How to Count Affiliated/Cognate Faculty for Purposes of the PGR Surveys?

Because of my move this summer, there may be some delay in producing the 2008-10 PGR (it is unlikely to be available until late fall or early in the New Year), but we are beginning the planning process now, and there are several matters on which I would welcome feedback from members of the profession.

One issue that has arisen repeatedly over the last several years is the status of faculty cognate to philosophy, or philosophers in other units at a university, who are not necessarily tenured members of the philosophy faculty.  The number who fall into this category is now quite large and includes, among many others, Charles Beitz and Philip Pettit at Princeton; Ronald Dworkin, Liam Murphy, and Jeremy Waldron at NYU; Jules Coleman at Yale; Jon Elster and Joseph Raz at Columbia; Matthew Kramer at Cambridge; Jim Nickel at Arizona State; Stephen Perry at Penn; A.A. Long at Berkeley; Kai von Fintel at MIT; and Harvey Friedman at Ohio State, among many others.

Many departments have followed the lead of the PGR, and created a category of "affiliated" faculty to capture those faculty who have cognate interests and/or philosophers in other units.  Unfortunately, departments vary quite a bit in how diligent they are about updating their websites, with some getting around to it rarely, while others reputedly padding the faculty lists with loads of faculty from other departments deemed to be "cognate."  The more serious problems, however, involve universities which do not have the status of "secondary" or "zero-time" or "affiliated" appointment, and so can not properly list faculty in those categories.  Harvard is the paradigm case for this worry, as I have heard from affected faculty at Harvard and many prospective students over the years.  Although there are a large number of philosophers or scholars doing cognate work in other units--Dan Brock in the Medical School; Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler in Public Health; Arthur Applbaum and Mathias Risse in the Kennedy School of Government; Michael Rosen, Michael Sandel, Dennis Thompson, and Richard Tuck in Government--some of whom occasionally teach philosophy courses, and others of whom also do work with PhD students, none of them were reflected in the 2006 (or earlier) PGR surveys.  Other schools (Texas is an example) have a quite relaxed view about these listings, with the result that there are many faculty from other units listed as members of the philosophy faculty, even without tenure or even voting rights, and yet who play a major role in the PhD program (Stephen White, a key figure in the classical philosophy program at Texas, is an example).

It is obviously not feasible to ascertain on a case-by-case basis which faculty in other units work with philosophy students and which do not.  On the existing approach, schools with "easy" cross-listing policies and/or those who are aggressive about updating their websites and/or those who "pad" the lists get a possible advantage.  (The evidence is equivocal on whether padding faculty lists with names of scholars who are largely unknown to philosophers is an advantage--though that is certainly not the worry about the names I've singled out, above.) 

The alternate approach we have been considering for the 2008-10 surveys is to create a category of "Cognate Faculty and Philosophers in Other Units" (or something like that) under which other tenure-stream faculty at a university (who are not appointed primarily or jointly in the philosophy department) who do philosophical work or work that is cognate to philosophy are listed.  The separate listing of such faculty would signal to evaluators that they should not be weighed quite as heavily for evaluation purposes, yet at the same indicate that they are intellectual resources for students at the school.  Presumptively all of the current "affiliated faculty" lists would be incorporated into these lists.  As in prior years, we would also publish draft lists of regular and cognate faculty, so the listings would be subject to correction and/or veto by departments (e.g., a department could report that philosopher/cognate faculty member X has nothing to do with PhD students etc.).

I would be interested to hear how grad students and faculty think this issue should be handled.  As long as you submit a legitimate e-mail address (one consistent with your ISP identifying information), you need not post your full name.  Thanks.

 

Comments

[Matt]

To my mind there are three main questions that a grad student ought to have about such faculty:

1) Does this person teach classes that are either listed or cross-listed in philosophy, so that one can get philosophy credit for taking the class? Relatedly, are philosophy students fully welcome in the classes, and are philosophical classes regularly offered by the person in question?

2) Can the person in question serve on a dissertation committee, and will they?

3) Could the person in question chair a committee?

The last is perhaps the least important so long as he or she could be on the committee. It seems to me that so long as at least the first two are met that it's useful to list such people as "affiliated" faculty. (It seems likely to me that many schools list everyone with "philosophical" interests even if they do not regular teach classes with heavy philosophical content or serve on dissertation committees. This seems to me to be a bit of false advertising and more than a bit shameful.) I'd be happy to see faculty who meet these standards (at least the first two) listed as "affiliated" faculty since they are important resources for programs though they ought not be listed as full faculty since, per hypothesis, they are not.

[Ralph Wedgwood]

It remains the primary purpose of the PGR to provide information for students who are choosing which universities to apply to for graduate study. So the guiding principle should presumably be: Can a graduate student reasonably expect to receive supervision from the philosopher in question (if that philosopher turns out to be the best qualified person to supervise the student at the university)?

What typically happens, at most universities, is that philosophers who are attached to other departments (such as Linguistics, Law, Political Science, Theology, Classics, and Oriental Studies) normally do give some supervision to graduate students who are enrolled in the Philosophy Department (even though they are usually not contractually obliged to do so); but they typically have less time to do so because of their commitments within their own departments. This is certainly what happens at Oxford with the philosophers based in the Law Faculty (e.g. Joseph Raz and John Gardener), the philosophers based in the Politics Department (e.g. Jerry Cohen), the philosophers based in the Theology Department (e.g. Marilyn McCord Adams), and so on.

However, it seems to me that there is a more or less continuous range of variation in the degree of access that philosophy graduate students can reasonably expect to have to philosophers at their university who are not full-time employees of the university's philosophy department.

So I think that (i) some more or less arbitrary line will have to be drawn (e.g. has the philosopher in question supervised at least one philosophy graduate in the last five years?), and then (ii) reliable information will have to be gathered about who falls on which side of the line. The only way to get reliable information about this, I should imagine, is the time-consuming method of asking around, and pressing the philosophy department in question to answer all questions honestly. (I remember that we had some discussion about this at Oxford two years ago. I'm pretty sure that there were some political theorists in the Politics Department whom we didn't include in the list of Affiliated Faculty on the grounds that they weren't really involved in the supervision of philosophy graduate students.)

[Sandy Goldberg]

At Northwestern the faculty raised this very question at a dept meeting this year, in connection with our web site. Much in line with Ralph's comments, we distinguished 2 categories: affiliated faculty, and faculty resource. The former was one that required meeting some (somewhat demanding) criteria regarding the individual's interactions with the Philosophy Department. To be listed as an "Affiliated Faculty Member" one had to avow a general interested in philosophy, be willing to serve on philosophy disrt committees, AND satisfy one or more of the following: (i) served/serving on at least one disrt committee in the past five years; (ii) attended at least three philosophy department colloquia in the past five years; (iii) served on at least one philosophy committee (search committee, chair search committee, etc.). Such faculty would then be queried every few years to see if they wanted to remain "affiliated" -- our idea being that we expect something from these faculty, so we don't want to list them if they no longer are interested. (We then listed them at our web site.)

One reason in defense of making such a category, and somehow counting it in the PGR: Northwestern is a medium-sized dept (at full strength we are 16 members), and we know that to compete with bigger departments we must utilize our resources in other departments. Several of us have taken the initiative to build (or sustain) strong connections to the excellent faculty here in Political Theory, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Classics. I had a vested interest in doing so: a prominent friend of mine at a top PGR school mentioned to me that one of the best group of philosophers of language was at Northwestern -- in the Linguistics Department. I don't assume Northwestern is unique in this respect (having an excellent group of philosophically-minded colleagues in a dept other than philosophy); it seems to me that interested students should know about this. It also seems to me that it is each depts' duty to ensure that the reporting of affiliated faculty is done in a responsible fashion.

[Sandy Goldberg]

TWO CORRECTIONS:

In my haste to post this morning I forgot that, in addition to criteria (i)-(iii) in my post above, we also had a fourth disjunct: (iv) published work with substantial philosophical content (book; or one or more articles in reputable philosophy or interdisciplinary journals) in the last five years.

Also, and more embarrassingly, I neglected to add this crucial qualifier: what I heard from a prominent friend of mine was that the Linguists Department at Northwestern has one of the best groups of philosophers of language NOT WIDELY RECOGNIZED WITHIN PHILOSOPHY. I apologize for the omission.

[grad student]

The situation is also complicated in HPS departments where the history faculty do not often make it onto the PGR faculty lists. This is unfortunate as many history faculty have extensive research interests in history of philosophy and philosophy of science, particularly ancient and early modern philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz. For example, and I hope this isn't too presumptive, Daniel Garber would probably be equally at home today as a historian in a HPS department as he is in a philosophy department (though he did seem to start his career squarely in philosophy).

The exclusion of historians from the PGR probably has to do with the fuzzy and sometimes problematic interdisciplinary nature of studying ancient and early modern "science". It is an impossible task to demarcate "philosophy" and "science" before the 19th century, thus placing the people that study ancient and early modern science into neat disciplinary boxes can also prove difficult.

The bottom line is that students should know HPS departments and schools with strong history of science departments often have better resources in ancient and early modern philosophy than the PGR might lead them to believe.

[Brian Leiter]

Regarding the last comment: in fact, HPS faculties are listed with the philosophy faculty, so only if an historian of science did not appear on the HPS faculty list would he or she be omitted. The practice of aggregating HPS and Philosophy faculties for evaluation purposes has been one of long-standing.

[(different) grad student]

Yes, but do you count philosophers in history of science departments, such as Harvard's? (Peter Galison, for example, is an important philosopher of science who happens not to be affiliated with Harvard's philosophy dept.) I'm not sure how widespread this is. A quick check of other history of science depts didn't reveal any obvious philosophers not also affiliated with the corresponding philosophy dept. But perhaps a more thorough examination might be useful.