I agree with Eric that “we need to start looking at ourselves the way that non-philosophers look at us” (Incidentally, I think this remark should remind us of the need to remember what it was like to be students walking into our first university philosophy course). However, I think that the problem to which Eric refers is much older than what, to many, may feel like the sudden and unprecedented emergence of a new business model for contemporary colleges and universities. Our modern institutions of post-secondary education without exception began as places to train a certain kind of professional, i.e. priests and religious authorities. In Europe, all of the oldest universities regardless of country were established with the specific purpose of training future priests to articulate and defend orthodox Christian doctrine. In India, Vedic schools were created to train brahmins to articulate orthodox Vedic teachings and to challenge unorthodox teachings. Buddhist schools were similarly set up to train Buddhist monks, again, to articulate and to defend the teachings of Buddha. In every respect, the purpose of these institutions was professional training of a very specific kind. Liberal education was a means to this end. One consequence of the philosophical and theological education that these religious authorities received is that it became conflated with their professional training. Since they were getting both simultaneously, it became unclear whether professional training or liberal education was the point. Over time, the humanities and liberal education took center stage in the mission of modern colleges and universities, but the conflation with professional training was never really resolved; the emphasis just shifted alongside the shift in the ruling class (from priests to the more numerous and secular aristocratic classes who believed that university education would provide them with the skills they needed to be civil servants and elected officials). When social mobility became part of the mission of post-secondary education (expanding access to students outside of the aristocratic classes) during the social and educational reforms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the emphasis began to return to professional training, preparing students to be upwardly mobile by teaching them the same skills they would need to join the ruling classes. Thus, in a way, post-secondary education is returning to its roots by placing more and more emphasis on providing students with job preparation and professional training than on the humanities and liberal arts. I don’t think that this return implies that the humanities and liberal education have no role in higher education. Given the history of post-secondary education, it means simply that role of liberal education and the humanities has always been and will probably always be incidental to professional training. My hope is that the humanities and liberal education will not disappear from the mission of colleges and universities altogether.

I agree wholeheartedly with Professor Steinhart, but I would add that our inability or unwillingnes to “see ourselves the way others see us” is significantly reinforced by prevailing norms within the profession, if not a straightforward consequence thereof. As I noted in a comment on another article (“The Demand for Philosophers”), despite the fact that the vast majority of philosophers in the U.S. work at teaching-centric institutions like Manhattan, the culture of academic philosophy is shaped almost exclusively by faculty membrs at elite research-oriented institutions–a vanishly small and extremely unrepresentative portion of the profession that neither knows nor understands the workaday reality confronted by those in the former camp. A professional culture that reflects the values, preferences, and priorities of disciplinary elites has no relevance to protecting and supporting the study of philosophy at places like Manhattan. Indeed, it is often explicitly contrary to doing so, since it encourages philosophers to under-emphasize, under-value, or altogether ignore the very sorts of considerations (e.g., teaching) that are most germane to such an aim. Outside of the rarefied domains of the Leiter-ranked, no one cares whether one took one’s degree from a Leiterrific program, or whether the journal featuring one’s most recent article is highly ranked, or, indeed, whether one publishes anything at all. The faculty of MIT or Princeton or Stanford might care about such things, but they’re not the ones who are making decisions about hiring, firing, funding at Manhattan or 99.9999% of others schools in this country. Rank and file philosophers who defer to the judgments of disciplinary gatekeepers, superstars, and mandarins regarding how they should comport themselves professionally ought not to be surprised when their programs are cut or their positions are eliminated.