The Philosophers' Cocoon

Clarity of tenure standards at time-of-offer

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I wanted to start a new series on tenure. This series is inspired by my general sense that, despite how important tenure in many people's careers, it is an issue that seems to be rarely talked about. What exactly is the tenure process like? What are tenure standards like? How clearly and consistently are they conveyed and enforced? And how do all of these things differ across different types of institutions (elite R1's, R2's, SLACs, community colleges, etc.)? My sense is not only that many job-candidates that don't know the answers to questions, but in fact that many senior members of the profession may not have a very good grasp of the answers to them either. This series aims to shed some greater clarity on these issues.

I would like to begin this series by asking readers who have obtained tenure-track jobs to chime in on the following series of questions:

1. How clearly were your hiring department's/institution's tenure-standards converyed at your time-of-offer (i.e. before you actually accepted the job)? Were you given any clear picture of what those standards are, or no clear picture at all? If you were given a clear picture, how clear was it? How exactly was it conveyed: merely verbally or in writing? Did you have to ask or even press them to find out, or were their tenure standards presented to you without you having to ask?
2. If tenure standards were conveyed to you at your time of offer, what exactly were the standards conveyed?
3. What kind of institution were you hired into the tenure track to--for example, an 'elite R1' (Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, etc.), a 'non-elite R1' (see here), a 'Leiter-ranked R1', an 'R2' (see here), an 'elite SLAC' (selective liberal arts college), a 'non-elite SLAC' (small liberal arts college), a community college, a special category of university outside of the North American system? In which country?
4. How accurately do the tenure standards that were conveyed to you represent the actual tenure standards that appear to you to exist in your department/university post-hire?

I am really curious to hear people's answers, and hope tenure-track and tenured readers take the time to answer. A good series of answers may not only help present and future job-candidates, but also provide the rest of us a clearer picture of the kinds of practices (both good and bad) and differences that exist across the academy!

What's it like to be a philosopher in Hong Kong?

This is the twelfth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that gives a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West. This is a guest contribution by Chris (C.J.) Atkinson, Visiting Scholar at Lingnan University and part-time Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong:

A Philosopher in Hong Kong

It wouldn’t be quite right to start an entry about life as a philosopher in Hong Kong without mentioning the ongoing protests. Originally known as the ‘summer of discontent’, the movement has now continued on well into the winter, and it’s not at all clear when (or how) it will end. Since the protests began on the 9^th of June, millions of people have taken to the streets to stand, in broad strokes, against the ever-increasing influence of Beijing in Hong Kong. As the situation has unfolded, many people have been affected in one way or another, not least university students and academics. Indeed, the students of Hong Kong have, on the whole, been the heart of the movement. Because of this, all universities were forced to close for the final weeks of the autumn term, with two in particular—the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University—becoming epicentres of clashes between protestors and police. It is these incidents, along with many others around the city, that have generated the widely shared images that have recently put Hong Kong on the forefront of the international conscience. Images of large-scale protests, clashes between protestors and police, gang attacks, petrol bombs, and tear gas.

However, as important as these events are for the future of Hong Kong, this is not the city I want to talk to you about here. I would much rather introduce you to the city that I have come to know over the majority of my five years here as a philosopher; both as a student and a full-time academic. And to the city that, I hope, Hong Kong will continue to be. For many, I expect that Hong Kong is not the most obvious choice for pursuing a philosophy career (it certainly wasn’t for me when, as a master’s student in the U.K., I first saw an email advertising the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme—more on that in a minute); but there are in fact many opportunities here for philosophers working at all levels. My aim, then, is to give you a broad overview of what these opportunities are, while also giving you an insight into what it is like to be a philosopher in this unique—and ordinarily very peaceful—city.

CFP: New Mexico - Texas Philosophical Society

71st ANNUAL MEETING OF THE NEW MEXICO - TEXAS PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

April 3-4, 2020 • Waco, TX
CALL FOR PAPERS

https://nmtx.org/

We invite papers on any philosophical topic in English or Spanish for the annual conference of the New Mexico – Texas Philosophical Society to be held in Waco, Texas. Papers ought not exceed 3,000 words (excluding footnotes and references) and are to be presentable within 25 minutes. Complete papers are required; abstracts will not be accepted. There will be commentaries on each paper, and authors of accepted papers are invited to comment on other papers. Papers that have been previously published (or are forthcoming for publication) are not eligible for submission. Each paper should be prepared for anonymous review and submitted electronically to the following website by December 1^st, 2019, extended to January 5^th, 2020.

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nmtx2020

When you submit your paper, please select the topic category that best fits your paper topic: Core Analytic, American Pragmatism, Continental Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Value, or Other.

Southwest Philosophical Studies Journal

The New Mexico – Texas Philosophical Society has a longstanding tradition of publishing outstanding contributions in its journal, Southwest Philosophical Studies. Submissions will be automatically considered for publication, unless otherwise indicated in the submission process. Journal editorial practices will enforce a limit of 3,000 words and endnotes in MLA format.

Are translations valued?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Theo writes:

Could we have a thread about publishing translations of philosophical texts? Is this kind of work recognized by the profession? Or should I rather publish "original" work?

'b' replied:

If you have not yet got a TT job, I would not recommend translations. But if you do have a TT job, and you are at the right sort of place, they will count for something. Clearly with a good academic commentary published along side a translation, you can make a worthy contribution.

This sounds right to me. My sense is that job-candidates in particular (and TT but untenured faculty to a lesser extent) should primarily focus on publishing original work, staying away from things like translations or editing books. While these things are valuable, my sense is that original research counts far more for securing tenure-track employment and tenure than editing books or translations.

But this is just my sense. What is yours? 

Query on IHS

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, left-winging writes:

I have been hearing that it is bad for an early career scholar's reputation to have received funding from the Institute for Humane Studies (George Mason). Any opinions?

I haven't heard anything like this myself. On the one hand, it is always possible for people with moral opposition to libertarianism or classical liberalism to hold IHS's ideological background against people. On the other, my guess is that if an early-career scholar does work with that kind of background anyway (as I would expect people who receive IHS funding generally do), then libertarian or classical liberal themes will show up in their CV and publication-list, in which case receiving funding from IHS is probably a moot point.

In any case, my general stance on these kinds of things is simple: "you do you." Although I'm not a libertarian or classical liberal myself, my sense of philosophical and moral integrity is that if this is the work you do and believe in, then living in fear of what people may or may not think of IHS funding is no way to live. Sure, it's always possible some people may not look favorably on it--but other people may: namely, those who are more sympathetic with libertarianism or classical liberalism. And so I guess I'm inclined to say: just do work you believe in, and let the cards fall where they may.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

Making LEMM relevant to students

A reader writes in:

I'm a long time reader of the Philosophers' Cocoon and have benefited from it immensely. Not trying to be humble, I admit that I'm not a good and talented teacher. And your blog has provided me with a lot of valuable information to help me get by in my job. Thank you for creating and maintaining the platform.

I might be dead wrong. But it seems to me that most of the teaching tips/posts on the blog have been about teaching normative stuff (broadly construed), which is natural given how much ethics is being taught out there. My problem is, my teaching duties are on non-value stuff (e.g. philosophy of mind, metaphysics), at a pretty vocation-oriented school. Whereas I learned a lot from the posts on teaching ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, etc., it seems that many of the activities and approaches that work for value theory don't seem to work for the kind of topics I'm teaching to make students care about those topics (Probably due to my lack of creativity as well). For example, topics like substance dualism just don't have much direct, real life application to work with. To be honest, I feel emotionally drained and lost. I'm sorry for going on and on venting. But I'm wondering whether you and your readers have any advice or suggestion. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

This is a great query, and I'm curious to hear how readers answer. Here are a few brief thoughts about possible ways to make LEMM (language, epistemology, mind, and metaphysics) courses and content relevant to students.

Turning dissertations into books

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Big Dawg writes:

I would sincerely appreciate if you could create a thread that seeks advice on the general topic of turning a dissertation into a book. I understand there is already a series on "book publishing" but this is obviously a different scenario.

I am looking for the following advice:

Where does one begin?

What is the best way to think about how to do this?

Is there any advice from someone who has done it themselves and what they would recommend?

Are there specific things one can do to make this process easier?

I realize advice may vary depending upon the specifics of the dissertation itself but any general advice would be much appreciate.

**Please note: I am not looking for advice on whether to do this. I have a book contract.

As I don't have any experience turning a dissertation into a book, I don't have much advice to give here beyond the following two things.

Wondrous and wonderful philosophy

If you are an academic philosopher, and you are like many other philosophers I know, the following situation may be familiar to you. You have this paper you invested in a lot. It has received very positive responses at conferences. People will come up to you after their talk and tell you they loved it so much. Yet, you struggle to place it in a journal. The journal rejections might be desk rejections without explanation. Or they might have detailed reviewer comments that may even strike you as fair. Indeed, you might say, nodding as you read the rejection, the argument was not really that tight in section 3. The move to x was unmotivated in section 4, and so on.

What is going on? I used to think it was due to two factors (1) behind the veil of anonymity, people are  more nasty and less charitable, and (2) people at conferences are just being nice/polite. This undoubtedly explains part of the phenomenon. But I now think that these explanations are insufficient. For one thing, I have received fair, clearly-written and polite rejections to pieces that received praise at conferences. For another, I can now distinguish better (I hope!) polite conversation from genuine enthusiasm.

My explanation now is as follows. Maybe the mindset of a conference audience and a journal reviewer is fundamentally different. A conference audience member is looking for interesting new stuff. Stuff that challenges her, ideas that might give her a new look on things.

On the other hand, a journal referee is often looking for reasons to reject. Indeed, some highly competitive journals specifically instruct referees to be extra-critical. Rejection requires specific reasons, which for philosophers often come in the form of (serious, fatal, etc) objections. 

Now the paper that does well at conferences but not at journals seems to me to have the following properties: it has lots of interesting, novel ideas, but the argument is not watertight. I think there is often a genuine tradeoff between papers that go out on a limb and do something novel, and papers that make a minor point but that are argumentatively watertight. Very rarely, you can write a paper that does both--be highly original and rigorous--and one can place it well. But usually, a paper cannot do both.  For one thing, the paper with lots of novel stuff cannot rely on an existing dialectic with familiar moves. Referees see the shortcomings, can offer objections, and recommend reject. Often this recommendation is fair. Looking over a paper recently rejected this way, I look at their comments and I think, as I have done before,  "yes, reviewer 2 (or often reviewer 1 AND 2) is right: the move from x to y doesn't quite work yet". But often, I don't know how to fix it. And, after a few unsuccessful tries, the paper just ends up in the heap of unpublishables. 

In a conference, you're more willing to think along with the paper---the format itself (an invitation for dialogue after) facilitates this. At a workshop in Minneapolis on formal methods in philosophy, we had a roundtable discussion on the nature of philosophy. What is philosophy? Many of us agreed: philosophy begins in wonder. Philosophy helps us to cultivate that sense of wonder. It challenges us, it pushes us out of our comfort zone. It stirs our emotions, leaves us perplexed about our basic assumptions. It was remarkable that we were in a company of analytic philosophers, many of us wrote formal analytic philosophy. 

Still, I still think this view of philosophy is fundamentally correct. Not only does philosophy begin in wonder, good and enduring philosophy evokes a sense of wonder in us. Good philosophy is profoundly experiential. As Martin Lenz comments 

Perhaps you have already asked yourself now and then why at least the first chapters of Descartes’ Meditations are such a widely and persistently appreciated text.  Why does it speak even to first-year students in such a direct way that other works never will? Let me give you a hint: it’s not the structure of the arguments; neither is it philosophical content. It is because it is a meditation. 

Reading Descartes' meditations is a powerful experience, that's in part why he still matters to us. Lenz cautions that we should not reduce or impoverish our experiences to finding and responding to objections. Objections are just one way to respond to other people's philosophy. At conferences, a lot of what goes on are objections the range of responses are typically broader---these include also the passive listening to someone's argument, including all the non-verbal cues such as images, emotions, that accompany the core text. When we respond to a conference paper, we respond to that whole. 

Some people might think that the journal review system is broken. There is something wrong if we systematically accept papers we can find no fault with but that don't stir our imagination, whereas the papers with holes but new ideas get shot down by objections. Maybe that's true, but maybe this also gives us the opportunity to expand the range of philosophy, including what is acceptable for tenure and promotion, beyond the journal article or classic monograph. By the way, I think that monographs already have different norms for acceptance compared to journal articles. The arguments in books, it seems to me, tend to be looser and a book to be publishworthy needs to be more original than a typical journal article. It does not work (typically, unless your writing style lends itself to it, but I think it often doesn't) to write a book exactly like a series of journal articles. Philosophy monographs allow room to breathe and wonder. They don't need to be referee-proofed to the same extent as journal articles. 

I'm inclined to an expansive conception of philosophy where images, aphorisms, music, poetry, can all be part of philosophical conversation. For example, I'm currently editing a book under contract with Oxford University Press which will feature 42 drawings I made, which are pictorial comments on philosophical thought experiments, accompanied by personal reflections of philosophers. The book would be marketed to intro to philosophy students. I'm also co-editing, with Eric Schwitzgebel and Johan De Smedt, a book of philosophical stories. Note that all of these are still in fairly traditional publication venues (OUP and Bloomsbury).

I do wonder whether there would be room for a journal that explicitly makes room for more wondrous philosophy--philosophy that is high in innovative content but low(er) in rigor, a journal of cool, exciting half-baked ideas of sorts. I don't think there is such a journal yet.

Closest come journals that require higher standards for originality (such as Mind), but these journals do not compromise on papers being tightly argued. Perhaps, one might say, that's how it should be. Poetry, music, etc. are all very nice but fundamentally, philosophy is still argumentative. A journal that compromises on rigor to accept any idea that tickles the reader, even if it's full of holes, will just be a rubbish heap of badly written papers. Perhaps that's true. Still, I think there's a market for such papers, which now languish unpublished, or occasionally end up in edited volumes (which is all fine, but writing for edited volumes is typically on invitation and so would exclude many scholars). 

New series on tenure

Yesterday, I came across an interesting discussion on social media on what tenure requirements are at different schools. Because it is clear from that discussion and others discussions I have encountered that tenure requirements differ greatly at different institutions, I thought it might be good to run a short series on the tenure process and tenure requirements. It occurred to me that such a series might be of interest to a variety of the blog's readers, including job-marketeers (who might benefit from better awareness of differences in the tenure process and standards across institutions), tenure-track faculty who have not gone up for tenure yet, and members of the profession more generally.

Anyway, I tentatively plan this series to cover the following topics:

• What tenure processes themselves are like at different institutions
• How clearly and consistently tenure standards are stated and conveyed to job-candidates
• What tenure standards are like at different kinds of institutions
  • R1 (research) institutions
  • Elite liberal arts universities
  • Non-elite liberal arts universities
  • Regional public state schools (non-R1's)
  • Community colleges
• What tenure-denial is like and involves (including potential for appeals)

Are there any other topics the series should cover? If so, please let me know in the comments section below this post. Because the quality of information this series provides will depend on reader comments, I'd like to encourage readers to share posts in the series, so that readers who may have experience and insight in these matters can chime in! For now, I'd just like to solicit suggestions on any additional topics to cover in the series. The first substantive post in the series will come in the next day or two!

Mentioning age in recommendation letters

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, prof writes:

I am a professor at an European University, and I would have a question concerning letters of recommendation.
Is it appropriate to write something like "This is an impressive list of accomplishments for someone who has not reached their 30s yet"? I want to emphasize that these accomplishments are exceptional for a 28-year-old. Or should I never mention or refer to the student's age?

Interesting question. I guess I'm inclined to think one shouldn't discuss age (so as to avoid unwittingly playing into ageism). I think there's nothing wrong with saying in a letter that someone has an impressive list of accomplishments for their career stage--but again, I'm inclined to think it is best to leave chronological age out of it. What do you all think?

External committee members for European PhDs

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, European PhD candidate writes,

I am currently a PhD candidate at an European university, and I wonder what exactly the relationship between the candidate and the external members of their committee is.
What are exactly the tasks of the external committee members?
How soon should one invite an external professor to be member of their committee?
Can one ask the external members of their committee to write letters of recommendation on their behalf?
Thank you in advance!

This is a great query. Unfortunately, given that I've spent my entire career in academia in the US, I don't know anything about it. But I'd be very curious to learn more and help European PhD candidate and others in their position out. Anyone with experience here have any helpful answers?

New survey: non-TT faculty issues

Last month, I began a new series on the rights of non-tenure-track philosophers. My aim in this series is to learn more about the issues that non-TT members of the profession face, the relative importance of those issues to them, what might be done to address those issues, who ought to address those issues and how (such as the APA), and finally, which issues ought to be considered rights of non-TT faculty.

In the first entry in the series, I held an open discussion on the question, "non-TT faculty, what do you take to be important professional issues you face that you would like to see addressed in some way?". I personally learned a lot from the discussion, and put together the following list of issues that commenters identified as important issues to them:

• Absolute deprivation (e.g. poor pay and/or benefits)
• Relative deprivation (less pay, benefits, and/or job security than similarly qualified individuals)
• Lack of job-security (e.g. year-to-year or semester-by-semester contracts)
• Lack of opportunities for promotion
• Lack of union representation
• Never feeling like you belong (always feeling like a 'visitor' in your own department/institution)
• Being treated as a second-class citizen at work
• Lack of respect in the discipline of academic philosophy (e.g. only people with tenure-track jobs matter)
• Unjust inequity (unequal pay for equal work)
• Lack of academic freedom

I have now put together this informal survey to elicit how important these different issues are to non-tenure track , as well as to solicit non-tenure track people's opinions on which issues the American Philosophical Association (APA) should do more to address. If you are a non-tenure-track member of the profession (e.g. working as an adjunct, postdoc, lecturer, VAP, etc.), please consider filling out the survey. Although it is only an informal survey, not a formal study, my hope is that the answers respondents give to it will be illuminating for further discussion in this series. Please only fill out the survey if you have worked or are working in the above non-tenure-stream capacities. Please do not fill out the survey if you have only worked as a graduate teaching assistant or graduate student instructor in your MA or PhD program while in graduate school. While I think the professional issues that graduate students face are important (and indeed, I hope to do a series on the rights of graduate students in the near future!), I would like for this series to focus squarely on non-tenure-stream members of the profession beyond their work in their own graduate program. Many thanks in advance to everyone who takes the time to fill out the survey!

Tips for recruiting majors & promoting diversity

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, ABD Philosophy Student writes:

In the recent 'What do first-round academic philosophy job interviews look like?' it's suggested that there are two common questions one might get: (1) How would you recruit majors? and (2) How would you promote diversity in the classroom and/or on campus?

I'm wondering: (1) How does one recruit majors? and (2) How does one promote diversity?

Not just, what can I say? But, what are genuinely effective tactics for these projects?

Good questions, and I am curious how readers would answer. I will share just a few things I did, my department has done, and which I have seen work well.

In terms of recruiting majors, when I was in a non-TT position I took it upon myself to put together a detailed informational packet on philosophy and the major, which I then took to my department. The packet included information on the major itself, including how easy it is to double major, as well as information on graduate school test scores, employment and salary statistics, examples of successful, real life people in all different kinds of fields who majored in philosophy (focusing on diversity too), and so on. In the years after distributing that flyer, our major numbers more than doubled, and 60% of our majors are consistently women and historically-marginalized minorities. I also coached an Ethics Bowl team each year, which seemed to recruit some diverse majors, and one of my junior tenure-stream colleagues has been very active and creative in relaunching our Philosophy Club, organizing club meetings around philosophical issues related to hot topics in pop culture and the news. We also began a series of 'lightning talks', featuring philosophers from nearby universities who give 10-15 minute philosophy talks on their research to the club, followed by discussion--which I think attracts and interests students in philosophy far more than, say, a traditional 30-60 minute colloquium talk. Finally, this year we began the fall by putting together a "meet UT's philosophers" event (with food!) where new students, majors, and potential majors could meet each other and the faculty--and we even started a department Instagram page (thanks to the suggestion of several students).

In terms of diversity, when I was still in a non-TT position, I also took it upon myself to create and c0-organize an annual human rights conference with a sociologist, which not of featured diverse academics but also representatives of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Enterprising Latinas, the League of Women Voters, the CARIBE Program for refugees, and many other organizations. These conferences were advertised all around the university, and attended by a diverse body of students.

Anyway, these are just some things we/I have done at my university, and I don't think there's any one way to do (1) and (2). But my advice is simple: be proactive and get creative. Talk to other people inside and outside of your department, brainstorming about things you could do. Chances are, you'll come up with something, and as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained! Do any of you have any tips of your own, including things graduate students might do (since the OP mentions they are ABD)?

Poll results: service and the market

A couple of discussions the past few weeks got me thinking about the role that service (to one's department, university, the profession, etc.) plays on the job market. First, a little over two weeks ago, Daily Nous hosted a discussion on whether graduate students should receive compensation for service work. Second, around the same time, a colleague in the discipline at a research university mentioned on social media that they actively discourage their grad students from engaging in service, the rationale being, if I recall, that it's just not worth grad students' time and energy. I weighed in on this discussion, saying that my experience working and hiring on four search committees at a liberal arts university is very different: namely, that service may substantially benefit candidates on the market for jobs at universities like mine. 

Anyway, both of these discussions got met thinking: do search committee members, and search committees as a whole, care about service? Do candidates' service records affect how they are evaluated by search committee members? If so, how?

Because these seem to me to be important issues, I decided to run an informal poll asking search committee members to weigh in on a few questions. To be clear, it is just an informal poll with a relatively small sample size (N = 29), not a formal study--so the results should be presumably taken with a serious grain of salt. However, here are the results:

• Number of respondents: 29
• # self-reporting as from R1 research universities: 18
• # self-reporting as from regional state universities: 4
• # self-reporting as from non-elite liberal arts universities: 3
• # self-reporting as from elite liberal arts universities: 1
• # self-reporting as from community colleges: 1
• # self-reporting as from 'other': 2

Q1 - A job-candidate's service record (viz. service to their department, university, community, etc.) can play a real role in how I personally evaluate their candidacy as a search-committee member:

Q2 - The search committee(s) I have been on have taken candidates' service records (viz. service to their department, university, community, etc.) into account in their collective deliberations on who to interview or hire:

Q3 - Depending on your answers to Q1 & Q2, what kind(s) of service may play a role in how candidates are evaluated?:

All responses, complete and unedited:

• "Diversity related service, public philosophy, service that brings in media attention, service that attracts grads to the department, undergrads to classes or the major."
• "All forms, but especially technology, diversity, and proactive, positive contributions to the profession."
• "Course development, curriculum reform, labour organizing, establishing MAP chapters, etc."
• "Student outreach, diversity initiatives, reading and discussion groups, syllabus reform."
• "Service with students."
• "Anything that indicates that they would be a responsible member of my department--graduate representative, serving on committees, organizing events, etc."
• "In a UK context, it really is a must. You need to be able to show some "admin" experience, e.g., being part of committees, taking on admin roles in your department."
• "Has the candidate been involved in any diversity initiatives on campus, or leadership/shared governance roles. At my institution we need people to do a lot of service because we are badly understaffed, and we also need people who can help with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts."
• "Undergraduate mentoring; teacher training related initiatives; diversity related initiatives (e.g. MAP chapter)."
• "It's not so much that kinds of service matter, but when debating candidates with differing research outputs, variations in teaching and administrative loads become relevant to predicting future performance."
• "Anything that indicates that the candidate is a team player."
• "Stuff that shows experience working with grad students, stuff that shows they would be a leader in enriching our intellectual community."
• "I don't care about journal refereeing. I take an absence of departmental service, or only insubstantial-looking service lines on the CV, as something of a red flag; it suggests to me that the candidate won't pull their weight in the department. Larger professional service roles suggest the candidate is becoming connected, which is a weak positive sign of reputation-building (which can matter for tenure)."
• "Work that showed a serious commitment to various kinds of diversity (running a MAP chapter, teaching philosophy in urban schools, etc)."
• "I was not allowed to officially consider any service, only the vague 'capacity' to take on roles within the department. This is a serious issue, and I wish that I could take into account junior colleagues that have undertaken senior roles (perhaps to the detriment of their research outputs). If able to, evidence of taking on important departmental roles would be great to ensure that we are hiring someone that can cope in those roles (i.e. future chairs of departments!)."
• "Primarily we have looked at administrative experience--has this person served as a chair, been in charge of adjuncts, performed class scheduling, served as an advisor."
• "Founding/running undergraduate clubs, recruitment efforts (with data to show their personal involvement), conference volunteer work, tutoring/mentoring students in an official capacity."
• "Philosophy club, public philosophy, pedagogical committees."
• "None."

Q4- I answered the above questions on the basis of my experience serving on search committee(s) at:

Again, this is just an informal survey--but I for one find the results intriguing, especially the qualitative answers to Q3 (indicating the kinds of service respondents care about, and their reasons for doing so). Anyway, I hope you all find this information helpful, and would be curious indeed to see what a more formal study might find!

Answering the 'any questions for us?' question

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, anon writes:

The "Any questions for us?" question. I'd be curious to hear general thoughts on how to handle this question, but even more, I'd appreciate concrete examples of good questions that search committee members have heard.

This is a good query. I vaguely recall serving on a search committee and being very impressed by some questions candidates asked, in ways that made a real difference in how I evaluated their interview (as in, "Wow, that question was really a breath of fresh air!" - though, to be clear, I am generally skeptical of the value of interviews on scientific grounds). Although I'm having a hard time recalling specific examples, one general thing that stood out to me was the overall thoughtfulness and originality of the questions asked. One definite thing not to do is to say you don't have any questions. My sense is that this comes across very poorly, making the candidate look unprepared or uninterested in the department and institution. But what are good questions to ask?

Readings in Classical Korean Philosophy?

Sergio Gallegos (John Jay College) writes in:

I am writing briefly to ask for some assistance that you or some of the Cocoon's readers might be able hopefully to provide: a brilliant undergraduate student of mine has requested to an independent study with for next semester, and she would like to do research on classic Korean philosophy (she is particularly interested in Neo-Confucian authors of the Joseon period). Since this a little beyond my area of expertise, I am writing to please request some assistance in getting some suggestions in terms of authors, major works and, hopefully, some secondary literature in English too.

Great query - I've just begun learning a little about the history of Korean philosophy myself, and think it would be very beneficial (both to Sergio and his student, but also to the Cocoon's readers!) to solicit some good sources! Anyone with background in Korean philosophy have any helpful suggestions?

CFP: Athena in Action

Call For Papers for ‘Athena in Action’

A Networking and Mentoring Workshop for Graduate

Student Women in Philosophy

Application Deadline: January 10, 2020

Ph.D. students are invited to submit papers (on any topic in philosophy) to participate in the workshop, held June 16-19, 2020 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Thirty-five PhD students in philosophy from outside the local region will be selected to participate in the workshop: seven submitted papers will be selected to be discussed at the workshop; fourteen students will be selected as commentators on the papers; and fourteen more students will be selected as chairs of sessions. An additional roughly fifteen students will be selected from the local region.

Our goal is to create a workshop at which high-level philosophical conversation occurs and great advice is offered. Participants will benefit from making connections with other talented philosophy students, getting to know the faculty mentors, and hearing the mentors’ advice on thriving as a woman in philosophy. Please submit papers and applications by January 10, 2020.

For more information, please visit the event's website at athenainaction2020.weebly.com

Book contracts and the market

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Anon writes:

To search committee members: how does receiving a book contract from a mid-tier press look to potential search committee members?

How should one go about listing this on their CV?

'Press' then responded:

Book contracts are not that impressive - in part, because they are not binding on the press, and they are often based on work not yet done. You say mid-tier ... that is hard to image which press. Can you be more specific: Springer, Chicago, Cornell, MIT? If you are dipping lower still, it really cannot count for much.

For what it is worth, Press's comment does not cohere at all well my experience on the market or my experience hiring at a liberal arts university. Here are my thoughts.

Grad school grades & the market

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, smoose writes:

...I have question concerning job prospects. I'm relatively early ish in my Grad program, but I've had some conversations recently with others in my program and they made me curious about what others thought (not just in my department).

1. 1. How important are your grades when applying for a job? Do they even look at them? Straight A's vs. a couple of B's.
   2. Should one just focus more on publication than grades?
   3. How many publications should one aim for? For instance, avg number for most graduates, a good number, a great number, and an outstanding number of publications?
   4. Mainly, is it better to focus on conferences, publication rather than getting top grades when it comes to getting a job?

I know that my advisor has a big role to play in me landing a good job, but I'm wanting to figure out where I should be putting most of my energy.

I could always be wrong (I am more often than I expect!), but my guess is that grad school grades almost never matter in any direct way on the job-market. When it comes to getting hired for R1/research university jobs, what matter most seem to be: (A) grad program prestige, (B) the overall perceived quality of your work (viz. your writing sample and letters of recommendation), and (C) the quality of your publication record (viz. publishing in top journals). Conversely when it comes to jobs at teaching institutions (e.g. SLACs), grad program prestige seems to matter less, as does publishing in top-journals. My own sense, having hired at a SLAC four times, and having been very competitive on the SLAC market when I was a job-marketeer, is that publication quantity matters more for SLAC jobs, as does the perceived quality and innovation of one's teaching and perhaps even one's service record. Here again, I suspect hardly anyone is likely to pay attention to grades--though I guess if you did have a very spotty grade record, it might raise a yellow flag, leading people to wonder about your work ethic, perhaps (I don't know). [Side note: as we've discussed many times on this blog, the above differences between what different types of schools look for suggests that different people should probably have different job-market strategies, depending on what kinds of jobs they are likely to be most competitive for!]

Does this mean you shouldn't care about grades in grad school? No! The way I see it, the point of grad school grades isn't to impress potential employers. The point is what they reflect: your philosophical development, and the extent to which your work has impressed faculty in your program. These are things worth caring about, but only as means to ends: namely, producing good work, publishing effectively, and so on. So sure, try to get good grades, but don't be mistaken: they're not what people on the hiring end of things care about. You're not going to get tenured on the basis of your grad school grades, but on the basis of your publications, outside letters in support of your candidacy, teaching, and so on. Your real focus, in other words, should be on becoming the best researcher, teacher, and member of the profession you can!

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

What do first-round academic philosophy job interviews look like?

The job market timeline is a bit more spread out than it was in the past, but it's still pretty much the case that for most tenure track jobs, interview requests will go out this month, perhaps also next month. 

Job interviews have moved to Skype. It's been a while that Marcus or I have interviewed for a tenure track position. If you were recently on the market, what does a job interview for a TT job in philosophy look like? What questions were you asked? Feel free to chime in with any recent experiences and observations! 

Elizabeth Hannon public philosophy interview

The following is an interview with Elizabeth Hannon of The Forum for Philosophy and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science conducted by the Philosophy of Science Communication network in their new series highlighting a range of philosophy career tracks related to public philosophy and science communication (for an introduction to the network, see this recent Daily Nous interview).

You are an academic yet you occupy a very interesting non-traditional position adjacent to what we think of as the traditional academic path. What are the roles you play?

I am Deputy Editor for the British Journal of Philosophy of Science (BJPS), and also the director of the Forum for Philosophy. This latter role is ostensibly to provide academic oversight of the programme of events the Forum organises, but in fact it involves every aspect of running a small non-profit organisation. In lots of ways, I think I’m incredibly lucky to have ended up where I am. I suspect making a living the way I do is almost unheard of in philosophy, and probably rarer than landing a TT academic job. So in that sense, I’m not in a position to give advice on a ‘career path’. On the other hand, I sort of made both of these jobs for myself: In both cases, I got the job in order to take care of administrative tasks. And then I just started doing other, more interesting things too, and so far no one has stopped me! (Mostly, academics are too busy—and prone to talking a good deal more than doing!—so that they’re happy for someone else to take over and get on with it… assuming they even notice!)

“I sometimes characterise my work as a midwife for philosophy—I don’t do the philosophy, but I help bring it into the world!”

Would you consider yourself a public philosopher, due to your role designing events for the Forum?

I’m really interested in public philosophy, far less in being a ‘public philosopher’. I sometimes characterise my work as a midwife for philosophy—I don’t do the philosophy, but I help bring it into the world! So I don’t call myself a philosopher, but I say that I work in philosophy: I couldn’t possibly do the work I do without my philosophy training, and I call on that training daily. And I really enjoy the challenge of switching between two distinct registers: an academic one for the BJPS and more accessible one for the Forum.

Wow, a midwife for philosophy! Tell me more about what that means and why it’s rewarding.

Here’s the aspect of my work that I think might be of most interest to you: when people from different disciplines talk to one another, they often end up talking past one another. What I’ve found is that by putting academics in front of a general audience and encouraging them to chat casually to one another (rather than present papers, etc.), they tend to unconsciously adjust how they discuss their work. As a result, not only does the audience gain an insight into the research, the speakers end up with a better understanding of each other’s research, motivations, frameworks, etc., and interdisciplinary research collaborations have resulted from the public events we’ve hosted. We have a host of techniques to bring the best out of our speakers for the sake of our audience, but it was a very pleasant surprise how this had the secondary benefit of facilitating interdisciplinary work.

What got you into philosophy in the first place? Did you see yourself as a publiciser of philosophy early on?

I became of philosophy grad student having not studied philosophy before (I studied mathematical physics as an undergrad). I got really lucky by being thrown in with a group of brilliant MA students, who tolerated me hanging around as they had these intense (slightly mad!) philosophy arguments across the pubs and bars of Durham. I loved it, of course. But there was a ton of technical terms I hadn’t come across and texts that I’d still to read, so that first year was very much in at the deep end. (At one house party, I became convinced that an argument happening around me, about the correspondence theory of truth, was an elaborate prank by my friends.) 

In accordance with cliche, being an outsider gave me certain perspectives on things taken for granted by the philosophy community. The analytic–continental divide seemed a bit bonkers, for instance (insofar as if you start from mathematical physics, the two Big Philosophical Traditions look like they share far more than divides them). Given the work I currently do with the Forum for Philosophy, the most salient thing this experience gave me was some grasp of what is and isn't easy to understand, given a limited or non-existent background in the philosophy. More so than with academics from other disciplines that I’ve worked with, philosophers (as a group!) have bad instincts about what non-specialists are likely to know or at least be familiar with (and this includes poor instincts about what is or isn’t familiar to colleagues from other sub-disciplines of philosophy and colleagues from cognate disciplines). At the same time, philosophers (again, as a tendency of the group!) are also more likely to underestimate non-specialists along other dimensions. (One example: public philosophy needn’t only be political philosophy and applied ethics, say—philosophers don’t have a monopoly on nerdiness! Nerdiness for the masses!)

I can’t say that I always planned or even hoped to do philcomm work—not least because it still barely exists as a job to aspire to do!—but I think when the opportunity landed in my lap, this curious-but-clueness background was really helpful!

“… academic culture, and especially philosophy culture, tends to value people purely in relation to the nature of their job, and the host of people who work with academics but are not themselves academics—librarians, professional service staff, publishers, and so on—are not perceived as colleagues.”

What is the day-to-day like at the Forum? Those interested in following your career path might be interested in knowing the tradeoffs or downsides of the jobs you have. 

It’s difficult to summarise the nitty gritty of my work, because any one aspect constitutes a maximum of 5% of the various things I do, from form filling and fundraising to editing academic papers and ‘marketing’ philosophy to people who know next to nothing about it (and often imagine they care even less).

The downside of this fragmentation is that I have absolutely no time for research. Another downside is that lots of philosophers don’t see any value in public philosophy, and take this as license to treat those of us who work in this area as having no value. (This is by no means unique to public philosophy, of course; academic culture, and especially philosophy culture, tends to value people purely in relation to the nature of their job, and the host of people who work with academics but are not themselves academics—librarians, professional service staff, publishers, and so on—are not perceived as colleagues.) I’m also often in a position where I often need to tell people they can’t have the thing they want (rejection emails from the BJPS and so on) or trying to get people to do things they don’t want to do (submit your referee reports, you cowards!). There’s aconstant backlash, as you might expect. Any single instance isn’t so bad, of course, but the drip-drip of angry emails is very tiring. This last point—the anger—can be quite gendered, or certainly exacerbated by sexism, as will probably come as no surprise either. For instance, when I give an academic an answer they don’t like, their response is almost always to reply copying in someone else (sometimes a man who works for me!) to complain. The response I get when it’s assumed a man has done the work or made the decision differs significantly to when the work or decision is recognized as my own. It’s exhausting!

On a much more positive note, the variety of the work suits me very well. And I’ve got to meet some amazing people as a result of our events: philosophers I’ve long admired, of course, but also people from all walks of life who have made important contributions to the sum of human knowledge, often in very difficult situations and at great risk to themselves. I’m also a massive fan of our audience. Their willingness to make space for philosophically informed discussion in their busy lives—how much this sort of thing clearly matters to them—is the main thing that keeps me going!   

Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for indulging us. It is brilliant and uplifting to see philosophers go out and create their own impact in the world! You have been an inspiration to me and the birth of the Philosophy of Science Communication Network. We hope to highlight more jobs and research ideas that showcase the wide diversity of philosophy communication.

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