Overcoming Elite Interests in Service of Diversity

This is the fifth piece in a several part series discussing ways to improve diversity in philosophy departments. The other pieces can be found here.

I once gave a guest lecture in an undergraduate course at an elite research university with an elite PhD program. The lecture was about doing philosophy that was a bit more connected to various societal concerns, that sacrificed some detail and rigor for more engagement with people working outside of academia, and that seemed to speak better to undergraduates looking to philosophy to round out an education.

One student, I forget whether it was a graduate or undergraduate, asked me why their program had such a narrow focus on only particular kinds of specializations in the more abstract areas of philosophy.

“It’s made me lose touch with why I loved philosophy in the first place,” she said..“What I learn here isn’t really the kind of philosophy I’m excited to spread to my friends and family,” she said.

After going through the motions about the epistemological benefits of specialization for the search for difficult truths, I defaulted to the usual explanation I give for these things.

“People recreate the conditions of their own success,” I replied. “For instance, the people who teach and run schools in America were the people who were good at school. That’s why schools are run in a way that makes people just like them flourish. Similarly, the professors at this department were the best and most successful people at a certain form of professional philosophy, and so that is what they are recreating.”

The people who succeed at the form of philosophical education instantiated in a previous generation are in turn going to internalize the success-conditions of those traditions and recreate them, in everything from research and publication to curriculum and teaching/advising styles. It is a pretty wide-ranging explanation for why any things perpetuate, and why there are remaining barriers to diversification.

It is a shame, though. Elite philosophy departments with large, reputable faculties and secure budgets and lines are most in a position to afford diversifying philosophy from top to bottom. They face less risk to their FTEs, their graduate student recruitment, their enrollment numbers, and their long-term viability at their institutions. They also stand most to benefit from diversification. I do not mean diversity simply of the demographic make-up of their faculty, majors, and student-body, but of all the material steps that make up what constitutes philosophy. I mean syllabi, course offerings, major and minor requirements, teaching-styles, advising styles, research topics, writing styles, journals edited, hiring and promotion criteria, external reviews, grant evaluation, right down to the kind of comments we write on student papers and the papers of our peers. But with few exceptions, they do not. I think the reasons are a lesson on the structural impediments of prestige economies.

In comparison to a lot of other homogenous academic fields, philosophy has many advantages in the path to diversification. Every cultural tradition and peoples have some contact with philosophy, as it is a central part of being human. The field touches almost every other field in academia, from those that study what is essentially human, and those that do not. In addition, philosophy does not have canonical forms of introductory instruction, and no required prerequisite knowledge that forces introductory courses to have a particular shape or form, whether it is historical, topical, or otherwise. This kind of disciplinary freedom is rare.

And finally, philosophy has a strong and powerful tradition connecting with matters of practical and historical concern, most notably with its examination of justice. As a result, there is a strong case for its relevance and impact. There is a strong tradition of philosophy amongst African American and Civil Rights leaders in this country. Martin Luther King’s syllabus in his political philosophy course at Morehouse college is indistinguishable from any you would find then and probably today in British and American universities. Angela Davis, Cornel West, WEB Dubois, Grace Lee Boggs, are just some amongst a list of civil rights leaders with advanced philosophical education.

The fact that elite departments aren’t able to set an example of diversity despite all of these advantages, in addition to others like good-faith efforts by individual people, the lip service to diversification amongst their institutions, and even structural incentives like HR interventions in hiring, specialized lines and job descriptions, and lobbying by students, speaks to the strong barriers that the prestige economy of academia places in front of all of these other forces.

Elite departments serve primarily elite interests, and those interests are incompatible with such diversification. That’s okay, it is argued, if there are also non-elite places, philosophy departments with heterodox faculties and curriculum, departments without doctoral programs, departments at liberal arts colleges, in regional or religious schools, that can serve more diverse populations with more diverse curriculum, faculty, and programming. I’ve heard similar arguments at my own institution in a completely different context, years ago, when a previous president pushed to diversify the student body through a dramatic increase in financial aid spending and need-blind admissions, at the cost of shrinking the faculty, a crumbling physical plant, and austerity measures that made national news (well, it made a podcast episode by Malcolm Gladwell). At the time, there were some faculty members who made the argument that they were comfortable with the mission of Vassar being a finishing school for elite rich kids of American aristocrats, on the grounds that we can simultaneously, as individuals, support and encourage non-elite places to educate the rest of society with more diverse curriculum at lower cost. I actually appreciated the honesty of the argument, it is rare to hear.

Unlike in higher education more generally, “elite interests” in the context of elite academic philosophy departments isn’t coextensive with the interests of the children of the affluent. There are plenty of elite departments serving less advantaged students, in the sense of teaching them. Instead, elite interests means the pursuit and preservation of prestigious people, prestigious work, prestigious fields, those people, work, and fields judged to be particularly “smart” or “genius.” It is the pursuit of people, work, topics, curriculum, teaching, advising, and so forth that maximizes reputational capital, the primary currency of the academic economy. I think it’s a sound hypothesis that when reputational capital is passed on generationally from elite program to elite programs, with people recreating the conditions of their own success, the outcome is going to be a broadly conservative approach to diversification. I’m willing to argue about whether it is good or bad, but I think we should all accept that the univocal pursuit of elite interests of this kind serves the field poorly.

So how do we change this? It is a difficult question. Barriers arising from trading in reputational capital are both incredibly cheap and expensive to overcome. Reputation is free. If those who are already reputable decide they are going to change what it is they find reputable, different things thereby become reputable. This isn’t an abstract point. Reputable people write letters for students, for tenure, for promotion. They write referee reports, they edit journals, they admit students, they teach courses, and they hire in their own departments. Individual acts could in principle change things greatly without any change in distribution of resources.

On the other hand, overcoming a set of entrenched judgments about quality that underlie reputation and prestige is very expensive. If prestigious places default to recreating the conditions of their own success, asking Deans to replace existing lines with people just like those who used to inhabit them, or simply look for “the best” person out on the market working in “the best” fields, using the criteria of “best” that they are reproducing from their own successes, it will take a lot of money and energy to create some new faculty lines dedicated to diversification. When the entirety of a faculty member’s own educational and professional history precludes work from certain cultural or intellectual traditions, asking them to offer a course in those areas will require professional development, months or years of new research, all for something which yields no professional benefit, since prestigious work is peer-reviewed research in particular tiers of journals, edited by the right people, not diversification of curriculum.

I think there is a place for good faith efforts at diversification at the top, and I think it would be quite impactful if it were to happen, because those at the top of the prestige-economic ladder affect those striving to take their place. Top-down change is possible. But I am not sanguine that individual efforts will be able to outcompete the structural constraints imposed by the prestige economy without some more radical steps.

Some of those steps are happening in the philanthropic space; the Whiting Foundation, the ACLS, Templeton, the Mellon Foundation, and the Marc Sanders Foundation are putting money into efforts that award innovative forms of work that move beyond the values of the existing prestige-economy. These are not merely efforts to diversify the demographics of a profession, or to include a few women into the canon alongside men. They are efforts to award and promote work that hasn’t even counted in the prestige economy as academic philosophy. This is the work of people doing philosophy with other people, communities, lawyers, nurses and doctors, the media. It is work we do not have metrics to evaluate nor translations of success into salaries, promotions, hiring, nor even the cheapest but most
consequential currency of academia, reputational esteem. But it is also predominantly the work of women, minorities, disability activists, and people in unprestigious jobs in unprestigious places with high teaching loads and low salaries. For established sociological reasons, this kind of stratification of work patterns throughout the economy, not just in academia. It reminds me of the early days of the “Muslim travel ban” when there was a similar pattern of mostly young women and POC lawyers working pro bono in NYC airports helping Muslim migrants while the rich Manhattan lawyer dudes were busy doing their rich lawyer dude things.

What all of this work requires are metrics of evaluation that run alongside the familiar metrics we have for hiring, tenure, and promotion that are passed down from elite places that can serve to value such people and such work within the prestige economy in which they are a part. A program sustained for five years bringing philosophy to hundreds of high schoolers in Detroit, or to laborers in the borderlands, or that makes it into the platform of District Attorney’s race, ought to count for at least something in the prestige economy in comparison to the fifth best paper on transfinite lottery paradoxes.

I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be research-excellence, prestige-based economies in academia. Rather, there ought to be other things of value that are in turn valued just as much. In history, there is a field, public history, which is far more than people writing historical essays for the public, but exactly the kind of work I’ve cited a younger generation of philosophers have been doing. In history, there are departments that have fully dedicated positions, tenure-track lines to this. There is a professional organization, best practices workshops, these positions have external funding organizations, and work with museums, community historical societies, are featured in documentaries, media, etc. The metrics are there as an example, and there is a place in the prestige economy for the diversifying work.

I’ll just mention a few names of people doing such things, while leaving out many others for brevity sake; Everyone at the Public Philosophy network, Cristina Cammarano, Jana Mohr Lone, Amy Reed-Sandoval, Briana Toole, Zoe Johnson King, Myisha Cherry, Ian Olasov, Kyle Robertson, and more. And this is not counting the number of people who are invisibly diversifying syllabi, curriculum, and teaching and advising styles.

In sum, let’s diversify by awarding and counting in the prestige economy the work that diversifies. If you care about diversity in demographic make-up, go to the work that the diverse groups are doing. If you care about diversity in curriculum, reward new course-construction, enrollments, and people whose work appear on syllabi for these new kinds of courses. For instance, the APA has compiled a list of resources. The Open Syllabus project is developing ways to track what is taught, and we as a field can turn frequently used works as currency in the prestige economy. If you care about diversifying what counts as prestige-economic work, look to the philanthropic dollars and projects for public engagement, digital humanities, at the NEH, Whiting Foundation, ACLS, Templeton, and so forth and treat the quality and impact of these projects as you would a paper in the Journal of Philosophy. These are small steps awaiting more revolutionary change. This is happening, and I believe will continue to happen from the bottom up. But it doesn’t hurt to have a little top-down help as well.

Barry Lam

Barry Lam received his BA in Philosophy and English at the University of California, Irvine (2001), and his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton University (January 2007). He produces a story-driven podcast about philosophy called Hi-Phi Nation.