Sculpin

The most recent episode of House followed awfully close to this script.

I scan a few philosophy blogs once in a while, and every so often I see something pop up again: why are there so few women in philosophy? Wikipedia tells us that “U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly the least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender.” Huh. Well, I’ve made no particular study of the matter, but I can tell you exactly when I decided not to go into it.

I spent a couple of years out of college, and during that time I really got into some aspects of philosophy, especially the philosophy of science. I read Mayr’s Growth of Biological Thought and a little Kuhn, and those led me to Popper and Quine and Feyerabend (who drove me up the wall) and Ruse and Lewontin and Sober and I don’t know who-all. When circumstances allowed me to go back to school, I was psyched. This was gonna be great. I was gonna take “History and Philosophy of Science” right away. I was gonna read all sorts of awesome stuff and have all kinds of awesome arguments and watch out I was gonna kick some butt, oh yeah. I was looking forward to diving in and giving it everything I had, because I liked it with all my nerdy little heart.

So, that’s not how it went. There we were, the very first week, when the prof sat on a desk all friendly-like and threw out to the class this question: what do we need, philosophically, in order to do science? What do we have to assume is true? We sat there in awkward silence. I broke it by saying, haltingly, that we have to trust that the world exists and induction is valid.

I remember exactly what he said: “That’s just stupid.”

You are fucking kidding me was my thought. I may have been hesitant and unused to being a student again, but there was no way I was stupid, and neither was what I said. If you’re going to define the space of the problem, I thought, define the fucking space. It didn’t even occur to me until years later that “That’s just stupid” is not the way to talk to an undergraduate. What threw me was that he went for “stupid” without even bothering with an argument.

So then, shifting his entire body, he turned to a boy near me and got his answer, which was something like, “We have to, uh, be sure that we’re doing good experiments?” And the professor was all “YES!” and I was all, Dear professor, please choke and die.

I believe I switched to auditing the class, but I might as well have dropped out. Except for two very good presentations by my fellow students at the end (history of birth control and history of chiropractic) there was nothing much for me.

It’s like this: imagine there’s some guy you’ve seen around campus, and he’s awfully attractive and seems really smart and funny. And then you’re at a party and you finally have a chance to go up and introduce yourself, whereupon he calls you a bitch and throws up on your shoes. Maybe he’s just had a really, really bad day, but too bad: odds are very good that he is out of luck where you’re concerned, because you’ve got better things to do than determining whether he’s a chronic misogynist shoe-vomiter or just an occasional one. There are too many fish in the sea for that kind of thing. Whether or not he cares, he’s lost his shot.

So that was it. If that’s what passed for a philosophy course, I wasn’t having any. This wasn’t about my inability to handle vigorous argument. I already had a history of thriving on vigorous argument. No, this was about how willing I was to be all but spat on by my professor, and the answer is, not so much. I wasn’t about to invest my time in looking into whether that kind of thing was typical of the discipline or merely tolerated. Not when there were dozens of competing programs that would have been delighted to have me, spit-free. So right there and then, the philosophy department stopped being a contender for me.

Edited to add: What’s sad, looking back, is that I don’t think the jerk professor was even part of the philosophy department. I believe he was actually some kind of hanger-on to the biology department. If I’d realized how disconnected he was from the actual philosophy faculty, I might have given WWU Philosophy a chance. Or I might not have; he may not have been been part of the department, but he was an academic philosopher.