Diversity in philosophy courses - an empirical approach and request for feedback

Last semester, I taught introduction ethics for the first time. I introduced plenty of interaction in the classroom with focused small discussion groups. Overall, I was satisfied with how it went but there was one big disappointment: I had hoped to make this course more diverse, but I did not succeed in that goal. For one thing, I only had one non-western topic, namely the Confucian concept of jen. We also worked on the topic of the philosophy of disability, with Elizabeth Barnes' excellent article in Ethics (I have now also bought her book and hope to explore this in more depth). I think this was particularly interesting to teach, as we ended this session with the story of the woman who wanted to be blind, and I had students discuss her decision and the decision of the doctor who was willing to help her. The students gave considered, sophisticated responses. Overall, I feel the addition of diverse materials improved the course. I had about 40% readings by women authors. 

Still, my overall feeling was that I did not succeed in making this course sufficiently diverse. This made me curious about several things

• What do we mean by a diverse syllabus? Women authors?  Non-western philosophy? Readings by non-white/non-western philosophers? Authors with disabilities? Philosophical approaches that are traditionally marginalised such as the philosophy of disability or the philosophy of race?
• What, if anything, do we think is an acceptable minimum percentage of authors who are minorities? 
• How do students respond to diverse courses? Is their engagement with the materials different?
• Why do we find it important to have a more diverse syllabus?
• Which obstacles stand in the way of having a more diverse syllabus?

Reflecting on this last question, for me the obstacles were that, as a non-specialist in ethics, I found it hard where to begin and how to find suitable materials to start teaching. Introductions, handbooks and readers don't have much diverse material. Second, I worried about having a course that was too non-standard (I wonder if others have this worry too). I felt it was my obligation to teach at least Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, Mill's utilitarianism,... Since semesters are only 12 weeks in the UK, this means that at least half the syllabus is already filled with white Western men. I do think my students need to learn this basic stuff, as some of them will go into graduate school or maybe will need ethics in their later career, and it would be odd if they didn't know it.

I will be presenting a paper at this conference in Nottingham in the fall where I will discuss these issues. For that, I would need to gather some data, and I think of doing this through a survey. In the survey, I would focus on a few courses: Ethics, Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind (maybe a few more but not too many more) and ask participants for each of these whether they have tried to make their course more diverse, what diversity means, and what obstacles they have faced, perhaps also some examples of things that worked well. I would be interested in hearing suggestions from Cocoon readers on what I could further include in this survey, and I would be glad if people who want to testrun it could e-mail me so I could send them a try-out version to see if everything runs smoothly. 

For the survey, which I will circulate as soon as IRB approval is obtained, I am interested in all kinds of responses, ranging from people who don't think we need to specifically aim for a diverse syllabus, to people who would like to but have not yet done so, to teachers who try but face obstacles, to those who have successfully included a wide range of materials. 

Comments

[Wesbuc]

Presumably the goal of doing this is to establish just or epistemically good outcomes, which in turn, would end up informing what people mean when they say a course is sufficiently diverse. But I suppose you could test that, in other words, why people want to diversify their courses and if rates they find acceptable cohere with their stated goals. It would be interesting to know if any one reason takes priority, for example because they think it will increase interest of students, because they think valuable material is being overlooked, because it is fair in and of itself, because they feel political pressure to do this, etc.

[Sara L. Uckelman]

A colleague of mine, Simon James, writes quite a bit on Buddhist environmental ethics, and even has a book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Environmental-Ethics-Ashgate-Philosophies/dp/0754613682

It at least ticks the "non-western philosophy" ethics box!

[Untenured Ethics Professor]

Pursuing diversity either for its own sake or in response to political pressure shows a lack of intellectual seriousness about the content of what we are teaching.

Think about how math professors should design their syllabi. Should the gender or race of the people who first proved theorems even be a consideration in the choice of which theorems to present? The suggestion is absurd. A math course should teach the concepts, theorems, proofs, and skills that undergraduates need to know.

Philosophy typically does not prove results with the conclusiveness that mathematics has. Nonetheless, philosophy aspires to the truth, and unless one is teaching it from a skeptical perspective, one cannot regard the choice of material to teach as an arbitrary choice or as a political choice. In an ethics course, in particular, if you think that ethical theory aims at and is moving towards the truth, you should choose topics accordingly. You should present ethical concepts and arguments, including interestingly unsound arguments, that you think can get students closer to understanding moral reality.

There are nonetheless two good reasons to consider diversity in syllabi. First, there are philosophers who have made important contributions to value theory that have been neglected for unjust social or political reasons. These philosophers include non-Western thinkers and members of disadvantaged groups in Western societies. Since we non-skeptical, non-relativist ethicists want to get the truth, and since we have reason to believe that some work that would get us closer to the truth isn't being discussed for bad reasons, we should make efforts to learn more about this work. We should then include unjustly neglected work on our syllabi when we think that doing so would be the best way of helping our students learn to think well about ethics.

If a syllabus fails to do this, the complaint should not be that the syllabus lacks diversity. The complaint should be that there is a specific figure or a specific concept that students ought to know and that is not on the syllabus. Don't say, "There are no women on this history of political philosophy syllabus. That's bad." You could justifiably say, "If one teaches Jean-Jacques Rousseau without discussing Mary Wollstonecraft's response, won't students be missing something important?"

Second, some courses in value theory include a selection of concrete or applied topics. Instructors have some discretion about what topics they could appropriately include. Here it is appropriate to respond to students' interests and to choose topics that are likely to draw students in. It is also appropriate to select topics that are socially important but that have been neglected for unjust reasons.

[Untenured Ethics Professor]

I should add--the last three paragraphs of my previous comment focused on value theory because that is what I teach. Certainly there are philosophers whose contributions to other areas of philosophy have been unjustly neglected!

[Amy Olberding]

This sounds like a wonderful project. I do think that one of the challenges is shifting away from reflexively assuming a set of "essentials" for a class as broad as introduction to ethics. The "essentials" wind up defining the whole field and I think part of the purpose of diversity is to acknowledge that, absent much serious time and attention to wider materials, we really don't know yet how to define "ethics" and hence derive a set of essentials. That's more radical than many would like, I'm sure, but I do worry that we automatically consider the usual western suspects (Kant, Mill, Aristotle) as untouchably sacred. And this in turn can lead to all else looking like optional color, with the choice of plugging in this or that always calibrated against what room is left over following the "essentials." I get the worry that students heading to graduate school ostensibly need to know their Kant, Aristotle, and Mill in order to be counted credibly trained. But that's part of the problem too, I think, and I'm skeptical that intro topical surveys are really providing any real, heavy, substantive grounding at any rate.

[Nathan Nobis]

I tried to make a list of race-related readings that are commonly used in introductory courses here:

http://dailynous.com/2015/05/28/intro-philosophy-books-and-race/

https://goo.gl/EtPGfY