Philosophy graduates are highly regarded across the public, private and charity sectors. The discipline’s focus on analysing difficult problems, developing creative solutions and explaining these clearly is well recognised as developing widely transferable skills. The subject’s concern with ethics in the broadest sense fosters a sensitivity that many organisations are finding increasingly valuable.
Even so, philosophy students often struggle to see how the work they do cultivates these abilities. On graduation, they can find it difficult to articulate the value their degree provides for the careers they want to enter. As a result, employers won’t always detect the contributions these candidates can make.
The solution is to embed this understanding into the curriculum itself. It cannot just be described to students in the abstract in occasional talks or documents. It needs to be something they experience directly themselves. Only this can allow them to see clearly what their philosophical knowledge and skills can do in the world beyond the campus.
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Here at Cardiff University, we have redesigned our BA and MA degrees with this in mind. Our students will still be focused on philosophy itself, its central issues, classic texts and current debates. And they will still engage with these in the same ways they always have done. After all, that is how the knowledge and skills so valued by employers are developed.
What is new is a theme running throughout our degrees: the usefulness of philosophising in working together to address problems that we face collectively as organisations and as a society.
It is there in the very first semester of our bachelor’s degrees, in a core module that brings together insights from linguistics, literature and philosophy to train our students in writing effectively across genres for a variety of audiences.
It is there in our assessment methods, which make regular use of group video discussions of philosophical problems. Produced using online meeting software, this kind of assessment brings Western philosophy’s oldest genre, the Platonic dialogue, directly into the 21st century.
It is there in the research-led modules we teach in the final year of our bachelor’s degrees and in our master’s degree. Our students can opt to study moral and political aspects of public artworks or beauty standards, for example. They can consider the social inequalities in opportunities to speak and be heard, and what can be done about them. They can analyse the ways that features of social media apps shape our identities and political discussions online.
And it is there most explicitly in our core modules bringing current philosophical work into dialogue with professions outside the academy. In our new bachelor’s degrees, all final-year students must complete a group project that recommends a specific policy or strategy for government or a large organisation. These reports draw on philosophical analyses and debates in relation to an issue of societal concern. Students must also collaborate to present this report verbally.
In our master’s degree, students must work in groups to justify and design an event that brings academic philosophers together with members of another profession to exchange ideas with the aim of benefiting both groups. As with the core module at bachelor’s level, this requires students to form a deep knowledge of a current philosophical issue to see how it relates to professional practice.
This new theme does not displace the content usually found in philosophy degree programmes at UK universities. Almost all our modules at every level are wholly theoretical in content. Almost every module has a traditional essay as the main assessment. Our students will still write detailed analyses of the justification of belief, the nature of the self, the relative merits of consequentialism and deontology, and so forth. They will still read Plato, Aristotle and Kant – and Arendt, Beauvoir and Fanon.
But they will also end up with a clear idea of the relevance of all this to whatever careers they might want to pursue. They will be equipped with the ability, the confidence and the examples they need to explain their education’s relevance in job applications and interviews. Once in their jobs, they will immediately be able to bring their philosophical knowledge and skills into professional discussions with their colleagues.
Many students interested in philosophy as a degree subject will be concerned about its employability prospects, especially if their parents and wider family have not studied at university. We are emphasising this new theme to reassure all prospective students that philosophy is a perfectly sensible degree to take, as well as one that opens up an intrinsically and endlessly fascinating world of thought.
Jonathan Webber is head of philosophy at Cardiff University.
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