This may seem literally incredible to some readers, so I encourage you to follow the link to the original article and read her endorsement for yourselves.
Meanwhile, here are a few salient excerpts:
I tell people the most useful classes I took were all in philosophy.Rupp closes with this:
Yes, the course of study that has long been denigrated as frivolous and useless in the job market has been the part of my education that I lean on again and again. For work and everything else.
[A] smattering of undergrad philosophy classes taught me something applicable to any and every job: clarity of thought. Name me one aspect of your life that doesn't benefit from being able to think something through clearly.
Because it delivers real skills, philosophy doesn't go out of fashion the way the vague, trendy subjects do. The University of Windsor just announced it's closing its Centre for Studies in Social Justice, after 11 years. I suspect some of the problem there may be that no one can actually define "social justice." And the importance of defining terms to ensure we all mean the same thing when we're talking is one of those skills I picked up in philosophy.
Epistemology -- the study of what we can know -- turned out to be particularly useful, since people love to tell reporters what they believe as if it's a fact. Well, to be fair, they often don't know the difference between their beliefs and facts. They think the mere fact that they believe something is true -- for example, that angels watch over us -- makes it true.
Logic had obvious benefits, as did ethics. And I've found that genuine disciplines that train us to think more clearly in any field never lose their value.
It seems that the postmodernist theory that began infecting the academy some 40 years ago has sent sensible students running, screaming. English was hit particularly hard by this nonsense. Where they once emphasized writing, they now turn students into PoMo phrase generators who are of no use to anyone.
I've long thought that the debate about whether universities should be offering trades training or educating citizens is something of a red herring -- the discussion should be about whether to study knowledge or nonsense. Post-secondary schools are as subject to fashions and fads as any business trying to edge out competitors; they have to fight for public funding and private donors as well as students. All too often that has them promoting programs that are little more than trendy course titles with flimsy credentials. Or selling seats in cash cow courses like journalism.
... I also recall a philosophy teaching assistant, who took a sabbatical from his fat-salaried job in the computer industry to do a company-funded PhD. He had benefited from that wave of computer development that hired logical thinkers to be trained in the new-fangled gizmos. For a brief, shining moment, BAs in philosophy had been hot commodities at places like IBM. One of his pals even wrote patents for companies that developed innovative tools and techniques.Of course, I'm biased, but I think everything Rupp says here is on the mark.
He thought some philosophy courses ought to be mandatory for every undergrad, partly because of the economic and technological upheaval of the time. The prognosticators warned that we would change careers an average of six times and work in jobs heretofore unimagined in this brave new world.
"Jobs change. But if you teach students to think clearly first, they can do whatever else they want to do," was the argument he made.
This is not to argue that all students should major in philosophy (although a minor in philosophy can be very useful), but it is to affirm that taking some traditional philosophy classes (I'd recommend staying away from the "boutique" courses) would not only open up whole new ways of seeing the world, but also train students to think more clearly and more deeply about a much wider range of ideas than they may have ever realized existed.
