University Times

Robert B. Brandom

The following is an excerpt from Robert B. Brandom’s Feb. 27 address to the Board of Trustees.

One of the glories of contemporary American academia is the decentralization of excellence it exhibits — what has come to be called “the American model.” Until about 50 years ago, we had a handful of elite universities maintaining uniformly excellent academic departments across the board — and the vast majority of world-class scholars, researchers and experts in their fields were to be found in them.

This was still the centralized, snobbish European configuration whose paradigm is the national role played by Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, and the Sorbonne in France. It is the attitude epitomized in ordinary life by the revealing road signs outside every village in France, with one arrow labeled “Paris,” and another labeled “Autreparts” — everywhere else.

Now any serious American research university can be expected to have some world-class departments, and most of their departments will have at least some world-class faculty members.

The University of Pittsburgh was in the vanguard of this radical decentralization, and the creation of the philosophy department at Pitt was an index event in that structural sea-change in academic institutions. It was the achievement of a visionary, entrepreneurial provost [Charles Peake] who saw an opportunity in tensions in the Yale philosophy department (then ranked second nationally, after Harvard). In a coup that still reverberates in our discipline, he persuaded a critical mass of Yale philosophers to move here. (I’ve also heard it said that the fact that a philosophy department is quite cheap to support, relative to, say, a biology department, had something to do with this choice.)

The two best American philosophers of their generation were [William Van Orman] Quine at Harvard and Wilfrid Sellars at Yale. When Sellars moved here in 1963 — to stay for the rest of his long career, becoming known as “the sage of Pittsburgh” — the new philosophy department he joined became a “spire of excellence” within the University, which gave impetus to the process of transformation and development that has brought Pitt from where it was then to where it is today.

The most recent National Research Council rankings put our philosophy department second in the nation in quality of both graduate and undergraduate programs — behind Princeton, and (for the first time) ahead of Harvard. Yale is ranked 40th. There is, of course, a spurious precision to such academic league tables, but it is a fact that for the last 30 years a consensus of the knowledgeable would rank our department solidly in the top 5 or so nationally.

Indeed, internationally, we are classed with Oxford — the best department in Britain — and well ahead of Cambridge. One concrete confirmation of that assessment is Oxford’s repeated attempts to raid our philosophical faculty. When I was department chair, my colleague John McDowell — who succeeded Sellars as University Professor, and is arguably the deepest and most important philosopher of his generation — was offered the Wayneflete chair of metaphysics, in an effort to lure him back there. The London Times, reporting the offer, listed some of the eminent people who had held it, and finished: “and more recently, it was held by John Locke,” the great democratic theorist and contemporary of Isaac Newton.

That chair comes with a knighthood, a perk we were hardly in a position to match. I regret to say that the Wyckeham chair of logic they approached me about some years later does not involve an eventual knighthood — but in any case, not being a British subject, I wouldn’t have been eligible for one anyway. McDowell turned them down to remain at Pitt. (When I asked his wife whether she was wistful about not becoming Lady Andrea, she charmingly and generously replied that it was not such a big deal as that, since it would have been his title, not hers; she would only have been Andrea, Lady McDowell.) He has subsequently turned down offers from Chicago and Harvard.

What keeps him here, and keeps the rest of us here, is an unparalleled community of colleagues and students, which provides the best possible environment in which to do one’s work. We attract some of the very best doctoral candidates in the world. And we have been exceptionally successful at placing them in distinguished faculties after they finish their Ph.D.s. McDowell’s most recent student just joined the Harvard faculty, and one of mine just got tenure at Berkeley. Others are senior faculty at Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, Chapel Hill and a host of other institutions.

The decentralization I’ve been talking about also plays an important role in attracting upper-division undergraduate philosophy majors to Pitt as transfer students. Students elsewhere who realize during their first two years that they want to major in philosophy are in increasing numbers also realizing that the power of our department gives the opportunity to get a world-class education — and the portable credentials that go with it — without having to be at, or pay the high fees for, an expensive elite university. Since, as you know, attrition during the first two years is an ongoing problem in [arts and sciences], this in-migration of highly qualified and talented upper-class philosophy majors represents an important counter-trend.

Philosophy majors, however, are not the locus of our greatest impact on undergraduate education at Pitt. The nature of the discipline ensures that the number specializing in it is always going to be rather small — typically 80-90 at any one time — most of whom will go to law schools (which very much like philosophy undergraduates) rather than going on to Ph.D. programs in philosophy.

The faculty and administration long ago made the decision that the thing to do with all these high-powered philosophers is to get them up on their hind legs in front of undergraduates. Accordingly, every senior member of the department offers an introductory philosophy course every year — typically structured as two lectures a week by the professor, supplemented by one or two small-group discussion sections per week, led by one of our doctoral students. And every undergraduate who takes a bachelor’s degree takes one such course at some point in his or her career.

At least for a couple of hours a week, they listen to and talk with people who are pushing back the frontiers of the discipline, have published a shelf-full of books, and lecture all around the world. One of the things I’ve always thought was special about my alma mater, Yale (where my son just started as a freshman) is that they have a policy across the board of having their most distinguished faculty teaching the most introductory courses, so that the most students are exposed to them. That’s the policy we’ve adopted in the philosophy department.

As a result, the number of undergraduate student-contact hours per senior faculty member in the philosophy department is the highest in [arts and sciences].

The students are not always initially happy about being required to take these courses, though our exit evaluations of satisfaction are very high. This underlines what is wrong with thinking of our students as customers, whose desires ought to drive our offerings. If we just give the students what they want, half of them would do nothing but channel-surf through undemanding courses on the symbolism of the Matrix movies and what the popularity of reality TV says about contemporary culture — with lots of video-viewing time.

A somewhat better model than that of commercial customer is that of professional client, in relation, for instance, to a doctor or lawyer. No one with any sense goes to their counselor and says: Prescribe this drug for me in this dosage, or file a lawsuit for me under this section of the Uniform Commercial Code. One goes instead for access to a different kind of judgment and advice, which one wants to take account of a whole range of possibilities and constraints initially visible only to the professional.

The case of university-level instruction is even further out on this spectrum. What we have to offer is in no small part instruction about what sort of education the students should be pursuing, what is worth reading, learning, thinking and writing about — and what counts as doing that. The students come to us to become familiar with, and be held to standards of excellence of various sorts, as much as for our specific knowledge.