Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

National Association Representing Computer Scientists Denounces NRC Rankings

Here.  I do not recall any national association of scholars reacting this way to prior NRC reports (though, of course, prior ones were straightforward surveys of experts evaluating faculty and program quality).  Here's an excerpt from the CRA statement:

CRA has serious concerns about the accuracy and consistency of the data being used in the evaluation of the Computer Science discipline.

CRA has identified a number of instances in which data were reported under different assumptions by institutions, leading to inconsistent interpretation of the associated statistical factors.

CRA has further identified a number of instances where the data is demonstrably incorrect - sometimes very substantially - or incorrectly measures the intended component.

CRA is pleased that the NRC acknowledges there are errors in the data used to evaluate computer science departments and that, in the words of NRC Study Director Charlotte Kuh, “There’s lots more we need to look at for computer science before we really get it right.”

CRA will continue to work closely with its member departments and the NRC to help correct these errors and determine more suitable data sources for the evaluation.

What are the odds these problems are limited to computer science?  More strikingly, Ms. Kuh, who apparently bears the primary responsibility for this baroque and senseless methodology, acknowledges that the NRC rankings in computer science are worthless.

In fairness to racists

They aren't all in the Tea Party and they don't all use e-mail.

A Devastating Analysis of the NRC Ratings from a Leading Statistician

Here.  I added this as an update to the main post on the NRC rankings, but it deserves special notice.  Charlotte Kuh and Jeremiah Ostriker, who bear primary responsibility for this fiasco, really have good reason to be embarrassed.

More NRC Reactions

Epistemologists are not impressed!

Brad DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, makes what I suspect will become a typical mistake in interpreting the results.   According to the NRC, there is a 90% chance that the "true rank" of Berkeley Economics is between 4 and 8.

Every school in the nation is "among the nation's best" according to their press releases, but given the NRC's failure to actually rank the programs in an intelligible way, this seems a defensible gloss!

A Quick Guide to the New National Research Council (NRC) Rankings

UPDATE:  Given the large number of (largely new) visitors coming to this post, and the various updates I am adding to it, I will leave it at the top for a few days.  Regular readers are encouraged to scroll down for new postings.  Thanks

=========================

The NRC ranking of doctoral programs for 2005-06 is finally out .  A few quick points, and then some details about the results relevant to philosophy:

1.  The NRC ranking is not a ranking of faculty quality, so not really comparable to the PGR, even the PGR from 2004-06, the closest in time to the data the NRC collected, which was for 2005-06.  While in every past NRC report, the NRC collected and published expert opinion about faculty and program quality, this time the NRC did not.  Only one of the 20 variables used by the NRC even has any connection to faculty quality, and that variable (major awards and grants [adjusted for faculty size], such as Guggenheims, NSF Fellowships, American Academy membership and the like) is only a very weak indicator, for a host of obvious reasons:  only a small number of such awards occurred during the time period studied, so just one or two faculty can make a huge difference to the results on a small faculty; many of these awards favor some areas of philosophy over others [philosophers of science and logicians can get NSF awards, other philosophers usually can't; Guggenheim and ACLS Fellowships appear to favor historians of philosophy and value theorists over folks in philosophy of mind and epistemology; American Academy membership is 'chummy' and tends to go to "friends of friends" and older faculty, thus being a better backward-looking than forward-looking metric--a school with great younger faculty won't get picked up on this metric, etc.].

2.  The NRC ranking purports to be a measure of program quality or attractiveness.  (The idea that you could measure program quality without having any real measure of faculty quality is, in itself, astonishing.)  It purports to do this by aggregating twenty different factors in the humanities, broken into three categories:  Research Activity (meaning the one qualitative variable noted above, plus per capita publications, which imposes no quality control for journal, publisher, impact, etc., so is largely meaningless); Student Support and Outcomes (e.g., graduate student funding [rich, private schools fare better on average on this metric], job placement (without, as far as I can tell, any audit of the data schools reported), time-to-degree, availability of student health insurance, and several other variables); and Diversity of the Academic Environment (i.e., ethnic and gender diversity of the faculty and student body).  Note an irony about the use of job placement, which I assume got significant weigh in both the overall rankings (about which more, below).   A school reporting job placement in 2005-06 for the preceding five years would be reporting on the success of students who chose the school in the early-to-mid-1990s.  The last NRC, which included a regular reputation ranking of faculty quality, came out in 1995.  My guess is the correlation between the job placement statistics and the 1995 NRC report (and the mid-to-late 90s PGRs) is probably pretty strong, but that, of course, is because job placement is always a backwards-looking measure.

(I do want to emphasize that there is no indication that the NRC audited all the self-reported data from schools:  on job placement, time to degree, even the faculty rosters and the CVs.  I know from PGR experience that departments err in their self-reporting of information in only one direction.  If I'm mistaken about this, please let me know.)

From this mass of data, the NRC constructed two rankings.  The R-Ranking assigned weights to these variables in order to mimic, in effect, the results of a secret reputational survey of an unknown number of putative experts in each field (seriously).  More precisely:  "a sample group of faculty were asked to rate a sample of programs in their fields.  Then, a statistical analysis was used to calculate how the 20 program characteristics would need to be weighed in order to reproduce most closely the sample ratings.  In other words, the analysis attempted to understand how much importance faculty implicitly attached to various program characteristics when they rate the sample of programs."  The NRC does not report the results of its reputational survey, amazingly.  Nor is it clear on my reading whether there was any reason to think that faculty evaluating programs were even aware of, let alone interested in, some of the NRC variables.  The NRC insists the R-Ranking is not a reputational survey, and that is right.  It's essentially a weird and not very reliable approximation of a reputational survey of an unknown group of evaluators of unknown size.  (UPDATE:  On page 198 of the NRC report, we learn that "up to 200" evaluators for each field were surveyed, and on p. 286, we learn that a total of 171 philosophy faculty [no indication of how they were chosen, or what distribution of expertise or areas they represented] were each asked to evaluate not more than 50 programs; that each program had an average of 46.7 faculty evaluate it, with a low of 34 faculty for some programs, and a high of 57 faclty for some others.  A typical PGR survey collects responses from between 250-300 faculty for each program evaluated, and, of course, the list of evaluators is public.  Note that not all the philosophy programs were evaluated by any rater--see the comments by Stigler in Update #8, below.)

The NRC also calculated an S-Ranking, which assigned weights to the variables based on the weights respondents in each field said the criteria deserved.  This is vulnerable to the confusions Ned Block (NYU) noted.

Given the huge range of variables and the baroque methodology (which will no doubt generate its own cottage industry of commentary), it should not be surprising that the results (for Philosophy) qualify as somewhere between "odd" and "inexplicable."

3.  The huge time lag--the NRC Report released today is already five years out of date--is quite significant, especially for the "Research Activity" measures, which, because it employs per capita (or percentage of the faculty) measures, can be quite sensitive to just one or two faculty movements.  And since the Research Activity measures were, it appears, given the most weight in the R- and S-Rankings, these changes are also quite significant.  (One guesses, of course--I can't tell from the material I've seen--that it was the Awards & Grants that dominated, since per capita productivity is such an obviously poor measure.)  So, consider that Yale, which according to the NRC is not close to the top 25 in either the R-Ranking or in "Research Activity," did not have on its 2005-06 faculty two highly 'decorated' and recognized senior philosophers, Stephen Darwall, who moved from Michigan, and Thomas Pogge, who moved from Columbia.  (Even without them, it seems bizarre that Yale was not in the top 25 for "Research Activity.")  Given the relatively small size of the Yale Department, it's hard to see how just these two, even by the NRC's criteria, would not have changed the results significantly.   Similarly, the 2005-06 University of Chicago faculty roster would have included John Haugeland (Guggenheim winner, now deceased), Charles Larmore (Fellow of the American Academy, now moved to Brown), and William Wimsatt (productive and influential philosopher of biology, now retired).  These examples could be multiplied in both directions, though I think the important point to remember is that the NRC was not really measuring the philosophical quality of the faculty.

Putting these criticisms and concerns to one side, there is data in the NRC Report that should be of interest to prospective students, particularly, the systematic data gathered on time-to-degree.  I hope they will make that data easily available on the Internet.

Below the fold, a sample of some of the results for Philosophy.

Congratulations to Boston University!

The first school to officially violate the NRC embargo on the rankings!  (8:25 am CST.)

The NRC Rankings Aren't Officially Released Until This Afternoon...

...but already serious mistakes are being alleged in the data collection and processing.  "Garbage in, garbage out," as the first link puts it.  (I should add that inaccurate data appears to be the least of the problems.)

Harvard and Marty Peretz Redux

Robert Paul Wolff has the details of the event.  Kudos to Professor Wolff for doing the right thing!

The National Research Council Will Release Its Rankings of Graduate Programs for 2005-06 Tomorrow

I'll have more to say then, but now seems a good time to bring forward Ned Block's earlier comments about the methodology and its peculiarities:

I am not criticizing using polling to derive rankings. That is what the PGR does and I (like a lot of other people) think the PGR ratings, despite flaws, are good enough to be of considerable utility. However, it is already clear that the NRC procedures are so poor as to make their results specious and misleading. It is important to be clear on what the NRC did. The 21 variables that they used (e.g. number of faculty publications, whether students have health insurance, percentage of international students) were not arrived at by any kind of research. They were a result of deliberation within the NRC committee. There were two methods of “weighting” the 21 variables (20 in the case of the humanities since citation data in the humanities was inadequate)....

The first method was just asking people about their views. These were the “direct weights”, and the method used was NOT complicated or hard to understand. They asked people which characteristics were "the most important to program quality". (The one minor complication was that they asked this question within each of 3 categories and then asked people a similar question about the categories themselves.) My point against this procedure is that in asking people which characteristics were “the most important to program quality” they did not distinguish between indicators of (i.e. factors that give information about) program quality and features that themselves constituted a kind of program quality even if not very relevant to the all important intellectual quality of the program. I mentioned that the percentage of students with portable fellowships (Mellons, NSFs) is an indicator or assay but not itself a kind of program quality. I mentioned health insurance as something that it is itself a kind of quality but not much of an indicator. This is an absolutely crucial confusion since (at least I would argue) the use of many of the variables including the 5 measures of diversity (of 20 variables) could not be justified on the basis that they are significant indicators of the intellectual quality of the program. The whole rationale of assembling a lot of weak indicators into a stronger measure is undermined if the question asked is straightforwardly ambiguous in this obvious way. In addition, it is a repeated result in experimental psychology that people who can make an expert evaluation (e.g. a doctor evaluating symptoms or a faculty member evaluating a graduate application) are not usually very good at saying what the factors are that justify the evaluation or which is more important. Thus academics may know high quality work when they see it but not what justifies the evaluation.

The second method of weighting the variables is the one that is hard to understand. But in overview it is simple. They ascertained which weights made the variables correlate best with a PGR-like ranking. Here my point is that those who object to the PGR ranking (e.g. Christopher Gauker) can hardly have high expectations of a ranking to the extent that it is derived from a PGR-like ranking. A further point is that the NRC has not told us HOW WELL their weighted variables predict the PGR-like ranking. And they are not revealing the PGR-like ranking itself. I think this is an astonishing piece of intellectual acrobatics. They got PGR-like rankings from their respondents but won’t tell us about what they were because they involve mere opinions about the quality of philosophy programs, but they think well enough of those opinions to use them to choose the weights of the variables they used. They actually describe themselves as using the PGR-like rating to weight “objective variables” so as to “imitate, to the extent achievable, the judgment criteria of the initially surveyed faculty” [i.e. the PGR-like rating]. The chair of the NRC committee (Ostriker) and one of the members (Kuh) cite a joint 2003 book as having shown how to do this. Christopher Gauker is right that for each evaluated program, they did provide a link to a page that provided information about the program. One thing I like about their PGR-like ranking (the one they aren’t going to tell us the results of because it isn’t “objective” enough) is that they asked for both a rating and how familiar the rater was with each program. This is something the PGR could learn from (though at the cost of complicating the process).

The NRC methodology is so technical (see Ostriker & Kuh, 2003) that most readers will lack the expertise to understand it. The key fact to focus on though is that eyeballing the list of 20 variables they used, only 4 have much prima facie plausibility as indicators of intellectual quality (as opposed to other kinds of goodness) in a philosophy program. Those are the number of publications of faculty, percent of faculty holding grants, faculty awards and GRE of students. The first of these is rendered uninteresting because no attempt is made to evaluate the substantiveness of the publication or the quality of the venue. One point for articles, five for books; that’s it. The percent of faculty holding grants is a matter of faculty holding grants at the very moment they filled in the form, rendering it uninteresting. GREs…well we all have our own opinion of the value of GREs. The award variable seems to me the most significant, although as Brian pointed out, some awards just perpetuate traditional hierarchies. Putting it all together, no matter how wonderfully advanced their method of weighting these variable is, it is unlikely that the information is there in those variables to make a highly significant predictor of actual intellectual quality of philosophy programs. And when you add the fact that it is already 3 [ed.--now five] years out of date, the word ‘pathetic’ comes to mind.

New Philosophy Major Approved for Texas A&M-Corpus Christi--So How Does One Recruit Majors?

Philosopher Don Berkich (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) writes:

In the midst of all the bad news for philosophy from Middlesex and Southern Mississippi, it may be heartening to announce that the Texas A&M System board approved the Philosophy Major at A&M-Corpus Christi Friday.  I believe this makes us the only A&M system school outside College Station to offer the BA.  Alas, we likely will not see approval to hire additional faculty any time soon, but it is a strong step forward. My colleague Andy Piker deserves most of the credit for a monumental, three-year slog bringing this about. Please see here for more information. Any advice you or the good folks on Leiter Reports may have for recruiting majors would be greatly appreciated.

Since almost all my teaching has been at the postgraduate level (either JD or PhD students), I'm afraid I don't have any useful advice to offer on this topic.  But I imagine many readers do, and that this will be of wide interest, especially at a time when administrators often appeal to enrollments and numbers of majors in deciding on cuts to programs.

3 Quarks Philosophy Blogging Prizes

Here.  Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia) is clearly a very generous critic!  In the comments, "Tomkow," one of the winners, suggests all philosophy will soon be blogged.  I'm not sure if he was joking.

Weimar America?

My former colleague Sandy Levinson (Texas) comments.

Speaking of commenting policies...

...I have one too, and newer readers might want to take a look at it, though they may have already inferred its contours.

Sorry for the No News Day

Once each year, the University of Chicago Law School hosts its alumni on the law teaching market for a day of mock job talks and interviews before the hiring convention, and I am one of the organizers of the event--which was today.  So I've been busy.  More posts coming this weekend, and of course next week.  Thanks for your patience.

"Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science"

A new group blog, featuring a diverse cast of philosophers, including many who will be well-known to readers of this blog as incisive commenters on threads here, including Mark Lance, Eric Schliesser, Jon Cogburn, and John Protevi--hopefully, they won't stop commenting here!  I also like their comments policy.

Should Departments Be Required to Rent "Suites" at the APA Hotel for Interview Purposes?

Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech) writes:

Am I the only female who thinks it silly in 2010 to force departments to pay many hundreds of dollars (coming right out of our budget) to exclude a certain piece of furniture in the interview room?  In the past, at least it sufficed to hide the b__ behind a screen (for which hotels charged quite a bit extra).  To create what they call "made" suites this year, one must pay for two rooms, but one is guaranteed cot-free (nor does it suffice to drag the offensive item out each interview morning). Isn't there already sufficient incentive to be 100% professional at interviews?  Is being interviewed behind closed doors in a suite more acceptable than in a room containing a b__, as opposed to a couch, or a screened bed? does it really help to shroud beds, cots, or couches?  (It's a bit like shrouding females to insure no unwanted attention?)

Kick the bed to the side, sit on a chair!

Thoughts from readers?  Signed comments preferred, though job seekers may post without putting their name in the signature line.

 

Switching from Quarters to Semesters: More or Less Work?

Philosopher Michael Cholbi (Cal State-Pomona) is soliciting opinions and taking a poll.

Alternative Options and "Back-Up Plans" for Philosophy PhD Students Facing a Very Bad Job Market

In the earlier thread on the job market, a couple of commenters asked for a separate discussion of options that PhD students might consider as they confront a job market that may be unusually austere.   I am opening comments here for questions and discussion.  A couple of readers did e-mail to ask about law school and the job market for new lawyers.  Students trained in philosophy tend to do well in law school, since the main analytical skill that is central to most law classes--dissecting arguments and responding to them, thinking about hypothetical cases, etc.--are ones that philosophy hones particulary well.  There are, it should be emphasized, big differences as well.  Most importantly, arguments from authority are not fallacious, but central to legal argument.  And thus the boundaries of any argument are set by the authorities at hand:  the legislative materials, the prior cases, and so on.  In addition, of course, many of the issues are fairly banal by comparison to what we might argue about in philosophy, though some areas of law (criminal law, torts) are a rich repository of problems familiar to those who work in normative ethics.

There has been a significant contraction in the job market for new lawyers, but nothing like what we have seen on the academic job market, and the effect of the contraction is extremely pedigree-sensitive (law being much more pedigree-sensitive than philosophy).  The vast majority of graduates of the very top law schools (Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Columbia most clearly) still have good opportunities.  So do most of the graduates of NYU, Michigan, Virginia, Berkeley, Northwestern, Cornell, Texas, Duke, Vanderbilt and so on.  I will say that it pays currently to go to a smaller law school than a larger one (ceteris paribus of course) given the contraction in hiring, for a simple reason:   the leading law firms are still hiring students fresh out of law school, but they are hiring fewer of them; at the same time, they all like to have at least one or two grads from the leading law schools, to keep the connections fresh, to benefit from word of mouth, and so on.  So if Skadden Arps (a leading and very large law firm) is now hiring, say, 100 new attorneys, instead of 200, but still wants to have at least 1 or 2 grads from each top school, and there are 200 students (mor or less) in each class at Yale and Chicago and Stanford, and 450 at NYU and 550 at Harvard, and every other major firm is acting similarly, well, you can do the math.

I am happy to answer other questions about law school in the comments.  And please do not take the thread as confined to law school as an alternative.  Please cast the net widely, and feel free to post advice and ideas as well as questions.  (I will permit anonymous posts as the norm here, since I understand that current PhD students do not wish to advertise their concerns about having to leave the profession.  I will still moderate for content and relevance.)

In Memoriam: Margaret Osler (1942-2010)

A well-known scholar of the history and philosophy of science, Professor Osler spent most of her career at the University of Calgary.  The Calgary memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Richard Zach for the pointer.)

UPDATE:   Another memorial here.  (Thanks to Fred Ablondi for the pointer.)

"Conservativism and Counterrevolution"

This is an instructive essay by political theorist Corey Robin (Brooklyn College/CUNY Grad Center) that puts contemporary American conservativism and its pathologies and peculiarities in some intellectual-historical context:

Download Raritan essay

It appears in the summer 2010 issue of Raritan; my thanks to the editor and to Professor Robin for permission to upload a copy here.

Another new philosophy blog...

...from the grad students at Colorado/Boulder.

"Marty Peretz's Emptiness and the Corruption of Harvard"

Another well-deserved "whack," this time from the political theorist Alan Gilbert (Denver).

Philosophers (and others) on logic

A nice collection of quotations, courtesy of David Marans (St. Thomas/Miami).

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

A Short Intellectual Biography of G.A. Cohen

By a longtime Oxford colleague, Michael Rosen (now at Harvard), presented at a recent memorial conference at Columbia University.  It's a good read, and illuminating also for its capsule history of Marxist thought.  Rosen makes a particularly useful point, I thought, about Cohen's extreme (and not very worked out) moral realism, one of many ways in which Cohen was a most unMarxian Marxist, and which probably explains his highly moralized version of Marxism in his later work (which I take as my target in this paper, from The Future for Philosophy volume [OUP, 2004]).

NPR Has a New Academic Blog, "Cosmos and Culture"...

...that includes philosopher Alva Noe (CUNY Grad Center).

Columbia's University-Bashing and Tenure-Trashing Mark Taylor Eviscerated

Here.  Even if he doesn't fall silent, perhaps we may hope that the New York Times will stop giving this know-nothing a platform.

(Thanks to several readers for forwarding the link.)

Robert Paul Wolff Whacks Marty Peretz Again

And rightly so:

Back in 1960, Marty was an egregious little wannabe hanger-on to the group of young proto-lefties who called ourselves "The New Left Club of Cambridge," but subsequently, he married money, bought The New Republic, and turned that fine old progressive magazine into a flack for the State of Israel. Marty has done well for himself, if you ignore the sort of person he is. It seems there is a Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature at Harvard, no less. A scholarship fund will now be set up in his name at Harvard, and he will be honored at the lunch.

When I heard that I was going to be sharing the podium with Marty, I thought seriously about canceling. I don't know how much time I have left on this earth, and somehow spending even a lunch of it in the presence of Marty Peretz doesn't strike me as a good use of my time. But I am genuinely proud of my small role in the establishment of Social Studies [at Harvard]....

Now I read that Marty has shot his mouth off about the controversy surrounding the proposed Muslim community center near the former World Trade Center in New York. Here is what he is quoted as having said: "But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse."

Apparently a doctorate from Harvard isn't what it is cracked up to be. Marty is under the impression that the First Amendment protections are a "privilege" -- which, I am sure, he imagines he has earned. I wonder whether he has remembered to register as an agent of a foreign power.

It's nice to read someone who speaks plainly about craven villains.  And it's nice not to be the only academic blogger who isn't afraid of his own shadow.

UPDATE:  On the relationship between having tenure and cowardice, do see this earlier discussion.

Bad Behavior by the University of Minnesota

Details here.

(Thanks to C.E. Emmer for the pointer.)

Ruth Barcan Marcus's Philosophical Autobiography

This is a very interesting, and often entertaining, read, both for what it tells us about a distinguished philosopher's career, but also about the sociology of the profession over time:  Download FINAL_RBM Dewey Lecture.  It will be published in the November 2010 Proceedings and Addresses of the APA, whose editor kindly gave permission to also post it here.

Politically Motivated Hacking and Wikileaks

Who better to comment than Peter Ludlow (Northwestern)?

The Ultimate 'Esoteric' Reading of Plato: Jay Kennedy Replies to Critics

Dr. Kennedy (Manchester) has kindly prepared replies to those who commented on the thread about his research earlier in the summer:

I thank the Leiter Report for making room here to respond to the many rich comments about my Apeiron paper on symbolic structures in Plato's dialogues. The stakes in this debate are high. Unravelling these symbolic systems promises to revolutionise our understanding of Plato and Platonism. 

There has been a great deal of progress made since the Apeiron paper was written. For those in the UK, I will be speaking to classicists about these developments at Manchester (23 Sept.), The Institute for Classical Studies in London (4 Oct.), and Leeds (27 Oct.). My forthcoming book, The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues (Acumen, Spring 2011), substantially expands the evidence in the paper. 

1) NEW DOCTRINES? Aaron Boyden, Mohan Matthen, and marcus say that my arguments expose musical structure but not new doctrines. MSPD has a chapter entitled 'Extracting Doctrine from Structure.' My strategy, however, was to publish the evidence for the musical structure first. 

The passages marking the notes repeat at regular intervals and therefore can be studied objectively and rigorously. A future book will show that there are other types of symbols which carry Pythagorean doctrine. 

Phillip Horky wonders if the symbolic structures really have a Pythagorean provenance. I agree that they may partially reflect Plato's innovations and that it may be difficult to parse the relation to the work of Archytas or Philolaus. There are strong indications, however, that the structures fit into the Pythagorean tradition. Most obviously, the hidden musico-mathematical structures bear a family resemblance to the hidden 'music of the spheres.' 

THES World University Rankings for 2010

Here.  Being typical journalists, who have no idea what they're doing, they've had to completely revamp the 'methodology' to fix little problems like Berkeley barely cracking the top 40 in past years.  The 'methodology' basically rewards schools for strength in the hard sciences, engineering, and areas of medical research; strength in humanities and the social sciences counts for much less.  The London School of Economics, for example, can't break the top 80.  Make of it what you will!

Pitt's News Release on Award of "Rescher Prize" to Ernest Sosa

Here.

Uffink from Utrecht to Minnesota

Jos Uffink, a philosopher of physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he will start in fall 2011.  Minnesota plans to search for another philosopher of science to complement Uffink's expertise.

Another Good Sources of News about Philosophy Conferences, Jobs Etc.

The Google Group on "Philosophy Updates" administered by Fritz Allhoff and grad students at Western Michigan.  You can also subscribe by e-mailing them.

Save the Warburg Library!

Several readers have called this travesty-in-the-making to my attention.  The collection survived the Nazis, but may not survive the new "corporate" model of higher education in Britain. A great opportunity for an entrepenurial university in North America or elsewhere!

Christian Hatred Watch

MOVING TO FRONT--SEE THE UPDATE

From an unsurprising source, though it gets even better in the comments. Jeff Culbreath, responding to the suggestion that his original posting amounted to calling for "a new Crusade":

I don't know about that. We just need our country to be an Islam-free zone. The presence of Mohammedans and the threat of Muslim violence is paralyzing. There is simply no alternative. May I suggest a gentle five point plan?

1. Halt Muslim immigration.
2. Revoke the visas of Muslim students.
3. Offer Muslim families $100K to return to the Muslim country of their choice.
4. Halt the building of mosques.
5. Halt the printing and distribution of the Koran.

Yes, I know, first amendment and all that. But the the first amendment is dead, and Islam killed it. There is no "freedom of speech" or "freedom of religion" with the threat of Muslim violence hanging over your head. Once this "five point plan" does its work you can have your first amendment back.

Lydia McGrew (yes, that one) weighs in:

And as far as I can tell, you could do points 1 and 2 without any actual First Amendment problems whatsoever, whatever the courts might say.

If you don't like 3-5, we could try adding--

3'. Pass jihad sedition laws and enforce them by seeding federal agents in mosques and arresting relevant imams.

4'. Local agencies refuse some mosque-building permits on plausible non-religious grounds. (E.g. "That coat factory has such wonderful architecture that we just can't destroy it.")

5'. Tear out all Muslim foot basins in public buildings.

6'. Federal and state enforcers of religious non-discrimination laws issue guidance statements to businesses indicating that a heck of a lot of things that have previously been required or thought to be required as "reasonable accommodation" of Muslim religion are actually _unreasonable_ accommodation and that they will get in _no trouble_ if they refuse these accommodations to Muslim employees.

7'. Revoke the passes of all Muslim prison chaplains.

8'. Begin extra screening of military personnel based on risk factors for Nidal Hassan-style violence, where these risk factors clearly include Islamic self-identification.

I believe that not a single one of these creates First Amendment problems. Remember re. #8 that military personnel do not as it is have all the constitutional freedoms, including rights to due process and freedom of speech (they can be punished for criticizing the President, for example), that civilians have. If any one would have to be cut on First Amendment grounds, it might be 7. But all the others should pass with flying colors.

They should cumulatively make Muslims in America feel uncomfortable. Which is fine with me.

Given the high-minded moral tenor of the discussion, it is perhaps not surprising that all this brings forth an intervention by one Steve Dalton:

Lydia and Jeff, I like your ideas, but I like mine better. A-bomb Mecca, Medina, and Riyadh into glass. As long as these three cities exist, Islam will be a threat to the West. Everybody who is well informed knows oil money from the Saudi's is used to finance the building of mosques and the printing of Islamic propaganda against the West. Nearly all of those that have committed acts of terrorism against us and other countries have been members of the Wahhabi sect of Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia. The Saudi monarchy should be told that Islam is coming to an end as a religion and a geo-political force. The citizens of those cities should be given fair warning to leave, then let the sand making begin. The Allah shouters will have to realize that Allah couldn't save his own land, and they'll start looking elsewhere for worship. This may seem harsh, but untill you destroy the very center of Islamic power, we'll always be threatened by it. History have shown that Islam and the Muslims will never give up untill they're defeated on the battlefield. I say end this nonsense once and for all by knocking out Islam at its very center.

The only rebuke this call for genocide provokes is from Mr. Culbreath who suggests that "before we go there, let's try some mild but firm common-sense policies at home, shall we?" meaning his own "mild" and "common-sense" proposals.

No further comment is necessary.

UPDATE:  I suppose it should surprise no one to learn that the Christian crazies who hate the Muslims also are anti-semites:

In the United States, the Jews - as Jews - do not constitute a violent or subversive socio-political movement. You can criticize Judaism in this country without a gang of brutes threatening to cut your head off. American Jews are not much into honor killings, nor are they particularly fascinated by explosive devices. The kinds of problems that Jewish influence typically introduces to a Christian society - religious indifference, moral laxity, etc. - have long been present in this country for other reasons.

(Thanks to Aaron Baker for catching this).  I have to confess, I'm kind of dying to know what would be on his "etc." list of the "problems that Jewish influence" brings. 

Is the Pacific APA Meeting Scheduled to Meet on Easter Intentionally? And Should It Be?

Philosopher Justin McBrayer calls my attention to the fact that it looks like the annual meeting for the Pacific APA is regularly scheduled to fall on Easter weekend.  Here is the information Professor McBrayer forwarded:

85th Annual Meeting
April 20 - 23, 2011, Hilton Bayfront, San Diego (Easter is April 24)

84th Annual Meeting
March 31 - April 4, 2010, San Francisco (Easter was April 4)

83rd Annual Meeting
April 8 - 12, 2009, Vancouver (Easter was April 12)

82nd Annual Meeting
March 19 - 23, 2008, Pasadena (Easter was March 23)

81st Annual Meeting
April 3 - 8, 2007, San Francisco  (Easter was April 8)

I am not, needless to say, a religious observer of the Easter holiday, but I was astonished by this pattern, which seems to place a burden on at least some observant Christians who might want to attend the APA.  Can anyone explain why the Pacific APA is scheduled this way?  And what do philosophers think about this? 

Yolanda Travis, McDonald's Franchisor of the Year

Business sense like this is probably hard to teach:   Ms. Travis owns the McDonald's here in Hyde Park/Kenwood (52nd and Lake Park, for locals), where last week a member of my family purchased a Big Mac, consumed it, and then became violently ill for hours afterwards (obviously food poisoning).  We complained to McDonald's.  Ms. Travis, in response, offered to give us a free Big Mac.  Seriously.

We'll see her in court, though if her legal sense is as good as her business sense, this will not be a protracted litigation.

Talking about "The Profession of Philosophy" on the Radio...

...with philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein from the University of North Dakota, tomorrow (Sunday) at 5 pm Central time, for those who might want to tune in (and hopefully this time, we won't have technical difficulties!).

UPDATE:  The full show is now on-line here.

More Details on the "Butchering" of the Philosophy Program at the University of Southern Mississippi

"Butchering" was the apt term used by a faculty member who sent me the following details:

The on-going budget crisis at USM required a $15 million reduction in spending for the academic year 2011-12. This is on top of a $12 million cut made last year for the 2010-11 academic year.

Last year’s cuts on the academic side of the budget were determined primarily on the basis of suggestions made by the Deans of each school (Arts and Letters, Business, Science and Technology, Education and Psychology, and Health). Included in those reductions was the elimination of the Economics Department from the school of business. Several faculty complained that those cuts were capricious and arbitrary (and in the case of Economics, political and personal).

In an attempt to make the process more fair and open, the administration formed the University Planning Committee (UPC). The purpose of the UPC was to evaulate and rank every “program” in the entire university. The administration would then base their cuts on these rankings, thus eliminating only those programs judged to be the weakest. Criteria included things like contribution to the mission of the university, history, uniqueness, internal demand, external demand, scholarly productivity, cost, etc.

In the cuts announced recently (August 2010) twentynine total current faculty are to be laid off across the university —fourteen tenured, eleven tenure-track, and four instructors. Ten of these faculty were from the College of Arts and Letters. The Department of Philosophy and Religion received a grossly disproportionate reduction. The entire Regious Studies program was eliminated, including one tenured professor, two tenure-track professors, and one instructor. The M.A. in Philosophy was also eliminated and the Philosophy faculty was reduced from six to four by the firing of two tenured professors.

Rutgers's Sosa Wins Inaugural "Rescher Prize" from University of Pittsburgh

Professor Rescher has kindly forwarded to me the announcement, which does not yet appear to be on-line:

  The University of Pittsburgh has named Ernest Sosa as the inaugural awardee of the recently established Nicholas Rescher Prize for contributions to systematic philosophy. Named in honor of a distinguished philosopher who has been on Pitt’s faculty since 1961, the prize consists of a gold medal together with a sum of $25,000.
    Born in Cuba in 1940, Ernest Sosa earned his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. From that time until 2007, Sosa taught at Brown University. He then joined the Philosophy Department at Rutgers University, which he had visited as a distinguished professor for a decade before that.  At Rutgers he is now Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy.
    Sosa has served as a president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) and as editor of the prestigious journals Nous and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 2005, and the Paul Carus Lectures at the American Philosophical Association in 2010. His work is the subject of John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa and his Critics (2004). His contributions to epistemology--and to virtue epistemology in particular--are widely appreciated as a groundbreaking unification of ideas from epistemology, value theory, and ethics.
    The prize is named in honor of Nicholas Rescher who has served on the Philosophy faculty since 1951 and has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society as well as Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences.  Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.

More Podcast Interviews with Philosophers

"Elucidations" is the work of two PhD students here, Matt Teichman and Mark Hopwood, who manage to cover a remarkably diverse array of topics with skill and insight.  Since I last posted a link to this site, there are lots of new interviews, including with Richard Kraut (Northwestern), Ted Cohen (Chicago), Jesse Prinz (Chicago PhD, now at CUNY), Jason Bridges (Chicago), Daniel Groll (Chicago PhD, now at Carleton), and Fabrizio Cariani (Northwestern), among many others.

More Photos of Philosophers by Steve Pyke

I see he has now many of the new ones on-line.  They'll be out in book form from OUP in a few months.

What will this year's job market be like?

We'll have more concrete evidence soon, since we're a month or so away from the October JFP.  I have no special "inside" information, just accumulated anecdotal evidence.  My best guess is that we will see more jobs this year than last, but that the market will be at least as competitive as last year due to the growing backlog of candidates who did not secure positions last year or the year before.  If--and this is a huge *if*--there is not a double-dip recession and the economic climate continues to improve, then maybe in two or three years we will see an academic job market with more favorable numbers.  But that also supposes that some candidates will have given up in the interim.  The inescapable reality, I am sad to say, is that there is going to be some number of very able candidates who would have secured tenure-track employment had they been entering the market ten years ago, but will not find such employment in the current severely depressed academic market.  It behooves all job seekers to have back-up plans in place, whether that means additional education or non-academic employment, and whether those plans are conceived as alternatives to an academic career or as ways of postponing the academic job search.

Information and perspective from others is welcome.  Signed comments preferred, as usual.

Barack Obama: Friend of Torture

More change we can believe in.

More New Philosophy Books

Some recent books that publishers and/or authors kindly sent me:

After Herder:  Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition by Michael N. Forster (Oxford University Press, 2010).   (This is a very important collection, that anyone working in German philosophy of the 18th-, 19th- or 20th-centuries will need to read.)

Signals:  Evolution, Learning and Information by Brian Skyrms (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Three Questions We Never Stop Asking by Michael Kellogg (Prometheus Books, 2010).

Heidegger's Nietzsche:  Being and Becoming by Paul Catanu (8th House Publishing, 2010)

Placing Blame:  A Theory of the Criminal Law by Michael S. Moore (paperback edition, Oxford University Press, 2010; originally published 1997).

Relativism:  A Contemporary Anthology edited by Michael Krausz (Columbia University Press, 2010).

UPDATE (9/9):  Just today, five more books arrived, all from VIP/Automatic Press, in the 5 Questions series:

Epistemic Logic edited by Vincent Hendricks & Olivier Roy (2010).

Mind and Consciousness edited by Patrick Grim (2009).

Philosophy of Computing and Information edited by Luciano Floridi (2008).

Living Technology edited by Mark Bedau et al. (2010).

Probability and Statistics edited by Alan Hajek & Vincent Hendricks (2009).

Any philosophy students (undergraduate or graduate) thinking about law school...

...or JD/PhDs will be interested in this.  Shoot me an e-mail if you have additional questions.

UPDATE:  Let me respond to some questions that have already been e-mailed me, answers to which might be of general interest.  First, these new full tuition scholarships are available to anyone, regardless of nationality.  So foreign students can be awarded these lucrative fellowships.  Second, there is only one criterion:  academic excellence.  Numbers are going to be a big part of that, i.e., LSATs in the 98th percentile and higher and GPAs in the 3.9 range and higher.   Let me be clear:  that's a rough numerical benchmark, not an official cut-off.  Having a PhD in philosophy is also obviously going to be a big plus, and certainly the Law School will be looking for candidates with potential to be distinguished academics.  (Per capita, Chicago lags only Yale in the number of graduates who go into law teaching.)    Third, I do not generally recommend a JD for someone with a PhD (or concurrently pursuing a PhD) unless they are interested in teaching in law schools.  While a JD will certainly add some intellectual value and skill sets that can be deployed to good effect in a philosophy career, it does not significantly enhance your competitive position on the philosophy market, and it's not obvious that the costs of the three-year course of study will be worth the intellectual benefits.  But for those interested in a law teaching career, a JD/PhD is pretty much de riguer now for anyone who wants to do work at the intersection of law and philosophy and get a job in a law school.  I talk a bit in the last paragraph of this old post about some of the difference between teaching philosophy in a law school versus a philosophy department, but I think I'll write something more about this soon.

Philosopher of Religion Keith Parsons Calls It Quits

This is striking:

Over the past ten years I have published, in one venue or another, about twenty things on the philosophy of religion. I have a book on the subject, God and Burden of Proof, and another criticizing Christian apologetics, Why I am not a Christian. During my academic career I have debated William Lane Craig twice and creationists twice. I have written one master’s thesis and one doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of religion, and I have taught courses on the subject numerous times. But no more. I’ve had it. I’m going back to my real interests in the history and philosophy of science and, after finishing a few current commitments, I’m writing nothing more on the subject. I could give lots of reasons. For one thing, I think a number of philosophers have made the case for atheism and naturalism about as well as it can be made.....

Chiefly, though, I am motivated by a sense of ennui on the one hand and urgency on the other. A couple of years ago I was teaching a course in the philosophy of religion. We were using, among other works, C. Stephen Layman’s Letters to a Doubting Thomas: A Case for the Existence of God. In teaching class I try to present material that I find antithetical to my own views as fairly and in as unbiased a manner as possible. With the Layman book I was having a real struggle to do so. I found myself literally dreading having to go over this material in class—NOT, let me emphasize, because I was intimidated by the cogency of the arguments. On the contrary, I found the arguments so execrably awful and pointless that they bored and disgusted me (Layman is not a kook or an ignoramus; he is the author of a very useful logic textbook). I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest; I don’t think there is a Bernie Madoff in the bunch. I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it. I’ve turned the philosophy of religion courses over to a colleague.

My anecdotal impression is that this attitude towards philosophy of religion (which has been, as a matter of the sociology of the profession, a 'growth' area over the last two decades) may be fairly widely shared, though primarily among philosophers who have not devoted as much time to the literature and the issues as Professor Parsons.  What do readers think?  I invite non-anonymous comments from readers:  full name in the signature line, valid e-mail.