The Philosophers' Cocoon

When to leave a university with budget problems?

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

How do you know when it's time to jump ship at a university with budget problems?

Sadly, I think the answer may be: as soon as you find out it has budget problems. If recent events in higher education (e.g., the closure of one college and university after another) are indicative, budget problems tend not to improve but rather worsen.

I had a friend at university that, much like other universities that have closed down, proceeded rapidly from "budget problems" to something like a budget death-spiral. It went something like this. The university was poorly-off financially because of some bad strategic decisions by its administration, coupled with a drop in student enrollment. The way it addressed those problems (presumably, the only way available) was to cut faculty and programs. But, of course, as soon as students and parents found out about its budget problems and cuts to programs, this led to even lower enrollment ... which, you guessed it, made the university's financial situation progressively worse.

Maybe the OP's institution is a different situation--I can't know without knowing more details. But, in any case, given that the situation at my friend's institution changed rapidly (and unexpectedly to many people working there), my sense is that the prudent thing to do is to probably begin looking for alternative prospects of employment sooner rather than later. But perhaps I'm overstating things? Given that I don't work at an institution with issues like these, I don't have any direct first-hand experience.

It would be good to hear from readers who have worked at a college or university with budget problems. How did things go at your institution? And when do you think it's good to "look toward the exits"?

What counts as a good generalist journal?

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

What counts as a "good" generalist journal? I am an MA student and have recently had a R&R from a well-known although not Top journal (the lower end of the Leiter Top 20) after being encouraged to submit by a professor. This is my first publication, and this was the first venue I submitted the paper to. After having read some posts (on here and elsewhere) about the importance of publications in top journals, I am now concerned that simply being in the top 20 does not mean that this venue is well-regarded enough, and a publication there may be looked on poorly during PhD applications. Am I overthinking, or should I really be aiming only for top 10ish journals?

Beauty, meet Eye of the Beholder. Seriously, I don't think there's any objective answer to this question. I've met some people who only seem to see top-5 or top-10 journals as good, others who only see some top-10 journals to be good, others who see all top-20 to be good, etc. I think a lot depends on context. If you're trying to get a job at NYU or Princeton, then yeah, you probably need to be publishing in top-10/top-5 places. But if you're like most of us who aren't at places like that, top-20 is probably sufficient for being considered "good."

But this is just my off-the-cuff reaction. What do readers think?

Grappling with lack of a sense of belonging to the profession?

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

How common is it to feel the lack of a sense of belonging (to the profession of philosophy)? How do you handle it?

I am a mid-career (tenured but not "senior" if it makes sense) philosopher at a small, non-elite school. My job is teaching-oriented, and teaching takes most of my time. I have published maybe 1 article per year on average. I have had less and less a sense of belonging in recent years. I occasionally saw posts here complaining about the unpaid work (and overwork) in the profession. I feel like, "I am sorry for your experience but, hey, I feel jealous in an odd way!"

For example, I have not received any invitation to give a talk or to attend a workshop anywhere. I receive review requests probably like 2-3 times per year. My department does not have a graduate program, and I never served as an external member for a thesis committee. I have received one book review request (which I declined because I did not have time). When I was at APA meetings, I was not part of any already-established circles, and I usually ended up talking with some graduate students who were similarly lost and awkward.

Maybe this is just a fact for me to accept. I am introvert and I do not like (and almost have never done) self-promoting. I am curious, though, is there any way to create some sense of belonging other than publishing more articles/books as a way to let others know you?

Good questions. I suspect this is pretty common, and I empathize. I've definitely felt it at times, particularly earlier in my career when I didn't know many people in the profession. Also, as an introvert myself, getting to know people isn't my greatest forte. Still, I've found that going to conferences helps, as over time I've been able to make friends in the profession.

I guess that would be my biggest tip: send stuff to conferences and try to get to know people. Other than that, I've always just tried to enjoy my work locally--that is, my research, teaching, and friends and colleagues in my own locale.

What do readers think? How common is a lack of a sense of belonging? If it's something you grapple with, how do you handle it?

What's Wrong with Rankings?: 1. A Measuring Cup Is a Poor Ruler

By Sam Duncan

I believe rankings in general are harmful to higher education and that potential graduate students in philosophy are making a huge mistake if they rely primarily on the Philosophical Gourmet Report to choose a program. But I’ve been thinking about a challenge posed by Shen-yi Liao’s comment on a post about ranking obsession that ran a while back and I think it deserves a response, which is what I will do in this and a few succeeding ones. Liao points out that:

If you make enough comparative judgments, and some of those comparative judgments are enough shared amongst enough people, what is that but a ranking, even if it is not explicitly numericalized? Perhaps there are really people out there who never make any comparative judgment, but I would be surprised.

He raises an excellent point and as I’ve thought about it I’d push it further. We all make comparative judgments– we simply couldn’t get through life if we didn’t– and most of us fall back on rankings and reviews in making some of them. As warmer weather rolled around last year I decided I wanted a cold brew coffee maker. What did I do? I googled “best cold brew coffee maker” and checked the rankings that popped up. I recently wanted to buy myself a really nice ink pen as a 45th birthday present to myself, so what did I do? I checked some reviews and rankings. When my wife and I needed a bigger car to schlep our twins what did we do? We checked the Consumer Reports car rankings.

Beat AI Game at PhilPapers

David Bourget (Western University) wrote in by email:

I'm writing to invite you to check out Beat AI, an online game for philosophers that I just released with the PhilPapers team. You can try it out here: 

https://philpeople.org/beatai

Please give it a try and mention it on your blog!

If readers would like to learn more, please see Bourget's post and discussion at Daily Nous.

Have essay prizes disappeared?

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

What has happened to essay prizes (particularly ones for grad students)? Many seem to have stopped. Does anyone know why? Does anyone think this is a good/bad thing?

Hmm...I seem to recall a number of prizes disappearing from the APA's website during or just after the COVID pandemic, and I presumed the reason to be the sharp drop in the stock market (which could have affected investments that funded them?). But maybe I'm misremembering, and maybe that's not the reason?

Do any readers have any insights here? Also, if any readers know of any resources for tracking down essay prizes (including ones for grad students), please do feel free to share!

Jobs and professional 'plums': do you need to be well-regarded by people in elite departments?

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

I wonder if others also feel that in philosophy, the only way to get a job or other professional plums is to be liked or well-regarded by the "right" people (in elite departments, etc). I see people who are "hyped" who get all the plums, and they all seem very well connected or otherwise widely liked or highly visible. Our obsession with rankings only fuels this worry. I'm a junior member of the profession and it makes me anxious that I need to be liked by all the big wigs... do others feel this way, or do I have the wrong picture?

I definitely don't think this is true of jobs in general, particularly jobs at teaching-focused institutions (see here), where in my experience few people care about rankings. However, when it comes to 'plum' jobs in elite departments, Helen De Cruz found that the vast majority of hires are from elite grad departments--though there are, obviously, competing explanations for this (such as that elite PhD programs put the best candidates on the market). As for other 'plums' (such as awards), being well-regarded by the right people obviously seems important, though again there are multiple competing explanations for why someone is well-regarded. 

I have to confess that although at various points in my career I've worried about this kind of stuff (particularly when I was on the job-market), I found it more productive--both then and now--to simply try to do good work. On that note, although there may well be elitist parts of the academy, my experience again is that large segments of it are not. For example, I've never encountered anyone at my university who seems to care "where you came from" or "who you know." So, if elitism bugs you, maybe the thing to do is to try to get at job at a place where it's not really an issue and not run in elitist circles.

Anyway, these are just a few quick thoughts. What do you all think? 

Effects of 'radically contrarian' views at different career stages?

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

What do you think is the effect of having (more or less radically) contrarian views at different points of one's career (from Ph.D. student onwards)? Thank you!

Interesting query, though I'm not sure it can be answered at such a broad level of generalization (I suppose a lot might depend on the topics one is radically contrarian about). In any case, I'd be curious to hear from people at different career stages who consider some of their views to be radically contrarian.

What do you think the effects have been? It could be good to hear from others as well, such as search committee and tenure & promotion committee members.

Reducing ranking-obsession?

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

Is there a way to reduce the obsession over rankings in our discipline? including department rankings and journal rankings. It really hurts us in my opinion. I know some scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists, none of who is as obsessive about rankings as philosophers (esp grad students). One of them doesn't even know any journal rankings (including Q1 vs Q2!). What they do know is (eg) which journals have what editors who have written which work etc. I really think it is more healthy than what we have. Also, talking to people in conference based on their departmental rankings is commonplace and insane. (In comparison, I have attended a math conference as a nobody and still everyone sitting around me talk to me about their and my research.)

Having been involved in various hirings and grad admissions, I really do not think too much of rankings!

Interesting query. Myself, I'm not sure whether philosophy is unusual in this respect. I've encountered other disciplines where there's a lot of interest in program rankings, publishing in 'A' journals, etc. I'm also not sure that academic philosophy as a whole is as ranking-obsessed as the OP suggests. While I suspect it may be common in many graduate programs (in part because of how competitive the job-market is), my sense at that in many colleges and universities (particularly those that prioritize teaching), people don't focus on rankings much at all. In any case, to the extent that it exists, I'm not sure what the best thing to do is than to try not to feed into it oneself--e.g., in hiring, publishing, citation practices, professional behavior (at conferences), etc. All the same, humans being what they are, matters of 'status'/prestige are probably always going to be salient to some/many people, regardless of what one does. 

Anyway, these are just a few of my quick thoughts. What are yours?

Norms for review times in philosophy compared to other fields?

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

Can some one explain how the norms for peer review got established in philosophy? I ask because while I'm a philosopher by training, much of my research is very interdisciplinary. As a result, I'm asked to referee for both philosophy journals and journals in the sciences. Science journals typically ask for a review be completed within a week or two, whereas philosophy journals often allow for somewhere around six weeks to hand in a review. For me, refereeing a philosophy paper doesn't take more effort or time than it does to referee a science paper. Both require about the same amount of time/effort, and I generally supply a few pages of notes. This leads me to wonder why philosophy journals give so much more time. Does anyone know the history behind how these norms have been established?

Interesting questions. I don't quite recall where I came across the information, but I seem to recall seeing somewhere that peer-review tends to take longer in a variety of humanities fields compared to in science. I wonder whether there might be a few reasons for this. First, people tend to co-publish with a lot of co-authors in science compared to humanities, where people tend to publish solo--which might leave scientists more time for reviewing papers (indeed, scientists often have well-funded labs with a large number of grad students and junior faculty who collect and analyze data, etc.). Second, perhaps the quality of scientific papers is easier to judge, given the comparative objectivity of scientific methods (e.g., agreement on sound methods of data collection and analysis, etc.) compared to the humanities? Then again, maybe there's some other explanation.

What do you all think? It could be helpful to hear from people who have published in different fields to get their takes!

Are the job-market/academia worth it?

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

Does anybody think this is worth it? Sorry that this is a grim question. But after a few cycles on the job market, I am wondering whether anybody thinks that this is worth it (and endorses that belief). I see so many intelligent kind friends absolutely burned out by the job insecurity, the constant moving, the two body problems, the low pay during prime saving years, the barriers to starting a family. I know we all know these things and we commiserate with each other - but then we just keep doing it. Line up again for another job market year, keep "crossing fingers". Has anybody figured out a defence, other than inertia, for why they keep doing it? If so could they share it, so that I can have their hope and reasoning as well?

I'm so sorry that the OP and others on the job-market are going through this. I spent seven (or was it eight?) awful years on the market wondering the same thing, and although I finally lucked out and ended up in a tenure-track job, I must confess that I still don't think that I have a good answer. Did a tenure-track job make that tremendously awful better-part-of-a-decade worth it? And would it have been worth it if I hadn't lucked out? I don't know how to answer either question, and I suspect there may not be any generalizable answers. Maybe it's all worth it in some cases but not others? But what about in comparison to relevant alternatives? I've heard a number of people who have left academia for industry joba report being far happier. Then again, maybe they are a non-representative, self-selected group of "alt-ac success stories"? 

In any case, it may be good to have a frank and open discussion of these issues, hearing the perspectives of people in different situations, including those on the market, those who have stayed in academia, and those who have left. 

Does anyone have any experiences or insights they're willing to share? Please do feel free to discuss away and commiserate.

Dizzying publication rates by PhD students?

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

I know of PhD students who have dizzying numbers of publications (think > 8) and who have not even started their dissertations yet. But judging by their CVs, most superstar professors at elite institutions published little or nothing before finishing their PhDs, and virtually none of them published anything before starting their dissertations.

This suggests one of two things. Either (1) such insane publication rates among PhD students are a new phenomenon, or (2) having an insane number of publications as a PhD student doesn’t predict career success.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts about this. I’d also like to know whether I should try to be one of these uber-prolific PhD students. (I just started my PhD .)

I'm curious what readers think. I suspect there is some truth to both (1) and (2). Back when I was in grad school in the early 2000s, it seemed pretty uncommon to publish while in grad school. In fact, I remember hearing many people say that they were actively dissuaded from it by grad faculty, the rationales being that grad students should focus on their dissertation publishing too early might "premature", leading to poorer published work than if the student waited to develop their ideas more. Alas, the hyper-competitive academic job market seems to have rather predictably led to something like a publishing arms-race--though, as the OP notes, it's unclear whether publishing a ton actually predicts success in landing a job.

What do readers think?

Reducing time to degree in grad programs?

A reader brought my attention today to a post at the Blog of the APA entitled, "Reducing Time to Degree in Philosophy Doctoral Programs." The authors, Martin Willard and Gina Helfrich, write:

In today’s dismal market for permanent academic positions, a median TTD of seven years, together with the refusal of many doctoral programs to disclose median TTDs to prospective students, represents a moral failure. Doctoral program faculty generally accept their obligation to assist graduates in obtaining academic positions (although increasingly these positions are not tenure-track). What should be just as obvious is their obligation not to take seven or eight of their matriculants’ critical career development years with academic programs that do not, for most students, lead to permanent employment.

...

Five-year doctoral program TTD medians are both desirable and achievable. Shorter TTD is desirable for the simple but under-appreciated reason that more than 70 percent of doctoral program matriculants will not obtain permanent (tenure track or similar) academic employment, and current trends away from university instruction in the humanities will only make this situation worse. Philosophy Ph.D. programs with long TTD medians therefore hamper the majority of their students’ career trajectories as well as their lifetime salary potential. Shorter TTD is not only desirable, it is achievable: it has already been achieved outside the U.S., and in the U.S. the doctoral programs at UNC, MIT, Princeton, and Yale have achieved a median TTD of six years or less for many of their graduating cohorts. In light of the limited job prospects for philosophy Ph.D.s in the US and Canada, sustained efforts to reduce the TTD for doctoral programs from the current 6.9 year median are, we believe, a moral imperative.

As someone who barely made it through grad school myself, and who grappled hard with the stress of worrying that I'd spent 7+ years in grad school with few career prospects to show for it, I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument. 

What do you all think?

Rigorous teaching standards vs. self-preservation?

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

I have a permanent, non-tt position at a state school. My position is teaching-oriented (4/4 load), and I teach a lot of gen-eds and lower-level classes. The threat of budgetary cuts at my institution concerns me, but I've been assured that my position is secure (I'm on multi-year renewable contracts). In spite of this, I'm still feeling a lot of pressure to maintain high enrollment in my classes and get strong student evals (lest I begin to appear expendable). I'm not cynical enough to think that the latter can only be gotten by compromising standards, but I do sometimes feel like my desire to impose rigorous academic standards and my desire for professional self-preservation are pulling me in opposite directions as a teacher. Does anybody else feel this way? Any tips on how to deal with it?

These are good questions. Recently, Eric Schwitzgebel catalogued some data on grade inflation, and it seems to be a progressive and ongoing issue across the academy. What's to be done? I don't know. It's a collective action problem which, as the OP points out, puts individual instructors in a bind.

How do you all handle these issues, and how well does it work?

How to do interdisciplinary analytic philosophy, appealing to a wider audience?

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

I want to be interdisciplinary, and to appeal to wider audiences, especially in this precarious time for philosophers. But I have a problem whenever I try to do so. As an analytic philosopher, many of my papers so far take the form of, at least in the first part, presenting a problem that should trouble people (often arguing why it should). It might be a problem with existing accounts of X. Or it might be a philosophical puzzle or problem in its own right. More often than not I then offer a solution.

So the reaction I expect – if my audience gets the paper – is either being troubled, for the reasons I urged, or being troubled and then relieved (by my solution), or disagreeing that they should be troubled, or relieved, and so being at least a little troubled about that, instead. Generally, analytic philosophers who get the paper react in one of these ways.

But outside analytic philosophy, I never get any of these reactions. I maybe get well-intentioned feedback along the lines of “Ah, yes, that reminds me of X,” or “You should look at Y,” or “Is your sense of P (which the problem doesn’t turn on) the same as So-and-So’s sense?” They never seem troubled, or relieved, but they also don’t seem to disagree or find the argument underwhelming, trivial, or obvious. This just leaves me frustrated that they’re not playing ball, and my frustration shows, preventing fruitful interaction.

Is it just me? What should I do?

Good questions. I guess I'm inclined to think experiences like these may be good opportunities to see whether the kinds of questions we raise and arguments we give have the kind of interest and appeal to outsiders that they do within our own disciplinary silos--and, if not, to investigate why and (potentially) what to do about it. One of the things I've always admired of the Socratic model of philosophy in Plato's works is how Socrates engages with everyday people in dialogue. And I think there are some trends in this direction in philosophy (including analytic philosophy in particular), viz. "public philosophy." Beyond this, though, I'm not sure.

What do you all think? It would be great to hear from people who have (or haven't) had similar experiences, and what they took away from them!

The crisis in publishing – how to make it slightly less awful (Guest post by the Editors of Analysis - 3 of 4)

By Stacie Friend, David Liggins, and Lee Walters

Philosophy journals are overwhelmed with submissions. We are all aware of the problems this creates. It makes it harder for authors to get timely verdicts on the papers they submit, it makes it harder for journals to reach those timely verdicts, and it means that many potential referees are overwhelmed with requests for referee reports.

The profession needs a solution to this crisis: a better way of doing things, and a way of switching to it from the way we do things now. We admit that we have no solution. Our goal here is more modest: to make some suggestions for how to make things slightly better.

First, let’s cheer ourselves up with some ways in which philosophy journal article publishing is doing relatively well. In contrast to some other disciplines, philosophy usually uses anonymous review: either double-anonymity (where the author and referee are unaware of each other’s identities) or triple-anonymity (where, in addition, the editors don’t know the author’s identity – this is the system we use at Analysis). (Sam Andrews has compiled some data on philosophy journals’ anonymous review practices: https://pjip.carrd.co/#spread). Outside of philosophy, triple-anonymity is rare: of the four triple-anonymous journals Oxford University Press publishes, three are philosophy journals. (In case you are wondering, the fourth is the Journal of Victorian Culture.) No system is perfect, but we think that anonymous review allows editors to make more objective decisions. Also, some disciplines allow authors to propose possible referees for their journal submission. But this runs the risk of creating mutual appreciation societies. So it’s a good thing it’s not the norm in philosophy.

Now for some suggestions for making things slightly better.

On Gilles Deleuze's birthday: on the philosophical significance of co-authoring

Today, January 18, is Gilles Deleuze's (1925-1995) birthday. The French philosopher would've become 99 had he lived to see the day. He died at the age of 70, in 1995 following a long pulmonary illness that plagued him for much of his life, which either drove him to suicide, or perhaps led him to accidentally fall out of a window. 

I only very recently got into his work, as I read his monographs on Spinoza and Nietzsche (both excellent). I am intrigued by the inherent paradoxical nature of Deleuze as a philosopher. He focuses on liberty, resisting societies of control, and standing out from the crowd, refusing to vote for your own oppressors, refusing to be tied down by conventional morality, for which he took inspiration in both Nietzsche and Spinoza. At the same time, he was for all appearances a regular guy, married to Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan) from 1956 until his death, he raised two children with her, living a quiet life where he did not travel much.  

Deleuze is known for co-authoring with his good philosophical friend Félix Guattari, a psychoanalyst. 

I've written about philosophical friendships and their importance on the Cocoon earlier, here.

Tips for obtaining leadership positions in philosophy associations?

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

I'm considering going up for promotion to full professor in the next few years. One of the criteria the promotion committee will be looking at is 'professional recognition' which includes holding an office in a professional organization or association. I've never been asked to hold such an office, or even been aware of any nomination procedures for such. Outside of just starting my own philosophy association and appointing myself president, how do I get a leadership position of some sort in a philosophy association? If anyone is looking, I'm volunteering.

Interesting question. One reader submitted the following reply:

The people who are elected to these positions are people who have been involved in the organizations for years. Though they involve some work, they also carry some honour - it is a small reward of sorts for contributing to the organization. So this is a bad strategy on your part. Incidentally, I belong to PSA, BSPS, APA, EPSA, AAAS, and HOPOS. So it is probably wise to support some of the professional organizations.

I didn't see Travis as suggesting any particular strategy, but otherwise this reply seems right: one plausible prerequisite to get appointed to a leadership position in an organization is to first get involved in it! All the same, that's not saying too much. 

Are there particular ways to get involved in a professional organization (say, the APA or any of the other organizations the above respondent mentions) that Travis might pursue to better position himself for a leadership position later? It would be great to hear any tips from people who are 'in the know'!

The loss of Twitter for the philosophical community

A lot of philosophy twitter accounts have gone dormant (like mine) or have now disappeared.

What are we losing with the philosophical Twitter community? 

I always liked the prickliness of Twitter and the resistance to a kind of conformity mindset I often encounter on FB and other places. However, the loss of important functionality on the site which is now X (such as the removal of headlines and circles), the prioritizing of blue tick accounts that have little of interest to say, and the increasing vitriol, as well as the fact that I was recently banned without explanation or ability to appeal, have led me to largely check out from it. 

I got a lot out of Twitter and am very grateful for the community I was able to build there, and the connections. As I became curious about what other philosophers got out of Twitter, I put some testimonies I collected, with their permission.

Many are philosophers who are on the path to an alt-ac career, such as Lynn Chiu: 

Thanks to Twitter, or what it used to be, I was able to sustain my social identity as an academic philosopher after I quit my postdoc. The "flatness" of Twitter enabled me to constantly find comrades and collaborators hidden in little niches across all disciplines, eventually bootstrapping a new philosophical path without losing my identity and colleagues. I know that this is not the experience many have with Twitter. I was lucky to have just enough of the right kind of followers to have fun, honest, and open interactions without attracting its dark side or fanning my ego. Now that Twitter is no longer Twitter, but X-- a site with a vision I never signed up for-- I am forced to leave this platform and rethink what it is to be a philosopher in practice, to philosophize in the real world, and to build academic communities. @drlynnchiu

In a similar vein, many philosophers who are self-described "on the margin of academia" and who do not follow a traditional path, found connection on Twitter: 

As a philosopher and researcher who is on the margin of academia, due to not pursuing the traditional PhD route, and due to being « first-generation », Twitter was absolutely vital for me as a window into the world of academic philosophy. At a crucial moment where I needed to « find my people » in order to know I could pursue philosophy, Twitter allowed me to coordinate with other academics in a way that my atypical profile wouldn’t have allowed otherwise. How important this was to my philosophical thinking is hard to understate : without those conversations, I would have had no way to *think together*, no feedback, no way to experience the productive « disconcertment » one experiences when one talks to a *colleague* and yet still struggles to be understood.--Pierrick Simon

There have always been a fair number of grad students on Twitter. Some of them have gathered large following, but there are also several smaller accounts of grad students and also people who are/were thinking of applying to grad school, such as this anonymous grad student: 

I was one of very few philosophy undergraduate majors at my old institution, and those that I did know in person were interested in philosophy for law school purposes. Pre-Elon Twitter was not only the first place where I found fellow philosophy students, but it also was a place that allowed me to get in contact with graduate students and academics at institutions that was thinking about applying to for graduate school. I miss that community deeply.—anonymous grad student

Finally, there are also quite some traditional academic philosophers, including professors with tenure (like me!) who enjoyed Twitter and got a lot of intellectual engagement out of it. Vernon Cisney describes (aka "Deleuze Clues") describes the experience as follows: 

Before I logged onto Twitter, I had scrupulously avoided entanglements with the world of social media. Never jumped onto Friendster, Myspace, or Second Life, and, despite its endurance, I’ve never launched a Facebook account. I don’t understand Flickr or Tumblr, and I’ve repeatedly had my children explain to me the differences between Instagram and Pinterest. I think there may have been a Vine in there at some point. Social media has just never seemed like my thing.

In May 2018, I decided to take the plunge and create a social media presence in an effort to expand my academic network; for whatever reason, Twitter seemed the platform for me. At the time, I was infrequently contributing to a blog and having difficulty directing traffic to it, and Twitter’s format seemed a useful mode of announcement.

Five years later, as it is dying, it is clear that Twitter has extended my philosophical and intellectual life in ways I could never have imagined. Without mentioning names (because I know I will inadvertently leave people out), I would like to briefly list a few. It has put me in touch with countless academics in and around my areas of interest, allowing me to foster relationships that have been further nurtured at conferences and beyond. More than a few of these relationships have led to professional collaborations and resulted in publications.

Philosophical friends and epistemic partiality in friendship

The history of philosophy is replete with passionate, deep, and inspiring philosophical friendships.

Consider Huizi and Zhuangzi, Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, David Hume and Adam Smith, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and the “Somerville Quartet” of women philosophers in Oxford during and after the Second World War, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley. Two recent books have been devoted to the lives of this group of friends, Metaphysical Animals (by Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman) and The Women are up to Something (by Benjamin Lipscombe).

 

Postcard from Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, 1959. Credit: Kingston University Archives

The Somerville Quartet

In her essay review of both books, Jennifer Frey highlights the epistemic benefits of philosophical friendship. It afforded these women a unique way of doing philosophy, that is, a unique set of philosophical practices that Frey did not think possible when she was an undergraduate, and when philosophy was presented to her (as it is to many of us) as masculine and solitary:

What is so startling and attractive about the love between Anscombe and Foot is that in spite of all their differences—of temperament, religion, class background, appearance, domestic circumstances and even politics and morals—they were able to draw close together based on their mutual desire to see their way through the philosophical problems that had gripped their imaginations and to make progress in their own search for a philosophical account of human experience. At the root of their affection lay a common goal—a search for insight and answers to the questions that were troubling them, a struggle they undertook together over the course of their lives in a spirit of cooperation and mutual aid. They did not always agree, but their respect for one another’s minds anchored their friendship.—Frey, The Somerville Quartet, The Point Magazine 2022

Epistemic Partiality

In the epistemic partiality literature, started by an influential paper by Sarah Stroud (2006), the thought is often that we should (or in fact should not) lower the epistemic bar for our friends. Stroud fleshes this out in the following way: the distinctive phenomenology and attitudes of friendship prompts us to adopt a set of unique doxastic practices that apply to our friends, such as believing them more readily then we would strangers, or treating negative accounts about our friends with excessive scrutiny. Differently put, we are biased when we deal with our friends. Epistemic partiality in friendship might mean that we “violate the standards of epistemology,” as Sandy Goldberg summarizes it.

But I wonder if we should flatten the epistemology of friendship in this way as just adopting different (lower) standards to certain propositions. Philosophical friendships show that the epistemology of reasoning with your friends indeed is subject to a distinctive set of norms and practices, but these do not merely amount to lowering the bar. Let me speculate how this might be.

Loneliness in academic life?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, 'One Hundred Semesters of Solitude' writes:

I'd like to initiate a conversation about the unexpected and honestly often quite difficult loneliness of having chosen an academic career. Note that I'm NOT looking for some Cocoon-style "what are *your* thoughts" on how to DEAL with this loneliness. That's partially what therapy is for, and the solutions to loneliness and solitude are pretty well-known regardless of what profession you choose (find hobbies, volunteer, put yourself out there, etc.).

What I'd like to ask is just how many people, like me, have kind of been surprised by how much less of a social network we have than other friends and non-academics at similar career stages. Here's the factors that affect my life, and I'm wondering how common these are. Again, I'm NOT looking for advice.

1) Lack of social connections from past stages of life -- Some people are able to build social circles out of their college or childhood friends and their mutual connections. However, because I chose to pursue a PhD in my 20s and partially because my program was far away from where friends from my BA ended up, I fell out of contact with many if not most of my college connections. None of my friends from college are nearby geographically. So that makes this source of social interaction slim pickins'. How many others have this experience?

2) Lack of social connections from work -- I'm in my mid-30s and I have a TT position in a major city! So I pretty much hit the lottery. However, I've learned that folks in other industries (tech, law, finance, etc.) often find a majority of their friends from their workplace. This is because these other workplaces are largely populated by people in a (1) similar age bracket who (2) are also looking for new social connections.

However, in academia, it's possible that neither of these factors applies. I am the youngest member of my department by a good 10 years and (nearly) everyone else lives in the suburbs with a family. Nobody is really looking for a buddy to go check out bars with on weekends.

Also, my institution (somewhat anecdotally) seems to do a really bad job of connecting its junior faculty with each other. Previously, when I worked at a much smaller institution, there were TT faculty orientations, meet-and-greets, and so on. At my current institution, there's been none of that.

Anyway, these factors have also made this source of social interactions very hard. How many others have experienced this?

3) The inherent social isolation of academic work -- The other obvious factor that makes it hard to develop meaningful social connections at work is that, unlike say tech or law or finance, academic work in the humanities is almost entirely solo. Most of us aren't running labs, with grad students and postdocs filing in and out and so on. And barring the odd committee assignment where people aren't rushing to leave the Zoom room, literally all of my work is conducted by myself.

I write by myself. I lesson prep by myself. Teaching isn't technically "by yourself," but you all know that it practically is, since undergrads are basically automata a little less able than ChatGPT (only barely joking). It's possible to work an entire semester quite productively without an actual interaction with another person, and I think I actually have had more than one such semester.

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I think these are the biggest couple of factors, but other additional factors might include whether someone is romantically paired or single, the fact that academics work a unique kind of schedule, and so on.

Again, I'm NOT looking for advice on how to make friends, etc. I'm just curious as to how many other Cocooners have noticed and perhaps been surprised by the loneliness that comes with academic life.

I suspect this query resonates with a lot of people, particularly those who work in small departments with high teaching loads. It definitely resonates with me. My university does a good job of building connections between junior faculty, but otherwise, all three of the OP's major points apply to me. 

What about you all? Have you found your career in academia unexpectedly lonely? If so, for what reasons--the same as the OP's?

Philosophical competence, language, and the perplexing Gavagai problem

Many grad students at the department where I work (Saint Louis University, philosophy) are fluent Latinists. In the hallways they make constructions such as these for fun in Latin (I am unfortunately not so endowed, so I’ll give you my approximation in English):  

Q: Whether it is true that there are alligators in Florida?

A: It might seem there are no alligators in Florida, for such reports are no more than hearsay…

In this respect, my department is somewhat of an outlier. Even passive competence in a second language at anglophone departments is at an all-time low, and language requirements at universities are being cut back or altogether axed. This lack of linguistic competence presents a problem: it cuts us off from our own rich philosophical traditions and it prevents serious and deep engagement with other traditions where the primary texts are in languages other than our own.

Christoph Harbsmeier, at a conference in Singapore I attended just now, lamented this loss of language. He is a senior German scholar of Chinese, and spent time in multiple countries. He worked at the University of Oslo, where he spoke with the legendary Arne Naess in Norwegian. In addition, he not only speaks Mandarin fluently (and reads classical Chinese as one might expect from a scholar in Chinese history and linguistics), he also knows Latin, Greek, some Sanskrit, French, German (of course), Polish (which he said he took with the sole aim to better understand Tarski—given the notorious complexity of this language I hope for his sake Tarski was worth it for him), and, of course English.

Each of us ESL speakers has at least two languages, a fact that is curiously regarded as an impediment rather than an advantage because of the worry of non-idiomatic English (see some more thoughts on English as a lingua franca by Eric Schwitzgebel, here).

In Harbsmeier’s view, any philosopher who is only competent in English (or any other language for that matter), suffers a severe cognitive and epistemic disadvantage. The starting point for his talk was W.V.O Quine’s problem of radical translation (discussed in Word and Object, 1960) where a native speaker exclaims “Gavagai!” and you, a linguist, wonder whether this word might mean “rabbit.” In a similar vein, should we translate the crucial Confucian concept of cheng as sincerity, authenticity, or wholeheartedness? The holism inherent in Quine’s conception of language and thought threatens any adequate translation of cheng because to really understand this idea it you must know that Confucianism is among others about self-authentication, getting rid of doxastic and motivational conflicts, and become whole within yourself as you avail yourself of the finely-honed cognitive technology of the rituals of the sage kings of the Western Zhou.

Closely connected to linguistic competence is cultural competence. Harbsmeier agreed with someone during the Q and A that some translations are relatively speaking straightforward, for instance, as his interlocutor said, “a rose is a rose is a rose”—this is, allegedly, a straight botanical fact. However, as Gertrude Stein already implied when she penned that famous line, the point is that a rose is not just a rose. A rose is a flower with rich cultural connotations that vary across cultures.

In a recent public address, Harvey Lederman argues for the disciplinary autonomy of Chinese philosophy. He argues that such work involves, necessarily, a close, patient, unglamorous engagement with the primary sources in their original language, reading them with “rigor, care and precision.” Herein lies an enormous difficulty for those who, like me, merely dabble in Chinese philosophy and only have a bit of Mandarin and even less classical Chinese.

The severe difficulty of relying on translation was recently brought vividly to me in a graduate seminar where my students and I looked at Wang Yangming’s responses to questions posed by students on the Great Learning (da xue), a chapter in a pre-Qin Confucian text. Wang Yangming, a Ming dynasty neo-Confucian author, objects to Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the relevant lines in Great Learning. He says:

And so, enlightening one’s enlightened Virtue must find expression in loving the people, and loving the people simply is the way one enlightens one’s enlightened virtue. (Trans PJ Ivanhoe) 

Wang, unlike his predecessor Zhu Xi, does not think enlightening one’s enlightened virtue (ming ming de) lies in renewing the people but in loving the people. He objects to Zhu Xi’s innovation in this text which had snuck in since the Song dynasty. Wang preserves the older meaning. But how could renewing and loving the people be two such different readings of the same text?

One of my grad students who is Chinese and visiting from mainland China explained that it is a confusion or perhaps deliberate emendation on Zhu Xi’s part where loving the people (qinmin 親民, where the sense of love is specifically proximate or familial) became to renovate or renew (xinmin,新民), that is the same character as for New Years (xin nian). This and other subtleties you will not get if you do not study classical Chinese.

So much of our competence in other languages is down to linguistic luck. You have moved as a child or as an adult, or as in my case, grew up in Belgium where it is obligatory to learn the three national languages (French, Dutch/Flemish, and German) and the education is of good quality. Beyond that, there is a genuine problem of investing in another language even in graduate school. Learning a language is slow, unrewarding, and unproductive for a significant period. You must submit obediently (as Iris Murdoch, I believe, pointed out) to the peculiarities of the language. In that respect, learning a language in its slowness and lack of immediate reward mimics the model of Chinese philosophy as Lederman puts forward: patient, unglamorous, slow.

Our students are already expected to do so much. It is unsurprising that language and logic and other such requirements that emphasize a certain well-roundedness are disappearing as the pressures mount to publish. Whereas it was fine to just focus on coursework in the first years (I’m taking the American context here, I know it differs between countries) they must now also already do “their own” research so as to get ahead in the publication game (as this question by Lila Graham makes clear).

Thoughts on networking: the good, the bad, the tacky

Early-career academics often get some version of this advice:

“Network already! Don’t be worried if it feels distasteful. Just call it “professional friendships.” It’s vital for your career.”

I’ve been thinking about putting the onus on networking on early-career academics like this. How, if at all, are we to think about informal relationships in academia?

The tacky utilitarian calculus

The blanket advice to network is almost always bad. It doesn’t take into account the very unequal structures under which we’re supposed to be doing this. Some people can count on introductions from their fancy advisors at prestigious schools. Others must do it on their own. We have differences in temperament: some of us are shy and introverted, others are sociable and outgoing. Some of us are first-generation, have had working-class upbringing (like me), and the social decorum of networking activities such as dinners at restaurants feel daunting and alienating when we first engage in them.

The calculus underlying networking (or however you call it) is cold, utilitarian, and often tacky. Here are some common scenarios that I’ve seen or that people talked to me about after they happened:   

“The professor began to talk to me during the break at the conference, but then he looked at my name badge and he abruptly stopped, mid-sentence, and left.”

At a garden party in Oxford, hosted by a professor who lived there, a postdoc talked to an Oxford don, and he introduced himself. The don asked, “so you’re a postdoc,” and the postdoc replied, “yes at [European, non-UK] university.” Upon which the Oxonian philosopher abruptly turned away and went to talk to others.

An early-career philosopher attended a small-scale workshop with mostly tenured very senior philosophers and there were only a few slots for non-invited contributions, “Almost nobody talked to me during those two and a half days. I tried to initiate some conversations, but nobody seemed interested to talk.”

In the days of in-person interviews and the big reception (the “Smoker”) at the APA, I would see large groups of people throng around the faculty of the most prestigious American departments, whereas some other people were mostly standing by themselves, holding a drink, not having anyone to talk to. They could’ve talked to each other, but they did not, presumably hoping to network “upward” as they had been advised to do.

The unequal playing field and the cold networking calculus are sides of the same coin. You’re incentivized to consider: who is worth spending time with? How can I optimize my time at this conference by networking with important people who might further my career?

It’s no surprise that a name badge with a non-prestigious affiliation or things that signal “graduate student” or “contingent faculty “can become a sufficient reason to break a conversation off mid-sentence, unhindered by any sense of decorum.

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?

The publishing arms race for philosophy students

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

Can we have a thread on publication trends among philosophy students (including BOTH those already in PhD programs AND those yet to be admitted to PHD programs)? Apologies if this has already been discussed/over-discussed elsewhere, but I read in another thread about an applicant to PHD programs already having five publications prior to even beginning their PHD education. This strikes me as ridiculous but also, perhaps, understandable in light of the publication arms race.

So, a question (and one that I'm guessing has been entertained already on this website) is: what should we (can we) do about the publication arms race in philosophy? Perhaps it needs to be tackled in conjunction with the publication arms race in academia more broadly, but perhaps not...

Further, maybe some folks this [think] it's not a problem. If this is the case, I'd be curious to hear why. For my part, I'm tired and overwhelmed by the # of publications out there...even those that just relate specifically to my sub-sub discipline.

This is a good query. I personally know of several cases of students publishing multiple papers in good journals before even getting into a PhD program--and these days, my understanding is that, generally speaking, job candidates need publications to be competitive on the market, which has indeed led to a publishing arms race. Some job candidates these days may even have more publications than the people interviewing them!

What I'm not at all sure is what, if anything, can (or should) be done about this. Do readers have any thoughts?

Women Philosophers in the Twitter ‘Manosphere’ (or, that light-hearted Hume Tweet that ended in r*pe threats)

This is a guest post by Daisy Dixon, Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University

Content warning:

This post includes discussion of abusive language, misogyny, body-shaming, and rape threats. The Cocoon’s mission is to be a safe and supportive forum that focuses on issues faced by early-career philosophers. We do not believe that this precludes all discussion of sensitive topics like these, and we are hosting this discussion in the belief that a safe and supportive discussion of the author’s story is both possible and a good use of this forum’s unique space in the profession, and for the author. Readers who may be sensitive to the above elements, please take note. Also please note that the blog moderators (Marcus and Helen) will moderate discussion carefully to ensure that discussion abides by the blog’s mission.

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Having recently secured my first permanent post in Philosophy at Cardiff University (something I still cannot quite believe), two weeks ago I excitedly posted on Twitter a familiar meme: ‘What People Think Philosophers Look Like/ What We Actually Look Like’. For the respective clauses, I posted a photo of David Hume – resplendent in lace and wig – and then a photo of myself, casually dressed wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses.

Not that this Tweet needs spelling out, but the point I was making is that philosophy looks different nowadays – basically a version of the hashtag ‘#thisiswhataphilosopherlookslike’ – and this is worth celebrating.

The Tweet was also a bid to dispel stubborn beliefs about who can do philosophy. As Helen Beebee’s and Jennifer Saul’s 2021 SWIP report shows, along with other under-represented groups in philosophy (e.g., people of colour, LGBTQIA+ and those with disabilities), we still have a way to go to reach equal gender representation in academia – with women comprising 30% of permanent staff in UK philosophy faculties. So, part of the Tweet was to raise awareness that the landscape is changing, albeit slowly.

However, within an hour, the Tweet blew up.

Honest grad school advice?

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

Why doesn't anyone give honest grad school application advice? It's pretty much common knowledge, and confirmed by accessible online data (programs' grad student list that displays their background), that prestige simply matters more than anything else in applications. Despite this, it's told as if one can write a brilliant writing sample and get in anywhere. People who get in everywhere are usually NOT people with brilliant samples; it seems neither necessary nor sufficient to have even a good writing sample. Most people get cut in the initial stages before their writing samples get a careful look. The so-called *elite* schools should just state on their website that they most likely won't admit you if you're not coming from another elite institution. Whatever they say, the statistics are obvious that that's who they are admitting. Instead, everyone goes on and on about how important writing samples are, misleading, or even worse, stealing from and scamming hundreds of people every year. Why is that advisors, programs' websites, etc. don't make this extremely clear?

Fair questions. As unfortunate as it may be, I suspect that the data on this is not nearly as widely known as the OP assumes. Time and again, I've been surprised at things that many people in the profession aren't all that aware of--in large part, or so it seems, because some people don't appear to spend nearly as much time online (on blogs, etc.) as other people do. Of course, all of this is consistent with the fact that people advising undergrads and grad applicants should be aware of the relevant data, and be honest with grad applicants about their chances. But then one salient question is perhaps how to best incentivize this. Perhaps the APA could do more here? Any other ideas?

Philosophy on dying social media platforms

"I'm working through a line of thought, a feeling and an instinct. Not an original one but not one I've fully internalized or understood yet. But the way that a need to profit runs counter to the value of the internet. A need for money broke Twitter, long before the billionaire decided to do... whatever it is he's doing with it. Twitter has been aging, I think, into obsolescence for a very long time. Because the internet is evolving and shifting away from what it once was." -- DongWon Song, Literary agent

For a while now since Twitter's takeover by Musk, its users have been sensing the ship sink, not sure when or how to jump ship. One reason for this is that each social media platform has its own affordances and structures, and this importantly structures our engagement with them. I take the notion of affordances from Gibson's affordance theory (explainer here). Briefly, affordances are the way our environment shapes to behave in a certain way. The environment offers us promises (positive affordances) and threats (negative affordances). A simple example is a couch, which invites us to engage us to sit in it in a certain way, different from a hard chair without a cushion. You'll slouch in the couch due to its affordances, in a way you would never in a chair. In a similar vein, Twitter encourages a different sort of engagement compared to TikTok or Instagram, or Facebook. 

In the same way, different social media shape our engagement with others. They allow us interactions that aren't possible or a lot harder to realize in other environments. 

How does the death spiral of one or more social media platforms impact philosophy? The slow death of Twitter is not a new phenomenon. DongWon Song's observations resonate with a lot of its users. Like them, I have sensed the decline already a while ago, long before Musk bought the platform. For example, Twitter's own research had noticed that its algorithms substantially favor right-wing politicians and news outlets. 

Just speaking from my own user experience, I had noticed over the past few months that small philosophy accounts with maybe a few hundred followers that I enjoy following had become obscured by the algorithm. I went to check if they were still there. They were. I just didn't see them anymore.  So already months ago, I changed my viewing preferences so Twitter would show me the latest tweets, as more and more the same duplicate stories began to show up. I hoped this would give me again that sense of engagement and serendipitous discovery I had before. But to no avail. The platform feels hollowed out, impersonal. The capacity for thoughtful philosophical discussion dries up. 

Some thoughts on gatekeeping

Gatekeeping has a bad rap. Still, though we loathe it, academics do it all the time. Our institutions depend on the well functioning of various gatekeeping mechanisms--mechanisms that help discern what should be funded or published, and what doesn't.

For instance, I am associate editor for journals Ergo and for Journal of Analytic Theology. In addition, I review for journals and for academic book presses (e.g., Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, Routledge, and Mohrbeck Sie, where I am in the editorial board). I have been, and am currently, a reviewer for several grant agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Academy. I help decision small grants and prizes for the APA Public Philosophy committee. Also, I regularly review the research of academics who come up for tenure and promotion. Until last year, I was on a committee for grad admissions at SLU, and presently I am on two search committees for jobs searches. 

So, a fair amount of my time is spent evaluating other people's work and trying to discern its quality. But how do we go about being gatekeepers? I think, inevitably, we end up being perhaps a little more conservative than we like, but we do have the power to shape the discipline. How the field advances depends on the quiet, often uncompensated labor of referees, editors, and other evaluators. 

When I got my first tenure and promotion file to review, I wondered how to adjudicate these and how to communicate to the committee if (fortunately  not the case for my first one) if I felt the file was a little thin, or if it plainly did not meet the criteria set out by the institution. I spoke about it at a conference over dinner to someone who has been an evaluator for many tenure and committee reviews. 

"Some people," this professor said over wine and quiche, "Feel somewhat squeamish about giving a negative evaluation. They'll resort to saying something bland or they try to talk up what they believe is insufficient."

"So," I asked "How about you?"

"Well I am not squeamish," he replied "I am part of academia, and tenure and promotion is part of that institution. I value tenure and the academic freedom it affords, but tenure depends on the procedure of the tenure and promotion process. While in most cases, the body of research presents a clear case in favor of tenure, it sometimes doesn't, and the committee needs to know that. I need to be honest and diligent in my assessments."

I often think back of this reply and how it can be generalized. When people violate this implicit norm/social contract, problems might arise.

Data Analysis of the PGR (by Frank Saunders Jr.)

Frank Saunders Jr. (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Yonsei University UIC) writes in:

I wanted to share a project that I thought readers of the blog might enjoy: interactive dashboard visualizations of the 2021-2022 PGR results. I've created a total of 10 dashboards that can all be found along with explanations on my website here. I hope that prospective students and other interested readers might find the PGR data a bit more navigable and potentially useful in this form rather than in table form alone. In particular, the visualizations make it very easy to compare a school’s overall score with its score within an area of philosophy.

[T]he visualizations are now part of a bigger project I’m working on, Data Analysis of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), which includes creating a relational database for all public PGR data from 2006 onward, creating new visualizations of different data points, and offering analyses. This project is still in its early stages, so I’d be very keen to learn what sorts of data points or analyses readers would be most interested in seeing studied or visualised. 

Journals & conflict of interest declarations

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

I recently submitted a paper to Phil Studies, which was sent back by Springer's editorial office because I didn't include a conflict of interest statement *in the blinded manuscript*.

I have never been required to do this before, and it seems quite obvious that this potentially violates the manuscript's anonymity. For example, my research is funded by a scholarship that is only awarded once every year, so it is very easy to deduce my identity.

Has anyone heard of such requirements before? I just cannot quite comprehend that this is the policy at Springer journals, but maybe I'm missing something.

I have to confess that I've puzzled over this too, as it has happened to me too. Another reader submitted the following reply:

Once one of my manuscripts was bounced back for the same reason, but then all they wanted me to write down was a line that essentially said, "Here is my statement on conflicts of interest. There aren't any". So, it did not violate anonymity, but it did feel silly.

This seems right (it's what I've done too), but it still raises the questions: (1) Why are some journals now doing this?, and (2) is there any (justified) point to it?

How are pieces in pop culture volumes viewed?

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

How do people (especially those on hiring committees, tenure committees, etc.) view publications in special volumes on pop cultural topics? E.g., Philosophy and Dragons, The Ethics of Middle-earth? Is there any professional value? Does it leave a negative impression?

Good questions. My sense is that the answers to them may depend a lot on the kind of college or university in question. One reader submitted the following reply:

I was editing a volume for a leading press, and one of the referees objected to the inclusion of a paper by an author of one of these popular pieces - this is merely a correlation. They never explicitly mentioned the publications. But I doubt this helped the person.

It's honestly a bit shocking to me that someone would object to including an author in an edited volume simply because the author published a pop culture piece. Then again, the longer that I've been in academia, the fewer things surprise me. There are always naysayers, and I have little doubt that some people may look down on these kinds of publications. On the other hand, I know someone at a teaching-focused university whose pop culture piece was one of the main things their tenure committee focused on in favor of tenure. They loved it, as apparently did the university's administrators. 

I'm curious to hear what other people think, particularly people who have served on hiring or tenure committees. I've written two pieces for pop culture volumes, and frankly I don't care what anyone thinks of it! I doubt they've had much (if any) "professional value" for me, but I've enjoyed writing them tremendously and think philosophy as a discipline can only benefit from this kind of stuff.

The wagon has three wheels: Reimagining philosophy of action from a working class perspective

This is a guest post by Deborah Nelson

Bio: Deborah Nelson received a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Brandeis University in 2014 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCR in September 2022.  Her dissertation examined the philosophy of action literature for class-centrism and proposed advancing this literature by balancing the current focus on stability with flexibility in order to address increasing complexity in agents’ lives. She now works as an Instructional Designer at XCITE, UCR’s center for teaching and learning.

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There’s a story my family likes to relay about my father as a child that has had a formative impact on how I approach claims about knowledge, rationality, and the evaluation thereof.  The one-sentence summary of the story is that, when he was five years old, my dad took an IQ test and only got one question wrong.  The more interesting facet of this story, though, is revealed by examining that one question.

The test question displayed a picture of a wagon with only three wheels and asked what was wrong with the wagon.  It just so happened that there was a three-wheeled wagon in regular use in my father’s household, which still functioned perfectly well, so he could not identify the problem with the wagon.  Needless to say, when I learned this story at a young age, it gave me early ideas about the ways that experience can affect how people perceive and understand the world, and the discussions in recent years of problems with IQ testing, as well as other standardized tests, have only added fuel to this fire.  These intellectual proclivities have clearly inspired my research interests and I just recently defended a dissertation at UCR which reflects them.

In my early days in philosophy, I was excited to learn that there is a whole subdiscipline dedicated to how people reason about which actions to take, but became less enthused as I learned that the concerns within it did not resemble my experiences.  Within the philosophy of action, the concerns seem to reflect that of people who enjoy economic advantage.  The agents described (directly or indirectly) as ideals in this literature are self-complete entities, who consistently resist temptation, retain stable intentions and characters, and have life-defining projects and plans, etc.  This focus seems, to my working-class-inspired mind, to ignore some central concerns and ideals for which my background prepared me.  

For the present, however, I don’t plan to criticize the current state of the literature.  Not only does it take a significant amount of space to argue for the structural biases that would inform this kind of gap between theory and experience, I just defended a whole dissertation on this topic.  Instead, I want to explore what taking up the perspectives of economically disadvantaged agents could add to the dialectic.  To that end, I want to propose three concerns which would likely garner more attention were the philosophy of action literature written by people whose backgrounds more resemble my own.  In doing so, I am not implying that the current literature could not take up these norms, but I am suggesting that were they to be taken up in a more substantial way, it would help to make that literature more salient to economically disadvantaged agents.

1. Flexibility

One of the more prominent ideals in the existing literature is that of stability; reasoners should keep their intentions and plans stable, display stable traits and characters, and must resist giving into temptation. 

Is PhD life hostile to families? (and beyond...)

Jared Oliphint (PhD, Texas A&M) has an interesting substack post up entitled, 'Why a PhD Program Is a Hostile Environment for a Family', which is in a sense less about PhD programs per se than 'PhD life' (broadly construed). A few snippets:

So what makes PhD life so hostile to families?

1. The Big One: Lack of Income

...Any philosophy graduate program worth considering will be funded, which means tuition is all or mostly covered, and you get an annual stipend over the life of your program ranging anywhere from $12k-$25k, in exchange for being a teaching assistant, a research assistant, or teaching your own courses. This will put you below the poverty line even if you are single.  It is extremely challenging to cover basic living expenses if that stipend is your sole source of income, even if you’re single, and it’s impossible to do so if you have a spouse and kids. The math doesn’t add up...

2. The Psychological Toll

…the psychological challenges of grad life are real and constant. You’re doing all this work in social isolation while in the back of your mind you know that there is a good chance you will have little or no employment payoff at the end of it.

I’ll give you an example. While I was looking at job listings in my field over this past year, a realization hit me like a ton of bricks: in the mainstream academic world, the skills I have trained for and honed for years are simply not valued, financially speaking. I was perusing philosophy jobs and noticed that Mississippi State University had an opening to teach in their department. It was one of the temporary positions I mentioned above: only 9 months (an academic year), and it paid $36k. Now, MSU is an R1 institution with a lot of financial resources, and a quick google search reveals that they recently set a fundraising record. Another quick google search reveals that the average public school teacher salary in Mississippi is…$48k. So if I was “lucky” enough to land this position at MSU after years of successfully grinding through a PhD, I would be making as much as the average public school teacher, but without the stability of long-term employment...

3. Isolated Work

The nature of graduate work is also unique... The level of research you need to achieve to be successful... requires a long-term physical space that is isolated and distraction-free, and such a space can be especially difficult to find with a family...

But the constant isolation is bound to have both short-term and long-term effects on your family and social life, in a way I haven’t yet figured out or processed...

The other unique part is the ever-present, relentless time-limit of your work in the program. You feel the constant pressure of completing the dissertation, of course, but sometimes even more important is the unavoidable, intense pressure to get your papers accepted at conferences, and to publish in a good journal before going on the academic job market...That job cycle can be indescribably tough on a family in many ways: financially, socially, psychologically, etc. In many cases those costs can be too high to be worth whatever the gains are.

Oliphint concludes the piece by making it clear that, 'I don’t want this post to read as a list of complaints; if it reads that way I’ve done something wrong.' Rather, as he puts it:

Being in a graduate program is a privilege, and getting accepted happens because of some mysterious proportion of merit and luck. I’m thankfully on the other side of all this, so I no longer have to navigate some of the intense challenges. My primary reasons for writing this post have been to warn those who may be thinking about applying to grad school (particularly in philosophy), and simply to provide a window into the tragically unique trials and challenges that have more to do with daily living than with the academic demands like presenting at conferences, getting published, pleasing an advisory committee, etc., which obviously provide their own unique trials and challenges. I could say quite a bit about the ways a PhD program is unimaginably difficult, academically speaking. I’ll probably say more about that broad topic at some point, but I wanted to focus here on why PhD programs are unavoidably hostile environments for grad students who enter the program with a family, or who start a family at some point during the program. 

I don't have children of my own yet, but I do have a spouse who suffered with me during the end of graduate school and during my seven years on the job-market--and when it comes to my family as such (including my extended family), Oliphint's post very much speaks to my experience. Further, now that I think about it, all three of Oliphint's major sources of hostility to family life seem to me to be hostility to individual and family well-being more broadly, including the well-being of those who don't have families. After all, financial insecurity, isolated work, and the psychological toll of grad school and the job-market all apply to single individuals too, though perhaps not in the same ways. In fact, some of the things Oliphint discusses--such as the isolating nature of grad work--might be even worse in certain ways for single people (who may have few, if any, loved ones to turn to for daily support). So, perhaps the real issue--or rather, more complete picture--is that grad life is profoundly hostile to individual and family flourishing. That seems very bad, but again, not at all inconsistent with my own experiences over the course of my career, both as a (formerly) single person (and son), and now as a husband.

Anyway, I'm curious. Did Oliphint's post speak to you, as it did to me? Or, if you had a family in grad school, did you have a very different experience? Finally, to the extent that you may share Oliphint's experiences, what (if anything) do you think grad programs or the profession more broadly could do to do better and be more supportive--both with respect to family life, but also (for reasons noted above) individual well-being too?

Philosophy majors: how many credits?

I'm curious: how many credit hours are required for the Philosophy major in your departments? Asking for a friend!

The ways we don't do research, because they don't exist

Helen's interesting post yesterday, 'The journals we don't write in, because they don't exist', about how philosophy journals might become fruitfully more diverse got me thinking more about a topic that I've been thinking about lately: namely, ways that today's technology and a new publishing model might fruitfully alter how we do research.

Readers may recall that Liam Kofi Bright, Remco Heesen, and I advocate in a new BJPS paper for a crowdsourced online approach to peer review. Although Heesen and Bright advocate elsewhere for abolishing traditional peer-review at journals, I am more inclined to support a hybrid approach to peer-review closer to that currently practiced in math and physics: one that combines traditional peer-review at journals with a crowdsourced approach. This is for a couple of reasons. First, insofar as some are skeptical of the utility of a crowdsourced approach, a hybrid approach would be a more conservative change to peer-review than abolishing journal review altogether. Second, the hybrid approach has already been implemented in other fields (see above), and seems to work well. Finally, insofar as (our arguments for crowdsourcing aside) there are arguably virtues and vices of both approaches to peer-review, a hybrid approach can stake a reasonable claim to be a 'best of both worlds' approach.

In today's post, I want to discuss one potential benefit that changing peer-review might have that has not, to my knowledge, been much discussed: namely, how it might revolutionize how we do research in a good way. In their earlier paper, 'Is Peer Review a Good Idea?', Heesen and Bright examine various potential benefits of abolishing traditional peer review at journals, including:

1. Improving the dissemination/sharing of scientific results
2. Improved time allocation (traditional peer-review is extremely time intensive)
3. Reducing gender skew in publications
4. Reducing costs of publishing/freeing up library resources
5. Reducing professional focus on 'short-term credit' (which favors publishing lots of articles) in favor of long-term credit (i.e. impact)
6. Reducing the role of powerful gatekeepers

Whatever you may think of these potential benefits (including whether they really would be benefits), here is another possible benefit of transitioning toward a more open, online approach to peer-review (including the hybrid journal + crowdsourced approach that I favor): it could substantially increase philosophical and interdisciplinary collaboration, in ways that might not only lead to better research, but help authors deal with a quandary that I expect that all too many of us face. Allow me to explain.

Updated ADPA job placement data & table

Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) has a new post up at the ADPA blog describing the results of "ten years of data for around 140 [PhD] programs, nearly 50 of which have so far been able to verify our data."

There is also a new sortable table at the ADPA site where one can learn about job-market placements from different programs. As the following table illustrates, some of the data is very illuminating:

Paper feedback groups?

Following Helen's recent post on finding "first readers" for paper drafts, a reader writes in:

[S]ome authors ... lack a community of readers who can provide feedback. Why not something similar to the dissertation groups but for papers and junior academics? This is not helpful for everyone, but I guess those from small departments, etc., may find it helpful.

This is a great query. When I was in graduate school at Arizona and my first VAP job (at UBC), finding readers for paper drafts was really easy. Both departments had large numbers of faculty and grad students, and finding a reader was often as easy as just walking down the hall, stopping by someone's office, and asking! However, once I moved into a much smaller department, finding people with relevant expertise to read paper drafts became far more difficult. I think it would be fantastic if there were some kind of good online resource for finding readers, perhaps some kind of dedicated message-board at PhilPeople (perhaps sorted by AOS) where philosophers could post "reader wanted" queries, perhaps along with some broad information on the paper's topic and other details (such as willingness to trade papers, etc.). But, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't anything like this.

Universities treating students as customers

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

At my university (in Australasia) administrators have claimed that students are customers or clients, using terms like "stakeholders" to describe not only current enrollees but also school leavers we are "targeting" for "marketing purposes." A few years ago I read a comprehensive article that argued why we shouldn't believe that students are customers. I'd like to hear from readers of the Cocoon whether they agree or disagree with my administration's sentiment, i.e., that students are customers and that we faculty are contractually obligated to provide them with a product (a degree?) or service (learning?). Second, if readers have recommendations for where I can find arguments like this (either for or against the aforementioned thesis), I'd appreciate them sharing the URL or source. Thank you!

I'd love to hear what readers think about this too. I've always naturally rebelled against this way of conceiving students, considering a university education a privilege rather than a purchased product. I suspect that many (most?) readers will object to this way of conceiving of students too, but that most of us also probably recognize that, regardless, universities have become big businesses. Not sure what can be done about it, but I'd be very curious to hear what other readers think about all of this! 

Public philosophy is an oligopoly--and here why this is a problem

Some recent takes on the Enlightenment resonated strongly with the broad public. This includes Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress  (2018), and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).

I'm not going to write a detailed analysis of these books (I have done so for Graeber and Wengrow, which will appear at some point). Suffice it to say here, while I think there are some merits in both works, they also suffer from deficiencies in the conceptualization of what the Enlightenment is, its influences, and also the broader implications. 

And this is not a surprise, given that any scholarly domain of expertise requires significant research and experience, which neither of these authors can profess on the Enlightenment. Maybe you, like me, would love to see a book on the Enlightenment reach the big public that is written by an actual specialist in 18th-century western philosophy or history. Sadly, no Enlightenment scholar has been able to resonate so well with the public as these two works (if I am mistaken and there is a NYT bestseller book on the Enlightenment, please let me know!) 

This is a symptom of a larger phenomenon, an oligopoly within pop culture. As backed up with detailed data in this post by Adam Mastroianni, a few franchises (reimaginings, live-action remakes, sequels, same universe movies) dominate pop culture and the phenomenon has worsened significantly over the last decades. A few winners take up an increasing portion of the market share, leading to a decrease in diversity of output.

Sometimes philosophers are still asked "Why don't you do public philosophy?" as if this is a supply-side issue. It is not. There has never been more public philosophy available than at present, many of it is publicly available. Magazines such as The Philosophers' Magazine, Aeon, Psyche, and many others feature public philosophy from a wide range of thinkers. Podcasts such as Hi-Phi nation, Philosophy without Any Gaps, and What's Left of Philosophy  offer professionally produced, engaging and intellectually stimulating content. Individual philosopher YouTube channels make philosophy accessible to everyone, including Ellie Anderson's continental philosophy series, Greg Sadler's Speculative fiction series and Bryan Van Norden's Chinese philosophy class lectures. 

So, when the public turns to Jordan Peterson to look for life advice, rather than to philosophers, it is not because of the supply side. There is really no reason to shame, say, an Aristotle scholar into doing public philosophy in the hopes that her work will reach a disaffected teen who is wondering how to live the good life, and faute de mieux, turns to Peterson. There is already a lot out there (of course, we should welcome and support this hypothetical Aristotle scholar if she wants to do public philosophy!)

We should also recognize that there are very, very few academics who can make it as public intellectuals, for reasons that are totally unrelated to the intrinsic merits of their work, or even to their communication skills. 

What's happening is that public intellectuals are working in an ecology where a small number of winners get a disproportionate share in public attention and media capture. This is on the supply side part of a more general winner-takes-all mentality. For publishing with the four major fiction publishers, for instance, it was fine a few years ago to be a decent "midlister" (i.e., someone who sells books that make a profit for the publisher but will never reap high figures). But now, a beginning author must exude that ineffable quality of being a rising star, of a potential NYT bestseller author to even get a deal with an agent (and hence a publisher). As a result, many authors are querying in vain, and some have turned to self-publishing. Few self-published authors can break through into traditional markets, though several have a decent readership and make decent money from their work. 

Fortunately, as academics we can still survive and thrive as small fish. Our scholarly books get contracts based on their perceived academic merit rather than on sales potential (especially in academic presses, which are often heavily subsidized). And many of us do reach/have a significant platform beyond academia. This platform is valuable. We should support colleagues and provide institutional support for people who wish to engage in public scholarship. But it is important to note how skewed the field is, and to adjust expectations accordingly. 

It is worth thinking about why people are happy with this oligopoly--differently put, what explains the increasing homogenization in pop culture. Mastroianni speculates: 

As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar. 

Philosophy is difficult. While the public struggle with philosophical questions on a daily basis (on e.g., the meaning of events in their lives, the abortion debate etc), trying to actively seek out philosophical resources that are publicly accessible is hard. People also have many other non-material needs, such as entertainment, comfort, a bit of joy, spiritual assurance, and philosophy is not a sure route to any of these things. This is why, although I think many people would benefit from engaging with philosophy, their bandwidth for it is very limited. Moreover, without media attention and platform, it is hard for the public to reach sources they might resonate well with.

I've got no easy solution how to fix this problem, but I think it is worth fixing.

We benefit from intellectual diversity in the public sphere. When diversity is mentioned, it is often in the context of viewpoint diversity (which often means that a few contentious polarized positions get a platform, e.g., on abortion and gender), but I'm interested in the broader phenomenon of a shared intellectual authority, as Helen Longino and other have detailed. 

It is no coincidence that many of the most high profile public intellectuals are at research-intensive universities, often Ivy League, where they largely compete with other similarly advantaged people for the limited attention from the public. Competition is fierce, which also provides bad incentives for giving unnuanced hot takes on recent issues. Public intellectuals at smaller colleges are sidelined, and we are the poorer for it. Public philosophers with a significant platform, who get 5-figure speaking fees (I know that this in fact happens!) should try to lift up more voices, especially when asked to speak about areas far outside of their expertise. But because the goods of being a high-profile intellectual are so significant (connections, money) there is little incentive to do so. 

I'd be interested to discuss what we can do to make more of the excellent public philosophy that is being done to trickle toward the general public. Contrary to perception, it is not a zero-sum game. If more people get interested in public philosophy, they might be tempted to engage with more public philosophical works. This would be to great mutual benefit, I think. 

The gamification of philosophy: how the profession became hoop-jumpers for top journals

Philosophy is gamified. We jump through hoops to try to get published in the "right" journals, and we do it willingly. We almost all do it, even those very lucky few of us who have earned tenure.

Perhaps we do it because this is genuinely the work we wish to write. Perhaps we just want to show we're still in the game. As Maeve McKeown writes in a paper on gamification and political theory  which just as well could apply to philosophy: 

Contemporary political theory is a game. Individuals compete to publish in ‘top’ journals, to amass greater numbers of publications than their peers; then journal-ranking is combined with number of publications generating scores. The aim is to get the most points. Whoever gets the most points wins: they get the best jobs and the most prestige. This Hunger Games–like contest has serious consequences for people’s lives, determining who can make a living from academia, who will be relegated to the academic precariat or forced out of the profession [...] these conditions are stifling intellectual creativity, diversity, and dissent in political theory/philosophy. 

Now, gamification isn't necessarily bad. We gamify things that we might otherwise not see through, such as language-learning. Yet, gamification narrows a broad range of experiences into a predictable path.

New Journal Announcement: Journal of Mexican Philosophy (JMxP)

This is a guest post by Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. Associate Professor of Philosophy at Occidental College: 

 

We would like to officially announce the launch of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy (JMxP), a peer reviewed journal that aims to make Mexican philosophy available and attractive to an international community of students and scholars. The journal URL is here:

 

https://www.journalofmexicanphilosophy.org/

 

The inaugural issue features original articles by Manuel Vargas (on the philosophy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), Amy Oliver (on the value of Mexican philosophy today), and Guillermo Hurtado (on the problem of malinchismo), as well as an original translation of an early work by José Vasconcelos (translated by Clinton Tolley).

 

In addition to diversifying and enriching the history of philosophy, the journal aims to set a model for linguistic inclusivity in mainstream academic philosophy and to cultivate working relationships with philosophers outside the English-speaking world (our journal is bilingual and will include at least one essay by a Mexican colleague in whatever language they prefer to philosophize in). We will also include one translation of Mexican philosophy, giving priority to the contributions of women, indigenous and Afro-Carribean philosophers, and political dissidents. Please check out Volume 1, Number 1 of the journal here! 

Candidates writing their own recommendations?

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

Though I take it to be frowned upon, I get the sense from graduate students that it's very common for some senior faculty members to ask students to write their own letters of recommendation, and then edit them. I'm curious if admission committees ever feel like it is obvious that an applicant has written their own letter. Is it unethical to do so? Or are letters so 'inflated' anyways that this isn't a major concern for applicants or committees?

These are excellent questions. I too have heard of this practice, and frankly find it a bit astonishing that it apparently occurs. It sort of seems to defeat the purpose of an outside letter of recommendation to have a candidate write it themselves, no? So, I'm curious too: how common is this practice? What do readers think of it? And, do committees ever suspect that a candidate wrote their own letter? 

Using PhilPeople features to find referees?

In response to Helen's recent post on the troubles that journal editors have finding referees and comments by a number of readers there that they are rarely asked to review, Mike Titelbaum (University of Wisconsin-Madison) helpfully writes in that David Bourget and David Chalmers suggest the following feature at PhilPeople:

"Our 'find a philosopher' feature of philpeople is a good start. You have to pick the relevant topic quite narrowly and order by number of publications in the topic, past five years. That gives you as top hits people that are active in the area and have solid publication records. If you don't do 'past five years' you get more senior people, who aren't going to be new to you or likely to be available. I bet many editors would benefit from these simple instructions."

I hope this helps in some small way with the ongoing 'publication emergency', as it might help authors get more timely verdicts while better distributing the burdens on editors and referees.

Seems like the peer review system has given up the ghost

I am an associate editor for Ergo, and I was idly wondering last night what would happen once I reach Reviewer Z.

The situation is this: A minimum of two referee reports are needed for each paper that is sent out for review. Each referee is assigned a letter, and I've already burned through Referee invites A through F in a couple of days.

Each referee says the same thing "too busy". One wrote to me the following "Sorry, but this is the 13th refereeing request that I've received so far in 2022 [this was 15 February], and I've accepted most of the others. I try to limit myself to accepting about one per week on average."

Similarly, for the Journal of Analytic Theology, I along with the other executive editor and managing editor made a happy dance when finally, reviewer 8 for a very specialized paper said yes to a referee request. 

Just a couple of days ago, one of the journals I am on the editorial board for wrote to us

"Since the COVID-19 pandemic began it has been increasingly difficult for us to find referees to review papers that are submitted to our journal. At the same time, we receive more papers every year. It is common these days that we have to approach six or seven people before we are able to find someone to review a paper. In light of this situation, I would like to ask you for help and request you to review papers more frequently than before."

It has come to the point that the most suitable referee(s) for a paper are almost never available. It takes us so long to find reviewers, sometimes a month, six weeks or more (this situation is also exacerbated by the fact that many people don't respond to referee requests at all). This lengthens the span of time even more for the total review process. All sorts of small fixes don't work anymore, e.g., shortening the time that people get to review, asking for alternatives (this is still very much appreciated, but unfortunately alternative referees are just as unavailable). 

Of course, it could be that my editorial experience is atypical--I'm just one scholar.

But it is my strong suspicion that the peer review system is finally broken beyond reasonable repair. We've seen a slow worsening of the situation and the pandemic has finally broken the system. People are burnt out and overburdened, job candidates increasingly desperate. 

In light of this, we need to do something. We owe it to authors to change the system, I think, rather than tinkering at the edges. Any suggestions (ranging from proposals to overhaul the entire system and how to do this practically, such as by our own Marcus Arvan in this paper co-authored with Liam Bright and Remco Heesen) welcome. *

Conferences and professional hierarchies

On Twitter, Emily Brier (Lecturer in Composition, Western Carolina University) writes: 

Anybody want to talk about how as an MA student at conferences nobody (and I mean NOBODY) would talk to me, and when I was a CC instructor nobody TT would talk to me, and how conferences often just reinscribe hierarchy in ways that show why TT folks are itching to go back FTF?

Our own Helen De Cruz followed up:

I have been thinking about this often. FTF conferences are often touted as great networking opportunities, but if you comes from a low-prestige program or are an MA student you're often just being ignored. The APA "smoker" reception is a good example of how this works. When I was a job candidate with a diploma from an obscure European program, I'd just stand around at that reception holding a glass and no-one to talk to. Meanwhile, you had the stars from the top department everyone would flock to. Eventually, I found some other job seekers...And we had great conversations. Still, conferences reinforce hierarchies. The informality of that in between talk results in a lot of people being left out of that talk. How can conferences provide more equitable opportunities for informal networking?

These are good questions. I myself endured a few rather humiliating conference experiences early in my career, and like Helen I would often stand (and sit) around at APAs with no one to talk to. Fortunately, this has changed over time, at least in part (or so it seems to me) because I adopted Helen's own strategy: trying to talk to other early-career people like me who didn't have jobs at fancy places. This is also part of the reason why I created the Cocoon, and in fact I used to hold informal Cocoon get-togethers at APAs I attended to provide a forum for early-career people to come together and get to know each other. I'll be at the Central APA this year, so maybe I'll try to hold a get-together or meet-up of sorts. 

But in any case, do any of you have any suggestions for answering Helen's question? How might conferences provide more equitable opportunities for informal networking?

What could search committees do better?

In our job-market discussion thread, a reader writes:

I would appreciate a thread/post that provided candidates with an opportunity to discuss the "bad behavior" of hiring committees...

Given the blog's supportive mission, I don't think a thread calling out bad behavior is appropriate here. However, another reader added a nice suggestion:

In light of anonymous associate professors' post, maybe such a thread could be framed as candidates constructively reporting things that they don't like/contribute to bad mental health, etc? That might also get more uptake than people complaining, especially if people are not aware of what candidates would prefer...

My list would include:

1. Not updating shortlisted candidates who didn't make the fly out stage. (Or, more generally, not updating candidates who you told made progress but then did not advance.) It comes off as disrespectful, even cruel.
2. Not having accurate timelines. If you tell candidates you will contact them on date X, then either update them to tell them why you can't do so (e.g. delay), or be more careful about giving such estimates. Constantly waiting and checking makes it very difficult to focus, especially when you're waiting for news on a particular day.

As a quick aside, following a few other comments, my sense is that candidates may over-estimate how much control search committees have over these kinds of things, as things like HR requirements and unexpected logistical difficulties (such as delays in getting administrators to approve finalist lists, etc.) can seriously constrain what search committees can do. But, that being said, I think a constructive thread on things that candidates wish search committees would do better is a nice idea.

What do you all think? (Note: please avoid "calling out" committees or specific behaviors that an individual reading this thread might infer "they are referring to me". Instead, please post in general terms on things that you have found frustrating as a candidate and what you wish search committees would do better. Thanks!) 

Talent and Bias

By Sam Duncan

In this post I want to dig more deeply into some points about the deeply worrying effects of our belief in talent on our students made by Allison Gopnik and Eric Schwitzgebel. As Gopnik notes there’s good reason to think that there is some causal relationship between the fact that philosophy puts so much stock in talent and our lack of gender and racial diversity. And Schwitzgebel paints a very plausible picture of one way that this likely plays out in practice; as he notes it’s a lot easier for a young white guy to get away with various ploys that allow him to seem smart than it might be for a woman or a member of a minority group (It’s also a lot less risky). However, I think there are deeper ways that a belief in talent sets up bias in our field.

Let me begin with a question: When you look at student papers or consider how to respond to student comments, questions, and challenges in class do you think about whose paper it is or who made the comment? I’m betting that you do. If you make much of an effort to know who your students are it’s hard not to do this, and to a great extent this is part of getting to know our students. But this also opens up a danger of bias and believing that talent determines success in philosophy makes this danger much worse.

The job market & financial health of universities

An anonymous reader writes in:

I was recently thinking about applying to a private, non-elite SLAC simply because it's a lot closer to my and my wife's families. I decided not to for a lot of reasons but one deep hesitation I had was that I know a lot of the private, non-elite SLACs are likely to flat out fold in the next ten or fifteen years and the public ones are likely to come in for some deep cuts. This brings me to a question that I thought it would be very good to put out there: How in the world does one get any information on the financial health of the place one is applying and related stuff like enrollment trends?

This seems super important. The people who ended up getting two jobs I interviewed in the past at public SLACs have already gotten laid off. It would have been a disaster for me and my family if I'd left a renewable lecturer gig . . . that, while shitty in oh so many ways, was at least stable, for a TT gig only to get laid off in three years. It seems important that applicants know that this is a real threat they need to worry about at a lot of schools, especially SLACs.

This is a really important question, and I'm really glad someone asked it. Over the past couple of years, I too have heard of at least of a few horror stories--cases where someone was finally able to get a tenure-track job, only to see their job eliminated a year or two after they started. Alas, I'm not sure how to answer the question. You can of course ask faculty or administrators at the university about the financial health of the institution (either during an on-campus visit or after a hiring offer is extended). But, as for asking faculty, my sense is that sometimes even they can be quite in the dark about these matters, as the actual financial health of the institution may only be known by upper administration (which, I think, is why so many of the recent waves of faculty-line eliminations have come as a total shock out of the blue to those who faced them).

So, while the OP's question is a super important one, I don't have any real guidance above and beyond: ask around before accepting a job offer. But this advice probably isn't all that helpful. What do you all think? Do you have any helpful tips or insights (or personal experiences) on this issue? 

Did you receive adequate mentoring?

Laurence B. McCullough (Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Baylor) writes in:

As a retired professor, I follow your blog to keep up with what is happening in the world of philosophy.  I spent my career as a medical educator.  In the Baylor Center we (Baruch Brody and I, then the only two senior faculty) had a program for mentoring for all junior faculty.  We met with our colleagues regularly both formally and informally, read their work, advised them on academic matters, etc. 

We called what we did mentoring for success.  For example, Baruch and I mentored a junior colleague who followed Baruch as Director of our Center and therefore as my boss before I retired.  This is common, and a point of considerable pride, in the world of medical education. 

I am struck as I follow the postings on your blog by the absence of mention or mentorship.  I benefitted from mentoring when I was junior faculty, especially from a philosophy colleague at Texas A&M (where I was on medical and philosophy faculties and my first position).  I get the sense that many of our colleagues whose comments you post have no mentoring.  Perhaps mentoring – the absence of it, when it helps, when it does not help – would make a good topic for your blog.

This is an excellent query, and I'm thinking of running a short series on the topic. But, before I move forward with that, I'd like to ask the Cocoon's readers a few questions:

1. If you are a current or recent graduate student, what kind of mentoring are you receiving (viz. research, teaching, professionalization, the job market, etc.) have you received or are you receiving? Do you think the mentoring you've received is appropriate/adequate? Why/why not?
2. If you are or recently were a junior faculty member (e.g. a postdoc, TT faculty, non-TT faculty, etc.), what kind of mentoring have you received or are you receiving? Do you consider it appropriate/adequate? Why/why not?