Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

In Praise of Idleness

Mark Kingwell (Toronto) comments.

Another Bush Legacy: Afghanistan

Here is what almost never makes it to The New York Times.

Dysfunctional APA?

I've heard these complaints from a lot of folks now, and they are summed up, sharply, here and here.  Not printing room locations of sessions in the program was really quite amazing.

Fashionable Philosopher

Here.  Click "skip ad" and then click through to the fifth photo.

(Thanks to Charles Huenemann for the pointer.)

Israeli Barbarism in Gaza

As usual, Counterpunch has a number of informative items:  one might start here, and then scroll the left bar for other articles.  The linked article makes the following apt observation: 

"HAMAS”… the word that, in this case, renders any action taken by the other side, no matter how barbaric or sadistic, legitimate. Couple any noun with the preceding adjective “Hamas” and it will be immediately quarantined as if tainted by some infectious bacteria. This is how to dehumanize a million and a half people overnight; how to render them different from us and dangerous to us.

The comical facade of American support for "democracy in the Middle East" has not, of course, included support for the democratically elected Hamas government.

But why this savagery now?  One imagines it has something to do with the specter of a change of Administration in the United States--from a far right to a perhaps centrist government--though Obama's choice of Senator Clinton, unapologetic supporter of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq, hardly suggests that 'radical' notions (like the Golden Rule applies to Palestinians) are about to come into ascendancy.

What a sad and ugly business.

UPDATE:  More useful resources courtesy of Patrick O'Donnell.  Professor O'Donnell writes:

Two books are indispensable for understanding the overarching philosophy, strategic political reasoning, and political policies of Hamas: Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela's The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) and Azzam Tamimi's Hamas: A History from Within (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2007). So much nonsense uttered about what Hamas is all about could be avoided (i.e., something other than the ad nauseum references to statements from its Charter) were the information and arguments found in these two works well known. Everytime the Israelis resort to an escalation of violence, they serve, for better and worse, as a finely tuned recruitment instrument for Hamas, in other words, a perfect propaganda vehicle for "radicalization" of the Palestinians. And that is over and above the manner in which the socio-economic and political conditions they've imposed on Gaza has been colosally counterproductive, at least in terms of any putative peace process.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Friday Poem: "M's Place"

M's Place

This is the farm stand
And that is the farm beyond
Where the good vegetables grow
I know you will want to see
The Catholic church down the road
My dentist is further-on the right

There are other things too
Which I may show you
They help to give some definition
To what I am where I live
They help to give some emphasis
To what I am not essentially

Across the overpass and up the hill
You'll see my home and yes
The station nestles left below
This town will grow and disappear
But there is more of me not here
Than all that is left or right

Tonight there is not anything you understand
The cartoon colors have dried on the page
They say for making do the rage is two
And there's little else except I think
We the wicked choosing books to dream by
Getting to know the grocer ere he dies

Eyes are on us they do not see us
There are bills to pay no credit's given
Seven times round these hills I'll wander
And Tuckahoe may be my home again
But on this night to stray is right
Until nothing's left except to go

When you make the final turn
You'll be halfway between
The highway you came up on
And the one to follow down
Lest you lose your direction
I'll hold your hand long after you're gone

Copyright 1980, 2008 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Philosophy Conferences and Calls for Papers

Probably worth reminding readers of this useful site.

"Because New York Has Become a World Capital of Philosophy"

Reason #56 according to New York Magazine to "love New York." 

Only #56???

As a native New Yorker, I confess that the extravagant cost of living makes the city much less 'lovable' than it used to be.  But perhaps the financial implosion will change all that.

PGR Update

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 18 (for the benefit of those who may have missed it)

The following e-mail has gone out to evaluators; I'm also pasting it below, though correcting the bit about the time zones (which I messed up in the original, sorry folks!):

First:  at the request of a number of you, we will extend the deadline for completing the survey to noon on Friday, January 9.  That will be noon Chicago time, which would be 1 pm in, for example, New York City, 10 am in Los Angeles California, I believe 5 or 6 pm in London, and sometime in the early hours of the morning of Saturday in Australia.  I hope this makes it easier for more of you to participate in the surveys.

Second:  Please remember to click on "submit information" every 20 or 25 minutes.  You can then go back into the survey quite easily.  But the system automatically logs people off after awhile (longer than 25 minutes), and any scores entered will be lost if you have not clicked 'submit information.'  And remember that once you 'submit information,' the faculties you have scored will be moved to the bottom of the survey page (under "Completed"), ordered based on the 'overall' score you assigned.  You can then review your scores and adjust them as you see fit (though, again, remember to click 'submit information' every 20 or 25 minutes).

Third:  there have been some corrections and additions since the start of the survey to faculties #24, 35, 43, and 99.  Anyone who has scored these faculties either 'overall' or in 'specialty' areas may want to quickly revisit the scores in the event these changes would affect your assessment. 

Fourth:  Some evaluators have asked about the evidential standard on which they should base their evaluations.   Evaluators take different approaches.  I do encourage everyone to print out the full faculty lists and review them in hard copy before beginning.  Some evaluators google faculty and department homepages to review more detailed profiles of the faculty.   Others proceed in the evaluation on the basis of those faculty whose work they know best.  Some choose only to evaluate faculties in their area of specialization, and not overall.  If a faculty is one you would recommend (or not recommend) to a student considering graduate school, then you should feel comfortable evaluating it here.  Remember that every evaluator has only imperfect and partial information, and it is precisely the point of a survey of hundreds of philosophers, representing many different specialties, to aggregate this imperfect information to produce a more informative picture than any individual could on his or her own.   So do not set the evidential standard for an evaluation unreasonably high and bear in mind that a central point of this exercise is to correct for the fact that no one of us has perfect information about any faculty

Evaluators should e-mail me with any questions.  Also, please note that everyone who participated in 2006 should have received an invitation this round.  Two people, wisely, contacted me after not receiving an invitation, and it turned out there had been an email address error.  So if you were an evaluator in 2006, and have not received a 2008 invite, please feel free to contact me as well.

About 100 philosophers have already completed some or all of the survey, for which my sincere thanks.

"Christian mathematics"

I don't believe this is intended as a joke, though it should be.  If I'm not mistaken, longtime readers may remember this fellow as one of the brainless blogospheric apologists for Intellient Design creationism we encountered ages ago.  Age has not, it appears, resulted in a maturation of his intellectual faculties.

(Thanks to Daniel Koffler for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Turri (Huron University College) notes the relevance of the Trinity, missed by Mr. Carter:

Mr. Carter's example of 1 + 1 is perhaps not the best one to establish that there is a "particularly Christian view" of mathematics. Better, I think, would have been 1 + 1 + 1. Most think it must be that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. But certain "distinctly Christian" views have it that sometimes 1 + 1 + 1 = 1.  -

Philosophy Dissertations

Even if you don't go with VDM Verlag, you can contact Josh Dever (Texas) and post a link to your dissertation here.

Publishing One's Dissertation with a Lesser-Known Publisher?

A junior faculty member writes:

I just received an email from VDM Verlag asking to publish my dissertation "in the form of a printed book."  I was wondering if you knew this publishing company, and whether you think doing something like this is a good idea for junior faculty.  I wasn't planning on publishing the dissertation, I'm on to other projects, but part of me thinks that it can't hurt (although maybe it could for tenure?)  I googled the company and it SEEMS like a legitimate organization, or at least not a blatant scam.  They have a large number of books on Amazon.com etc.  On the other hand, it is a form letter and I received identical emails at my old email adress and my new one.

Anyhow, I thought you might want to post this for discussion on your site since I'm sure many of your readers have received similar solications.  If it is a blatant scam, then it couldn't hurt to warn people about it either I suppose.

I've heard of VDM Verlag, I think, but know next to nothing about it.  I am inclined to think if one's dissertation is worth publishing, it is with revisions and one should aspire to place it with the best publisher possible.  But comments are open, and I invite thoughts from readers on the general question about publishing dissertation, as well as from readers knowledgeable about Verlag.

Nietzsche and Political Philosophy

A review essay of an important recent book that may interest some readers.

Open Access Philosophy Publishing

Once again.

RAE and PGR

Some interesting analysis of the new RAE results and the 2006 PGR results for the UK.

A Bit More on How to Interpret RAE Results...

...using law as an example.

2008 Research Assessment Exercise in UK is Out

The philosophy results are here.  I confess I still don't know what they mean, though the matter is under review!  Bear in mind, of course, that RAE results are always backwards-looking:  so, e.g., St. Andrews was getting full credit for Crispin Wright (who is now mostly at NYU).  Comments from UK philosophers (and others) welcome.  Signed comments only.

ADDENDUM:  I should confess to being a bit facetious, above.  Here's a quick primer about what the chart means:  4* is the highest mark for submitted research, and it's down from there.  The number under each column is the percentage of submitted work by each faculty that received the score in question.  So, e.g., UCL submitted a higher percentage of work getting the highest score than Oxford, but Oxford submitted a lot more such work because, of course, it's a bigger faculty.  As a measure of per capita quality of research output, this is probably quite instructive (putting aside certain weirdnesses:  e.g., how could Middlesex rate above Southampton, both programs that emphasize post-Kantian Continental philosophy?  It makes no sense).  But what it means for a student choosing graduate programs?  Harder to say.   The list of philosophy evaluators:  Alexander Bird (Bristol), Ruth Chadwick (Cardiff), Roger Crisp (Oxford), Jonathan Dancy (Reading), Nicholas Davey (Dundee), R.A. Duff (Stirling), Katherine Hawley (St. Andrews), Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan), Christopher Hookway (Sheffield), Stephen Houlgate (Warwick), Peter Lamarque (York), Robin Le Poidevin (Leeds), E.J. Lowe (Durham), Mike Martin (UCL), Suzanne Stern-Gillet (Bolton), Alan Weir (Glasgow).  Lots of good philosophers here, though far fewer than participate in PGR surveys of course.  But the real surprise is the weak representation for Continental philosophy, except for Houlgate in 19th-century.  Where are Poellner, Janaway, Finlayson, Martin, Han-Pile, Geuss, S. Gardner, Stern?

UPDATE (Dec. 17, 7 am Chicago time):  A U.K. philosopher writes:

One thing that should be borne in mind is that the GPA average [see Professor Otsuka's comment, below, containing the average scores] doesn't take account of the overall proportion of staff eligible for inclusion who were actually included. So Department A can get a higher GPA than Department B by submitting fewer eligible staff as "research active". Previous RAEs have included data on this, but this time there was a big mix up and they eventually decided not to include it for legal reasons I can't quite understand. I suspect this may account for some of the stranger looking results on the GPA list.

It appears, for example, that Oxford submitted all their staff this time around--including, I take it, overworked tutorial fellows who probably have little opportunity to publish.  I'm also told that St. Andrews included the quarter-time staff at the Arche Research Center there, i.e., philosophers like Jason Stanley, Graham Priest, and Stewart Shapiro, among others.

Another Rich University Takes an Endowment Hit

Yale's fortune off 25%, but the really stunning figure is not that, but this:

The 25 percent decline has a very significant impact on operations because income from the endowment supports 44 percent of the university's annual expense base of $2.7 billion, Levin said.

Yale projects an annual budget shortfall of $100 million next year and growing to over $300 million by 2013-14.

This compares to Harvard's reliance for 35% of operating expenses on endowment income.  But the good news, at least according to the Yale President:

Levin says the endowment is still very large and is at its same value as January 2006.

Yale will continue to recruit faculty and maintain improvements to financial aid it announced last year for low- and middle-income families, he said.

Perhaps this is true, though it's hard to see how they can sustain this long-term without spending endowment principal, which most schools (NYU is an exception) are reluctant to do. 

Curiously, the troubles at wealthy private universities may be good news for state universities, since it reduces the likelihood of "raids" on senior faculty at wildly inflated salaries.  Even if Yale continues hiring, as I expect it will, there will surely be fewer cases of offering faculty elsewhere 50% increments on their current compensation, the kinds of things that happened not infrequently over the last decade. 

UPDATE:  A philosopher at Harvard writes with an important clarification:

I wanted to mention that your Harvard/Yale comparison is a little misleading.  At Harvard each faculty is fiscally autonomous.  So what's relevant to Philosophy is the financial state of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  And the FAS relies on endowment income for 54% of operating expenses.   Currently the FAS is projecting a $100-133 million shortfall in its budget for next year.   (The annual budget of the FAS clocks in at about $1 billion.)   Hence the job freeze.  However, the administration is committed both to maintaining our high level of financial aid (undergrad & grad) and to not letting financial factors influence promotion decisions.

Why Major in Philosophy?

Thoughts from a personal finance blogger.

Tales from the American Oligarchy

New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whose main qualification has always been her willingness to stay married to the neoliberal womanizer Bill Clinton (and to keep using his brand name), will become Secretary of State, based of course on her excellent judgment and high moral standards as exemplified by her unapologetic support for the criminal war of aggression against Iraq.  Now that her seat is to be vacated, Caroline Kennedy, whose main qualification is that she is the daughter of a former womanizing President, wants to be named to the New York Senate seat.  That journalists, opinion makers, and ordinary citizens do not laugh in her face at the very idea tells us everything we need to know about the oligarchy in America.  More here.

And, of course, we're not done yet with the clan of Bush cretins and miscreants.

UPDATE:  As if on cue, the New York Times, longtime aider and abettor of the oligarchy, weighs in:

She has not held a full-time job in years, has not run for even the lowliest office, and has promoted such noncontroversial causes as patriotism, poetry and public service. Yet Caroline Kennedy’s decision to ask Gov. David A. Paterson to appoint her to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat suggests that she believes she is as well prepared as anyone to serve as the next senator from New York — and is ready to throw her famously publicity-averse self into the challenge of winning back-to-back elections in 2010 and 2012.

Already, some columnists, bloggers and even potential colleagues in Congress have begun asking if she would be taken seriously if not for her surname.

Only "some"?

Representative Gary Ackerman, a Queens Democrat, told a radio host on Wednesday that he did not know what Ms. Kennedy’s qualifications were, “except that she has name recognition — but so does J. Lo.”

I suggest Ackerman be appointed.

Aside from a 22-month, three-day-a-week stint as director of strategic partnerships for the New York City schools, her commitments generally involve nonprofit boards: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., the American Ballet Theater, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

But friends and associates say that Ms. Kennedy, 51, is no dilettante, and that her career is replete with examples of the kind of hands-on policy work and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that could serve her well

That's precious, her "friends" support her.  I wonder whether the reporter who wrote this article felt any unease about writing this article as though there were really "two sides" to this debate?

Will the Financial Crisis Affect PhD Admissions?

A student writes:

I am a Ph.D. student at [an unranked PhD program], currently applying to transfer to a top program (11 of the best ethics programs, according to PGR and my own interests).  I, as well as others on the application front, have started to wonder whether the economy is likely to affect admissions this year.  My own institution is hurting badly enough to start talking about admitting fewer graduate students in some programs (I don’t know if ours is one of them), and this began to make me nervous.  Is it possible that my timing will add yet one more element of luck into the admissions game?  Do you have any sense of whether programs in general, but top programs in particular, have talked about admitting fewer students this year?

I don’t know if this is something faculty are talking/blogging/gossiping about, but if you have any information, I would be very interested to hear it.

It would be useful to hear reports from others on this.  Clearly the financial crisis is affecting hiring, but it seems to me it could go either way with admissions:  programs may cut back either because they get less fellowship/TA money and/or because more of their existing money has to be used to support current students who don't get jobs this year; or programs may keep admissions steady because they will need more 'cheap' graduate labor to do the teaching that needs to be done, and for which departments don't have money to make new full-time hires.  My guess is the first scenario is the more likely one, but the second one may be applicable, especially at state universities which often depend more on graduate student TAs.

Thoughts, predictions, reports from others?

Involving Graduate Students in Job Searches and Interviews

A philosopher at a ranked PhD program writes:

Here's a question that came up in a departmental meeting today; it might be an apt discussion question for your blog.  Is there a norm in the profession about allowing  graduate students to sit in on interviews conducted by their departments at the APA?  In particular, is it good/bad policy to allow students that are not members of the search committee to sit in on interviews in order to become familiar with the interview process?  Subsidiary questions are these:  If it is good policy, is it only good policy for students not on the market? And if students do sit in, is it better if they do or do not participate in the discussion?  Are there legal issues involved (particularly privacy issues)?  And what do job candidates think about coming to an interview and finding graduate students there as observers and/or participants?

I suppose we might also ask whether it is appropriate to have graduate students on the search committee.

Graduate students/job seekers may post anonymously (please indicate your e-mail address, though--it won't appear); I hope faculty will post under their own names.  Post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

To Those Participating in the PGR Surveys: Please Make Sure to Click "Submit Information" Every 20 Minutes or So!

If you don't hit "submit information" periodically (every 20 minutes to be safe), the scores entered will be lost.  I'm sorry about confusion on this.  The system automatically logs someone out (not after 20 minutes), so even though the information on the screen remains, the system is no longer recording the data.  We became aware of this problem the first two days, and so extended the amount of time before automatic log-off--but, to be safe, please "submit information" at regular 20-minute intervals.

Refutation of Richard Taylor on "Fatalism" Makes the NY Times Magazine!

It helps that the refutation was in the undergraduate thesis of the late novelist David Foster Wallace, who actually began the PhD program at Harvard, before turning to fiction writing, where he won wide acclaim. (His father is the well-known moral philosopher James Wallace, now emeritus at Illinois/Urbana-Champaign).

New "National Research Council" Ranking of Grad Programs Across All Fields Due Out in February

And judging from this article, it is likely to be, unlike prior iterations, much less useful, and not simply because of the lag time between data collection and publication (at least two years, maybe more).  All indications are that the NRC planning committee was captured by interest groups representing smaller universities, who pushed 'per capita' measures, for the obvious reasons (one superstar on a faculty of 15 is worth a lot more than 1 superstar on a faculty of 30).   Here's a taste of what to expect:

Kuh provided new details on how the NRC is constructing three “supplemental measures” that will be both part of the main rankings and available individually. Although she called them “supplemental,” Kuh said that they are actually “essential measures” for doctoral programs. They are scholarly productivity, student outcomes and support and diversity.

It's unclear whether these factors will be alagamated, or presented separately; if the former, then the overall result will be as meaningless as a U.S. News ranking of law or medical schools or colleges based on a dozen different, and incommensurable factors.

In each of these cases, data will support the rankings, but faculty surveys have been used to weight the relative importance of different factors that make up the analyses. While the scholarly productivity measure is closest to the values that shape the overall ranking, Kuh stressed that all of these measures matter. “The quality of doctoral programs is not just about the scholarly productivity and scholarly recognition of program faculty,” she said.

Of course, in philosophy, we went through a variation on this nonsense during the Heckling campaign seven years ago:  on the one hand, everyone knows that the scholarly distinction of the faculty is central, but it can be a defeasible reason for choosing a program under particular circumstances, as when the faculty are disengaged from instruction and mentoring.  But we have no way of measuring that, nor does the NRC.

For each subcategory, there are further subcategories:

• For scholarly productivity: Average publications per faculty member, average citations per publication, grants per faculty member, awards per faculty member.
• For student support and outcomes: Percentage of graduate students with full support, average cohort completing program in six years, average time to degree, job placement of students, and availability of outcomes data.
• For diversity: Percentage of professors from underrepresented minority groups, percentage of faculty members who are women, percentage of students who are from underrepresented minority groups, percentage of students who are female and percentage of students who are international.

There will be some definition shifts based on discipline. For example, on the measure of percentage of entering cohorts finishing within six years, the measure for the humanities will be eight years. Then, for each subsection of the subcategory, faculty surveys are being used to weight the various factors. So under scholarly productivity, for example, faculty members in the sciences are counting grants as a much larger share than are humanities professors.

The questions Friday didn’t challenge the importance of any of the categories, but raised concerns about how they are being measured. One dean said that her agriculture science professors were bothered by the idea that grants are being counted by their number, without regard to their quality, importance or size. So a faculty member who receives $1,000 from a local agricultural producer to study some local problem is counted the same way as a faculty member who pulls down a large, peer reviewed grant from a prestigious national agency. The dean said that there was “a lot of angst” in some disciplines over such apparent flaws in the methodology.

Another dean raised a question about how success is measured in the diversity categories, and was told that the greater the diversity, the greater the score. In many of the diversity categories, that may make sense, and many departments have relatively low percentages, for example, of minority faculty members. But he said that the international students ranking was potentially deceptive under this system. The dean said that any graduate program that doesn’t attract any foreign students probably deserves to go down in the rankings. But he said that a program where 95 percent of the students are international isn’t necessarily better than one with 40 percent — and in fact is quite likely a worse program.

One could, of course, mulitply the worries about applying these kinds of criteria to philosophy programs.

Meanwhile, the wickedly funny, self-proclaimed "cranky jerk" philosopher notes regarding the impending release in January of the new PGR:

What joy. For not only will undergraduates not be at the mercy of their (often clueless or biased) professors' impressions of what's what and who's who in the profession, but the Philosophy blogosphere will once again be alive with petty, misinformed, idiotic, self-serving whining about the PGR, all dressed up in the guise of righteous indignation.

Now, in addition, the misinformed and self-serving can also refer to the NRC, in the event that a department fares better there than in the PGR.  We'll look at such cases when they arise; I strongly suspect that the explanation will be traceable to some of the peculiarities of the new NRC exercise noted above.  S

In any case, since more real information is better than less, one may hope that the NRC report will, in the end, be more informative than this preview of its methodology suggests it will be.

"Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche"

I've posted a revised version of the paper I gave at the annual NYU "History of Modern Philosophy" conference in November (which generated an excellent and very helpful discussion).  I hope the paper may interest moral philosophers generally, as well as Nietzsche scholars.  Here is the abstract for the paper:

This essay offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche's argument for moral skepticism (i.e., the metaphysical thesis that there do not exist any objective moral properties or facts), an argument that should be of independent philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche offers a version of the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike familiar varieties, it does not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete cases. Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent and apparently intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics (perhaps in kind, certainly in degree). According to Nietzsche, the best explanation for this disagreement is that, even though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can still construct valid dialectical justifications for moral propositions because the premises of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs of at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The essay concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this abductive argument for skepticism based on moral disagreement and by addressing the question whether the argument "proves too much," that is, whether it might entail an implausible skepticism about a wide range of topics about which there is philosophical disagreement.

Comments would be welcome:  please e-mail me or post comments here.

Financial Crisis Hits the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard

Details here; an excerpt from the Deans' letter to department chairs:

First, we plan to keep all faculty and non-union staff salaries flat next year. Union staff have a contract with the University, which has been negotiated with the central administration.

Second, we are postponing almost all current tenure-track and tenured searches. There will be a small number of exceptions (selected with an eye toward minimizing costs and maintaining priorities) and, of course, internal promotions will continue as planned. The FAS remains committed to a tenure-track system.

We intend to resume searches once the financial situation turns around. At that time, we plan to allow departments to proceed with their original searches or to switch those searches to new fields, so long as they align with the departments’ academic plans. Thus, it is imperative that we continue with the academic planning process.

Third, to minimize the cost of visiting faculty, new non-ladder faculty appointments, and purchases of faculty from other Harvard schools, we will only authorize requests for these types of instructional faculty to fulfill essential curricular needs. If such a need is demonstrated, we ask that departments search for candidates according to the ordered list below:

* Recent PhDs (from Harvard or other institutions)

* Tenure-track faculty from local institutions

* Senior faculty from local institutions or local practitioners from industry or government

To attract and support h ighly qualified candidates who have recently or will shortly earn their Ph.D., the FAS is developing a new program akin to a teaching post-doc. You will soon receive a description of this program. This program provides one way in which the FAS can support our Ph.D. students who are graduating into what looks to be a tight job market. At the same time, we must support our continuing graduate students.

The good news, of course, is the effort to support their current job seekers in "a tight job market."  Hopefully other schools will follow Harvard's lead.

(Thanks to Kenneth Winkler for the pointer.)

Update on the Academic Freedom Situation at Tel Aviv

Here.

Four Million Dollar (Canadian) Gift to Philosophy at Western Ontario!

Philosophy departments don't get gifts like this everyday!  More details here.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Regional Meetings for Chairs of Philosophy Departments?

Sanford Goldberg, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, writes:

I just came back from a meeting with one of the Chairs of a dept here at Northwestern who mentioned to me that in his field (physics) the chairs of midwestern physics departments get together once a year, by themselves, to talk about issues facing their departments.  They use this meeting as an occasion to share best practices, talk about common challenges (how to promote physics at their respective universities), discuss trends in the field relevant to the administration of physics departments, and so forth.  I think it would be worth asking whether chairs of philosophy departments might be interested in doing something similar.  Such annual discussions might be most fruitful if we disaggregated departments by type (research university vs. 4-yr college), geography (east, south, midwest, west), etc.  If there is enough interest I would be happy to try to organize this and get it going.

I've opened comments for other Chairs to indicate their interest in doing this with colleagues in their areas.

PGR Surveys Have Begun

E-mailed invitations to participate in the new PGR surveys began going out this morning.  More will go out through tomorrow, at least, as we fix e-mail errors and the like.  Please contact me if you encounter any problems with the survey or have questions.

Attack on Academic Freedom at Tel Aviv University

Details here.

In Memoriam: Andrzej Zabludowski (1938-2008)

Justyna Grudzinska (Warsaw University) writes:

Andrzej Zabludowski died on November 11th. At the time of his death he was affiliated with Warsaw University. He left Poland in 1968, driven out by the communist regime's repressiveness and anti-Semitism, emigrated to the U.S. and was affiliated with different American universities. He came back to Poland in 1997.  [He was] noted for his work on the theory of induction and Quine's doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation, [and perhaps] best-known for his polemics with Nelson Goodman.

PGR Update

It looks like we are on track for the invitation e-mails for the new surveys to go out on Monday, December 8.  The survey will run through Friday, January 2.  We have a total of 469 nominated evaluators, though if past experience is any indication, not all the e-mail invites will go through successfully, but the vast, vast majority will.  A new feature this year (for which I'm grateful to Ted Ressell, the excellent IT person here at Chicago) will permit evaluators, after saving their scores, to then see the faculties re-ordered based on the 'overall' scores awarded (so, e.g., one will get a list starting with all the faculties the evaluator gave a 5, then the faculties that got a 4.5, then those that got a 4, and so on).  Evaluators then have the option of revising the scores.  This will, I think, be a powerful corrective for any order or other similar biases in the initial evaluations, and it is a feature that a number of evaluators have asked for over the years.

"The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy"

Michael Rosen and I are certainly grateful to Professor Vandevelde of Marquette for this generous review of The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy; his conclusion is particularly welcome, because it states well our aim and the aim of the contributors, and confirms that we achieved it:

In sum, this handbook is a remarkable achievement. On the one hand, the scope of the themes and authors is large enough to count as an excellent overview of the many facets of continental philosophy; on the other hand, the creative and critical nature of the contributions provides a thorough and in-depth discussion of the trends making up continental philosophy. It is both a scholarly work providing a large amount of information and a philosophical work testing and assessing the originality and fruitfulness of continental philosophy. If a case had to be made about the relevance, originality, and fruitfulness of the continental approaches, this handbook makes it rather convincingly and brilliantly.

MacBride from Birkbeck to Cambridge

Fraser MacBride (metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, history of analytic philosophy), Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, has accepted a permanent post at Cambridge University, to commence in October 2009.

Please Post Information about Cancelled Job Searches Here

Karen Bennett (Cornell) writes with a very good suggestion:

As you know, the economic situation is hitting a lot of universities pretty hard.  Various schools have hiring freezes, or "pauses", and so forth.  As placement director at Cornell this year, I'm hearing a steady trickle of rumors about positions advertised in the JFP that have since either been canceled or at least turned into merely possible positions.  Both job candidates and placement directors would benefit if this information were collected in one place.  Could you post about this, and open the comments for departments to post updates to their ads?

In this spirit, Professor Bennett also volunteers the following information about Cornell (her format is a good one to follow):

Cornell:  advertised one open-rank position with additional positions possible.  The additional positions are now apparently impossible; we will hire at most one.

Only signed posts by faculty at the hiring department will be approved for this thread.  Please post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

Stanford Trying to Cut $100 Million from Its Budget!

And the President and Provost (philosopher John Etchemendy), among others, are taking 10% pay cuts.  When even the wealthiest universities are taking these kinds of steps, that is worrisome indeed.

Meanwhile, the Philosophy Job Market wiki shows six searches cancelled so far.  Anecdotal reports suggest the number is higher, especially if one includes contractions (e.g., multiple positions advertised, but now only one or two authorized to be filled).

As I have remarked previously, I hope that Departments will make every effort to help their job seekers weather this difficult situation, through extending funding, in-house teaching opportunities, and the like.

UPDATE:  On a related note, Harvard University's endowment has lost at least 22% of its value (that's eight billion dollars!).

ANOTHER:  The University of Toronto expects to have $62 million less to spend next year due to endowment lossts.  (Thanks to Anthony Skelton for the link.)

Advice for Job Interviews

Tad Brennan (Cornell) calls my attention to this useful advice about job interviews at a  hiring convention.   As Professor Brennan writes:  "It's written by an historian, about the AHA, but the advice carries over directly.  There are a few things one could disagree with, but by and large I think it is very solid advice for people who are going to the APA for the first time."  I agree.

Shut Up Already!

Jonathan Wolff (UCL) comments on philosophers and brevity.

Faculties to be Added to the PGR Survey

The Advisory Board has voted on those faculties that requested inclusion in the new PGR surveys.  Those that got either a majority or a significant minority of support (Board members in some cases gave particular reasons for the support), as well as those with the most support in Australasia and the U.K., will be added.  They are:

University of South Carolina

University of Exeter

University of Oklahoma, Norman

University of Cincinnati

University of Kansas

St. Louis University

University of Otago

York University, Toronto

I shall utililze the faculty lists that the departmetns, in each instance, supplied me for purposes of Advisory Board consideration.

It now looks like the PGR surveys will begin on Monday, December 7--more details later this week.

New Obituary for C.B. Martin Has Appeared

The link is here, for those who might be interested.

Comparative Information on Stipends/Benefits for Grad Students

This appears to be a useful database, though bear in mind that even at schools with low average stipends there may be particular fellowships that are quite generous.  There may also be particular departments whose averages are much higher than the university norm.

PGR Update

Within the next 24 hours, the faculty lists will be finalized (post corrections here) and, with luck, the on-line survey will begin by the end of the week, and run for about two weeks.  Faculties that the Advisory Board has voted to add to the survey will be announced here tomorrow.  Remember that even those not added to the survey are eligible for inclusion in the specialty rankings based either on 2006 results and/or input from the Advisory Board.

If all goes as planned, Blackwell will have the new PGR on-line by the end of January.  I may preview some results on this site earlier in January as well.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed helpful feedback and information.