Field Notes of a First-Year

Toward a Sociology of the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department

“Let us not burn the universities – yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse…Suppose Oxford had
snared and disembowelled Shakespeare! Suppose Harvard had set its stamp on Mark Twain!”
– H.L. Mencken

C.J. Sentell
December 2007

In this essay, I will survey the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department from a sociological point
of view. That is to say, my analysis in this essay will focus on the context of a particular
social and institutional setting that is the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University.
While my analysis affirms the sociological premise that “the local situation is the starting
point of analysis, not the ending point,” I begin the essay by outlining some theoretical tools
that guide my analysis (Collins, 20). In the second section of the essay, I examine the
Vanderbilt Philosophy Department and offer several specific proposal for reconstruction.

I. Analytical Tools: Institutions, Disciplines, and Traditions

All knowledge is produced; it is made, not found. Knowledge is the product of particular
people in the contexts of particular situations. In this way, knowledge is artifactual and ideas
are artifacts. Intellectuals and other “knowledge workers” do not stumble upon the facts of
nature or the norms of culture and simply report what they find, but rather are always in the
course of making and remaking past facts and past norms in light of present considerations.
The production of knowledge, then, happens in a variety of ways and in a variety of contexts.
These contexts vary to the extent that individuals and their social, cultural and institutional
milieus vary. Problems, philosophical and otherwise, do not exist free-floating, so to speak,
ready-at-hand before inquiry begins, but rather arise in the midst of concrete interactions in a
concrete world. While this way of framing the production of knowledge grounds the
production in a social base, it is not to say that the relationship of knowledge to its base is
unidirectional. Rather, “the relationship between knowledge and its social base is a
dialectical one, that is, knowledge is a social product and knowledge is a factor in social
change” (Berger and Luckmann, 87). Thus, knowledge is both produced within a social
context and is, in turn, productive of that social context.
While this analytical framework for the production of knowledge is applicable to
specific cases of philosophical and otherwise intellectual forms of knowledge, the work of
 2

John Dewey expands the sociological premise to include all forms of thinking, not simply its
most theoretical and abstract formulations. According to Dewey, philosophy is just one type
of thinking among many that attempts to find varying degrees of certainty in an uncertain
world. In terms of the philosophical tradition, Dewey traces this “quest for certainty” from
the Greeks, who held that if philosophy were truly to aim at certainty, it could not be
concerned with the realm of doing or making, but must focus its efforts on the search for the
eternally and necessarily true. Dewey traces this bifurcation between knowledge and action,
between theory and practice, through the modern philosophies of Locke, Spinoza, Kant, and
extrapolates its effects for much of the epistemologically and metaphysically oriented
philosophy that follows in their wake. By maintaining this division between theory and
practice, Dewey claims, the mainstream philosophical tradition has divorced itself from the
conditions that gave rise to it in the first place, namely, the uncertainties of everyday life.
For Dewey, philosophy grows out of the problems of life, it does not stand over and
against an independent reality that is beyond normal reach; it emerges organically from our
fumbling about the world, rather than being handed down through transcendent rationality.
This view is meant to release philosophy from the quagmire of “timeless” questions and call
it back to cultural relevancy by addressing the concerns and problems that face communities
in the present. Writing a few years before the appearance of his most metaphysically
adventurous work, Experience and Nature, Dewey argues that an important philosophical
and cultural reconstruction would occur when philosophy “ceases to be a device for dealing
with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for
dealing with the problems of men [and women]” (MW 10: 46).1 Within the limits of this
argument, it is important to note, contain Dewey’s account of the origins of philosophy as
well as a prescription for its future office; indeed, for Dewey, the two were and are
inextricably linked.
Dewey’s account of philosophy is simultaneously psychological, sociological, and
genealogical. Psychologically, philosophy arises out of a real cognitive need to attempt to
gain certainty and security in a world fraught with uncertainty and insecurity; it endeavors to
render the world intelligible by means of ideas that facilitate explanation, understanding, and
control. The urge to philosophize, to seek adequate answers to the complex range of

1
I note the sequence here because it is interesting that Dewey develops his meta-philosophical stance,
which is firmly grounded within a sociological account of philosophical knowledge, before writing one of
his most “philosophical” works; this fact, one can only hope, indicates Dewey’s intention to provide a
rubric under which to read his own work, as well as the work of others.
 3

problematic experiences is, in other words, itself simple and basic to the continuation of life.
Sociologically, philosophy is a particular form of cultural response to the experience of
uncertainty that confronts individuals and communities in particular times and particular
places; it accounts for various philosophical doctrines, systems, and positions as concrete
artifacts directed at the precariousness of lived experience as it was then had.
Genealogically, these responses are connected across time, through generations of people
living in actual communities who face actual problems, clinging together in the dark against
the experience of indeterminacy. This connection across time is a literal, physical one:
because the material arrangement of cultures, with all their concomitant economies of
community, body and experience, persists through time, the problematic situations
experienced by cultures persist through time. Philosophy, in this way, is both a product of
and constitutive of material traditions of communities across generations.
The strong and central sociological thesis of Dewey’s account is that all forms of
thinking are ideational constructs that arise within a given culture so as to deal with a
particular set of problems and concerns, which are, in turn, both the necessary conditions of
and the grounds upon which various understandings of the world are constructed. Even logic
itself is subject to this thesis: rather than Aristotle’s logic embodying the necessary and fixed
logical structure of the world that timelessly obtains, Dewey argues that Aristotelian logic
was “relevant, and grounded in, the subject-matter of natural science as that subject-matter,
the structure of nature, was then understood” (LW 12: 416). While many of the responses
typically read as part of the philosophical tradition have been articulated in a universal voice,
and therefore have at least implicitly denied precisely that cultural historicity Dewey
attributes to them, the account he offers embraces these intimations to immortality as simply
characteristic of the philosophical experience, which are, in turn, based within everyday
experience. While the attempt to escape the present into an everlasting and unchanging
realm of existence and truth has been a prevalent feature of philosophical inquiries past and
present, the propensity to speak declaratively, in the universal voice, and under the aegis of
finality has been part and parcel of the history of philosophical authorship.
According to Dewey, then, philosophy is a cultural phenomenon whose development
is coextensive with the material conditions of life as they present themselves as problematic.
Problems, actual problems, give rise to philosophical experience; the problems of philosophy
do not exist prior to or outside of experienced life, but emerge rather as responses to
interactions with and within the world. Dewey claims that when the history of philosophy is
 4

understood in this way, the task of philosophy in the present shifts from being concerned with
the timeless and technical disputes of past thinkers – something he variously refers to as
“scholastics” or “dialectics” – and instead becomes an organ for cultural criticism in the
present (LW 1:298). By arguing that philosophers need to return to “the problems of men,”
Dewey is suggesting that when philosophers return their critical gaze to the problems of
contemporary life they will thereby restore philosophy to its proper office of addressing the
ongoing experience of contingency and uncertainty in the present. In this way, the activity of
philosophizing could be rejoined to its generative conditions and thus regain its original
social function.
It is important to note, however, that Dewey is not claiming that the philosophies of
the past were themselves disconnected from their material, cultural, and experiential bases; in
fact, and as I have put the matter above, Dewey is arguing precisely the opposite. The way to
read the history of philosophy is just as the history of particular artifacts, characterized as
responses to the uncertainty and instability of personal and cultural experiences, the primary
(though not exclusive) expressions and transmissions of which have tended through the
written word. Moreover, Dewey is not saying that philosophers need to stop doing
philosophy and instead do something more “practical”. Rather, Dewey reiterates that the
vocational imperative of the philosopher is the reconstruction of practices along more
intelligent lines through engaged cultural criticism.2 Philosophy is immanently practical to
the extent that its critical inquires transform actual practices, beliefs, and forms of life. To
cite but one instance of this insistence, Dewey says:
The depersonalizing of the things of everyday practice becomes the chief agency of
their repersonalizing in new and more fruitful modes of practice. The paradox of
theory and practice is that theory is with respect to all modes of practice the most
practical of all things, and the more impartial and impersonal it is, the more truly
practical it is. (MW 8:82)
That is to say, theoretical inquiry is practical insofar as it renders experience more
manageable, more understandable, and more efficacious with regard to experience yet to
come. The potential of philosophy to reconstruct practices along more intelligent bases
resides in the willingness of philosophers to engage people where they stand, in the middle of
their own experience, and in between the experiences of others. Thus Dewey considers
philosophy to be an immanently practical endeavor insofar as it is attentive to the

2
Cf. Dewey, MW 12:80, 187, 256; and LW 1:295; 8:29.
 5

experienced problems of life and responsive to task of making practices more intelligent. But
Dewey’s account of the social origins of philosophy, as well as the way in which it situates
philosophical inquiry within the limits of particular genealogies or traditions, neglects the
crucial role institutions play in the production of knowledge. Put differently, Dewey’s
account of philosophy omits the central context in which philosophy has come to be
produced, namely, the institutions of higher education, of which the modern research
university stands as an exemplar.
The institutionalization of intellectual life is closely bound up with the particular
mode of intellectual activity now grouped under the rubric of philosophy. This link,
importantly, is historical and contingent; there is nothing analytically or conceptually
necessary about the link between institutionalization and philosophy, but it is rather the
consequence of a group of individuals working to affect a transformation of the material base
that supported their intellectual lives.3 This institutionalization began in the late eighteenth-
century with the efforts of Kant, and the generation of German Idealists that followed him,
who worked to establish the modern university system as it now exists. Randall Collins has
shown the ways in which the creation of the modern research university has
centered on the graduate faculty of research professors, and [its] material base has
expanded to dominate intellectual life ever since [the late eighteenth-century]. Kant
straddled two worlds: the patronage networks of the previous period, and the modern
research university, which came into being, in part through Kant’s own agitation,
with the generation of Kant’s successors. (618)
In other words, the contemporary American university, qua institution, is a direct descendant
of the German university system, and therefore makes “the period from 1765 to the
present…institutionally all of a piece” (Collins, 618). Since this time, the primary home of
philosophical activity has been within the institutions of higher education.
That the institutions of higher education are now the primary spaces in which that
aspect of intellectual life known as philosophy is conducted is a well-established empirical
fact. In many ways, then, the question “What is Philosophy?” can be answered
sociologically: philosophy is simply whatever is being done in the departments of

3
It is worth highlighting the way in which bread and reason are connected. When one begins to analyze
the justificatory practices that individuals and communities deploy in route to rationalizing their activities,
one must be equally aware that the interests of maintaining an income so as to provide food, shelter, and the
other requisite material goods of life often take on an overriding importance. Put yet another way, one
must be careful about engaging positions that deal with people’s sources of livelihood and income, as these
exist in a close, rapid relation to the reasons they offer to justify their professional activities.
 6

philosophy found in institutions of higher education. This answer may seem question
begging or simply unsatisfactory. And, indeed, a more robust answer can be given to this
question, but only after one accepts it as an entry point for inquiry into the question. Put
differently, it is only by recognizing the inextricable connection between institutions and
activities that the activities whose nature and meaning is being sought can be circumscribed.
All activities – even primarily intellectual ones such as philosophy is often taken to be –
occur within a social context. And when these activities become such that they do not
typically occur outside of institutional contexts, those very contexts must be the starting point
of analysis. To understand the process of the institutionalization of intellectual life that
began roughly in 1765 and which has continued into today, then, requires further
interrogation into the concept of the institution.
An institution, most generally, is an organization of individuals that structures the
activities of those individuals in a particular way. This organization and its concomitant
regulation of activity requires legitimation as soon as it attempts to pass on the norms implicit
in its organization to a new generation of institutional members. In this way, “the expanding
institutional order develops a corresponding canopy of legitimations, stretching over it a
protective cover of both cognitive and normative interpretation. These legitimations are
learned by the new generation during the same process that socializes them into the
institutional order” (Berger and Luckmann, 62). Institutions, then, are the organizations of
habits that guide the activities of its members in a particular way. These habits are
transmitted in the processes of socialization and education, which requires certain structures
of legitimation to account for the value of its habituation.
Thus there is a reciprocal, dialectical relation between institutions, the habits they
inculcate in their members, and the reasons given to legitimate those activities that are
considered central or typical of the organization. As Berger and Luckmann point out,
“[i]nstitutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized
actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution” (54). The
typification of behavior, in other words, is the sine qua non of institutionalization. When the
activities of individuals are regulated so as to produce a relatively homogenous (or at least a
consistent) space of behavior, institutionalization is already underway. The regulation which
produces this unified space of activity, importantly, is not strictly limited to institutions qua
buildings or even qua legally constituted bodies organized toward a particular end.
Institutions, rather, include all forms of behavior typification, some of which are tacit, such as
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the norms of polite conversation, while others are more explicit, such as the conventions of
public morality as they are ensconced in codified law.4 Institutions involve the ordering of
life and its activities, public and private, along channels of expectation and meaning that are
reinforced through the transmission of the institution to the next generation. In this way,
institutions can be thought of as both the material arrangement of individuals in a given
social space as well as the constitutive patterns of conduct that delimit the bounds of
meaningful and acceptable behavior in that social place. The scope of institutions, then,
extends from edifices architectural and legal, to resource allocations financial and cultural.
Institutions are, above all, spaces of order. The space of this order, moreover, is
always constituted by a particular place. In institutions, space and place exist simultaneously,
coinciding and developing in a dialectical relationship. The space of institutional order, in
other words, is constituted by the material singularity of individuals and their activities
existing at a particular time and place. Put differently, institutions do not exist in the abstract,
but are always constituted by actual bodies and powers existing within a given social order.
In light of this, it is important to note that:
Institutions further imply historicity and control. Reciprocal typifications of actions
are built up in the course of a shared history. They cannot be created instantaneously.
Institutions always have a history, of which they are the products….Institutions also,
by the very fact of their existence, control human conduct by setting up predefined
patterns of conduct, which channel it in one direction as against the many other
directions that would theoretically be possible….To say that a segment of human
activity has been institutionalized is already to say that this segment of human
activity has been subsumed under social control….Institutionalization is incipient in
every social situation continuing in time. (Berger and Luckmann, 54-55)
The order that institutions impose upon activity, then, requires discipline. Varieties of
discipline are to institutions as rules are to games. Without discipline, there would be no
such thing as institutions; without rules, there would be no such thing as games. And, given
that institutions both exist within and are the operative structures of social life, discipline is,
ipso facto, a constitutive feature of social life.
Thus, discipline is a necessary condition of institutionalization. It is not a sufficient
condition because, again, the work of legitimation is always already underway through the

4
For an fascinating account of the former, i.e., tacit norms of civility, within scientific cultures, cf. Shapin
(1994), especially Chapter One.
 8

transmission of the institutional order to new members. Discipline, in this context, refers to
the specific limitations placed on behaviors within the institutional context. But discipline,
obviously, has another meaning relevant to this discussion, namely, an area of study within
institutions of higher learning. In this context, we speak, for example, of history, chemistry,
and mathematics as being separate disciplines, each of which are marked off by discrete
subject matters and distinct methodological approaches that establish lines of demarcation
between different areas of inquiry. It is neither coincidental nor inconsequential that the
word “discipline” is used in both of these contexts. On the one hand, discipline is understood
to be the general means by which order is transmitted among individuals so as to establish the
limits of meaningful action within social organization. Discipline, in this context, is neither
explicitly violent nor especially coercive, but is instead a function of the scaffolding around
which individual behavior is built according to the joint matrices of social expectation and
typification. On the other hand, however, discipline takes on a more precise meaning by
denoting a particular type of disciplining that constitutes an area of study within the
university. In this context, discipline is a way of thinking, a way of training one to see the
world from a particular intellectualized point of view or framework. Here, disciplines are
differentiated from one another through the identification of methods and contents
distinguishable between disciplines.
It is important to note the way in which the two distinct senses of institution track
along the two distinct senses of discipline outlined above. While institutions are both
conceptual and material, disciplines too are conceptual and material. That is to say, to the
extent that institutions are both the conceptual structures around which an individual’s
behavior is shaped and the actual material arrangement of resources and power in a given
society, discipline functions as the regulatory source of that conceptual structure and the
material manifestation of authority in negotiating the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.
The move from what I have termed the conceptual senses of institution and discipline
to the material senses of the same amounts of a reification of these phenomena. But it is
more than merely a reification, because these two senses are in a dialectical, mutually
constitutive relation. In other words, and as I have argued above, the conceptual aspects of
institutions and disciplines are immanent from within the pre-existing material arrangements
of the same within society. Berger and Luckmann claim that reification “is the apprehension
of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possible suprahuman
terms…[It is] the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something
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else than human products” (Berger and Luckmann, 89). The key to the concept of reification
for Berger and Luckmann, then, is that it mistakes those aspects of the world that are made
for those aspects that are found. “Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his
own authorship of the human world,” they claim, and that “the reified world is, by definition,
a dehumanized world” (Berger and Luckmann, 89). While this conception of reification is
helpful, there is yet another sense of the term, namely, reification as the making concrete of
that which is merely or simply theretofore abstract. Reification, in this sense, is the
concretizing of the abstract; it is the material instantiation of the conceptual order. But, as I
argued earlier, the material and the intellectual, the concrete and the abstract, are but two
sides of the same dialectical coin, which is to say each reinforces and gives rise to the other.
Thus, reification can be taken to denote a more particular phenomena that involves the
material manifestation of conceptual orders, and this occurs, for example, in the way in
which writing reifies thought and identity or the way in which certain ideologies of
philosophy are reified into disciplinary institutional structures that narrow the range of
acceptable activity on the part of its practitioners.
So, within the academy, disciplines quite literally discipline individuals into a
particular institutional space so as to carry on a specific mode of thinking and writing and
teaching. Because disciplines are situated within actual institutions, which have a limited
amount of resources to allocate, the social and intellectual work necessary to maintain the
5
boundaries between disciplines gains a decidedly pointed focus. This “boundary-work” is
characteristic of institutions whose financial or cultural resources are limited, which is every
institution. In other words, because all institutions have finite budgets of money and
eminence with which to dispense according to merit and import, individuals in disciplines
often take up entrenched positions in order to justify or legitimate their place within the
institutional framework. This justificatory work often takes the form of denouncing certain
subjects as not within the legitimate scope of the discipline or the exclusion of certain sub-
fields as being methodologically under par.
It is no surprise, then, that this “ideology of disciplinary independence” arose in the
very same cultural milieu as the modern research university (Collins, 619). The development
of rhetorical and methodological strategies, and the transmission of these strategies to the
next generation of scholars, is key to maintaining difference and import within an
increasingly specialized and competitive institutional environment. The concept of

5
Cf. Gieryn (1983)
 10

legitimation is again central to understanding the nature of this boundary-work. As Berger

and Luckmann note, “the increasing autonomy of subuniverses makes for special problems of
legitimations vis-à-vis both outsiders and insiders. The outsiders have to be kept out,
sometimes even kept ignorant of the existence of the subuniverse….The insiders, on the other
hand, have to be kept in” (87). Negotiating this boundary, in other words, has a double
function in that it demarcates the space of inclusion and exclusion with respect to individual
practitioners so as to create a unified place for the discipline within the larger institution.
The rise of the modern research university brought with it professionalization, which
in turn brought the distinction between professionals and amateurs, genuine practitioners and
mere dilettantes, to the foreground. The lines between these descriptions have been endlessly
negotiated and disputed since the professionalization of intellectual life, and in their very
disputation the distinctions have been mutually reinforced. Marjorie Garber draws these
distinctions in terms of the “amateur professional” and the “professional amateur” and notes
how these boundaries continue to shift today. She describes the contemporary debate over
the boundary between professionalism and amateurism in terms of a paradox, namely, that
the virtues of amateurism are the goals of the profession, and yet the professional makes the
best amateur (51). But this debate would not be possible if the modern research university
did not maintain such institutional hegemony over the lives of intellectuals. Before the
modern research university, most philosophers tended to be polymaths that addressed a wide
range of intellectual issues. These all-purpose intellectuals, moreover, were either
independently wealthy (e.g., Descartes), or were supported through the intricate networks of
patronage in the form of aristocratic support (e.g., Hobbes), or held perfunctory governmental
jobs (e.g. Lessing). The important point, in other words, is that “before the academic
revolution, the most important and best-known philosophers had for several centuries been
non-academics” (Collins, 638). While there is a tendency to idealize this organization of
intellectual life, it is worth noting the difference, if only to compare the benefits and
drawbacks of organizations past and present. But institutionalization brought with it
specialization and the division of the intellectual attention space into discrete academic areas
of focus (Collins, 619).
In light of the above considerations, it should come as no surprise that philosophy has
been an active participant in the persistent and oftentimes vitriolic disputes of the disciplines
since the establishment of the modern research university. What counts as philosophical and
what does not count as philosophical has, in other words, been a central philosophical issue
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for some time, and has as much to do with philosophy qua intellectual practice as it does with
the institution qua arrangement of resources. In a very significant sense, the important
innovations that have occurred within philosophical discourse since Kant have been answers
to the question concerning the boundaries of philosophy itself. But these philosophical
questions are not different in kind from the institutional questions. While they can be
distinguished analytically – i.e. as philosophical questions within texts and political problems
within institutions – such separation is specious at best and naïve at worst. The central crux
of the sociology of philosophy is that the philosophical and the sociological are intimately
and inextricably linked. One gives rise to the other and each develop in a mutually
constitutive relation to the other. Thus, while the impulse to make claims in the form of
“Philosophy is…” has been a distinguishing feature of philosophical discourse throughout
history, after the sociology of philosophy such claims are more likely evidence of a
fundamental category mistake. To continue to engage in such boundary-work in an
unreflective or overly serious sense is, in other words, evidence of a certain naiveté with
respect to one’s own activities. The sociological has now enriched the philosophical, and to
neglect this insight is to be intransigent to the evidence at hand; it is to resist a certain
institutional and disciplinary self-consciousness.
Because the question regarding the boundary of the philosophical can be answered in
an empirical way does not, of course, mean that there is not a philosophical question
regarding that boundary. Rather, it means that any inquiry into the nature of that boundary
must be carried out in light of the relevant social facts and the arrangement of particular
material and cultural resources. And because such boundary-work occurs only at the level
particular individuals in particular institutional contexts, it is hardly worth talking about
philosophy in the abstract. There is always philosophy begin done here, by this person, or
there, by that person. There is no philosophy in general; and, contra Nietzsche, who wanted
to add philosophers to Aristotle’s gods and beasts living outside the polis, philosophers too
are always already living within a particular polis, at a particular time, with a particular group
of people, and are acting with particular interests and for particular ends.
With this in mind, I would now like to turn to a particular institution of philosophy
and examine it in terms of its institutionality, its disciplinarity, and its legitimation functions.
But first a note on being a member of the subject of analysis: being a current member of this
institution poses certain problems for the objectivity of analysis. More specifically, as a
graduate student member of this institution, I certainly have certain interests and concerns
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that would not, for example, be necessarily the same as a tenured professor of three decades,
or an undergraduate student, or the departmental administrative assistant. But, since one
cannot do without a perspective altogether, I will proceed by way of affirming my place
within the institution so as to heighten the awareness of my potential selective emphases and
guard against their undue influence.

II. The Vanderbilt Philosophy Department

Vanderbilt – both in terms of the philosophy department proper and the university more
generally – is in a time transition. In many ways and for many good reasons, the university is
attempting to overcome various facets of its history, which includes some disgraceful
episodes and roles as an elite Southern institution. These attempts at reformation include, but
are obviously not limited to, recruiting a more diverse student and faculty body, revising the
curriculum and augmenting it with centres of specialized study, and raising the profile of
specific departments through a variety of approaches. The philosophy department in
particular has purported to be participating in this transition by seeking a way forward as a
coherent and distinct department that exemplifies the university’s larger mission, vision, and
goals. Whether the department will be able to overcome internal oppositions so as to
participate in this transition remains to be seen.
Vanderbilt University consists of 10 different schools offering a variety of degree
programs. The university employs 2,689 full-time and 315 part-time faculty members, 97%
of which hold terminal degrees in their field. When these figures are combined with the
17,567 non-academic employees, Vanderbilt employs 20,571 people, thus making it not only
largest employer in Nashville and middle-Tennessee, but also the second-largest private
employer in the entire state. Founded in 1873 through a one million dollar gift by the
shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, as of June 2006 the university’s net assets
totalled 4.6 billion dollars and it possessed a total managed endowment of 2.6 billion dollars,
an amount that surpasses the 2005 GDP of every nation in the world except the United States,
Japan, and Germany. Obviously, the financial and cultural resources that this institution has
at its disposal are enormous. Moreover, the history of the growth of the university is
complex and includes periods of openly discriminatory practices and the investment and
influence by many who aimed to guide its direction toward decidedly political ends. While
the details of this history are beyond the scope of the present analysis, the general trajectory
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of Vanderbilt’s institutional history is nonetheless an important feature of which to take

note.6
Like any institution, the history of the philosophy department at Vanderbilt is
constituted by various interpersonal pasts. Many members of the faculty have been at
Vanderbilt for several decades, which makes for a significantly rich cluster of interpersonal
relationships. Of particular note is a sexual discrimination lawsuit over a contested tenured
position that began in 1994 and was resolved in 1999.7 Though the explicit and public
rancour that emanated from this conflict has largely subsided, there remains a palpable sense
of division between parties to the dispute. This episode highlights a further fact of note,
namely, that the settlement of the suit resulted in the first woman receiving tenure in the
department. To date, only one other woman holds tenure in the department, and she entered
with a named chair. So, to put this point more directly, only one woman in the history of the
department has received tenure along the typical professional route from assistant to full
professor, and this decision was contested all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Moreover, in the last five years the department has also undergone a significant influx
of new faculty members. One result of this influx has been a significant revision of the
graduate curriculum, which was spearheaded by several of these new faculty members. The
changes of this new curriculum included modifying the structure and content of
comprehensive exams, revising the language and logic requirements, as well as adding
requirements for modest historical breadth and familiarity with a range of disciplinary sub-
fields. The end result seems to be aimed at producing doctoral candidates who have a
specialization in at least one historical period, e.g., the twentieth-century, and one particular
area of focus, e.g., social and political philosophy. One notable change in the new
curriculum is the addition of a compulsory course for first-year graduate students on teaching
and research methods within the profession, which will analyzed below in more detail.

Communities, philosophical and otherwise

Thus far I have been using the language of institutions to denote the assemblage of
individuals within the context of mutually constitutive disciplinary matrices. I would now
like to alter that language by using the word community to denote the same. This shift is
meant to capture the way in which the individuals that constitute the Vanderbilt philosophy

6
For institutional facts and figures, see www.vanderbilt.edu
7
1999 FED App. 0243P (6th Cir.), Nos. 98-5266/ 5268
 14

department tend to understand themselves to be participating in a smaller organization, based

roughly on the boundaries of the philosophy department proper, but also within the larger
institutional context of the university. To be sure, the philosophy department is itself an
institution, but it also functions within the larger institution of the university. The philosophy
department is, in other words, a sub-set within the university, a smaller and at least
purportedly more tightly knit group of individuals, which the term community is meant to
capture more effectively.
The philosophical community at Vanderbilt has several spheres of participation and
involvement. If we define a community in terms of those individuals who are affected by
actions taken by other members of that community, the philosophical community of
Vanderbilt must be construed more widely than simply the members of the philosophy
department.8 When so construed, the faculty and graduate students comprise but two of the
most obvious categories of community composition. Other categories include undergraduate
majors, affiliated scholars from other institutions, as well as departmental administrative
assistants, student workers, and janitorial personnel. To be a member of the community,
then, is to be affected by actions taken by other members of the community. In this way, the
scope of community boundaries is drawn so as to take into account all such effected
individuals. That said, in terms of direct philosophical involvement – which includes
teaching and learning inside the department and out, participation in departmental functions
and colloquia, and the present and future professional affiliation of its scholars – the graduate
students and the faculty comprise the largest and most central members of the philosophical
community at Vanderbilt.
In terms of the faculty, there are thirty-six faculty members, lecturers, or instructors
that constitute or are otherwise affiliated with the department. Of these, approximately
twelve call some other department, program, or office their institutional home. For example,
there are several philosophers or philosophically-trained faculty who are primarily associated
with the Law School, the Medical School, or the Political Science Department, one faculty
member serves in an administrative capacity, two run the Center for Ethics, two are
associated with the Writing Center, and there are at least two professors emeriti still active
within the department. In addition to these, there are two new incoming faculty members,
and the department continues to discuss additional hires. Among the total existing faculty
(including incoming members), there are 28 men and 8 women. Of these, there are three

8
For more on defining a community in this way, cf. Dewey (LW 2:243-246).
 15

faculty members of colour, or who represent typically underrepresented racial and ethnic
groups within the discipline specifically and the academy more generally.
Though not exclusively, graduate students represent the other primary pole of
philosophical community life at Vanderbilt. While there are approximately 10 active
undergraduate majors, there are approximately forty-three graduate students active within the
department, each at different stages of their degree completion. Of the total number of
graduate students, there are 14 women and 29 men. Currently, there are two students of
African decent and two students of Asian decent. Since 2004, the department has accepted
only the number of graduate students to which it could offer fully-funded assistantships. This
has resulted in an average incoming class of five. The move to accept only those students for
whom the university could fully support was a crucial one. When members of the graduate
student community were differentiated by the degree of support they received from the
university, certain social tensions were inevitable. In other words, when some members had
to constantly worry about the sources of their financial support while others did not, that
inequality tended to negatively affect the interpersonal dynamics of departmental life. As I
understand it, the redress of this inequality has resulted in a positive change in the social
organization of the graduate student community.
For a few decades now, the department has been described both internally and
externally as “pluralistic,” which is most basically understood as not being committed to any
one particular philosophical school or method, but rather open to the co-existence of such
schools of thought within a single department. By their own description, the faculty at
Vanderbilt represent a fairly atypical conglomeration of philosophical perspectives and
specialities. This description is, of course, highly contested from both within and without,
and while it is not my purpose here to inquire if, in fact, the description is accurate, it
nevertheless remains a prevalent feature of the department that it claims to welcome a
diversity of philosophical perspectives, projects, and questions.
It is important to recognize that the philosophy department at Vanderbilt is not
necessarily well-regarded within the profession as a whole. To be sure, within the enclaves
of Continental and American philosophy the department holds a distinct place among the top
institutions covering those traditions. But, as a whole, the program lacks top-tier status
within the contemporary professional philosophical world. To cite one, if contentious,
example: the department fails to appear on the Philosophical Gourmet Report, which purports
to be a ranking of the top 50 graduate programs in philosophy, broadly construed, as well as
 16

specific sub-rankings according to faculty speciality and notoriety.9 This survey is,
importantly, based explicitly on professional reputation. The only place Vanderbilt appears
on this ranking is under the sub-category of “American philosophy,” and here the department
musters only a “Notable” status. Also of note, one faculty member of the department serves
in an advisory capacity to the rankings committee of the Gourmet Report, while another
faculty member has commented critically on the Report’s methodology in print.10 And while
I wish neither to affirm nor deny the validity of these rankings here, I point them out so as to
index a general professional sentiment about the department. Many members of the
department are aware of the department’s status within the discipline as a profession, and this
fact causes a host of reactions among students, faculty, and administrators alike. While some
take pride in the department’s “outsider” status, others find it a source of professional anxiety
and, at the extreme, may even harbour some resentment over the matter. To further situate
this sentiment, many members of the department eagerly await the disclosure of the National
Research Council’s findings regarding the respective rankings of departments along more
“objective” criteria than are used by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Rather than basing
the rankings of various departments in the reputations of individual faculty members and
their work, the National Research Council’s data is based, for example, on the number of
scholarly articles and books accepted for publication.
The reconstructive question thus becomes about how to regard this status and what to
do about it in the future. Some members of the community think that the department needs to
work to become in some way more “mainstream.” Proposals toward this end include
attracting new faculty members so as to raise the professional profile of the department, and
otherwise move to become more like the departments that are regarded by the profession to
be the best. Other proposals suggest the department find a particular niche within the
discipline and focus resources at becoming a top program in that field. One of the most
recent suggestions has been to focus on “Global Value Theory,” which would create a new
area of specialization and make Vanderbilt the de facto leader in the field.11 But what,

9
For more details on the Philosophical Gourmet Report and its operative methodology, see its website
located at: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/
10
Stuhr has been quoted in Lingua Franca and The New York Times regarding this issue.
11
From the proposal: “ We aim to build the preeminent philosophy department in global value theory,
understood broadly to encompass issues of justice, equality, freedom, responsibility, identity, virtue,
beauty, culture, criticism, tradition, and liberation. This goal both enhances and diversifies our existing
strength in value theory; it is also compatible with our long-standing commitment to doing philosophy in a
historically-informed way. Accomplishing this goal requires a commitment to expanding the diversity of
our faculty, students, and curriculum.”
 17

exactly, this field would include is at least not obviously clear, and widespread disagreement
over its potential substance and focus persists. But these two options are not necessarily
opposed to one another, and mediating between them seems to be the most sensible option.
In the view of this writer, the department should avoid trying to become more like the
top departments of the profession because such a pursuit is not likely to succeed, at least in
the short-term, and evidences a peculiar lack of perspective and vision. In many ways, the
department is not ranked with those schools precisely because it fails to fully participate in
the predominant image of professional philosophy in the academy today. This image is
shaped by a thoroughly institutionalized discourse of professionals who direct their energies
into producing journal articles, books, and scholarly contributions for the consumption of
other academics in their fields and sub-fields. The number of philosophers speaking to a
general, non-academic audience – or who are at least being listened to by that audience – is
quite low, which is to say that an overwhelming majority of professional philosophers writing
today are writing to a very limited, technically-oriented audience that are concerned with
specific “philosophical” questions. Moreover, though the dominance of “analytic” or Anglo-
American philosophy may not be as strong as it once was, the analytic attitude remains, on
the whole, the most prevalent one within the top professional Ph.D. producing programs in
the English-speaking world. This framework, of course, is typically contrasted with other
conceptions of the philosophical voice and its praxis, the most common of which falls under
the vague rubric of “Continental” philosophy.12
Now, obviously, within both of these frameworks there are many variations on
themes, and I do not wish to skate over these differences here, as they often consist of subtle
and insightful critiques of different methodologies. Within the last quarter century or so,
however, the profession has had an ongoing and oftentimes intensely personal and vitriolic
debate over the relative merits of each of these general methodological frameworks.
Furthermore, this dispute constitutes one of the most visible manifestations of the boundary-
work philosophers have been engaged in during this time. It is noteworthy that this
boundary-work has been an internal one to professional philosophy and its departments rather
than an external one between philosophy and some other academic discipline. That said,
there is a significant number of philosophers who see the primary distinctions between
analytic and Continental philosophy as outdated, hypostatized, and otherwise overdrawn.

12
For an fascinating analysis of the historical roots of the split between analytic or Anglo-American
philosophy and its Continental counterparts, cf. Friedman (2000).
 18

More specifically, many young philosophers are intentionally working at the intersection of
these traditions, attempting to synthesize the insights of each in the service of new and
historical philosophical questions. So as far as the department’s self-description goes,
Vanderbilt’s attempt to work in between the two prevailing philosophical traditions of the
twentieth century places it in a unique position vis-à-vis the profession more generally.
Vanderbilt’s purported pluralism, then, already constitutes a significant niche within the
profession, and the question then becomes in what ways is it might be most fruitfully
developed. One such way would be to cultivate the difference the Vanderbilt philosophy
department already embodies through the identification and clarification of goals, both
institutional and pedagogical, and augment that difference by selecting potential community
members on the basis of those goals. In other words, rather than effacing the difference
between Vanderbilt and other mainstream schools of philosophy, more work should be done
to differentiate the department from the mainstream.
It would be wrongheaded, then, to work to assimilate the philosophy being done at
Vanderbilt with the philosophy that is done elsewhere, say, at a Yale or Princeton or Notre
Dame. It is, rather, precisely this tension and difference that needs to be highlighted and
explored philosophically. As Collins shows, such tensions and differences have typically
been the central means by which periods of heightened philosophical creativity are initiated
and maintained. The tension is a catalyst, the difference a waypoint between traditions. To
develop the metaphor, traditions are shadows cast against the space of intellectuals operating
in the present. Intellectuals and philosophers are, of course, always simultaneously moving
in the wake of some shadow and are themselves casting a shadow, but the light that causes
the shadow remains the intellectual attention space within a given network of individuals and
institutions. Being consciously engaged in a tradition is much the same as Wittgenstein’s
remark about knowing one’s way around a room: within a tradition, one knows one’s way
around problems and pseudo-problems, and one knows how to use the tools implied by the
problem on the way toward their solution. Philosophers are trained within traditions –
indeed, to think at all one must already be engaged with some tradition; they take up
positions amid the room and kick away their ladders so as to go about the business of
philosophizing. But I am now mixing metaphor, because the image I am trying to convey is
one in which particular traditions are seen as umbras to the globes of the present. And if
traditions are the umbras, then the boundary between traditions is the boundary between the
umbras and the penumbras, or the negative space outside the shadow cast. The tension
 19

between traditions, then, is a site, it is point along the boundary at which traditions can
engage one another in potentially rewarding ways.
But, by arguing against the effacement of methodological difference and for the
cultivation of cross-traditional tensions, I do not wish to argue for its contrary, namely, that
the boundaries between traditions need to be maintained in a rigorous way and simply joined
together in a crude amalgamation. Rather, I am suggesting that the members of the
department begin to more actively ignore the anachronistic dualism between analytic and
Continental philosophy, to resist the temptation to see the department as consisting of two
camps of competing philosophical methodologies, the peace of which rests in a tenuous
balance of power between the two. Perhaps it is needless to say, but a mere détente between
these camps does not constitute a genuine pluralism. By assuming a shallow pluralism, the
department risks locating the balance of power that maintains the peace in a superficial
numerical criterion. Such an attitude was on display, for example, during the recent hiring
processes of the phenomenology and ancient positions. During that time there was at least
one faculty member that explicitly used the “balance of power” language in arguing for the
need to hire an analytically trained ancient philosopher in light of the inherent
methodological alignment of the incoming phenomenologist. By continuing to employ these
distinctions in evaluating the merits of potential colleagues, members of the department
reinforce the seeming self-evident value of such a distinction. The shallow pluralism that
locates departmental homeostasis in this numerical balance of power is, moreover, patently
unethical in that places the source of contention on an individual that has not yet even
become a member of the community. So I am not advocating a continuation of this type of
pluralism, but am rather suggesting that through the dissolution of that boundary the
department may more effectively maintain and develop its institutional difference within the
profession.
One upshot of the above considerations is that new faculty members and graduate
students be selected according to the extent to which they are willing and able to expand the
department’s conception of philosophy by covering under- and un-represented traditions of
thought. More specifically, new faculty could be chosen so as to increase the breadth of
exposure, rather than consolidating areas of departmental specialization. By exposing
students and faculty alike to new traditions, questions, and methods, faculty members could
provide the necessary exposure for future philosophical experimentation. To put this point a
slightly different way, rather than choosing faculty based on their alliance with a particular
 20

tradition, or their eminence within their sub-field, faculty selection could be based explicitly
on criteria that emphasized a desire to represent a genuine diversity of viewpoints and a
willingness to engage in cross-traditional dialogue. Obviously, the risk of this suggestion is
that the department would become a jack of all trades and yet a master of none. But as soon
as this charge is levelled and considered more carefully, it becomes quite clear that
departments themselves can be masters of nothing; only individuals within departments can
be specialists in one sub-field or another. And to the extent that departments do become
homogenous bodies of scholastic perspective and method, they run the equal risk of
becoming static and insular and losing the very material by which further creative thinking is
initiated.
By resisting the urge to focus the philosophical specialty of the department through
the respective specialities of the faculty, moreover, entails nothing about the future
specialization of students. Specialization will occur among those not yet specialized
regardless; by definition, the dissertation is a work of intense specialization. Students will
pick historical periods on which to focus and will chose particular problems to engage and
address. Just because the speciality of the department is dispersed across traditions, in other
words, does not mean that the specialization of the scholars its produces will be dispersed.
Rather, it is precisely through the exposure to diverse traditions and questions that students
will be able to synthesize their training so as to produce genuinely new philosophical
inquiries. But to locate and cultivate the intersections of traditions requires a great deal of
breadth, creativity, and patience on the part of both faculty and students. It requires,
moreover, a thoroughgoing acceptance of the value of experimentalism, and the ability to
follow up on a potential line of inquiry and change tack as lines no longer prove fruitful. It
requires a certain flexibility of the intellect and a certain willingness to try new arrangements
of ideas and insights. These are all issues of pedagogy, however, which I will address below,
but not before stepping back a bit to the ends of graduate education in the first place.

Interests and Ends

Heretofore, I have been speaking as though the reasons for educating graduate students in
philosophy were clear. This is hardly the case, and thus raises the question as to the end or
ends toward which this activity is aimed. To ask this question effectively, the various
perspectives from which such reasons could be given need to be identified, and the sets of
diverse but distinct interests at play need to be differentiated. Empirically, these seem to be
 21

three, namely, the individual graduate student, the faculty (taken both individually and as a
group), and the institution of Vanderbilt as a whole.
Obviously or not, the individual graduate student tends to have the most at stake in
undertaking a graduate education in philosophy, at Vanderbilt or anywhere else. Because of
the relatively few number of positions available, as well as the prominent uncertainty of
employment after completing the degree, applications to pursue graduate education in
philosophy are not generally taken lightly. The application process is by all accounts
competitive, and when this is considered in light of the wide array of the discipline’s various
sub-specialties, the student generally engages in a fair amount of deliberation as to which
programs might be the most appropriate given their interests and educational background.
The factors that go into this decision are many, but the most prominent tend roughly to be
based on such things as the reputation of the department (within the discipline and more
widely), the specific areas and traditions of philosophy covered by particular faculty
members, and the more general atmosphere of collegiality between students themselves and
among the faculty.
The faculty of the department also represent a distinct set of interests and
perspectives to consider when considering the goals of graduate education in philosophy. On
the one hand, graduate students offer faculty the chance to pass on their philosophical values
to the next generation of scholars. In this sense, graduate students are the sites of tradition-
transmission, the importance of which often depends upon the previous work of the teacher’s
career. Obviously, there is as much at stake for the particular teacher in this relationship as
there is for the student. Studying under a specific faculty member whose work is not
influential or will be dated in short order is one of the pitfalls of this arrangement of
mentoring. On the other hand, however, the faculty as a whole have an interest in the success
of its graduate students because their success reflects back on the department’s standing
within the profession. If graduates of the program do well within the profession, this is taken
as evidence of the strength of the training offered by the program.
Finally, the university as a whole represents a substantial set of interests and
perspectives in this analysis. In fact, without the institutional support of the university,
graduate education in philosophy would be significantly more difficult and, therefore in all
probability, significantly less common. Because the university provides nearly all the
financial resources to attract and maintain graduate students, it is apt to call its interests and
support one of the primary conditions of possibility for graduate education in philosophy.
 22

Again, in the long run, the success of its graduates goes on to reinforce the eminence of the
university within the wider context of institutional competition. More specifically, however,
the university’s interests in graduate education are also directly instrumental in that graduate
students in philosophy teach required introductory courses in the core curriculum. This role
of graduate students is particularly important given that students are employed as cheaper
labor for accomplishing the larger and more central mission of the university, namely,
preparing its undergraduates for meaningful and effective lives within the larger society.
Now that the primary interests have been identified, it is appropriate to turn to the
more specific reasons why graduate education in philosophy is undertaken. One such reason
is an abiding interest in continuing the cultural conversation that has been characteristic (and
a caricature?) of philosophical discourse for the last several centuries. Members of every
group identified above can be seen to support this goal in some way, as it is largely abstract
and an ideal at which scholarship aims more generally. Within the scope of this reason,
faculty and graduate students evidence at least a tacit commitment to the value of
philosophical inquiry, no matter how it is actually conducted. The university, too,
purportedly values these things, but its commitment tends to be couched in a more general
terms, e.g., by providing a well-rounded, liberal education to its general student population.
Following this line of thought, a further reason for conducting graduate education in
philosophy is to train the next generation of scholars who will continue this conversation
after the retirement and death of the existing generation of scholars. In terms of graduate
students in particular, there is of course the interest in pursuing a career. Advisedly or not,
many students choose to undertake graduate education so as to give them the credentials to
pursue a career within the academy. In this sense, graduate education is instrumental vis-à-
vis the student and their pursuit of a means by which to support their lives, both intellectually
and financially. Of course, the particular career path of the professional academic typically
comes after one’s interest in philosophy has begun, but many view the career path as
inevitable if they are to maintain an active engagement with philosophy. According to this
reason, then, becoming a teacher is a central aim of graduate education, if only as the
inevitable outcome of a deeper interest. Moreover, to be a teacher within an institution of
higher education is to be already caught up in a system of professionalized standards that
tends to relegate teaching to a second-order activity, behind the primary one of producing
novel contributions to a generalized body of cultural knowledge. These standards, obviously,
are inextricably linked to the reward system based on professional eminence.
 23

But, by almost all accounts based on the number of positions available within the
professoriate, the institutions of higher learning in the U.S. are producing too many Ph.D.’s.
Philosophy is no exception to this professional trend, and may even be one of the trend’s
exemplary cases. There are, in other words, too many applicants for too few academic jobs,
or at least the jobs people actually want. Many doctorate-level graduates end up teaching not
at top-tier research university, but at small liberal arts and local community colleges. This, of
course, is not necessarily an undesirable situation, but one which further begs the question as
to the appropriateness of training received during graduate school. In light of these facts, the
department should initiate an open and earnest dialogue with its members about the reasons
for undertaking graduate level education in philosophy and the possibility (or lack thereof) of
being employed in a desired capacity. Why does Vanderbilt have a graduate program in
philosophy? Whose interests does it serve and who is being served equitably or inequitably
in the process? What is the point of a Ph.D. in philosophy? The answers to these questions
cannot be answered in the abstract, prior to engaging in an actual conversation. Nor can they
be answered for every institution offering graduate education in philosophy. Rather, if these
questions are to be answered adequately, they require an active engagement on the part of
students and faculty at Vanderbilt.
With respect to the problem of employment, instead of focusing solely on training
graduate students to be academicians, the department could begin to think through some of
the ways in which philosophers could work outside of the hallowed halls of the ivory tower.
By restricting the efficacy and utility of a doctoral degree to professional philosophy, the
department (and the academy more generally) does a disservice to itself and the larger culture
in whose service it stands. The narrowly focused career path typical of early twenty-first
century academic philosophy is, in large part, simply a failure of imagination. Through
various institutional apparatuses, the seeming inevitability of this career path stifles the
possibilities of philosophers contributing to the development of their culture’s social
consciousness through the reconstruction of actual practices in ways that do not involve
publishing in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy or even in Philosophy and Public
Policy.
By most accounts, philosophers tend to think that philosophy is in some ways
important to both individual lives and the collective social future. If such a premise is not at
least tacitly present, it is doubly unclear why one would dedicate a career’s worth of energy
to its practice. Rather, I suggest that the doctorate degree in philosophy is an eminently
 24

practical degree to the extent that it prepares individuals to carry out independent research
and writing into the cultural problems of their day. But it can potentially be so much more as
well. In this sense, graduate education that is circumscribed to being an apprenticeship into
the guild of professional scholars is fundamentally lacking in imaginative solutions to
contemporary problems, both inside the academy and out. Such an education merely
transmits and legitimates norms of inquiry and modes of thinking that were handed down
from the last generation of scholars who, in turn, received their norms from the preceding
generation.
Education is always a particular form of socialization. It socializes students into
thinking about the world and their place within it in a particular way. Education habituates
students into particular modes of inquiry and rewards, both socially and professionally, the
behaviors that are prized within a given institution or discipline. But an education that is just
this contains nothing in particular to distinguishes it from indoctrination into a cult of
professional experts who regulate the boundaries of community membership.

The Program and Its Pedagogy

My analysis so far has been concerned to situate the Vanderbilt philosophy department
within the larger context of institutions of higher learning that support communities of
intellectuals who identify themselves as philosophers. I suggest that when the theoretical
insights outlined in the first part of this essay are coupled to an analysis of the material
arrangement of resources and persons that is the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department, an
important perspective is gained as to the potential ways in which the department could guide
its reconstructive efforts in the future. More specifically, I have argued that a lack of
sociological perspective as to the interests and ends at work within the department and
university leads to a certain lack of perspective when it comes to charting a course for
changing the department in the near future. Rather than naively pushing forward with
reforms aimed at raising the stature of the department in traditional ways, I have suggested by
cultivating the institutional difference that Vanderbilt already embodies would be a more
fruitful way to proceed. While this course of action, no doubt, includes adding more faculty
to the department whose research areas compliment the current constellation of interests by
augmenting their scope, there are other important areas on which to focus as well. One of the
most promising of these areas, and an area that has received surprising little imaginative
attention thus far, is pedagogy. While the Vanderbilt philosophy department may be unique
 25

in its self-described pluralism, the pedagogical approach outlined in the curriculum is far
from novel. In fact, the way in which the degree is structured, i.e., with the first two-and-a-
half years being devoted primarily to course-work and the last two-and-a-half years being
primarily devoted to researching and writing the dissertation, is roughly identical to the
majority of departments training graduate students in the U.S.. Thus, developing a novel
pedagogical structure could function so as to further differentiate Vanderbilt from other
institutions.
The most obvious place to begin thinking about restructuring the department’s
pedagogy lies in the seminar. Currently, the graduate seminar is the centrepiece of graduate
course work in the department. By rethinking the purposes of seminars, the department
might develop a more distinctive approach to the course-work aspect of the doctoral degree.
Again, like the degree itself, the specific purposes of seminar are at least not obviously clear.
While such purposes may be implicit and assumed valuable by the fact of their long-standing
use within the academy, an explicit discussion of the consequences that result from the
pedagogical experience of the seminar might cause their structure to be significantly altered.
The credit-bearing seminar, moreover, is a distinctive feature of American as opposed to
English and other European graduate educations, and for many it is an attractive feature to
the extent that it continues the intentional and systematic exposure to new texts, traditions,
and questions that is lacking in graduate programs that focus primarily on research and
writing. By dedicating time and space to examining these texts and traditions, students
acquire insights and conceptual tools that can contribute to their more specialized work once
it is taken up more directly. Put another way, the importance of continuing course work into
the first few years of graduate study lies in the lack of deep and broad exposure typically
found in contemporary undergraduate majors.
But the classroom does more than allow such exposure to continue by offering a
place for individual students and faculty to engage in face-to-face conversations over issues
and problems found within the studied material. Personal interactions are crucial aspects of
the educational process, whether that process be elementary education or graduate education.
By directly engaging their colleagues and teachers, students learn how to phrase questions,
pose examples, and participate in the give and take of ideas that is a central virtue of
intellectual life. In this way, learning the arts of conversation, which include the arts of
listening attentively and respectfully as well as the arts of speaking precisely and cogently, is
one of the more underdeveloped aspects of seminar pedagogy. This, again, points to the
 26

ways in which the purposes of such pedagogical structures remain unarticulated, or at least
under-articulated.
Under the current program, graduate students typically attend three seminars per
semester for the first five semesters. Seminars are typically focused either on a particular
figure considered to be of traditional importance, a certain historical or topical theme, or a
combination of the two. Typically, seminars consists of both lecture and discussion formats,
which depend upon individual faculty member’s pedagogical style and the intent of the
course. Naturally, the lack of a clear intent behind the seminar can and does lead to a
diminished pedagogical experience. But, more generally, the purpose of seminars is both too
wide and too nebulous. In other words, oftentimes too much is being attempted in single
enterprise. For example, one purpose of seminars seems to be to teach students to become
close and careful readers of texts, and to understand the source of potentially divergent
readings of certain texts within various traditions. Another possible purpose of seminar
seems to be to learn how engage colleagues in respectful and productive ways. These two
purposes can often work at cross-purposes. That is to say, if a faculty member were more
text oriented, a seminar consisting primarily of lecture and exegesis might be the most
efficacious pedagogical practice. If, on the other hand, a course were more focused on a
contemporary issue within the literature, a class of primarily discussion and disputation might
be the more appropriate approach. The point I am trying to raise here is that perhaps these
two purposes should be more clearly distinguished within the graduate curriculum so as to
cultivate these skills in more direct ways.
More specifically, and to further distinguish the Vanderbilt graduate curriculum from
that of other programs, perhaps seminars ought to be disaggregated into several distinct
components. This disaggregation, moreover, could work to obviate the difficulties that
accompany graduate level work that stem from being part of a larger institutional calendar.
As it stands now, graduate seminars are identical in length and in fact are co-extensive with
regular undergraduate classes, classes that the faculty and graduate students themselves
teach. The result of this that all the courses, i.e., the ones being taught and the ones being
taken, follow the same rhythm, beginning at the same time and ending at the same time.
Now as every member of the university knows, the end of the semester is the most hectic and
busy time of the semester. Exams are being given and studied for, papers are due and require
grading, and yet, more often than not, assigned course work continues apace. By suggesting
seminars be disaggregated into distinct blocks of purposes and focus, what I am suggesting is
 27

that courses at the graduate level be taken out of sync with courses at the undergraduate level.
For example, instead of having just one type of seminar structure that continues for an entire
semester, perhaps there could be two distinct types of classes offered throughout the same
time period. The first type of class I would propose would be ones characterized by short,
intense periods of closely reading a particular text or author. These classes could perhaps
meet every other day and complete a difficult text in, say, a three week period. The purpose
of these classes, again, is to get exposure to a text or set of text in a direct way. Another type
of class could then be devoted almost completely to discussion and conversation. The
subjects of these conversations, importantly, would be the materials written by the class
participants. This type of class would be much more on the model of a workshop wherein
pieces of writing are distributed ahead of time and students come prepared to offer feedback
in a formal but conversational atmosphere. According to this proposal, then, perhaps two
reader sections and two workshop section could be completed in a single semester.
This proposal is meant to address the way the structure of the semester works against
the habits of good thinking, writing, and discussion skills. While the beginning part of the
semester is relatively open, the latter part of the semester is over burdened with work and
obligations. As many are well aware, good thinking takes time, and good writing takes even
more. The department does a disservice to both of these pursuits to the extent that it
continues to perpetuate an acceleration of work toward the close of the semester. This
proposal would allow the intent of the scholarly activity to be more clearly defined, thereby
allowing the pedagogical experience to be sharpened in the process.
But, if for some reason such a proposal were found unfeasible, the department should
definitely rethink the tempo of the semester seminar anyway. What I mean is this: assigned
readings should stop anywhere from two to four weeks before the ending of the semester so
all to allow the seminar participants to share their writing projects and get feedback from the
group. Seminars during this time would consist of participants passing around drafts of
essays and short presentations of their theses, ideas, and arguments so as to solicit
constructive criticisms and suggestions. Not only would this benefit the papers written for
the seminar, but it would also facilitate conversations between students working on similar
topics and questions. So many potential conversations are missed simply because we remain
ignorant of the subjects on which our colleagues are writing; so many connections could be
made between persons and ideas that are currently being missed in our largely isolated
intellectual lives. Moreover, this type of schedule would lighten the reading load as the
 28

seminar progresses so as to allow more time to write. This just makes sense. At the end of
semesters everyone is extremely busy trying to balance new, often quite important, reading
material, all while trying to give birth to a seminar-size idea and paper, all while trying to
teach, grade, and appropriately attend to private and familial affairs. This would, of course,
also work toward making us better conversationalists, better listeners and responders. It
would work toward integrating our analytical eyes and our analytical ears. With the tendency
to be much better readers than listeners, our philosophies too might benefit from some better
conversational skills.
Two further ideas to increase the pedagogical distinctiveness of the department
include designing seminars in concert with graduate students. Seminars could be constructed
more effectively by soliciting feedback as to what figures and topics graduate students are
interested in. These interests naturally change as various individuals migrate in and out of
the philosophical community. For example, in one series of years several graduate students
could be very interested in topics such as Marx and Freud, while a few years later there is a
significant interest in the connections between philosophy and literature. Now, this proposal
raises the issue of equity and balance between what graduate students are interested in and
what graduate students need to learn. This, in turn, points to a potential deficiency in the
curriculum by not having a standard set of courses offered regularly as a core set of
knowledge and skills the department considers central to graduate education, which, again,
raises the question as to what end graduate education is aimed. Another idea would be to
allow graduate students in their final year of dissertation work to teach an upper-level
seminar on their dissertation topic. This could be a very fruitful space in which to test the
ideas and arguments of the dissertation, as well as allowing graduate students experience
teaching a more focused and intense course. It could also serve as a recruitment tool, as
many programs do not have such a option for their upper-level graduate students, and many
such students at Vanderbilt appear genuinely excited by that option.
I would like to conclude these considerations of pedagogy by addressing a recent
addition to the curriculum that has caused a significant amount of discussion and dissention,
namely, PHIL 301: Teaching and Research Methods. This course was brought to Vanderbilt
by a recently hired faculty member from another university, and was required of first- and
second-year graduate students for the first time this year. This course consisted of three
sections – teaching, research, and professional development – and seminar visits by every
faculty member of the department. While many students found the faculty visits enjoyable,
 29

and the first two foci of the seminar helpful, the professional development section was
entirely dogmatic, narrowly-construed, and superficial. This section of the seminar
unreflectively regurgitated the current mainstream standards of the profession and
perpetuated the seeming inevitability and necessity of pursuing the typical career progression
of a twenty-first century academic philosopher. This course ought to be overhauled
completely, integrating more discussion and interrogation as to the causes of this seeming
inevitability and necessity. Moreover, the course should be revised so as to introduce a
thorough amount of reflection on what it means to do philosophy and what it means to be a
philosopher today. Not only would this course be an ideal place to begin a discussion about
the potential ways in which philosophy could be practiced outside the academy, it is also the
ideal place to begin to raise the levels of reflective awareness about what the practice of
philosophy entails within institutions of higher learning. In short, rather than being a naïve
inculcation of professional standards, this course ought to serve as the starting point of
critical analysis over those standards; instead of being a space of passive acceptance over a
tacitly accepted conception of philosophy, this course ought to be an active examination of
the history and sociology of the discipline as it is inherited and transmitted today.
This, finally, points to the way in which critical thinking about the practices of the
department and discipline are lacking a formal mechanism within the department. In other
words, now that the curriculum has been revised, the department needs to take steps to see
that the consequences of these revisions are studied and discussed within the near future.
Such discussion should lead to further revisions and additions in light of the consequences
they produce. Institutionalizing critical review is no doubt difficult, but without it new ideas
risk becoming ossified in the ongoing development of the institution. Constructing a
structure through which critical review is initiated and implemented would, moreover, work
to increase the efficacy of the department’s experimental comportment to philosophical
pedagogy and practice.

The Department and Democratic Life

I would like to conclude my analysis of the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department by examining
its governance structure and the attitudes surrounding it. The governance of the department
hinges on two sets of standards, one external and one internal. The external standards by
which the department governs itself is dictated from the office of the provost of the
university, while the internal standards by which the department governs itself stems
 30

formally from a set of by-laws developed by the department. (More informally, of course,
the department governs itself through a diverse set of historical precedents and institutional
memories that are at times in tension with one another.) These by-laws are not well-known
within the department, but the incoming chair of the department intends to re-emphasize their
function in the course of self-governance. That said, under current departmental practice, all
important departmental matters are discussed and decided among the tenured, full-time
faculty at faculty meetings. The graduate students have elected two representatives to serve
as informal envoys to the faculty at such meetings, but these representatives are neither
regularly informed nor are they necessarily invited to attend all its meetings. Such
invitations, in other words, seem to be extended on an ad hoc basis, which reemphasizes that
the status of graduate students within the governing structure of the department remains
informal, anecdotal, and largely inconsequential.
If the department wants to affect a sincere transformation of its stature within the
profession, it ought to begin with a thorough reconstruction of its own practices vis-à-vis the
way in which the department is governed. By reconfiguring the channels of authority and
participation that characterize the political life of the department, the philosophical
community at Vanderbilt stands to create a distinctive place within the profession, and to
practice more genuinely the deep commitment to democracy that is constitutive of the
philosophical tenets held by so many members of that community. To put the matter a bit
more forcefully, the department remains governed by a traditional, hierarchical structure that
disenfranchises more than half of its community members. If there are thirty-six faculty,
lectures and instructors, forty-three graduate students, and ten active undergraduate members
of the department, then the question of the democratic legitimacy of less than half of the
community governing the rest must at least gain prima facie consideration. And the question
gains even more focus when one considers that hardly all of the doctoral degree holding
members of the community are actually members of the faculty; non-full-time faculty, i.e.,
lecturers, instructors, and affiliated scholars, are not granted membership or voting privileges
on the faculty. This fact significantly lowers the number of individuals who have a voice and
a vote over the decisions that affect the life of the community.
With this in mind, it is hardly worth disputing that the levels of democratic life in the
Vanderbilt Philosophy Department are disappointingly and distressingly low, especially
given the explicit research interests of so many of the faculty. John Stuhr, to cite but one
example, has made numerous arguments in print that democracy is not simply a form of
 31

government but a personal and social way of life.13 It is worth quoting Stuhr at length on
American democracy more generally because it is so obviously applicable to the political life
of the department:
We fail to renew and revitalize American’s democratic inheritance, acting as though
yesterday’s hard-won investments and tomorrow’s rosy projected earnings always
will be adequate for needed social expenses today. We thus fail to bridge the
growing gap in America (and elsewhere), for example, between new powers of
inquiry and communication and their infrequent, haphazard actual employment for
genuinely democratic purposes. Rather than exploring and realizing new possibilities
for public inquiry, participation, and self-government, we instead achieve by default
political, economic, educational, environmental, aesthetic, and religious exclusion of
people from effective decision making about their own lives. At the same time, we
fail to recognize that this increasing cultural disenfranchisement undermines and is
incompatible with the ideals of American democracy itself. Here complacency
fosters absolutism, both inside and outside of America. It converts social, economic,
political, scientific, and moral arrangements that fostered democracy at earlier
particular times and places into sacred, revered, timeless institutions, practices, and
relations. It dogmatically turns once effective historical means into eternal ends –
ends supposedly beyond the demands of progressive social reconstruction. (2003, 48)
While there are many similar passages one could cite from Stuhr (and several other members
of the department) in this regard, this passage highlights and affirms the central claims of my
argument about the inadequacy of the governing structure within the department. First, it is
insufficient to assume that past democratic practices meet current democratic needs. Second,
it is unacceptable to rest content with a polity that systematically disenfranchises members of
a community from the decision-making processes that affect their lives. Third, the failure to
recognize and ameliorate gross disparities of voice and representation within the life of a
community fosters absolutism and reinforces the patriarchal, hierarchical structures that have
been and continue to be pervade our cultures large and small. Finally, this complacency
reifies institutions and their communities into static forms of political organization that works
against the needs of individual empowerment and social self-governance as they are
experienced within the course of community life. Moreover, and as I have argued above, all
of this is evidence of a deep lack of reflexive awareness about the ends and means of

13
Cf. Stuhr (2003), pgs. 46-93
 32

activities personal and professional that we are engaged in as members of the Vanderbilt
Philosophy Department. It is, in short, the concrete manifestation of a certain lack of respect
for individuals as they exist within common institutional frameworks.
All this is to say that, at present, the way in which this department is governed is
based on a sharp division between the tenured and tenure-track faculty, on the one hand, and
the non-tenured lecturers, instructors and affiliated faculty, the undergraduate and graduate
students, and the non-academic members of the Vanderbilt philosophical community on the
other. There can be no doubt, of course, that the permanent faculty members of the
department form an integral constituency of the community, and that in their more permanent
capacities they deserve a significant, if decisive, role in governing the community. But there
are other constituencies as well, whose interests are not always taken into account by the
reigning channels of authority and governance. This raises a question with which I began
this analysis, namely, who, in fact, is a member of this community and who is not? If one of
the central criteria of community membership involves the formal recognition of their
political agency in that community, the philosophical community at Vanderbilt dwindles
considerably to include only those full-time, tenured faculty. And empirically, this simply
does not add up to the actual members of this community. There is, then, a significant
discrepancy with the purported boundaries of community membership and its actual
boundaries, between the recognized legitimacy of certain forms of political organization and
its unquestioned underbelly of hierarchical rule.
The way the department is governed, moreover, is evidence of a certain tacit
pedagogical comportment between teachers and students. This comportment is most simply
characterized by the attitude of the faculty knowing what is best for its students. While this is
an extremely complicated issue, which I cannot go into full detail here, I can highlight one of
its central problems. By structuring the governance of the department along a strict
bifurcation of faculty and students, the faculty affirms an attitude characterized by Freire as
the “banking concept of education,” wherein
knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon
those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto
others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and
knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as
their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own
existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their
 33

ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence – but, unlike the slave, they never
discover that they educate the teacher. (53)
While perhaps this situation is not as extreme vis-à-vis graduate students and faculty, by
denying the graduate students a formal voice and vote within the life of the community the
faculty are complicit in perpetuating an anti-democratic way of life in the name of education.
Thus, at present, this pedagogical temperament remains reflected in the political structure of
the department. In its stead, Freire argues for a pedagogy wherein the dialogue of education
is the practice of freedom (77). By reconstructing the political mechanisms of community
governance to include more members of the community, the Vanderbilt Philosophy
Department could work against the cultural and institutional grain by taking the practice of
democracy more seriously.
My specific proposal for reconstruction would include the following. First,
enfranchise those members of the community that currently lack an actual and efficacious
voice in the governance of the community. This would include graduate students,
undergraduate students, non-tenured lecturers and instructors, as well as non-academic
personnel. Based on numbers and interests, this might include granting the following voting
rights to the following constituencies at all meetings of the department: 1) graduate students
would be granted two official voting representatives, 2) non-tenured faculty, lecturers and
instructors would be granted one representative vote, 3) undergraduate students would be
granted one official voting representative, and finally 4) non-academic personnel would be
granted an official voting representative. Moreover, the by-laws should be re-written to
reflect this reconstruction of political organization within the department and should include
these new representatives in the various committees of the department, i.e., hiring
committees, colloquium committees, and even admissions committees. Not only would this
alteration of the governing structure make the department stand out professionally and
institutionally, it might also significantly reduce the amount of committee work which is now
required of only faculty members. As always, an extension of rights includes an extension of
responsibilities. For those constituencies that are willing to accept such responsibilities, such
rights ought to be extended accordingly. In this way, “faculty meetings” would be
transformed into “departmental meetings” that included all of the relevant constituencies of
the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department.
Such a reconfiguration gains all the more force when one considers that a primary
goal of graduate education is to teach students how to become faculty. Indeed, and more
 34

generally, the process of education is precisely the process of the child becoming adult; it is
the education into adulthood, into responsibility and agency, and this education is obviated at
every turn where teachers treat students as passive receptors for their authority and
knowledge. To the extent that education effectively integrates the younger members of the
community into the community’s governing structure is the extent to which education
accomplishes one of its most fundamental aims. At the graduate level in particular, how does
a department expect to educate its student into the professoriate if it does not begin to
incorporate their skills, efforts, and voices? This is to say that an important – indeed, perhaps
it is a central – aspect of the pedagogical aims of graduate education is missed by excluding
graduate students from the political decision-making procedures of the community. If the
dialogue of education is indeed the practice of freedom, then the practice of freedom is also a
process of education, and the department is fundamentally lacking with respect to both. The
faculty shirks a pedagogical duty by failing to recognize the pedagogical potential of
including more voices rather than less in its deliberative democratic processes.
One such pedagogical moment that continues to be missed in the way the department
is currently organized consists of the way faculty members could take that opportunity to
model deliberation and conflict among equals. But, unfortunately, rancour among the faculty
is a well-known and all too accepted fact of community life in the Vanderbilt philosophy
department. The ethos and pathos surrounding departmental meetings is renowned for its
comedic levels of hostility and pettiness. And this is not to say that it is not similar
elsewhere. Certainly it is. But the point is to not be like elsewhere. It is to be here, and to be
a productive group of scholars and thinkers here, together, now, not in some future, more
intellectually homogenous or cohesive department. It is to be here now and live according to
the best ways available to us. If such ways are reflected in current practice, no reconstruction
is needed. But if the actual organization of the community is in significant tension with those
ideals and experiences of past forms of life – and it seems to me that they are – then an urgent
reconstruction of practices is most certainly in order. In this way, augmenting the current
governing structure of the department might have a positive effect on the attitudes of what is
now a governing elite answerable to no one but themselves. The addition of new official
members to the current political constellation might inject a apparently needed dose of
insight and perspective; it might work to rearrange the current political stalemate that seems
to have arrested the creative potential of a group of creative people. Indeed, perhaps the
inability of the faculty to forge a viable course for the department’s future is indicative of a
 35

lack of governing legitimacy. By infusing new members of the community into the
governing body, the department may reinvigorate its political life and begin to forge a new
consensus on how to think and live together as a philosophical community.

Philosophical Futures
In this essay, I have attempted to undertake a general institutional analysis of the Vanderbilt
Philosophy Department. Operating below this analysis, there has been a more general
question as to the ways the university qua institution facilitates or militates the learning of a
set of texts and the practicing of a way of life that the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt
University wishes to promote. Although I do not offer a definitive thesis in answer to this
question, I hope that my analysis has highlighted some of the potential strengths and
weaknesses of the philosophical community at Vanderbilt. Obviously, one of the central
problems with institutional life is that institutions are simply not very adept at changing
themselves. Whether it is institutional momentum or institutional memory, habits die hard.
One of the most difficult things to accomplish is an experimental institution, or an institution
that builds into itself an apparatus for review, critique, and revision. But just because this is
difficult does not mean that it is impossible.
Moreover, and in light of the foregoing analysis, I am left with the question as to
whether we in fact have the time or the will to be the community we claim we are or want to
be. With respect to this question, I am not hopeful, at least in terms of the current
institutional organization of a graduate education in philosophy. And what are the
implications – both institutionally and philosophically – of this point if we are unable to be
the community we claim to want to be, whether that be through a lack of time or a lack of
consensus? The conclusions to these questions remain open precisely because, as Dewey
says, “[t]he issue is one of choice, and choice is always a question of alternatives. What the
method of intelligence, thoughtful valuation will accomplish, if once it be tried, is for the
result of trial to determine” (LW 1:326). So in our efforts to make the institutions in which
we live more experimental, more democratic and responsive to the needs of the present, it
remains crucial to remember to cultivate within ourselves the requisite hypothetical
comportment to our own ideas, experiences, and beliefs. We might just surprise ourselves.

C.J. Sentell
Department of Philosophy
Vanderbilt University
Spring 2007
 36

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