The Philosophers' Cocoon

Academic philosophy and the good life, part 1: some initial questions

In the comments section of Helen's excellent post asking how professional philosophy "affects our moral lives", a few commenters raised broader concerns about the extent to which professional philosophy is concerned with living a good life at all, as opposed to merely studying it. One commenter, 'Sigh', initially wrote:

[T]hose who suggest philosophy is about 'living a good life' are openly mocked...It is so sad professional philosophy is an endless race to improve one's reputation. It also creates a bunch of very unhappy philosophers: we are never done and have never achieved enough. All of this is especially problematic for those who believe they ought to lead a life that pleases God rather than people. 

After I responded that it seemed to me that many philosophers do care about the good life--thinking, writing, and teaching about it on a continual basis--'Ambrose' and 'Sigh' clarified the concern:

Sigh originally wrote that "those who suggest philosophy is about 'living a good life' are openly mocked" and that instead "professional philosophy is an endless race to improve one's reputation". So the contrast here seems to be between two ways of life, one that is about living a good life and another that's about reputation and competition. You may be right that people publish papers on ethics or the meaning of life, or teach about these topics, but I take Sigh's initial point to be that, regardless of what our papers or lectures may be about, professional philosophers don't take seriously the idea that our _lives_ as philosophers should be about living a good life. We tend to be cynical about that conception of philosophy (as a way of life not just a subject matter). I realize that Sigh now says that he or she is just claiming that the topic of the good life should be a focus, but I think the original comment is about another and possibly more important problem. - Posted by: Ambrose | 02/28/2016 at 09:28 PM

I am a bit concerned that people care so little about the connection between studying the good life and living it. However, I don't expect this to be part of professional responsibilities. That is, I don't expect people to 'pay us' to live a good life. But I do think that as people who focus on this all day, there ought to be some personal and social norms that encourage us to 'practice what we preach'. One norm might be, "don't be self-aggrandizing"...As far as my concerns about being mocked, maybe this depends on what circle one works in. I have run into many big shot people from big shot departments who do mock this kind of thing. Marcus, do you disagree that applied ethics is looked down upon in the field as a whole? Consider, for example, papers published in top journals, few ethics papers, and almost none in applied ethics. So my perspective might be from a narrow window of those who work in top research schools... - Posted by: Sigh | 02/29/2016 at 04:05 PM

CFP: Fifth Oxford Graduate Political Theory Conference

This is just a quick note that the deadline for submissions to the Fifth Oxford Graduate Political Theory Conference, the conference theme of which is "Feminism and (Political) Progress", is this coming Sunday, March 6th. The full CFP is listed below (thanks to the organizing committee for drawing it to my attention!):

Christian philosophers in a competitive market: Who is greatest among us?

The job market is extremely competitive. And even once one has secured that coveted tenure-track or permanent position, there is the continued pressure to be excellent. We are pressured to publish in the best venues (journals conveniently ranked by prestige), to gain external grant funding (preferably a large grant), to transfer to a job that is at a more prestigious university (again, several convenient rankings can be found). In short, we all have to be superstars.

There is a worry on how this affects our moral lives, our aims of philosophy as the love of wisdom. I am confident most of us got into philosophy because of our excitement for the field, for what it has to offer, and not to become research superstars who publish in the top-20. No-body says (I think) "I want to become a professional philosopher so I can publish in Philosophical Review".  Could we be betraying those considerations that got us into philosophy in the first place, as a result of structural incentives that put personal prestige and accomplishments over everything else?

There may be a special worry for Christian philosophers. The following story has the apostles jockeying for position, and the answer is clear:

A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. But he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves (Luke 22: 24-27).

Of course, this passage has not prevented church leaders from jockeying for positions, so why should Christian philosophers not go out to secure the best positions, the largest grants, publications in the most prestigious venues? One could argue that such things may even help them to accomplish good things such as providing compelling arguments for God’s existence.

Yet one cannot help but think that this competitive climate affects one’s moral standing in a negative way, especially, I think from a virtue ethical point of view, as it may prevent us from cultivating virtues such as compassion and humility. Worse, it may lead philosophers to be complicit in a climate that is bad and harmful (e.g., covering up a philosopher’s actions who is known to be sexually predatory because his work makes the department look good).

So the open-ended question is how we can avoid that - the worries I raise here are not specific to Christian philosophy (except in the challenge of the gospel text I cited) but permeate our discipline as a whole.

Should one only publish one's best work?

We have discussed publishing strategies before on this blog, mostly in reference to which kinds of journals to submit to in order to be competitive on the academic job-market. However, there is another, broader issue that most of us encounter from time to time, and which I have been struggling with a bit lately: how should one decide which of one's papers to try to publish?

Given that we are human beings, it is highly unlikely that all of our work is of the same quality. Some of the papers (and books) we write are better than others, in some cases by leaps and bounds. And, of course, sometimes one writes something terrible (or, at least, I do!). Worse still, we also seem quite fallible evaluating the quality of our work--and those around are aren't necessarily the best judges either. In graduate school, some of the most "famous" papers we studied were profoundly flawed. In one case, I remember a fellow student, asking in class of one very famous paper, "How did this ever get published?" I recall everyone in the class--including the instructor, also famous int the field--being just as baffled about the paper's status as that student. And yet, despite its very serious flaws, it was a very famous paper that ended up establishing its author as a top-figure in the philosophical subfield. And it's not the only case like this that I can think of, by a long shot. Many profoundly influential works, both in philosophical history and the contemporary scene, also appear to be profoundly flawed--while many far less flawed (but perhaps less interesting?) papers seem to go relatively undiscussed. One reason for this could be because flawed but interesting works open up more ground for fertile discussion--e.g. refutations, attempts to clarify and fix the work's flaws, etc.--than less flawed, but less ambitious works.

Anyway, as a researcher trying to decide what to publish, these are some of difficulties one faces. One knows, or has reason to believe that:

Balance Series, Part 8: Problems with Structured Procrastination Revisited

By Trevor Hedberg

In the last post in this series (which was all too long ago), I gave an overview of structured procrastination based significantly on John Perry’s essay on the topic. Structured procrastination attempts to solve (or at least ameliorate) the problem of procrastinating by transforming one’s procrastination into motivation to get work done (so long as it is not the work that one is supposed to be doing at the time).

I concluded that prior post by gesturing at some problems with structured procrastination. Readers also raised some other concerns. This post is an attempt to address those issues.

How to teach intro effectively

Last year in Amsterdam, I got my first opportunity to teach Introduction to Philosophy. I found this a daunting task, especially given the student body: there were 250 non-philosophy majors enrolled in the course, people mostly from STEM fields and something called business analytics. As an undergraduate, the intro to philosophy course I got was very historically oriented. The professor who gave the course was a talented, passionate teacher, who gave a sweeping overview from the presocratics to roughly Heidegger, with a big emphasis on ancient and continental philosophy. He dismissed medieval philosophy saying, "Nothing of substance was written then." I found the course very interesting but at the same time dissatisfying: going through so many authors (often 10 or more!) during one 2-hour lecture gave me the impression I did not know what philosophy was really about, as we rarely spent more than 10 minutes on one of the "great figures". We also did not read any primary materials. 

So I wanted to do something different for the introduction course, focusing instead on four topics which I focused on in great depth. I chose articles (not secondary literature) as the primary materials, and I chose topics I thought STEM students would be interested in: What's it like knowledge (Thomas Nagel, Laurie Paul, Jackson); are we living in a computer simulation? (Bostrom, Descartes Meditations, Chalmers on The Matrix), mathematical platonism versus nominalism (Quine, Kitcher, Mary Leng, the new indispensability arguments by Baker and Colyvan), and nativism versus empiricism (Plato's Meno, Spelke, Locke, Hume, Prinz). This worked fairly well. It was surprising how excited my students were about the mathematical platonism materials. When at the end of it, some students came to me and asked "So what do you think is the right position, nominalism or platonism?" I knew they enjoyed that.

I took time looking at each view in detail, and we also did a bit of close reading in the classes albeit not as much as I wanted to do. I encouraged people to have discussions in small groups (a lecture theatre with 250 people is not the most conducive to philosophy, and this had mixed results). I also spent quite some time teaching them how to read a philosophy paper, with Concepcion's excellent paper on this topic as a guideline. 

The student evaluations came back positive, and I felt happy with the course but overall I also felt the course had a bit of a disjointed feeling. There was no overarching justification for choosing the topics I chose except something STEM students might like. I am curious how other people approach the task of teaching intro. What do you choose? Which topics inspire students? Also, which topics tend to fall flat?

 

Inside the Universe that Creates Itself

So apparently a team of programmers just built a self-building cosmos from a single piece of code (one of the programmer's phone numbers!) combined with some "laws of nature" and "randomization":

Every particle in the universe is accounted for. The precise shape and position of every blade of grass on every planet has been calculated. Every snowflake and every raindrop has been numbered. On the screen before us, mountains rise sharply and erode into gently rolling hills, before finally subsiding into desert. Millions of years pass in an instant...

Here, in a dim room half an hour south of London, a tribe of programmers sit bowed at their computers, creating a vast digital cosmos. Or rather, through the science of procedural generation, they are making a program that allows a universe to create itself...

“The physics of every other game—it’s faked,” the chief architect Sean Murray explained. “When you’re on a planet, you’re surrounded by a skybox—a cube that someone has painted stars or clouds onto. If there is a day to night cycle, it happens because they are slowly transitioning between a series of different boxes”... In No Man’s Sky however, every star is a place that you can go. The universe is infinite. The edges extend out into a lifeless abyss that you can plunge into forever.

The universe begins with a single input, an arbitrary numerical seed—the phone number of one of the programmers. That number is mathematically mutated into more seeds by a cascading series of algorithms—a computerized pseudo-randomness generator...

In one sense, because of the game’s procedural design, the entire universe exists at the moment of its creation. In another sense, because the game only renders a player’s immediate surroundings, nothing exists unless there is a human there to witness it...

While the basic behaviors themselves are simple, the interactions can be impressively complex. Artistic director Grant Duncan recalled roaming an alien planet once shooting at birds out of boredom. “I hit one and it fell into the ocean,” he recalled. “It was floating there on the waves when suddenly, a shark came up and ate it. The first time it happened, it totally blew me away.”

It's only a matter of time until we recognize that this is all our Universe is! ;) 

Ways to improve philosophical engagement?

According to this study (see especially the charts on p. 4),

1. More than 90% of published humanities papers have received no citations two years after publication.
2. About 82% have never been cited five years after publication.
3. Citation rates in the humanities have been consistently this low across the past several decades.

In contrast,

1. Over 50% of natural science and social science papers receive at least one citation within two years.
2. About 70% receive at least one citation after five years.
3. Citation-rates in both areas have climbed dramatically and steadily over the past several decades.

To me, these comparisons are very depressing. If you work in the natural sciences or social sciences, chances are your work will be cited and/or discussed in the literature. However, if you work in the humanities, chances are it won't. This means that, currently, the vast majority of us spend months, even years, of our lives working tirelessly on papers and books that we think matter (or should matter) that no one ever cites, let alone engages with. Which is rather disheartening, to say the least. Of course, one possibility is that 80-90% of humanities papers are terrible, and not worth citing/discussing. Yet, while I have actually heard people say things like this, I have a hard time believing it. Philosophers are a rather smart bunch of people--and it seems to me that I read good papers all the time that are never discussed.

What could be done to improve this situation--done, that is, to incentivize broader, more inclusive philosophical engagement? I'm not sure, but let me brainstorm out loud a bit:

Experiences with copy-editors

By Axel Gelfert

It's been a while since I last wrote a post as part of the series 'Publishing as process', which I promised would discuss some of the mechanics of publishing. Sorry for the long hiatus -- in my defence, I was busy finishing a book and taking care of a newborn...

In my last post, I urged authors to proofread their books and papers properly; this usually requires several iterations -- it's amazing how one can read the same material over and over again and miss glaring typos (which is why it's important to budget enough time, so as to give oneself a break in-between). It helps, of course, if one can hire a research assistant (or get someone else to read one's manuscript as a favour); for both my books, I was lucky enough to be able to hire an undergraduate research assistant who did a stellar job spotting typos, highlighting possible ambiguities, and pointing out formatting issues.

Today, I'd like to continue in the same vein, but focus on interacting with copy editors. In my experience, the competence and professionalism of copy editors can vary drastically, even for the same journal. I've had my fair share of positive and negative experience. Some of the variation is due to publishers having outsourced production to companies overseas. Thus, my first book, A Critical Introduction to Testimony (published by Bloomsbury), was copy-edited very competently by an external company in India, and the most recent one, How to Do Science With Models: A Philosophical Primer (published by Springer) by a Springer subsidiary, also in India. (In the former case, I was able to get them to produce an additional -- third -- round of proofs, just to make sure that all my changes as well as the index were implemented correctly; in the latter case, I had to fight quite hard to get a very favourable endorsement by a senior scholar included on the inside cover -- the bigger the publisher, the more rigid their templates and production procedures seem to be!)

One recurring issue with journal publishing is the quick turnaround time: you wait for months to get the paper reviewed and accepted, and then an email arrives telling you to return the corrected proofs "within  48 hrs". As if this wasn't bad enough, it seems that some copy editors have a penchant for unilaterally making changes to the manuscript. Sometimes this may be due to technical issues. My recent book, in philosophy of science, contains a number of fairly complex mathematical formulas, and even though I had used a formula editor (and even had the source code in TeX), apparently these were typeset again separately, leading to some errors (which, luckily, I was able to catch at the proof stage). That much seems inevitable, given the complexity of typesetting software and the vagaries of word processors.

What seems less excusable are unilateral changes that are clearly intentional. I once received the proofs of a paper in which I had used the phrase "A nice example of this would be..." a couple of times. The copy editor had changed this to "A pleasing example of this..." which, correct me if I'm wrong, sounds a bit silly. In another case, I described a Gricean picture of communication, in which a speaker S (="she") tries to communicate a belief of hers to a hearer H (="he"). Using "he" and "she" in this way nicely helped to keep track of the different roles of the speaker and hearer. Unfortunately, in a misplaced attempt to be gender-neutral, the copy editor made changes that rendered the whole example unintelligible, by editing perfectly clear sentences into something like this: "The way in which H is intended to arrive at her/his belief that p is by taking S’s act of telling (for example, her/his perceptible utterance of certain sounds) as evidence of her/his intention to get H to believe that p, and subsequently to take her/his having that intention as evidence that S her/himself has the belief that p."

On yet another occasion, a copy editor with a penchant for etymology and differences between British and American English entered into a lengthy email exchange with me. While this was probably unnecessary, in the end I found it to be an informative exchange (especially for me as a non-native speaker/writer of English), and I was even a little touched by the detailed attention this person was giving my manuscript.

So, let's hear from readers about some of their best/worst experiences with copy editors!

Working at Philosophy, Part 2.5: How We Talk about Philosophy and Leaving It

By Stacey Goguen

This post might be a bit off-topic, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how our work in philosophy is influenced why our larger picture of the field. I swear, eventually I will actually talk about doing work!

Allen Wood recently finished up his series of posts on the Job market at the APA Blog, in which he contributed his time to discuss his observations about the of the job market, some pieces of advice, and a fair amount of gallows-type humor, as well as some biting criticisms of the overall arbitrariness of the market and job searches. Many people have found his posts helpful, cathartic, witty, and an important gesture of solidarity with those on the market. I agree with that, though I found myself interested in hearing more concrete advice. But I deeply appreciate that he took the time and energy to write these posts, and to articulate how he himself approaches candidates’ material. Some of the value I see in his posts is his emphasis on the incentive structures around looking at applications. (“Academic job searches these days are fundamentally conditioned by the hard fact that virtually every advertised position has many, many applicants. The first task of anyone doing a job search has to be to eliminate as many candidates as possible from consideration as quickly as possible” (Part I).)

However, there is another aspect of Wood’s posts that I want to talk about, namely, the way he talks about philosophy, and people’s decisions to pursue a career in it or not. I think that Wood gives voice to a very common model of philosophy here and there, one that I have heard almost verbatim out of the mouths of many people from a number of departments. The model has three parts:

1. Philosophy is more than just a job, but really a vocation or a way of life.
2. Philosophy requires a certain kind of talent, constitution, personality or [something], which not everyone has or is capable of having.
3. Philosophy is something of a meritocracy.

Maybe we can call this the “meritocratic innate vocation” model of philosophy (MIV). In short, philosophy a calling, and it’s something you are either meant to do and good at, or something you simply aren’t cut out for, or don’t love enough to stick with it. And the profession will weed out people accordingly.

I think this model of philosophy is (a) largely inaccurate/unhelpful, (b) cruel on the individual level, and (c) pernicious at the institutional level, in that it masks relevant power dynamics—and thus may count as ideology in the pejorative sense.

Academic philosophy and psychological well-being

I've been thinking about some of the comments in reaction to Stacey's excellent recent post, "Working at Philosophy, Part 2 - That Time I Considered Quitting Philosophy." The relevant comments are:

This post feels like my own autobiography. - pbj | 02/08/2016 at 03:50 AM

Graduate school and the academic job market, especially philosophy, are extremely hard and competitive. There is never such a thing as 'good enough'. It is inevitable that such a work environment breads anxiety and depression. Really, for a lot of people, academia is not psychologically healthy. Even after all these years, I still struggle to put negative thoughts in check. I even remember talking to tenured professors who confessed to struggling with anxiety and depression...Your experiences are not unique Stacey, as you of course now know. - Pendaran Roberts | 02/08/2016 at 04:15 AM

Studenthood, especially at the graduate level, is inherently unsettling because it requires continual exposure to one's own areas of ignorance. While in that role, it can feel as though one's life and one's very self are being gradually torn down. Ironically, this is a cumulative byproduct of extended learning. Think of ignorance as large dark wall and knowledge as a light shining on it. As the area of the light grows larger, more it comes into contact with the vast darkness. In other words, the more you know, the more you know you don't know...The problem with academe, especially grad programs, is that they represent a culture that has is very good at challenging students to face their areas of ignorance, but not at helping students to develop confidence in their unique knowledge, skills and professional self-esteem. Look at the way the departmental pecking orders play out with ego wars among faculty recruiting unwitting grad students as their pawns and the primary mode of attack being one of convincing others how much smarter they are than anyone else. - Larry Cesare | 02/08/2016 at 12:19 PM

I think it's really sad that rampant physical or mental illness or the worsening of these illnesses is supposed to be "normal" just because one is in graduate school. While I'm sure it's fair to ask students to go to therapy or take medication, I also wonder whether we should restructure our programs such that these very serious things are prevented from ever entering students' experiences. It's difficult for me to believe that these illnesses are simply the byproducts of exposing oneself to one's own ignorance. That's not how it seemed to me, at least! - Paula | 02/08/2016 at 01:19 PM

Stacey's post feels a bit like my autobiography as well. I feel like I've been stressed out for, oh, about the past 15+ years or so--and no, I'm not exaggerating. I was stressed out in grad school, was even more stressed out on the job-market, and am still (a bit less) stressed now. As the above comments suggest, I don't think this makes me weak or "weird." I think it just makes me human. Anyway, Stacey's post and the above comments raise many important issues--among them:

1. Are graduate school, and academia more broadly, inherently bad for psychological well-being?
2. What can programs, our discipline, and academy more broadly do to better support good psychological well-being?
3. What can individuals (e.g. grad students, faculty, etc.) do to grapple effectively with the psychological pressures, etc., of academic life?

Although many of these issues have been discussed elsewhere, they seem to me to be such important issues that I think it could be helpful to openly discuss them here at the Cocoon. I suppose I will simply share some of my (admittedly anecdotal) thoughts, and then open things up for discussion.

 

Syllabus design: an occasional series. Part I: Against Inertia

By Jerry Green

Confession time: I really enjoy writing syllabi. I like the challenge of building a cohesive structure out of numerous options in a limited space. The best analogy I can think of, if this does anything for you, is rolling an RPG character. I remember being invited to play D&D years ago, and while I never really into the game itself, I loved the character creation part (and I really like KotOR, Dragon Age, etc). You have a small set of points to use to build a character that has to be interesting and fill a certain class role. Designing a syllabus is the same, with the number of meetings as points and the kind of class (survey, deep dive, etc) as the, well, class.  You have so many possibilities, but also so many constraints, and getting things to click just right is a joyous feeling.

So I think a lot about writing syllabi, and I’ll be sharing my thoughts on a range of topics. I’ll devote future posts to specific issues, like how much reading to assign or how to connect material to assignments and learning outcomes, and I’ll try to be as specific and practical as I can. But I wanted to start off the series with a kind of mission statement (or really, just a complaint about one of my pet peeves).

Here’s the tl;dr version: Inertia is a cardinal sin of syllabus design.

Jennings and Schwitzgebel on Gender Disparities in Philosophy

Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Eric Schwitzgebel have a new paper up discussing data they collected on gender disparities in the discipline (thanks to Eric for drawing my attention to it!). From the abstract:

We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher’s Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions: (1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women’s involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women’s involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. We find mixed evidence on the question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige.

Working At Philosophy, Part 2 - That Time I Considered Quitting Philosophy

By Stacey Goguen

Before I dive into the nuts and bolts of how we work, I want to talk about why we work—or don’t. I struggled with getting work done in my first half of graduate school. My writing was sloppy, and I rarely left myself time to polish it. Even when I did proof-read, often my mind was usually a stressed-out mess, so I would read over my mistakes without catching them. Sometimes simply reading philosophy was just as hard.  Again, it was like my mind was on hyperdrive, constantly babbling in the background, making it impossible to concentrate on anything other than more accessible than fiction, Facebook, or the news—which I spent a lot of time reading instead, just to fill the time or to try to get myself to calm down.

During this time, I did okay in my classes, but I had no idea whether I was, in general, getting any better at philosophy. My professors and advisor were helpful, but I felt like there were underlying issues (like maybe I’m just horrible at this stuff) that I was too scared to bring up with them.

Then I bombed my first attempt at my qualifying papers. I struggled for months on these papers and didn’t ask for help (for fear someone would tell me to just give up). As the deadline approached, I freaked out, found it incredibly hard to focus, and did a rush job in the last week, leaving myself little time for careful editing and polishing. One of my papers I turned in was so bad, a professor made me promise that I would never turn in something that sloppy and subpar to them ever again.

Two months later, a whole bunch of things in my personal life went to shit. I was in a bad place. It was summer, a time when I am usually at my best mood-wise. Instead, I was in what-I-now-believe was something of a depressive episode. Many days I struggled to find a reason to get out of bed. Sometimes I wanted to cry all day. And sometimes I just felt numb all week. Ahead of me loomed a second attempt to pass in my qualifying papers, but I couldn’t see a path forward. I had been in graduate school for four years, and if I had made seemingly little progress in that time, how was I supposed to get myself together enough to not only pass my QPs, but then successfully defend a prospectus and write a dissertation?

Clearly, I thought, if there are some people who just can’t hack it in philosophy, I must be one of them.

At point, I honestly thought I might drop out of my program and quit graduate school. As you might have guessed, I did not in fact end up doing this--though I did such little philosophy work in the next six months that I pretty much took an unofficial leave of absence (apart from my TA duties).

I’m lucky that several things happened during those six months, which were the beginning of a huge shift in how I thought about philosophy, graduate school, and my life.

Job-Market Boot Camp, Part 25: When Spring Term Rolls Around

It has been a while since the last installment of our "Job-Market Boot Camp", but given that it is Spring Term and hires are starting to be made, I thought it might be good for a new installment: one focusing on what to do at this point. Obviously, if you have interviews or on-campus visits, you should be practicing your interview skills and/or prepare as best you can for your visit. But, what about if you don't have interviews or campus visits? What should you do then? As someone who was on the academic job-market for seven years, I encountered this situation a bunch of times. So, allow me to offer a few suggestions, and then open things up for discussion.

Suggestion 1: Don't give up yet on this year's job cycle

One of the more interesting things I was told my first year on the market (when I was ABD) is that things can happen really late in the game. That year, I think I had three first-round interviews--but none of them turned into on-campus visits. But a bunch of people told me not to panic, saying they knew people who got hired for postdocs and VAP positions pretty late in the game, everywhere from March to as late as July (and in one or two cases, even August!). And indeed, this is what I found my first two years on the market. My first year, I received a VAP offer completely out of the blue sometime in March, and then, my second year (after not hearing back from my interview for over two months) I was once again offered a VAP in late March. So, if you do not have any TT interviews or flyouts, it's not necessarily time to give up on this year's job cycle. Things can still happen. Indeed, on that note, it is worth bearing in mind that not all academic job-markets follow the North American cycle (i.e. apply for jobs in fall, interview in winter, hire in Spring). UK, European, and other job-markets are more "year round", with jobs coming out constantly. So, keep an eye out for new job postings, and keep applying. Something could still happen!

Suggestion 2: Reflect, and discuss, whether to try again next year

At the same time, although good things can still happen, I've found that it can be good to not simply wait, but instead be proactive about what to do should things not turn out the way one hopes (i.e. you do not receive any offers, or you do receive a non-TT offer, but it is not an offer you want to take--say, due to low pay, relocation, etc.). The first thing to do, obviously, is decide whether to give the academic job-market another go next year. Here, I've found a few things are important:

1. Honest evaluation of "indicators" (i.e. whether you are "getting closer" to a TT job): What do I mean by this? Well, it can be hard to evaluate one's competitiveness on the market after just one year. If one gets no interviews, that may be a bad sign for the future--or it could just be that one got unlucky. However, if one is on the market a few years, trends may emerge. On the one hand, you may find yourself with few interviews year after year, or even see your number of interviews decrease. Alternatively, you may find that your number and quality of interviews increase substantially from year to year. Although the number and quality of one's interviews are merely that--reflections of how attractive committees find you as a candidate to interview--they are that: indicators of competitiveness for interviews.
2. Honest evaluation of one's priorities: Are you miserable? Can you "stand it" one more year on the market. I don't pretend to know when you should "give up" (or rather, pursue a nonacademic career)--but, for reasons I will turn to below (in Suggestion 3), now (Spring Term) is the time to decide: for you either need to start now looking for nonacademic work, or get on with the task of improving your dossier for next year's market.
3. Honest discussion with, and fairness to, one's loved ones: This one was particularly important to me. Once you are married, in a committed relationship, or have children, you now have obligations to others. Not only that: at least in my experience, the academic job market can be really trying on them. Those who love you tend to share your successes, as well as your misery? Would sticking it out on the job-market harm those you love? Is that worth it to you? Is it fair to them? Obviously, I have my own views about fairness--very roughly, that it requires negotiating compromises with others--but, even if you don't share my views (though of course you should!:), I would suggest that out of decency, kindness, and love, you should at least consider these issues very seriously.

If you decide to pursue nonacademic work, the obvious thing you need to do is find good resources for making that kind of career transition. If, on the other hand, you decide you want to hazard another year on the academic job-market, I would advise...

Suggestion 3: Start improving your candidacy now

If you are going to go through the academic job-market gauntlet yet again, I think you owe it to yourself to do everything you reasonably can to give yourself a better shot next year. How? By getting started on improving your candidacy now--yes, while you're still waiting on this year's job market. One obvious thing you should do is keep trying to publish the best work you can in the best venues you can. But, given how many people there appear to be with good publication records who report not getting many interviews, you should not stop there. There are many other things you can do. You can seek out more (and better) letters of recommendation, cultivate a positive online presence, work hard to improve your cover letter, research statement, and teaching dossier, etc.--and yes, "network". The important thing, again, is to start these things now, as you only have so much time before next year's market.

I hope this post has been helpful. Have I forgotten anything? For those of you have been on the market a few years (or succeeded in finding a job), do you have any advice that readers might find helpful here? Thanks, in advance, to everyone who chimes in!

Teaching Links

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I plan to write mostly about teaching. But I don’t want to give the impression that I think I’m an expert dispensing pedagogical Truth. I’ve taught a fair amount for a grad student: I’ve been sole instructor for 8 courses, I’ve TA’d a bunch, and I was a GRE tutor and a marching band percussion instructor. [1] But I’m definitely still picking it up as I go, and I hope that writing at the Cocoon will be another avenue for learning from folks who know things I don't.

With that in mind, I thought I’d start by sharing my collection of online teaching resources. I have these bookmarked and refer to them often, especially when I’m thinking about a new course. These are collections of entries, not single articles (though I may post a collection of those later). I hope you find them useful. More importantly, I hope you have suggestions to add to the list. If you know a good source I missed, put it in the comments and I’ll update the post periodically.

If I Only Knew Then...Tenured Scholars on Professionalization

There is a great new series, "If I Only Knew Then...Tenured Scholars on Professionalization", over at Religion Bulletin that I very much encourage everyone to check out. Although it is not a philosophy blog, the three posts up so far in the series are very informative, touching upon concerns often raised philosophy blogs about the job-market, academia in general, etc. The three posts up so far are:

• Nicola Denzey Lewis on advice for junior women scholars.
• Stephen C. Berkwitz on what it is like to transition from an early- to mid-career academic.
• Mark Hulsether on the job market, changing priorities in academia, and whether he would "do it all again."

Given that the series just kicked off in January, I suspect it will be a great series to follow in weeks to come!