“How important is it for a typical university to maintain a department in each of the following fields?”
A survey by Polarization Research Lab asked people that question. Fifteen fields were listed, and respondents were given four options:
- Essential — a university should always have this department
- Important, but could be cut if necessary
- Not very important
- This department should be cut.
The field with the most public support, according to this survey, is English, with 86% of the respondents calling it “Essential” and another 11% calling it “Important”. In spots 2 and 3 were Mathematics and History. Very few deemed these fields “not very important” or said they “should be cut”.
At the bottom of the list was Gender and Sexuality Studies, with 24% of the responses saying it is “Essential,” 28% saying it is “Important”, 21% saying “not very important,” and 28% saying “should be cut.”
Where does philosophy fall on the list? Close to the bottom, with 34% calling it “Essential,” 45% calling it “Important”, 17% saying it is “not very important”, and 4% saying it should be cut.
The following graph shows the results. It was brought to my attention by Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck (Carleton University), who shared and wrote about it in a thread on X.com.
Mr. Hoyeck says the lesson here is that “philosophers have done a pretty woeful job of marketing ourselves as the people who can teach and employ… crucial [critical thinking] skills”.
Discussion welcome.
Related:
- How to Show that Studying Philosophy Improves Thinking Skills
- Studying Philosophy Makes People Better Thinkers: Further Data
- The Benefits of Studying Philosophy: Not Just Selection Effects?
- The Demand for Philosophers
- Improving Philosophy’s Prospects with a Model for Bringing it to High Schools
- Two Ideas for Improving the Future of Philosophy
I would’ve liked to see them ask about Psychology. One thing that Psychology has in common with English as vs. Philosophy is that it seems to be a remarkably popular major compared to Philosophy despite (from my perspective) not having many (if any) particular advantages over Philosophy. Indeed, in the contexts I know the most about (USA and India), Philosophy and Psychology both share a feature English lacks, which is that nobody comes into college knowing anything about them, but Psych and English each blow Philosophy out of the water. I’ve always wondered why that is, and I wonder if it matches people’s thoughts about what departments a university could lose. The answer seems to be “yes” for English, assuming this survey is accurate.
I would also have liked them to ask about Business. If you gave me a magic wand I’d get rid of every undergraduate degree in Business before getting rid of a single other degree in anything. But I’m not sure a typical American would concur.
I also wonder how Political Science ended up so much worse off than History in this poll, and about Anthropology’s poor showing vs. Sociology and especially vs. History. These things are all very mysterious to me.
I mostly think about this stuff in the context of wondering how much my department should worry that our major numbers are pretty low. But the major numbers for Harvard, Tufts, Cornell, Brown, Gonzaga, Williams, Bowdoin, and Amherst are equally low. So it’s not like my department specifically is doing anything wrong. If there are mistakes philosophers are making, they’re making them in lots of places.
“One thing that Psychology has in common with English as vs. Philosophy is that it seems to be a remarkably popular major compared to Philosophy despite (from my perspective) not having many (if any) particular advantages over Philosophy.”
Isn’t it just a completely different discipline? Experimentally based, much narrower in subject matter, much less focus on texts and close reading, much more need to study statistics. That’s not to say it’s better or worse, but even prima facie I wouldn’t expect the two to be equally popular – they appeal to quite different interests and skillsets.
Two points:
1) One common response to stuff like this is “teach Philosophy in high school and Philosophy will be more popular.” (See e.g. Barry Lam’s comment below.) But as far as I know, Psychology is rarely or never taught in high school and yet it’s consistently extremely popular as a major.
2) “Psychology is completely different, so why expect parity?” perhaps implies that for very similar topics we ought to expect parity. But English and Philosophy seem to me to be very similar topics. They’re both “useless” humanities majors stereotyped as fields where you sit around bullshitting all day and don’t learn anything useful. And yet somehow people love to major in English and think it’s the most important department in the university, whereas Philosophy is way down there.
look, no one’s saying english majors can’t be insufferable too but have you read the comments on this site recently?
less uncharitably, as an undergrad english major my joke was that the common denominator was that we all wanted to talk about sex.
Quick search suggests IB/AP Psychology is taken by far more students than IB Theory of Knowledge, which is I think the only philosophy course in the US. Psychology is among the most popular classes. Moreover, most kids in the US have some sense of what psychology is about, if only because so many of them have received some form of therapy or counseling.
That often ends up being a problem, as it shapes their expectations for what psych will teach them: that it’ll teach them to do psychotherapy, that it’s a major oriented toward turning them into clinical psychologists. That is one possible pathway, but you’d be surprised how many first-year students take it as the only pathway and then ask “Why are we learning about neurons? Why do I have to know what a t test is?”
Agreed!
minor note about the IB: I don’t know if this tells us one way or the other, because IB Psychology (from what I know) is an elective, and can be chosen to be taken, without the broader IB Diploma (which has requirements on how many IB courses must be taken). So the TOK requirement tracks how many students take this broader diploma requirement, which is more substantive (it isn’t something you can take on your own).
But you’re right in general: I just suspect that people think doing psychology –> more flexibility for medical and law schools, counseling services, social work, whatever, while it’s unclear philosophy will help for those things. there’s lab work involved in psychology, data analysis, etc, all of which are somewhat translatable skills in the workforce.
From the numbers I’ve seen, more students take IB Psych in total than TOK. And then there’s AP Psych, which doesn’t have a philosophy counterpart.
A quick search says psych is taught at over 5,000 schools in US – my public high school in Midwest even had psych 40 years ago
Philosophy is much less taught
Compare with Ontario Canada- where Philosophy is a standard high school subject
Toronto produces a lot more Phil majors than those other schools you mention
This is just conjecture, but I would guess the relative success of psychology is down to its outsized footprint in pop-culture. You can find a million fictional therapists, psychologists, etc. How many philosophers?
Even a child has a vague, sterotypical idea of what a modern psychologist does. I doubt the idea of a philosopher conjures much of anything, except ancients in togas.
Regarding “they appeal to quite different interests and skillsets”: Yes, but I’m not sure very many students who’ve studied neither field in high school are aware of these differences. My advisees would regularly admit to choosing intro-level philosophy courses over intro to world literature because they “don’t want to have to do a lot of hard reading,” and they’d regularly be shocked when I tell them psychology majors have to take statistics.
Psychology is often offered as an AP elective. There is something like a philosophy AP course, but it is not called philosophy and it is rarely offered). I think many more people are familiar with psychology (even if they don’t really know what it is as a field of study) going into college than you might expect.
When I read this chart I could just imagine pinning each major against some kind of quadrant (my inner business major shining through) that has ‘Necessary’ on one axis and ‘Employable’ on the other.
I think Philosophy tends to get placed into a quadrant that makes many people think: not necessary and not employable. I don’t *agree* with that assessment, but we’re talking about perception, not reality.
Regarding English vs Philosophy, have you seen the prose they get to read in the English department (which often times includes continental philosophy)? I would not underestimate the English department’s triple-threat of style, substance and necessity.
Optimist that I am, I think it’s worth noting that the rank-order here (based on “is it essential”) doesn’t tell the whole story. Almost four in five respondents think philosophy is either essential or important. Only 4% think it should be got rid of. Contrast ethnic studies, where about as many people as philosophy thought it was essential (33% vs 34%), but only two in three think it’s either essential or important and one in six want to get rid of it. Contrast gender studies, where almost half the respondents don’t think it’s important and more than 1 in 4 actively think it should be cut.
Not a reason for complacency, of course!
I think this is the right take. The results are much better for Philosophy than I thought they would be after reading the first few lines of the OP.
One other thought: I worry that advertising Philosophy’s value in terms of its contributions to to “Critical Thinking” is a strategic mistake. The problem isn’t that Philosophy doesn’t contribute to critical thinking…surely it does. The problem is that every academic discipline can say the same. There’s plausibly something unique/valuable about the particular way Philosophy teaches critical thinking. But that ‘something’ inevitably gets hidden from University administrators (who sometimes need to make cuts) when basically every class in every department can make the case that critical thinking is one of the essential/transferrable skills it teaches.
I don’t, to be honest, have a better alternative ready-to-hand. This is just a reflection after spending a few years as department chair, doing course proposal forms and trying to figure out how to make Philosophy’s value legible to upper admin who are surrounded on all sides by departments making the case that their classes are important to the overall University curriculum.
The survey tracks almost perfectly what is taught in US secondary education as a requirement rather than elective.
If you want the public to think philosophy is essential, teach it in high school.
The conditional at the end may end up being good advice. But I don’t know about the suggested explanation for the survey results.
I’m not aware of many places in the US where Econ and Comp Sci are required subjects in high school. The idea that the survey tracks required vs elective subjects also wouldn’t explain the higher support for Soc and Poli Sci. So, I’m not sure that the survey really is tracking what’s required before college.
In terms of the advice, it would be be interesting to see results from surveys in places where Phil is taught pre-college. Anyone know of any such results?
I am curious to see what they think philosophy is. My own experience is that the public’s understanding of philosophy is close to existentialism or something similar, and many people do not think philosophy is (essentially) about critical thinking.
Or, judging from sections in bookstores titled “Metaphysics,” it’s about crystals, past lives, time travel, and so on.
Philosophy is (also) about time travel!
These findings seem consistent with how campus writing centers have developed. At my university, I’m one of only two writing-center instructors with a philosophy background (among approx. 75). My colleagues’ backgrounds are mostly in English and other literary fields. A favorite slogan is, “Writing is thinking,” so teaching how to write is teaching how to think.
Increasingly, writing centers are claiming critical thinking as their thing, and yet they typically don’t see philosophy as having much relevance to this focus. Indeed, I’ve heard more than one of my writing-center colleagues joke about how they just don’t ‘get’ philosophy writing (“Don’t ask me to figure out how philosophers write!”).
I have no real understanding of how this attitude came about, but it seems consistent with the survey results positioning philosophy as peripheral.
Regarding the 21% of people who think philosophy is not very important or should be cut, it would be nice to see companion results that speak to how much of the effect is due to the term “philosophy” (in the sense of a department) not referring in the participants’ vocabulary.
For instance, one might speculate that results in “African American/ethnic studies” and “gender and sexuality studies” are a “true” effect of the population’s mood, relying on the politicization of the terms as the relevant causal mechanism. Likewise, the results in the standard science and history and English cases are a “true” effect, relying on the exposure of students to such terms in high school as the relevant causal mechanism. But philosophy (and anthropology)?
This would be useful to steer policy/marketing proposals—do people just need to have a more concrete familiarity with “philosophy”, or do we need to sway people’s judgements about philosophy? (A likely interaction effect is also worth noting: “I don’t really know what philosophy is, including because I haven’t been exposed to it in high school or in the political arena, so it must not be important”).
These results are vastly better than what I would have predicted. Only 4% are in the cut camp? Only 17% think it’s not at all important?
Sounds like a victory to me.
It would be interesting to compare these fields in terms of both the actual earnings of undergraduate majors, 10 years after graduation and the imagine were believed Earnings. I suspect that most people think the earnings of difference.Undergraduate humanity’s majors would be the same , but they are not. Philosophy majors do better than many because those drawn to the philosophy major and who stay with it and graduate have general thinking skills that are actually better. Also a undergraduate major who has taken a range of courses from esthetics to the philosophy of science and mathematical logic is capable Of learning many more things, more rapidly. I am a philosophy PhD. And I move effortlessly through multiple fields and disciplines. When the philosopher Donald Schoen died his obituary said that among all of the people in Boston, he was the one most of the powerful people wanted to have lunch with. He was a powerful and influential philosopher , but he never taught in a philosophy department. If we are to succeed as a discipline , we all should be a little bit more like professor Donald Schoen.
Well, I for one am quite satisfied with the total of 79% saying philosophy is Esential and/or Important, in light of its past Euro-centric follies. Go philosophy of mind!
Framing effects seem to dominate here.
Most university English programs teach critical theory, and indeed may see various forms of critical theory as more central to their mission than Shakespeare.
But if you replaced “English” by “Critical Theory,” I’m pretty sure the numbers would have come out very differently. Even “Comparative Literature” would have scored much lower.
So, English benefits from the fact that people have no idea what currently happens in most English departments. And it benefits from the fact that it still sounds cozy and old-fashioned — maybe it’s like watching a lot of PBS costume dramas, but with books?
What happens in Philosophy departments is equally unknown to the survey population — and to the faculty in the rest of the university– but Philosophy does not gain from seeming cozy and familiar.
There was a US congressman (Louie Gohmert, I think) who, roughly ten or so years ago, complained that colleges were now teaching “a funny kind of math, with letters in it” (paraphrasing). (The word “woke” wasn’t really used a pejorative by the right back then, but I guess today he would’ve called it “woke math”.) The thing is: He was complaining about algebra.
We seriously overestimate how much the public knows about what university departments and curricula are like and how accurate their perceptions of the academy are. Much of it is shaped by the distortions of propaganda, yes, but much of it is more mundanely misrepresented through popular depictions of academic life. In either case, the result is a lot of surface-level understanding, supported more by vibes than anything.
I tracked it down. It looks like this was Al Melvin, Arizona state senator, who complained about “fuzzy math” in K-12. No less hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Melvin_(politician)
There was someone who got in a tizzy about Arabic numerals, too.
A pertinent xkcd https://xkcd.com/2501/
For what it’s worth, this is not an accurate description of English departments. I was an undergrad English major in the early 1990s, a grad student in the late-90s and early 2000s, and a professor since then. No English Department sees theory as more important than Shakespeare or than poetry, fiction, drama, etc. in general. Every English Department I know of and have been a part of (ranging from private and selective to public regional comprehensive) is literature-focused.
I left the APA some years ago for a number of reasons, not least of which was my feeling that leadership did not prioritize issues like this. We knew the demographic cliff we were facing and by my lights our national organization was focused on other issues. Given that enrollments were about to tank, public perception of philosophy should have been a priority.
While I agree with the commentators who note that the overall non-negative view of philosophy is reassuring, we have much work to do. Because we have SO MUCH to offer and such a long way to go to get the public to recognize that fact.
perhaps we need a rebranding, HBOMax style. We could add ‘science’ to our name, how does the Focus Group feel about ‘Thought Science’? Or even better (bc it’s accurate)–Conceptual Engineering!
Haha. If it was up to the ‘public’, we would still be burning witches. And Reacher would be considered the height of artistic creativity. 🙂
Indeed, the same “public” who agreed that Socrates should be put to death.
I’m not one to always defend the public, and I like a good hierarchy where it’s needed, but if we’re concerned with our image, I’m not sure that painting respondents as malevolent rubes will do much to alleviate the perception that we’re just a bunch of pretentious elites.
I didn’t say malevolent. Just noting the sad truth that defending the value of what we do is literally as old as the discipline itself.
True, some of the people who agreed to put him to death were not malevolent but cowardly, others corrupt. Same for those burning witches. These are totally value-neutral analogies.
I couldn’t find any of this data on the Polarization Research Lab website. It seems that only Sean Westwood tweeted out this chart himself, separate form any draft describing how they conducted this study: https://x.com/seanjwestwood/status/2091957966710653071
I’m not really sure what to make of this. Is there a substantial connection on a discipline-by-discipline level of public opinion about disciplines and their likeliness to be offered in various ways at colleges? I’m not finding any evidence to make a confident judgement on that matter. And clearly the public is not particularly informed about what individual departments do. As others have noted, many English departments — even factoring in first-year required writing classes — are more similar to area studies departments than any other kind of department. And the variation in first-year required writing class effectiveness is larger than some may think. Would people swing way downward if they had to browse a few English department websites for 10 minutes?
Barry Lam’s observation that this tracks what’s offered in k-12 seems pretty explanatory here. I’d add that it also tracks a kind of prototype people have about what college is, a sort of Oxbridge sterotype, along with whatever majors are seen as unambiguously positive return on interest (comp sci). As Dan Weltman pointed out, there’s some important disciplines missing here, namely psychology, criminal justice, and social work — all job oriented disciplines squarely in the realm of social sciences. Maybe they fare as well as the lower rated physical sciences here despite being in the lower half of ROI and instead this tracks an American college prototype of something like the third best public university in most states. Either way, this doesn’t really bother me that much because I don’t think it really says much about what the future of philosophy departments and classes at colleges will be.
You beat me to the punch, GS#223…I was also going to say that there doesn’t seem to be a published study here, just this one graph that’s making the rounds online. So, we don’t know much about the study and shouldn’t draw any conclusions from it.
For instance: who exactly were the 425 people surveyed; are they relevant at all, or just randos? Are the 425 responses even statistically significant? What’s their methodology, exact questions, and context in asking those questions? Given the organization that supposedly ran the study, the survey could’ve been part of a larger survey about political polarization, and so it may have drawn a certain set of respondents that’s not really relevant here. And so on.
Or if someone has access to the full study, please share!
But they ask about philosophy or about this Anglo-Saxon parochial analytic philosophy?
We have been having this discussion at my institution now that we are considering returning some programs that were eliminated after the pandemic. In general, the issues seems to be one in which administrators, politicians, the general public, students, and their parents have bought into the idea that the purpose of pursuing education beyond K-12 is workforce development, not human development. Until we win the battle to change the view of the purpose of higher education, efforts to improve attitudes toward disciplines in the lower half of the chart will be unlikely to change. If we can change the idea of the purpose of higher education, we can make the argument that philosophy contributes to human development AND has benefits for the individuals in terms of their work. But just having to play the game of showing how philosophy and any of the other lower half disciplines a contribute to workforce development strikes me as unlikely to succeed.
Here’s what a psych faculty with 20 years of statistics teaching under his belt told me: “Junk. Although 79% of people chose the top two “Yes” options, so you should boldly use that in support of any arguments for keeping your department! Just pick the data you like! Although any group that thinks Sociology should rank higher than Philosophy, and doesn’t even include Psychology, can’t be worth a flip.”
Not sure if this survey reveals any important information on its own. What we need is a contrast with employer opinion by sector. My sense we would see something vastly different. A comparison with the general public would be then instructive. Furthermore, we need to know it by country or region. So I am sceptical what to make of all the takes on this. When I first saw the survey, was that it is largely uninformative from a European perspective and also possibly from an employer perspective, having recently spoken to the ceo of worldwide PR agency.
Most people have no idea what benefit they get from the work of professional philosophers or why they should want to pay for it.