$75 Million, for Philosophy?
It was exhilarating to read of Bill Miller's generosity, a former philosophy doctoral student at Johns Hopkins turned Wall Street legend. In January of 2018, the philosophy department of Mr. Miller’s alma mater formally announced his $75 million gift, “the largest by far to a philosophy department anywhere in the world.”
The substantive benefaction “will allow the department, which will be renamed for Mr. Miller, to nearly double in size, to 22 full-time faculty members, while also supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and new courses aimed at attracting undergraduates.”
While departments of philosophy are not traditionally the recipients of such contributions, it was a welcome investment in the progression of crucial qualitative skills, especially in an era when such skills are eschewed from the landscape of learning by their strongest quantitative opponents. Many institutions have tragically decided to downsize or outright eliminate their humanities departments. Case in point, Howard University recently announced its decision to close its classics department as part of a broader "prioritization effort." It forces one to ask: what exactly is being prioritized?
In business, the ability of Mr. Miller to assess the quantitative and qualitative merits for investment in a given entity are the direct result of his humanistic education. In his own words, “[philosophy] has made a huge difference both to my life outside business, in terms of adding a great degree of richness and knowledge, and to the actual decisions I’ve made in investing.”
The humanities, of which philosophy and classics are a part, are broadly characterized as the study of human experience and culture. Effectively, they serve as case studies, but unlike the curricula of business departments - frequent recipients of Wall Street philanthropy - the case studies of humanistic departments are uniquely that: human.
Instead of evaluating the mathematics of a business miscalculation, subjects like philosophy delve deeper, ultimately developing superior interpersonal and analytic skills within the student, far more so than the calculative case studies of MBA programs. Philosophy provides us with a larger - and frequently more complex - frame of reference.
One of Mr. Miller’s more notable decisions, investing in a then-small company called Amazon, was grounded in the philosophical ideals he cultivated as a student. “There was a huge amount of confirmation bias going on with Amazon,” he recalls when considering the skepticism from most Wall Street analysts. “There was an inability to do what Wittgenstein talked about... crisscrossing the landscape from many angles, investigating in many different ways.”
Most of the gurus balking at an Amazon investment relied on quantitative analysis alone, which inhibited their ability to see a broader, more nuanced picture. History is rife with other such examples.
That's because, as written in the Harvard Business Review: “[Business] knowledge can be acquired in two weeks... people trained in the humanities... have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can’t be analyzed in conventional ways.”
Humanistic subjects like philosophy can help us clarify the values, vision, and purpose for the professional organizations of which we are a part. And while departments of academic philosophy are not without their challenges, the skills in which Bill Miller is investing are critical to all human endeavors... business too.
Our collective prioritization effort should therefore be to expand access to qualitative skill development through humanistic education and not focus on the quantitative realm alone.
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Co-authored by David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer, Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans will be published by the Hachette Book Group under the PublicAffairs imprint on September 21, 2021. Now available for pre-order!
