I wonder to what degree the existence of other academic departments, like Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, African American Studies, etc.,–areas similar to philosophy in method (like conceptual analysis and otherwise non-empirical/statistical/scientific methods), and in which many of the groups that are underrepresented in philosophy are overrepresented–contributes to this problem by housing a lot of scholars and work that would otherwise be in philosophy.
I also wonder, if this fact does contribute to the underrepresentation at all, what this implies with regard to this issue.

1. I had a similar reaction to “burner”, or at least I think I did: my university, for example, has female philosophy PhDs in a range of other departments that aren’t philosophy (e.g., women’s studies). At the same time, no males with philosophy PhDs are in any of those departments. How are these phenomena “captured” by these analyses? To put it another way, I suspect the view is that females are “underrepresented” in our department, but, if they weren’t, then they’d be “overrepresented” university-wide. So it’d be nice to have some more robust metric that thinks about these sorts of possibilities.

2. This has come up on various posts before, but the only sort of “diversity” even in play here is gender (or race). It’s still the case that something like 99% of the philosophy faculty is on the political left, whereas only something like 50% of the country is. This is a super pernicious form of viewpoint discrimination that homogenizes our faculties and eviscerates “diversity”. Yet it never seems to be “that kind” of diversity we care about, but rather more localized–and potentially idiosyncratic–kinds. If the point is that our faculties should reflect the population, for example–which is the sort of analysis various people are doing up above–then you’ve gotta conceive of that more broadly.

I hope the APA sessions take these sorts of views seriously, instead of taking a more naive approach to what diversity is or requires.

I’m not a philosopher per se; I’ve taken a couple of classes and read a bit and I’m thoroughly competent with regards to mathematical logic – other logics maybe not so much. But I’m thoroughly curious – especially in this context, as to what professional philosophers think of Bryan van Norden’s latest book, “Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto?”

“Are American colleges and universities failing their students by refusing to teach the philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and other non-Western cultures? Taking Back Philosophy says yes. Even though we live in an increasingly multicultural world, most philosophy departments stubbornly insist that only Western philosophy is real philosophy and denigrate everything outside the European canon. In this biting and incisive critique of contemporary education, Van Norden lambastes academic philosophy for its Eurocentrism, insularity, and complicity with nationalism, and issues a ringing call to make our educational institutions live up to their cosmopolitan ideals. Building on a controversial New York Times opinion piece that suggested any philosophy department that fails to teach non-Western philosophy should be renamed a “Department of European and American Philosophy,” this book will challenge any student or scholar of philosophy to reconsider what constitutes the love of wisdom.”

Doesn’t it seem a rather obvious conjecture that underrepresentation of certain racial groups is directly related to the phenomena van Norden addresses here? It certainly does to me. And if you’ve read some of these Post-moderns it is very difficult to deny the Eastern influence – at the very least. Additional reading which also may be relevant:

When Whales and Humans Talk

Why These Birds Carry Flames (I don’t endorse National Geographic, due to what they have done to Rupert Sheldrake, but the story is interesting)

I just found this blog recently, by the way, and I sure do appreciate it!