College of Humanities
79 We Are What We Read: The Problem of Representation on Undergraduate Philosophy Syllabi
Mykie Valenzuela
Faculty Mentor: Carlos Gray Santana (Philosophy, University of Utah)
Academic Philosophy suffers from what has been called a “demographic problem.” In 2018,only 1% of full-time philosophy professors in the US were black and women professors totaledjust 17%. Progress in recruiting underrepresented groups has lagged far behind other humanitiesdisciplines, particularly in race and gender. I hypothesized, given that undergraduate syllabicontain texts predominantly written by white and male philosophers that students fromunderrepresented groups are less likely to major in philosophy. This theory was explored using19 semesters of syllabi records from the University of Utah Department of Philosophy, fromSpring 2011 to Fall 2018. Using the Simpson’s Diversity Index, originally a biodiversitymeasure. Based on the identities of authors of assigned readings each syllabus receives a scorethat illustrates how representative it is of the different identities of philosophers and authors. Forexample, if a syllabus only includes authors with the same identity, this would score a 0, while asyllabus that represented each identity equally would score a 1. Simpson’s was chosen rather thanpercentage or ratio to represent a more robust representation of identity as it combines both theamount of variation between individuals and the number of identities represented on the syllabus.Identity labels were chosen to match the MAP self-report survey information available to thepublic. Authors that appeared more than once on a syllabus were not counted as being multipleentries of identity for that particular record. Identities were recorded by self-report and historicalrecord. The averaged scores of each semester were used to create a longitudinal comparison withundergraduate demographics in the major of philosophy at the University of Utah. Scores of thegender and race of authors of assigned readings, separately, correlate with the gender and race ofundergraduates in the major. The scores of gender correlated more strongly with demographicsthan that of race. Since the University of Utah has a predominately white student population,further research would contribute to the results found in this study. This novel research studyadds to the literature that supports diversifying the philosophical canon, especially as a benefit tounderrepresented students and the field as a whole.