Growing into a Public Philosophy Program

It’s often the case that public philosophy is distinguished from academic philosophy in terms of its goals, venues, and participants. Public philosophy is meant to inform policy or improve social discourse by providing a lay audience with a broad understanding of relevant philosophical concepts and arguments. While the venues vary, mainly this type of philosophy can be found in op-eds, short articles, and public lectures. As for the participants, despite its focus on general audiences one most often finds that the creator of a public philosophy work is a professional philosopher. In contrast, Western academic philosophy tends to have more speculative goals, can be found at professional conferences or in scholarly journals, and is almost entirely limited to those with a PhD in philosophy.

Of course, those who are most active in public philosophical projects tend to hold more nuanced views about the differences and similarities between this work and that which occurs in philosophy programs. And, we often challenge the approach to academic philosophy that elevates objective, logical argumentation and expertise in the Western canon while minimizing the values of working toward social change or pursuing the good life. Nevertheless, there is one assumption about public philosophy that has not been properly attended to even by those of us with a deep interest in this work: that public philosophy is necessarily distinct from the work we do in our clasrooms.

My developing view is that this assumption can lead to public philosophy that is unidirectional (the philosopher shares their insight with the masses). And, without careful consideration, adopting this approach can reinforce some of the very assumptions about the nature of philosophy that our public works were meant to uncover and resist.

What if we’ve been wrong to focus on distinguishing public and academic philosophy? What if our academic programs were organized around some of the core principles found in public philosophy projects? Can we create a public philosophy program and, if so, what would this look like?

These questions are central to conversations I’ve been having with my colleagues about the future of our philosophy program at LaGuardia Community College. The issue of our program’s future initially arose out of the work we were doing for our periodic programmatic review (a process whereby we evaluate our courses, student growth, learning objectives, and identify areas for growth and improvement). However, as we have watched more and more colleges eliminate or significantly reduce philosophy programs, as well as the ravages of Covid-19 on enrollment and college budgets, this question took on even greater significance. As one of the largest philosophy faculty of any U.S. community college with 10 full-time, tenure track professors, we needed a clear understanding of our purpose and our value to the community.

We knew we had to consider that most of the students who took our classes were not philosophy majors and that, amongst our majors, few planned to pursue a PhD in philosophy. Whereas some would identify this as a shortcoming (especially when number of majors becomes a key metric for determining which programs to cut!), we’ve tended to see this as a strength of our program. For example, our courses help students who plan to become lawyers, police officers, social workers, nurses, or do other community work develop their critical thinking abilities and ethical/social awareness. One could argue (though I’m not entirely sure I would agree) that students who plan to pursue academic philosophy in the U.S. require a more traditional philosophical education – e.g., a robust understanding of the Western canon, strong logical argumentation skills, a command of Standard American English.

Without denying the value of this traditional approach, it’s less clear that these tools are the most relevant for our students. Instead, it seems more likely that the tools my colleagues and I use in projects connected to mass incarceration, philosophy for children, the environment, as well as in public-facing work on consciousness and at the intersection of science and religion can allow our students to flourish in their preferred careers.

Taking these ideas into consideration, we saw that it was crucial for us to reshape the way philosophy is taught at LaGuardia. What should one of the largest philosophy programs at one of the most diverse community colleges in the nation be oriented toward? What are the central goals of our work as faculty and scholars? This brought us back to LaGuardia’s mission statement: “to educate and graduate one of the most diverse student populations in the country to become critical thinkers and socially responsible citizens who help to shape a rapidly evolving society.” Central to our mission statement are the core values of learning, diversity, opportunity, responsibility, and innovation.

The goals of helping students to become critical thinkers and socially responsible citizens, and the values of diversity and innovation are deeply connected to our developing understanding of what it means to do public philosophy. Over the past decade, faculty in our program have increasingly incorporated projects and readings that encourage students to approach the world as socially responsible problem solvers. This can be seen in the implementation of culturally-relevant and critical pedagogies, as well as in the digital real world problem solving project that is used in our Critical Thinking course.

Because of these efforts, as we refined our learning outcomes to emphasize critical thinking, integrative learning, and global citizenry, we expected to find that we were succeeding in helping students enhance their abilities in these areas. However, some of the assessment work we did as a part of our programmatic review showed that our efforts were not as effective as we had thought. In particular, we saw that students needed more support developing responses to social problems that integrated strong critical thinking with prior knowledge from other academic courses and their personal experiences. 

In order to improve student learning outcomes, we needed to rethink both how and what we were teaching in our philosophy courses. As we examined the curriculum, we noticed a tension between an approach to teaching focused on the history of philosophy and one focused on employing philosophical skills and concepts to engage with real world problems. Again, this isn’t to deny overlap between these two approaches, nor to diminish the value for our students in studying historical texts. However, when we consider what is happening with philosophy programs across our country right now (e.g., adjunctification, reductions in hiring) as well as the small number of our students who plan to solely major in philosophy upon transfer to a four-year school, the differences between a historical and, for want of a better term, applied approach to philosophical education is significant. 

To serve our students better, we need to refine our program in order to allow students to connect philosophical skills, concepts, and methods to the problems facing their various communities. And, as mentioned, we want to ensure that our classes are culturally-relevant and attuned to the needs of our students. This is where our commitments to public philosophy, as well as our questioning of exactly what these commitments entail, have been incredibly important.

One of the ways in which I’ve been able to incorporate elements of public philosophy into the classroom came out of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant I received with my colleague Naomi Stubbs for 2019-20. In the first year of our “Summer Institute on Mass Incarceration and the Humanities,” one of the central goals was to create materials for our courses that helped students draw connections between humanities scholarship and the problems of mass incarceration (MI). I focused on revising a unit from my Philosophy of Law class on the question of whether there should be a legal duty to rescue. In the past, I had relied on a more traditional model for teaching this unit; students were asked to read articles that adopted opposing stances on the question and then prepare an argumentative essay in support of or against the duty to rescue. The changes I made included having students research cases from New York City, work with a group to apply the concepts from our readings to their case to determine whether the city should impose a legal duty to rescue, then create a poster presentation that they shared with the class in a mini-conference.

These changes connect with the goals of public philosophy by emphasizing community connections (students analyzed cases from their own city), skill development (they developed new research and presentation techniques), and the application of philosophical concepts to real world problems. In addition, I invited my Philosophy of Law students to submit their posters to the college-wide Student Exhibit on Mass Incarceration that was held at the end of the fall semester. The idea for this exhibit came out of our NEH institute as we realized the need to showcase some of the incredible student work on MI to the larger community. Watching my students present their posters to our provost, fellow students and faculty, and community members who work on MI was an important reminder of how powerful philosophy can be when it’s put into action. There was so much more engagement between students and attendees at this exhibit than I’ve ever seen at undergraduate philosophy conferences. I believe this had to do with how invested my students were in their cases, their developing sense of themselves as worthy of making philosophical claims, and the dialogues they had been having with other students presenting at the exhibit.

There was a strong sense of community throughout the exhibit that helped me to think about the work of public philosophy as a multidirectional academic pursuit, rather than as work that occurs outside of the classroom. It’s multidirectional in that it should be both informed by and in dialogue with the broader community. In order to achieve this, we’ll need to continue to revise our curriculum so that it is increasingly focused on the application of philosophical tools; strengthen our community connections so that we avoid adopting an expert position in favor of a collaborative spirit; work with students to develop internships, projects, and co-curricular activities that center on their particular academic and career goals; and work with administrators to ensure they understand the value of this work and evaluate faculty performance in light of these commitments. 

These issues were at the heart of a talk I gave with my colleagues Leslie Aarons, Cheri Carr, and Kashema Hutchinson at the Public Philosophy Network’s event at the 2021 Eastern Division Meeting of the APA. During our presentation, we shared some of the incredible work being done in our classrooms (such as through publicly engaged project-based learning assignments developed and refined by Cheri Carr and Kashema Hutchinson), across the college (as in our Philosophy for Children Internship and the NEH grant mentioned above), and throughout the community (e.g., teaching at Queensboro Correctional Facility and in local high schools) to bring about this growth. We also talked about the work we have left to do connected to tenure and promotion.

One of the most challenging questions we received is whether our approach was feasible for those working at different types of institutions. It’s true that LaGuardia’s Philosophy Program is unique in many ways given the diversity of our student body (our students come from over 150 countries and speak 89 different native languages), our location in New York City, and the number of faculty members we have who engage in public philosophical projects. Through our conversations, it seemed that a number of the changes we’ve adopted can be incorporated into

differently-situated programs. However, it’s even more important that colleagues at different institutions consider the specific possibilities for student-community connections at their schools and think carefully about what lessons from public philosophy they can bring into their classrooms. It is unlikely that there is a one-size approach to transforming into an academic program based on the values of public philosophy.

Shannon Proctor

Shannon B. Proctor is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities Department at LaGuardia Community College - City University of New York. She received her PhD from Michigan State University in 2013. Her scholarly interests include the phenomenology of addictions and eating disorders. She published "The Temporal Structure of Habits and the Possibility of Transformation" in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy. In 2019-20, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant entitled "Summer Institute on Mass Incarceration and the Humanities." This grant has supported her efforts to incorporate more humanities research into college-wide projects connected to mass incarceration, as well as her work teaching philosophy at Queensboro Correctional Facility. She is currently working on a manuscript about disordered temporalities.