January 23, 2019

To: The Selection Committee for the

Distinguished Faculty Lecture at
Salt Lake Community College

Dear Selection Committee,

Please accept this letter of interest as you consider my application for the Distinguished Faculty Lecture
for Spring 2020. I have always appreciated the commitment to faculty scholarship, intellectual
community, and professional growth that ground the DFL, and am excited to throw my own name in the
hat for this coming year.

Project Title:
The Community College and the Examined Life:
The Value of Philosophy and the Role of the Philosopher

On the motivation and history of my project

Once, in a particularly pithy closing-statement, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey compared the state of
Ohio (the prosecution) to a person who was poking around in the gutter beneath a street light. When a
passerby asked what they were doing, they said they were looking for a dollar bill they had dropped fifty
feet away.

“Then, why aren’t you looking over there?” asked the passerby.
“Because,” they said, “the light is better over here.”

I’ve been thinking about Bailey’s little parable lately.

As I sit in department meetings where, for the sake of external ears, we try to articulate the value of
philosophy in terms of “teamwork,” “argumentation skills,” “problem-solving;” as I attend academic
conference sessions recounting the closing of another philosophy program, in which we strategize how
to best protect and promote our field; I am struck by how good we have gotten at looking for the value
of what we do in the wrong place, just because it’s easier to see, quantify, concretize and measure
under the fluorescent lighting of “soft skills.”

Having spent my own fair share of time and energy reflecting on the (to be sure, veritable)
instrumentally-valuable skillset that philosophy offers the student/worker/citizen, over the last several
years I have turned my attention back over into the shadows, away from the streetlights that have come
to be most illuminated around our discipline, to try to locate and articulate the value of philosophy (and

Department of Humanities, Language & Culture

4600 South Redwood Road
Salt Lake City, Utah 84130
Phone: (801)957.4338 · Fax: (801) 957.4622
the Humanities more generally) as a practice that can, among other things, guard against the
instrumentalization and economization of our day-to-day movements through life, that can shape how
we “attend to” and engage our inner and outer worlds, and that can promote individual and collective
intentionality, reflection and enlarged thoughtfulness: the crucial ingredients of an engaged life and a
vital community.

In the foundational stages of this “what is the value of philosophy” project—for instance, in the effort
that led to my Teaching Philosophy publication on teaching environmental ethics—I explored particular
forms of dualistic and relativistic thinking that are disrupted through the (harder-to-measure, but
critical) habits of mind like “multivocality” promoted in applied moral theory. I presented at a
predominantly-STEM conference on Sustainability, drawing on Josiah Royce, Immanuel Kant, Aldo
Leopold and others to argue that the field of Philosophy is crucial for addressing our pressing issues in
Sustainability Studies because the big problems we face in our society and world are not just scientific
problems. They are not just economic, or design, or technical problems. They often require deep
inquiries into the underlying logics and moral systems we take for granted and carry within us
unknowingly. I also turned back to an old friend—Hannah Arendt—as I explored the role of general
education for cultivating a life of the mind, and a public world; for disrupting the instrumentalization of
“work” and “action;” for rescuing and grounding “thoughtfulness” and the capacity for judgment. Here,
I have been focused on her work on judgment as cultivating through practice an “enlarged thought” or
“representative thinking.”

The above scholarship, in turn, has led to my current project: Reviving Philosophy as a Way of Life—a
cultivation of ways of attending through engaging in “philosophical exercises.” Inspired by the work of
Pierre Hadot, the way-of-life approach is grounded on the conviction that the discipline of philosophy as
it’s practiced today sometimes seems to have lost sight of the fundamental value of philosophy and its
capacity contribute to a life well-lived. The value of philosophy lies not just in the substance of our
theories, nor merely in the critical reasoning skills beneficial for our students’ other classes, careers and
pursuits. The value of philosophy for our students lies in its capacity to affect, inspire, make meaningful,
and make-real the day-to-day lives we live. In the Way-of-Life approach, then, teaching philosophy to
our students is about opening spaces for them to engage with different philosophical ways of life, in
order to see how belief inspires action, affect inspires insight, knowledge inspires commitment,
metaphysics inspires ethics.

Proposed DFL Project: Teaching Philosophy as a Way of Life at the Community College

For this Distinguished Faculty Lecture I propose to present on a series of student workshops I have been
developing and which are built around classic and newly-created “philosophical exercises” in the Way-
of-Life philosophical approach. I propose to engage the DFL audience in some examples of these
workshops as I more generally offer an exploration and reflection on the value and place of philosophy
for our students and the overall community college, and on the role of the philosopher in higher
education today.

This proposed-presentation is part of larger (OER) project—collecting and framing teaching materials on
philosophical exercises—which I began during the NEH Summer Institute on Reviving Philosophy as a
Department of Humanities, Language & Culture
4600 South Redwood Road
Salt Lake City, Utah 84130
Phone: (801)957.4338 · Fax: (801) 957.4622
Way of Life, and that I will continue developing through its next phase, the Mellon Foundation Way of
Life Network. Because this proposed presentation is part of a larger, ongoing project which is
embedded in a robust network of support, and which has already led to related presentations, honors,
publications and accomplishments, there is ample track record here to assure the committee of my
ability to deliver a high-quality project in April 2020.

It is also worth adding here, however, that while this proposed presentation is part of a larger project, I
could very much benefit from the committed support, released-time, (and accompanying deadline…) of
SLCC’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture award, in order to tie together two substantive threads: a) the
WOL approach and the b) reflective work I describe above: understanding and articulating in a
compelling way the value of philosophy in community college education, and the role of the philosophy
professor in the larger efforts to orient and inspire directions in higher education.

At bottom, and in the most simple terms: I am invested in this project because I am concerned about
the future of higher education (especially at the more vulnerable institutions like public state colleges
and community colleges), as we move further away from engaging the liberal arts (and education
generally) as intrinsically valuable, and more towards defining their value in terms of immediate and
trackable benefits they can manifest in employability. I am concerned about the extent to which cross-
disciplinary “wicked” problems seem often to be understood predominantly in their technical and
economic aspects, and words like “values,” “meaning,” “wisdom” and “perspective” get mislabeled as
superfluous.

I would argue that it is the job of the philosopher to call our collective attention to these types of
concerns, to continue to be the gadfly stirring the institution towards the higher ends of education, and
to explore the holistic and essential connections (and tensions) between our disciplines. I would argue
too that it is the job of the community college professor—with our “rubber-hits-the-road” perspective—
to remind our overall disciplines, and higher education generally, about what is at stake in educating
persons.

Thank you for your consideration. Below you will find my proposed budget.

Sincerely,

Jane Drexler
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Humanities, Language and Culture Department
Salt Lake Community College

Department of Humanities, Language & Culture

4600 South Redwood Road
Salt Lake City, Utah 84130
Phone: (801)957.4338 · Fax: (801) 957.4622
Proposed Budget:

DFL Contributions to OER/Website Development: $600

Research/Books/Subscriptions $400
Miscellaneous Supplies/Presentation Materials $200
$1200

Department of Humanities, Language & Culture

4600 South Redwood Road
Salt Lake City, Utah 84130
Phone: (801)957.4338 · Fax: (801) 957.4622