Australia now offers Australian Federation Fellowships to lure its leading philosophical ex-patriates back home: five-year research appointments, high salaries, and equally large research budgets. So far, Australia has reclaimed Huw Price from the University of Edinburgh, David Chalmers from the University of Arizona, Paul Griffiths from the Universities of Pittsburgh and Exeter, and Philip Pettit from Princeton University.
Canada, meanwhile, has created the Canada Research Chairs; the senior ones (there are chairs for younger scholars as well) involve 7-year appointments, with one term free of teaching each year, and at a salary of 200,000 Canadian dollars (so about 160K US). In terms of salary, they are comparable to the Australian Fellowships, and while they involve more teaching, they also involve considerable research leave, and are renewable. (I'm not sure whether the Australian Federation Fellowships are renewable: I assume some knowledgeable reader will inform me before long.) In philosophy, the senior Chairs have gone to four English-speaking philosophers: Nicholas Griffin (McMaster University), Will Kymlicka (Queen's University), Adam Morton (University of Alberta), and Jeff Pelletier (Simon Fraser University). Unlike in Australia, most of the Chairs have not gone to recruit ex-patriates--only Morton, I believe, was recruited from abroad (from the University of Oklahoma at Norman).
No country, though, has suffered a brain drain of philosophical talent like the United Kingdom. Lost to the United States from Britain over the past two decades have been Julia Annas (Arizona), John Campbell (Berkeley), Jonathan Dancy (Texas, half-time), Susan Haack (Miami), Richard Holton & Rae Langton (MIT), Paul Horwich (CUNY), John McDowell (Pittsburgh), Colin McGinn (Rutgers), Christopher Peacocke (Columbia), Mark Sainsbury (Texas), and Galen Strawson (CUNY, half-time), among others.
Other native Brits who have spent longer in the U.S. include Kit Fine (NYU), Philip Kitcher (Columbia), and Michael Tye (Texas), among many others.
It would seem that a program in Britain similar to the Australian Federation Fellowships or the Canada Research Chairs would have many worthy candidates to recruit home from abroad. Of course, there is no sign, yet, that any such program is in the works for the U.K.--which is fortunate for the many U.S. departments, including my own, which have benefitted from being able to recruit first-rate British philosophers! And while Britain has had some success recruiting home some of its leading philosophical lights (Michael Frede went from Princeton to Oxford, and Raymond Geuss from Columbia to Cambridge, each about a dozen years ago; more recently, Sarah Broadie went from Princeton to St. Andrews, Simon Blackburn went from North Carolina to Cambridge, and Andy Clark went from Indiana to Edinburgh), it is clear that the balance sheet still favors the U.S. quite strongly. British Research Chairs or Fellowships, modelled on the Australian or Canadian ones, would almost certainly reverse the flow of academic talent, especially if it is coupled with abolition of the mandatory retirement age, which seems inevitable given European Union human rights standards, which bar age discrimination.
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