New Ohio Law Ends Philosophy Major at Univ. of Toledo
In order to comply with Senate Bill 1 of the Ohio Legislature (SB1), the University of Toledo will no longer be allowing students to become philosophy majors.
Ohio State Senator Jerry C. Cirino, sponsor of SB1
The philosophy major is one of nine degree programs the university says it is ending because of SB1. The others are Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Data Analytics, Disability Studies, Middle East Studies, Religious Studies, Spanish, and Women’s and Gender Studies.
The legislation orders the state’s public institutions of higher education to “eliminate any undergraduate degree program it offers if the institution confers an average of fewer than five degrees in that program annually over any three-year period.”
It also prohibits “the continuation of existing diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or departments” or the establishment of new ones.
It requires each public institution of higher education to “affirm and declare” that it “shall ensure the fullest degree of intellectual diversity,” (though this and related clauses in this section of the legislation “do not apply to the exercise of professional judgment about how to accomplish intellectual diversity within an academic discipline, unless that exercise is misused to constrict intellectual diversity” and “nothing in this section prohibits faculty or students from classroom instruction, discussion, or debate, so long as faculty members allow students to express intellectual diversity”).
SB1 also includes clauses about limiting the right of public employees to strike, and about their collective bargaining agreements.
The legislation is facing some popular pushback, and there is currently a petition calling for a referendum on it that registered voters in Ohio may sign. Signatures for the petition, which must be collected in person, not online, are being submitted to the state attorney general in waves. The first wave of 1,000 signatures was submitted on April 21st. Information about the petition and where it can be signed is here.
I am told that it is SB1’s clause about graduation rates, and not those about DEI, that triggered the decision to end the philosophy major. It’s worth noting then, that the clause about graduation rates includes the following:
The chancellor may grant a waiver to a state institution for a program to which this division applies. State institutions shall appeal for a waiver in a form and manner determined by the chancellor. If the chancellor grants a waiver to a state institution, the chancellor shall establish terms under which the state institution may conditionally continue the program, including whether the program is eligible to be supported by state share of instruction funds.
So there may be a way to save the philosophy major at the University of Toledo, and the department is looking into possible avenues for that.
I’m also told that, fortunately, the elimination of the major is not anticipated to lead to cuts to the philosophy faculty, owing to the Philosophy Department being responsible for many high-enrollment courses satisfying general education requirements while also offering required or recommended courses for other programs (Logic, Medical Ethics, Data Ethics, Environmental Ethics, and others).
Meanwhile, it has been reported that the sponsor of the SB1, Jerry C. Cirino, wants to follow Trump’s lead in coercing universities with threats to their funding. Ideastream Public Media reports that Cirino, chair of the Senate finance committee, “said the committee will attempt to tie higher education funding to compliance with SB1, to ensure ‘all the work we’ve done doesn’t go to waste.'”
[Sigh.]
[Defeated head shake.]
This is anecdotal, but: every academic I know, be they in the sciences or the humanities or the arts, deplores the use of clumsy metrics like graduation rates, time to graduation, or number of degrees granted per year as ways to measure and communicate the value of their disciplines. And I agree.
Are there better, more sensitive metrics out there? Or is the practice of measuring these things for administrative / bureaucratic eyes intrinsically doomed?
It seems difficult for academics to explain the value of their disciplines to those who do not participate in those disciplines — even to other academics. But with the humanities it seems even more difficult. Sometimes I think I succeed in communicating the value of philosophy to “people on the street.” But do we need to think of how to communicate the value of philosophy to state legislators instead? To the dean with a PhD in Molecular Biology?
I’m at my wit’s end. I don’t even know the right questions to ask anymore.
I don’t understand what the point is of getting rid of the major. How does that help the university if they’re not going to fire any of the professors? Or is the idea that they’re going to fire most of the non-philosophers, and they can’t find any consistent way to eliminate those other degrees (and thus to justify firing those professors) without using criteria that also eliminate Philosophy, a major they don’t care about one way or the other?
I fought the “greater than five” requirement and can say that this kind of objection did not register at all with the Republican legislators. They either didn’t understand or didn’t care. They have the basic idea in mind that education is workforce development and we shouldn’t offer degree programs for which there is no demand. “No one chooses a college for its general education program.”
Makes sense (as an explanation of their behavior, not of course as a good principle to endorse) – thanks!
They’re all working from the same playbook. Colleges need to compete by focusing on the majors that bring students in the door. That’s what the consultants say. “No one chooses a college for its general education program” is just a cliche at this point.
And since the humanities by an large doubled down on “all we do is teach marketable skills”, philosophy is just the same as English, which is bigger and has more majors, and so those Gen Eds can be taught by adjuncts. The job hopping assistant vice provost gets a line on his resume, and everyone’s education is a little bit worse.
Yes, this is exactly what the consultants say to do. Make each college a place with fewer, shinier choices. Rather than having the extensive menu at the local diner, the consultants say consumers (i.e., students) prefer each place to have fewer choices. So, we get the place that does fried chicken sandwiches only, and then another place that only does farm to table burgers, etc.
Eliminating majors accomplishes this goal of presenting the consumer with fewer choices and makes a college seem more unique. At least, this is the claim. Empirical support for this claim is manufactured from limited or misleadingly presented data.
In some places, eliminating the major allows other things. For example, in some US states it can be the first step to firing tenured faculty, even those in state institutions with strong union protections. Eliminating the major at such places is (legally) exactly the same as saying that one’s (state-funded) department is no longer relevant to the mission of the state agency and thus, since faculty are tenured in departments, they can be fired (or rather “retrenched”).
I had the same question as Daniel Weltman so thanks for this reply!
It’s hard to understand their behavior consistently with the need for enrollments. If the same faculty are all retained because they teach valuable and high-enrolling courses to nonmajors, then there is no seeming expense involved in making five or six majors happy, and that way the university retains the five or six majors. Maybe the powers that be felt like, eh, we have a few more students than we want and we’d love it if they went elsewhere.
Ah well, seems like an odd imposition of a cost to a few students with no gain for anyone.
When I was at Texas A&M, this was an issue because the PhD program in philosophy was only barely above the threshold for needing a waiver of this sort. It wasn’t clear what the motivation was.
I understood the rules that said that classes with fewer than 10 undergrads or 5 grad students couldn’t be taught, because that is at least aimed at ensuring that the effort faculty devote to teaching is benefiting some number of students. But I don’t think that having a degree program usually involves a lot of effort other than the effort that is proportional to the number of students in it.
Maybe the idea is that by eliminating a degree program, you get the department to focus more on teaching 100-student intro classes rather than 10 student classes for senior majors, or 5 student graduate seminars?
“Maybe the idea is that by eliminating a degree program, you get the department to focus more on teaching 100-student intro classes….”
Yes, this is part of the aim. The overall idea is not simply to “pay for your cost” or “break even”, like in the case of having a minimum enrollment # for classes. Instead, the goal is to think about all “effort” as a decision to put an “investment” into some area or other. Higher Ed Consulting Firm rpk calls this the “ROI approach” to Higher Ed.
Here’s some of it: https://rpkgroup.com/do-less-better/
Here’s an example of that type of claim from someone at rpk talking about cuts at SUNY Erie:
https://youtu.be/iMPLgauiQr0?si=YLKZCkCo2XutOXQH&t=3440
The claim is that any decision about having a program (should we have this major?) is an “investment”, no matter how small, that costs time, “faculty energy” to maintain a program, listing a program, educating counselors and advisors on program requirements, and recruiting students. Reallocation is something that can be possible (according to these consultants) by closing a program.
When pushed, consultants rarely have sensible things to say about what these costs are, but the ideology should be clear. All dollars in an educational context need to be maximized not simply have their costs covered.
Because they offer general education courses in Philosophy-those that nearly all students are required to take-as part of their breadth of understanding of the world.
I think that it’s a bad idea to do away with the study of philosophy. Philosophy majors develop critical thinking skills and all of the most important contributions to human progress in every domain of human life has been made possible through creativity and critical thought.
You want to cut off the head, philosophy major and you are saying the body,the minor would live.
Who will be doing the researches that would be sustaining the minor user depts ?
Philosophy as a major should always be a option for a undergraduate. Too bad, it has to be “sold” as a worthwhile concentration, in lieu of career oriented fields of study. The simple solution is to incorporate philosophy courses into other curricula. Those who have seem to know what they would like to apply philosophy coursework toward, be it law, computer science, linguistics, or a area of math or science.
It would be more reasonable to ask how many students take electives from those departments.
Meanwhile, in Canada: Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): UBC Philosopher Andrew Irvine, Settler Denialism, and the Emboldened Right in Canadian Academe – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
I am quite put off by the virtuing signaling involved in tagging the fact that “we” are on indigenous lands. Perhaps those who feel that way should take action and return to … wherever.
My European ancestors mixed with the first nations communities … indeed, two 3rd cousins, three times removed, died in residential schools. I certainly feel entitled to be in Canada (though I do not even live there now).
His OP Ed is worth reading: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/andrew-irvine-were-taking-ubc-to-court-over-dei-and-other-political-activity/ar-AA1Dwt9S?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Many of the comments also apply to university art departments and drama departments. If there are concerns about the practicality of Philosophy, then why don’t those concerns extend to art & drama?
How do you order universities to do away with DEI and then, in the next breath, argue that university instructors need to be sure they’re making a strong effort to promote intellectual diversity? Seems to me that if universities aren’t allowed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, then every instructor now has the right to teach their bias and require students to comply with that point of view. After all, if promoting DEI in universities is now illegal, that means the legislature wants conformity, inequity, and exclusion…so either conform, find the instructor’s bias to align with yours (even if it doesn’t align with someone else’s — irrelevant, they can get left behind, it’s fine), or get out. 🤷🏻
The same thing happened at Bowling Green. We had roughly 4 faculty fully staffing two majors, Philosophy and PPE (roughly15-20 graduates total per year). More absolutely ridiculous stories out of Bowling Green attend these events.