[PHILOS-L] MacArthur Grant to Investigate Cuts to Academic Philosophy
Planning Committee
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Investigating Cuts to Academic Philosophy
MacArthur-funded project to document cuts to philosophy
budgets, departments, faculty, majors, courses, and enrollments
October 21st, 2025: We are pleased to announce a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to document the defunding and shrinkage of academic philosophy in the United States.
Philosophers are well aware of losses to the field in the form of budget cuts, faculty layoffs, closed departments, dropped majors, narrowed curricula, and declining enrollments. At least we’re aware of them anecdotally, alongside occasional examples of growth. This project will go beyond anecdotes to trends, and quantify the cuts to the field in the past several decades, primarily in the United States.
The principal investigator is Anthony Beavers (Visiting Associate Researcher, Indiana University). The co-PIs are Catherine Kemp (John Jay College CUNY), Corey McCall (Elmira College), Peter Suber (Harvard University), Mark Valenzuela (Washington University in St. Louis), and David Weinberger (Harvard University).
We aim to release an open-access report of the results in the fall of 2026.
We are a group of academics, mostly philosophers, with nearly a century of collective college and university teaching experience. We’re greatly concerned by cutbacks to institutional philosophy in the US, and began meeting in October 2022 to think about new ways to support the teaching and study of philosophy.
Our discussions keep pointing in two directions — first to the need to document the problem, and second to the need for an alternative and complementary institutional home for philosophy.
We’re tentatively calling that complementary institutional home an Independent Philosophy Institute (IPI). The core idea is for a nonprofit organization to offer small, online philosophy seminars across a wide range of topics, texts, figures, periods, movements, and cultures. It would be administered primarily by philosophers, and exist outside conventional colleges and universities, not subject to their budgets, curricula, staffing levels, or enrollment expectations. Our hope, perhaps after a start-up period, is that faculty could be paid and students could earn transferable credits. (We realize that not all faculty will need to be paid and not all students will need credit.) A related hope is that many or most of its courses would be free of charge, even if it charged tuition for other courses to raise revenue to pay teachers and cover basic operating expenses. The idea is still in the planning stage, and we’re thinking hard about finances, quality control, curriculum, accreditation, governance, and infrastructure, among other central issues.
Please let us know if you’re interested in our research project or deliberations about the future of philosophy by visiting www.futureofphilosophy.org, where you will find instructions for signing up to our mailing list, forms for volunteering, and a sign-up page to participate in an important data-gathering survey. And please forward this announcement to any colleagues who might be interested.
Signed: Planning committee for an Independent Philosophy Institute:
Anthony Beavers (https://www.afbeavers.net)
Visiting Associate Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Indiana University; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Evansville
Catherine Kemp (https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/catherine-kemp)
Associate Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College CUNY
Peter Suber (https://cyber.harvard.edu/~psuber/wiki/Peter_Suber)
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Earlham College; Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard University
Mark Valenzuela (https://provost.washu.edu/people/mark-valenzuela/)
Project Manager, Academic Compliance and Accreditation, Washington University in St. Louis
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