A proposal for derumsfeldifying the profession

I think that 'to derumsfeldify' should be a verb meaning the same as 'to inform someone of something that they didn't know they didn't know'. And following some recent blog posts on Feminist Philosophers and NewAPPS about the "unwritten rules" of the profession, I think the Cocoon could help to derumsfeldify the profession for us.

Here's my proposal:

We find some professionally successful philosopher and persuade him or her to (a) write a guest post explaining "three things I wish I'd known about the philosophy profession when I was younger," and (b) find another professionally successful philosopher and persuade him or her to write another post on the same topic. I suggest asking each of our generous guest bloggers to submit their response within two weeks, and to include in their post the name of the person who will submit the next post.

What do you think? Is this worth doing? If so, how can we improve on my version of the proposal?

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Sounds awesome! Anyone know a professionally successful philosopher who'd be willing to kick things off?

[Trevor Hedberg]

This sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would be appropriate here. It's definitely worth doing if we could track down some senior professors willing to offer their expertise.

[Matt DeStefano]

This would be extremely useful to me, personally. Although I'm only an MA student currently, I often find myself lost on how to navigate academia. Even things which probably should be obvious to me by now, are not.