$75 Million To Philosophy (For The Elite)

One of John Hopkins University alumni, Bill Miller - who did really study philosophy there in what appears to be a more or less serious way - made a massive donation earmarked specifically to support the Philosophy Department at that institution.  $75 million dollars.  That is the sort of money that can be "life-changing" not just for a person, but for an institution.

Here are a few representative pieces about Miller's gift, discussing his reasons for the donation.

• A Wall Street Giant Makes a $75 Million Bet on Academic Philosophy (New York Times)
• Bill Miller Is Giving $75 Million to Johns Hopkins University (Bloomberg)
• Bill Miller Donates $75 Million to Johns Hopkins University
• Legendary Hedge Fund Investor Attributes His Success to Studying Philosophy (CNBC Make It)

My first reaction upon reading that piece was a mixture of two main sentiments.  That's awesome!  And also: That's too bad. . .

That an alumnus who studied philosophy would make that level of a donation on behalf of the discipline philosophy is awesome, for a variety of reasons.  First, it does go to show that there are people who study philosophy, become successful, and then recognize that philosophy played some role in that success, and then want to give back in tangible ways.  Second, in an era when donors are often much more interested in getting the prestige that comes with charitable giving than in precisely who the recipients are, it is excellent that he specified that the money is supposed to be used to advance and sustain philosophical study.  Administrators and trustees can't get their proverbially grubby hands on it, and use it for their pet projects or favored programs.  It will hopefully get spent on genuinely worthwhile projects, people, and programs.  Here's what the money will accomplish, according to Bloomberg:

The commitment will help the department increase full-time faculty to 22 from 13 and create endowed professorships for the chairperson and eight others, the school said Tuesday in a statement. The university also aims to attract more undergraduates to study philosophy through new courses.

As Baltimore Business Journal reports, the department will also be changing its name to the "William H. Miller Department of Philosophy."

At the same time, for the rest of the profession, it is indeed too bad.  A wonderful opportunity to make a major difference has effectively been squandered. This one lump-sum donation to one single institution - if the goal really is to help out a discipline so often on the ropes - seems poorly thought out.  John Hopkins has some great researchers and teachers who make solid contributions to philosophy.  But so do countless other colleges, universities, and other organizations that do not enjoy the high prestige or financial status and security of John Hopkins, or of elite universities in general.  Was it really a rational allocation of that generosity to funnel it straight and solely into one department rather than to spread it around?  There assuredly are places where even just a portion of that money would have much greater impact on promoting philosophy as a profession, and in better educating students in philosophy on a potentially massive scale.

Of course one can respond that it's Miller's money, and he can therefore do whatever he likes with it.  Quite true.  I doubt anyone asserts his gift to John Hopkins is somehow a bad thing.  It is a net gain for the profession.  But it is entirely legitimate for any of us to criticize his choice, precisely as philosophers.

It's perfectly reasonable to see that gift and think:  "Right, more money for the already abundantly well-funded."  In a time when across the nation we see programs being cut, students struggling, and the widespread impoverishment of an entire adjunct class, even a fraction, a sliver, just crumbs of that money could have been used to make a major positive difference throughout the field.

The last thing I'll say on this matter is that I have no doubt that Miller was given advice from all sorts of people about his decision.  But he might have done better to set aside a mere fraction of the massive gift he intended ultimately to make simply to hire someone (or even a team) who could have drawn up a list of worthy potential beneficiaries of his largesse.

He could have decided that John Hopkins philosophy department gets $50 million, and then doled half of that out to other departments, programs, and organizations.  He could have endowed chairs of philosophy at dozens of struggling state schools or private colleges.  The list of other measures he could have taken with his money, with aims of promoting and protecting the discipline he praises, stretches out interminably. 

So, good for philosophy at John Hopkins, and for those others to whom some good trickles down.  But for the rest of the field, it is like hearing about how a castle several countries over is getting a beautiful new remodeling job, funded by a local magnate.  We might glance at the pictures, but then it's time to get back with the work in the unchanged world we know and live in.

Critical Thinking: Class or Curriculum?

One of the conversations focused on college curricula and student learning, in which I perennially -- though thankfully not perpetually -- seem to find myself involved takes on the form of a false dilemma, a forced option, which all too often gets used as the framework for thinking out the role of foundational disciplines should play -- and the shape they ought to take -- in higher education.  Whether it is a matter of Critical Thinking, Ethics, Writing, or other similar disciplines, the same basic problematic arises:  should students be introduced to, and practiced in, that subject matter in a specific course?  Or should it be infused throughout the curriculum?

My answer, put in one word, is simply this: BOTH.  I've got my reasons to say that, and to assert it so emphatically -- which I'm going to set out in detail below.  I'd like to observe first, though, that there are also reasons why so many people find themselves constrained to frame this sort of issue in terms of an exclusive Either-Or.  Maurice Blondel, a great dialectical philosopher of the early 20th century, observed and critiqued this tendency to frame  matters important to us -- whether in metaphysics or moral theory, politics or education, aesthetics or religion -- through such rigid dichotomies, where choices are seemingly constrained to opting between one of the two poles.  Concealed by this, he notes over and over, is that, at a deeper level, often unrealized by those making it, another option, another choice gets made -- one between setting up the terms in abstract opposition to each other, or seeing that neither term is sufficient on its own, and demands the complement of the other term for its very own adequacy.

Lessons From the Ethics in Business Education Workshop (part 2 of 2)

Back at Fayetteville State University last spring, I developed and delivered a workshop for faculty of the School of Business and Economics, titled Best Practices for Addressing Challenges in Teaching Ethics.  It was the third of a set of workshops I provided as part of the Ethics in Business Education Project, a collaboration between philosophers -- brought in as subject-matter experts in Ethics -- and business educators, the main goal being improvement of teaching and assessment of Ethics in FSU's Business courses and curriculum. 

For this particular workshop, I reflected on my years of teaching a variety of Ethics courses -- some of them straight-out theory courses, some of them various "applied" ethics courses -- as well as other courses in which ethical content either inevitably entered into components or key concepts of the course (e.g. Intro to Philosophy, Social-Political Philosophy, World Religions, and all the history of Philosophy courses) -- or where discussions involving Ethics always seemed to arise, whether I'd intended them to or not (e.g. Critical Thinking, Religion in American Culture, and other Religious Studies classes).  What I learned through experience in the classroom, thinking about what had worked and what had failed, broader-scope comparison and rumination, and redesigning courses, components, and content was that -- at least in our educational culture -- there were certain critical junctures, certain potential roadblocks, certain places in discussion where students would raise challenges, present problems, present objections, often exhibit strong emotional reactions.  These supply, to use that worn-out phrase, "teachable moments," and my goal for the workshop was to supply business educators with some tools and insights for transforming them into educational opportunities.

Back from the Conference Season: Notes from POD

It's a tad flip, ad hoc, made up on the spot, just for this occasion, for me to joke about now having made it through the "conference season," as if I've been out on the road, hitting place after place, speaking, meeting people, then moving on to the next location, the next audience. There are some people who do live like that, on the circuit, spending less time at their home base with their core of friends and family than they do at a string of scattered stops -- but I'm not actually one of them.  It only feels a bit like that because I've (or really, we've, since my partner and I have done all of this together) traveled to and presented at three very different conferences in the last month -- sort of like taking a lifestyle out for a test-drive, the best part about which is that after you're done, you do get to hand back the keys.

Early in October, it was the CUNY Supplemental Instruction conference -- a local conference, mainly faculty and administrators concerned with developing, using, or improving  that type of pedagogical resource.  When asked, I did end up finding something to first think about, then talk about:  how a Virtue Ethics perspective can inform and complement the other ways of looking at SI (slides, draft paper, and video available).  I just got home from the MAPACA conference over in Philadelphia, where I talked (slides, video coming later) about how Aristotle's moral theory (understood broadly, through the two Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics) can illuminate George R.R. Martin's epic and still unfinished Song of Ice and Fire.  Sandwiched between them, just two weeks ago, down in Atlanta, was the Professional and Organizational Development network conference, which is what I'm going to write about today.

In Favor of Platform Pluralism

News  -- and even more than news, speculation -- about social media runs in seeming cycles, enhanced and deepened in imaginative resonance by the complex feedback between the tradition, albeit partially online and streaming media and the users and developers of social media platforms, with a number of social media experts, sites, and magazines as go-betweens in the loops.

It could be just a reflection of the position I occupy -- a rather humble, at times behind the curve, more information-consumer than opinion-former spot -- but it seems to me that there has been a rise in frequency and prominence of one genre of speculation and one closely associated template of news story.  Perhaps I'm off, and these have been going on at the pitch and tempo they assume at present, unbeknownst to or unnoted by me, bent on exploring, using, and integrating social media in more traditionally academic pursuits.

Lessons from the EBEP Workshop (part 1 of 2)

I've delivered my last workshop as a Philosophy faculty member to educators in the School of Business and Economics (SoBE) at Fayetteville State University.  This finality is amicable in tone and tenor -- I'm simply leaving FSU in June for opportunities elsewhere (I'll say more in a future post), so if I return to provide further workshops, curriculum review, or assessment assistance, it will be  formally (rather than just functionally) as a consultant in Ethics pedagogy and assessment, rather than as a Philosophy prof.

It's certainly not the last workshop I'll be providing dealing with issues, programs, or initiatives in Ethics -- I intend to further develop and draw on the materials, bases, lessons, and collaborative model of the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP) which I co-founded with a Management professor, Beth Hogan, originally to assist SoBE in improving their Ethics assessment required for their specialized disciplinary accreditation with the Association to Advance College Schools of Business (AACSB)  It's not even the last workshop of the EBEP series -- later this month, we're bringing in a former FSU Philosophy prof, Michelle Darnell, who we lost to the Warrington School of Business (University of Florida) last year to give another workshop in Business Ethics pedagogy.  What becomes of EBEP at FSU after I leave depends largely on what the involved Business faculty choose to do with it and whether any of the remaining Philosophy faculty choose to step into the engaging space of dialogue we've created and take up the project.

I'm going to indulge in a little retrospective about what we've achieved with the collaborative project in its first year -- but put off fuller assessment for a followup post after Darnell's workshop -- and then discuss something very interesting, even humorous if you look at it in the right light, that occurred throughout the course of my last workshop, driving doubly home its lessons to me, if not to every one of the participants it was designed for and delivered to.

Beyond 3,000: Thanks to Orexis Dianoētikē's Readers

Sometime last night, Orexis Dianoētikē's total number of total page views passed the 3,000 mark.  It might appear a rather arbitrary occasion for me to to stop and take note, celebrate, retrospect, reflect, and actually, in certain ways it is.  I started the blog in September, and by the end of October, it had 500 views. It passed 1,000 in December, then 2,000 in January.  At each of these small milestones, my partner, encouraging in so many needful ways, pointed out the growth in readership to me, and we chatted about prospects for new posts, interested readerships.  She reminded me that many blogs go on consistently for over a year before provoking a single comment, and  -- except for allowing vacation, visits with family, and a few other projects to distract me from blogging much in December --  I stuck with the writing, willing to see where it might go.

There's two main reasons why this round number takes on a different meaning to me.  One, which I'll write about momentarily, is that I feel as if Orexis Dianoētikē now has not only its space, not only a small but persistent readership, but also its groove, a clear direction, lines to follow out.  The other reason, much more of the moment, is that last night -- or so Bloggerstats tells me -- my blog attained an international readership of a different depth and diversity than ever before.  Here's a readership map of the last 24 hours:

For once, the USA was not the location of the majority of my readership.  27 readers hailed from the UK, 20 from Taiwan, 16 from Mexico, 11 from South Korea, 7 each from Australia and the USA.  Others read from Germany, Greece, India, and Kuwait.  Oddly, nobody from Russia yesterday -- I do seem to have some readership there, and even to have made it into a Russian search engine.

Is College a Ticket to Success?

A piece posted today in the Chronicle of Higher Education, New Evidence That College is a Risky Investment, argues quite rightly that merely choosing to attend college does not translate into the likely successful life our culture unfortunately still promises to prospective students.  It is often overlooked -- and Richard Vedder is doing a service to point out -- that if a student does not actually graduate with a degree, the better-paying job opportunities will remain inaccessible for him or her, and they will likely accrue still-harder-to-pay debt in the process.

I have been saying for years that there is a huge risk that new college entrants will drop out, and that published academic studies usually implicitly look at those who graduate, ignoring a roughly equal number who fail to graduate from college in a timely manner. That is the huge flaw in the Does College Pay? studies annually produced by Sandy Baum for the College Board.

Crossing The Tracks: Ethics in Business Education

Or, why I enjoy working with the FSU Business faculty on Ethics education.

Today, over in the School of Business and Economics, we held a second workshop emerging from a fairly new, needed, and exciting partnership, the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP).  Since I provide the history and initial purposes of  the project on our website (which is still under construction), I'll skip over it here, other than to mention three things:

First, EBEP is a collaborative partnership between philosophers and businesspeople.  Second, the model of collaboration EBEP relies on and embodies involves philosophers, as subject matter experts in Ethics, assisting business faculty to develop high levels of competence and confidence in teaching Ethics and in assessing student learning and development in Ethics. Third, the project arose symbiotically both from needs perceived on the side of the businesspeople and from opportunities grasped on the side of the philosophers.

The first and most pressing specific project we saw the need to tackle was reviewing, then developing a better version of, a scoring rubric used for grading student essays responding to typical ethically problematic cases in Business. Again, the history of that process, including the developmental stages of the rubric, is summarized on the EBEP website, so rather than cover that same ground, I'd rather think and write about why this particular exercise took on importance for a philosopher and for business professors, and what took place between us in today's grading workshop.

There is a stock joking response to any mention of Business Ethics:  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" It reveals a common, longstanding, and doubtless not entirely unmerited perception of businesspeople, even Business faculty, as not knowledgeable about, as uninterested in, and as unmotivated by ethical principles, concerns, values, let alone theories, figures, and texts. 

The reality is that those involved in business have always had some sort of  interest in ethics.  Admittedly, this may well have often taken the form of explicitly worked out ethical stances which academics (particularly in the humanities) and the intelligentsia have found less than congenial.  There certainly have been many cases of businesspeople clearly and deliberately acting unethically.  Plenty have used moral language and concepts as window-dressing for what they wanted and aimed to do anyway.  It may well be that due to the nature of business and business education, there are some environments particularly corrosive to ethical standards and reasoning, more seductive in their temptations. . . .