Why Philosophers Should Become Academic Leaders

The department chair is one of the most maligned and misunderstood positions in academia. Department chairs are university leaders but they can also experience their roles as middle management, caught between the demands of faculties and the exigencies of the upper administration. Chairs represent their department and protect their faculties’ interests, while implementing (sometimes conflicting) university missions and visions with limited resources. It is not uncommon for colleagues to give newly elected chairs condolences for their appointment. Some philosophers say that they’d only ever want a chair who’d hate the job, the bizarre logic being that anyone who would want the position would abuse it.

The role of chair is challenging, but we lose much more when philosophy faculty refuse to take leadership in faculty governance and treat administrative tasks as somehow beneath them. We are three department chairs and a dean who have served as administrators for a total of 25 years. Philosophers should welcome opportunities in academic leadership.

Here are five reasons why.

1. Philosophers get to use their strengths in new ways.

Philosophers are humanists who aren’t afraid of spreadsheets. Skills such as the ability to decipher, explain, and criticize difficult texts, give arguments and muster evidence, and engage in sharp, yet respectful disagreement are key to success in university leadership. These skills translate well to reading and engaging with a strategic plan, university by-laws and policies, or a budget. Moreover, much philosophical work is genuinely interdisciplinary: many of us seriously engage with other fields of scholarship and are comfortable engaging colleagues in the sciences, social sciences, and professional fields. This is excellent preparation for building bridges.

Furthermore, philosophers excel (no pun intended) at entertaining and reflecting on ideas that are – to put it mildly – counterintuitive. We can take seriously and discuss earnestly the possibility that reality is Mind coming to know itself or that beliefs and desires do not exist. When confronted with the choice between saving the Archbishop of Cambrai or saving your spouse or child from a fire, philosophers are willing to entertain the possibility that the one should save His Eminence. This suspension of disbelief can come in handy in administration.

More saliently, survival in a philosophy program requires the ability to sharply and vigorously disagree with colleagues, but nonetheless maintain mutual respect. Academia (like society more general) is fraught with deep disagreements that cannot always be overcome. Philosophy is useful training for focusing on the issue and evidence at hand and recognizing that well-informed, thoughtful people may see the world very differently.

2.     You get to connect and collaborate with colleagues and programs across the university.

Too many of us are stuck in disciplinary silos. In philosophy departments, it’s not uncommon to mainly communicate with people in our areas of specialization. For many of us, our research is more closely connected to people outside of our department than to our immediate colleagues. One of the joys of being chair is that part of your job is coming to realize the intellectual connections you have with people across the university. You learn very quickly that philosophy is everywhere – perhaps not surprisingly in English, Architecture, Black Studies, and Geography (to list a few) – but also in Computer Science, Biology, and Math.

Beyond the intellectual excitement of confronting philosophical ideas in unfamiliar settings, there is an opportunity to build allies. Chairs can support their colleagues by advocating for their inclusion in large grant projects – most philosophers don’t have the background to successfully compete for seven-figure NSF or NIH awards, but many can make important contributions as team members. Beyond advocating for philosophical research, most philosophy departments survive in large part by teaching service courses. The continued survival of our departments depends on our ability to cultivate meaningful, intellectually compelling partnerships with other departments and schools within our institutions.

3.     You can improve department climate and culture.

Academia is often toxic and philosophy departments are in no way exempt. Racism, sexism, abusive hierarchies and unhealthy work-life balance are part endemic. Interpersonal relationships can be fraught. Department meetings can be a source of stress or, on occasion, trauma. These are systemic problems that need to be addressed collectively and at multiple levels, as many of their roots emerge from society at large and the culture of academia. Chair power is almost entirely soft power – we are far more successful when we are able to convince and persuade than when we try to compel.  Nonetheless, department chairs can take many concrete measures to make people’s lives better.

Chairs can spearhead bylaws and norms of respectful interaction and end, or at least mitigate, bullying. They can redistribute service loads along more equitable lines and provide junior faculty with the necessary resources, support, and coaching to succeed. They can listen carefully and empathetically to the experiences of all of our students, faculty, and staff and treat diversity, equity, and inclusion not as mere compliance, but rather as values that define who we want to be. They can model healthy work-life balance and promote department activities for all members of the community.

4. You can take concrete measures that advance racial justice and equity for students and colleagues.

Philosophy departments are notoriously white and male. Despite welcome changes in recent decades, many programs’ curricula and faculty are neither representative of their students nor intellectually defensible to anyone immersed in recent scholarship. The disciplinary culture still prevalent in many departments of aggressive argumentation is ill suited for understanding complex social issues and contributes to silencing many students. Chairs can bring attention to these issues and support professional development to support change.

One of the responsibilities of the Chair is to lead efforts to recruit students to the department.  Chairs can help inspire new students to study philosophy, especially students from non-traditional and diverse backgrounds. They can lead collaborations to cross list courses with departments such as Black Studies, Indigenous Nations Studies, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, or Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Leading scholars in all of these disciplines, from Angela Davis to Marìa Lugones, have philosophy backgrounds and have made major contributions to our discipline.

Even though department budgets are usually more meager than when we’d like, chairs have budgetary authority. Chairs can provide incentives to diversify speaker series and allocate resources to DEI measures. Finally, chairs can advocate for new positions and to have a key say in hiring new colleagues. Once new colleagues arrive, chairs can take steps to make sure they have the resources and support to succeed.

5. Chairs have a significant voice in shaping the discipline to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Today’s philosophy departments are very different from the departments where we got our PhDs.  Not only is the curriculum in flux, but the humanities in many institutions are under-resourced or in a precarious position. This can and should change. Philosophy should be at the core of every university. People who have never studied philosophy are unaware of how philosophical ideas shape their worldview. Philosophical training, at its best, opens us to complexity and possibility, challenges us to justify our beliefs to ourselves and our community, and forces us to recognize our fallibility.

On a more mundane level, when people in the humanities forgo positions in leadership, they risk leaving leadership to people with little interest in or knowledge of the humanities (or in some cases, outright bias). If we want philosophy to play a central part in a twenty-first century education, we need philosophers in leadership roles to advocate for our discipline. Serving as department chair is the first step.

Samantha Brennan

Samantha Brennan is the Dean of the College of Arts and a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. Samantha Brennan's main research interests lie in the area of contemporary normative ethics, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy. With Tracy Isaacs, she started the blog Fit is a Feminist Issue and her book on feminism and fitness, also co-authored with Tracy is available here.

Janet D. Stemwedel

Janet D. Stemwedel is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University, where her teaching and research focus on philosophy of science and the ethical conduct of science. She is also a lapsed (or perhaps non-practicing) physical chemist, and she has tremendous empathy for those who feel like they have been in school forever.  She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her better half, two children, and a white rabbit named Snowflake Free-Ride (aka Notorious B.U.N.). She is ill at ease discussing herself in the third person.

Jeanine Schroer

Jeanine Schroer is a philosopher of race and feminist theory and an Associate Professor of philosophy at University of Minnesota, Duluth and currently Head of the Department of Geography & Philosophy.  Her teaching and research concern the ethics and politics of social oppression and its remedies, including, the metaphysics of race and racism; feminist ethics and social theory; and empirical and experimental philosophical approaches to racism, sexism, and ethics.  

Alex Sager

Alex Sager is chair of the Department of Philosophy at Portland State University. Much of his research is on the philosophy of migration with recent books including Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (Rowen and Littlefield, 2020) and Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility: The Migrant's-Eye View of the World (Palgrave, 2018). He developed Portland State's Philosophy for Children Capstone class and founded the Oregon High School Ethics Bowl. Follow him on Twitter at @aesager.