Lawyer/philosopher Tommy Crocker (South Carolina) calls to my attention a recent blog post by philosophers Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin (both Vanderbilt) arguing that public philosophy should not be part of the institutional criteria for promotions and salary increases. They observe:
[O]nce a faculty member’s public-facing work is folded into the usual schemes of recognition and reward, its quality will become a focus of professional assessment. However, most public-facing scholarship is not subject to peer review, and thus its content often does not have the endorsement of the scholarly community to which the faculty member belongs. What this means is that, in crediting public scholarship, administrators will need to apply their own conception of the relevant metrics for evaluation. The danger is that, once it is introduced into the formal channels of professional advancement, one’s contributions to public philosophy will be assessed according to administrators’ ideals concerning the branding and public face of the university.
Professor Crocker added his own apt observation:
[T]he link I see with the “new ptolemaism” discussion is that it might seem to invite encouragement of social activism in lieu of traditional scholarship in ways that create possible pernicious incentives for administrators to encourage public facing advocacy along favored lines of say promoting diversity and inclusion, and for it to count as scholarship, and by implication to be able to evaluate as non-meritorious non-favored advocacy say of criticisms of university investments for their climate impact and the like. If a faculty member can get merit raises or scholarship credit for favored public facing advocacy that aligns with the administration’s favored views, then such writing will be more likely to be skewed accordingly.
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