Diversity in philosophy

Myisha Cherry and Eric Schwitzgebel wrote an article for the LA Times a few months ago criticizing the academic field of philosophy for its lack of diversity. They identify the main problem as a “subjectivity and bias in the evaluation of philosophical quality.” While a field like biology has relatively clear objective standards of rigor, philosophers appeal to a shifting constellation of vague criteria to judge the work done in their field:

We admire philosophers whose central arguments are nearly impossible to understand, or who speak in paradoxes, who accept seemingly bizarre views, or who display dazzling skill with formal logical structures of no practical significance. Kant and Hegel are better loved than understood.

It’s almost aesthetic, the assessment of philosophical quality. And like aesthetic judgments, it’s shaped by a huge range of factors — how well the view fits with your hopes and preconceptions, whether it’s argued with confidence and flair, how clever or wise the author seems, how much other people admire the author.

It gets worse:

To a substantial extent, what we assess is whether the person who is expressing the ideas in question sounds smart. If you’re going to convince someone to take your perplexing, paradoxical ideas seriously, or if you’re going to convince them that your impenetrable prose is worth the struggle, you had better first convince them that you’re wicked smart. Being good at seeming smart is perhaps the central disciplinary skill for philosophers.

So how has this led to a lack of diversity? C + S continue:

It’s not that white men are innately better philosophers than women and people of color. It’s that white men have better command of the cultural apparatus of seeming smart. As undergraduates, they enter the classroom with more self-confidence. They see faces like their own in front of the classroom and hear voices like their own coming from professors’ mouths. In the philosophy classroom, they see almost exclusively white men as examples of great philosophers. They think “that’s me” and they step into it. Those around them, their professors and fellow students, see them and think that person sounds smart — and these students are then further encouraged.

C + S offer some advice to their fellow philosophers: consider more strongly your own biases before dismissing work that you don’t approve of. The implication here seems to be that if less work done by women and people of color were dismissed outright, we might start to see increasing diversity in the field of philosophy.

I appreciate the worry about subjective bias, but I can’t help but feel that the lack of diversity in philosophy speaks to a deep structural problem with the way that philosophy departments function in the modern American university system.

It is certainly the case that women and people of color are steered away from philosophy by the dismissive and condescending attitudes of many senior professors. But it could also be that women and people of color are turned off from philosophy because so much of it is boring, tedious and, honestly, not very good.

Much of contemporary philosophy is just not that exciting. The average article that comes across my RSS feed has a title like “Pragmatic encroachment, epistemic modals and twin-earth intuitions.” Some papers published in major journals do not even advance determinate claims anymore; they lay out a variety of different theories, appeal dogmatically to a few intuitions and then come to an “instructive” conclusion that tells us that if we want to try and combine theory A with theory B, we will have to amend intuition C with proviso D. Continental philosophy is no better. The average throwaway continental paper usually begins by reading Kant through Lacan (whatever that means) and ends with some vague appeal to a communist revolution of love that will never happen.

There is still a lot of good work done in philosophy. It is just surrounded by an absolute mountain of mediocrity. This heap of forgettable articles results from the immense pressure to publish on young professors. Even graduate students now feel as if they need to publish before going on the job market to have any chance at all of landing a good tenured-track job.

There is also the problem that a career in academic philosophy is an enormous gamble. It takes years and years of schooling to get a PhD in philosophy and the job market is abysmal. Few rational people who do not enjoy independent means of support are going to take this gamble.

To have any guarantee of success in philosophy, it is important to procure a coveted position in a PhD program at a top university, which is increasingly difficult for those who did not have the backing or cultural capital to be able to attend an elite institution like NYU or Amherst for undergrad.

Attending a top university and taking a gamble on a future as a philosophy professor require social capital and financial stability. Due largely to a history of systemic racism, many African American families have far less of either than their white, European counterparts.

It is therefore not surprising to me that many first generation college students of color take one look at the state of professional philosophy and say “no thanks, not for me.”

It would be great if philosophy’s gatekeepers reflected deeply about the effects of their personal biases. But I think increasing diversity (of all sorts, from racial and religious to economic and ideological) will require some deeper structural changes. If the main draw of academic philosophy is that you have a one in three chance of getting a tenure-track job and spending your days leafing through thousands of indistinguishable journal articles dealing with scholastic objections to objections to objections, most young undergraduates without independent means of support will justifiably turn to more enticing options.