Monmouth College Eliminating Its Philosophy Major
The President of Monmouth College, a private liberal arts college in Illinois, has recently announced that students at the school will no longer be able to major in philosophy, nor in a number of other subjects, starting in Fall 2026.
“We stand firm to our commitment as a liberal arts college and embrace the traditions of Monmouth and liberal arts schools,” said President Patricia Draves, as she announced the elimination of major programs in philosophy, history, classics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and other areas.
Apart from some vague language about how the set of cuts “ensures our commitment to educational quality and aligns it with the College’s mission and financial resources,” there was no explanation for the specific decisions.
The elimination of the philosophy major will also mean the elimination of the one remaining philosophy faculty position and the elimination of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.
A petition, entitled, “Save the Humanities at Monmouth College,” is now circulating. It is from “former majors, minors, friends and supporters” of the targeted departments, “and those generally concerned with the maintenance of the institution’s longstanding commitment to the liberal arts.”
Here’s an excerpt from the petition’s text:
We are concerned that the elimination of these majors is, in reality, the elimination of the meaningful study of the humanities at the College.
The President’s email states that the changes recommended by the Task Force would “allow the college to focus on what today’s students and families value most: affordability, strong outcomes, and a meaningful educational experience.” We ask: how is a meaningful educational experience possible when students cannot engage seriously with anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy or religious studies—the very disciplines that help us understand what it means to be human?
The email further states that the College’s reorganization “will foster more interdisciplinary collaboration.” We ask: how is more interdisciplinary collaboration possible when entire disciplines will cease to exist in a substantive way? With whom will faculty and students collaborate when their peers and mentors are no longer at the College? The prioritization process page states that “courses” will continue to be offered in many of the terminated disciplines, even though majors, minors, and departments will be eliminated. How will this be possible without faculty?
The petition’s authors
call on the President, the Board of Trustees, and the Faculty Senate to reconsider this decision and halt the disastrous abolition of majors in anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, and religious studies at Monmouth College. Furthermore, we ask for representatives of the College Administration to enter into a dialogue with the broader College community to find an alternative path forward.
You can read and sign the petition here. Letters can also be sent by email to President Draves.
Illinois Public Radio reports on the story here.
Headline: Liberal arts college ceases to be a liberal arts college.
Every time a story like this breaks on DN, I look up how the college’s total enrollments have changed over time, and every time it’s the same answer. In this case, Monmouth’s student numbers apparently peaked at ~1400 in 2009, had fallen to ~1150 by 2016, and are now 715 – nearly a 50% decrease in 15 years. This is at a college with a $38M budget of which more than $30M is tuition income.
I don’t have any particular insight into whether these particular changes are reasonable, outrageous, or in between. But a tuition-funded institution whose student numbers have fallen to this degree has an existentially serious financial problem that it can’t realistically solve without reducing staff numbers (given that demographics make reversing that fall implausible), and the optimal size and shape of the faculty of a college of 750 students has to be much different from that of a college of 1400 students. That’s unfortunately the educational and economic context in which any story like this has to be understood.
A minor correction, sorry: I read Monmouth’s financial statements too quickly. Tuition (and room/board) is the largest contribution to their income but it’s not quite as dominant as I thought – they have a reasonable income from endowment and gifts. This doesn’t qualitatively change my point (it’s still an existentially serious income loss) but I don’t want to mislead on the details.
Right. But you’d think the optimal size and shape would also depend in very large part on the institution’s mission. How many students would you say a college committed to the liberal arts needs to justify a degree program in history?
I’d distinguish “justify” from “require”.
Prior to these cuts being enacted, it looks to me as if Monmouth has programs in 21 areas I’d call “liberal arts”: anthropology, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, classical languages, computer science, economics, environmental studies, english, international studies, mathematics, music, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, religious studies, sociology, spanish, theatre, women’s studies. (Perhaps CS could be debated; at some universities it’s definitely a liberal arts subject but arguably at others it’s glorified IT training.)
I agree that a big university with thousands of students probably ought to have programs in all (with, I guess, the caveat that for some ‘studies’ area it’s a choice whether to break them out or treat them as interdisciplinary parts of other programs). But 21 areas is a lot for a university of 700-odd students (especially since many of those students are doing programs like nursing instead, which don’t normally get counted as “liberal arts” but which are still important), and I can see it might be difficult to sustain (the fact that they are dropping nine of those 21 areas but only losing six faculty shows how thin they are already spread. (Estimating from World News and Report, it looks to me as if Physics, the eighth most popular major, graduates <10 students per year, and History and all the other majors being phased out are smaller than that.) If you are operating a program on a scale that small – especially one that has shrunk massively in the last decade or so – you are going to have to make difficult choices. Maybe this is the wrong choice, but no choice is going to look good.
My experience with these stories is the same as David Wallace’s. I can’t see what should be done in situations like this that doesn’t involve drastically reducing personnel costs. I hope that’s figuring into the calculus as PhD-granting institutions are courting students to their programs today, and preparing them for life after the degree. I’ll repeat something I said at Leiter’s blog in April of 2024 when SUNY-Potsdam was facing something similar.
At any rate, going on the offensive has always struck me as worth more attention. David Hoinski urged the same when WVU was doing something similar, and I wish a more pro-active approach had been taken up by humanities professors two decades ago. The rpk Group is just one of a handful of institutional and individual forces looking to remake higher ed in the image of a new social and employment environment. As it is, I worry that humanities education in the U.S. today has developed an elitist image whose adherents are thought of as fostering ideological commitments that are not as widely shared among U.S. citizens in general as they are in the humanities, so that it seems rational for citizens who reject those commitments to encourage their children to do something different with themselves. Maybe it’s possible, this late in the culture war, to bridge that divide — and if I had the resources to mount a charge, that’s the line of attack I’d take. But together with the demographic cliff that higher education will face in the next few years, owing to the dip in birthrate after the recession of 2008, I suspect we’re fighting a reargaurd action at this point.
It also strikes me that a more pro-active effort on the part of our profession to foster philosophy instruction in American high schools today might go a long way. There is very little high-school instruction in philosophy in the U.S., there very many of us un- and under-employed, and Lord knows American citizens need more instruction in things like critical thinking, media literacy, and questions of human flourishing.
> American citizens need more instruction in things like critical thinking, media literacy, and questions of human flourishing.
aka “ideological commitments that are not as widely shared among U.S. citizens in general as they are in the humanities”.
Perhaps! And if the game can be won on those terms, those are the terms to play on.
So then the problem you see isn’t really about popularity, but rather that there are some other commitments that you don’t want to play on.
I’m sorry QP, I don’t follow. I don’t think I said or implied anything about the popularity, per se, of the kinds of positions that have come out of the academy over the last few decades, and which are out of step with much of the rest of American society. Here’s what I wrote:
The topic of that sentence is revealed in the second half, where I point out that, for one in the grips of that perception, it will be rational to, e.g., encourage the young people around you to skip college.
More generally, I was talking about the need for critical thinking and a study of human flourishing in the U.S. today, the possibility that this might be a common ground that much of the American public could accept, the fittingness of philosophers in facilitating that role (both on the demand and the supply sides), and the disconnect between an elitist wing of the American academic left today and much of the rest of the world (including, for whatever it’s worth, much of the rest of elite academia outside the Five-Eyes countries). How does popularity enter into any of this? And what are the other commitments you think I don’t want to play on?
I took you to suggest that to dissolve the “elitist image” you describe we should revise our commitments because our current commitments are unpopular or perceived as ideological. I took you, furthermore, to suggest that ideals like “critical thinking” and “flourishing” could be promoted in a more popularist fashion, avoiding the perception of ideological bent.
I don’t think this is possible. Many people partake in these ideals merely verbally. Vaccine skeptics profess to value “critical thinking” and homophobes claim to promote “flourishing”. But they do not partake in these ideals in any substantive sense.
Advocating for these ideals in any substantive sense will then incur perceptions of elitism from the same exact corners that generate these perceptions currently. That is because substantive advocacy for critical thinking will ultimately be unpopular with vaccine skeptics and substantive advocacy for flourishing will be unpopular with homophobes (and mutatis mutandis for related cases). But this kind of advocacy is what is usually referred to as our ideological bent that promotes the image of elitism.
I don’t mean this in any defeatist sense. I share your commitment to stand up for our ideals.
Thanks QP, that helps. I suppose I am more optimistic about our ability to collectively speak to, and be heard by, a middle ground in the American body politic that agrees about more than they realize because of the way the extremists have captured the discourse, both inside the academy and outside it, on the left and on the right. Pew has been tracking this trend for decades, and I try to say something in support of my interpretation of that data in “Education as a Public Resource for Addressing American Political Polarization”.
https://sites.google.com/site/prestonjstovall/teaching/public-essays?authuser=0
I see, thanks for clarifying. I guess I’m less optimistic. The things that we are most maligned for (say, critical race theory or support for trans rights) are the outcomes of critical thinking and a concern for flourishing. You can’t maintain a substantive commitment to critical thinking and flourishing while avoiding these things.
Would that we, in the academy and beyond, were having more forthright and open critical discussion of the bearing of critical race theory and trans theory on human flourishing today.
I guess we can talk about how exactly you think we are falling short.
But if your idea is that we must disavow certain results of our inquiries because they are “unpopular” with our ideological enemies in order to survive, then we might as well close up shop. Appeasement might keep the label “philosophy” on some buildings, but there wouldn’t be any philosophy happening inside them.
I’m not sure why you brought up popularity again, or why you’re now wedding popularity to an explanation contrary to the one I said was my topic above. And I’m certainly not advocating for appeasement — as someone who’s spent the last 8 years in the Czech Republic, that’s not a strategy I’m in favor of.
Let me try one more time, and see if this helps. I’m not saying that we should “disavow certain results of our inquiries because they are ‘unpopular'”. I’m pointing out that for one who disavows (in general) what today’s Anglophone humanities intelligentsia thinks about, e.g., the relevance for human flourishing of their advocacy projects, it will be rational to encourage young people to turn away from that kind of education. I’m not taking myself to be saying anything deep or interesting about the problem. And I’m certainly not the first to point it out. As for why we are in this situation, and what we should do about it, I’m staking no claim here beyond 1) the need for a more thorough and open discussion of these issues, both inside the academy and out; 2) the fittingness of philosophical instruction in preparing the groundwork for that discussion in the U.S. today, both at the doctorate level and by graduate instruction in primary and secondary school settings; and 3) the potential value this could have for American society, and which can be recognized by parties on both the political left and the political right.
At any rate, this is probably too far afield from the game Monmouth is facing right now, where the time for making a play of this sort has likely passed. But I’d be happy to talk more about what I have in mind offline, so feel free to send me an email.
Maybe I have misunderstood what you mean, but it seems that it is because we have had those discussions, and because we are having them, that we become targets, particularly the targets of those whose ideal of human flourishing represents a narrow slice of humanity and for whom falling short of that ideal is a moral failing that the body politic must organize itself to preempt or manage.
I don’t think there’s anything to be done to prevent that. To go with the example there (CRT), it’s not as though those principally opposed to CRT are somehow open to another form of analysis that reaches the same or similar conclusions. Their issue with it isn’t methodological. And it’s perhaps far too charitable—naive perhaps—to presume that it is and that, apart from those methodological scruples, they want us to have “forthright and open critical discussion” about race. I don’t think they do. And so I don’t think we can prevent them from seeing universities as a threat, and a threat specifically to the ideal they are striving to maintain and the moral failing they see as the result of not upholding it. A strategy of placation won’t stave off the inevitable confrontation when universities are, because of the conversations they allow for, necessarily going to look beyond the limits of that narrow slice.
Again, I’m not advocating for placation, appeasement, or anything of the sort. That just isn’t making contact with what I’m saying.
I would like to see humanities scholars do more to interest students while they are still at school. We should ask ourselves what we could write or say that might interest them, and how we could get our product to them.
I love how these presidents always assure us that they remain committed to the liberal arts while they cut liberal arts programs.
I imagine that they would argue that given their difficult medium-term enrollment and financial situation, they have to make the hard choice to cut the least popular liberal arts subjects to preserve a viable university that still offers a program covering a wide range of liberal arts subjects.
That’s assuming you intend ‘liberal arts’ in the inclusive way I normally understand it, to include physical, life and social sciences as well as humanities. Certainly Monmouth is turning quite hard away from the humanities part of liberal arts. But given the demographic headwinds mean that a bunch of liberal arts colleges are going to shrink drastically, I think that some specialization, where (say) some schools only offer a few physical science majors and others offer only a few humanities majors, might be preferable to having to close or consolidate schools entirely.
(Again, these are somewhat general observations: I know little about Monmouth specifically, and possibly specific facts on the ground mean that this particular decision is egregiously wrong.)