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Unabridged Version: Do We Need More Black Philosophers And Anthropologists (And Fewer Black Scientists)?

[NOTE: An abridged version of the following appeared here.]

You've all heard the old saw: when all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. My blog, Discriminations, devoted primarily to discussing racial preference issues, is my hammer, and more than a few of my friends (and others) think I have a tendency to see perverse racial policies everywhere. Sometimes I'm tempted to agree, but then I see the uproar produced by Howard University's consideration of eliminating or downsizing its departments or programs in philosophy and anthropology and I realize that troubling racial arguments really are everywhere, that higher education, at least, is in danger of racializing just about everything.

According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education,

[l]eaders of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Anthropological Association have urged Howard University to preserve programs in their respective fields as it contemplates cutbacks as part of a major reorganization of its academic offerings. The associations worry such moves at the historically black institution would harm attempts to bring black scholars into their disciplines.

But why worry? Exactly why, that is, should Howard, with about 10,000 students (7,000 undergraduates), pour some of its no doubt scarce resources into producing more blacks with undergraduate degrees in philosophy or anthropology, even granting the reasonable assumption that a few of them would go on to graduate school and careers in those fields? And why, exactly, is it important for there to be more blacks in philosophy and anthropology? Is there philosophy or anthropology that can only be done by blacks? Wouldn't every black philosopher or anthropologist produced by Howard by definition mean one less black in another field? Is having more black philosophers or anthropologists more important than having more black literary critics or chemical engineers or even lawyers (don't answer that)?

Since Howard feels it must reduce some programs, why and how do the members of the philosophy and anthropology associations presume to tell Howard that their fields should be spared the cuts that instead should be imposed on others? Let's look at what they say.

The philosophers are soliciting signatures for a petition to the president of Howard whose preamble asserts that demoting philosophy there

will weaken the university's commitment to the kind of humanistic self-examination that underwrote the US black freedom movement; and it will repudiate the legacy of philosophy at Howard, a legacy forged by the likes of Alain Locke, one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance.

I could, of course, point out that most academic philosophers (and other academics, including anthropologists) have long since abandoned the philosophy that "underwrote" the civil rights movement, i.e., the principle that individuals should be judged "without regard" to race, but doing so here would be unduly argumentative.

But wait; there's more. Peter J. Markie, chair of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession, wrote to Howard president Sidney Ribeau to oppose the proposal "to reconfigure" Howard's philosophy program. His letter makes it sounds as though the fate of Western Civilization (if the anthropologists will excuse such a hegemonic, value-laden term) rests on Howards's decision about its philosophy department.

"The future of Philosophy," Markie ponderously declared,

depends on the development of minority scholars, the expansion of philosophical research into new or long-neglected areas of inquiry, and the maintenance of Philosophy's central role in ethical and public policy debates of national and global importance. The Howard Philosophy program, as it currently exists, strongly supports all of these goals.

Again, why? Why, exactly, does the "future of Philosophy" depend on "the development of minority scholars"? Like any field, academic philosophy depends on developing new scholars, but why does it matter what color they are? Why does "Philosophy" require minority scholars in general, or Howard graduates in particular, to pursue "research into new or long-neglected areas of inquiry?" Does "Philosophy" regard Asians as minority scholars? If so, how many more of them are needed? If not, are they, and whites other non-minorities, somehow incapable of pursuing research in new areas?

In a separate letter to president Ribeau, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton and Chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association, was also almost exclusively concerned with race, beginning with his own apparently race-based qualifications to discuss race:

My bona fides in addressing you on this subject are these: I have played a role in developing the modern philosophical study of race and in shaping the field that is now called Africana philosophy. I have worked hard my entire career to make sure that there is a more welcoming place for African-Americans as students and colleagues in the field of philosophy. And, as the first person of African descent to receive the PhD in philosophy from my own alma mater, Cambridge University, and (so far as I know) the first black President of the Eastern Division of the APA and the first black chair of its Board of Officers, I have every reason to be conscious both of the progress that has been made over the years in integrating our field and of the fact that we still have a distance to go.

Appiah proceeded to list four reasons why reducing the role of philosophy at Howard, and all but the last, which reads like an afterthought ("strength in the liberal arts is rightly considered an important gauge of the strength of a university..."), were variations on the theme that "philosophy continues to have a relatively small proportion of black scholars."

Howard, he writes, as "the only HBCU that has both the BA and the MA in philosophy," has over the years hired bright black philosophers.

Shutting down Howard's department, given that fact, would undermine the effort to recruit talented black students to philosophy. It would signal the closing of one important door to our field.

That would be regrettable in view of the second consideration, which is that philosophy continues to have a relatively small proportion of black scholars. The American Philosophical Association, through the Committee on Black Philosophers and the Committee on Inclusiveness, has made strenuous efforts over the years to do something about that problem.

Like Markie, in short, Appiah simply assumes that it is a "problem" if blacks choose other fields over philosophy. Neither writer explains why "Philosophy," as a discipline, requires more blacks, what race-based qualities of mind or intellect blacks have to contribute to the field that can't be contributed by others.

One philosopher at Howard, however, has made a rather striking argument about why his department should not be downsized. As quoted by Inside Higher Ed, Prof. Charles Verharen argued that "the most general problem that philosophy solves is self-knowledge," an endeavor that "carries a special meaning at Howard" because "[c]oming to self-knowledge for African Americans has been distorted for 500 years using the tools of science, economics and politics."

Prof. Verharen almost sounds like the anthropologists encountered in my recent essay, liked above. In any event, the four Howard anthropologists made a similar argument, reproduced on the American Anthropological Association website. "The consequences of a closure," they argue,

will not only negatively impact students and faculty at our institution, but it will also have a bearing on the discipline of anthropology overall, the African American community, and other peoples of African descent. This decision will affect our abilities as a discipline to recruit minority students and give students of African descent exposure to current anthropological research.

Again, the argument that reducing anthropology offerings at Howard will be bad for the discipline of anthropology is asserted but not supported, and the horrible consequences for "the African American community" and "other peoples of African descent" seem greatly exaggerated.

Implicit in these race-infused pleas to save philosophy and anthropology at Howard is what I have called, here and here, the "C'est Moi!" defense. Briefly, as used to justify race-based affirmative action, the "C'est Moi!" defense asserts the policy is justified because it produced ... me! That argument, lurking by implication in the arguments directed at Howard, are almost explicit in a column by Penn anthropologist John L. Jackson, a Howard graduate who writes frequently on race for the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I didn't major in Anthropology at Howard," Jackson writes.

I was studying film in the School of Communications. But when I was a senior, one life-changing course with physical anthropologist Michael Blakey (linked to the bones excavated from what was then a newly-discovered antebellum African Burial Ground in Manhattan) sealed my professional fate. Howard's Anthropology Program convinced me to get a Ph.D. in the discipline, and like many of my colleagues, I would be devastated to see it go.

Well, we wouldn't want that.

Finally, there is a large, unrecognized irony in these arguments that philosophy and anthropology must be preserved intact at Howard. In The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity I noted that sometimes

it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren't more women [and minorities] in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain more of them

In More "Diversity" STEM-Selling a few weeks later I noted, again,

that every month or so (or so it seems) a new report appears pointing with alarm to the "underrepresentation" of women or blacks or Hispanics or Aleuts (or usually all of the above) in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, math and outlining STEM-"diversity" steps that must be taken in order to save the nation from destruction by competition in the "new global economy" with those more diverse than we (like the Japanese?).

As Inside Higher Ed reports, the changes proposed at Howard are

in keeping with a vision staked out by Ribeau, who assumed the presidency in 2008. Graduate studies and, in particular, doctoral research will grow more central to Howard's mission, according to this new vision. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics will become areas of emphasis, as will the health sciences.

I argued in the two pieces linked above that the push for STEM ?diversity? is misguided, for many of the same reasons I think the arguments discussed here about why philosophy and anthropology at Howard should be immune from cutbacks are misguided. But it strikes me as unusually presumptuous for leaders of academic professional associations and other academics with disciplinary axes to grind to lecture the president of a leading HBCU about, in effect, what is good for blacks, and to do so without arguing that Howard's decision to produce more STEM graduates is misguided.

Full post as published by Discriminations on December 09, 2010 (boomark / email).