MTSU President Sidney McPhee has released his preliminary response to the Oversight Steering Committee's recommendations. You can view his reponse here: http://www.mtsu.edu/strategic/docs/final/CompleteResponseDocument.pdf. It's 46 pages long, so make sure you have time to peruse it.
The tiny victory: as of now, merging philosophy with another department (it does not specify which department) is "under serious consideration." While I'm not nuts about a merge, it is much better than the elimination of the department. However, I am not relenting. We will be heard.
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The idea behind a merge might well be to teach the basic classes that are needed for gen ed (or possibly interdisciplinary minors) out of another department and get rid of everything else. So in a sense the merge would be the elimination of the department. I don't think elimination without some type of merger was ever even on the table, as some philosophy classes seem to be necessary for gen ed and other programs, and possibly required by TBR (I'm not sure of this last point). In any case the real questions are: will there still be a philosophy major? Will upper division philosophy classes still be taught? Are they going to try to fire any of the philosophy faculty? I don't think the notion of a merger goes any way toward answering these questions, it just seems like a different way of saying the same thing to me.
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