding. Bowdoin accepts fewer than one in five who apply (though the school admits about a third of black and other "underrepresented" applicants to satisfy its commitment to "diversity"). The cost of tuition, room, board and fees for the school's roughly 1,800 students is hefty: $56,128 for the 2012-13 academic year, a sum that exceeds the annual income for half of all American households.

[. . .]

Bowdoin requires all freshmen to take a first-year seminar, which is supposed to provide the gateway to the "critical thinking" skills the college purports to value. Among the 35 courses from which students must pick, easily half are either frivolous or, worse, tendentious exercises in identity politics. The titles alone tell the story: "Fan Fiction and Cult Classics," "Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes," "Racism," "Fictions of Freedom," "Sexual Life of Colonialism," "Prostitutes in Modern Western Culture" and "Queer Gardens," to name a few. The latter course "examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces." One can only infer that the college deems such knowledge a necessary building block to every student's intellectual development.

[. . .]

The study also looks at the college's implicit promotion of sexual promiscuity and the "hook-up" culture among students, which begins during first-year orientation. A play called "Speak About It," which all incoming students must attend, includes what its authors say are autobiographical sketches from current and former Bowdoin students. The play depicts graphic on-stage sexual encounters between heterosexual and gay couples -- complete with simulated orgasms. Paradoxically, the Bowdoin community also seems obsessed with preventing sexual assault, which administrators seem to believe is rampant on campus despite the low incidence of reporting alleged attacks.

If Bowdoin were unique in its abandonment of traditional liberal education, this study might be of no more than passing interest. What the authors found at Bowdoin, however, exists to some degree at many if not most elite colleges and universities. This study deserves widespread dissemination and discussion -- first among Bowdoin's alumni, donors and the parents of current and potential students. But anyone interested in the future of higher education in America should take note.

Our colleges and universities shape the next generation of leaders and citizens, for better or worse. And the country's most elite schools will influence disproportionately who we become as a nation and a people in the future. What has happened to Bowdoin College should matter to all of us.

Imagine paying $225,000 or going into debt for such garbage. 

A trifecta of corruption: government, the universities, business.  The federal government makes irresponsible student loans.  The universities respond by  greedily inflating tuitions and fees while ignoring the traditional purposes of the university. Businesses demand bachelor's degrees for jobs high school graduates could do. 

It Takes a B. A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk.

Related: Has College Become a Scam? 

Related articles

Subprime College Educations

Bowdoin responds

Has College Become a Scam?

I am afraid it has, for many if not most.  It will depend on your major, of course.  Here is a list of seven institutions at which total annual costs hover around $60,000.  You read that right: annual costs.  What do you get for that $240 K?  It is obvious that you do not get an education in any serious sense of that term.   (It is also obvious that most attendees have no interest at all in an education in that sense.)  Nor do you get what most people (mis)use 'education' to refer to, namely, a ticket to a high-paying job.

I went to a private college, but in my day one got value for money.  I worked part-time, received a California State Scholarship, and borrowed $2,000, a debt that was quickly discharged.   Those were the early days of the federally-insured loan program.  The program was set up with good intentions, but it had a serious unintended consequence: it provided an incentive for administrators to hike costs for no better reason than that naive students were able to pay exorbitant tuitions by floating loans.  Part of what the administrators did with all this excess money was to hire more  useless overpaid administrators.

Talk of a 'scam,' though harsh, is not inaccurate.  There is lot to be said on this topic.  But I've got to get on to other things.  So I hand off to John Stossel.

Related articles

Is College a Lousy Investment?

The Abysmally Ignorant Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne complains:

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).

This is an amazing confession.  It shows that the man is abysmally ignorant outside his specialty.  He is not wondering about the distinction between de dicto and de re, but about a Philosophy 101 distinction.  It would be as if a philosopher couldn't distinguish between velocity and acceleration, or mass and weight, or a scalar and a vector, or thought that a light-year was a measure of time. 

Despite his ignorance of the simplest distinctions, Coyne is not bashful about spouting off on topics he knows nothing about such as free will.  Lawrence Krauss is another of this scientistic crew.  And Dawkins.  And Hawking and Mlodinow. And . . . .  Their arrogance stands in inverse relation to their ignorance.   A whole generation of culturally-backward and half-educated scientists does not bode well for the future.

Related articles

• Jerry Coyne's Modal Confusion
• Jerry Coyne on Why You Don't Really Have Free Will
• More on Jerry Coyne on Free Will

The Academic Job Market and the Gentrification of the Professoriate

John Pepple makes a good point about gentrification, one that I didn't mention in my recent job market post.

Academic Malpractice: The Case of Grover Furr

If you are not reading Ron Radosh, you should be.  In this piece, he refutes a fool who denies the crimes of Stalin.

The Academic Job Market in the 'Sixties

Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was:

. . . I reflect on the ease and endless rewards of my career, moving from comfortable position to comfortable position, and compare it with the terrible struggles of young academics trying to gain some sort of security and time for their own scholarship in an increasingly hostile job market.  The sixties, when my career was being launched, was a time of explosive growth of higher education in America.  Spurred by the G. I. Bill and the post-war economic boom, and fed by an endless stream of young men avoiding the Viet Nam draft, colleges and universities virtually metastasized.  State universities, which had existed ever since the Land Grant Acts of the 1860's, suddenly sprouted satellite campuses.  State colleges plumped themselves up into universities, and Community Colleges became State Colleges.  There were so many new teaching positions to be filled that in the sixties and seventies graduate students were being offered tenure track positions before they had become
ABD.

BV: I'm  a generation younger than Professor Wolff.  By the time I began applying for jobs at the end of the '70s things had become grim and the gravy days of the '60s were a thing of the past.  But I lucked out and got a tenure track job in '78 right out of graduate  school at the University of Dayton.  Lucky me, I had no other offer.  I later learned that in the '60s there were four philosophy hires in one year at UD, some of them sight unseen: no interview.  One of these gentlemen couldn't even speak English!  And of course the quality of the people hired was relatively low.

It is also worth pointing out that the '60s and early '70s were also a time when what William James in 1903 called the "Ph.D Octopus"  acquired many more tentacled arms.  New graduate programs started up and new philosophy journals as well.  Another Harvard man, Willard van Orman Quine, cast a jaundiced eye on the proliferation of journals in his delightful "Paradoxes of Plenty" in Theories and Things (Harvard UP, 1981):

Certainly, then, new journals were needed: they were needed by authors of articles too poor to be accepted by existing journals.  The journals that were thus called into existence met the need to a degree, but they in turn preserved, curiously, certain minimal standards; and so a need was felt for further journals still, to help to accommodate the double rejects.  The series invites extrapolation and has had it. (196)

At the same time, the Cold War and the Sputnik scare triggered a flood of federal money into universities. Most of it, of course, funded defense-related research or studies of parts of the world that America considered inimical to its interests [Russian Research Institutes, East Asia Programs, language programs of all sorts], but some of the money slopped over into the Humanities, and even into libraries and university presses.  For a time, commercial publishers found that they could not lose money on an academic book, since enough copies would be sold to newly flush university libraries to enable them to break even.  Those were the days when a philosopher willing to sell his soul [and who among us was not?] could get a contract on an outline, a Preface, or just an idea and a title.  The professor introducing me at one speech I gave said, "Professor Wolff joined the Book of the Month Club, but he didn't realize he was supposed to read a book a month.  He thought he was supposed to publish a book a month."  Well, we all thought we were brilliant, of course.

Then the bubble burst.  First the good jobs disappeared.  Then even jobs we would never have deigned to notice started drying up.  Universities adopted the corporate model, and like good, sensible business leaders, started cutting salaries, destroying job security, and reducing decent, hard-working academics to the status of itinerant peddlers.  Today, two-thirds of the people teaching in higher education are contract employees without good benefits or an assured future.  Scientists do pretty well, thanks to federal support for research, but the Humanities and non-defense related Social Sciences languish.  The arts are going the way of high school bands and poetry societies.

The truth is that I fell off the cart onto a nice big dung heap, and waxed fat and happy, as any self-respecting cockroach would.  My career happened to fit neatly into the half century that will, in future generations, be looked back on as the Golden Age of the American University.  There is precious little I can do for those unfortunate enough to come after me.  But at least, I can assure them that their bad luck is not a judgment on the quality of their work.  And, of course, I can write increasingly lavish letters of recommendation in a desperate attempt to launch them into the few remaining decent teaching jobs.  I would have liked to do better by them.  They deserve it.

Is College a Lousy Investment?

This piece by Megan McArdle is required reading.

The role of government in causing the college bubble cannot be gainsaid.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.  For the painful details, see Paul Campos' law school scam blog.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of
fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the
corruption of the rating agencies. 

Observations on the Joys of Teaching

Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry.

Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who are neither hungry nor know what food is.

Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.

Philosophy, like a virgin, is wasted on the young.

The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.

According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.

"I would rather eat dry bread than teach." Franz Schubert, quoted in Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 233.

"I would rather sweep the streets than teach children!" Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 24.  Hone is quoting Sayers. 

The quotations borrowed from Dr. Gilleland, antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.

Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants.  But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate.

..........................

Addendum: 2:45 PM

Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments:

Academic anything eventually degenerates either into ego battles or battles for status as grant securers.  In addition to tuition inflation the big money-maker for universities is the administration overhead awarded within grants and the supplement to salaries in some cases that allow them to forego raises or to reduce their portion of the payroll.   

Government corrupts all that it touches.

I agree with Bill's first point, but not with his second.  The source of moral corruption is not government, but the human being, his ignorance, his inordinate and disordered desires, and his free but wayward will.  Everything human beings are involved in is either corrupt or corruptible, and government is no exception, not because government is the unique source of corruption, but because government is a human, all-too-human, enterprise.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the corruption of the rating agencies. 

So, contra my friend Keezer, we cannot assign all the blame to government.  We need government, limited government.

Political Correctness and Left-Wing Bias in the Universities

Liberal profs admit they would discriminate.

Captive Minds: Conformity and Campus Intellectuals  Excerpt (emphasis added):

Working for four years at this prairie college, I had many opportunities to see political correctness in action: in our so-called “equity” hiring practices, in changes to our course offerings to highlight racial and sexual diversity, and in the unfailing faux-reverence with which all aspects of Aboriginal literature and culture were treated, even down to a discussion about whether, in a job advertisement, we should refer to Canada by its indigenous name of Turtle Island.

But this was not a matter of political correctness alone: it was collective thinking in its most blatant form. There were striking parallels to what Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind analyzes as the intellectual’s not-unwilling accommodations to Party orthodoxy. Milosz was interested not only in the compulsions of totalitarianism but in the significant emotional and psychological attractions of the Communist system: the reassurances and rewards of ceding responsibility for judgment, and the manifold reasons why an intellectual could find himself at home in conformity. Can it be that, even free of threat or compulsion, many intellectuals will choose to surrender their independence of thought? C.S. Lewis wrote about the seductive pleasures of belonging in “The Inner Ring,” brilliantly highlighting the desire planted deep in the heart of every human being to be approved, acknowledged as “one of us” by people we admire. To get into that charmed circle, Lewis warned, many of us will assent to nearly anything.

No matter the reigning orthodoxy — in our department it was, as in the vast majority of English departments across North America, Leftist, anti-Western, feminist, and multiculturalist — the desire to fall in line, and to compel or outlaw those who do not, seems to be an enduring fact of human nature.

Milosz's Captive Mind is essential reading.  Your humble correspondent has of course read it, but he has yet to blog it.  He really ought to. 

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

Here is a list of the most useful and useless college majors:

The top 10 most useful college majors:
1. Nursing
2. Mechanical engineering
3. Electrical engineering
4. Civil engineering
5. Computer science
6. Finance
7. Marketing and marketing research
8. Mathematics
9. Accounting
10. French, German, Latin and other common foreign languages.

The top 10 most useless college majors:
1. Fine Arts
2. Drama and theater arts
3. Film, video and photographic arts
4. Commercial art and graphic design
5. Architecture
6. Philosophy and religious studies
7. English literature and language
8. Journalism
9. Anthropology and archeology
10. Hospitality management

Philosophy comes in at #6 of the useless.  Those who fill their belly from teaching philosophy (or rather from conducting philosophy classes, which is not the same) will be strongly tempted to defend philosophy by arguing that it really is useful after all.

I say that's a mistake.  I take the classical line.  Of course philosophy is useless, and therein lies its nobility and dignity.  The merely utile is ancillary to the non-utile.  Failure to appreciate this shows a lack of nobility of soul.  What follows is the meat of my Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy?

What I object to . . . is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification is in terms of an end outside of it. The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them as is possible. What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with the goal of philosophical study. The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary or to prepare for a career as a journalist.   Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that may prove handy in law school.

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for
something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony good for something? And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."  You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions.  Put him on the spot.  Play the Socratic gadfly.  If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?" 

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the typical Board of Regents. But philosophy is what it is, lofty by nature, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

It might be better, though, not to stoop to defend it at all, at least not before the uncomprehending.  It might be better to show contempt and supercilious disdain. Not everyone can be reasoned with, and part of being reasonable is understanding this fact.

Jonathan Haidt Awakens from his Dogmatic Liberal Slumbers

Conservatives have broader moral sense than liberals.  All praise to Haidt for having the openmindedness and courage to change his view, but I marvel at how incurious and bigoted he was before his metanoia.  What sort of person ignores whole swaths of the intellectual terrain without any desire to explore at first hand?  That sort of narrowness among supposed intellectuals has always amazed me.  Analytic philosophers are a particularly bigoted bunch.  Not all, of course, but far too many.  Some even  brag of their ignorance.  "I have never read Hegel and I have no intention  of reading him." 

Then get out of here you contemptible bigot!

Before stumbling across the Muller anthology, the popular former University of Virginia psychology professor thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,” he says — an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.

So without any first-hand acquaintance with conservative thought, Haidt bought into an ugly misrepresentation.  But, as I said, he has come around and ought to be praised for that.

At Yale, Mr. Haidt majored in philosophy to find some answers. Discovering that academic philosophy had abandoned the big questions of human nature, morality, and the good life, Mr. Haidt turned to psychology — and found his calling.

It is simply false to say that academic philosophy has abandoned the Big Questions.  That was true in the '30s, '40s, and '50s for the logical positivists and some of their successors and fellow travellers, but by the time Haidt went to college in the '80s the Big Questions were securely back in the saddle even in the mainstream.  To give but one example, consider Thomas Nagel 1979 collection of essays entitled Mortal Questions.

 

Subprime College Educations

Another chapter in the decline of the West.  Excerpts (emphasis added):

In his Encounter Books Broadside "The Higher Education Bubble," Reynolds says this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised prices -- and lowered standards -- to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall Street Journal headline: "Student Debt Rises by 8% as College Tuitions Climb."

[. . .]

The budgets of California’s universities are being cut, so recently Cal State Northridge students conducted an almost-hunger strike (sustained by a blend of kale, apple and celery juices) to protest, as usual, tuition increases and, unusually and properly, administrators' salaries. For example, in 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.

The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald notes that sinecures in academia's diversity industry are expanding as academic offerings contract. UC San Diego, while eliminating master's programs in electrical and computer engineering and comparative literature, and eliminating courses in French, German, Spanish and English literature, added a diversity requirement for graduation to cultivate "a student's understanding of her or his identity." So, rather than study computer science and Cervantes, students can study their identities -- themselves. Says Mac Donald, "'Diversity,' it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism."

She reports that UCSD lost three cancer researchers to Rice University, which offered them 40 percent pay increases. But UCSD found money to create a Vice Chancellorship for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an Administrator of Diversity Education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a Diversity Program Coordinator; an Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in "Unpacking Oppression"; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in "Understanding Diversity and Social Justice." California's budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach to supplement UCSF's Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become "a Diversity Change Agent"), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor's Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

Are we in Cloud Cuckoo Land yet?

The Case of Morris Starsky

Quite by chance this morning I stumbled upon materials relating to one Morris Starsky, a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University who was fired from a tenured position for his political views in 1970.  Here is the Wikipedia article; here is something from the Phoenix New Times; this is from The Militant.  All of these sources to be consumed cum grano salis. 

A search at PhilPapers turned up nothing on the man, which says something.  Some commentary later, perhaps, once I know more about the case.

Addendum (7:05 PM):  The ever-helpful Dave Lull reports that Morris Joseph Starsky earned the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a dissertation entitled, "On the Ontological Problem of Oratio Obliqua.

Addendum (5 April):  Lull informs me that the Morris J. Starsky archives are housed at the ASU library.

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at #79.  Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants  to graduate programs may find the site  useful.  I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go.  But there is something whiny and wimpy about it.

Suppose you are paid to spend five years, from age 22 to age 27, studying in depth a subject you love and have aptitude for in the idyllic environs of a college campus.  You have been give tuition remission and a stipend on which to live.  You really enjoy reading, writing, thinking, and studying more than anything else.   You have good sense and avoid the folly of assuming debt in the form of student loans.  You live within your very modest means and have the character to resist the siren songs of a society bent on crazy consumption.   A little monkishness never hurt anyone. You spend five years enjoying all the perquisites of academic life: a beautiful environment, stimulating people, library privileges, an office, a flexible work schedule, and the like.  At age 27 you are granted the Ph. D.  But there are few jobs, and you knew that all along.  You make a serious attempt at securing a position in your field but fail.  So you go on to something else either with or without some further training.

Have you wasted your time?  Not by my lights.  Hell, you've been paid to do what you love doing!  What's to piss and moan about?  You have been granted a glorious extension of your relatively carefree collegiate years.  Five more years of being a student, sans souci, in some exciting place like Boston.  Five more years of contact with age- and class-appropriate members of the opposite sex and thus five more years of opportunity to find a suitable mate.  (But if you marry and have kids while a grad student, then you are a fool.  Generally speaking, of course.) 

Of course, if your goal in life is to pile up as much loot as possible in the shortest possible time, then stay away from (most) graduate programs.  But if the life of the mind is your thing, go for it!  What's to kvetch about? Are you washed up at 27 or 28 because you couldn't land a tenure-track position?  You have until about 40 to make it in America. 

For more on this and cognate topics, see my Academia category.

The Overeducated

I once had a graduate student with whom I became friends. Ned Flynn, to give him a name, one day told me that after he finished high school he  wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and get a job with the railroad. His mother, however, wanted something 'better' for her son.   She wanted him to go to college, which he did, in the desultory  fashion of many. He ended up declaring a major in psychology and graduating. After spending some time in a monastery, perhaps also at  the instigation of his Irish Catholic mother, and still not knowing quite what  to do with himself, he was accepted into an M.A. program in  philosophy, which is where I met him. After goofing around for several more years, he took a job as a social worker, a job which did not suit him. Last I saw him he was in his mid-thirties and pounding nails.

His complaint to me was that, had he followed his natural bent, he would have had fifteen or so years of job seniority with the railroad, a good paycheck, and a house half paid for. Instead, he wasted years   on studies for which he had no real inclination, and no real talent.  He had no discernible interest in the life of the mind, and like most  working class types could not take it seriously. If you are from the working class, you will know what I mean: 'real' work must involve  grunting and sweating and schlepping heavy loads. Those who work on oil rigs or in the building trades do real work.  Reading, writing, and thinking are activities deemed effete and not quite real. When my  mother saw me reading books, she would sometimes tell me to go outside and do something. That use of 'do' betrayed her working class values.  What she didn't realize was that by reading all those fancy books I  was putting myself in a position where I could live by my wits and avoid the schlepping and grunting. Of course, the purpose of the life of the mind is not to avoid grunt work, with which I have some acquaintance, but to live a truly human life, whether one fills one's belly from it or not.

Overeducation' is perhaps not the right word for cases like my former student Ned. Strictly speaking, one cannot be overeducated since there  is and can be no end to true education. The word is from the Latin  e-ducere, to draw out, and there can be no end to the process of actualizing the potential of a mind with an aptitude for learning.  Perhaps the right word is 'over-credentialed.' It is clear that what most people in pursuit of 'higher education' want is not an education, strictly speaking, but a credential that will gain them admittance to a certain social and/or economic status. 'Education as most people  use it nowadays is a euphemism for a ticket to success, where the latter is defined in terms of money and social position.

A Crisis in Philosophy? How Not to Avert It

Those who make a living teaching philosophy, or are hoping to make a living teaching philosophy, have reason to be concerned.  Enrollments are in decline, and as the University of Nevada (Las Vegas) example shows, whole departments are under threat of elimination.  Some speak loosely of a crisis in philosophy.  But it is more like a crisis for paid professors of it.  And perhaps 'crisis'  is overblown.  So let's just say that philosophy teachers collectively have a problem, the problem of attracting warm bodies.  The fewer the students, the less the need for teachers.

Lee McIntyre addresses the problem in the pages of the The Chronicle of Higher Education.  He asks who is to blame for "the growing crisis in philosophy."  His answer is that philosophers are.   Philosophers have failed to make philosophy relevant to what people care about despite having had ages to do so.  Yes, he uses that '60s buzz word, "relevant."  So the problem is not caused primarily by hard economic times despite their exacerbating effect; the problem is that philosophers have failed to make philosophy "relevant." 

What is to be done?  "We must recognize what is unique about philosophy . . . philosophy's historical mission, which is not merely to find the truth, but to use the truth to improve the quality of human life."  This is hardly unique to philosophy -- think of medical science -- but let that pass.  We are then told that the goal . . . "should be to help students recognize that philosophy matters. Not just because it will improve their LSAT scores (which it will), but because philosophy has the potential to change the very fabric of who they are as human beings."

Sorry to sound negative, but if there is a "crisis," this high-sounding blather is unlikely to "avert" it. I should think that the primary task of philosophy is to understand human beings before going off half-cocked in pursuit of a radical transformation of their "very fabric."

The theme of 'change' having been sounded, the reader is not surprised to hear McIntyre go off on a liberal-left tangent, identifying critical thinking with the espousal of left wing positions.  Here is one example:

Similarly, when a 2009 Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 28 percent of the American public—and an alarming number of their elected representatives in Washington—refuse to believe the overwhelming scientific evidence for the existence of global warming, where is the voice of the philosophical community to right the ship on the norms of good reasoning? Personally, I'm tired of hearing members of Congress who couldn't pass an introductory logic class say that they are "skeptics" about climate change. Refusing to believe something in the face of scientific evidence is not skepticism, it is the height of credulity. How delicious would it be for philosophers to claim public venues to rap their knuckles over that?

This is quite astonishing.  We are being told that those who raise questions about global warming such as Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are in violation of "the norms of good reasoning"!   Just as lefties think they own dissent, they think they own critical thinking too.

Michael Valle's comment on McIntyre's piece is dead on:

Here's how I read this. "We need to make philosophy more politically active. We need to teach our students that conservative and libertarian ideas are wrong and illogical. We need to spread progressive values and political views to our students. Unless we do this, our discipline will fade into obscurity." Yet this is exactly why our discipline isn't trusted. It's because we are allowing ourselves to become pickled in political correctness and leftwing activism. Until the public knows that it will not get progressive preaching in our philosophy classes, we will not be trusted, and for perfectly good reason.

That's exactly right.  Contempt for philosophy, and for the humanities generally, on the part of the public is in large part do to the political correctness that infects humanities departments.  Tax payers realize that there is no free and open inquiry going on in these venues, no balanced examination of the whole spectrum of opinion on issues,  that what is going on is indoctrination. 

To sum up.  There is no crisis in philosophy.  It is alive and well and will continue, funded or unfunded, enrollments up, enrollments down, praised or maligned, suppressed or supported, as it has for  20 centuries in the West and even longer in the East.  It will bury its undertakers.  At most, those who fill their bellies from it face lean times.  Some will no longer be able to fill their bellies from it.  Then we will see how seriously they take it and whether they really believe their own rhetoric.  We will then discover whether they live for it or only from it.

The problem is not that philosophers are insufficiently engaged in 'progressive' agitation and indoctrination.  The problem is due to the fact that times are tough, economically speaking, and that the cost-to-value ratio of a college education has become outrageously unfavorable.  It is just plain stupid to incur massive debt to earn a degree in a subject that has no market value. 

Nor is the problem that philosophy is not "relevant" to the issues of the day.  The purpose of a university education is to elevate people, to give them perspective, to challenge them with difficult texts and ideas.  Concern for "relevance" leads to the erosion of standards.  As I used to say to my students: I am not going to make philosophy relevant to you; I am going to make you relevant to philosophy. 

References

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/04/philosophy-under-attack-at-the-university-of-nevada-las-vegas.html

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/10/should-one-stoop-to-a-defense-of-philosophy-or-the-humanities.html

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/08/does-the-left-own-dissent.html

http://chronicle.com/article/Making-Philosophy-Matter-or/130029/

Glenn Reynolds on the What Comes After the Higher Ed Bubble Bursts

Here.  Excellent analysis of the problem, but he also offers solutions:

For higher education, the solution is more value for less money. Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years -- but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance.  Up until now, the loan guarantees have meant that colleges, like the writers of subprime mortgages a few years ago, got their money up front, with any problems in payment falling on someone else. Make defaults expensive to colleges, and they'll become much more careful about how much they lend and what kinds of programs they offer.

[. . .]

Another response is an increased emphasis on non-college education. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, skilled trades are doing quite well. For the past several decades, America's enthusiasm for college has led to a lack of enthusiasm for vocational education.

Absolutely right.  The notion put forth by the foolish Obama and others that anyone can profit from a college education is absurd on the face of it. 

They Pay So Much for So Little

Update (11/27):  I am told the sign is a fake.  I suspected as much.  Fake or not it makes an important point.  The point being that (i) the Left has done much to destroy the universities, and (ii) government programs, e.g., federally insured loan programs, have done much to cause an education bubble.  The cost of education nowadays is shockingly out of proportion to the value of what the student receives.  This shows what happens when government interferes with the market. (This is not to say that I am opposed to all government regulation as so many  liberals think.  They think that if you are a conservative you must be a laissez-faire capitalist.  That's just plain stupid, but par for the course for the typical  liberal who is apparently unequipped to make a simple distinction between conservative and libertarian.) 

Compare the education sector with the electronics sector.  I paid a paltry $800 over a year ago for my current Hewlett-Packard computer with huge flat-screen montor .  It's an amazing piece of equipment and unbelievably cheap given what I am getting.  ( I paid around $2000 in less-inflated dollars in 1985 for an Apple II-c which was a piece of junk compared to this machine.  No hard drive, a mere 128 kilobytes of RAM.)  Why so cheap?  Because of competition and market discipline. 

It is not that big-government liberals intend to make things worse; the worsening is an unintended consequence of their foolish and ill-thought-out policies, policies that fail to take into consideration the realities of human nature.  One such reality is that if you make it easy for people to borrow monstrous sums of money, they will follow the path of least resistance and do so.  Another such reality is that the educational institutions will raise their tuitions and fees to absorb as much as they can of this easy money without any concern for what they are doing to the students' long-term financial health or to the country's.

In I Too am a Debt-Peon, Justin Smith reports that his first year in the graduate program at Columbia cost him $45,000 which he financed using federally-insured loans.  $45 K!  I don't know which is harder to believe, that any institution could get away with charging such an outrageous amount for a year's worth of courses in a subject  which, noble and magnificent as it is, notoriously bakes no bread, or that anyone could be so stupid as to go $45 K into debt in pursuit of a degree in a subject which, magnificent and noble as it is, notoriously bakes no bread.  Luckily for him, Smith managed to get funding for the rest of his graduate study, and even luckier, got a job. 

But now he complains about having to pay back the debt that he freely and foolishly assumed, and says that he will do what he can to avoid repaying it, thereby stiffing the taxpayers that financed his foolish adventure. 

On Used Books, Marginalia, Underlining, and Teaching

My library extends through each room of my house, except the bathrooms. (I suspect that in the average household, where the only purpose of reading could be to inspire excretion, it is the other way around.) If I weren’t pro-Israel I would say that my library commits territorial aggression against my wife’s ‘Palestinian’ books; her few shelves are either occupied territories or under threat of occupation. My bibliomaniacal blogger-buddies  would turn green with envy if ever they laid eyes on my library. So I shall have to protect them from descent into this, arguably the deadliest, of the seven deadly sins.

Many of my books were acquired on the cheap from used bookstores in college towns such as Boston-Cambridge and Bloomington, Indiana. I used to really clean up when disgruntled graduate students packed it in, dumping costly libraries purchased with daddy’s money into the used book dens.

Among the used books I scored were plenty of copies of philosophical classics used in undergraduate courses. I always used to get a kick out of the marginalia, if you want to call them that. Mostly it was the absence of marginalia that caught my eye, an absence corresponding to the paucity of thought with which the reading was done. The rare marginalium was usually pathetic. Here is a passage from Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794):

Revelation is a communication of something which the person to whom that thing is revealed did not know before. For if I have done a thing or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it or seen it, nor to enable me to tell it or to write it. (LLA, p. 13)

That’s not the best writing in the world, but the thought is clear enough. Our brilliant student’s comment? "Word Play!" ‘Word Play!’ is ever on the lips of boneheads who cannot or will not comprehend any piece of well-constructed prose. The litany of the blockhead: Word Play! Semantics! Hairsplitting!

One good thing about student marginalia was that it never extended very far since the reading never extended very far: the obscene magic marker underlining typically ceased three or four pages into the text.

One of the many drawbacks of teaching is that one could never get the little effers to do the reading especially if one used primary sources, refusing to dumb things down with comic books, audiovisual 'aids,' etc.: once they saw that genuine effort was demanded, they wimped out. All my preaching about being athletes of the mind availed nothing, falling on dead ears, like pearls before swine. Or am I being too harsh?

Harsh or not, it is blissful to repose in my Bradleyan reclusivity, far from the unreality of the classroom.

Graduate School and Self-Confidence

This from a reader:

. . . I am now in my senior year as a philosophy major, considering strongly the prospect of grad school. However, I remain deeply frustrated with myself with regard to my academic discipline and intellectual ability.  Instead of philosophy making me proud--which some claim it does--it humbles me. But it does so to such a degree that I feel inadequate. So I want to ask what the remedy is for these frustrations. Also, have you encountered this, specifically as an undergrad, or in grad school? I feel as though I care too deeply about philosophy to 'give it up'. I will do it regardless. Though I've been told I have some ability, I wonder if pressing on to grad school is the way to go given these frustrations.

It is very difficult to give helpful advice to someone with whom one is not closely acquainted.  But here are some things to consider.  Evaluate them critically, test them against your own experience, and get the advice of others. 

 

1.  If you have a genuine passion for some field of study or activity, and fail to pursue it out of concern for practicality, then you may live to regret it.  The harder heads will tell you that philosophy bakes no bread.  They are right, of course, but then man does not live by bread alone.  I know people who have regretted 'playing it safe' in life.  I myself decided to take the risks, pursue my dream, and am very happy as a result.  On the other hand, you must proceed without illusions about possible outcomes if you decide to devote years of study to a subject that most likely will not pay off in economic terms.  Ending up an academic gypsy or an adjunct faculty member are decidedly suboptimal outcomes.  But of course it depends on the individual and extent of the 'dues' he is willing to pay to play 'the blues.' 

 

2.  Go to graduate school only if you receive a full fellowship and tuition remission.  Do not pay out of your own pocket (unless you are independently wealthy) or take out any loans.  You did not say whether your career goal is an academic position or whether graduate study would be for personal enrichment.  If you have an all-consuming passion for philosophy and are really good at it, then you might consider going into academe to make your living from philosophy. But this is a long shot. Good tenure-track positions are hard to find, competition for them is ferocious, and the market can be expected to worsen.  And even if you obtain a tenure-track job that still leaves you with the final hurdle: tenure.  If you are denied tenure, then not only are you out of a job, you are to some extent 'damaged goods.'  There is quite a lot of material and links for you to explore in my Academia category, some of it depressing.  Take it all cum grano salis. 

 

3.  Whether or not you have any business pursuing graduate study in philosophy depends on whether you have any philosophical aptitude.  This is a question only your professors can answer for you.  Try to persuade them to give you an honest and blunt appraisal. 

 

4. The question of self-confidence is a difficult one.  There are those who have far more of it than they are objectively justified in having.  We have all met people like that.  But it it is often one's self-confidence, even if out of proportion to one one's actual abilities, that contributes to success.  You have to believe in yourself to accomplish anything and to get to the pont where your self-confidence is objectively justified.  A certain amount of 'overbelief' is pragmatically useful.

 

How improve self-confidence?  By extremely hard work, monomaniacal focus, and total dedication.  There are plenty of examples of people of modest abilities who accomplished something by dint of single-minded commitment.

Another Side of the Education Bubble: The Law School Bubble

Who hasn't thought of attending law school?  Before doing anything rash, you may want to peruse the posts of law professor Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam.  He began the blog in August so you could easily take it da capo.

And then there is the student loan crisis and the moral and economic absurdity of Obama's 'forgive and forget' policy.  Just as government interference in the mortgage industry bears a large part (not all) of the responsibility for the housing bubble, it bears a large part of the responsibility for the education bubble.

Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?

The place of philosophy in college curricula is often defended on the ground that its study promotes critical thinking.

Now I don't doubt that courses in logic, epistemology, and ethics can help inculcate habits of critical thinking and good judgment. And it may also be true that philosophy has a unique role to play here. So, while it is true that every discipline teaches habits of critical thinking and good judgment in that discipline, there are plenty of issues that are not discipline-specific, and these need to be addressed critically as well.

What I object to, however, is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification is in terms of an end outside of it. The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them as is possible. What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with the goal of philosophical study. The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary or to prepare for a career as a journalist.   Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that may prove handy in law school.

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony good for something? And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."  You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions.  Put him on the spot.  Play the Socratic gadfly.  If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?"  

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the typical Board of Regents. But philosophy is what it is, lofty by nature, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

It might be better, though, not to stoop to defend it at all, at least not before the uncomprehending.  It might be better to show contempt and supercilious disdain. Not everyone can be reasoned with, and part of being reasonable is understanding this fact.

Lynne Ballew

At the time I knew her, in the mid-'70s, I had no idea what a remarkable person she is.  I was a graduate student and she was a young professor.  We spoke a few times in the hallway.  A while back I was re-reading some Plato and I came upon a marginalium of mine: "Ask Lynne about this."  That put me in mind of her and I wondered what had become of her.  I had heard that she had left academe but knew nothing more.  A few key strokes  and her inspiring story unfolded before me.

Academic Rot Exposed

I plugged this site a few days ago.  By now I've read most of the posts, and they are good.    #65 of 100 reasons not to go to graduate school is up.  Title is Teaching is Less and Less Rewarding.

The abdication of authority by professors and administrators that set in in the '60s  is a good part of the problem.  Indeed, much of our national decline is traceable to abdication of authority on the part of parents, teachers, and clergy.  Not to mention go-along-to-get-along politicians.  But that's another post.

100 Reasons Not to Go to Grad School

Here. 

The Higher Education Bubble

Good analysis by Michael Barone.

Federal subsidies have caused college costs to skyrocket while quality goes down.  What does all the money buy?  Administrative bloat:

Take the California State University system, the second tier in that state's public higher education. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That's right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

These people get paid to "liaise" and "facilitate" and produce reports on diversity. How that benefits Cal State students or California taxpayers is unclear.

Barone goes on to point out that to pay $100,000 for a degree in women's studies makes no economic sense.  But he doesn't forcefully make the point, contra Obama, that it is just foolish for everyone to go to college.  Only some people are 'college material' to use a phrase  one no longer hears.  There is nothing wrong with learning and plying a trade right out of high school.  Why waste thousands of dollars partying and goofing off just so one can -- learn a trade?

And let's be clear that for the vast majority, 'getting an education' is a euphemism for getting ahead, for acquiring credentials that one hopes will bring social and economic advancement.  It is not about becoming an educated human being.  It's about money and status.  But then it should be spectacularly  clear that if one wants money, a decidedly suboptimal way of going about getting it is by saddling oneself with $100,000 in college debt.

Of Plagiarism and Paraphrase

My man Hodges has some interesting and useful entries on these topics, especially for those of you who labor in the academic trenches.  Start here. 

Catholic University Returns to Single-Sex Dorms

A paucity of common sense, a lack of wisdom, a tendency among those in authority to abdicate . . . these are among the characteristics of contemporary liberals.  Common sense would suggest that in a sex-saturated society putting young men and women together in the same dormitory would be an unwise idea, one rather unconducive to the traditional purposes of a university.  Among the traditional purposes were the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and the inculcation of critical habits of mind.  (Take a gander at Newman's Idea of A University.)  The facilitation of 'hook-ups' and the consumption of prodigious quantities of alcohol was never on the list as far as I know.  'Hook-ups' there will be.  But only a liberal would adopt a policy that facilitates them.  University officials abdicated their authority starting in the 'Sixties.   The abdication of authority is a fit topic for a separate post.

That a Catholic university would sponsor coed dorms is even more absurd.  In Catholic moral theology sins against the sixth and ninth Commandments are all mortal.  It would be interesting to explore the reasoning behind this.  But part of the motivation, I think, is a conservative appreciation of the awesome power of the sex drive and its perhaps unique role in distorting human perceptions.  Of the Mighty Tetrad (sex, money, power, fame/recognition) sex arguably ranks first in delusive power.  In the grip of sexual obsessions we simply cannot think straight or live right.  The news is replete with examples, Anthony Weiner being the latest example.  'Weenie-texting' he threw away his career.  In the grip of his obsession, a naked old man, Strauss-Kahn,  pounced on a hotel maid.  And so on.

But all is not lost.  CU is backtracking on this one.

Philosophy in Academe and Out

From a reader:

 

Well, you must have read this sentence a million times but let me tell you once again, anyway: I have been an ardent follower of your blog and simply admire it. I thought you might be the best person to write to as I am confident you will also give me  honest advice regarding a troublesome question I have. Here it is. I plan to do a course in philosophy since I love this subject. And finally get a Ph.D. if possible. I am afraid, according to the descriptions you have given of the academic marketplace in philosophy, I might only end up hurting my passion for this subject. At the moment I am a pleasure reader and love philosophy this way. At least, it helps me organize my life and has had a positive effect. If studying philosophy academically only cracks my rose-colored glasses and I end up being repulsive, then it might not be worth it. Perhaps I am better off reading the little that I can and gather all the pleasure thereof. Would love to know what you may advise me.

 

I do get probably more fan mail than I deserve, but it is all gratefully received.  So thanks for the kind words.

 

One question you appear to be asking is whether a person can embark upon and complete a course of study in philosophy at the graduate level and not become as disagreeable and nasty as G. B. is portrayed as being in Philosophy as Blood Sport.  Yes, of course.  I employ the 'No Asshole Rule' the blogospheric corollary of which is 'Delete and Block.'   If a person behaves badly, I have nothing to do with him.  You could do the same.  Before applying to a department, visit it and get a feel for the atmosphere there by talking to grad students and others.  If you don't like the vibe, apply elsewhere.

 

Another question you may be asking is whether pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy is a good bet when it comes to generating an income that is above the bare subsistence level.  My thoughts on this topic are at the other end of the first hyperlink above.

 

A third question in the vicinity is whether it is necessary to study philosophy formally to become competent it it.  I would say 'no.'  It depends on whether you have intelligence, philosophical aptitude (which is not the same as intelligence), and discipline.  If you have these qualities in sufficient quantity, then formal study can actually be a hindrance.

 

Nowadays, with the Internet, it's all our there.  You can find almost everything you need, for free, when you want it, wherever you live, including lectures (on YouTube).  Suppose you are interested in topic X.    Read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic and then start working your way through the bibliography.  Try to write something yourself on the topic and try to get it published in a decent journal.  You only learn philosophy by doing it: thinking, reading, writing, and submitting your work to the criticism of others.  The emphasis must be on your own thinking and writing.  Otherwise you may end up a mere scholar who knows who said what when but hasn't a clue as to what he himself believes.

 

Hashing things out with competent, sincere, like-minded others is also important, not to mention extremely enjoyable.    For as Aristotle says somewhere, "We philosophize best with friends."  But friendly interlocutors are not necessary.  What is necessary, besides intelligence, aptitude, and discipline is a desire to get to the truth of the matter that trumps every other desire.

Is College for Everyone?

When I was in the 7th grade my teacher told me I was 'college material,' the implication being that not everyone is.  She was right on both counts.  I was and not everyone is.  But times have changed, and pace Obama, change is not always for the better.  Part of the change for the worse is that the very phrase 'college material' has fallen into desuetude. 

The conceit that everyone can profit from a college education is of course foolish -- which is perhaps why it is is so warmly embraced by liberals, those whose egalitarian instincts are rarely constrained by common sense.  It was foolish when college was affordable and it is multiply foolish now when it isn't.

I now hand off to 'Professor X' whose Atlantic piece, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, is one of the best things I have read on this topic. 

Philosophy Under Attack at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Start with this piece by Todd Edwin Jones, chairman of the UNLV philosophy department:  Budgetary Hemlock: Nevada Seeks to Eliminate Philosophy.  The original plan to eliminate the philosophy department entirely has apparently been revised.  See here. Excerpt:

UNLV’s College of Liberal Arts received news Tuesday from its dean of a revised budget-cutting plan that includes the elimination of non-tenured professors in the philosophy, anthropology and sociology departments.

This is a departure from the college’s previously stated plans, which recommended the philosophy department be cut entirely. The women’s studies department, also previously slated for elimination, is still on the chopping block. Women’s studies, philosophy, anthropology and sociology have the least amount of majors within the college, which also includes political science, psychology and English.

Professor Jones' defense of philosophy's role in the university curriculum  takes a familiar tack:  philosophy is useful because it teaches critical thinking.  Jones writes,

. . . people think of philosophy as a luxury only if they don’t really understand what philosophy departments do. I teach one of the core areas of philosophy, epistemology: what knowledge is and how we obtain it. People from all walks of life—physicists, physicians, detectives, politicians—can only come to good conclusions on the basis of thoroughly examining the appropriate evidence. And the whole idea of what constitutes good evidence and how certain kinds of evidence can and can’t justify certain conclusions is a central part of what philosophers study.

Now I don't doubt that courses in logic, epistemology, and ethics can help inculcate habits of critical thinking and good judgment.  And it may also be true that philosophy has a unique role to play here.  So, while it is true that every discipline teaches habits of critical thinking and good judgment in that discipline, there are plenty of issues that are not discipline-specific, and these need to be addressed critically as well.

What I object to, however, is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification  is in terms of an end outside of it.  The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them  as is possible.  What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with  goal of philosophical study.  The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary.  Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that will prove handy in law school. 

Philosophy is an end in itself.  This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for something.  It is not primarily good for something.  It is a good in itself.  Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating.  Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony good for something?  And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such reponses are lame.  (Doesn't Professor Jones' apologia for his way of earning his bread strike you as slightly lame?)  You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the Board of Regents.  But philosophy is what it is, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

Of Kripke, Kuhn, and the "Ashtray Variant" of the Argumentum Ad Baculum

Very interesting in what it says about human nature.  (HT: Peter Lupu)

The Social and Political Views of American Professors

Here.  For more on anti-conservative bias, see this e-mail sent to Instapundit.  (HT: Mikey)

From the Mail: What is a Degree in Philosophy Worth?

This just over the transom:

My name is Bryce. I am a freshman uni student, studying philosophy. I have a question I believe you are well-suited to answer, considering your vast life experience and knowledge in philosophy; is it worth it to get a college degree in philosophy?

I am academically unaffiliated by choice, having resigned from a tenured position at a university.  So I am not an outsider to academic philosophy, but neither do I have a vested interest in recruiting philosophy majors.  So I am in a position to be objective.  But I advise you to solicit opinions from a variety of people both in and out of academic philosophy.  I have enabled Comments for this post in the off-chance that some readers will offer you some helpful suggestions.

If you are asking whether it is economically worthwhile to pursue an undergraduate degree in philosophy, then my answer is that it is probably not unless you have in mind to study law or journalism.  In that case the philosophy training could be very useful assuming that you are studying in a department that is analytically as opposed to Continentally oriented.  But studying philosophy as preparation for L-school or J-school  or some other professional school would not be a reason to study philosophy as opposed to economics or political science, say.  Of course, you might have an interest in the foundations of the law and so study philosophy of law as an undergraduate in preparation for law school. 

If you have an all-consuming passion for philosophy and are really good at it, then you might consider going into academe to make your living from philosophy. But this is a long shot.  Good tenure-track positions are hard to find, competition for them is ferocious, and the market can be expected to worsen.  And I presume that you would not want to end up an academic gypsy traipsing from one one-year position to the next or end up an adjunct  teaching 12 courses per year for slave wages at a community college in [insert name of least desirable locale]. 

So, from a purely economic point of view, you ought not major in philosophy -- or in English or in Women's Studies, or . . . .  This is especially the case nowadays when the cost of a college education is vastly in excess of the value of what one gets for the money and many assume onerous debt to finance it.  By and large, the old adage holds: "Philosophy bakes no bread."  There is no money in it, nor, in my opinion, should there be: the lack of earning potential tends to keep out those with the wrong motivations.

The other side of the issue, of course, is that "Man does not live by bread alone," this New Testament verse being my stock response to those who say that "Philosophy bakes no bread."  Surely it is only the stunted mortal who views everything in economic terms. Philosophy is a magnificent and noble thing and the best have always pursued it for its own sake as part of a spiritual and intellectual quest for ultimate understanding, wisdom, and true happiness.  In my opinion, philosophy is the highest quest a human can embark upon.  The life of the philosopher is the highest life possible to a mortal.  But be aware that what I just wrote will be violently contested by many.  (Their contesting, however, is just more philosophy in the guise of anti-philosophy.)

And this leads me to a final suggestion.  If you agree with the spirit of the preceding paragraph and want to study philosophy for its own sake, then you might consider double-majoring in something 'practical' such as Information Technology so as to have a latter-day equivalent of lense-grinding by which to support yourself.  (The allusion is to Baruch Spinoza, patron saint of maverick philosophers, who was academically unaffiliated by choice and who supported himself by grinding optical lenses.)

B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

Gescheit, gescheiter, gescheitert.

Infinity and Mathematics Education

A reader writes,

Regarding your post about Cantor, Morris Kline, and potentially vs. actually infinite sets: I was a math major in college, so I do know a little about math (unlike philosophy where I'm a rank newbie);
on the other hand, I didn't pursue math beyond my bachelor's degree so I don't claim to be an expert. However, I do know that we never used the terms "potentially infinite" vs. "actually infinite".

I am not surprised, but this indicates a problem with the way mathematics is taught: it is often taught in a manner that is both ahistorical and unphilosophical.  If one does not have at least a rough idea of the development of thought about infinity from Aristotle on, one cannot properly appreciate the seminal contribution of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the creator of transfinite set theory.  Cantor sought to achieve an exact mathematics of the actually infinite.  But one cannot possibly understand the import of this project if one is unfamiliar with the distinction between potential and actual infinity and the controversies surrounding it. As it seems to me, a proper mathematical education at the college level must include:

1. Some serious attention to the history of the subject.

2. Some study of primary texts such as Euclid's Elements, David Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, Richard Dedekind's Continuity and Irrational Numbers, Cantor's Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, etc.  Ideally, these would be studied in their original languages!

3. Some serious attention to the philosophical issues and controversies swirling around fundamental concepts such as set, limit, function, continuity, mathematical induction, etc.  Textbooks give the wrong impression: that there is more agreement than there is; that mathematical ideas spring forth ahistorically; that there is only one way of doing things (e.g., only one way of construction the naturals from sets); that all mathematicians agree.

Not that the foregoing ought to supplant a textbook-driven approach, but that the latter ought to be supplemented by the foregoing.  I am not advocating a 'Great Books' approach to mathematical study.

Given what I know of Cantor's work, is it possible that by "potentially infinite" Kline means "countably infinite", i.e., 1 to 1 with the natural numbers?

No! 

Such sets include the whole numbers and the rational numbers, all of which are "extensible" in the sense that you can put them into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers; and given the Nth member, you can generate the N+1st member. The size of all such sets is the transfinite number "aleph null". The set of all real numbers, which includes the rationals and the irrationals, constitute a larger infinity denoted by the transfinite number C; it cannot be put into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers, and hence is not generable in the same way as the rational numbers. This would seem to correspond to what Kline calls "actually infinite".

It is clear that you understand some of the basic ideas of transfinite set theory, but what you don't understand is that the distinction between the countably (denumerably) infinite and the uncountably (nondenumerably) infinite falls on the side of the actual infinite.  The countably infinite has nothing to do with the potentially infinite.  I suspect that you don't know this because your teachers taught you math in an ahistorical manner out of boring textbooks with no presentation of the philosophical issues surrounding the concept of infinity.    In so doing they took a lot of the excitement and wonder out of it.  So what did you learn?  You learned how to solve problems and pass tests.  But how much actual understanding did you come away with?

Glenn Reynolds on the Higher Education Bubble

Read it.

The Kehowski Contretemps: Political Correctness Alive and Well at Glendale Community College

Here,  here, and here.

Do You Want an Academic Job?

Thomas H. Benton, Dodging the Anvil:

Essentially, if you want an academic job, you'd better be really good at what you do. You should be at a top university (although sometimes less-famous institutions can be effective at local placements); have at least a few high-quality publications, preferably in top-tier journals; have a dissertation that's nearly a publishable book, preferably under contract with a university press; be a charismatic and challenging teacher; be socially energetic without being threatening; have well-known and well-connected advisers who will support you without any reservations; be willing to live anywhere; be prepared to work as a visiting professor and move a few times in the first decade of your career; and be willing to live with the possibility that you will always have an itinerant, insecure, poorly compensated existence.

But you knew all that already.

Related posts, and links to two other earlier Benton pieces, are filed under Academia.

Philosophy is Inquiry not Ideology

(The following, composed 16 February 2005, is imported from the first incarnation of Maverick Philosopher.  It makes some important points that bear repeating.)

On the masthead of The Ivory Closet, now defunct: "Life as a Closet Conservative Inside Liberal Academia."

From the post Liberal Groupthink is My Cover:

My dissertation, which I'm still working on, focuses on a contemporary French philosopher who is known in academia primarily as a radical Leftist. Generally speaking, academics seem to just assume that you agree with and share the same views as the figure you focus on in your dissertation. So, everyone just assumes that since I'm writing on a radical Leftist that I must be a radical Leftist. I keep my mouth shut about my conservativism. Often I have to bite my tongue when I hear disparaging remarks about conservatives. But, so long as I manage to do that the liberal bias of academia makes it all too easy to stay in the closet. Everyone just assumes your [you're] a liberal.

What is it with Ladder Man?

His latest outburst.

Young Scholar, Old Scholar

The young scholar may pepper his prose with foreign expressions so as to appear erudite. But as the years pass, a different ideal may appear choice-worthy, namely, to write as simply as possible, using only the resources of the mother tongue.

David Gordon Reviews Thomas Nagel's New Book

David Gordon reviews Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008.  The following is a particularly interesting portion of the review in which Gordon comments on a certain status-obsessed careerist's puerile fulminations against a real philosopher:

From the Mail Bag: Dogmatism in Academe

This just over the transom:

I wish I could express to you just how much of a blessing your blog has been (and continues to be) to me.

I am a grad student in a Ph.D. program here in the states.   I read your site for enjoyment, but also because I find that you tend to very acutely and eloquently crystallize objections and points that I find appearing in my own mind in a very rudimentary and unrefined way.  It is a great reassurance when I find you making a point so clearly that has occurred to me, but that I haven't known quite what to do with.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of your topics and insights that are well beyond me and never would have occurred to me.

I have a love/hate relationship with this field.  I love it, but I suffocate within it because of predominating paradigms.   I was recently instructed by a professor in one of my courses that "no reasonable person needs to argue for naturalism" when I pointed out that a certain author never once argued for the naturalism he was presupposing.

Philosopher of Religion Complains, "I Don't Get No Respect"

Like Rodney Dangerfield, we philosophers of religion get no respect. As philosopher of religion Nelson Pike puts it,

If you are in a company of people of mixed occupations, and somebody asks what you do, and you say you are a college professor, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are in a company of professors from various departments, and somebody asks what is your field, and you say philosophy, a glazed look comes into the eye. If you are at a conference of philosophers, and somebody asks what you are working on, and you say philosophy of religion . . . [Quoted in D. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 2006, p. 33)

I'll go Pike one better. I am an academically unaffiliated philosopher of religion. Could there be anything more contemptible?

Once Again on Liberal Bias in Academe with Some Remarks on Indoctrination

A reader e-mails (my responses in blue):

I had a question regarding your blog post, From the Mail Pouch: Of Comments and Liberal Bias.  Does the intention to indoctrinate follow from the fact that academia has more registered Democrats than Republicans? 

No, it doesn't follow, but neither did I say that it followed.

Obviously, group think and unconscious bias can and does happen when you get like-minded people altogether. 

Yes indeed.

Amateur and Professional

Amod Lele e-mails: 

I've been enjoying your blog for some time now, and particularly appreciated your post Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation. I recently mused on this topic at my own philosophy blog - http://loveofallwisdom.com/2009/06/neither-career-nor-hobby/ - and you might find my remarks there of some interest. I'm intrigued, though, by your distinction between professionals and amateurs, as distinct from those who get paid and those who don't. I suspect that by your definition I aspire to be a professional philosopher who doesn't get paid; but I'm not sure, because I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Would you care to spell this distinction out further?

 

Here is what I wrote:

 

While I'm on this topic, I may as well mention two other distinctions that are often confused. One is the distinction between professionals and amateurs, the other between people who make money from an activity and those who do not. These distinctions 'cut perpendicular' to one another, hence do not coincide. Spinoza was a professional philosopher even though he made no money from it. One can be a professional philosopher without being a paid professor of it, just as one can be an incompetent amateur and still be paid to teach by a college.

 

A better way to put it would be as follows.  'Professional' and 'amateur' each have two senses.  In one sense, a professional X-er is a person who makes a living from X-ing.  This sense of 'professional' contrasts with the sense of 'amateur' according to which an amateur is is an X-er who does not make a living from X-ing.  As the etymology of the word suggests, an amateur in this first sense is one who does what he does for love and not for money.  In a second sense, a professional X-er is a person whose X-ing meets a high standard of performance, while an amateur in the corresponding sense is one whose X-ing fails to meet a high standard of performance. Examples:

A. Tiger Woods is a professional in both senses and an amateur in neither. Kant is an example among the philosophers.

B. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professionals in the second sense and amateurs in the first sense.

C. Ayn Rand was a professional in the first sense, but a rank amateur in the second.

D. The vast majority of chess players are amateurs in both senses: they neither make a living from chess, nor do they play at a high level.

 

Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation

An e-mail from a few years back with no name attached:

Leiter fancies himself a gatekeeper to the realm of academic philosophy. You gotta love the professional gossip that seeps through his blog - Ned Block got an offer from Harvard but turned it down, here's the latest coming out of the Eastern APA, or noting, yesterday, that Ted Honderich consulted him during the publication of the new Oxford Companion to Philosophy. And look at the way Leiter prides himself on knowing the goings on at each school and each professor. . . what a status-obsessed elitist (I believe those are your words). No wonder this guy publishes the PGR. Others of us enjoy doing philosophy, most of the time, but here is a man who loves *being* a philosopher, all of the time.