AAPT Members

I bookmarked this one ages ago, but forgot to blog it. USNews and World Report ran a series in Dec. on '50 Ways to Improve Your Life'. Diane Cole wrote a short note called "Learn Philosophy," highlighting the ethics bowl.

In January, they published a letter to the editor from Felicia Nimue Ackerman, Professor of Philosophy, Brown University:

As a philosophy professor, I am embarrassed to see an officer of my
professional organization advertising philosophy as teaching skills
that are "wonderfully transferable" to a range of careers without
giving any hard evidence for his claim ["Brush Up Your Socrates"].
Must professional philosophers hawk their product like used-car
salesmen nowadays. Whatever happened to studying philosophy for its own
sake rather than as a smart career move?

She has a point, especially about the lack of evidence. But come on. The original article contained 344 words. And not everyone teaching Philosophy has the luxury of teaching solely to students pursuing wisdom for its own sake. Many of us, who teach at colleges and universities not fully endowed, are required to defend our value in the academy in terms of our support for other more practical pursuits, such as pre-law.

My students are often under massive financial, cultural and parental pressure to pursue a degree with a clear monetary outcome. This is even more true for non-traditional students. For students of this kind--who are more likely to read of the US News and World Report than those who are committed to attending an Ivy--we need to articulate the value of Philosophy in relation to that monetary outcome.

I have an even larger problem with this letter, however. It seems that whenever any one of us manages to appear in a main-stream publication, and hence raises our profile in the public eye just that little bit more, there are legions of other Philosophers out there all too anxious to cannibalize their peers.

I believe (notice, there is no actual evidence offered in support of what I am about to say, which is why it is prefaced with the qualifier 'believe') that this kind of nastiness is exactly what makes our discipline so unattractive to so many. Philosophers eat their young. I've had wonderfully talented students scared out of Philosophy after reading some of the blogs out there. And god forbid what would happen if an undergraduate witnessed the APA!

I also don't believe this happens in other disciplines. Scientists have egos, and some can be just as much assholes as some of the major assholes in Philosophy. Yet while science reporting routinely glosses over the details of experiments or theories, I've never seen a Physicist publically refer to a public representative of his or her discipline as a 'used car salesman.' Why can't we just recognize that marketing material is for marketing? And crushing someone in public because of a little philosophic gloss in a 350 word note is harmful to the public perception of our discipline--and hence, to the long term viability of academic philosophy (at least, outside the Ivys)?