Ding-dong! Philosophy is dead!

It happened.

At my university, the provost followed up on the president's plan to eliminate athletics a few academic programs, including philosophy, by formally submitting the paperwork to the campus curriculum committee.

What good does philosophy serve in a university anyway, right?  For that matter, who cares for philosophy in the real world outside the ivory towers!  It is not as if philosophy provides any kind of guidance to one of most pressing questions that people wrestle with: What is a "good life" to live?

I am sure the favored academic disciplines of criminal justice, business, computer science, and the like, provide clear and concise answers to students to the question, "what is a "good life" to live?"  So, when those programs provide all those clear answers, why duplicate the effort through a philosophy program?  It is an enormous waste of taxpayer money and the tuition that students pay.

Of course, I am being sarcastic!

The sciences, business, and criminal justice, do not address the questions that overwhelm most of us, which (from my post in 2015) Tolstoy articulated so well:

The question is this: What will come from what I do and from what I will do tomorrow--what will come from my whole life? Expressed differently, the question would be this: Why should I live, why should I wish for anything, why should I do anything?  One can put the question differently again: Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me? ...

These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.  They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers."

These questions and more suddenly became painfully important in the age of Covid-19.  When friends, family, and neighbors, were all kept apart by an invisible virus that killed people, many of us were compelled to consider the questions that Tolstoy brought to our attention.

Later as the vaccine distribution began, we were forced to think about questions that are philosophical, like how do we prioritize who gets the vaccines first and who should go to the end of the queue.  But, of course, it is during these Covid times that my university is axing the philosophy program!

But we knew this was coming.

In this post in May 2020, I quoted Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote:

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

It is a shame of the nth order that an undergraduate university is getting rid of its philosophy program.  And, oh, the geography program, too, is gone.