By Julie FrenchThe Daily Northwestern

Over the past three years, Northwestern’s philosophy department has lost six tenured professors, including a rapid succession of four departures in the spring of 2005. But students and staff remain optimistic about their ability to regroup.

In a department where full strength is 16 faculty members, the exodus of one-third of the staff had quite an impact. Course offerings declined, some graduate students had to rearrange dissertation committees, and the ability to attract grad students in certain areas such as metaphysics and epistemology suffered.

The departures likely also caused the drop in rank from 46 in 2002 to 53 in 2006 on the Philosophical Gourmet Report, an online ranking edited by University of Texas at Austin philosophy Prof. Brian Leiter. The rankings are based largely on the reputation of senior faculty, said the NU department’s chairman, Kenneth Seeskin.

“At the moment, we don’t rank that well, and I think that’s because we’re operating at half capacity,” Seeskin said.

The rankings and updates on departing professors made the future of the department appear more bleak than it really is, Seeskin and several graduate students said.

“It looks a lot worse from the outside than from the inside,” said second-year graduate student Laura Papish. Students who use the report as an authoritative guide to the best programs, she added, “shouldn’t be doing philosophy.”

Professors left for a variety of reasons, including retirement and lucrative competing job offers, Seeskin said.

“It was a bit of a shock when it first happened,” said Henry Southgate, a second year philosophy graduate student.

Once the rehiring process began – with the addition of two young professors, Rachel Zuckert and Kyla Ebels-Duggan – the atmosphere of the department improved, he said.

“It’s easier to bounce ideas off of younger faculty,” he said. “It makes a world of difference when you’re developing your own ideas.”

Papish said the new faculty seemed more active in the department, attending talks and socializing with students more often than the senior professors they replaced.

“Officially it was a setback, but it was not a problem for me to adapt to the new faculty,” she said.

Katie Padgett Walsh, a sixth-year graduate student, said she was probably one of the most affected students because she lost a dissertation committee member and had to petition to keep her adviser after he left for the University of Pittsburgh.

“There were a number of people in the department who felt the loss somewhat, but there was no one devastated by it,” she said.

The department will continue to hire new faculty and probably will make four or five additional offers for tenure-track positions by the end of the academic year, Seeskin said. Many professors left because they were all at the top of the field, he said. This time, most candidates the university plans to extend offers to “are just about to move into stardom,” he said, making it likely they will stick around longer than the last round of hires.

“We’re trying to build a farm system instead of trying to be the Yankees,” Papish said.

Graduate students still have been attracted to NU throughout the rebuilding process. For first-year grad Adam Ring, Northwestern’s strength in continental philosophy far outweighed the low rankings.

“There are enough faculty here that I knew I would be able to study what I wanted to study,” Ring said. He added that most of the top-ranked schools did not offer courses and faculty in his areas of interest.

Undergraduates were affected less by the changes. Weinberg senior and philosophy major Johnny Baylor said he knew about the shortage only because his adviser told him.

“I think there’s still tons of courses out there that everybody is anxious to take,” he said.

Within two years, the department should be back to full strength, Seeskin said.

“I am committed to getting this department completely back on its feet,” he said.

Reach Julie French at [email protected].