APA Signs Onto Statement Defending the Dept. of Education
The Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association (APA) has added the organization to a list of signatories of a statement opposing the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the Department of Education.
The statement, initially issued by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (PBK), says:
In this moment of turbulent policy change, The Phi Beta Kappa Society and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) remain steadfast and nonpartisan voices championing education in the liberal arts and sciences as essential public good. For nearly half a century, the Department of Education has been critical in ensuring robust funding for colleges and universities nationwide and safeguarding student financial aid necessary to access colleges and universities. Dismantling of the Department of Education will result in catastrophic implications for students, faculty, communities, and the nation.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society and ACLS urge the administration to rescind the Executive Order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education.
The statement also offers links to information about what individuals can do about the threat to the Department of Education here and here.
You can view the statement and its list of signatories here.
I appreciate the APA’s efforts here, but they do not go nearly far enough. As philosophers, we have a special responsibility to not only say that these actions should be rescinded because they will have negative consequences (framed here in the most anodyne language possible) but to note that they are *wrong*. They are a part of a wider attempt to Orbanize American higher education, which is itself part of a larger project to replace American democracy with (arguably) fascist autocracy. The “closure” of the Department of Education (itself facially illegal, though the legal actions the administration is capable of taking are themselves catastrophic) is taking place in the context of academics—instructors and students—being kidnapped off the streets for expressing their views.
It’s vital for organizations like the APA to speak out on these matters because there is strength in collective organization and action. It is more difficult (though obviously far from impossible) to attack the APA than a single instructor or student who speaks out, and such actions can (and I hope will) have a catalyzing effect among individual philosophers.
My sincere hope is that signing onto this statement is the first step by professional organizations in our discipline rather than the last word. My further hope is that these actions will encourage more individual philosophers to speak clearly and publicly about what is going on.
As philosophers, I think we have a special responsibility to investigate, empirically and philosophically, whether the Department of Education, as it has been formed over the years, has the right sort of relationship to the aim of an educated citizenry.
Is it envisioning education in the right way? Even if it is, is it doing things needed to achieve that aim? If so, do the things it’s doing have any wider adverse affects? If it’s doing something salubrious — dispersing funding, say — could that function be absorbed by another department? Is it articulating and imposing the right metrics? Is it doing so in light of heterogeneous local and regional interests? To what extent does it, to what extent should it, achieve a balance of subsidiarity? If it’s not doing something right, should we reform it or dismantle it? How, and with what degree of delicacy, should it be changed, if at all?
While I too have serious reservations about many DOE initiatives (e.g. NCLB, Race to the Top) make no mistake that this executive order is a direct attack on public education and federal funding to low income schools and special education. While I would like to think that this move would lead to rich philosophical discussions about the issues you raise, and inspire states to make deeper commitments to public education and pass ed reform more in line with the Finnish model, I just don’t see it playing out this way. In truth, the current administration isn’t interested in improving public education, just like DOGE isn’t really interested in fighting corruption and fraud. That is why I think a weak and neglected DOE is better than no DOE at all. We need to keep as much intact as possible and hope for a change in leadership soon.
This is a deflection.
Philosophers consistently ask these types of questions. As do economists and political scientists (among other academics).
You need to stick your neck out and say why you think the DOE ought to be slashed to give people a proper target for discussion. Asking leading questions is a bad faith diversion.
Odd — if the aim is a fascist autocracy, one would expect this administration to lean into these centralized agencies and use them as instruments of control to leverage educational institutions to their own ends, rather than dismantling them.
“Orbanize” is perhaps more apt. Nevertheless, it’s an open question whether the DOE gets in the way (of higher ed, especially) more than it assists it. Another open question is whether the roles taken on by the DOE might be better addressed via state level agencies or other federal agencies. If not, which activities of the DOE are most essential? That is, if this is right and the results of closing the DOE will be “catastrophic” (count me a bit skeptical), how exactly will they be catastrophic?
I know a lot of people celebrating the potential closure of the DOE, and it’s not because they hate education. It’s because they love education and they think the DOE is part of what causes barriers to it, through extremely rigid and dry curriculum mandates, a rather joyless sense of “rigor” in education, a prioritization of math and science curriculum at the expense of reading, an obsession with assessment, an arcane accreditation bureaucracy with an endless set of demands, such labor-consuming demands put up barriers to entry for start-up colleges, increasing costs of higher ed as administrators proliferate, which of course decreases access, and so on.
I guess we’ll see whether this is good or bad. I honestly don’t know. And I don’t think you do either.
While most of the people celebrating the demise of DOE don’t “hate education,” a fair share of them hate public education and simply don’t care to invest in the education of children from low-income families. Arizona is a good example of what some people celebrating the demise of DOE really want — the AZ voucher program is mainly designed to fund private schools that serve the privileged and for-profit schools that dish out a joyless sense of “rigor” to increase test scores and improve their enrollment numbers with savvy marketing. The remaining scraps go to the schools that serve everyone else. Most importantly (for these people) Arizona boasts among the lowest teacher salaries and per-pupil spending in the country. I am all for reforming our schools and replacing the current standardized system that has done so much harm over the years, but I don’t think abandoning public education is the answer.
I should add that I agree with most of your complaints. We do need real reform.
By jointly penning and endorsing statements such as these, members of universities whose presidents will not do the same — whether individually or collectively with other universities — can still deliver crucial public messaging, albeit in a less overt fashion. Some may reasonably claim that without the names of universities on a list, the public is less likely to care. I won’t deny that.
But unless and until universities and their presidents are willing, directly, to put their names to paper, I think it’s all the more important for academic councils, societies, and associations to take up the charge and to keep it up.
That said, I hope there are plans among these many groups to target their campaigns to include the general public, too. Get on your area’s local politics radio. Write op-eds. Contact your elected officials and try to get the main message onto the dockets of their town halls. Do what you can to reach people who need help making the connections between democracy and education, and fire them up.
While we can all take these actions individually, the learned societies and professional organizations are in a relatively better position to act more efficiently and effectively.
I am heartened to see this letter and the list of signatories.
In conjunction with the other commenters, I would like to add emphasis to just how wrong *wrong* it is, to do away with the department of education. Per Hegel’s comments on the relationship between intellect and morality that we find in his Philosophy of Right and of History, it would spell utter doom and more than just a literal educational set back. When people become educated, beyond their ignorance as children, they become morally educated as well. I think this can be true in simple ways, in public schools we meet people of various backgrounds, religions, races, and so on. We learn to accept each other and love each other, we learn history and the many evils therein. When we don’t have this, when we isolate ourselves from each other, something this ‘anti-dei’ scare would promote, we do not learn just how alike we are, how basic *humanity* is in each individual. I apologize for shorthanding what should be a deeper discussion, but going further, it is notable how the transition of the world, from feudalism to capitalism for example, so many were brought out of ignorance and became well educated, labor became more socialized, and many things that were ‘all the rage’ in feudal societies (anti-semitism for one), began to wither in most societies (most, not all).
Intellect and Morality may not be so strongly correlated as Plato might have thought, but I think there relationship, especially for Hegel, is deeply important to our context. With this loss of the department of education, generations of citizens will be brought up, being able to be manipulated (more than they already are), not smart enough to fully understand right and wrong, or how they are being misled, and much worse.
To the extent that I understand your idea here, I am utterly sympathetic.
But I also think it’s worth thinking about exactly what the Department of Education, or a Department of Education, has to do with realizing this idea.
(I don’t mean this rhetorically: I don’t mean to imply that I think it has nothing to do with it. I don’t know what I think.)
Has the APA made, or signed onto, any statement about the disappearing (and deportation) of graduate students in the last few months?
If not, why not?
Here’s a link to a relevant list:
Here are the international students and faculty known to be targeted by ICE