I believe there is self-selection in the professorship as to who teaches what, and this explains this student's experience. Feminism has (relatively) direct po

I believe there is self-selection in the professorship as to who teaches what, and this explains this student's experience. Feminism has (relatively) direct political and behavioral consequences, and so the professors who teach it will tend to skew towards people who want those policies and behaviors implemented. By contrast, what is the agenda of someone who teaches Methods and Problems of Philosophical Thought? Probably that field self-selects for people who don't want, or believe they can, change the world too much in any particular way. Rather, if you asked them why they got into the subject, they would probably say it's inherently interesting, or that they like reading and argument, or have some kind of vague idea about changing the world that lacks much salient political or behavioral implication (e.g., "opening people's minds"). Thus, they will encourage debate and want to make sure the students learn all the ideas correctly (the ideas being what they find beautiful) moreso than actually accept the ideas. After all, who cares if one of your philosophy students goes on to law school thinking it's not impossible he's a brain in a vat? It would be interesting if the philosophy professors had to swap out who taught what. But this is unlikely because of the division of labor and time required to teach and do research---each would feel frustrated. In my own field, transportation engineering, many professors often started out like the first type of professor and wound up like the second. They go into the field thinking they're going to help improve transit or get people to stop driving less or design highways better. But after a while they realize the decisions they impact are (i) extremely context-dependent (e.g., bus rapid transit vs light rail), (ii) made by bureaucrats not the public (e.g., diverging diamond interchanges) or (iii) made politically/randomly without any pretense of optimization whatsoever (e.g., Trump's infrastructure plan seems to have been designed partly by an investor, Wilbur Ross, with no prior interest in roads). At that point the professors become more interested than they were in furthering knowledge for its own sake, which is all that's left over to do and is also what will get you tenure. This leads to something of a balancing act when they teach, whereby the professors want to teach the students the big ideas without discouraging their enthusiasm.