The Philosophers' Cocoon

Listing supervision on a CV?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, an anonymous postdoc asks:

A simple CV question: How, if at all, do you list supervision on your CV?

Should you list supervision at all? Does it matter whether it is MA or PhD supervision? Does it matter if you are chair or a secondary supervisor? Do you put it under teaching or in its own section? Do you give names of the students? Do you give the titles of their theses?

I ask because I am a postdoc at the moment with limited teaching experience on my CV. I am serving as secondary supervisor to two MA students. I wonder if I should include this in my teaching section and, if so, how I should do so (see above questions)?

Good questions! Another reader submitted the following reply:

All the distinctions matter. Have a sub-list for PhDs separating those you are the supervisor for, from those you serve on the committee of; a sub-list for MAs, again, separated. List it under teaching, unless you are a leader of a team or lab with post-docs as well, then have a separate heading for Supervision. Whatever you do do not exaggerate your role to beef up your teaching. It will backfire.

I'm curious whether other readers agree. It does seem to me that it's good to list how much supervision one has done, as some job ads explicitly note supervision experience as a hiring priority. But, beyond that, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure whether it's a good idea to list names of students, as in the US at least my understanding is that all academic information falls under federal FERPA privacy laws. 

Anyone else have any helpful tips or insights?

New Work in Philosophy (NWP) Roundup

This is just a quick roundup of this week's posts over at New Work in Philosophy. This week NWP featured:

• Matilda Carter (University of Glasgow), "Minority Minds: Mental Disability and the Presumption of Value Neutrality" (Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2022)
• Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green State University), “The Epistemic Significance of Social Pressure” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2022)
• Jeffrey Kaplan (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), "A New Problem for Rules" (Forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) (video)
• Charlotte Knowles (University of Groningen), "Beyond Adaptive Preferences: Rethinking Women's Complicity in their own Subordination" (European Journal of Philosophy, 2022)
• Paul Schofield (Bates College) on recent work of Jack Samuel (NYU Law Student)

You can also visit NWP's full archive of posts, and our YouTube Channel and Playlist. Also, if you have recent or forthcoming peer-reviewed work that you'd like to share more widely, please do consider emailing us with a pitch. NWP currently has nearly 1,100 subscribers, and we feature new posts on a rolling basis as they come in.

As our About page notes, 

We welcome unsolicited submissions from any professional philosopher (PhD students or beyond) or anyone who has published philosophy in legitimate peer-reviewed venues.

We particularly encourage submissions from junior philosophers and underrepresented groups in the profession, as well as postdocs, VAPs, and full or part-time faculty from a diverse variety of institutions.

Also, in addition to posting contributions by authors on their own work and the work of others (e.g. book/article reviews), we would like to encourage:

1. 1. Submissions by established (or somewhat established) philosophers that discuss/recommend new work by less/un-established philosophers who aren’t their colleagues or students.

   2. That readers draw our attention to other Substack pages with professional philosophical content, including their own. Substack has a nifty “recommend” feature, and we hope to draw amplify the work of other professional philosophers on Substack, as well.

Please email marvan@ut.edu or barry.maguire@ed.ac.uk to pitch a post or draw our attention to another Substack in professional philosophy that you would like to recommend.

Monist CFPs?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

The Monist used to have a page on their website that listed CFPs for upcoming issues (all their issues are special issues devoted to particular topics). However, I can't seem to find that page anymore. Does anyone know if it exists somewhere, or where else we can see what future issues are coming/which CFPs are active?

Another reader seconded the query:

I have been wondering this exact thing lately, and have been tempted to reach out to them to ask what happened.

Anyone have the inside scoop on this?

How to teach sensitive topics close to students' lives?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

How to teach topics which in some way come very close to the students and their lives or are related to who they are? What I have in mind are cases of teaching sexual ethics when someone in the classroom says she is a victim of a sexual assault, teaching philosophy of disability when there is a disabled person in the class, or teaching philosophy of discrimination when you have 24 white students and one black student on the course? Is there something the teacher should do differently in these cases compared to when the issue is not present in the same way?

These are excellent and important questions. Another reader submitted the following reply: 

I have an experience that is relevant to [the OP's] question. I was teaching a feminist philosophy class for the first time and we often discussed sexual assault. I used an example to explain a concept and, unbeknownst to me, the example I used very closely matched the actual experience of one of my students. She emailed me about it later and requested that I stick to the examples provided in the text. That way, she explained, she will have already grappled with the exemplar situation (at least once) while reading and could be more mentally and emotionally prepared in class discussions. I apologized to her and agreed that her suggestion was very sensible. That's what I did for the rest of the semester and I had no other issues.

Does anyone else have any helpful tips or experiences to share?

How can we help you? (February 2023)

Now that it's been over a month since our last "how can we help you?" thread, it's time for a new thread.

For those of you unfamiliar with this series, this is a chance for you to post openly or anonymously in the comments section below on anything you could use help with related to the profession. After you post your query in the comments section, I will then post new threads for readers to discuss your query.

As usual, feel free to ask questions on anything (within the Cocoon's mission) that you could use help with, including but not limited to:

• The job-market (applying for jobs, etc.)
• Issues in the profession (including issues of social justice)
• Graduate school
• Publishing
• Teaching
• Work-life balance
• Mental health & well-being
• Personal struggles
• Etc.

Ask away - we're here to help! 

Important reminder: if you submit a comment in this thread responding to someone's query, I won't post it, as this makes it difficult for me to keep track of everything in the comments section, particularly which queries I've started new threads on and which ones I have not. However, if you do post a follow-up comment, chances are good that I will post it in the new thread I start on the relevant query. So, do feel free to submit responses. Just know that they won't appear in this particular thread and might instead appear later in a new post.

Good (minimalist) templates for Mac Keynote?

In our January "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'm pretty bad at designing slides for talks and teaching, so I tried searching things like "free" "keynote" "templates" "minimalist," but every search resulted in some website where I needed to register or pay. Any idea where one can find free and downloadable templates for slides, preferably for Mac Keynote (and of course also asking for powerpoint).

Anyone have any tips or templates to share?

Tips & resources for publishing a trade book?

I haven't asked many questions of my own on the Cocoon for a while, but today I have a few. I'm curious about the process for publishing a 'trade book', that is, a book pitched toward a general audience. I have a couple of ideas for one, but don't know much about the process for actually pitching one successfully. I've heard anecdotally, for example, that one needs to obtain a literary agent first, even before approaching presses. Is that right? If so, how does one go about finding an agent? And, more generally, what is the process of securing a contract like? Does one need to actually have a manuscript drafted (or partially drafted), as is usually the case for academic books?

I could probably find out answers to many of these questions by searching the web, but I figured it could be good to hear from people who have experience in these matters to demystify these kinds of questions here. So, then, does anyone have any helpful experiences, tips, or other resources related to publishing a book for a general audience?

Tips for developing research ideas in a small department?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

How do people working in small departments brainstorm research ideas?

I work in a teaching-oriented small department, and people work in quite different areas. I often encounter small ideas and thoughts in my research such as "x is interesting. I wonder if anyone talks about it" and "can we think about y in a different way?"... Some of these ideas were developed into papers, but many of them were based on misunderstandings or the lack of basic background knowledge on certain topics. In graduate school, I could just have a quick conversation with either my peers or professors. But there are no such people around me now. I saw people doing this kind of brainstorming on Facebook and Twitter, but I do not have many friends or followers on social media. So, I was still emailing my peers and professors from graduate school, but I am not sure if this is sustainable. I wonder if there are other effective ways to brainstorm small research ideas.

This is an excellent question, and I'm curious to hear from other readers who work in small departments. I work in a very small department myself, and this was one of the more difficult things that I had to learn how to grapple with early in my career. I wish that I had some helpful tips, but in my case, I just had to learn how to do work mostly on my own. Everyone in my department worked in very different areas, and I've never been very good at cultivating a research network--so I just learned to draft up ideas that seemed interesting to me and send out work to conferences and journals. That worked fine for me in the end, but I imagine that it's probably not the best solution for everyone. 

So, if you work in a small department, what do you do? Any tips for the OP on how to brainstorm new research ideas?

Listing a course one has taught as an AOC?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

i am an abd grad student. I thought I had my AOS/AOCs figured out, but my department threw me a curveball and is having me teach a class that is outside of those areas. i'm not really worried about teaching the class and i am interested in the material, but i don't research this stuff at all. i fear that adding it as an AOC will look a little strange, both because there are now too many and because it doesn't really 'fit' with the rest, but i also don't want to undersell my capabilities when the ability to teach a wide range of classes is valued. if anyone has faced this situation, or evaluated someone like this from a committee perspective, i would be interested to know what you think.

This is a good query, as people always seem to have questions about what constitutes a 'legitimate AOC.' My understanding has always been that an AOC is supposed to be something that one would be able and qualified to teach an advanced undergraduate course in, even if it isn't an area that one does active research (i.e. publishing) in. So, I would think, at a minimum, an AOC should be something that one either has graduate coursework training in, and/or something one has cultivated some advanced competence in by some other means (such as by teaching lower-division courses in the area regularly and developing a more advanced background in by reading more widely in that area).

Consequently, my sense is that it is probably not a good idea to list a course that one has merely taught a couple of times in grad school as an AOC. Fortunately, in many cases, I don't think that much is likely to turn on this for a job-candidate. If a department otherwise likes you, they want/need someone to teach X, and you have taught X before, then that's likely to be a mark in your favor, AOC or no.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? It would be great to hear from readers in general, but particularly from members of search committees!

Prestigious PhD programs in Continental Philosophy?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Most of my department and its graduate students identify very heavily with "the continental tradition," of the sort that is most represented by the "SPEP" (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy). I work in core analytic M&E, so it is a tradition which is *extremely* foreign to me.

My question is this: which PhD programs are considered the "prestige" programs in this tradition? For us folks working in the analytic tradition, it's the "Leiterrific" places. But due to unfamiliarity with the SPEP-affiliated side of the profession, I have no idea what the equivalents might be. This might not be the best question to ask here, since I know that rankings of all sorts are typically looked upon here with an eye of suspicion (often rightly so!).

I recognize that any list of the "prestige" programs in the SPEP arena are going to be subjective and highly anecdotal. But that's okay -- ultimately the PGR is, too. I just need to get some sense of which programs are considered the exceptionally strong ones, and which programs are considered maybe also strong but less exceptionally so. (My tentative sense is: maybe Penn State, Northwestern, Stony Brook, and Emory? Maybe DePaul, too?)

I would like to note that I actually have legitimate professional reasons to be asking about this, but I would like to keep them private for reasons of anonymity.

Interesting question, and I'm not sure what the answer is! I do know that there is placement data out there indicating which continental programs tend to have the best job-placement rates (some of which are better than the best analytic programs)--in fact, I know this because I posted it on the Cocoon a few years back. Alas, I can't seem to track it down. Anyone able to find that post? In any case, another reader submitted the following reply:

As a grad student in continental philosophy, things are very volatile, since many of the "best" continental programs come from smaller Jesuit universities who I believe were harder hit by COVID and general declining enrollment than others. As far as the "top tier" of continental programs, I think Penn State and Emory are the two 'best' programs, in that they are the best funded and most likely to remain strongly continental. Many of the mixed continental programs are shaking off their continental faculty and the smaller programs are losing a lot of lines.

Anyone else have any helpful insights?

How much time do editors and referees spend on submissions?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

How much time do editors/referees spend on average reading submissions before making a decision? Do they read them more than once?

Interesting questions. It would be great to hear from readers (both editors and reviewers), but I suspect there is huge variance. As an another reader writes in the following submitted reply:

I suspect the average would be misleading -- a distribution would be much more helpful. Such info, while likely not feasibly accessible, would be interesting to see (probably there's a *huge* variety).

In my own case as a reviewer, how long I take on a paper depends on many things: how long and complex the paper is, how good I think it is, how certain I initially am about the recommendation I plan to make to the editors (sometimes I know that I want to recommend reject, accept, R&R-major revisions, etc.; other times I waffle), how much work I think a paper needs if I recommend an R&R (as in these cases I write extremely detailed reports specifying exactly what issues need to be addressed for me to recommend acceptance), and so on. Then, of course, there is my personal and professional schedule. Some times of the year are busier than others with teaching, family obligations, service obligations at my university, research (sometimes I have revise-and-resubmits and other research deadlines to meet too!), and sometimes these things can be planned for but other times not. All of these things and more result in huge variance in how long it takes me to get a referee report done. Sometimes I get reports done well in advance of the journal's deadline (in fact, sometimes after just a few days or weeks), but sometimes it takes considerably longer. In any case, I have a policy of meeting journal deadlines, and I'd never not complete a report on time (or at most a day or two late).

But this is just my experience. What are yours? It would be great to hear from reviewers and editors! 

The inside scoop on open access book publishing?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Do any readers have an inside scoop on how open access monograph publishing works? Every once in a while, a book from a university press like OUP is published Open Access. Nick Shea's (2018) Representation in Cognitive Science is one example. I assume that in such cases, the author gets a grant from somewhere to pay the press a fee to make the book open access. How much are such fees? And are there particular places to go looking for that kind of funding? I know there are also recent efforts to create all-OA monograph publishing venues (in philosophy of science, there's the new BSPS Open). What other such ventures are out there?

Good questions. I seem to recall hearing that in some places (particular parts of Europe?), people are expected (required?) to publish their research open-access. Is this right? I'm not entire sure how much it costs to publish an academic book open-access (though I seem to recall it definitely being on the order of several thousand dollars), but my sense is that people who publish open-access stuff tend to have dedicated research budgets that they can use to pay for it. Am I right about this? And what about all-OA monograph publishing venues? Here, I know very little.

It would be great to hear from readers who are in the know. Anyone have the inside scoop on this stuff? It would be great to hear some details!

Referrals for 'the professor is out' (or other non-academic job search services)?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Hey, asking for a friend: has anyone used/consulted 'the professor is out' for help making the transition to a non-academic career path? I know a while ago there were some threads on another site about their academic services, but wondering specifically about whether they would be helpful in thinking about non-academic options. Thanks in advance!

Good question. I was well aware of the Professor Is In, but wasn't aware of their Professor Is Out services until now. One reader submitted the following response:

I have not used "the professor is out" for that. I did reach out to them in my first year on the TT, and I was surprised at how unreceptive they were to my inquiries. Ymmv. If this is appropriate, may I suggest reaching out to Larry McGrath, https://www.larrysmcgrath.com/career-consulting. He himself found a way out, from a phd in French intellectual history (and plenty of familiarity with philosophy), to private industry work. He now consults with other scholars looking to go a similar road, and I believe he has worked with a number of philosophers. Disclosure: although I have not worked with him in this regard (I'm still toiling away in philosophy), I know Larry socially.

Anyone else have any helpful tips or experiences to share?

Developing a mentoring program for underrepresented groups?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I have heard that many search committees consider it a notable plus (and some perhaps even an unspoken requirement) that one has experience mentoring/working with people from underrepresented groups in philosophy (or perhaps it is enough to have mentoring experience more broadly-please advise!).

There are very few formal opportunities for PhD students at my (very large, very diverse, relatively prestigious) institution to do any type of robust formal mentoring (we teach to diverse groups, of course, but it seems like search committees find it good to have more one-on-one type mentoring experiences). I want to help design a systematic, mutually-beneficial program that can actually benefit undergrads and create meaningful connections while also helping PhD students get formal mentoring experience that can help them on the job market.

I know my department will support this endeavor, perhaps even with funding (they are super supportive of things like this, both job related and DEI related), but I am curious if anyone has advice, models, links, books, articles, podcasts, warnings, etc. about current programs of this type and what has worked/not worked well for others? I first and foremost want to make sure we go about designing the program in a way that it will not cause any further harm, exploit vulnerable undergrads, or waste people's time.

Any suggestions or stories would be greatly appreciated! I think there is potential to create something truly beneficial for all parties, if such a program is crafted with care.

What a great query--I'd love to hear some suggestions and experiences too! Anyone have any tips, resources, or experiences to share on creating a mentoring program like this (particularly ones that might help a PhD student like the OP)?

Going on the market just after starting a job?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Two questions about job market etiquette:

1) Is it considered "rude," "in poor taste," or in violation of relevant norms to leave a job after only one year? One the one hand, I believe in employee freedom in a labor market; on the other, I get that people might be offended by this.

2) Is is a valid worry that your current employer might find out that you're on the market? I would hope that application materials are confidential, but I also imagine that philosophers, like the rest of humankind, like to gossip. Does anyone have experience of their employers retaliating in any sort of way after finding out they were applying out?

Good questions! Another reader submitted the following response:

I had a colleague who we hired leave after one year. I did not consider her rude ... I understood her motives quite well. But I am sure some of my colleagues absolutely hated her. We spent a lot of time doing the search, time we did not have. And then we choose her from among a number of fully qualified candidates - she deserved the job, but others were deserving as well. And then when she left we did not get the line renewed. It was lost ... for good! So do not expect your colleagues to be endeared to you if they find out you are on the market.

This sounds right to me, but here are my hot takes:

1. Sure, people will probably get upset if you leave after a year, as they hired you hoping and expecting you'd stay. But you have a right to leave for another job at any time (though if they asked during the hiring process whether you'd stay if hired and you were dishonest, then that seems bad, right?).
2. It's a worry for sure, but a "valid" one? I have no idea. I've never heard of employers finding out about this kind of stuff through the proverbial grape-vine, and think it would be an enormous wrong for anyone to compromise the confidentiality of a job application. Does it ever happen? I have no idea.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? It would be great to hear from people who have some experience with this kind of scenario, both on the job-candidate and hiring sides of things.