Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

UK Philosophers Tackle the "Business Model" Being Forced on British Universities

Their blog is here.  It deserves a wide readership; the issues it raises are not peculiar to the UK, though, ironically, because there is no meaningful private sector in higher education in Britain it is proving far easier for the government there to enforce the 'business model' on all universities.  In the U.S., at least, the elite private universities can actually exploit their market position (in the market for prestige and certification) to uphold non-business models of learning, and by doing so they create some pressures for the elite public sector of higher education to do the same.

A Temporary Reprieve for the PhD Program at Florida?

Professor Jamil at Miami Dade, who started the petition in support of the philosophy PhD program at the University of Florida, calls to my attention this article from a Florida newspaper which reports that:

The UF board of trustees, in a conference call Tuesday, unanimously approved a budget largely identical to what UF President Bernie Machen announced last week. But Machen made a few changes to cuts to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which had taken the lion's share of faculty layoffs.

The revised budget spares five of the 16 college faculty members slated for layoffs and another of those faculty members is retiring. While doctoral programs in German, philosophy and romance languages and literature with a concentration in French were proposed for elimination, the new budget instead freezes admissions to the programs until at least 2012.

The resolution approved by trustees kept open a window for 60 days for Machen to make additional changes to proposed mergers and eliminations of academic programs.

Freezing PhD admissions for three years may, of course, just be an attempt to permit existing students to get through the program, before closing it down, it's hard to know.  Equally worrisome is this story passed on to me by a philosopher at another university:

[A] friend in the german/slavic lang & lit department at Florida just received a letter from the dean firing him. This letter comes a couple of months after the same dean wrote a letter supporting my friend's tenure and promotion. So, it seems that those unfortunate to have come up for tenure this year (in certain departments), and got it (except for the president's signature), are being laid off. i wonder if junior faculty in the 'eliminated programs' are being laid off as well?

Absent a very clear signal from the University President and Dean that tenure decisions are and will be made on the academic merits, not based on cost-cutting considerations, it's hard to see how the affected programs will be able to hire or retain tenure-track faculty.

Comments are open for those with additional information; non-anonymous comments are very strongly preferred.

Life in a Small Philosophy Department

Andrew Mills, a philosopher at Otterbein College in Ohio, is collecting information on the experiences of philosophers working in small departments.  He writes:

As a member of a small philosophy department, I am interested in what other philosophers in similar departments think about the concerns and advantages of life in a small department. I plan on leading a discussion on this topic in August at the 2008 AAPT International Workshop-Conference on Teaching Philosophy at the University of Guelph, and, in order to prepare for that discussion I would like to know what other philosophers think about being in a small philosophy department.

For the purposes of this project, I've defined "small philosophy department" as a department (either free-standing, or linked with another discipline) that contains 3 or fewer full-time philosophy faculty. If you are a member of such a department, I would very much appreciate you filling out this survey. Moreover, if you have colleagues who teach in small philosophy departments, I would appreciate it if you could forward this survey to them. Finally, if you used to work in a small philosophy department, feel free to take this survey, answering as if you still worked at that department. 

You can access the survey by clicking here.

Professor Mills says he will make the results of the survey available on-line after the August conference.

A Third, and Final Call, to Sign the Petition in Support of the Florida PhD Program

In the second 24 hours, the petition calling on the University of Florida President to reconsider the decision to close the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Florida garnered just under 400 new signatures, bringing the total to well over 1,000 in just two days!  I know this is a busy time for most philosophers and students, with exams and essays to grade and/or write, but please take a moment to sign if you have not done so already.  The outpouring of support from those inside and outside the academy for the discipline of philosophy should encourage everyone who cares about the subject, and so please add your voice to theirs.

The Florida Department has also been reposting some of the comments from the petition, including some that appeared since my posting yesterday.

A Second Call to Sign the Petition in Support of the Graduate Program in Philosophy at the University of Florida

In just the first 24 hours, there have been more than 650 signatures to the petition calling on the University of Florida President to reconsider the decision to close the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Florida.  It would be wonderful if there were 650 more in the next 24 hours!  Please take a moment to sign (and include some identifying info as you do so, e.g., Prof of Philosophy at .... or undergraduate at....).  (I hope some of the journalists who cover higher education and read this blog will run a story about the effort to save the PhD program at Florida.  650 signatures in support of the Florida program in just one day is, I hope, newsworthy!)

Many signatories have posted excellent comments as well.  Here are a few samples. 

From John Protevi, Associate Professor of French Studies at Lousiana State University:

Philosophy is the oldest and most rigorous of all the humanities disciplines, stretching back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Philosophy has been taught in European universities since at least the 13th century in the schools at Paris and Oxford. It is today a lively and important discipline in its own right, and also as a pivot, linking many of the sciences. Because of its positive effects on the intellectual growth of students, it is increasingly popular as an undergraduate major. The University of Florida can only damage its reputation if it follows through on this shortsighted proposal.

From Stephen Darwall, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (who is moving next year to Yale University):

Dear President Machen, Years ago (I like to think not so many), you and I worked on some projects together when you were Provost at Michigan. Since you left Michigan, you have devoted your life to the effort to make good universities great. Do you really think a university can be great without a good philosophy department? And do you think a philosophy department at a research university can be good without a Ph.D. program? Florida faces great exigency and must cut its budget. While you were at Michigan, the University also faced great exigency, as it has again recently. Was cutting the Philosophy Ph.D. program something you would have long contemplated as Provost of Michigan? I doubt it. I like to think that the proposed cut to Florida's Philosophy Ph.D. program has yet to come before your attention with sufficient vividness, since the document with the proposed cuts is large and complex. And I like to think that when it does you will see the wisdom of retaining the program.

From C. Kenneth Waters, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities:

Great universities across the world have first rate philosophy departments, and that is no accident. I am sorry to see that the flagship public university of one of America's most prominent states does not recognize the value of philosophy.

From Daniel Garber, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Princeton University:

This is a short-sighted move, one that sets back the cause of liberal education in one of the country's important state universities.

From Otavio Bueno, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami:

UF has an excellent philosophy department. Keeping the department's Ph.D program will be an asset for the university -- and for the profession.

From David McNaughton, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University:

Even though I am on the faculty at FSU, and thus likely to benefit from this extraordinary decision, as a Past President of the Florida Philosophical Association, and as someone who cares about the profession, I am appalled.

From Peter Carruthers, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Florida cannot possibly aspire to be a serious research university without a PhD Program in Philosophy.

From Craig Duncan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College:

Others have spoken of the importance of philosophy to the humanities. Let me emphasize its practical importance too. In today's dynamic economy, career changes are the norm. Given this fact, it is important that students be trained in highly portable skills such as critical thinking, lucid writing, and accurate reading. Philosophy is a first-rate opportunity to hone these skills. Harming the quality of your philosophy department harms your undergraduates' education.

From Janice Dowell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln:

I have taught philosophy at state universities for over ten years. I have served as an undergraduate advisor for five of those years. I urge you to reconsider the termination of Florida's graduate program in philosphy. Good philosphy departments, such as Florida's, make a contribution to undergraduate education that far exceeds their size. Philosophy departments tend to be small and their faculty relatively low-paid. In short, good philosophy departements are relatively cheap. Yet philosophy majors consistently far out-perform just about any other major--in engineering, the sciences, or the humanities--on standardized tests for graduate programs, an excellent neutral measure of undergraduate learning. (Just check any source of information for the comparative scores of undergraduate majors on the GREs or LSATs. Year after year, philosophy majors dominate these lists.) The emphasis here, though, is GOOD philosophy departments. A university's ability to attract strong philosophers depends in part on the strength of their graduate program. Florida currently has a strong program and a strong department. It would be a real blow to undergraduate education at Florida to decimate the philosophy department by terminating its philosophy program. If this action is taken, I predict that the best faculty leave for better positions within a few years. It would be very difficult for a department to recover from this. And the reinstatement of the graduate program will be a necessary condition on recovery.

From Radu Bogdan, a philosophy professor at Tulane University and Bilkent University in Turkey:

Some time ago, I was considering applying for a job at UF, given the strength of the philosophy graduate program and its prestige. Philosophers make a great difference to a university, being the most interdisciplinary and connecting various fields. Both at Tulane and now visiting in Turkey, I set up and run cognitive science programs -- one of the most exciting developments in recent education -- and it is my experience that philosophers are the best link across disciplines in cognitive science. In eliminating the PhD at your university, you would weaken not only philosophy but also future developments in cognitive science, also various areas of applied ethics (business, ecology, medical, etc.) where philosophers are also essential. I hope you would reconsider.

From Alistair Norcross, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder:

Eliminating the Ph.D program in Philosophy at the University of Florida would be a terrible move. If that happens, the "flag" would have to be transferred to FSU

From Barry Loewer, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick:

It is a grave error for the University of Florida to close its PhD program in pilosophy. Over the years it has been an excellent program. A vibrant philosophy PhD program is needed for vibrant undergraduate programs in philosophy and the humanities and sciences in general. Closing the program will make the university much less appealing to undergraduates. It will lead to many of the faculty leaving. It will be embarrassing to Florida that its flagship university doesn't have a doctoral program in Philosophy and re-instituting the program will be enormously more expensive than maintaining the current program.

From Joel Anderson, Research Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands:

This strikes me as very poor judgment. Sometimes, sacrifices have to be made to make certain savings. But in this case, the savings are likely to be small, and the cost in loss of prestige and academic standing will be extremely high. For, what talented person is going to want to be hired or pursue an advanced degree at UF -- in any field of the humanities -- with this as the track record of the University? As a faculty member at one of the UF's international partner universities, I would add that this is the sort of move that will likely raise questions about whether to continue that partnership.

From Kevin Fink in Ohio:

This decision comes just weeks after I was admitted to the PhD program in philosophy. I am extremely disappointed. This is something I never would have expected from such a highly respected research institution. Further, I can hardly imagine that the cost to the reputation of the university is worth what little money can be saved by this cut.

From Elizabeth Palmer:

I completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the Univeristy of Florida and am now attending Indiana University's PhD program in philosophy. I cannot express how disgusted and disappointed I am with your decision to end the PhD program in philosophy at UF. The UF department is quite strong - they are ranked in the top 50 of all graduate philosophy programs. Although I understand the budget constraints Florida is facing, it is ludicrous to eliminate a program clearly performing so well. At this moment, I'm ashamed to be a UF alumna. I hope you reconsider your decision.

From Jennifer Arellano, an undergraduate majoring in philosophy at Florida:

As a philosophy undergrad at UF, I am outraged that [President] Bernie Machen would cut such a vital discipline from UF's PhD. curriculum. I have firsthand witnessed the proficiency of UF's philosophy department, the growing student interest, and the passion and drive of its philosophy students and professors. I came specifically to UF with one goal in mind - to earn my undergraduate degree in philosophy. If this department suffers any more setbacks due to Machen's insensitivity, inconsideration, and general insolence towards a first-class undergraduate education, I will hold him personally responsible for disrupting the quality of my education. The department is already small in size, and with some professors already leaving, how can we afford to lose any more faculty? At the expense of increasing student interest in the major? At the expense of the respectability of Florida's supposed flagship institution? I'm pretty sure Berkeley still offers PhD's in philosophy.

From Jason Braswell in Illinois:

As a former philosophy major at the University of Florida, I strongly disagree with the decision to cut the PhD program. Studying philosophy was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and it's sad that such an important subject is being marginalized.

From Charles Wolvertron in Virginia:

As someone who "discovered" philosophy late in life after a career in engineering, I think a claim of being relatively unbiased is justifiable. It is now my opinion that a course in philosophy should be a graduation requirement for every student. Eliminating a key part of your philosophy program is a step in the wrong direction and sends a message opposite to the one that needs sending.

From David Holt in Florida:

As a tax paying resident of Florida, who understands the skills in critical thinking that the study of philosophy provides, I urge you not to eliminate the Ph.D program at the University of Florida. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student some 30 years ago and know the sound foundation it provided for earning a living in business.

From Alice Allen in Florida:

Dear Dr. Machen, From a fellow Vanderbilt alumnus... Please reconsider and keep the PhD program in Philosophy. I know several of their students and have known others over the years. These young scholars are EXCEPTIONAL. I know times are tight and understand your need to cut somewhere. But a top Liberal Arts university needs a Philosophy Ph.D. program. Respectfully submitted, Alice Allen B.A., Vanderbilt, 1965 M.A, M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1967, 1969 Mother of a 2006 Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Florida with double major in English and Philosophy.

Here, finally, is an article from a Gainesville paper about the initial response to the proposed cuts.

Show Your Support for the Philosophy PhD Program at Florida, and for the Importance of Philosophy in the Curriculum

A professor at Miami Dade College has created an on-line petition protesting the decision to eliminate the PhD program at the University of Florida.  I hope other philosophers will join me in signing.

UPDATE:  May I suggest that when signing you use the comments to indicate who you are:  e.g., "undergraduate philosophy student at University of Missouri," or "graduate student in philosophy at University of Notre Dame" or "Assistant Professor of Law at University of Kentucky," or "Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida," etc.  You should, of course, add whatever other comments you think relevant, as many signatories have already done (lots of good comments too!).

ANOTHER:  50 new signatures in the hour since this post went up.  Nice work, readers!  But there were over 500 'hits' on the blog in the last hour (of course not all of those were real visitors, some land here by accident).  Don't be shy, please!  Sign!!!  It is important for the profession to stand up for the centrality of the discipline to the mission of a major research university.

Campus Visits by Prospective Students: What are the Norms? What is the Ideal? What are People's Impressions?

A philosophy graduate student at a mid-ranked PhD program writes:

I've been reading with interest the comments on your post aboutgraduate admissions yield.  It strikes me that it might also beinteresting to discuss the way that admitted prospective students aretreated on their campus visits. A couple of issues are important:

1) Different schools do their visits differently: some have a group visit, where all admitted applicants are invited to visit at the same time, while others invite the candidates to come individually. Both models have their merits and their disadvantages. Group visits, it seems to me, obscure the way that the department actually runs on a day-to-day basis. Individual visits, though much better at revealing the department as it actually is, have the unfortunate disadvantage of giving students the impression that the department is less ambitious(or less attentive, or - even worse - poorer) than other departments to which they've been admitted. While I doubt this is generally the case, impressions matter.

2) This is related to a second issue: the behavior of students on group visits. In my program - and I suspect this is true of many programs -the other offers our admitted students have received are wildly different. Some have been admitted to the very best programs, while for others our very good department's is the best offer they have received.  This disparity, it seems to me, leads to some extraordinarily infantile behavior on group visits. Those admitted to the top programs seem interested in little more than letting others know. And I fear that they poison the well: those who have no real intention of coming are able to influence others who have more meager options. I am confident in claiming that my department has lost a couple of prospective graduate students for whom our department was a terrific fit because of the ways in which one or two higher-profile admitted students laughingly compared our department to other, higher-ranked places.

All of this is encouraged, I think, by the recruiting process: we treat admitted applicants like rock stars. We throw them parties and takethem out to (sometimes quite expensive) dinners. We buy them plane tickets. And while they're around, we go out of our way to impress them at every moment. Every admitted applicant, no matter how arrogant, will presumably be put in his or her place in the very first week of a proseminar wherever they end up. But the disparity between what will happen when one arrives at a program and what faculty and graduate students put themselves through to get the students there in the first place is enormous and, to me, alarming.

All of this is just to say that I'd be interested to see if others havethe same impression I do. If you have the inclination, perhaps you'd start a thread on this topic.

Post only once; as long as an identifying e-mail is visible when you submit the comment (it won't appear), you need not post using your full name.

Job Placement Information on Departmental Websites

Colleagues in other fields are often impressed by how much information about job placement philosophy departments now make available on their web sites.  It was not always that way, alas.  About six years ago, I used the Update Service to the PGR--which reached several thousand philosophers--to suggest that departments be more forthcoming about this information, citing some models and indicating that in future editions of the PGR I would call attention to departments that were not providing such information, since that should surely be a warning to prospective students.  Departments, for the most part, reacted constructively and did the right thing, posting information about recent job placement on the web.  (One philosopher--a Kantian moral philosopher no less--objected to my "bullying" departments that perhaps preferred to keep the information secret.   There are, I suspect, many lessons to be learned about Kantian ethics from this example, but I'll save that for another day.)

Of course, the quality of information departments provide varies quite a bit in quality, reliability and informativeness.  I have mentioned, in the past, that the Michigan site is a real model of disclosure and detail, while the Texas site, among many others, is at the opposite end of the spectrum (even though, I should add, Texas job placement has improved markedly in recent years, but the site is both relatively uninformative and not entirely accurate).  It is in this context that I wanted to share an e-mail from philosopher Miriam Solomon at Temple University:

Recently, I compiled my department's placement statistics.

In doing so, I consulted the placement statistics that other departments have posted, and found considerable variability in reporting, which may lead to misleading comparisons.

For example, some departments just list those PhD graduates who have gone on to academic jobs and leave off the ones who dropped out; some departments omit those PhD graduates who "did not seek a job" or "went on the job market with geographic restrictions"; some departments list only the first placement, which may be temporary; some departments list job offers received and others job offers accepted; one department actually counts MD/PhDs as having "tenure-track"

jobs if they have a medical residency. In my opinion, the best information comes from those departments that list all their PhDs (by dissertation title) with full employment records.

May I propose that we have some standardization in compiling statistics here? If, as we recommend, students should take placement record into account in selecting graduate programs, we should provide them with the most usable, impartial, data as we can.

So what do readers think are model placement sites?  What information should be standard?  What presentation is most conducive to informing students while respecting the legitimate privacy interests of, for example, unsuccessful job seekers?  No anonymous postings; post only once.

Will Demographics Result in a Job Crunch in the Near Future?

A philosopher on the earlier thread about admissions posted a comment raising issues that deserve separate attention.  She writes:

I don't want to start a wave of paranoia, but I think it might be worth it for the profession to start some long term planning in grad admissions. It is my understanding that in about a decade (ie not long after the incoming grad class finishes their dissertations), the college age population is going to drop somewhat dramatically. The statistic I have heard floated is that this year's kindergarten class is the smallest since WWII. With about half as many students as are currently enrolled in college to teach, I suspect that universities will be cutting the number of faculty. What this likely means is no retirement replacements. Rather than create another situation like that of the late 80s and early 90s, the profession might well want to begin thinking now about how to handle these demographic changes. Grad admissions might be a clear area to strategize around. Another area might be the inclusion of philosophy into HS curricula (so there is a non-university arena for job-seekers). And while I never thought about these issues as a grad student (I didn't even know they existed), it might well be some handy information for grad students to have as they think about getting through their programs in a timely manner.

My impression of the demographics (at least for the US) is similar to this philosopher's.  References to data or trends, analyses of the implications of demographic shifts, and what the profession should be doing about all this are welcome in the comments.  Usual commenting rules apply:  post only once, non-anonymous preferred, etc.

Any Pattern to This Year's Graduate Admissions in Terms of Yield?

A senior philosopher writes:

We are a mid-ranking graduate program. In previous years we have normally finished up making about 15 offers to get an intake of half a dozen students, going two or three deep into our wait list following an initial set of dozen offers. This year, however, our experience has been quite different. We had to go much deeper into our wait list, and finished up making nearly 30 offers overall. An informal inquiry to one other program suggests that they had a similar experience. I wonder if there is some general trend here. Are students becoming much more cautions, making more applications overall, and making more "back up" applications than they previously would have done?

Usual commenting rules apply, though as long as I can verify your identity from your e-mail address (which will not appear), you don't need to post under your full name.

How to Best Prepare for Job Interviews at Schools with a Primary Emphasis on Teaching

A philosopher at a ranked PhD program writes:

I and some of my colleagues have the sense that we could do a better job helping our grads apply for jobs where the emphasis lies on teaching.  I would appreciate any advice from people who have served on Search Committees seeking to fill such jobs.  In particular, what are the elements of a really stand-out dossier, and a fantastic initial APA or phone interview?

Usual commenting rules apply, though as long as you have an e-mail that confirms your identity, it is not necessary to post your full name in the comments section.  Post only once please!  Comments may take awhile to appear.

McGill TAs on Strike!

A philosophy grad student at McGill points me to a web site with information about the situation for McGill TAs and the issues that prompted the strike.  Since Canada has actual labor laws that protect the rights of workers to effective collective bargaining and actions, one may hope there will be a timely and fair resolution to the dispute.

John Rawls Too "Selfish" to Hold Highest Professorial Rank at University College London

Michael Otsuka (UCL) writes about bizarre new rules at UCL and how they would have applied if Professor Rawls had taught at London:

John Rawls managed to write at least one book that deserves to be placed alongside Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, and Rousseau's Social Contract. He also devoted himself to the careful supervision of the doctoral work of a stunning proportion of the next generation's best moral and political philosophers.

Under the new professorial banding criteria that the Provost at University College London has just approved, Rawls would, however, have been consigned to the lowest (full) professorial rank and therefore would not have advanced more than £10,000 beyond the (full) professorial minimum. This is because he did not put the writing of A Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism, or the supervision of his doctoral students, on hold in order to find the time to meet at least two of the following three criteria:

(i) ‘Substantial engagement with national or international partners [e.g., Government Departments, NGOs, or the Media] in the public dissemination of information to the benefit of the community, or the population at large or to the commercial sector’;

(ii) ‘Active, ongoing leadership of review (or development of) the curriculum or teaching/assessment methodologies or the management of teaching within’ his university;

(iii) ‘A successful and effective contribution to the achievement of [his university’s] strategic goals beyond the area of research and teaching (for example in widening participation, in implementing the International Strategy, furthering equality and diversity or [his university’s] Capital campaign internally to [his university] or through negotiating complex partnerships, representing [his university] on matters of key importance overseas or in the local community or through fundraising)’.

At Harvard, by contrast, Rawls was promoted to the highest academic rank -- that of University Professor (of which there were only eight such professorships at the time of his

promotion in 1979).

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s best philosophers would be placed in the lowest professorial band at University College London unless they devoted significantly less time to their research and teaching (as opposed to the review or management of teaching) and more time to management and popularizing for which they have no special aptitude.

At a meeting, the Provost justified these criteria as a means of ensuring that the ‘selfish researcher’ is not able to rise up the professorial ranks. I guess Rawls’s problem was that he was just too selfish.   All he ever did was write great philosophy and form the next generation.

Whatever one's view of Rawls (there are, as we have noted, dissenters), it seems utterly mad to substitute PR showmanship for academic excellence as a criterion for promotion, at least at a serious university.  What do readers, in the UK or elsewhere, make of this development?  Is this kind of foolishness spreading to other schools in the UK?

Should a Philosophy Grad Student at a Non-Anglophone University Write His/Her Dissertation in English?

A graduate student at a German university writes:

I am a philosophy student at [a university in Germany] and will start with my PhD thesis soon. Because I am contemplating heavily whether I should write it in English or not, I have the following question for the philosophical community - and I guess/hope that it will be of great interest for many of the Leiter Reports' readers outside the English-speaking world:

"Imagine your philosophy department - in the English-speaking world - has a free postdoctoral position and it is up to you to decide who will get the job. Do you take into account a candidate who has published in, say, German, French or Spanish? Do you hold in esteem a paper in the, e.g., "Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung" at all? Has a candidate who has written (and published) his PhD thesis  in a foreign language any real chance to get the job? Thanks a lot for your comments!"

My guess is that a lot depends on the area of philosophy in which the student is writing.  While historians of philosophy are often actively engaged with scholarship in languages other than English, this seems to me, at least anecdotally, to be much more rare among those working in various contemporary fields, from philosophy of language to ethics to epistemology.  In consequence, a German student working in, say, philosophy of mind would probably encounter a very basic obstacle to being taken seriously in Anglophone departments, namely, the inability of most philosophers to read the work.  What do others think?  Usual rules on comments apply. 

Deciding Between Admissions Offers: The Importance of Visiting/Talking With Current Students

Applicants to PhD and MA programs have now mostly received offers of admission and, if they are lucky, are making choices between different departments.  I want to reiterate a point made in the PGR, namely, that students are well-advised to talk to current students at the programs they are considering.   There are often things you will want to know that you won't glean from familiarity with the excellence of the faculty's work, even if that remains the most important, if defeasible, reason for choosing a particular department.  Here are some examples of information that no ranking, no departmental brochure, and no "official" departmental representive will tell you about; all of these are drawn from stories I've heard from students over the last few years about ranked departments (the departments will remain unnamed, obviously).  You can think of them as representing "types" of problems you should be aware of before enrolling.  I've tweaked some of the details to protect identities.

The Absent Faculty:  Are the faculty who look so good on paper actually around and interested in working with students?  I heard a story about a key senior person in one department who is an alcoholic, and who simply ignores his students.  In another department, almost all the graduate students had to sign an open letter to the faculty a few years ago protesting the failure of faculty to return graded papers and their general lack of interest in mentoring the students.   In yet another department, a well-known senior member of the faculty spent so much time travelling and lecturing around the world, that he rarely had time to review or discuss work carefully with students. 

The Sexual Predator Faculty:  Are women treated as young philosophers and aspiring professionals, or do faculty regularly view them as a potential source for dates and sexual liasons?  It's a bit shocking to realize that this is still a live issue in some departments, but, sadly, it is.  Are faculty-student sexual relations common in the department?  What happens when the relations end?  Are there repeated cases of sexual harassment complaints against faculty in the department?  Do they ever result in discipline?  I suppose it is possible this could be an issue for male students, but all the reports I've gotten over the years have been from women victimized by male faculty. 

The Nasty Faculty:  Talented philosophers and scholars often differ, dramatically, in how pleasant they are personally and professionally.  I recall the story of one department where a member of the faculty was known to reduce students to tears in seminar.  In another department, a faculty member regularly refuses to work with students, even those interested in his areas; he works only with those he deems "worthy," and there are not many of them!  In another department, faculty openly express doubts about the competence of the graduate students and their ability.  Make sure the philosophers who seem most interesting to you don't fall into these categories!

The Factionalized Faculty:  Many faculties are "factionalized," in the sense that there are sub-groups that rarely see "eye to eye" about departmental issues, from appointments to admissions.  Where this becomes worrisome, though, for a prospective student is when certain members of the faculty who share interests and approaches control all the key resources--fellowships, resources for speakers etc.--and use that control to define "in" and "out" groups of faculty and students:  students with the "wrong" philosophical interests or who express an interest in the "wrong" faculty members are denied access to important perks and support.  This kind of ugly factionalization is less common, but it exists. 

I wish it were possible to meaningfuly measure and evaluate faculties along these important dimensions, but, alas, it is not.  I can report, based on accumulated anecdotes over many years, that some departments are really exceptional for how pleasant they are as places to do graduate study:  faculty are engaged, kind, supportive, committed, and professional in their interactions with students.  Arizona, North Carolina, MIT, UC Riverside, and U Mass/Amherst are among those about which one regularly hears these kinds of glowing reports.  I have no doubt there are many others, and the way for a prospective student to discover them is to talk to lots of current students.

Good luck with your decisions!

 

Advice for Undergraduates about Strengthening Their Applications to Grad Programs

An undergraduate philosophy student in Canada writes:

I am wondering, if you have some time to answer, whether you can suggest ways undergraduate students can get involved in philosophy outside of their classroom. Since graduate programs have become so competitive, there is a lot of fear among my peers that we will not be admitted into our schools of choice, particularly since the school we are doing our BAs in is not very well regarded, and is by no means at the top.

I have approached professors, inquiring whether I may help them out, but if they do offer such an opportunity it never involves doing actual philosophy. How can students co-author papers in top journals; that is, how should we approach our professors so that they will give
us such a chance? What should philosophy students do during the summers, when we are not taking classes? Aside from ensuring that we achieve top grades, what should we be doing to make ourselves attractive to prospective graduate schools? Also, how much do publications in undergraduate philosophy journals count?

Two quick thoughts:  first, it is extraordinarily rare for faculty to co-author with undergraduates, so undergraduates should not waste time pursuing that possibility; second, publications in undergraduate philosophy journals are worthless as a credential.  If it's a good piece of philosphical writing, great!  That it appeared in an undergraduate philosophy journal counts for nought it seems to me, all that matters is the quality of the writing.

Comments are open; post only once (comments may take awhile to appear); signed comments strongly preferred, as usual.

Talkative Students

Jonathan Wolff (UCL) comments.

Visiting Professors from Abroad Finding it Harder to Get Into the U.S.

A distinguished academic from the U.K., who has visited a number of times at U.S. institutions, writes:

I'm thinking...of giving up longer visits to the US. Not because I don't enjoy working here. On the contrary. But for various other reasons, not least of which is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy associated with getting a visa and getting through the border and reporting every little thing one does to the feds. The whole nightmare starts with a 15-quid phone call to a rude and sullen call centre operative who handles visa appointments and slaps your wrists for asking questions. Those who live in, say, Glasgow then have to travel 500 miles to sit in the US Embassy in London incommunicado (no phones or laptops allowed, and nowhere to store them if you have the effrontery to have them with you) until someone is good and ready to take all their fingerprints and to look for trivial errors on their numerous repetitive and gratuitously intrusive forms. The cost is astronomical even without all the travel and accommodation costs. Then you never know for sure how long they will hold onto your passport: a distinguished colleague of mine recently had to cancel a long-arranged lecture in another country because the US embassy, which knew of his travel plans, kept his passport for a month AFTER confirming that his US visa had been approved! Europeans have started to refer to US travel, only half-jokingly, as 'going behind the iron curtain'. Actually, this is an insult to the Warsaw Pact countries, several of which had a much lighter touch than today's US. They're now thinking of introducing a rule that you can't buy a plane ticket to the US, even for a quick tourist visit, without advance permission from Uncle Sam! I wouldn't mind any of this if it achieved something, but we all know that it is a competition by US politicians to see who can be the biggest ultra-nationalist bully, preferably by squeezing an arbitrarily-chosen selection of non-Americans until the pips squeak.

In an era when the scholarly community in most areas of philosophy, indeed in most disciplines, is international, this is a quite pernicious development.  Have others encountered problems with getting foreign scholars into the U.S. for extended, visiting/teaching appointments?  Do others overseas share my correspondent's perceptions of the problem?  Non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual, though if I can verify the identity of the commenter from the e-mail address, that will be sufficient (those addresses do not appear on the post).

Reading Philosophy

A reader writes:

I enjoy your blog at leiterreports. This sounds strange, but would you consider doing a blog on 'reading philosophy'? Reading philosophy isn't like reading done in other fields. The big issue that would be interesting, I think, to get feedback from others on is: how long does it typically take you to read a philosophy journal article, and what kinds of philosophers take the most time to understand. It would be interesting to have some kind of crude scale.

In a general sense, I just often find it frustrating, being a philosopher, to be able to speed-read other literature, only to have to spend hours upon hours to make my way through philosophical literature.

Leiden's Philosophy Department in Trouble!

Eric Schliesser, a philosopher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, writes:

I write you because I hope you would be willing to publicize the predicament of Leiden University's Philosophy department.

In the guise of transforming graduate education at Leiden University, the new University President wishes to merge the philosophy department (and a bunch of others) into a giant Humanities/Arts department. Normally such things move at very slow pace in the Netherlands, but the University President (a specialist in employment law) appointed a committee with himself as Chair and without membership of any of the affected departments; despite assurances to the contrary, he is now implementing the committee's recommendations even before the formal consultation process has finished. The reality behind the proposal is to create a vehicle in which to slim down all the Humanities at Leiden regardless of individual performance. A free standing graduate program for Humanities is financially not viable given the way funding for Humanities research has been cut in the Netherlands. (In Holland, PhD students are paid employees who are treated as civil servants.) Once the philosophy department falls under the new accounting procedures we will be unable to replace retiring faculty or fund new PhDs. Meanwhile, our valued support staff runs the risk of being laid off.
The department is a free-standing 'faculty,' which (to simplify) means it reports straight to the University President and is responsible for its own academic policies, academic hiring, and profit/loss accounting. The department is financially secure, has growing enrollments, an ample cash reserve, and is very efficient in its management of resources. The PhD program is very small (4), but a recent graduate got a job at Washington University in St Louis and another got a prestigious Dutch fellowship. It has 12 faculty, which have strengths in the history of philosophy (we have wide coverage in Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, ethics, logic, and early Analytical philosophy). We just had a visiting committee (one of the members was Bob Pippin) which praised the faculty research productivity.

Maybe you can ask your readership to contact the University President, Prof Dr Paul van der Heijden and let him know that there is International concern and support for our independence.  Believe it or not all publicity scares the administration. I would be much obliged.

This certainly sounds like an underhanded way to destroy a well-functioning unit through administrative maneuvering.  I hope philosophers will write to President van der Heijden in support of the independence of the philosophy faculty at Leiden.

University Support for Faculty Who Win External Fellowships

A philosopher writes:

Since fellowship awards typically get announced this time of year, it might be interesting to consider the following question: What policies or practices does your institution have regarding support of external fellowships in the humanities such as the NEH or ACLS?   Such fellowships typically support around half a senior person’s salary.  What, if anything, does your institution do to help recipients make up the shortfall and secure a full year’s research release?  For example: Does your institution routinely make up the shortfall, or only when the
recipient has accrued sufficient sabbatical credit?  Is the recipient responsible for covering her own benefits, or does your institution cover that?  Details regarding the kind of institution you work at – “research” v. “teaching”, “private” v. “public, etc. – will be especially helpful.

Comments are open; signed comments strongly preferred.  Post only once. 

A Huge Cut in Postgraduate Funding for Philosophy in the UK?

Simon Blackburn excorciates a recent government proposal in Britain, whose implications are, indeed, ominous for philosophy:

I have been reading the Arts and Humanities Research Council document called the Delivery Plan, 2008-2011....

[T]he document reminded me of the brag sheet I once caught a glimpse of when a rather porcine business man left his laptop open and facing me on a train. It was full of sentences like “I have considerable experience of progressing hands-on product delivery serving a variety of stakeholders in a fast-moving and challenging commercial environment”, which I interpreted as meaning something like I drive a van in Gateshead. But after the joke had gone on a little long, it dawned on me that the delivery plan was serious. They actually do think in terms like “Fostering knowledge transfer by our researchers with an increasing range of partners to produce greater economic and social impact”, and yes, they do scatter bold type everywhere to show just how serious and forward-looking they are....

Mere lapses of taste can be forgiven, but as in the movies when the slightly unnerving character with the gold tooth and the unfortunate wig suddenly reveals that he is a cannibal, so the AHRC soon reveal the black-hearted villainy behind the clowning. The essence of its delivery plan (also in bold) is that “over 2008-11 we will, via the new Block Grant Partnerships, move the percentage of our postgraduate budget falling within strategic themes from a low base to some 50%... A large number of the studentships we fund will fall within our strategic priority areas, such as the creative economy and heritage.” Not only the creative economy and heritage, but also lifelong health and wellbeing, and living with environmental change, and, well, just heaps of things that make up the challenging drivers and value chains piloted with our partner stakeholders. Not classics, or history (unless it is heritage), languages, literature, law or philosophy, of course.

We heard last week that the number of postgraduate studentships is to fall next year from 1,500 to 1000, although it would then go back up to some 1,300. That seemed bad enough. But now take away half of the support for anything that most people in universities would recognise as a subject, and we are down to between 500 and 650 students a year in classics, philosophy, languages, literature and the rest. That might be defensible if there were any evidence that there had been gross overproduction of MPhils and PhDs in the years before. But the AHRC itself admits that this is not so. 55 per cent of current AHRC graduates take up academic appointments, and 45 per cent go to key positions in the public and private sectors. One wonders what the equivalent figures will be for those who have done a PhD in heritage studies.

How bad will this be?  Will it go through?  Comments from UK readers and other knowledgeable observers are welcome.

Posting Drafts of Papers on the New SSRN-Like Service

David Estlund (Brown) writes:

I recently received an email about an SSRN-like service for philosophy....I’m writing to you to propose some discussion on your blog of this sort of thing. A few issues: Do journals object to final drafts being posted? Do we think it’s a good idea to treat so much work-in-progress as effectively published? Is it fair to cite a posted work in one’s own published work even though the cited thing might not be in final form? Is the shape of the field going to be affected by the dynamics of who participates the most in this technology, even though there’s no referee system that applies to it? I’m not a technophobe, but I do think these are worth continually thinking about. Distributing work in progress is time-honored, but it’s a new world. That was nothing like publishing. Now the lines are getting pretty blurry.

Good questions; what do philosophers think?  Post only once; comments may take awhile to appear, and are reviewed for substance and relevance; signed comments strongly preferred as usual.

"As a profession, is philosophy in a better or worse state than it was in 1997?"

That was the question put to ten philosophers in the 10th anniversary issue of The Philosophers' Magazine (which, alas, is not on-line).  Here are some of the answers that struck me as most interesting.

Simon Blackburn (Cambridge University & University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill):

The return of a highly scholastic metaphysics means it's worse:  there is a return of "intuition" masquerading as the a priori and a highly suspect self-image that metaphysics is just like science, except without the need toleave the armchair, which is about parallel to entering Formula 1 races without an engine.  I suspect that political and moral philosophy are better.

While Professor Blackburn thinks the glass is half empty, Jerry Fodor (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) thinks it half full:

It's better in one respect:  Philosophical inquiry is increasingly informed by discussion with adjacent subjects (psychology, biology, cognitive science, physics, and so forth).  In consequence, a priorism is less widely prevalent than it was at the height of the "analytical" philosophy movement.  That's surely a good thing.

Jaakko Hintikka (Boston University), by contrast, seems to be looking at a wholly different glass:

Intellectually, philosophy is now in the same or worse state of stagnation as in 1997.  With a few exceptions, the paradigm of philosophical thinking and writing is no longer like that of a scientist inquiring into the deepest secrets of nature or of the human mind, but an interpreter of the great works of literature or perhaps of a religious teacher interpreting the sacred texts.  The truth of what is commented on is either irrelevant or taken for granted.  For instance, in the immense secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have never found anything that would help me to understand better the subject matter Wittgenstein was inquiring into.  The main reason for the Byzantine state of affairs is the lack of fresh new ideas that would open up specific problems for philosophers--especially young philosophers--to tackle.

Alasdair MacIntyre (University of Notre Dame), meanwhile, presumably plans to stop writing:

If the philosophy published between 1907 and 1967 were to vanish without a trace, it would be an intellectual catastrophe.  If the philosophy published between 1967 and 1997 were to vanish without trace, it would be a very serious loss.  If the philosophy published between 1997 and 2007 were to vanish similarly, it would matter a little, but not that much.

Colin McGinn (University of Miami) is less gloomy than Professor MacIntyre, but still a bit nostalgic:

Better in some respects, worse in others.  It seems more democratic now, less centralised; but philosophy is not as exciting these days as it used to be.  I'd even say that a kind of graduate student mentality has taken over:  being an expert in "the literature" is too highly prized, while originality is looked on with suspicion.  Also, it's just got more nerdy.  The people are less amusing, shallower, more one-dimensional (I'm speaking generally).

Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) starts by noting (she is alone among respondents to mention this) that "the job market for young philosophers is considerably worse," meaning that "talented young people are increasingly deterred from choosing philosophy as a career."  She continues:

As for the people who are still in the profession, I think that the basic quality of work in moral and political philosophy is pretty high, but I wonder where the people of large insight and imagination are in the younger generation, people with the sort of humanistic breadth exemplified by [Bernard] Williams.  I sometimes think that we are becoming smaller, and that it would be a good thing if people who wrote on moral and political philosophy read more novels and poems, and spent more time encountering real human beings in different parts of the world.

John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) sounds a note of optimism, pointing to "the increasing 'globalisation' of philosophy," noting that one can "go to just about any major university in the world and lecture in English to audiences who are sophisticated, informed, and enthusiastic about philosophy."  Peter Singer (Princeton University & University of Melbourne) is similarly upbeat (and even more succinct):

In better shape.  At least so it seems to me--there appear to be more philosophers being widely read, beyond the profession, and a broader public interest in philosophy than there was 10 years ago.

So what do philosophers think?  Do you share the diagnoses of the philosophers quoted above?  It would be especially interesting to know whether younger philosophers are as gloomy as many of those senior scholars quoted above (McGinn, at 57, and Nussbaum, at 60 are the youngest philosophers quoted).

Post only once; signed comments are more likely to appear; as always, comments are reviewed for substance and relevance.

"How the APA Stole Christmas"

Here, courtesy of bioethicist Carl Elliott at Minnesota.

Jeff McMahan on the State of Normative Ethics

Once again, an excerpt from an interview in Normative Ethics:  5 Questions, this time with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers):

I am highly optimistic about the prospects for progress in normative ethics.  It is evident to me that great progress has already been made since I entered the field in the early 1980s.  Unlike many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which in recent years were seduced by bad French philosophy into a lot of silly "post-modern" theorizing that hs exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance, analytic philosophy is flourishing.  Part of the reason why analytic philosophy generally is in such a healthy state is that, as Jerry Fodor observed in a recent book review, philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies.  We no longer devote our lives to developing comprehensive philosophical or ethical systems.  We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed.  The result is that philosophy has become more of a collective endeavor than it was in the past, in the sense that different people are focusing selectively on problems that are elements or aspects of larger problems.  When the results of individual efforts are combined, we may achieve a collective product that exceeds in depth, intricacy, and sophistication what any individual could have produced by working on the larger problem in isolation.

I agree that some parts of the humanities have been "seduced by bad French philosophy" that has "exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance"; I agree that "philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies"; and I agree that "philosophy has become more of a collective endeavor."  But I disagree with everything else here, especially in the case of normative ethics (what would be the evidence, e.g., for its "relevance"?).  I am curious, though, what other philosophers think about McMahan's assessment.  (I would also be happy to hear from those who disagree with the claims of McMahan with which I agree as well.)  Signed comments are preferred; post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

ISI Philosophy Journals and Promotion Decisions

A philosopher in Turkey writes:

I am a junior professor teaching at an English language philosophy department in Turkey. There are at present five such departments (Bilkent, Bogazici, METU, Yeditepe and Koc) and a number of American and European trained philosophers at other departments. The number of English language departments looks likely to increase over the next few years. So there is a sizable and growing community of English speaking philosophers working in the country.

The reason I am writing is because here in Turkey the main criterion for promotions and hiring decisions is the number of articles published in journals listed in the ISI Arts and Humanities Citation Index. The distinction between ISI and non-ISI journals is one that is made at the national level by the Turkish Higher Education council. A list of journals included on this index can be found at: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~phil/phil-jrnls.htm. There are a number of good journals that are not included on this index and philosophers working in Turkey have a very strong incentive not to send papers to these journals. And so I often find myself sending articles to journals that are less prestigious and less appropriate for my work merely because they are included on the index while my preferred journal is not.

The reason why a number of good journals are not included in the index is a frequent topic of discussion here. And the guess is that for most philosophers in the English speaking world whether or not a journal is on the ISI citation index is not relevant when it comes to tenure and hiring decisions, combined with the fact that journal editors are already overworked and undervalued and getting a journal on the index quite possibly involves a lot of bureaucratic work. Is this guess accurate?

I have a number of questions for readers of this blog: (a) Are there any other countries where this sharp distinction is made between ISI and non-ISI journals? (b) Are there any departments in the English speaking world where whether or not a journal is on the ISI index is a crucial issue? (I imagine this might be the case in some institutions that focus primarily on the hard sciences) (c) For journal editors (especially those who have had experience with getting their journal onto the ISI index): Is the process of getting your journal listed extremely cumbersome?

Signed comments will be preferred; post ony once and be patient, comments may take awhile to appear.