The Philosophers' Cocoon

Taking part in an "inside search" (pretenure)?

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

Suppose one is pre-tenure and has been asked to participate on a hiring committee for a job specifically created for a person already at the institution who is in a temporary position. This fact--that the job is "for X" is widely known and openly discussed at faculty meetings. Yet, per institutional requirements, there is an ad and a search. There is virtually no chance anyone outside will get the job but making a stir about this without tenure seems foolhardy. So does voting for one of the (potentially better) outside candidates who applies.

What should one do?

I don't know. My sense is that there are inside candidates or favorites in many industries, but also, that these candidates don't always get the job, including in academia. I've heard anecdotally that search committees may begin a search strongly favoring an inside candidate, but then end up selecting another candidate that they take to be better in the end. In any case, I've never been in this kind of situation, and the ethical issues seem like ones that reasonable people may disagree over. As for legal issues, I'm not entirely sure what the law holds here, including what protections there may or may not be for whistleblowers on an issue like this.

What do you all think? Do any readers have any helpful tips, experiences, or other insights to share?

CFP: SPECIAL ISSUE (Journal of Applied Philosophy): What We Owe Super Soldiers

Submission deadline: August 31, 2023

Editors: Blake Hereth (University of Pennsylvania), Nicholas G. Evans (University of Massachusetts Lowell)

Special Issue Venue: Journal of Applied Philosophy

Topic: What We Owe Super Soldiers: Ethical Reflections on Long-Term Care at the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

CFP: Military researchers in various countries are pursuing human enhancement regimes in order to attain strategic battlefield advantages. For example, the United States military's research arm, DARPA, is aggressively developing technologies like ADAPTER, a brain implant designed to provide "therapeutic substances on demand." However, super soldier veterans face a profound risk of inadequate long-term care -- an existing problem compounded by the unknown long-term side effects of many enhancement drugs and technologies. Sadly, the topics of disenhancement and long-term care for super soldiers have been overshadowed by other ethical inquiries, with the result that long-term care is scarcely addressed in the literature. Alongside other scholars seeking to bring greater attention to super soldier veteran care, our special issue aims to redress this oversight in the literature.

Confirmed Contributors: Blake Hereth (UPenn), Nicholas G. Evans (UMass Lowell), Adam Henschke (University of Twente), Łukasz Kamieński (Jagiellonian University in Krakow), Pierre Bourgois (Catholic University of the West)

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): Persons from traditionally underrepresented groups in philosophy and bioethics (e.g., women, BIPOC, disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQ scholars) are especially encouraged to submit. 

Timeline: Only abstracts (min. 250 words) will be considered. Please submit by 31 August 2023. The guest editors (Hereth and Evans) will review submissions in September and provide notification of acceptance in the special issue proposal by 30 September. The special issue proposal will then be submitted to the Journal of Applied Philosophy for consideration and, if approved, sent for anonymous peer review. Please be aware that the guest editors cannot guarantee inclusion in the final product, as the guest editors have no control over the peer review process.

Submission email: Please submit abstracts (min. 250 words) to [email protected].

7 Years Later Excerpt #7: Preparing Your CV for the Job Market

By Trevor Hedberg

For many of us, summer is wrapping up, and for those nearing the end of graduate school, that means job market preparations are right around the corner (or perhaps have already begun). Since another job market season is not too far away, I think it is appropriate to share a few excerpts from 7 Years Later that focus specifically on aspects of the job market. This one covers how an ABD graduate student should approach editing and refining their CV in preparation for their first run on the job market.

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Hopefully, as you have inched closer to the job market, you have been periodically updating your CV. It will almost surely be one of the first items read by committee members, and it is one of the most important. Your biggest accomplishments should be clearly visible on the first page, and the document as a whole should be organized using a clear and consistent scheme. If you are including a brief dissertation summary on your first page, make sure it is succinct enough not to make your other accomplishments less noticeable, particularly if you have a strong publication record. If you’re looking for a way to model a good CV, browse some well-known philosophers online and find a CV format that presents the material clearly and professionally.[1] Then mimic that style. Don’t be tempted to use any odd fonts or avant-garde formatting: they might make your material more noticeable, but you want your application to stand out because of its impressive content – not because its bizarre appearance.

Before we go further, here is one obvious but important rule to remember when preparing all of your materials:

Honesty Rule: Do not intentionally present false or misleading information on any of your application materials.

There are two reasons for abiding by this rule. First, there are moral considerations. It is generally wrong to engage in acts of deception, and absent the outlandish thought experiments of philosophers with too much time on their hands, there will rarely be anything special about applying for a job that would warrant an exception to this general moral rule. Second, there are practical considerations. These acts of deception are likely to be detected – either upon initial review or later in the process – and getting caught trying to deceive the committee is a surefire way to sink your chances for that particular job. Furthermore, since the philosophical world is small and people talk, there is a decent chance that being caught in this lie will follow you to other job applications. Here are a few deceptive practices on CVs that should be avoided:

• Do not list AOSs and AOCs that you genuinely do not have.
• Do not list papers under review as publications. They are not publications. Only papers that have been accepted for publication should be listed as publications.
• Do not lie about the projected date of your dissertation defense. (Your dissertation advisor is the one who should speak about the projected defense date anyway; they should mention it in their letter of recommendation.)
• Do not list all your publications in one section and title it “Selected Publications.” This creates the impression that you have more publications than you actually do.
• Do not present campus talks (e.g., a presentation delivered to the undergraduate philosophy club at your institution) as if they were equivalent to presentations at professional conferences or invited talks at other universities.[2]

Beyond these rules about avoiding deception, there are two other important things to keep in mind about the content of your CV. First, do not list anything from prior to graduate school except for information about your undergraduate degree and where you received it. This material will look like CV padding and is mostly irrelevant to your professional credentials now. The lone exception might be a truly distinguished undergraduate award (e.g., Rhodes scholar) that would be impressive even though it was achieved at the undergraduate level.

Second, your CV should be constructed so that every major strength of your professional profile appear within the first two pages. Your CV may well be much longer, but whatever your selling points are, they need to be front and center on the first two pages. If a committee member is not impressed on the first or second page, it is doubtful they will read further: there will be hundreds of job applicants for their vacant position, and very little time will be spent reviewing the fine-grained details of your materials at the initial review stage.

Placing your greatest strengths early in your CV could require reorganizing your credentials from how they would normally be formatted. The standard order puts your education, areas of specialization and competence, and employment history first (though you may not have any employment history beyond your GTA experience). After these items, publications and other research-related material typically follows. But if you have a ton of solo teaching experience and are targeting teaching-focused jobs, make sure your courses taught are prominently featured and cleanly presented within the first two pages. Do not bury that information near the end of your CV where it may never be read. To offer a different example, when I was preparing for the job market, I opted to push my dissertation abstract to the very back of my dissertation so I could list all my publications on the first page of my CV. No matter how concise I made the summary, it still pushed a few of my publications onto page 2. My publications were my strongest selling point, so I wanted them all on the first page.

Regardless of your formatting scheme, some items should virtually always be near the back of your CV. Your graduate coursework, reference information, and university service should not be in the first two pages. Even if your service work is impressive (e.g., president of graduate student senate), these details can be mentioned in your cover letter if you think they are worth highlighting. Typically, they will not be noteworthy enough to leave a big impression on search committees.

Now what if you do not have 2 pages of content without including graduate coursework, service, etc.? Unless you are using ludicrously small font, that is a very bad sign. Just your AOS, AOCs, educational information, and contact information will take up almost half of the first page. Surely, during 5+ years of graduate studies, you have some conference presentations, publications, awards, notable teaching experience, etc., that can fill up an additional page and a half. If you do not, then you probably did not do enough during graduate school to prepare yourself for the job market.[3]

 

[1] If you want a more elaborate list of a CV’s typical content and organization, see this post by Lewis Powell. Note, however (as Powell does), that in many respects there are no agreed-upon rules regarding how CVs are formatted and organized. A large aspect of that will be left to your discretion.

[2] Note that there is some disagreement about whether “job talks” – presentations delivered to a department who is considering whether or not to hire you – should be listed on a CV. See this post on the Philosophers’ Cocoon for some discussion of that issue.

[3] This is a relatively rare problem – I have only seen a handful of CVs of ABD graduate students with less than 2 pages of publications, accomplishments, teaching experience, and presentations. Even so, a thin CV is often a foreshadowing of an inauspicious job market run: not one person from that handful fared well on the academic job market.

How long should cover letters be for UK jobs?

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

UK cover letters: I recently heard that these should be 3-4 pages, which goes against everything I have been told (1-1/2 pages). Who is right, if anyone?

Good question - I'm not sure. What I do seem to recall hearing at some point is that a cover letter for jobs in the UK should be sure to address every single part of the job ad, specifically everything that the job ad says is "required" or "desired" in a successful candidate for the position. I can't quite remember if I'm right about this, but I seem to recall hearing that this is in part because letters are read by HR people, not just people in the department to which one is applying. Is this right, or am I misremembering/confabulating?

Do any readers from the UK have any helpful tips or other insights? 

Working in philosophy of religion and seeking R1 jobs?

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

I am a PhD student with an interest in philosophy of religion. A professor recently advised me not to publish anything with religious content unless and until I receive tenure, since (in his experience) hiring committees heavily discriminate against religious people.

I have two worries about this advice. First, I doubt I will be very happy or productive if I do not write about philosophy of religion, at least occasionally. (I am interested in lots of other kinds of philosophy, but none so much as philosophy of religion.) Second, I have already published in philosophy of religion. (To make things worse, the relevant papers are -- horror of horrors -- arguments for theism.) So, it might be too late for me.

I used to think that allegations of anti-religious discrimination in philosophy were overblown, but reading this blog -- in particular, reading comments from posters who seem to regard religious people as their moral inferiors, or unfit to be their colleagues -- has changed my mind. I am quite worried about how this state of affairs could affect my family. (This also makes me worry that any hesitancy on my part to publish in philosophy of religion would be due to cowardice.)

What do you all think about this? I should emphasize that I am aiming for a research job at an R1 university, not a teaching job at a religious college. (I am aware that the odds of landing such a job are prohibitively long, but I am aiming for one anyway.)

I'm not sure that I have good answers to this question. I know some very good philosophers who work in philosophy of religion (including, I think, some who work at R1s), and I guess my sense is that there are some R1s (Notre Dame?) where work in philosophy of religion would be welcomed. I guess I may also have some faith in my fellow philosophers that, while there may of course be some people who are biased against those who work in philosophy of religion, there are others who aren't. 

Anyway, I guess my (rather unhelpful?) advice to the OP is: do whatever work is true to yourself, and let the proverbial cards fall where they may. It's a complex world that we live in where people have all kinds of biases, there's not a lot one can do to endear oneself to everyone, and compromising one's integrity as a person or philosopher seems bad. Some people may discriminate against kinds of philosophy they don't like, but other people may be inclined in your favor, particularly if the work itself is good.

What do you all think?

Tips from Search Committee Members: How committees read research statements

The first two posts in this series examined how hiring committees read and evaluate CVs and cover letters. In today's post, I'd like to ask search committee members to answer some or all of the following questions about research statements:

1. How do you read a research statement?
2. Which sorts of things in research statements tend to produce a positive impression?
3. Which sorts of things do you mostly pass over?
4. Which sorts of things (including common errors) have you encountered in research statements that produce a negative impression?
5. What type of institution do you work at? (R1? R2? Highly-selective SLAC? Non-highly selective SLAC? Community College?)

Finally, if there are any other questions you think are worth addressing not listed here, please feel free to volunteer and answer them. 

Really curious to hear your answers!

How to be competitive on the market with a "gap year" post-PhD?

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

I recently completed my PhD and it looks like I may have missed the boat for applying for postdoc/lectureship positions that begin in the Fall. Although I am applying to the odd positions that have been coming up, I'm anticipating having a "gap year." For this year, I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for what I should be focusing on preparing or completing in order to strengthen my applications for the future. Thanks in advance!

The first thing that I would suggest to the OP is to make sure that they find better job-market mentoring. Someone in their PhD program should have given them the heads up that they needed to apply last year for postdoc/lecturer positions that begin this fall. A few years ago, I met a job-candidate at another institution who clearly wasn't receiving adequate job-market mentoring in their program. The job-market was just a month or two away (as it is now), and they seemed mostly unaware that they should be prepared for the market already. How this happens at some PhD programs, I don't know. But the OP really should have been clued in by someone in their program to these kinds of facts about the job-cycle. 

The second thing I would suggest is for them to check out the Cocoon's various series on job-market prep: our Job-Market Boot Camp, Notes from Both Sides of the Market, and Secret Lives of Search Committees. In terms of a "gap year", I don't know if it will be a problem this year, as they just completed their PhD and the gap probably won't immediately be very evident on their CV. But beyond that, I don't know.

Do any readers have any additional tips or advice for the OP?

7 Years Later Excerpt #6: Approaching Publication with the 2/2/2 System

By Trevor Hedberg

Well, it has been quite a while since the last entry in this series, folks. The last academic year had a combination of personal challenges (highlights include my car being stolen and wrecked due to a pernicious TikTok challenge and battling COVID for 2 weeks despite having all the shots) and professional obligations (mostly making good on commitments made during the pandemic or tied to my first year of employment here in Arizona) that made it difficult to blog with any consistency. But I have returned to working on this guide to graduate school and hope to release a full draft for community feedback before the fall semester begins.

Not so long ago on the Cocoon, there was some discussion about how important publications are for improving one's job market prospects. My general impression is that they matter a good deal, particularly if your PhD-granting institution is not distinguished. Publications are one of the main ways you can distinguish yourself despite lacking prestigious origins. So in this excerpt, I discuss the approach I used to secure several publications in peer-reviewed journals while in graduate school. It is certainly not the only viable strategy but one that worked well for me.

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After 2 or 3 years of graduate school, you will have developed many papers while completing your graduate coursework. Not all of them will contain publishable ideas, but some will. At this juncture, you should revise those papers with the aim of getting some of them published. Unfortunately, trying to revise all of them while simultaneously developing new material (which you will be doing throughout graduate school) is not a preferable strategy.[1] A better strategy is to balance the development of new ideas with the refinement of old ones. There are many ways to strike this balance, but I favor a method I call the 2/2/2 system. The goal of the system is to meet 3 conditions:

1. Have 2 papers under review at journals or (if applicable) at other stages of the publication process (e.g., awaiting editor feedback, awaiting proofs).
2. Have 2 papers fully drafted and undergoing revisions.
3. Have 2 paper ideas in development.

Certifications and the job market: are there any that benefit job-candidates?

A reader writes in:

I’m wondering which, if any, certifications would stand out on a CV as valuable to a search committee at a teaching-heavy institution? If there are some, what are they? I’ve seen places offering DEI certs and other pedagogy related certs, but I don’t know if the ROI is for getting one or multiple of them.

I don't know. What do you all think? Does anyone have any helpful insights on how certifications might benefit a job candidate applying to your department?

Is single-anonymized review a problem?

A reader writes in,

If possible, I would like to ask you and other readers to share some thoughts about the single-blind review policy (= reviewers are aware of the author’s identity but not vice versa). Recently, I noticed that one influential journal adopted such a policy. To be honest, I do not see any benefit from this practice. On the contrary, it seems to me that it is intentionally designed to filter submissions on grounds that are not philosophically relevant. For instance, there is a strong possibility that one can get rejected based on the religious pedigree of hers/his institution, as well as one can get rejected based on the place of living/working and hers/his personal beliefs, public service, membership in some association, etc. Obviously, the same reasons that worked against someone might help someone else. I suspect some sort of snobbish gatekeeping also might be a hidden intention behind such a policy. Or am I simply missing the point?

I don't know of many philosophy journals that practice single-anonymized review, but my understanding is that it is pretty common in the sciences. Is the practice problematic? The empirical evidence suggests so. Various studies and experiments have found that disclosing authors' names in peer review has an "astonishing" influence on peer-reviewers, benefitting famous names and authors from prestigious institutions, while hindering newcomers from publishing. 

So, why is single-anonymized review still practiced at some venues? Proponents may argue that single-anonymized review has some advantages, particularly in the sciences (where reviewers may be able to spot conflicts of interest, for example), and that so long as other forms of peer-review are practiced, including at other journals, then diversity in peer-review practices may be a good thing--particularly if authors can always choose to send their work to double or triple-anonymized journals. 

But these are just a few thoughts. What do you all think?

The Happy Sophist (guest post by Eric Schliesser)

This is a guest post by Eric Schliesser, University of Amsterdam

Because my dad resented being shunted into the family business – and disguised his anger at himself for not escaping this fate – he made it very clear that unlike his parents, he was willing to support me in my education ‘whatever I would choose.’ (He had received an Associate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, but no other higher education.) 

My dad had assumed I would be prudent about my freedom, and was aghast when in my mid-twenties I was pursuing a PhD in philosophy partially subsidized by him. I had opted for a PhD because Professor Eichenberg (my Intro to IR teacher) had asked me to teach a number of sections of his intro to IR course. I loved that vastly better than any of the ‘real jobs’ I landed in the early 90s (the so-called ‘jobless recovery’); academia beckoned.

At The University of Chicago even junior PhD students were given the opportunity to teach their own classes in the required undergraduate great books/Humanities sequences. During one winter session in the late 1990s my dad visited my class, and sat in the back of the room. He had no idea what we were talking about, but after class he was beaming, and he said something like ‘you have really found your calling.’ After that frigid morning in Hyde Park, he only spoke with pride about my career choice (and gleefully remained ignorant of the content of most of my work until he died). 

Back in those days, we received no teacher training, and I was not an especially good teacher. I have some evidence of that: my dad himself often referred back to the class visit by telling people that apparently I had called on a student by asking “is that your hand or are you scratching yourself?” He thought that genius (and ridiculous). I am sure part of his joy in sharing that story is my obvious discomfort about it. But the other part was the shared joy in my vocation.

At Chicago, and also in my first few temporary jobs, I generally taught students who were obviously much smarter than myself. In these jobs, classroom sizes were small; ‘teaching’ basically involved sitting in a small circle and learning from my students while discussing the reading and facilitating discussion. Yes, there were lots of papers to grade, but basically I was being paid to read books with bright, articulate students.

In reflecting on my graduate and undergraduate teachers – remember I had received no teaching training  – I decided that good teachers used an exaggerated feature of their character to connect with their students and, thereby, re-direct their focus to facilitate mutual learning. Plato calls this (more highfalutin-ly) the turning of the soul; Adam Smith (a very successful lecturer), ever so practical, suggests it’s directing vanity to its proper ends. In acting on this insight, I became a classroom character, and my teaching evaluations were polarized. Later I realized that the student-critics had a point: I was teaching to my better students – the ones who would be teaching me – and not to all my students.

So much for introduction. A few years ago, I was disabled and spent almost year in bed with debilitating headaches and general lack of conviction I could ever be professionally active again. (Check out my long covid diaries on this.) I had plenty of time to reflect on my career and the existential choices that had brought me where I was. After discussing it with my occupational physician, and soul searching, I realized that in my job I was passionate about three things: undergraduate teaching, having my research read, and learning from my peers at workshops or conferences. Being denied all three was clarifying. There were also things I enjoyed not strictly part of my job description (like blogging). Things that on refection I really didn’t like: both ends of peer review, administrative tasks, being a PhD supervisor, and a few others. 

On the merits of low-key, low-standard philosophy

Reinventing yourself

A blogpost by Liam Kofi Bright on how he no longer believes in his work begins in the following sobering way

For a while now I have been unable (unwilling is what I should say, but from the inside it feels stronger than that) to really commit to doing philosophy research. (I have stuff from before this in the pipeline so it might not be obvious from the outside that I have not been doing new work, but to those who know me this is not news.) The basic issue is that I do not think my work is good or interesting. 

Reflecting on this, and without making any reference to Liam's work (as he requested), I'll offer some reasons to think that the reason Liam offers is never by itself a good enough reason to stop doing philosophy. My claim is not agent-relative. It doesn't matter how good or bad you are. Obviously, there may be other reasons to cease doing philosophy that I think have more merit, such as Mitchel Aboulafia's delightful post on why he stopped writing philosophy altogether. 

What often seems to happen is that we need to reinvent ourselves when we reach an academic milestone. It may seem surprising that defending the dissertation, finally getting a permanent job,  getting tenure, come with this horrible sense of emptiness and slump in work. For tenure, there is the well-known phenomenon of the midcareer slump.

What precipitates this is the falling away of an external motivator (such as the looming tenure dossier, or the harrowing job market). With that motivator gone, we need to find a new motivation for doing our research, and it's not always easy to find.

Not being a competitive person in a competitive academic environment?

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

Is there any place in academic philosophy for someone who is utterly non-competitive? I'm a junior scholar, and I keep being told that I belong in academia, but I find the academic atmosphere to be unbearable. I'm very secure about my own philosophical abilities and find no need to compete with anybody for anything, but I keep getting plagiarized from/sabotaged with zero provocation. The push for diversity, while great on paper, still only seems to be for hiring people who look different outwardly, but are still willing to "play the game" as it were, in exactly the same ways as everybody else. And so despite checking a lot of the cosmetic diversity boxes myself, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to remain in academia almost exclusively because of my reluctance to gamify philosophy. Am I simply naive in thinking that academic philosophy should not be identified with gamified philosophy, that there should be room for people like me as well?

Good questions, and I empathize. My sense is that there are indeed places in academic philosophy for non-competitive people. I know people at liberal arts colleges and universities, as well as at community colleges, who've told me that this is one of the things they like about working outside of the kind of R1 environment they were in during graduate school. My experience is that you can do the kind of work you enjoy at your own pace, and not worry so much about the "gamified" parts of the academy.

But this is just what I have heard and experienced. What about the rest of you? Do you have any tips, experiences, or other insights that the OP might find helpful?

Preparation tips for soon-to-be (birthing) parents in academia?

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

I'm starting a permanent teaching position this Fall (3/3 load, small classes of 20-30 students, no research obligations - though it seems most people in this position do publish a little), and will have the equivalent of a "tenure review" after 3 years. My spouse and I also hope to grow our family in this window and I'm the birthing parent. (FWIW: after a year of employment I'll be eligible for a semester of parental leave, and the department I am joining has a reputation for being a supportive and caring environment.)

Do folks have advice for how to best prepare for this? Ways to build excellent courses that are dynamic and engaging (i.e. will make material for an impressive teaching portfolio and get stellar reviews from both students and supervisors), but that also can adjust for pregnancy-related interruptions and the collateral damage of postpartum sleep deprivation + hormones? I'm also open to advice about more general "life stuff" like time/household management, making the transition from 1 to 2 kids, etc. (FWIW: My spouse has a hybrid work schedule, we have a toddler who is in full-time daycare, a cleaning service 2x/month, and Instacart. We have no family nearby.)

My first pregnancy was physically very rough, but I was not teaching at the time. I also had postpartum "baby brain" for about a year - honestly, this is the thing that worries me the most. I LOVE teaching and am SO excited to start the new position, and a I want to do a stellar job. At the same time, I am not going to put my personal life on hold for my career. But (insofar as it's possible!) I want to be smart about this.

There have been a few good advice threads on pregnancy + parenting on this forum before, which I want to collect here for those searching for this kind of insight in the future:

https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2020/03/tips-for-professors-with-children.html

https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2017/02/grad-school-survival-guide-part-4-having-children-in-graduate-school-as-a-woman.html?cid=6a014e89cbe0fd970d01b8d2688f7c970c#comment-6a014e89cbe0fd970d01b8d2688f7c970c

https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2017/01/grad-school-survival-guide-part-3-having-children-in-grad-school.html?cid=6a014e89cbe0fd970d01bb096eb022970d#comment-6a014e89cbe0fd970d01bb096eb022970d

Thanks to Marcus (as always!) for cultivating the supportive environment found here on the Cocoon. It has helped me think through a lot of my choices and strategies over the years, and has made me feel less alone.

Thanks so much to this for the very kind words! Do any readers have any tips for how expectant parents--particularly birthing parents like the OP who may be starting a permanent full-time job--can best prepare, personally and professionally, for this exciting next step in their lives?

Tips for revising papers?

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

I'm very good at generating new projects and writing initial drafts. But, revising is much harder and a specific difficulty I have (especially with more complex revisions like r&rs) is that it's harder to develop a sense of progress when working on a revision. So far, I've tried making lists of specific changes so the work doesn't feel invisible/non-existent. This has been a medium success. I'd like to know if other people have techniques they use to approach this part of the writing process.

Good query, and I'm curious to hear from readers. One thing that I do with R&R's is to color-code each major reviewer concern, highlighting the reviewer's comments in a PDF or Word doc with different highlight colors for each concern. Then, what I'll do is to match that color code in my revisions by using those same colors of text for my revisions. That way, I'm able to easily see in the manuscript which revisions address which concern. Finally, whenever I think I've addressed a concern well-enough, I'll use the strike-through function in the reviewer comments to indicate that I'm done with those revisions. Once all of the reviewer concerns are struck-through, I know I'm done!

Of course, it always helps to have an outside reader or two look through your revisions to help make sure that you've dealt with everything well. I've found this is especially helpful if I have any inkling of doubt whether I've dealt with a concern well-enough. Usually, if I'm honest with myself, I'll have a sense of which of my revisions might not be entirely adequate--and if an outside reader or two verifies that doubt independently, then I'll know that I have more work to do.

Anyway, these are just a few things that I do in revisions. Do you have any revising tips for the OP?

Submitting another paper to a journal just after rejection?

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

A paper of mine has been recently rejected from a journal. I have another paper that deals with a topic in the same sub-field. Would it be against me to submit that paper to the same journal that just rejected my other paper? I want to submit to that journal because it has a fast response time but would like to know whether it'd be ill-advised or not.

I have to confess that I've often wondered about this too. Generally speaking, I try to send papers to different journals--but on occasions I've sent a paper to a journal that recently rejected a paper of mine because it seemed like a good fit and had a reputation for good turnaround times. However, I've always sort of wondered whether editors frown on it. I do know that some journals have explicit policies, for example that they will only consider one paper by a given author in a given calendar year. But what about other journals that don't have policies like these?

What do you all think?

Tips from Search Committee Members: How committees read cover letters

The first post in this series examined how hiring committees read and evaluate CVs. In today's post, I'd like to ask search committee members to answer some or all of the following questions:

1. How do you read a cover letter?
2. Which things do you lend the most weight to in deciding who to interview?
3. Which sorts of things in cover letters tend to produce a positive impression?
4. Which sorts of things do you mostly pass over?
5. Which sorts of things have you encountered in cover letters that produce a negative impression?
6. What type of institution do you work at? (R1? R2? Highly-selective SLAC? Non-highly selective SLAC? Community College?)

Finally, if there are any other questions you think are worth addressing not listed here, please feel free to volunteer and answer them. Really curious to hear your answers!

Choosing a writing sample for PhD program applications: critical or positive argument?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, an upcoming PhD program applicant writes:

I am applying to PhD programs this upcoming cycle as an MA student. I have received very conflicting advice on the importance of having a "positive" writing sample rather than a critical one. The current paper I have prepared is a critical paper, though it is one that several professors and colleagues (including those working in the same area) have looked over and praised. The criticism has some large significance (if I'm right!) for a very recent subfield of normative ethics. But I am worried that my sample will not be well-received at top 25(ish) programs because it does not advance a strong positive argument. Could anyone provide any perspective on this issue? All feedback is appreciated.

Good question, and I'm curious to hear what readers think. Here's one anecdote: way back in the early 2000's when I applied to PhD programs, I initially used a critical writing sample. Then, one day I heard from the chair of an admissions committee at a top-15 program asking me if I had any other writing sample (I'm guessing they were on the fence about my application, and weren't enamored with my writing sample). I submitted a more ambitious paper with a more original positive argument, and after I sent it in, I was accepted into the program later that same day. This is just one anecdote, but as someone who now thinks that it's generally much easier to criticize other people's arguments that to provide a good original positive argument of one's own, I'm guessing that it's probably more advantageous, all things being equal, to use a writing sample that advances an original argument. 

But again, these are just my thoughts and experiences. What are yours?

CFA: MAP & Bloomsbury Academic Volume on Structural Injustice in Philosophy

MAP & Bloomsbury Academic Volume on Structural Injustice in Philosophy

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Editors: Alexandria James (MAP),  Milana Kostic (MAP), Maeve McKeown (University of Groningen), and Robin Zheng (University of Glasgow) 

Deadline for 500-word abstracts/pitches: July 31, 2023

We invite submissions on the use of structural injustice as a conceptual tool for explaining underrepresentation and related issues in the discipline of philosophy and related disciplines. 

More than any other Humanities discipline, philosophy has an underrepresentation problem (Schwitzgebel et al, 2021). Philosophers have appealed to concepts such as implicit bias and stereotype threat to explain this (e.g., Saul, 2013; Saul & Brownstein, 2016). Recently, these psychological and individualistic explanations have been critiqued. For instance, Haslanger and Zheng have pointed out the need for structural explanations of social phenomena (e.g., Haslanger, 2016; Zheng 2018). Even though the idea that education systems are structured in an unjust way, i.e., that they are structured in a way that promotes reproduction and legitimization of social (gender, racial, class, ability, etc.) inequalities, has existed for a long time (e.g., Bourdieu, 1990), there has only recently been systematic work using structural frameworks to explain the underrepresentation problem in philosophy (e.g., McKeown, 2022). This MAP / Bloomsbury Academic edited collection on structural injustice aims to redress this. 

We aim to uncover the exact structures and mechanisms at play in classrooms, conference rooms, conversations, hiring procedures, evaluative practices (e.g., grading, peer review, rankings of philosophy departments) that perpetuate social inequalities in the academic setting and in professional philosophy more specifically, including during undergraduate degrees and grad school, the job market, and temporary and tenured faculty positions. The overarching goal is to present an encompassing framework for understanding how various social-structural processes function to produce and reproduce conditions in which people of color, gender minorities, working class people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups are systematically excluded, disadvantaged and their work disvalued (Young, 2011). Topics include, but are not limited to:

• How can structural injustice be used as a tool to explain underrepresentation of social groups and marginalized epistemologies in philosophy?
• What makes unjust structures so persistent in philosophy (i.e., what are the exact mechanisms for creating and reinforcing unjust structures in philosophy specifically)?
• Why is philosophy as a discipline especially susceptible to reproducing racial, gender, class, ability, and other social inequalities?
• Linguistic injustice as structural injustice (e.g., the role of English language as lingua francain philosophy in perpetuating structural injustices).
• Discursive injustice (Kukla, 2014) as structural injustice in philosophy.
• Academic migration, precarity of academic labor, material and socio-economic conditions and their role in reproducing social inequalities in philosophy.
• Harassment, bullying and abuse in academic philosophy and their contribution to structural injustice.
• Metaphilosophy and structural injustice (how do debates on delineating the scope and method of philosophy, i.e., what Kristie Dotson calls the ‘culture of justification’ (Dotson, 2012), contribute to perpetuating unjust structures in professional philosophy?)
• Why does structural injustice in philosophy matter?

Formats include:

• Standard scholarly articles that theorize or apply the structural injustice framework to philosophy (5000-8000 words). 
• More personal accounts (comparable to Hypatia’slong-running collection of ‘Musings’) on structural injustice in philosophy. While such essays may benefit from being more personal in their content or less scholarly in their style and form, they should remain theoretically rigorous and methodologically sound (3000-5000 words).

To submit your abstract for a MAP & Bloomsbury Edited Volume on Structural Injustice, please complete this form by July 31st, 2023. More info on the MAP website.

Applying to a job that only asks for cover letter, CV, and recommendation letters?

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

I've come across a job ad for a tenure-tack position at the rank of assistant professor that only asks for a cover letter, CV, and letters of reference. The job is teaching-focused. What gives? How can I stand out as a candidate if they don't see a writing sample or even a teaching portfolio from me? Would it be a bad idea to send additional documents anyway?

Good questions. Another reader submitted the following reply:

[Y]ou need to customize the daylights out of that cover letter. I would guess they aren't asking for anything else because they are concerned most about "fit" and want to filter for this first. They may ask for more materials after zoom interviews. Don't send extra materials until asked (unless you have an inside contact who knows for SURE this is OK). At best nobody will look at them (out of fairness to other applicants), at worst this makes you look like you are desperate or like you didn't read the ad.

I agree with this commenter that it would be a bad idea to send additional documents. If the committee asked for only three items, it's because (for one reason or another) those are the only things they want at the initial stage. I suspect that they would probably frown on candidates who don't follow directions, as search committees are supposed to consider all applicants equally on the basis of materials requested in the job ad. As for why they only asked for those three items, I have no idea--but again I agree with the commenter: the OP should customize the letter as much as they can to highlight their pedagogy and teaching experience, and maybe also briefly discuss their student evals, etc.

But these are just my thoughts. What do you all think?

Journal citation styles vs. authorial sensibilities & accessibility

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

Something I've recently encountered is editors and copy editors insisting that footnote citations be moved to the main text. This offends my aesthetic sensibilities and strikes me as unduly infringing on author style: other things equal, I strongly prefer philosophy papers with main text that is just doing philosophy over those that go back and forth between philosophy and scholarship throughout the main text. I also listen to a lot of philosophy papers and much prefer listening to ones that confine citations to footnotes. (After hearing one or two citations, I tend to get distracted and have to go back or miss parts of the paper. I can avoid this problem when citations are in footnotes by skipping the footnotes. In contrast, I don't know of any easy way not to listen to citations that are in the main text.) It occurred to me that it might be easier to persuade editors and copy editors not to insist on moving citations to the main text if there were a discussion to point to in the profession that acknowledges confine-citations-to-footnotes as a legitimate writing style with accessibility advantages.

I'm curious to hear what readers think. An editor submitted the following reply:

The issue you raise, as I understand it, is not one of author style - it is one of journal style. Journals and book book publishers have house styles, and they want all the pieces in an issue or a volume to have the same style. So the price an author pays to be published in these issues or volumes is to cite according to the journal or publisher style. I think it is reasonable, but I work for Dark side - I am a journal edited and the editor of a few edited volumes with CUP.

And Malcom submitted the following:

On footnote citations: it sounds like what "a postdoc" is talking about is a preference for author-date style over notes and bibliography, as CMOS distinguishes the systems (see chapter 14 for detail). The editors and copyeditors enforcing these citation styles are probably not in a position to change the requirement for a single author contributing to a journal, since the house style has been set already. Books are a different matter, and there often can be some flexibility there. Part of copyediting involves enforcing consistency, which is why a single citation style is (typically) preserved across issues of a journal. Author style is something that should be respected, however, citation style isn't typically considered part of this. The other points are more substantive and perhaps controversial: the distinction between "doing philosophy" and "scholarship" in this context isn't one I agree with. Citations are part of how we give evidence for claims, for instance, and so are not easily partitioned off from "doing philosophy." To the point about listening to audio of papers: in discussions of endnotes over footnotes, some have made a similar criticism, that footnotes interrupt the reading (since they are read between pages, often interrupting sentences). I think the points about accessibility are ones that we should consider in the profession--however, for those who want to hear the citations immediately (because they want to know the sources for claims, etc.), wouldn't moving citations to the end impact their accessibility negatively? It seems like the solution may be more technological, allowing hearers to access the text in the ways they prefer, than about uniformly enforcing notes and bibliography over author-date.

I have to confess that I'm a bit sympathetic with the OP. As an author and reader, I much prefer footnote citations to in-text citations or endnotes. I also have to confess that changing citation formats is one of my biggest pet peeves, as I've never learned how to use a citation program that enables one to switch formats easily (though I've heard that ChatGPT can make these kinds of changes swiftly, so I'm curious to try that). I understand that journals and book publishers have house styles, but I'm curious to hear what readers think about this.

Should publishers be more flexible with authors in this regard, letting authors choose their favored citation format? And what about accessibility concerns? What do you all think? 

What is strong evidence a job applicant will complete their dissertation before starting a job?

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

One of the commenters on the recent CV advice thread writes, "For PhD students, I glance at expected graduation date, but my assumption is that it is inaccurate. Unless I see strong evidence that they will complete their thesis before our job starts, I mostly pass them by. We have hiring restrictions around this, and given the number of stellar applications we have, it is not worth dealing with the problems arise if a PhD student doesn't have their degree in time." I've seen similar sentiments elsewhere on threads where search committee members are giving advice.

My question is, what is 'strong evidence' that an applicant will complete their dissertation before the job starts? My impression was originally that letter writers would essentially guarantee that the defense would take place e.g. that summer and back it up by summarizing progress and so on, but I noticed in the same thread that many people don't care much about letters at all. (Indeed, I can imagine that nearly all advisors would claim their students are certainly going to defend in time, so their statements wouldn't be super informative or reliable.) So, how can applicants who are genuinely certain to defend in time demonstrate that that's the case?

Good questions. Another reader submitted the following reply:

from conversation, I know that a person from another institution whom I was competing against on the job market (who is wonderful! and who got a TT job and who is now tenured) did not even get an interview at my institution because their advisors did not guarantee a defense date. For what it is worth, they defended before I did (and both of us by the date that my advisor warranted I'd defend by).

What do the rest of you think? It would be particularly helpful to hear from search committee members!

How can we help you? (July 2023)

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

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

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

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

Ask away - we're here to help! 

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

Leaving a publication off a CV to avoid prejudice?

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

Before getting a PhD in philosophy, I did an MA in a different subject (related to religion) and got a publication in that area. This topic no longer characterized my interest or personal convictions - and given some recent discussion on this website, it seems it could evoke some prejudice in search committees. Would it be dishonest to simply remove this publication from a CV used for philosophy jobs?

Good question. Another reader submitted the following reply:

you do not have to list anything on your c.v. To be completely honest, you can even use the label "Selected publications", which many people use, especially if they have a lot of publications (50+). But do not kid yourself ... we do not leave our past selves behind. I was involved in a job search where a colleague-troll found an unlisted publication of an otherwise promising applicant that she objected to. It sank his ship. The trolls are everywhere ... and the web ensures that one cannot hide their past.

I'm inclined to think that listing "Selected Publications" on the CV is probably fine, but I don't agree with the claim "you do not have to list anything on your c.v.". A CV is supposed to be a record of one's professional accomplishments, and if you simply leave things off that a hiring committee or university administrators may find relevant (since they have to sign off on new hires), then they may take that to be an act of dishonesty if they find out later, and who knows what the repercussions of that may be. In fact, I know of at least one philosopher in the distant past who was fired from their job after it was discovered that they were dishonest on their CV, so I don't think it's worth risking that. 

Anyway, I'm not sure what the thing to do here is. If the OP simply lists "Selected Publications", then (as the commenter above implies) that could lead search committee members to do some digging, and if they find the publication in question, then that could blow up in the OP's face as well (indeed, it could even look like the OP is trying to hide their philosophical/ideological commitments to get hired). So, what to do? I guess I'm sort of inclined to think that the OP might be best served by addressing the issue openly in a cover letter, saying something to the effect of, "In my distant past, I worked in religion and published an article that no longer represents my interests and personal convictions, so my CV only lists selected publications." But, of course, this too might have unintended consequences. As the commenter above notes, leaving one's past behind is difficult, and it's always there on the web for an interested party to dig up.

So, I'm really not sure what the best thing to do here is. What do you all think?