The Philosophers' Cocoon

Doing better for our graduate students, making a PhD in philosophy worth it

This story, by Rachel Williams, is simply entitled "A PhD in philosophy was not worth it".  The title reflects the contents well. The story's familiar, but that does not make it less sad:  Rachel Williams writes about the disillusionment, lost opportunities, low wages, and a profession that looks increasingly hostile and unattractive.  She lists the problems that plague the profession: the obsession with brilliance, the editorial buddy circles, publish or perish culture, the slim chances of getting a tenure track job out of grad school, or at all (after years of precarious employment), and the lack of support from peers or mentors. 

Suppose you make it in the profession. By 'make it', we will typically mean that someone is in their mid or late thirties by the time they land a tenure track job in a geographical area they will often not have chosen to live in, working on a 3/3 or even 4/4 course load, and earning a starting salary of anywhere between 49 and 76k (often the lower part of this range), which only slowly inches up over the years. While that is still a decent salary, you have to take into account the years of lower earnings and the risk in the market. 

What if you do not make it? Did you then just waste at least six years (at least, in the US) on graduate school that could have been spent better elsewhere? "You don’t really know what academic philosophy is really like before it’s too late." - Williams writes, regretting her lack of opportunities and lack of money in her retirement fund at age 32. 

The solution, some might argue, is to just have fewer PhDs in philosophy. But I'm not at all sure that is a good idea. If we restrict the number of PhDs, the barriers to entry to the profession will shift to earlier on in the process, and it will be more difficult for people without the cultural, economic and social capital (middle class, white, etc) to do a PhD in philosophy. Moreover, I think that a PhD in philosophy has value. I've interviewed people who went to grad school in philosophy who are successful writers of novels and have produced and co-written TV series,  as well as career coaches, statisticians, computer programmers, and  I was recently filmed for television series on science and religion by someone who studied (but did not complete) a Philosophy PhD. A Philosophy PhD is currently running for Member of the European Parliament (see here for an article in Dutch).  

I will be placement officer next year, so I'm thinking about ways to help support our grad students. Absolutely, if our graduate students see academia as their plan A, we should support them in that and help them to achieve this goal. We should be realistic about the range of jobs on offer (not every job is a job at a research-intensive, prestigious university; most aren't and that is fine) and we should help them to prepare and tailor their CV and materials for the places they want to land jobs at. 

But if our graduate students feel some hesitation at academia over time, it is important to recognize that and to support them in alternative career choices. Typically, in the humanities (though I am not aware of any empirical work on this and would like to hear about it), it seems to me people mostly start graduate school wanting to have an academic career. But over time, some grad students start doubting that teaching is for them, or that writing papers is for them, or that the combination of teaching and research really suits them. And then we should also support them in that. Maybe it is prudent to talk about non-academic placement in any case, just as a sensible plan B. 

In praise of ordinary academics and their goodness

Averageness is a statistical concept, but often it becomes a normative one. Once you establish a bell curve, you can start looking for the exceptional and unusual, as for example Galton's quest for "nature's preeminently nobles" in eugenics, and this becomes the new norm. In academia, averageness is bad.  We all need to be exceptional: exceptionally productive researchers who publish in the right venues, gifted teachers. 

The drive for exceptionalism is toxic. People who go to graduate schools and write doctoral dissertations are already exceptional and gifted in academic talent, but if you find yourself in a pool of such people, it's hard to stand out. Eric Schliesser estimated in 2014 there are 44,000 philosophers alive worldwide. Yet just a few names keep on popping up.

We rely on heuristics and shortcuts to recognize brilliance, because it would be unfeasible to read everyone's work in detail. So we use prestige (as I've argued earlier, see also here) as a shortcut, or gender (although, I do have to say that situation has markedly improved over the years.) Still, even if somehow we had total gender parity and prestige bias could be mitigated the drive for exceptionalism remains. There are exceptional people deserving of recognition, of mention on blogs, of prizes, of symposia at the APA devoted to their books. And then there's all the rest. Whatever shortcuts we will use to gauge exceptionalism, as long as the drive for it persists (and given the job structure of academia, I do not see this change any time soon), that belief will remain.

Supporting struggling students

In the Daily Nous comments thread to Eric Schwitzgebel's excellent post a last month entitled, "Seven Principles of Humane PhD Advising", Chris Surprenant writes:

If [PhD students] lack motivation to complete their work while in graduate school, they’re not cut out to be professional academics...If folks can’t cut it, the sooner they learn that the better.

I have heard this sort of thing said many times. I've even heard that some graduate programs effectively codify something like it as a program policy, pressuring students to leave the program relatively early on if they are not making "adequate progress." Although I think the intent behind attitudes and policies like these may be good--aiming to save students "not cut out" for academic philosophy from wasting valuable time in their life pursuing it--I have nevertheless always bristled at this way of thinking. Reading Michael Huemer's (Colorado) new post, "A Philosopher Squeaks By", the other day helped me to clarify why. Allow me to explain.

In his post, Huemer details how "I barely made it in the profession": how he squeaked into graduate school, how get barely got an academic job, how many of his articles "have been hated by referees", and so on. On reading Huemer's story, my initial reaction was that he seems to have fared a heck of a lot better than other people who barely made it in the profession. For example, as I reported several years ago, in her 2014 APA Dewey Lecture aptly entitled, "Accidents", Ruth Millikan detailed how she had to walk out of a grad school exam for personal reasons (p. 4), how she entered grad school at Yale as only one of two women in a class of 22 students and one of only two students without a fellowship (pp. 4-5), how her dissertation supervisor left her program before she had made any real progress on the dissertation (p. 5), how during grad school she had a serious back injury, two children, a divorce, spent a summer in mental hospital, and how her dissertation took her 5 years (!) to complete, with basically no supervision (pp. 5-6). 

I've read numerous stories similar to Huemer's and Millikan's. A few years ago, I remember reading an APA address where Charles Mills detailed how he barely squeaked into the profession. Or consider Rae Langton's (Cambridge) self-confessed "career lowlights":

At Sydney, my background in Philosophy was deemed so poor I needed a remedial extra year. At Princeton, my PhD dissertation was initially failed, though (somewhat awkwardly) OUP had meanwhile decided to publish it, as Kantian Humility (see Books).

Being good at being good at philosophy

A guest post by Ian James Kidd, University of Nottingham

 Some years ago, a then-colleague would occasionally spot me sitting working in a coffee shop and join me to chat. Sometimes, he would ask about whichever paper I was writing, and often offer to take a look. After reading the first couple of paragraphs, my colleague would purse his lips, shake his head, and say, “No, you haven’t quite got it yet.”

What I hadn’t ‘got’ was the skill of crafting a good paper – a skill not only possessed but had fully mastered by my well-published colleague. Almost every paper he wrote soon appeared in the ‘top’ journals, so similarly mastering that skill would’ve supercharged my chances of securing a postdoc or a permanent job. Unfortunately, not once did my then-colleague offer any advice on the skill of crafting a paper, leaving me without a crucial skill – that of translating one’s philosophical ideas into the form of a publishable journal article.

I offer this recollection to illustrate what seems to be a crucial distinction between being good at philosophy and being good at academic philosophy. Sitting in that coffee shop, what I lacked wasn’t the ability to come up with good and useful philosophical ideas (one thing my then-colleague did, at the least, affirm). I lacked the specific performative academic competence needed to successfully understand and exploit the norms and structures of academic philosophy. Without that specific competence, my philosophical abilities were not able to do any professional work for me.

Clearly, there are many super philosophers out there, who can think widely, deeply, and clearly about aspects of existence and our place within it. The problem is that many of them may be good at philosophy but are not always good at academic philosophy – while they have a love of wisdom or craving to understand, what they lack are the practical and professional abilities to enact their philosophising within the accepted forms and norms of academia. Crucially, I don’t say this as a criticism of those philosophers - quite the opposite! My concern is that many good philosophers aren’t being helped consistently to also become good academic philosophers. Before speculating on what one can do about this, let me fill out the distinction a little.

Dealing with unresponsive journals

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

(Part of the reason I haven't been super alarmed by this issue is that the paper in question is a short side project sort of thing rather than my main research project, which has been doing better than this paper.)

But anyways: say a paper of yours has been under review for about a year, and that you started checking in on its status after the four month mark, and you haven't gotten a reply to your 3-4 short, polite inquiries that you've sent since then.

Is it fine to just send an email saying "I am withdrawing this MS", and then to proceed as if the MS has been withdrawn? I get the impression I shouldn't expect a reply (or for anyone to read my email), which makes me a bit worried about effectively double-submitting when I resubmit the paper elsewhere. But on the other hand, this paper has probably just been "lost" this whole time.

This is a good (albeit distressing!) query. As far as I am concerned, the moment you send an email to a journal indicating that you have chosen to withdraw a manuscript, it is withdrawn, whether the journal responds or not. You do not have to wait for the journal to acknowledge your message, particularly if (as in this case) the journal has been unresponsive. Further, if any problems were to arise (i.e. a referee never being told by the journal and complaining about you engaging in double-submissions), then by my lights you would be "safe" as an author: as long as you have a copy of your email to prove that you withdrew it). Or so say I. What say you?

Writing on obscure topics in philosophy: A few tips for younger colleagues

If you write on Plato, you should start in medias res. If you write on Thomas Aquinas, you can do the same (unless you are writing for a journal specialising on something completely different, say, business ethics). If you write on a slightly less known author, I would suggest adding at least the dates of birth and death and perhaps a short description of their main work (say "the epistemologist XW (1200--1250)"). What about writing on a niche topic, say, South Asian philosophy? If you are writing for a non-specialist journal, you will need to explain a lot, since no one will know even the main authors, ideas and schools you will name. Nonetheless, this does not mean that each new piece on that niche topic should resemble a pale summary of scholarhip on it. Even if you need to tell, say, who Jayanta was and what nyāyā means, this does not mean that you cannot make an original contribution to the debate.

1. Just start with what you discovered. Did Jayanta think that justification is not needed in the case of the "ought" domain? Are you the first one who noticed this move? Be sure that this is your departing point.
2. You can then move to the background needed to appreciate the depth of your discovery. Do not just start with the background, otherwise your reader will think there is nothing new and close your article before reaching its core.
3. Be sure that theme and rheme are well distinguished in your article. The reader should not be confused about what is just a short summary of the background and what is your new and original contribution.
4. Please remember that an article is not a book. You can only convey one point. Don't try to overdo or you will not manage to convey anything at all.

What do other readers working on niche topics do? What do you recommend to your students?

Cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy Blog, where you can read some interesting comments

Making things easier for editors

In my last three posts in this series, I investigated ways the peer-review process might be reformed to:

• Incentivize better behavior by authors: incentivizing the submission of fewer and better papers for review.
• Incentivize better behavior by reviewers: incentivizing faster and more thoughtful referee reports.
• Improve turnaround times: giving editors resources to secure reviewers and completed reviews more quickly.

In brief, the general proposal I floated is that peer-review might be improved by creating a central peer-review platform--a central interface (perhaps at Philpapers?) which might use a clever author and reviewer scoring system to match new papers with reviewers whose scores are closest to the authors' own.

The idea here is, first, that this system would incentivize better author and reviewer behavior, as it would (finally!) create actual incentives to being a good author (submitting papers ready for review) and being a good reviewer (answering being timely in responding to review requests and timely and thoughtful in submitting reviews). The idea then is that this would in turn make things easier on editors, as instead of having to spend copious hours emailing possible referees, etc., the system would recommend reviewers to editors and enable them to send out requests to reviewers who are likely to say yes and do a good job more quickly!

At present, this is just a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. However, David Bourget (who co-runs Philpapers/Philpeople) chimed in saying that such a system would actually be quite doable--and I see no reason not to think big. Although the current system of peer-review has some positive features, there are also many things about it that everyone seems to recognize to be suboptimal: authors, reviewers, and editors. We should therefore think creatively about what could be done to make things better for everyone--and I am optimistic that the kind of system outlined above might help a great deal. However, it is increasingly clear to be--based on David Velleman's and others' remarks--that there is a fundamental issue that needs to be dealt with: the way in which journals are simply over-flooded with submissions. This is the issue I'd like to grapple with a bit today.

Improving journal turnaround times: a proposal

In my post sharing the results of the informal survey I ran on peer-review, I reported that a full 93.67% of respondents at least somewhat agreed with the statement that journal turnaround times are too long and inconsistent (with 67% strongly agreeing). Given that so many people seem to think this is a serious problem, I think it could be good to have a discussion about what could be done to best address it.

In order to think about how journals might address the issue, we need to know its causes. From what I have heard on social media (including remarks from various editors), long and inconsistent turnaround times appear to have the following two primary sources:

1. Difficulty and delays in finding willing reviewers.
2. Problems with unresponsive reviewers who fail to get their reviews in or respond to reminders.

Oftentimes, when I've heard (1) discussed on social media, it has involved editors imploring people to respond to review requests more quickly (like, within 24 hours). However, imploring people seems to me likely to be an ineffective solution--and, judging from people's responses to the survey, it has been pretty ineffective in practice. No, effective systems of compliance don't just implore people to do the right thing: they incentivize it. Moreover, good systems are also efficient. Instead of looking haphazardly for people who might say yes (but just as well might say no), an efficient system would also drive editors toward people likely to say 'yes.' All of which raises a first question: how might journals most efficiently (A) find competent reviewers likely to accept an assignment request, and (B) incentivize quick answers to review requests? 

I'd like to brainstorm answers to this question, and am curious what readers think...

Survey results on peer-review

Several days ago, I put up this informal survey to gauge readers' opinions about various features of peer review. I am going to leave the survey up so that people can still take it. But here are the results so far (n = 91), organized by what I will call the good, the ambivalent, and the bad.

As this is only an informal survey, the results should of course be taken with a grain of salt (and then some). Still, I found the results interesting and will be curious to hear readers' reactions.

The Good

64.1% of respondents agreed that anonymized review works well on balance, giving authors a fair chance (whereas only 23.07% disagreed).

An easier poll on peer-review

[Update: survey fixed!]

Following feedback on the poll on peer-review I rolled out the other day, I've tried to design an easier poll. HERE is a new survey that I think readers should have a much easier time with. Although it has 20 items, the items are so simple that I think it should take readers just a couple of minutes to click through. Hopefully we'll get some better data out of this one--and, although it's only an informal poll, my hope is that its results will give us some good material to discuss moving forward!

Reader poll: best & worst parts of peer-review

Based on readers' answers to my query on what works and what doesn't in peer-review, I've put together THIS POLL (poll suspended for revisions - see comments) for readers to rank features of the peer-review process in philosophy from best to worst. Although I'm by no means an expert at putting polls together, my hope is the results will give at least some rough indication of readers' attitudes. We'll see how it goes--and I plan to host discussion threads on specific issues moving forward--but I hope some of you take part!

Sexual Assault and Citation Practices

By Peter Furlong

Another philosopher recently looked over a manuscript I had been working on for a book. He noted that in a footnote, I cited a comment from someone that has recently fallen from grace because of sexual assault issues. My friend, reading my manuscript, noted that readers might not respond positively to the inclusion of this footnote.

Before moving on to the issue of how we should treat these sorts of offenders, I want to say something about my specific case. The footnote was not really necessary. In the book, I was saying something about conflicting intuitions concerning an issue that people have been weighing in on for centuries. People have strong intuitions on both sides; this is well known. In a footnote, I quoted a particularly forceful endorsement of commitment to one side of this issue (one that was not even made in a piece of scholarship). The person I quoted does not even really work much in this area, just, apparently, has extremely strong views on this particular question. So I cited it to illustrate just how committed some are to particular answers. It was an illustrative citation, rather than one that recognizes prior contributions from others.

What kind of colleague do you want? (Or, why we don't want passionate teachers and kind people as academic colleagues)

Imagine you're a tenured faculty member at an average sort of department, not super-prestigious but still with some aspirations for research excellence. You're hiring a new tenure track faculty member. Although people do sometimes move from tenure track positions, it is still a safe bet that a new hire will stay and will be your colleague for many years to come.

What kind of colleague would you rather have? Would you like someone who is ambitious, puts their research first in everything they do, certainly does not have a passion for teaching? Or would you like someone who is an excellent scholar but who also is kind, considerate, collegial, cares about their students?

Supposing you're hiring someone for a senior position, such as an endowed chair, or a Reader or Professor or Department Head (in the UK the latter is not uncommon). Would you like someone single-minded focused on their next excellent book with a prestigious press--OUP or Cambridge, perhaps a few select other publishers for subfields? Or would you like someone who is an excellent research but who is also caring, compassionate, who thinks about the wellbeing and prospects of the graduate students and about the department's wellbeing, who serves the department and puts other people's needs (regularly) above their own? 

Going by advice for cover letter writing and for writing letters of recommendation, it would seem we want a colleague like the former. We want the ambitious, single-minded person for whom teaching is a necessary evil. Take the following handy advice sheet for how to write letters that don't show gender bias, from the University of Arizona (pictured below).

Sustaining Activism

This is a guest post by Mark Lance, Professor at the Philosophy Department and Justice and Peace Studies Program at Georgetown University:

Early in my activist career, I had a mentor, Molly Rush. Molly has done an enormous amount in her life, but was most famous as a member of the first “Plowshares” action. She, Dan and Phil Berrigan, and others broke into a missile plant in Pennsylvania and poured their own blood on documents and damaged Mark 12a first-strike nuclear nose-cones. She was sentenced to five years in federal prison. I worked with Molly a couple years after her release and one day was saying how much I admired her courage. She insisted that this was not the right thing to admire. She felt called to perform this action, but insisted that sustained lifetime involvement was much more important and harder than bold, dramatic, performances.

She told me about, and later introduced me to, a woman in her early 60s. Mabel had decided in her 20s that she could devote one evening a week to social justice work. Sometimes she attended a protest; sometimes stuffed envelopes or worked a phone bank; sometimes she organized teach-ins. But she had not missed a week. In 40 years. (20 years later, when I was organizing one of the large mobilizations around the IMF/WB meetings, she emailed me with a long apology, because her doctor had forbidden her from coming to DC on her broken hip for the protests. In introduced her to a bunch of young activists over the phone.)

I’ve had a second career in activism for roughly 35 years. I have seen hundreds of passionate committed young people jump into the work, doing everything, 80 hour work-weeks, nights in jail, enduring verbal and physical abuse, inspiring the hell out of me and others. And then disappearing after a total burnout, never to be heard from again. I’ve also come to know a smaller number of folks who have made movement work an enduring part of their lives.

Publishing as a non-native speaker

A reader writes in:

[My query] concerns publications in the English speaking press. An early career researcher needs to publish in English journals, which are almost the only journals internationally recognised. Nonetheless, a non-native speaker may encounter some linguistic barriers: first, the impossibility of paying someone to edit her writing; second, explicit comments from the reviewers about the paper's style; and third, and maybe more important, implicit biases from the reviewers who may doubt of the quality of the paper because of its grammar or style. I do not know if there are empirical data in some journal about rejections made to native English speakers and non-native English speakers, but I intuitively suspect that non-native speakers may receive more rejections than native ones. 

This is a great query. I don't know of any empirical data about this. However, I do think it's important to ensure that non-native speakers are not unfairly discriminated against in the reviewing process. What can be done to better ensure this?

Reader query on handling idea-theft

A reader writes in: "what should a student or early career researcher do when someone with a permanent position and recognition steals some of her unpublished ideas (for example, ideas from her thesis) without literally plagiarizing them?"

Great question. I've heard multiple stories of this happening to early-career people. In fact, I saw someone report such a story on social media just the other day. In that case, it was a senior member of the profession reporting what happened to them earlier in their career, noting that they felt powerless to do anything about it and how it negatively affected their career prospects (evidently, the person and the person who stole their ideas both published on the topic, but the person who stole the idea has reaped nearly all of the credit for it). 

Given that I have heard more than a few stories about this sort of thing, it seems like an important issue to address. What can an early-career person do in cases like this? And what, if anything, should they do? Also, what if it happens to a non-early career person? Is how they should handle it relevantly different?

Improving our current peer-review process

As I'm sure most of the blog's readers know, I've advocated for dramatic changes to our peer-review system--ones I've argued would be likely to benefits authors, reviewers, editors, and the profession. While some surprising changes in policies by European funding agencies might push things in the direction I've advocated (though that remains to be seen), a fair number of readers have asked whether it might make more sense--at least in the short-term--to examine less radical ways we might improve our current system of peer-review.

A few comments the last several days got me thinking more about this. First, Angry Anon wrote:

I send only to generalist journals that I know are quick (1-2 months), and after that only to specialist journals that I know are quick (and are usually quicker).

Here's the real question though - and maybe we could start a separate post for answering this question - why are you, as a referee, taking longer than 3 weeks to review a paper? It is unreasonable and immoral to take longer than that. (Yes, you are a bad person if you take longer than 3-4 weeks to review a paper.) I have never taken longer than a week to review a paper. That it takes anyone longer is ridiculous (save for extremely long papers that might take 3 weeks or so). What ever happened to treating others how we would like to be treated? Does anyone like having their paper getting hung up for 3 months minimum? If you aren't going to review it in 3 weeks, don't accept the invitation to review.

And what about those grossly immoral referees who take longer than 3 months? I've had a paper take over a year only to get an R and R. (And no, I didn't revise and resubmit it. I'm not going to send it back to some jerk who is going to take that long to review it.) What was this jerk doing that whole time? Did it take less time to review after waiting 12 months?

Publishing ordeals: you are not alone

Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humbolt University) shared this interesting story of a four-year publishing ordeal. A brief excerpt from the introduction:

This is the story of the obstacles that a scholarly manuscript has to overcome before it eventually gets printed. It can confirm the impression, shared by many, that much in the publication process of such a text depends on pure chance, good (or bad) luck, and contingent circumstances. Perhaps it can be of comfort to younger scholars who are undergoing this process...

I'm not sure the story will be of much comfort to younger scholars--but I guess it does make me feel a bit less alone when I get frustrated with things, so I figured I'd share it (shared from Leiter Reports).

Steps for changing peer-review?

I've been arguing for changes to our system of peer-review for about six years now--specifically, in favor of the more "open" peer-review utilized in math and physics, where papers are posted to a public repository, discussed openly, and routinely cited even before being sent to journals. I've tried to catalog the benefits I think such a system would have in philosophy--for authors, reviewers, editors, and the profession. Further, some researchers have defended a similar proposal in more detail, in part by using empirical research on peer-review. To clarify, my argument is not that our current system is terrible in absolute terms or "broken" (though at least one editor has raised serious concerns about the viability of the status quo). Rather, it is merely my belief that we can probably do better--and that the math and physics is probably the way to do that.

I recognize the case that I and others have made for changing peer-review is still controversial. However, while not everyone agrees, one question that arises for those who it should is: what steps might individuals and the profession more broadly take to realize change? Peter asked this question (and more) in a recent comment, where he wrote:

[L]et's suppose that you are correct. How do you think we might begin transitioning as a discipline to something like what you suggest? Do you think it might start best with some subdisciplines beginning something like this (I know philosophy of science already has something a bit like this)? Do you think this would work better than trying to get something together discipline-wide (perhaps through PhilArchive, for example)? It is an interesting problem since it involves both a change in behaviors and norms on the one hand and the creation of an infrastructure that is designed for this purpose.

I've been thinking about these issues a bit, as change can only occur to the extent that people begin to take action. What types of actions might we take? What types, if any, should we take? Allow me to explore a few possibilities and then open things up for discussion (i.e. both further brainstorming as well as critical discussion).

What's wrong with letters of recommendation

All of this.

Model Journals

Today I am going to set aside the question of whether we should radically alter our system of peer-review, whether by having a more open system that fed into peer-reviewed journals, or by getting rid of peer-review entirely.  Instead, I want to ask you all about journals that have great policies in place already, journals you think of as models of how our current system should work.

I am especially interested in the policies that particular journals have in place, rather than whether or not the experience of authors lives up to the promise of the policies.  For this reason, I am not interested (in this post) in talking about my own experiences with various journals.  Instead, I want to hear from others about journals that you think have excellent policies in place.  Doing this, I think, serves two functions.  First, it can help us think more carefully about what our policies should be by looking at examples of what others find exceptional.  Second, it can highlight some journals that deserve to be highlighted.

Virtues and Vices of our Peer-Review System

There has been quite a bit of discussion about problems with philosophy publishing. Marcus has had a number of very interesting posts on various problems or issues with the system (see, for example, here, here, here, and here), and he has been advocating for changes based upon practices in other fields (see, for example, here and here). 

In this post, I was hoping to hear more from the Cocoon’s readers about their views of article publishing (let’s leave monographs and edited collection to the side this time) from the perspective of a writer (not a referee or editor this time). What do you think works? What do you think is broken? Are your views based upon your own experiences, those of friends, research (like this paper that Marcus recently discussed), blog posts on the Cocoon and elsewhere, something else entirely? 

Reader query on posting drafts online

In the comments section of our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Jake Wright writes:

I'm curious about something in light of the recent posts regarding the peer review process and making it more like arXiv. Given the current peer review system we have in philosophy, warts and all, how would/do reviewers, editors, etc. respond to identifiable drafts posted to an archive like PhilPapers? I generally like the idea of moving towards a more identifiable preprint system for many of the reasons Marcus identifies, but I worry that posting my own work will negatively affect me by somehow impacting drafts once they are submitted. Am I right to worry about this? Wrong? How can one manage this, if it's a concern?

This is a great query, one I have wondered a good deal about myself. Indeed, it's the main reason I don't currently post unpublished drafts online, let along offer up drafts for feedback here at the Cocoon (which I think would be a great place for early-career philosophers to share and discuss drafts publicly). I worry that reviewers and editors may take openly posting unpublished drafts as subverting anonymous review, which might in turn influence review of the paper in a negative way.

You should never, ever, edit a volume and other blanket early career advice

Regularly, I see well-meaning and evidence-based advice for early-career people along the following lines

• Don't ever edit a volume. It's a lot more trouble than it's worth. It hardly counts for tenure/finding a job.
• Don't ever write a book review. Okay, perhaps if you really wanted to read this book in depth anyway, but even then, it's a waste of time. It doesn't help you network, it doesn't help you for finding a tenure track job, it does not count for tenure or promotion. Worse, if you're early career and you have mainly book reviews it might signal you are not able to write "real" papers. 
• Instead, you should focus on getting either (1) a single-authored paper in a top-5 (okay, maybe top-10) general philosophy journal or (2) a book contract for your single-authored monograph with OUP or a publisher with prestige. Those are things that will make you stand out. 

Etc. 

The question is: to what extent is such blanket career advice warranted? Obviously, if your CV is filled with book reviews and not a single paper, then it's going to raise questions and weaken your file. But the blanket advice seems to not take into account the broader experiences gained from editing volumes or writing book reviews.

Protecting authors in peer-review

Readers may recall that I have dedicated quite a bit of time to arguing for systemic changes to our peer-review process--specifically, for moving away from "anonymized review" in favor of the kind of "open online" peer-review model utilized in math and physics. Why I have I dedicated so much attention to this topic?

One set of reasons (the ones emphasized in the posts linked to above) is that I think such changes are likely to have substantial benefits for everyone--for authors, reviewers, editors, and the profession at large (by, among other things, improving the dissemination of new research). I have tried to draw attention to these benefits in large part because, or so I have argued, the oft-ascribed benefits of "anonymized" review are dubious and probably illusory ("anonymized" review really isn't in the digital age). Interestingly, Remco Heesen (Cambridge) shared a draft of a paper co-authored with Liam Bright (LSE) defending similar conclusions using empirical research:

We think there are a number of clear benefits to abolishing pre-publication peer review. In contrast, while various benefits of the existing system (downsides of abolishing peer review) have been suggested, we do not think there exist any that have clear empirical support. Insofar as empirical research exists, it is ambiguous in some cases, and speaks relatively clearly against the claimed benefit of the existing system in others...[Consequently], we claim that the present state of the evidence suggests that abolishing pre-publication peer review would lead to a Pareto-improvement: each factor considered is either neutral or favors our proposal. (p. 3, my emphasis)

However, the likely benefits alluded to above--to authors, editors, reviewers, and the profession--are not the only reasons that I think we should favor change. More deeply, I have long worried that "anonymized" review--far from ensuring fairness (as often claimed)--plausibly places authors at serious and undue career risks, particularly early-career and less-established authors. Allow me to explain.

Reflections on my upcoming 40th birthday, hitting targets, and our relevance in the profession

In less than a month, I will be 40 years old. 

In my early 30s, I took away my date of birth from social media and from my CV.

The reason behind this was that I worried about being regarded as "past my prime", especially for hiring committees. It took me a while to get funding for my PhD and then it took me a while to get a second PhD, as well as several postdoc positions. I also had two children. My partner was the primary caregiver for both through their early years, so I only took a few months off for each birth. Still, this all takes time--and time goes on inexorably. 

In the past I could not help thinking, "By age 40, I should..."

• Have a permanent job, check. Still, what is permanent these days? 
• Bought house, nope. Too expensive. 
• Published a paper in one of the top-3 philosophy journals, nope. (I should start writing in a different way and actually submit to these things, so it doesn't seem to be that big a priority). Etc. 

We use age as a measuring-rod, a series of checkpoints that we should have reached. Seeing younger people getting all sorts of accolades and accomplishments fills us with gladness for them, but also amps up our insecurity, as if we're missing the targets we need to hit. A bit like looking at the ultrasound of a gestating fetus, there are these set checkpoints that we evaluate ourselves by. By age x I surely should have accomplished y. Otherwise, there's a problem.

Should journals discourage repeat reviews?

I recently reviewed a paper for a journal, and was struck by a check-box in the online reviewer form that I recall encountering before. The check box asked something like, "Would you be willing to have your review forwarded to another journal if the manuscript is submitted elsewhere?" This in turn got me thinking about a broader phenomenon: reviewers reviewing the same manuscript at different journals. I've encountered this phenomenon on social media before, the typical case being a reviewer saying something like, "I rejected this paper at one journal. Then I got asked to review it again at a new journal, and because the author didn't seem to revise it in light of my feedback at the first journal, I just attached my first review advocating rejection at the second journal."

Another kind of attrition rate

In my recent post addressing a reader's query on how to choose between PhD programs, I suggested the reader should focus less on the reputation of a program or particular advisor and instead focus more on programs' attrition rate (i.e. how many people don't finish the program) and job-placement rate. The other day, however, an anonymous comment inadvertently drew my attention to another salient issue that in my experience is rarely discussed: what I will (for lack of better words) call post-PhD attrition rates. Allow me to explain what I mean, and why I think it may be good as a new disciplinary norm to expect programs to track and make them clear on their placement webpages.

JHP opportunities for early-career scholars

I've been asked to post the following set of announcements by The Journal of the History of Philosophy, which includes a number of opportunities (travel grants, fellowships, and one award) for early-career philosophers:

JHP ANNOUNCEMENTS

–––––––––––––––

Master Classes in the History of Philosophy

Sponsored by The Journal of the History of Philosophy

Mindful of the challenges facing young scholars working in the history of philosophy, the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Philosophy has established a program of Master Classes in the History of Philosophy. The central idea of the program is that a senior scholar who works primarily in some area of the history of philosophy would undertake to direct an intensive week of master classes for the benefit of a small group of recent Ph.D.’s whose main research and teaching are in the relevant area. Normally, the classes will focus on one or more texts that are typically not part of material that the participants would have studied as graduate students. The goal of the program is the enhancement of the expertise and understanding of the young scholars in their area of specialization.

Mid-career reflections - part 8: on fear in the discipline

When I started the Cocoon a little over six years, I didn't have many hopes for it. I was just a struggling early-career scholar with few friends or professional contacts in the discipline (due, admittedly, to some bad choices I made early on). I started the Cocoon not because I expected anyone to read it, but simply because I was sick of feeling isolated and alone in a discipline that seemed to me to incentivize those things. My only hope in starting the blog was that I might find a few similarly-minded others: people like me who were sick of feeling alone, and who wanted to help each other make their path through the discipline just a little bit better.

In some ways (many ways), the Cocoon succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. It seems to be widely read, at times has had a good stable of contributors, has been a wonderful way to get to know other people (and helped me feel far less isolated), and I've often heard people say complimentary things about it (though maybe they're just being nice). However, there's one major thing about the Cocoon that has been a persistent disappointment, at least for me--and that is how few early-career people have joined as contributors. I will be frank: since day 1, I've always hoped the Cocoon would really bloom--that early-career people would come out of the woodwork left and right to congregate here to post regularly and speak their minds: sharing their work, discussing their career struggles, and so on. Yet, while there are many commenters--as well as people who have (mostly anonymously) shared professional questions and career struggles in our "how can we help you?" series--the blog has consistently had few official contributors...and these days it is basically just me and sometimes Helen.

I've often wondered why so few early-career people blog. It could of course be anything: maybe people think they have better things to do (like, you know, research and teaching). However, I've asked people about this on occasion, and every time I've done so the dominant answer seems to be very different: fear. Fear of what search committees might think. Fear of what other philosophers might think. And so on (see the comments section above). If this is the truth--and it appears to be--I think it is just terrible. It is the reason why I began the Cocoon in the first place: because I was sick of living alone and in fear. I wanted a better profession than that. And yet--or so it seems--the fear is still there. Why? And how should we grapple with it?

Reader query on reading vs. writing

In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Amanda writes:

I guess this might help me in terms of understanding my own attitude toward the profession. I am curious whether most philosophers like writing or reading philosophy more? Also, I am curious whether most philosophers read things they like, or mainly read for the purposes of their own research. Either way, what percentage of the philosophy that you read do find intellectually fulfilling? 

I too am curious to hear people's answers. Here are mine...

A plea for more types of publications

Avram Hiller has a good piece over at Daily Nous (one I mostly agree with!) suggesting that philosophy journals should be more like science journals, which publish very short (1,500 word) "letters" along with full-length articles. Hiller's basic ideas are that many philosophy articles don't need to be as long as they do, and that more space for shorter pieces might increase philosophical discussion and inclusivity, make things easier on authors, editors, and readers, and increase acceptance rates.

I'm not sure about a few of these things--as I expect journals might start to be flooded with short pieces--but still, I'm generally sympathetic with Hiller's proposal. As I've mentioned before, I think the fairly standard policy of journals not considering "replies" to articles in other journals is a pretty big barrier to philosophical discussion. If more journals had a "letters" section, involving both short original pieces as well as replies, I suspect it would benefit the profession in some of the ways Hiller suggests.

However, I'd also like to make a converse plea I've made before: a plea for journals to consider longer pieces as well. In brief, I think good philosophy comes in all shapes and sizes. Some arguments can be made in 1,500 words. Some arguments can be made in 6,000 words. Others can be made in 10,000 words. Others still can only be made in 15,000 words. Still others require 20,000 words. And some--book length arguments--require 100K+ words.

Changing peer-review: as good a time as any?

I wrote last week about how I've found it better to let bitterness and resentment about the profession go. While I didn't claim that my experiences generalize or suggest that there aren't things about the profession that might rightly make people bitter, I hope at least some of you found the post helpful. All that being said, there are still some things about the profession that frustrate many of us--and as I mentioned in that post, I think we should discuss and try to improve things in the profession. So, in today's post, I'm going to discuss some concerns I've mentioned before about our current processes of peer-review, and how our system might be improved.

I'd like to begin by considering how people feel about our system of peer-review. Here is my general sense:

Editors don't seem to like it: As J. David Velleman (editor of Philosophers' Imprint) wrote at Daily Nous a while back, journals are overwhelmed with papers. The number of papers journals receive is making it progressively more difficult to find enough willing referees, give papers the attention they are due, and so on. Velleman has not been shy about his concerns, as I recall him sharing similar concerns on a number of occasions. And, in my experience, other editors seem to feel similarly. For example, when I recently inquired with an editor about a paper I submitted that had been under review a fairly long while, the editor mentioned that the peer-review system is "broken." I very much appreciated the editor's candor--not to mention the editor's timely and conscientious resolution to my inquiry--but I think it just goes to show: editors seem to like our current system about as much as the rest of us. Which brings me to...

Referees don't seem to like it: I can't even begin to count the number of times I've heard referees complain about our current peer-review system. It isn't that referees despise reviewing per se. On the contrary, I've heard some people say they think it is a valuable and important service to the profession. No, the concerns I've heard referees voice--many times in the comments section of this very blog--are typically about the kinds of papers they receive: papers that in their judgment are nowhere near publishable, and should have been desk-rejected. Among other things, I've heard referees often complain about egregious failures to engage in relevant literature--something I continually encounter as a referee: papers saying or implying things like "No one has argued X" when a simple philpapers search on that topic reveals multiple listings of people arguing X on the very first page.

Authors really don't like it: This much should go without saying. I want to be clear, though. Like many people, I think, I have had some very good experiences in the peer-review process: timely decisions, with really helpful referee reports, and so on. The problem, from an author's perspective, is not that the process never goes well. The problem is that there are many things that often don't go well. Waiting many months to get a verdict on a paper can be excruciating--especially if one is on the job-market or coming up for tenure. Having to bug editors about papers that are well-past their reviewer deadlines is nerve-wracking, as one may worry that bugging the editor (and, by extension, reviewer) might elicit a negative result. Then there are worries about being "scooped", as in cases when one worked for months or years on a paper, finished it years ago and yet, while it is still under review, one sees other people publish similar arguments (a dispiriting and anxiety-producing experience, to be sure). Then there is the phenomenon of "Google reviewing", which occurs when one submits a paper for anonymized review only to suspiciously find one's website googled with the paper title a few days later (I've heard many people report this). Finally, while there are some very good reviewers, there are also reviewers who don't do a good job--reviewers who take months on a paper only to give you five dismissive (and in some cases, needlessly inflammatory) sentences, as well as reviewers who seem to have read totally different papers--not to mention the fact that some of the most influential papers in the field appear to have been systematically rejected. 

A philpapers reply journal?

I've mentioned a few times about how journal restrictions on replies seem to me an unfortunate barrier to philosophical discussion, and how it might be cool for there to be a replies-only journal. Anyway, a few days ago David Bourget asked on philpeople whether the PhilPapers Foundation should create a journal of just that sort. Would you like to see such a journal? If so, I'd suggest liking Bourget's post and letting him know!

Science magazine on choosing the kind of academic you want to be

A reader drew my attention today to this article at Science Magazine on the freedom to choose to be the kind of academic you want to be. Here's an excerpt:

A postdoc friend recently called me to discuss his career options. He didn’t want to run his own lab, he said. Instead, he wanted to become a research scientist, mainly working at the bench— like me. I sensed that his mind was already made up, but he needed validation about pursuing a path that is not generally thought of as a professional success. Our conversation got me thinking about my own decision to become a research scientist—and about other career choices I made that went against the norm.

Reader query on the worst aspect(s) of the job

In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Anon writes (my emphasis):

Following up on the thread about impostor syndrome and the one on Daily Nous about the graduate student mental health crisis (which is probably a faculty crisis too) I think this might be a good time to focus some light on the following issue: What is the worst aspect of your job as a professional philosopher? Or if you are a graduate student or job seeker, what is the aspect of the job you look forward to least, and wish most to avoid. Basically what is the one thing in the profession that most drags you down, saps your will to work (or to live even), such that fixing this problem would result in the single largest improvement in your professional, and hence personal, well-being?

For me, I think it is the relentless speed-up of the job driven by the relentless demands for ever-increasing "production". It is bad enough when it comes from the mindless MBA-bots which run universities now, but the worst thing is that so many academics have now internalized this imperative and it guides their professional actions and expectations (even while they complain about it). I find this incredibly alienating, in the Marxian sense. The constant pressure, combined with the fact that I have to publish on what's fashionable, rather than what I think is worth working on (let alone interesting), has utterly drained my work of any value to me. This, in turn, is compounded by the need to publish quickly, so the work is necessarily half-assed, which in turn saps my self-respect since I am not even producing the best crap that I can (and I have to spend time engaging with work that is, it seems to me, similarly rushed and drained of value...). I feel that I am not a researcher but simply an academic "content-creator", whose job is just to generate a fancy version of click-bait. I often find myself day-dreaming that being an adjunct would be preferable; yes, I would have less time to write, but outside of class my time would be entirely my own.

I know not everyone feels the same way about the need to produce, and I am interested to see what other people consider the worst thing about their job, or the profession more generally.

I think this is a good query. If there are particular things that people find frustrating about working in the profession, it can be good to know what those things are--not only for commiseration, but for (hopefully) working to make things better. I may weigh in myself down in the comments section. For now, though, I think it might be good to just open the topic for discussion: What is the worst aspect of your job as a professional philosopher, and why? Let me also ask one further question: What do you think could/should be done to make that part of your job better?  

A 'replies-only' journal?

A while ago, I suggested that there may be an underappreciated barrier to philosophical engagement. The barrier is this: with a few exceptions (see e.g. JESP), most philosophy journals do not accept "replies" to articles in other journals. In practice, this means that, by and large, reply pieces can only be sent to one journal. My sense is that this is a real deterrent to philosophical discussion. Although I published two reply articles early in my career, I've largely given up on writing them. Why spend time writing a piece you can only send to one journal?

This potential barrier to philosophical dialogue concerns me given how rare engagement with published articles seems to be. According to this study:

• More than 90% of published humanities papers have received no citations two years after publication.
• About 82% have never been cited five years after publication.

Kieran Healy's research on citation rates indicates philosophy is similar ("on the average hardly anyone is getting cited"). I think this is unfortunate. While I've heard some people say most published philosophy isn't worth engaging with, I think this is terribly cynical, overly dismissive of the hard work of our colleagues, and mostly serves to uphold hierarchies (viz. engagement with Big Names, ignoring No-Names). Further, the more I read, the more I think there are a lot of people doing interesting work--work that, unfortunately, given the incentives in place, just isn't being engaged with.

I've long wondered what the profession might do to incentivize greater engagement with people's work. One obvious possibility would be for existing journals to be more open to replies to articles in other journals. However, I do not see that happening any time soon. Which got me thinking about one other possibility: a replies-only philosophy journal that might serve as a central forum for engagement with other articles in the literature. While such a journal would, obviously, only increase the number of places one could submit replies to by one, I cannot help but wonder whether--with the right kinds of editorial standards and review process--such a journal might substantially incentivize greater philosophical engagement.

What do you all think: would such a journal be a good idea? If so, that brings me to my next question: what exactly are the steps one must take to create such a journal? I'm sure it would be a fairly massive undertaking (logistically speaking)--and I'm far from sure whether it's something I would ever sensibly pursue myself--but still, I'd like to learn about what it might involve. What does it take to get a new journal started? Anyone have any experience or tips they're willing to share?

Should journals use 'outside reviewers'?

Daily Nous recently ran a post on whether journals favor affiliated authors. In the comments section, Neil Levy wrote:

Note that there is a minimally pernicious explanation that may account for some bias: the bias may be toward topics or approaches (which it is an editor’s prerogative to favor) rather than people or institutions.

This got me thinking about something else I've worried about for a while: self-selection effects in the peer-review system. Here's my worry. From my experience as a reviewer, the selection of peer-reviewers tends to work something like this:

1. A paper is submitted on topic X.
2. The editors of the journal then seek out reviewers who specialize on topic X.
3. The editors thus rely on judgments of people steeped in topic X to judge new papers on X.

So, for example, in my case, I receive a good number of requests to review papers in the following areas: nonideal justice, transformative experience, experimental philosophy, and free will--all areas I've published in. I am almost never asked to review a paper outside of these areas. Why? Because I don't specialize in the areas in question. But is this a good rationale? It might seem like it. Specialists are, it seems, the most qualified people to evaluate papers in their area. Alas, I think there's an underappreciated danger here: the danger of self-selection bias. Allow me to explain.

Guest-post on perceptions about different types of jobs

The following is an invited guest-post composed by Sam Duncan (Tidewater Community College):

Whether we admit it or not, we philosophers think a lot about how other philosophers view us and our academic positions. In fact, many of us often weigh this more than we should other considerations like the day to day reality of jobs and their larger impact on the world.  I worked as an adjunct and as a lecturer on a year to year appointment for many years and one of the thoughts that dogged me was that my professors and colleagues from grad school thought of me a failure. When I finally landed a full-time gig at a community college I couldn’t shake that thought that even though I liked my job, other members of the profession would view me as a failure. The reactions of some of my former professors only reinforced this. I remember writing one to tell her about the job and her reaction was basically “Well you deserve a better job but it’s a step up.”

The thing is, it’s actually a really good job by almost any objective measure. The pay is good, and my workload and stress levels are much lower than my friends working in research focused jobs. I also have a lot of autonomy in the way I do my job. In fact, not only does administration not meddle in how I do my job but they’ve been extremely supportive of my own ideas and responsive to the few concerns I’ve had as a faculty member. For instance, I wanted to offer a bioethics course here and a number of deans and other administrators did a lot of work to help me through the process and to drum up interest in the course once it was offered. This is a huge contrast to the relationship between the administration and faculty at the research focused school where I worked as a lecturer, which could only be described as acrimonious if not poisonous. And while I don’t have to do much research to keep my job, the college is extremely supportive of research. I get a pretty good travel budget and my dean is overjoyed when I present papers at conferences. So I can do research if and when I feel like it, but there’s none of the publish only to publish pressure that many faculty members feel at research focused institutions. To me at least that seems ideal. Why then would my former professors and others respond in a tone of commiseration? And why would I care?

Poll: would you still choose to pursue a philosophy PhD?

In light of the discussion in the comments section of our recent query by an undergraduate considering grad programs in philosophy, I thought it might be interesting to run an informal poll. Specifically, I'm curious how many of our readers who entered PhD programs in philosophy would make the same choice if they could go back in time and make the decision again.

Obviously, this is an unscientific poll and there might be significant self-selection effects, so I encourage readers (particularly those considering grad school in philosophy) to take poll results with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I thought it might be interesting to gauge our readers' thoughts. I respectfully ask readers to answer the poll honestly, and to fill it out only once. The poll is open to those and only those who entered a PhD program in philosophy, regardless of whether they finished their program. Finally, if you would like to briefly share why you answered the poll the way you did in the comments section (in a manner consistent with the blog's Mission), please do! 

If you pursued a PhD in philosophy, would you do it again?

Definitely

 

Probably

 

Unsure

 

Probably Not

 

Definitely Not

 

 

pollcode.com free polls

Undergraduate query on grad school

In the comments of our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Jonathan Lauret writes:

...I'm an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy, and I'm entering into the process of looking for what graduate schools to apply to.

I just today have been scanning through the internet for information on graduate school situations involving philosophy, and the tone is almost always very disheartening and depressing due to a number of given reasons. Most posts or blogs wrote about really rough conditions involving the application/hiring process, the amount of experience required for a very punishing and unrewarding job (typically), and the sheer rarity of any resulting enjoyable professorial position. 
I don't know what exactly I'm looking for in regards to the particular positions out there for graduates in philosophy. I do know that I love the discipline, that I hold it in value not due to some sort of desire to be famous or great or sage-like, but to get a better grasp or understanding of the world I live in. I feel as though teaching and talking to students/other people who have their own ideas and feelings on these things will bring me what I'm looking for in a profession.

I guess the question that comes from all this may be, where do these sorts of feelings fit into the grand scheme of going into graduate school and later entering the academic job market?

I think this is a great query, in part because we might be able to help Jonathan, but also because this is a kind of inquiry I expect a lot of get fairly often from undergraduates (I know I do). Indeed, I'm hoping a lot of you chime in, as perhaps this thread can function as an online compendium of different people's responses to these kinds of questions--one we might direct our undergraduates to in the future to hear different perspectives on the issue!

How another discipline mentors its grad students

Earlier this evening, I accompanied my spouse, a PhD candidate in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, to the reception at her discipline's major regional conference (akin to our Eastern APA). As I was chatting with her advisor, he mentioned the previous day at the conference. I was a bit surprised, as my spouse told me the conference began today. So, I asked him, "Wait, how many days is this conference?" He told me the conference was three days long, beginning today--but that there were also two pre-conference days. I'd assumed that the pre-conference days were probably special workshops (i.e. invited mini-conferences on hot topics), of the sort common in philosophy these days. Still, I was curious, so I asked him what was the deal with the two pre-conference days. He said, "Oh, those are the pre-doc and post-doc consortium days?" Because I had no idea what that meant, I told him, "I have no idea what that means." That's when he told me.

Apparently, the first day of the annual pre-conference (the pre-doc consortium) is an entire day of workshops for undergraduates and Masters students considering applying to PhD programs. The discipline's organization (i.e. their "APA") arranges for professors from all different kinds of programs around the country to hold seminars on applying to programs, what to expect if you get in a PhD program, how to succeed in PhD programs, what the facts are about academic and non-academic job markets (so that people know their job-prospects before applying to PhD programs), and so on. 

That's the first day. The second pre-conference day (the post-doc consortium) is an entire day of workshops for current PhD students and job-candidates, where professors from programs from around the country hold sessions on finding academic jobs, finding non-academic jobs (including networking), succeeding in research, developing teaching skills, and many other things too apparently.

Peer-review and sub-disciplinary silos

I'd like to share a vague worry I have about the effects that "sub-disciplinary silos" may have on the peer-review process and philosophy more generally. What is a sub-disciplinary silo? Very roughly: a group of specialists in a specific sub-area of philosophy who primarily read and review work in that area. Here's a personal illustration. I'm increasingly asked to review papers for journals. Because I've published in nonideal theory in political philosophy, as well as on transformative experience, I often get asked to review papers in precisely those areas. I don't often (and in some cases, ever) get asked to review papers outside of my sub-disciplinary specialties--say, in metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of language. Generally speaking, I suspect I am not unique in this respect. The peer-review process generally seems to something like this: a person sends a paper to a journal, the editors look for specialists in the area to review it, and decide whether to publish the piece on the basis of the specialists' recommendations.

On the surface, this looks all fine and good. Who is in a better position to evaluate a paper than a specialist in the area in which the paper is written? Alas, I have a concern. In the sciences, papers are tested against the world--against a mind-independent reality. Scientific papers make hypothesis, and then test whether those hypotheses are confirmed or disconfirmed by data. In philosophy, on the other hand, we test papers against each other, making a case to our readers that our premises are true or plausible. In which case it matters who one's readers are. If one's readers are a biased sample--a group of self-selected individuals united, say, by similar philosophical commitments--then even if people in that sample find one's premises true or plausible, that may not actually be good evidence that one's premises are true or plausible. And herein lies my worry: when papers are read and evaluated primarily by specialists in a given sub-discipline, it is possible that the very group in specialists in question may comprise this kind of biased sample.

I came to have this worry in part by some of my experiences at conferences, as well as in part by some experiences as a journal reviewer.

Reader query on presenting to a department on mental illness

A reader writes in:

I finished my Phd in 2015 and decided not to go into academia. While I don't at all currently regret that decision, now that I have recently been able to finally be completely free of depression for the first time since maybe I was a little kid, I am able to recognize that my decision not to go into academia was at least partly influenced by depression. In short: I had been taking zoloft since my 2nd year in grad school; my marriage fell apart during my 8th year, and I coped by smoking way too much weed; my doctor decided to take me off zoloft because she was worried about its interactions with weed; during my 9th year I completely lost interest in philosophy (similar to my experience prior to taking zoloft during my 2nd year) and was able to eke out the rest of the dissertation but called it quits with philosophy.

Anyways: I was recently chatting with a few of my old advisors back at [redacted]... We talked about how we think it's really a shame that depression just isn't discussed openly within the department, even though so many people have it. I thought that it might be a good idea for me to come back and give talk, sharing my own experiences with depression in grad school, talking about resources at [redacted], etc. He agreed, so I'll be giving the talk in November :) In the meantime, as I'm thinking about the content and structure of my talk, I was wondering if you have any thoughts for such a talk: What sorts of things might be good to include in a talk to a philosophy department whose students suffer from depression and at least some of the faculty are interested in helping and improving the environment of the department?

I think this is a great query, and would like to commend the reader, advisor, and department that took the initiative to organize this individual's upcoming presentation. I'm curious to hear what readers think. I myself feel fairly comfortable offering suggestions, as I have a good deal of experience with mental illness: I worked as an intern in an outpatient ward for a year, was co-director of a group home for the mentally ill for another year, and mental illness runs in my family, being more or less a constant in my life-experience since early childhood. Allow me to share some of my thoughts, then, before I open things up for comments...

Should journals rethink word-limits?

I had a spirited (and surprisingly contentious!) discussion on social media the other week on journal word-limits. The conversation began with a friend of mine--a well-published and respected philosopher in his AOS--noting that he had to cut down a 16K word article to meet a 7K word-limit. As someone who tends to write long pieces myself, I noted that what typically happens in cases like this is one cuts one's paper down to meet a limit only to find out 5 or 6+ months later--after the paper goes through peer-review--that reviewers advocate either rejection or revise-and-resubmit because the paper fails to deal with problems the longer version of it did deal with. In revise-and-resubmit cases, this often requires the author to put back in material that was in the longer version to begin with, requiring authors, reviewers, and editors to do more work that they might have had to do if the author had just been able to submit the better, longer version to begin with!

In other words, in my experience, journal word-limits often end up wasting everyone's time. They make authors waste a ton of time cutting down articles, and they waste reviewers' and editors' time by having them review--and, in revise-and-resubmits, review multiple times--inferior, shorter versions of what were previously better, longer papers. Because I think good philosophy papers come in many different shapes and sizes, and the most relevant thing is whether a paper is any good, I'm inclined to think it would be better all-around--wasting fewer people's time--for journals not to have hard word-limits but instead be willing to accept papers of any length short of a book (i.e. 20K words or so). Preemptively precluding authors from submitting longer papers--as many journals currently do--seems to me to only stand in the way of philosophical inquiry, making things more difficult on everyone, particularly authors who write longer, more ambitious papers (as it gives them fewer venues to publish in).

Reader submission: the perspective of a long-term non-TT faculty member

A few weeks ago, following Amanda's very nice suggestion here, I invited long-term non-TT faculty to share their perspectives on their jobs and the academy on the Cocoon. Here is the first submission I have received (if you would like to share your story, please just email me at marvan@ut.edu):

By Anonymous

I thought about writing a submission for the “Long Journeys” series on the Cocoon and then again when the “Real Philosophy Jobs” series came out but ultimately decided against it. When the invitation for a non-TT perspective appeared, I decided I would finally share my story and my observations. It includes a long journey and a real non-TT philosophy job at the end.  I am about to start my third year of a full-time, permanent teaching position in a philosophy department at a public university.  Prior to this, I accumulated many years of experience in the profession doing temporary jobs that are now becoming more of a norm rather than an exception.

Helping graduate students succeed: are better mentoring and admissions strategies needed?

I had dinner with an early-career philosopher friend the other evening, and at one point the conversation turned to a topic I have cared a great deal about ever since I was in graduate school: helping graduate students succeed. As readers may (or may not) know, I attended two different philosophy PhD programs: Syracuse in the late '90s, and then Arizona (where I transferred because four of our star faculty at Syracuse were simultaneously hired away by other programs). I have very fond memories of joining both programs. It was truly exciting--and more than a bit humbling--as a young person who loved philosophy to join programs with so many talented and brilliant people. I particularly remember the grad students in both programs. Basically everyone who entered the programs was smart as a whip, with a history of academic success. As a naive newcomer, I confess that I expected that most of the grad students I knew would succeed, get tenure-track jobs, and go on to have long careers in the academy.

Of course, and unfortunately, I was wrong. While I don't have the statistics in front of me, I seem to recall coming across a statistic several years ago that something like only 50% of philosophy PhD students ever finish the degree, let alone finish and get a tenure-track job. At any rate, even if this statistic is wrong, every graduate program I've ever visited or heard about has plenty of students who fit that description--students who hang around the program for 7-8 or even 10 years, only to fade from view, never finishing the degree. Moreover, at least in my own experience, it tended to be very surprising which students those would be. A few cases aside, I don't think anyone--neither I, nor the faculty or other students in the programs I joined--could forecast very well which new students would succeed and which wouldn't. For my part, some of the students I felt sure would succeed didn't, and some who I expected wouldn't succeed did. Indeed, from my perspective at least, some of the most brilliant grad students I knew didn't make it, whereas some of the "less talented" ones did. Why?

Katzav & Vaesen on peer-review in philosophy

Joel Katsaz and Krist Vaesen have an interesting new paper forthcoming in Philosophers' Imprint entitled, “Pluralism and Peer Review in Philosophy” (via Daily Nous). In brief, Katzaz and Vaesen argue on epistemic and moral grounds that, "journals should relax their standards of acceptance, as well as be less restrictive about whom is to decide what is admitted into the debate." As long-time readers of the Cocoon may recall, I'm very sympathetic with their overall position!

PhD graduates by AOS

In the comments section of my post on last year's job numbers by AOS, an enterprising commenter, 'Curious', writes:

I was curious so I spent a couple hours going through the AOSs of recent graduates (2012-17) from NYU, Princeton, Rutgers and Michigan. Here are the results:

Total: 194
Ethics - 39 (20%)
Epistemology - 28 (14%)
Metaphysics - 27 (14%)
Mind (inc. Action) - 25 (13%)
Language - 15 (8%)
Science - 13 (7%)
Political/Law - 13 (7%)
Ancient - 11 (6%) (NB. These are ALL from Princeton, so this is misleading)
Math/Logic - 9 (5%)
History (excl. Ancient) - 8 (4%)
Aesthetics - 5 (2%)

I interpret this as pretty bad news for budding epistemologists and metaphysicians, given the job numbers. Obviously more departments would have to be gone through to really get useful numbers. Princeton has a unusually large number of dissertations in Ancient (same for Rutgers in epistemology and Michigan in Law).

Another reader, 'Also Curious', then added:

I suspect - suspect - that the "relatively booming specialties" that you identify are areas of growth in "lesser" departments, that is, departments outside the top 20 (perhaps top 40) on Leiter's rankings.

Two decades ago, there was very little interest and training in applied ethics at elite (and even below that) schools. Bowling Green, for example, was noted as one of the best in the USA. That again is an area where there are great teaching "needs" at non-elite schools.

Because I too was curious, I quickly looked up Carolyn Dicey Jennings' 2016 update on her earlier job-market report, and found the following chart:

As you can see from the purple parts of the pie-charts (indicating graduates whose dissertations were in "core" areas), many departments appear to be graduating somewhere between 20-40% of their PhDs in core areas...when only something like 8% of available jobs appear to be in those areas.

One can also pretty plainly see some anecdotal support for Also Curious' hypothesis that lower-ranked departments may be graduating more people in "booming" areas of the job-market (i.e. value theory). Just looking at the chart, one can see that departments like Depaul, Vanderbilt, Georgia, Marquette, McMaster, Rochester, Sussex, Hawaii, and Macquerie are graduating comparatively larger proportions of PhDs in value theory than some more highly-ranked programs.

Although I don't have the time to look more closely, I'm sure an enterprising reader or two could use Jennings' data to better evaluate Curious' and Also Curious' hypotheses!

Where the jobs were(n't) in 2016: by AOS

Updated - June 14th: Figures now include August 2016 (percentages by AOS changed very little).

I haven't done this in several years, but I was curious how academic jobs were distributed by AOS this year and quickly went through the philjobs advertisements from August 1, 2016 - May 31st, 2017. Because I figured readers might be interested as well, I posted the numbers below along with a bit of commentary.

A few quick notes. First, when I encountered jobs with multiple AOS (e.g. metaphysics, moral philosophy), I counted each job as '.5' jobs in that area (or in the case of 3 AOS, '.33' jobs, etc.). Although I recognize this is a bit odd, it seems to me to make sense, as a job like that could go to someone in any of the listed AOSs, not just one particular AOS. Because I did this with all jobs, the numbers seem to me to accurately weight whether a job is in a particular AOS simpliciter, or whether it was also available to candidates in other AOS. Second, I only counted "entry-level" jobs, i.e. postdocs and Assistant Professor positions, not Associate or Professor level jobs. Third, while I tried to get the numbers right, this is just a "quick and dirty" tally. While I don't think there are any major errors, I wouldn't be surprised if made a minor mistake or two.

In any case, here are a few highlights, followed by some commentary and then details (viz. breakdowns within each AOS):

TOTAL jobs = 482

• Value theory = 176 jobs (36.5%)
• Open AOS: 117 jobs (24.2%)
• Science (including cog. sci) = 44 jobs (now 9.1%)
• History = 43 jobs (now 8.9%)
• Core (mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, logic) = 39 jobs (now 8%)

TT jobs = 231

• Value Theory = 78 jobs (34%)
• Open: 39 jobs (17%)
• History: 30 jobs (13%)
• Core (mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, logic) = 23 jobs (10%)
• Science (including cog. sci) = 18 jobs (7.8%)

Non-TT jobs = 251

• Value theory = 98 jobs (39%)
• Open = 78 jobs (31%)
• Science  (including cog. sci) = 23 jobs (10%)
• Core (mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, logic) =16 jobs (6.4%)
• History = 15 jobs (6%)