The Philosophers' Cocoon

Teaching During Lockdown (guest post by Graham Oppy)

This is a guest post by Graham Oppy, Monash University, for our unusual teaching ideas series.

In Australia—as in many other parts of the world—we have been through more or less an entire academic year of teaching entirely via Zoom. It is likely that, in 2021, we shall continue to do some part of our teaching via Zoom.

I taught three medium size upper level classes via Zoom this year: a second year class in philosophy of religion (‘God, Freedom and Evil’) and two third year classes, one in philosophy of religion (‘Philosophy of Religion’) and one in metaphysics (‘Metaphysics’).

Philosophy of Religion Classes

The two philosophy of religion units were taught on the same plan. Each week, the students were assigned three tasks to complete prior to a two-hour Zoom class:  reading (around 6000 words); watching a collection of short videos (typically, 10-12 short videos, with a total running length of around 50 minutes); and working through a list of questions on a worksheet.

I made the videos using Panopto. Each video was somewhere between 2 minutes and 5 minutes in length. The videos were collected into a playlist on Moodle. Each video had an informative title. Each video dealt with a discrete topic: the explanation of a concept, or the examination of a premise in an argument, or the like. I used no more than one PowerPoint for each video. Most students liked the searchability of the short videos; some students wanted a single video that they could listen to while doing something else (e.g. exercising).

The questions on the worksheet were grouped in sets of five. Typically, I made four sets of questions; sometimes, I made five. The group of questions were connected thematically: typically, exploring different angles on a single important claim or sub-topic. (I include an example of the question sets below, in an appendix.)

Zoom class group sessions were organised around the sets of questions. After a brief introduction to a set of questions, the students were [randomly] divided into five Zoom breakout groups. (There were about 30 students in each class group.) Each group was assigned one of the five questions. The groups were given an assigned time period to discuss their question. One member of each group was appointed to deliver feedback to the main group. Feedback to the main group allowed for discussion from everyone in the class.

Early in the semester, the group sessions were 7 minutes; and the feedback sessions were about 13 minutes. This allowed us to get through four sessions in two hours (with a coffee break in between the second and third sessions).  Later in the semester, the group sessions expanded to 10-11 minutes; and the feedback sessions expanded to about 40 minutes. This allowed us to get through two sessions in two hours (though we sometimes went slightly beyond the allocated time in order to complete the second session).

In second semester, I had two separate cohorts—so, 60 students in total—and I had a tutor who was randomly assigned to a different breakout group in each small session. (The breakout groups were randomly reassigned after every small session.) In first semester, I also had two separate cohorts—again, about 60 students in total—but no tutor.

Even in second semester, during our second—and very long—period of lockdown, a higher percentage of students attended class than in past years. Moreover, student engagement in general discussion was much better distributed across the cohort than in previous years. Finally, the assessment results for the unit were slightly up on assessment results in previous years. These might all reasons for thinking that it will be worth trying to implement this model of teaching when we eventually get back to face-to-face learning in the classroom.

Many of my students—and my tutor—agreed that these classes had been important for their mental health during lockdown: they all looked forward to the (admittedly limited) form of human interaction that the small and larger sessions afforded. While this reflected a uniform trend at Monash, it is probably worth noting that my first semester student teaching evaluations were the best that I have had (in thirty-five years of teaching). We do not yet have the second semester teaching evaluations, so I cannot report on them.

Part of what I aimed for in setting up the classes in the way that I did was to build communities of discussants who were committed to candour, charity and doxastic humility. There is clearly room for argument about whether these are appropriate goals for the classroom. In particular, if students do not complete the pre-class tasks, then there is a risk that such classes will descend into banal agreement. This did not happen in my classes this semester. One of the interesting features of the reporting back periods was the reporting of the range of opinions in the small groups.

(In the first week of semester, I got students to post to a discussion list, explaining why they were taking the class. From that information, I know that the class was quite diverse: a number of religions were represented in the class, as well as a range of non-religious standpoints.)

Posting your dissertation online?

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

I recently have had a number of requests for a pdf of my dissertation. I defended in 2018 and am currently a postdoc. At the moment, I've polished and published a few sections of the dissertation; however, I'm currently in the process of refining other elements into their own proper articles. Is there any reason, besides the somewhat dated content and style, that I shouldn't post a pdf version of my dissertation on my website? When I've searched for advice on this topic, I've found blog posts (usually from other humanities fields) that recommend not making the dissertation freely available (e.g. https://theprofessorisin.com/2011/08/24/the-perils-of-publishing-your-dissertation-online/). I would love some advice from folk in the tenure-track process on this matter.

This is an interesting question that I have to confess never coming across before. Having read The Professor Is In's post above, the main worry there seems to be book publishers not wanting to publish something that's already available online. However, this worry seems to me a bit overblown in philosophy. My understanding is that some disciplines (English?) generally expect faculty to publish books for tenure. But this isn't the case in philosophy, and my impression is that publishing dissertations as books is pretty rare. Further, the Professor Is In updated their post with data indicating that almost no publisher would refuse to publish a substantially revised dissertation, and that posting dissertations online is in general no obstacle to tenure.

By my lights, a more relevant worry about posting dissertations online might be 'idea poaching', i.e. someone reading your dissertation and publishing ideas based on yours without appropriate attribution. Here again, though, I'm not sure how seriously to take the worry, and of course in one sense 'publishing' your dissertation online (via ProQuest or even on PhilPeople) does constitute a public record of the relevant ideas being yours. So, I'm really not sure what to advise. I uploaded my dissertation to PhilPapers prior to obtaining tenure, and it didn't prevent me from obtaining tenure or from publishing papers based upon it.

What do you all think?

Summer community college teaching?

In our November "how can we help you?" post, Anthony writes:

Question: How does a graduate student find summer teaching opportunities? I would be happy to adjunct this summer at a community college.

Context: I'm currently earning a masters degree in humanities. For it, I'll take a couple philosophy-related courses. I'm actually halfway through a PhD in philosophy at a different institution; I'm officially on a leave of absence from my PhD program to complete this MA. I've completed graduate coursework at my PhD program. But my PhD program only grants masters degrees to those who exit the program early (which seems unjustified to me, but that's a different matter), so I won't have a MA degree until June. My only experience as a primary instructor was at a summer school, but I do have several semesters of TAing under my belt.

Good question, and I have to confess to not knowing the answer. I suspect it's easier to get teaching opportunities at a community college during the normal academic year, as there are presumably more course sections then. I taught at a CC for a couple of semesters during grad school, and if I recall I just applied when I saw an advertisement. But I never did during the summer, so again, I'm not quite sure what the answer to the OP's question is. Do any of you know?

Do job candidates need a website?

In our November "how can we help you?" thread, Bram Vaasen writes:

Do I need a personal website?

I'm a currently a postdoc and I keep my PhilPeople profile up to date. I.e. recent CV, PDF:s of penultimate drafts and my thesis, a picture in which I look like a normal person, and a short blurb about me and my philosophical interests.

Consequently, I wonder whether there is any advantage in having a personal website that I have to maintain separately. It might look a tad more professional to have one, but only a tad. And even that tad is arguably a case of LOOKING more professional rather than being more professional.

Looking forward to input.

(I'm mostly interested in jobs in Europe, but interested in hearing perspectives from US job experts as well.)

Good question. I'm really not sure, but if it were me, I think I would err on the side of having a nice professional website. As Vaasen notes, it is arguably a case of looking professional. While one may of course think that the important thing is to actually be professional (viz. publishing, teaching, etc.), let's be honest: both of these things (looking as well as being professional) are plausibly advantages on the job-market. Is a personal/professional website likely to be a 'difference maker' in terms of getting interviewed or hired? My guess is probably not. But notice: this is merely a guess--and as thread after thread on this blog has revealed, search committee members can care about all kinds of strange things. We also had a recent discussion of whether search committee members look at candidate websites, and a few chimed in saying they do, noting that they look for things that aren't necessarily on PhilPeople (e.g. teaching documents, etc.). So again, if it were me, I'd err on the side of having a website.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours, particularly those of you who have served on search committees?

Good jobs not on PhilJobs?

A reader writes in:

There are jobs out there for philosophers that do not get advertised on Phil jobs. Here are two in applied political philosophy that came my way recently. Perhaps it is worth posting about these particular ones and about the general problem: where do we find jobs that would love to hire philosophers but that are not advertised on philjobs?

Open-rank faculty - Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston

Assistant Professor of Policy & Governance - University of Washington

Good question! When I was still on the job market, I followed three different job boards: PhilJobs, along with the philosophy and political science listings on HigherEdJobs. I see that the first job this reader linked to (at Houston) is listed in the HigherEdJobs philosophy page, but I don't see the second job anywhere.

Do any readers know of any other good places to follow to find potentially viable jobs for philosophers? The reader who wrote in found the first job at ZipRecruiter, so perhaps that is a board to follow. But I suspect there are other boards as well. Indeed, how about boards for philosophy jobs outside of the United States (i.e. Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, etc.)? It might be good to try to crowdsource resources in the comments section below!

Dealing with the collapse in the academic job market: advice for mentors and people on the job market

I was inspired by Marcus Arvan's earlier call for strategies on how to deal with pandemic job market collapse, and I want to make some remarks on that from my perspective as placement director.  Currently, I am the placement director at SLU, though all my remarks in this rather lengthy post (apologies) are made in a personal capacity and do not represent their official policy.

When I took on the role of placement director in 2019, my program was doing better than average in placing graduate students into permanent positions (see here for data), and we were doing better than many more prestigious programs in part because our graduate students frequently find their way into small, religious liberal arts colleges, and we offer a lot of training and mentoring on how to teach well (see the comments by grad students near the end of this post),  which is particularly appreciated in small liberal arts colleges. 

Nevertheless, even in these pre-pandemic happy times, and even in a program with an above-average placement in permanent positions, it was important to help students find a plan B (above average still means well above 40% of grad students do not find permanent academic placement within 5 years--we can't just neglect these people). The job market for academic tenure track positions took a nosedive in 2007-2008 and never quite went up to former levels (and was stable from 2013 t0 2019).

For this reason, in 2019 I also tried to help students prepare for the possibility of a non-academic career. This year, I have been more proactive on this front. Here are some easy, low-hanging fruit kind of things advisors, placement directors, etc can do to help their grad students deal with a collapsing academic market. 

One easy thing grad programs can do is to help students prep for non-academic careers and provide structures just as they do for academic careers. Mock interviews, help with resumé building, cover letter help are all things that placement directors already do for academic jobs, it isn't a big stretch to provide this service for non-academic jobs. For example, we organized two mock interviews for a student who applied for a non-academic job that was also part of a university (but not a faculty position) with good job security, pay and benefits. The student received the job offer.

In addition, I think it's important to make students aware that an alt-ac job is a live option for them, that there are significant advantages to an alt-ac job, that it is not a consolation prize. Thus, I organized several sessions with my students this year on alt-ac possibilities, including one with a guest speaker (a philosopher with an alt-ac position who wishes to remain anonymous, who gave my students the honest talk about how little a professor in a tenure track position makes compared to what one can potentially make outside, and what they were making outside). 

It is important to counteract stigma associated with alt-ac jobs, where professors still seem to assume that landing a livable non-academic job is something to be regretted, rather than celebrated. Thus I make a big deal out of all our placements, including alt-ac placements, which put both on social media and through our departmental channels (once the candidate is happy for me to advertise it). I also list all our non-academic placements on our placement spreadsheet, not just as "did not seek academic employment" but "Learning experience designer at Facilisgroup" and "Student engagement coordinator at St Mary's University" (two of our most recent non-academic placements). 

I think that there is a lot of negativity and pessimism about what philosophy PhDs can accomplish outside of academia. This negativity is unhelpful, and needs to go. The thinking seems to be as follows: but you aren't trained to be a learning experience designer! You were trained to be a professor! The almost universal view seems to be that we are training people to be professors, and if there are fewer professor jobs, then most grad programs ought to simply disappear, maybe only the top-10 or so (the most prestigious) ought to exist. I disagree with these claims. We are training people with a lot of transferrable skills, but we aren't doing a good enough job yet to help students realize those skills and where to look for jobs. There are no courses where you can train to be a learning experience designer. So, for a job like this people with a degree in Education might come in, and it's true that a master's might be enough. But... a philosophy grad student can bring something really unique into the role. As a philosophy grad student in our program, you'll have designed and taught your own courses, you'll have been mentored on how to teach really deep, abstract content in a relatable way, you'll have learned how to assess it effectively. Similarly, philosophy grad students learn to organize events (conferences etc), learn to talk for large audiences (soon again possible, hopefully!), learn to network and be hospitable to senior guests, to write difficult and abstract content in a clear and transparent way, etc etc. 

There are so many jobs where our skills come in handy. Sure, we aren't trained for those jobs, but any role benefits from different perspectives, and our perspective and experience as philosophy PhD is very valuable in a wide range of roles. I'd need almost a separate post to defend the legitimacy of grad education for philosophers even in a collapsing academic market, but suffice it to say here that negativity and overt pessimism about the prospects of grad students isn't helpful, you need to (as mentor etc) believe in their capacities and possibilities so they can believe in themselves too. 

Finally, for those of you who are mentoring grad students, or for those of you on the market who want to think about alt-ac careers, please see the text below of a handout I used in a recent meeting with grad students. 

The alt-ac/non-academic job market

By way of introduction:

It’s good to explore your options. Don’t think of looking at alt-ac jobs as “giving up” on academia. You can apply to both. Or, you can just go for alt-ac jobs right way. There is still an internalized stigma associated with alt-ac jobs. Some academics still think that one should only do it if one has no other options. And maybe you are only considering a non-academic position because of the bleakness of the market due to Covid-19.

That’s fair but I want us to think a bit about the alt-ac job market in a different light, namely as a serious alternative to academia in any case. 

Grappling with the COVID-era job market

In the comment thread on my post on publishing advice for grad students and other early career people, a grad student writes:

As a graduate student, I do appreciate the time and effort made to help us figure out how to best go about trying to publish papers. My biggest concern is that such posts utterly fail to take into account the current moment. Maybe such advice will be applicable in the future (we can hope!), but for right now, I'd love to see advice that explicitly takes into account the fact that the academic job market has simply collapsed.

This is a great point, and I'd love to offer more posts and discussion how to grapple effectively with the post-COVID reality. I just haven't been quite sure how to do so. I'm definitely open to suggestions! One graduate student planning on defending their dissertation made one suggestion, namely:

I just mean it could also be good to talk about the nuts and bolts of building a plan B.

For example: if I have to devote half my working hours now to developing a set of skills for plan B, as I in fact am, which of the more purely academic skills should get cut first, that are also the least likely to just totally tank my prospects (however antecedently dim) of getting a job in academia?

For me, I've basically leaned into the research and forsaken any hope of developing a compelling teaching portfolio.

My research habits have also changed. I've gone more in the direction of, write and try to publish papers I'm excited to write, don't worry about the bigger picture or how this stuff hangs together. Because all indications are that I've got maybe 18 months left in this profession, and none of that big picture stuff will pan out.

You can hopefully see how serious, and scary, these sorts of decisions can be.

I wonder what readers think: first, on the nuts and bolts of preparing for a plan B, but also, second, on whether this person's decisions are good ones.

I myself don't have any advice on the nuts and bolts of building a plan B. But I have a few thoughts on the other issue. Personally, I think the decision to focus on publishing stuff you're excited about is a great one. It's more or less the strategy that I adopted when my time on the job market looked like it was running out--and it not only made philosophy again; I started publishing a lot more than I ever did before. My rationale was basically this: "If I'm going to flunk out of this profession, I might as well go down doing work that I enjoy and believe in." It was pretty transformative, and I've never looked back.

On the other hand, I'm a bit less sure about this individual's decision to lean into research and forsake any hope of developing a teaching portfolio. I think whether this is a good decision probably depends on three things:

1. Whether the academic job market is likely to be equally catastrophic in future years.
2. Whether this person is willing to stay on the market beyond this year.
3. Whether they are interested in community college jobs.

On (1) & (2): given that effective vaccines seem to be on the horizon, and people are likely to be vaccinated en masse, it seems to me highly likely that the academic job market will recover. Of course, this job market was already brutal before COVID, but that's a different story. The point is, the market seems to me like it is likely to recover pretty significantly--so if this individual's decisions are predicated upon the assumption that the market is going to be consistently like it is this year, I think that may be a bad bet (one anecdote: it looks like my department will probably hire a tenure-track person once COVID is resolved--and I expect many other universities are waiting to do hires as well). So, it seems to me, if this person is willing to stick on the academic market for at least a couple of years after their defense, the drastic decisions they are making now (focusing on research rather than developing their teaching portfolio) might be really short-sighted.

On that note, it's worth thinking about (3): community college jobs. As this discussion revealed, community college jobs can be really great; you just need a wealth of teaching experience (and ideally, experience teaching at a community college) to be competitive. I personally know a few full-time tenure-track faculty at community colleges, and they love their jobs (seemingly more, in fact, than some of the faculty I know at 4-year universities). Moreover, from what I have heard, community colleges are expected to flourish post-COVID. During times of economic uncertainty, people seem to flee 4-year universities for community colleges, and so the latter are likely to need more faculty, not fewer (indeed, I've already seen some of my own students say they are taking time away from university during COVID to take community college classes for economic reasons). So, it seems to me, if this reader is seriously interested in an academic job and they might be happy with a CC job, their decision to lean into research at the detriment of developing their teaching portfolio seems like it could be doubly short-sighted (though, of course, they might not want a teaching-heavy CC job).

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Also, if any readers have any suggestions for other topics the Cocoon might cover to address the first reader's concerns (how to better help early-career people in the post-COVID reality), I'm all ears!

Addressing ability to attract outside funding?

In our November "how can we help you?" thread, Mary writes:

Writing applications now, [currently a] post doc, second year on the market [applying for TT jobs]. I think I finally have a handle on how to address what hiring committees are looking for with one big exception: evidence of ability to attract funding. I see this frequently in Europeans jobs (yea I’m including the UK in that). Not only am I confused what exactly they are looking for and why, but I simply don’t have anything that can be squished until it kind of looks like evidence for external funding when you squint. It’s just not something that ever came up for me (or anyone in my cohort), I didn’t even know it was a thing until I started seeing it on job ads to be honest. My ideal is a European job so I would really appreciate any advice how to address this.

This is a great query. When I was on the market, I was very interested in European jobs. However, I had no idea how to address this kind of issue, as external funding isn't something that grad students early-career philosophers in the United States are generally expected or encouraged to obtain. Is this something that can be overcome, or is a lack of a track record of obtaining external funding basically a disqualifier for obtaining a job in European countries where this sort of thing is expected? If not, what is the best thing for a candidate like Mary to do in her application materials?  

Bringing some social life to Zoom conferences (guest post by C. Thi Nguyen)

This is a guest post by C. Thi Nguyen, philosophy professor at the University of Utah

OK, I just survived being Program Chair of the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference - a huge, 4-track, 3-day conference that had to go virtual. I didn’t know it was going virtual when I volunteered to head it up, and the entire experience was one long grueling flirtation with disaster. But: it went off with barely a hitch. What I really want to talk about, though, is the surprising success of the experimental social Zoom rooms.

So the ASA Annual has always been my favorite conference. The aesthetics gang is this big, goofy, lovable, amiable family of weirdos. (Who does analytic philosophy... about art? My people, that's who.) And when we realized we had to take it virtual, we thought: we had to do something to recreate that wonderful atmosphere. So Aaron Meskin volunteered to spearhead the effort, and we formed a social idea gang (with Jonathan Weinberg and Andrew Kania) and brainstormed all kinds of experimental ideas.

My guiding observation: big social Zoom rooms full of many strange people are fucking awkward. They're weird; it’s much harder to naturally break into small groups; social chat flows awkwardly. So we tried a bunch of things. First, we ran parallel social sessions, to keep the numbers manageable. (For a 300 person conference, we did 3 parallel social Zoom rooms each night, and ended up with 15-20 people in most rooms.) Second, structure.  We had structured activities for most of the Zoom rooms, including:

• Show and Tell Room
• 3 Minute Silly Talk Room
• Talent Show Room
• Joke Room
• Trivia Room

And they worked... insanely well. Tons of people have messaged me saying they were shocked how well those rooms worked, how much community it built, how fun they were. And I suspect that, even though only some of the attendees went to the social rooms, that the spirit from the social rooms carried through the rest of the conference. A lot of the regulars, and a lot of more talkative newcomers, met and commingled and got to know each other, and I think a lot of the spirit carried into the rest of the conference — especially in the chat.

My very favorite was the "3 Minute Silly Talk" room, which I ran with Anne Eaton. Rules were: people just had to make up a talk on some topic - silly, or small, or maybe just float the inchoate beginnings of a new paper. No topic too wild or too small. 3 minutes to talk, enforced with total strictness, followed by 3 minutes of lightning Q&A. And it was... amazing?

Looking at job-candidate websites?

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

I have two questions about the role of personal websites in the job application process.

1. What are some reasons search committee members might visit an applicant's webpage?
I have a hidden, password-protected page on my website that contains all my application materials and a few additional ones. I put the address and password in my cover letters. Now that most of my applications are in, I see that people from regions I applied in are visiting my webpage, but they are not using this page. Instead, they are just browsing the website in general. Most frequently, they spend a minute or less on my homepage and research page. Sometimes it's less than 30 seconds and just my homepage. But I'm not sure what information they are looking for in these pages, since all of it is predictably contained in my dossier. The only thing I can think of is that the website gives a vibe of who the candidate is, or maybe they just want to see a photo?

2. In what stage of the process do search committees look at the candidates' websites?
For example, is it when they go through the batch to make the initial cut? It is when they decide on the long list? I'm sure there's a lot of variation, but I wonder if there are some commonalities. I'm curious because of a pattern I see on my website. Sometimes there is a burst of visitors from a certain place for a few days and then they stop vising my website. Could this be interpreted as some vague indication that there was a discussion of my dossier? If I don't hear from that department in the following weeks and they have stopped visiting my website, should I take it as some sort of signal that my dossier is no longer considered? On the one hand, intuitively, it does seem to me like a sign that they lost interest. On the other hand, this happened to me with several departments and I haven't seen reports that any of them invited people for interviews or any updates about their searches.

Another reader submitting the following reply:

I think you are overthinking this way too much. This is the sort of worrying that leads to serious anxiety around the job market. Your job is to submit an application. Then leave it to the committee to do their work. Some people will look at your webpage and some won't. The one case I remember most vividly is a very unaccomplished colleague trolling around looking for dirt on an application ... and finding it! So just keep the content professional.

In one sense (as I explain below), I think the OP probably is overthinking things. But as the follow-up comment notes, one reason search committee members may visit a candidate's website is to simply see how professional and 'put together' a candidate is. So, I think it is important to reflect a bit on why search committee member might visit candidate websites.

Publishing advice for early-career people: a different perspective

Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) published a post yesterday entitled, 'How to Publish a Journal Article in Philosophy: Advice for Graduate Students and New Assistant Professors.' While I think the post is very helpful in a variety of ways--particularly in terms of walking grad students through the whole publishing process--I'd like to explore an alternative perspective.

Schwitzgebel begins his post (quite rightly, I think) noting that his advice is directed at graduate students interested in jobs at research institutions (i.e. R1's). He writes:

Should You Try to Publish as a Graduate Student?

Yes, if you are seeking a job where hiring will be determined primarily on research promise, and if you can do so without excessively hindering progress toward your degree.

Speaking to this audience, Schwitzgebel's first major piece of advice is this:

Generally speaking, you'll want your first publication to be on something so narrow that you are among the five top experts in the world on that topic.

He then advocates extending this same strategy to several follow-up papers, which he calls the 'tripod theory of building expertise':

Publish three papers on narrow but related topics. These serve as a tripod establishing your expertise in the broader subarea to which they belong.

I suspect this probably is very good advice for graduate students interested in pursuing R1 jobs (and who are on a legitimate track to this end--see below), and I've seen some people at these kinds of institutions chime in to this effect. But this raises a few further questions:

1. Is it a good publishing strategy for graduate students in general?
2. Is it a good publishing strategy for graduate students not on a path to an R1 position?
3. Is it a good publishing strategy for Assistant Professors?

Has being a philosopher met your expectations?

In celebration of World Philosophy Day, Daily Nous shared a thread today from way back in 2014 asking readers to share why they went into philosophy. The comments are a lot of fun to read, but they led me to wonder: has being a professional philosopher met their hopes or expectations, or not? I figured it could be informative to have a thread on this here at the Cocoon, as it might provide students who are now considering a career in philosophy some picture over whether such a career will be at all what they hope for or expect. I suppose I'll kick things off.

I went into philosophy for a couple of related reasons. When I was a teenager just starting college, I had no real passions. Yeah, there were things I was sort of into: baseball, music, poetry, English literature, and politics. But none of them were what I would call a real passion. I wasn't super motivated to put in the hard work to pursue any of the above. All that changed when I took my first philosophy class. Quite simply, I took to philosophy like a fish to water. I loved everything about it: reading it, writing it, thinking about it, the questions philosophers were concerned with, and so on. Second, I had an undergraduate mentor, Dan Dennett, who was extremely encouraging. In addition to being a fascinating and engaging person, he was really the first person in my life other than my parents who ever really gave me encouragement.

Anyway, I don't know quite what I hoped for or expected when entering philosophy. I guess I expected to love reading, thinking about and writing philosophy for a living, and that being a college professor would be gratifying (I always wanted to be the kind of mentor that Dan was for me). But, beyond that, I don't know what I expected. 

Has being a philosopher met my expectations? In two important ways, yes. I still love philosophy as much today as I did way back then at 17. I feel (and am) incredibly privileged to be able to think about and write on philosophical questions, I work on issues that I find important and meaningful, and from time to time teaching and mentoring is just as gratifying as I had hoped. Every now and then, I'll get an email from a student thanking me for how I affected their life, and in those moments it feels like I've done some real good for the world beyond myself. I also find conferences just wonderful: I love attending talks, learning about what other people are working on, presenting my own work, catching up with friends, and of course, debating philosophical arguments.

But, of course, a career in philosophy hasn't been all roses--not by a long shot. I never expected the academic job-market (which I spent seven years on) to be anything like the monumentally awful experience that it was (and I cannot overstate just how horrible of an experience it was). I also think it's a scandal that so many academic jobs are part-time, low-paying positions without benefits (though we've worked hard to change this at my university). I also never expected how brutal academic publishing would be: the long waits, near constant rejections (90+% rejection rates), and (from time to time) meanspirited comments of referees. While I still love philosophy tremendously, I really think one has to be a 'glutton for punishment', as it were, to have a career in the field. And that, I think, is sad. Oh, and grading is the worst. I also wasn't prepared, I think, for what I might call 'philosophical isolation.' I work in a small department whose faculty work in divergent areas, and our teaching and service loads are quite high. This might surprise some readers, but in over 11 years at my university, I think I can probably count the number of philosophical conversations I've had with colleagues on two hands. Nearly all of the philosophical conversation I have occurs with students or at conferences. We tried to put together a reading group of philosophers in the area a few years ago, and it worked well for a bit but sort of fell apart after a while. We’re just all so busy. And so generally  speaking, I do philosophy in isolation, and I really miss the kinds of philosophical conversations that I had all of the time in graduate school. 

Anyway, long story short: a career in philosophy both has and hasn't met the hopes and expectations I had when I initially set out pursuing it. It's been a far, far more difficult road than I ever expected. But I still love philosophy and teaching/mentoring students, and find it a meaningful life.

But this is just me. What about you?

Online/hybrid teaching technologies?

Several months ago, I shared some of the new teaching practices I experimented with this fall (my first ever time teaching in a hybrid in-person/online format). As I noted in that post, one thing that seemed to me to work very well has been having students record short Flipgrid video responses to daily readings. Although this seemed to me to work pretty well pedagogically, it was also a lot of work to watch and categorize which videos I wanted to discuss before class, and it got to be a real drain (and stressor) the further we got though the semester. I'll also be curious to see what my students thought of it in my end of the semester evaluations. I also avoided using online test proctoring services (such as proctorio), largely on the basis of privacy concerns--though I'm curious what other people think here (and how, if you don't use proctoring services) how you approach exams instead.

Anyway, in light of the above, I'm beginning to think about how I might do things next semester: whether I'll use the same technology, or do some things very differently, and if so, what might work better. Which brings me to several questions today for you all:

1. Which teaching technologies have you used for online/hybrid teachings this fall?
2. How did you use them in terms of a teaching tool?
3. Did you think it worked well or not so well? Why?
4. In light of your answers to (1)-(3), how do you see yourself doing things differently in the spring?

Struggling with difficult readings?

In our November, “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

How do professional philosophers deal with readings in their field that they find challenging, even too challenging to understand? As a student, I regularly come up against readings that I have trouble understanding. Does this happen to professionals who are well-established in their area of specialization? Assuming the paper they're reading is not incoherent, how do they deal with it?

Hmm, maybe try to ask a friend and/or work through it with someone else (e.g. a reading group)? Anyone else have any helpful thoughts or strategies?

Updating search committees?

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

Suppose that an R1 institution schedules a first-round Zoom interview with a job applicant. And suppose that between the moment the interview was scheduled and the interview itself, this applicant receives a request to contribute to a special issue of a specialty journal and an invitation to contribute to an edited volume on some topic relevant to their AOS.

Should this applicant inform the search committee of these developments? Or do these developments not rise to the level of newsworthy?

And in a case like this, what developments are newsworthy such that an applicant should inform search committee members?

Good questions! I'm inclined to think that it's just fine to inform a committee of new accomplishments, such as a new forthcoming (i.e. accepted) publication. However, I'm not sue that mere invitations to contribute to a special issue or edited volume rise to that level. What do all you think, particularly those of you who have served on search committees? Which kinds of developments are newsworthy enough to inform search committees about?