What would you have paid to take a class with Nozick? The end of the article linked is, as it says, priceless.
My colleague, Mike Pelczar, passed this under my nose this afternoon. A letter in the latest APA Proceedings and Addresses volume:
Why are philosophers limited to one-at-a-time journal submissions? Law professors can submit articles to as many journals as they like. It seems to work. We can submit book manuscripts to multiple publishers ...
[Stories about inordinately slow responses from journals.]
Why can’t the APA do something about this? My first suggestion is that the organization force the journals to allow multiple submissions. My second suggestion is that we organize a little civil disobedience. People are afraid of breaking the custom (surely it’s not more than that?) but if enough people did it, it would cease to exist.
Bonnie Steinbock
University at Albany/SUNY
This seems to me an eminently reasonable proposal. Discuss. I would be interested to hear how things work differently in law and other disciplines. Probably Eugene Volokh has written some big old thing addressing this very question. But I must have missed it.
There is exactly one thing to be said on behalf of the 'custom' of exclusive submissions, which is that if multiple submissions were permitted, global volume of submissions would increase several fold. Ergo, the need for reviewers would go up. Ergo, the system might actually slow down. On the other hand, editors would have an interest in beating the competition to the good stuff, so more reviewers would be called to duty, etc. (Possibly some such system could be employed as was pioneered by the British navy. Find drunk philosophers and press gang them into service.) Necessity would mother some child, although perhaps one only a mother could love. And the system would speed up. Seems reasonable to Mike and me.
I will now proceed to draw you in by adding a 'human interest' angle to this dull academic stuff. (Hey, did you read that nutty stuff over at Powerline today? And every day? Here's my advice. When you find yourself reading something by Hindrocket, some rant about how irrational and traitorous the left is, or the MSM; just sort of pretend you are reading a Spider-Man comic, and Hindrocket is J. Jonah Jameson yelling at Betty Brant, or Robbie. Or Peter. About Spider-Man. Because why does he hate on Spidey so? Spidey is so obviously not a menace. He's good. It's too bad we all know who Atrios is now. Otherwise we could imagine: what if Atrios is really, like, Hindrocket's secretary? I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren't coming back. Still, you've got to find a way to read their stuff with a sunny heart.)
As I was saying, I just had a piece rejected by Arion; my mock-Platonic dialogue, "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory For Life" (PDF). (Can't remember whether I've linked a version from CT before. Probably. Comments welcome. All about literary theory and its discontents.) And - here's the punchline - I submitted the thing two. years. ago. I hadn't even started blogging yet. As you can imagine, I'm a tetch frustrated by this development. I'm not an ent. Actually, when I compare the pace of blogging and academic publishing, it's more like one of those Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes where it turns out there is another species sharing the same space with us, but so sped up or slowed down in time, relatively, that contact is almost impossible. (Which episode was that? Original Trek?)
The thing is: the rejection is not surprising or manifestly unjust. Because the thing's too long and unconventional. The journal would have to devote most of an issue; that's a lot to give. Also, the lengthy wait was to some degree justified; there was a revise and resubmit; then various versions and versions and improvements. The editor liked it. What it came down to was the outside readers really really didn't. Two hated it. One loved it. (I haven't actually even seen the reports yet.) Sub specie aeternitatis, I can accept this as potentially a fair verdict. I knew that some folks would find it inappropriate. It's got problems. Meanwhile, back in space-time I really didn't want to wait two years to find out those were the folks reviewing it.
The other thing is: I know my piece is publishable, but seriously flawed, because over the last two years I have engaged in lively discussions and comment exchanges with about - oh, I dunno - thirty people. I've had serious, sustained debates and exchanges with maybe ten correspondents. More than for anything else I've ever written. Mostly academics in philosophy and literary studies. I met the editor of a musicology journal who stumbled in while googling something else. We've traded emails. Most people seem to like the piece, but I have been fortunate enough to garner sharp and shrewd criticism as well. I've made mistakes. The tone of the thing really could be toned down. Given all this, i.e. what blogging the thing has taught me, final publication in paper form was going to be a sort of end to a story already told. A wake. The thing would be inhumed in paper, where it would be available to few people. (Who reads the journals, sad to say?) And I'd move on and do it better next time. So getting a rejection after two years is sort of like getting a letter in the mail, today, telling me I just flunked out of junior high. What the hell. (Sigh.)
I guess I should try to publish it as a book. (That was always the plan, actually. Add extra chapters, of a more conventional sort, tinker with the core in the face of criticisms.) At least I can submit to multiple presses. But what press will take such an odd orphan, no portion of which has ever been published? Any CT readers out there who are also editors of humanities presses, looking for mock-Platonic dialogues about literary theory? (Why, oh why did I ever think that was a funny idea and actually DO it, rather than just chuckle about it?)
But enough of my doldrums. Suppose you were designing an online journal, built for speed. (There are such things, of course. Philosopher's Imprint is a nice example. Gotta get that manuscript done and sent off to those folks.) But what's the best way?
What do you think of the following innovative plan? A publishing CO-OP. All online, all submissions electronic. Here's the key. If you want to submit, you have to earn the right by committing to review submissions in turn.
Let's pick a number. (Might not be the right one.) You have to review six submissions to submit once. When you get a submission to review, you have to turn it around quickly. Two weeks. (You could apply for an extension. But basically two weeks. No nonsense.) This is a significant service commitment, but in exchange you get your manuscript accepted or rejected in under a month, guaranteed. Up or down.
How is acceptance determined? First, there would be a further condition on reviewers. They get 2 accept votes, 2 reject votes and 2 open votes. (Again, this might not be the right ratio, but bear with me.) If a given reviewer has already voted to accept 4 papers, so all she has left are votes to reject, she can still vote to accept, but see still need to use up those reject ballots. So in effect her service requirement just bumped from six to seven. This is some incentive to vote neither too harshly or to acceptingly. (There may be problems with this. I'm thinking about it.)
Another incentive: all reviews are published with any manuscript that is accepted. Reports with votes to accept are published with their author's name attached. This is a big incentive not to vote to accept a piece of crap, because your name will be attached to it, praising it, forever. Negative reviews are anonymous, so they can be frank. Please notice that we just created a useful resource. Everything published comes complete with a mini critical discussion consisting of six reports, which you can skim, giving you a good idea about the contents and quality of the piece. Also, this seems like a pretty good resource for purposes of determining publication quality.
But which pieces get accepted? Well, pulling some more numbers: you publish anything that wins acceptance by at least 4 votes to 2. You distinguish them as 4's, 5's and 6's in the online journal. A tiered system. So naturally folks look first at the 6's, the pieces that won unanimous acceptance, on the not implausible assumption that these are best.
Finally, there is an appeals process so authors can deal with that perennial problem: insane reader reports. First of all, we can imagine an editor who catches clearly insane reports and rejects them. (We'll get back to editors in a moment. We want to make their lives easy but can't quite do without them.) But suppose your piece is rejected and you think one of the reviews is full blown gonzo bananas nuts, or crucially in error in some demonstrable way. You can 'purchase' the right to a review of the review by agreeing to do another review yourself. Then someone new reads your piece, reads the review and determines whether it is nuts. If it is indeed nuts, that person then casts another vote to accept or reject. (It would be possible to agree that a review was nuts but still cast a vote to reject the manuscript on saner grounds.) The offending review is disappeared and replaced with the newer, hopefully saner one.
And the editors? What do they do? Well, the system is as automated as it can be. Submissions are all electronic. Even distribution to reviewers could be semi to fully automated. (I think you can see how this could work. You fill in a form when you submit and you get matched with a reviewer who has self-described as qualified in your general subject area.) When a reviewer decides to do her duty, she just logs into the system and tells it to give her something to review. Presumably the queue could move along pretty quickly. Editors don't even read the pieces themselves, necessarily. They just read the reviews, looking for anything screwy in the review process that the system isn't catching. Like crazy reviewers. (The system could automatically flag certain odd patterns, like reviewers who are doing nothing but accepting or rejecting.) Editors could have the authority to demand a revise and resubmit if the content of the reviews seems to merit it. Say there is clear consensus that the piece is OK but has one serious problem.
A sticky question. Do people have to fulfill all their reviewing duties BEFORE they can submit? Or can they do it on the honor system? Submit first. Review later. I'm inclined to try the honor system. The problem with the honor system is that folks who submit and are rejected may have little incentive to fulfill their duties, since they stand to receive no benefits. On the other hand, folks who are rejected are presumptively less capable of doing good work. And folks who do not do their honorable duty are presumptively less honorable in their execution of whatever portions they do. You might not want their help. (You could put them on a wall of shame, though. Folks who didn't pay up.) This admittedly risks having too few hands. But probably you could get others to take up the slack.
Who do you let submit? Just anybody? That means you are letting just anybody do peer review, so: definitely not. Maybe you let anyone with a clear qualification - a Ph.D. in the relevant field - review. And anybody else who seems likely - a graduate student, say - can be a probationary reviewer. Probationary reviewers have to do their whole tour of review duty before being allowed to submit. Editors would make sure to see all reviews by such folk. They would be rejected if deemed of low quality.
This is pretty baroque, I admit. You'd have to build the system. It would be complicated and would need maintenance. But it's not as though there aren't people out there who can program and build databases. It might be a very fast, efficient little publication engine. What do you think? (Obviously I am biased in favor of speed after my traumatic experience.)
I think it would work a treat for monographs in literary studies, where everything is screwed on the publishing end by all accounts. People have got to publish peer reviewed books for tenure. But the presses are cutting back and there's no money, blah blah blah. (And who the hell ever thought it was a good idea to leave tenure decisions to university presses, in effect? Silly plan.) Let folks submit their tenure manuscript to some such rigorous peer review system as this, and publish the results only as high quality PDF's. All freely available online. Niftily searchable. Who needs paper? (I mean, it's nice. But I trust we don't fetishize academic monographs. It's not like Chris Ware designs them so you just want to fondle and stare.) Obviously you need considerably more editorial oversight for books. They just take work. But the review and acceptance process could be considerably sped along. You could obliged every reviewer to write 2000 words about the manuscript. This means committing to review six books, to get your own submissions considered, means a lot of reviewing. But hell. How many times are you planning on submitting a book for publication?
It's funny that I'm even thinking this way, brooding in the night. Planning to build a whole system so that I can submit my poor manuscript and hear back in two weeks rather than two years. It's like when you're in the restaurant and the damn chicken isn't coming, and isn't coming. And someone says, 'what the hell are they doing back there? Hatching the eggs?' And suddenly you think: you know, I think I'll actually do that. Hatch me an egg. Grow it into a tasty chicken. It would be faster if I did it myself!
Obviously rejection has caused me to lose my mind. How sad.
A correspondent writes that my complaints about the Summers controversy are unfair to Larry Summers. If you’re interested, his case and my reply are below the fold.
My correspondent says,
To pick just one relevant passage:Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I’ll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance.Maybe I’m just imagining things, but Summers appears to be doing the opposite of reducing “entrenched” social expectations to “a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preference.” Summers asks here: “Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?” This appears to suggest that the socially structured “familial arrangements” are the key factor. All through this passage, the way Summers begins each point is to ask “is our society right to expect …. Is our society right to have familial arrangements … Is our society right to ask … ?”
Now, it’s also true that Summers didn’t put all his suggestions, speculations, and reflections in precisely this form. At other times, he’s asking whether factors other than social arrangements might also play some role, including marginal differences between categories of people due to socialization or (a tricky point) genetics. But that’s really the point. Whatever might be said for or against his social graces in other situations, in this particular context Summers was not handing down hard-and-fast conclusions but trying to frame open questions and alternative possibilities in thought-provoking (and sometimes provocative) ways. One can certainly criticize a lot of his points on various grounds—and I agree that some of them provided reasons for people to get upset (though not hysterical)—but (in my humble opinion) there is just no way that the thrust of his remarks fits your characterization.
I see the point here, and there is something to it. Over the past few days, having re-read the transcript, I’ve thought myself that if Summers had pitched his remarks just a little bit differently, and demonstrated a just bit more knowledge of existing work on this issue, there would have been no controversy. But in his talk he failed to show that he knew what he was talking about, and he presented himself in a way that invited criticism that he deserved. (And the bulk of it wasn’t “hysterical”, either.) Take his main conclusion:
So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.
Now, Summers might have said something like, “It seems the main reason for the under-representation of women in academia is that we have these expectations for work built in to the system that assume, in all kinds of ways, that you have someone taking care of you and the kids, if you have kids. Those expectations tend to disadvantage women.” And then he might have said “You know, there’s a been a lot of work by researchers in this area looking into just how this happens, and some proposals for how it might be fixed. Obviously, just one school can’t change the world, but here’s what could be done …” Instead, though, he frames the problem like this: “the first very important reality is just … who wants to do high-powered intense work?” (Emphasis added.) He then launches into his discussion of differences in IQ, differences in socialization (which are dismissed with the “mommy truck, daddy truck” story) and the role of explicit discrimination, which he thinks relatively unimportant.
These remarks are not focused on understanding the social context he gestures towards, notwithstanding his mention of very broad questions like “Is our society right to expect …” and so on. These ideas aren’t developed in the talk. Maybe if you knew Summers personally (I don’t) you could add that his heart is in the right place. But it’s obvious that the thrust of his remarks is that, for good or bad, our system presents people in general with a choice about working hard and (a) women tend to choose not to work hard, because they prefer to have kids, (b) sometimes they’re just not smart enough anyway, and © discrimination on the ground isn’t really as important as women’s initial choices or their mathematical limitations. This view is presented by shuttling back and forth between his own speculations and some anecdotes. It’s obvious from the content and tone that he neither knows nor cares about the relevant research literature. Work in this area makes it clear that the three mechanisms he mentions interact and reinforce each other: e.g., negative expectations negatively affect performance; broad expectations about careers lead to people making specific decisions for you (by not offering an opportunity, say); and small differences in initial advantage — I mean a bit of time off here, a nicer research budget there — can accumulate into large differences in outcomes. This means that the role for discrimination may be greater than Summers imagines, because discrimination isn’t just running into some guy who really believes women don’t want to or just can’t cut it in high-powered research jobs. Fine-grained features of the career path can accumulate into bad outcomes. This is what the MIT Gender Equity Project found:
Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT, and was often accompanied by differences in salary, space, awards, resources, and response to outside offers; women receiving less despite professional accomplishments equal to those of their male colleagues.
In nearly all cases, Department chairs or other decision-makers could give plausible particularistic reasons why a decision was made in a specific case, but the outcome was always gender-specific. Similar things happen even further back in the pipeline: if women get encouraged to pursue lower-status specialties, for example, or are not called for an interview because someone thinks they wouldn’t accept a job because they have a husband who works elsewhere. And that’s not even going further back to college or high-school. Of course, it should go without saying that if there are people who really believe women generally can’t or don’t want to manage a job at an elite school, and those people are in the happy position of having the power to help make their beliefs true — well, then discrimination can have a bigger role than we imagine. Summers’ convictions about women’s work choices and his anecdotes about Mommy and Daddy trucks rather put him in this position. The burden is on him to show that it’s not a problem.
So, I just don’t buy the defence that Summers wanted to understand what’s happening, and forthrightly put forward some challenging hypotheses about it, but was beaten up by the evil PC witches because he mentioned biology. Instead, I see someone who believes he already knows the answer, and frames it in a completely conventional rhetoric of work-family choices, with a bit of biology thrown in. Because he’s very smart, he came up with some decent, but half-formed, ideas about the structure of careers in academia. But they were presented in an empirically uninformed way. Listening to some of his defenders, you’d think no-one had ever raised the issue of career paths, or the role of gender differences in math ability or what have you, when in fact they have been the subject of research for years. In particular, the speech shows an impoverished understanding about the relationship between careers and discrimination. He sees the latter as overcome and the former as framing a perhaps tragic individual choice. There’s what employers want, and there’s what women choose. This is not a provocative analysis. It’s just Sunday-Supplement stuff. Combined with the obnoxious tone, and the record of tenuring and senior hires of women at Harvard under Summers’ administration, it’s no wonder his audience didn’t feel especially sympathetic. Frankly, when you’re the President of Harvard, you should do a lot better on a topic like this. And by “better” I don’t mean “you should be nicer”, or “you should deliver the usual bromides.” I mean, “you should know what you’re talking about.”
In summary, I agree that there were positive elements in the talk. That’s partly why it’s been such a disaster for him: a little more work and he could really have impressed people. But given what he said, it’s no surprise that he angered a lot of people in the audience, and I think he deserved to be criticized for it. As I said before, I really don’t think he should lose his job over this: if the Harvard Corporation removes him, it’ll be because this incident provided a focus for more widespread dissatisfaction with his Presidency and allowed his enemies, motivated by all kinds of grievances, to move against him.
Matt Yglesias should be pleased to hear that Princeton University Press has re-issued Harry Frankfurt’s well-known essay, “On Bullshit,” as a small book. You can buy it at Amazon. There’s a nice piece in the Times about it, distinguished by the fact that the newspaper’s stylebook forbids the word “bullshit” — though of course its pages are filled examples of the stuff — so it’s referred to throughout as “[bull]” instead. As I think Matt’s also observed, journalism would be serving its readership much better these days if it were possible to write headlines like “More Bullshit from White House on Social Security Reform.”
Via Cliopatria, Thomas Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University, has posted an essay that accuses Ward Churchill of having committed fraud in his research. I know nothing about the historical issues at stake, so can’t comment on the truth of the allegations - however, if the accusations have merit, they transform the case from one of free speech and academic freedom, to one of whether or not Churchill has lived up to the minimal standards required of a tenured academic.
Also, see this Timothy Burke essay which responds gracefully to my (and apparently others’) criticism of his lumping Glenn Reynolds and Ward Churchill in together.
Update: Inside Higher Ed has a follow-up story, with some interesting quotes from people on both sides of this issue.
Scott McLemee 's new column at Inside Higher Ed. The ethics and aesthetics of kettle chopping. Plus this bit about our kind:
For every scholar wondering how to make blogging an institutionally accredited form of professional activity, there must be several entertaining the vague hopes that it never will.
I am the former sort. But let's consider. The concern might be that blogging will drag down the tone of scholarship. But clearly Scott has in mind the reverse concern that scholarship will drag down the tone of blogging. It is clear enough how the dynamics of obligatory overproduction - among other common, cruel disfigurements - can produce hollow but noisome artifacts such as Scott laments:
And so the implicit content of many a conference paper is not, as one might think, "Here is my research." Rather, it is: "Here am I, qualified and capable, performing this role, which all of us here share, and none of us want to question too closely. So let's get it over with, then go out for a drink afterwards."
Let's grant the problem (I do.) The question is whether serious, dedicated scholarly blogging - if it became the sort of thing for which one claimed a sort of steady, low-grade service credit - could avoid slipping down the same slope. The old evil: to reward x is to teach the art of simulating x. Still, I think blogging could hold its not terribly elevated ground pretty well; this is a major point in its favor.
Yes, a stampede of accredited newbie blogscholars padding CV's with daily posts might be an unseemly spectacle. In many ways it would inevitably recapitulate all the old routines of academic comedy. Certainly there is nothing about blogging that prevents stupidity, ignorance, bad argument, inanity, bullshit (via Matt). But I think the bloggish compulsion to win and hold an audience - an audience that is presumptively a mix of academic and non - would almost inevitably breed healthy respect for teleology. And this would be likely to rub off on scholarship. (Perhaps with other bad habits to go with it, but life is complicated that way.)
Not that blogging can be scholarship, let alone supplant it. (Parellel to a popular fallacy about the capacity of blogging to replace journalism as we know it. If you've got no facts, the ass you check may be your own.) And, admittedly, if it became the norm for all scholarship to be shaken in brisk, brusque, bloggy fashion all manner of bruises might be inflicted on sensitive, slow scholarly growth. But I think individual injuries would heal. I think in general scholarship would not respond by studying the black arts of infotainment. No, it would go off into a huddle with itself, find something to be the point - several somethings: no doubt there would be lively disagreement - and report back to the toe-tapping bloggers.
What do you think? Would accredited scholarblogging enliven the life of the mind, saving civilization; or just spread the stain of misery, as twilight engulfs the West?
A passage from Nietzsche's essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator" - which I taught today - seems vaguely relevant. Whatever can be the motivation for academic life?
It can hardly originate in any supposed 'desire for truth': for how could there exist any desire at all for cold, pure, inconsequential knowledge! What it really is that impels the servants of science is only too obvious to the unprejudiced eye: and it is very advisable to prove and dissect the men of learning themselves for once, since they for their part are quite accustomed to laying bold hands on everything in the world, even the most venerable things, and taking them to pieces. If I am to speak out, I would say this: the man of learning consists of a confused network of very various impulses and stimuli, he is an altogether impure metal. First of all there is a strong and ever more intense curiosity, the search for adventures in the domain of knowlege, the constant stimulation exercised by thte new and rare in contrast to the old and tedious. Then there is a certain drive to dialectical investigation, the huntsman's joy in following the sly fox's path in the realm of thought, so that it is not really truth that is sought but the seeking itself, and the main pleasure consists in the cunning tracking, encircling and correct killing. Now add to this the impulse to contradiction, the personality wanting to be aware of itself and to make itself felt in opposition to all others; the stuggle becomes a pleasure and the goal is personal victory, the struggle for truth being only a pretext. Then, the man of learning is to a great extent also motivated to the discovery of certain 'truths', motivated that is by his subjection to certain ruling persons, castes, opinions, churches, governments: he feels it is to his advantage to bring 'truth' over to their side.
What follows is a list of less essential but still frequent characteristics. 'Eleventh, the scholar from vanity,' so forth. Most edifying, this chemical demonstration in which a cocktail of several colorful ingredients is stirred and shaken - and the product appears so deceptively transparent!
I love that bit about the huntsman's joy. (Scott concludes his piece with a line from a friend: "Do you think there's any way that intellectual life in America could become less lonely?" Ah, perhaps the brain is always a lonely hunter.) Adapting Isaiah Berlin, it seems to me some scholar-huntsmen are fox hunters, others hedgehog hunters. That is, there are some who delight in showing the many things their prey do not know; and others who delight in showing the one big thing the prey does not know. Each method has its agonic satisfactions. (At Berkeley when I was in grad school Sam Scheffler and Barry Stroud used to do a sort of fox-hedgehog tagteam thing to any visiting speaker. Thing of beauty.)
Stephen Bainbridge steps in for the right, and says that basic principles of free speech and academic freedom mean that Ward Churchill shouldn’t lose his job. I think he’s right; but I also think that there is something to Timothy Burke’s argument that Churchill shouldn’t have been invited to speak at Hamilton in the first place (the two positions are of course not contradictory). Not because of his extreme opinions - but because he seems to be neither a good nor thoughtful academic.
In Tim’s description:
Churchill’s scholarly oeuvre is practically a guided tour of every trope of identity politics: polemical extensions of the concept of genocide into every possible institutional or social interaction between the colonized and colonizer, erasures of any historical or programmatic distinctions between colonizers in different eras or systems, reduction of all history and contemporary society into a sociologically and morally simple binary schema of colonizer and colonized (hence the remark that the people in the Twin Towers were “little Eichmanns” while Iraqis are literally infantilized into starving babies and nothing more), pervasive indictments of systems of representation, and aggressive assertions of exclusive cultural, moral, political and economic ownership of anything and everything connected with a particular identity group (Native Americans in this case).
Anything and everything can be fed, often with appalling casualness, into the polemic machine he builds: other scholars become, if not heroic comrades, mere “crypto-fascists” (there is no other possible position or posture).
… There’s nothing in his work to suggest a thoughtful regard for evidence, an appreciation of complexity, a taste for dialogue with unlike minds, a proportionality, a meaningful working out of his own contradictions, a civil ability to engage in dialogue with his colleagues and peers in his own fields of specialization. He stands for the reduction of scholarship to nothing more than mouth-frothing polemic.
What Tim is saying is that academic freedoms shouldn’t be an end in themselves - there should be some real degree of quality control. People who use their academic positions to spout self-evident nonsense shouldn’t be fired - but other scholars shouldn’t be inviting them to give guest lectures, or providing any of the other little marks of recognition that academics prize. There should be some minimal degree of self-regulation - people whose purported scholarship is political hackwork shouldn’t be rewarded for that, whether they’re on the left or the right. Which isn’t to say that you need to be politically neutral to be a good or interesting academic, but you do need at a bare minimum to be interested in dialogue, to recognize that there are other valid political positions to your own (and that your own position has weaknesses), and to engage in real argument rather than polemic, when the scope for a real argument is there. People whose ‘scholarship’ consists entirely of polemic are not, by virtue of that fact, scholars.
One final point: Tim says that:
Conservatives should not necessarily welcome a turn to those deeper issues: it seems to me that Glenn Reynolds, for example, would have to be held a hack by any standard that held Churchill to be one.
I think that’s rather unfair to Reynolds (Me? Defending Glenn Reynolds? Makes for a bit of a change). Churchill’s hackwork is his scholarship, and his scholarship is his hackwork - the two are indistinguishable. I’ve not read any of Reynolds’ academic work, but my understanding is that he does have a substantial body of scholarly output which is quite independent from his blogging. To my knowledge, only the latter is marked by the mendacity and vicious jingoism that we’ve come to know, if not especially to love. While I think that Reynolds can be, and should be, vigorously criticized as a ‘public intellectual’ (using that term in its very loosest sense), I don’t have any reason to believe that he’s betraying his vocation as a scholar - he seems to keep the two fields of activity quite separate.
Update: this hasn’t posted thanks to our server issues; for another outbreak of Reynoldsism and a purported reply to my earlier post, see this.
Are leftwing academics really responsible for the events of September 11? My post below on Robert Conquest attracted two outraged responses from ‘Armed Liberal’ at the popular pro-war blog, Winds of Change suggesting that indeed they are. In his more recent post, AL seems to be retreating rapidly from his forthright factual assertion of yesterday that
The 9/11 hijackers found their ideological center in European universities, and took up a philosophy rooted in Western leftist thought there.
while leaving in his wake a rapidly-expanding ink-cloud of “equally interesting to note”s, “wonder if”s, “worthwhile effort to discuss and explore”s and “may have something to do with it”s. Still, even now, AL is trying to insinuate that anti-Western Nihilist academics in European universities somehow turned Arab students into terrorists, without providing either facts or testable arguments to support his case. Which is probably a good thing for him, as the facts indicate that he’s completely wrong. Marc Sageman, who has actually done some real research on this topic, has the goods. In his network analysis of 400 terrorist biographies, he found that:
Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.
This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find if exposure to leftists in the humanities and social sciences caused people to become terrorists. Unless AL wants to make the case that those notorious humanist Nihilists at engineering schools, computer science departments and urban planning institutes have been indoctrinating their students with Romantic anti-Western ideas, he’s plumb out of luck. Sageman, who unlike AL has some idea of what he’s talking about, puts forward a rather more plausible explanation of how Arabs studying in the West drifted into terrorism.
When they became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques. So they drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends. They moved in together in apartments, in order to share the rent and also to eat together - they were mostly halal, those who observed the Muslim dietary laws, similar in some respects to the kosher laws of Judaism. Some argue that such laws help to bind a group together since observing them is something very difficult and more easily done in a group. A micro-culture develops that strengthens and absorbs the participants as a unit. This is a halal theory of terrorism, if you like.
(I’m grateful to a commenter at Unfogged for the Sageman link).
Update: description of WoC changed in response to comments below.
Via Political Theory Daily Review, a review of Robert Conquest’s new book, The Dragons of Expectation which apparently makes some rather outrageous claims in the course of a general attack on leftist academics and internationalists. I haven’t read the book yet (I’m trying to get my hands on a copy),1 but if the reviewer is quoting him accurately, Conquest argues that a fair portion of the blame for September 11 can be laid at the feet of left-leaning professors. The reviewer quotes from Conquest’s introduction:
“And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements … The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”
According to the reviewer, Conquest doesn’t bother even to try to provide any evidence in support of this accusation.
There’s an interesting juxtaposition between this and the disgusting efforts of Glenn Reynolds and others to use Ward Churchill’s comments as a means to smear the left. On the one hand, Conquest’s language and claims are less inflammatory and offensive than Churchill’s. On the other, Conquest is one of the right’s most senior and respected figures, a fellow of the Hoover Institute, and a key player in the Anglo-American right’s intellectual network. Churchill, in comparison, is a relative nobody who represents no-one except himself. I’ve always had a fondness for Conquest; he was dead right on Stalinism, and he comes across as a very human figure (and a first rate composer of limericks and light verse) in his letters to Kingsley Amis. But if he’s seriously trying to claim, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that leftwing professors in Western universities shoulder some of the blame for September 11, he should be deeply ashamed of himself. It’s a vicious, disgraceful slur, and it’s every bit as unacceptable as the claim that the West and the US had September 11 coming to them. Still, I don’t think that Reynolds or any of his cronies will be following their advice to the left and disassociating themselves from Conquest (indeed, judging by Reynolds’ dishonest and hate-filled post, I wouldn’t be surprised if he agrees with Conquest’s claims).
Update: to be quite clear (there’s already one rather bizarre misinterpretation out there in the blogosphere), Conquest isn’t referring in this passage to Western ideas percolating through into radical Islam in some indirect fashion. First, he draws a link between “the abstractions of fashionable academics” and the propensity of the students accepting those abstractions to then become terrorists. Then, in the very next sentence, he asserts a direct connection between the fact that some of the 9/11 terrorists attended Western universities, and the fact that they absorbed an anti-Western mindset. In the absence of any evidence of a connection between what the 9/11 terrorists were taught in Western universities, and what they then did, this is a slur, clear and simple.
Update 2: “Armed Liberal” replies (or, more precisely, purports to reply) to my post.
1 If, when I get the book, I find that the reviewer has seriously misrepresented Conquest, I’ll very happily apologize - however, given the unambiguous slur in the quote above, I don’t expect that I’ll be in a position where I need to.
I’m very excited about the launch of Inside Higher Ed, a new web-based publication with “news, opinion and career advice and services for all of higher education.” This is, of course, not entirely dissimilar from what the Chronicle of Higher Education has been offering for many years, but there are some very important differences. The Chronicle has some great writers, but it’s primarily a print-based publication, and it shows. Most of the interesting web content is only available to subscribers. This is highly frustrating for bloggers, who don’t, as a rule, like to link to articles that most of their readers can’t access. Individuals within the Chronicle are pretty understanding about this, but there is only so much that they can do. IHE is beginning from a very different model, one which I think is much better designed to capitalize on the explosion of web-based discussion over the last three years. All their content is going to be free, which means that bloggers can link to their stories without a second thought. Furthermore, they’re deliberately seeking to integrate IHE into the debates that are happening among blogs, highlighting and picking up on the more interesting discussions. They’ll also have a jobs service (which will be the bread-and-butter of the website), and a weekly email digest.
In short, I reckon that IHE is going to be an extremely valuable resource for bloggers and non-blogging academics. It will provide the kinds of reporting and detailed analysis that bloggers themselves aren’t much good at. It’s worth noting that the people behind IHE include Scott Jaschik, who was editor of the Chronicle during its glory days, Doug Lederman, who has done some superb academic reporting and editing at the Chronicle and elsewhere, and Scott McLemee, who will be their ‘Essayist-at-Large.’ Scott McL has his first column up today, where he describes the blogosphere as
that agonistic realm routinely combining the best qualities of the academic seminar with the worst traits of talk radio
With any luck, IHE will mean less talk radio, and more grounded discussion. As I’ve said, I’m excited.
I’ve been looking at some data from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a well-known and widely-used reputational survey of philosophers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australasia. The survey asks philosophers to rate the overall reputations of graduate programs as well as their strength in various subfields. The ratings are endogenous, in the sense that the philosophers who produce them are members of the departments that are being rated. This gives the survey some interesting relational properties and allows for an analysis of the social structure of reputation in the field. I’ve written a working paper that analyses the data from this perspective. It’s still in in pretty rough shape: there’s not much in the way of theory or a framing argument yet, and it’s way short on citations to the relevant literature. (So don’t be too harsh on it.)
I’m not sure whether philosophers will like the paper. On the one hand, they tend to think of themselves as sensible individuals guided by common-sense and rational argument. This makes them resist thinking of themselves in sociological terms, subject to the influences of context, social relations and role constraints. On the other hand, in my experience they have an insatiable capacity for gossip. Within the limits of the data, the paper addresses three questions:
The answers are, in short, “It depends on the field”, “Yes, but only sometimes, and then only for high-status specialists”, and “A great deal.” Some quick findings:
Over the fold are two visualizations of the field: the first is a blockmodel describing the relational structure of prestige amongst U.S. philosophy departments. The second is a segment plot showing the profile of departments across a range of different subfields. I think they’re both pretty cool, so read on.
A Blockmodel of Prestige
First, the blockmodel. You can get the full-size version of this graphic, or a higher-resolution PDF version, or the captioned version from the paper. This picture is a department by department matrix. Each colored cell represents the average “vote” by a department in the row for a department in the column. Departments are sorted in the same order in the rows and columns, according to an algorithm that groups them by how similar their voting patterns. The row and column numbers DO NOT correspond to the PGR rankings. (That is, Department 10 in the figure is not the 10th-ranked department.) Purple and blue cells represent high rankings; green cells represent middling rankings; brown and yellow cells represent low rankings. (The captioned version provides a reference scale.) The main diagonal is blank because departments are not allowed vote for themselves. In a high-consensus field, we’d expect each column to be the same color all the way down: that is, everyone agrees on how good a particular department is. In a low-consensus field, we’d expect more heterogeneity, with disagreement on the quality of particular programs. The data suggest that — at least according to the respondents to the PGR — philosophy is a very high-consensus discipline.
To help the interpretation, we can further group departments into “blocks” based on their similarity: members of the same blocks will stand in similar structural relations to other departments. In this case, I’ve generated a model with 5 blocks. Blocks are set off by thicker lines that project out into the margin. Block 1 is made up of the just first four departments, so the first four rows and columns show Block 1’s assessment of itself, for example. The four Block 1 departments enjoy the highest prestige and the greatest degree of consensus about their quality. Looking down the first four columns lets you see what everyone else thinks of Block 1 — almost everyone agrees they’re the best, as you can see by the almost unbroken strip of purple and dark blue. Looking across the first four rows lets you see what Block 1 thinks of everyone else. Thus, focusing on the intersections of the graph created by the thicker horizontal lines lets you see how different blocks relate to one another (and themselves). For instance, the bottom right corner of the figure shows what the lowest-status block, Block 5, thinks of itself, so to speak. It turns out that it agrees with everyone else’s assessment of its relatively low quality. In fact, as I show in the paper, Block 5 thinks a little better of Block 1 than Block 1 thinks of itself, and thinks a little worse of itself than Block 1 thinks of it. In other words, the lowest-prestige block is slightly more committed to the hierarchy than the highest-prestige block. Although the mean scores awarded to blocks varies across blocks, there is complete agreement on the rank-ordering of blocks. So, for example, there’s no dissenting group that thinks itself better than everyone else believes.
Departmental Strength in Specialist Areas
This is a segment plot. Again, you can get a larger version of it, or a much nicer PDF version. For each department, the wedges of the plot represent the department’s reputation rank in a particular subfield. The bigger the wedge, the better the reputation rank. A department that was ranked first in all areas would look like the key at the bottom. To simplify the presentation I’ve grouped metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language into a single group, “MML.” (This has a substantive justification, as strength in these areas is highly correlated.) The distribution of segments gives a nice picture of a each department’s profile: what it’s known for. I’ve also ordered the subfields clockwise from the left, roughly in order of their contribution to the overall reputation of a department. You’ll notice that Princeton and Oxford are the only departments in the Top 15 or so to have a roughly symmetric “fan-like” structure, indicating strength in a wide variety of areas. By contrast, NYU is very strong in MML, Ethics and History, but not ancient or continental. Rutgers’ profile looks like a chambered nautilus: it’s very strong in MML and Epistemology, and gets progressively weaker as you move around the half-circle. Yet NYU and Rutgers outscore Oxford and Princeton in terms of overall reputation. This is because — as the paper shows — not all areas contribute equally to the status of a department. Strength in MML is more important than strength in, say, Ancient philosophy or (especially) Continental philosophy. The segment plot makes all the specialties have the same weight, but in reality this isn’t the case — so Oxford doesn’t capitalize on its strength in Ancient philosophy, for example. Michigan is an unusual case in that it ranks very highly despite lacking a strong reputation for MML and Epistemology. Conversely, strength in MML will only get you so far: MIT and the ANU excel in these areas, but probably won’t go any higher in the ratings without diversifying.
The plot shows some other features of departments and the field in general, too. Harvard’s relative weakness in metaphysics and mind is clear, for instance, as is Chicago’s strength in continental philosophy. As one moves down the rankings, the size of the wedges declines, of course, and departments with distinctive niches appear: the LSE is strong in the philosophy of science, Penn in modern history, Wisconsin in Science.
The data have a number of limitations, of course. For one thing, not all departments are present in the survey, and in most cases only one or two representatives of those departments were sampled. But it’s still a rich dataset. The draft paper has a fuller discussion of all this, together with a few other neat visualizations of the structure of the field. Comments are welcome, of course.
Update 2: Following a query from Tom Hurka, I discovered a small error in the segment plot. The original “History” measure mistakenly included Ancient history, which wasn’t my intention. That’s been fixed now, and the History measure is a department’s mean score in 17th Century, 18th Century and Kant/German Idealism.
There’s also a second question about interpreting the plots, especially if you’re looking closely at the profile of a particular department. The size of the wedges is not determined directly by the scores departments get in each area. First, they are scaled to have values between 0 and 1 in order for the plot wedges to be drawn. This rescaling can affect how departments appear. Imagine a department that scores the same in two subfields. If one subfield has a wider range of scores than another, however, a gap may open up in their position when this scaling takes place. This happened in some cases in the original segment plot. The range of observed scores for ethics is wider than for modern history, for example. The result is the relative position of some departments will differ from the former to the latter, even though their raw scores might be the same in both subfields. Originally I just left it at that, but to simplify things I’ve redone the segment diagram so that the size of the wedges is directly proportional to a department’s rank in that subfield. Bear in mind that ranks are calculated after being rounded to one decimal place, so ranks will often be tied.
Visually representing multivariate data is tricky, and this is an example of where a segment plot might be slightly confusing and the choice between using the raw means or the ranks isn’t entirely clear-cut. The ranks bring out the relative ordering of deparments but don’t convey how, for some fields, a few departments might be head and shoulders above the rest of the field. On the other hand, the ranks are easier to interpret than a “relative reputation” measure.
I was just looking around Tim Lambert’s Deltoid in a slow moment, when I came across this priceless story from BoffoBlog about a presentation from “More Guns, Less Crime” author John Lott. In this episode, the hapless AEI scholar gave a presentation arguing that elections have become more expensive because of growth in big government:
His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth in federal spending and growth in campaign spending, and from that he concluded that Big Government caused expensive campaigns. Two lines trending upwards, and he claims with perfect seriousness — and without performing any of the necessary tests — that the one causes the other. When we pressed him on his analysis, not only had he not performed any appropriate tests, but he seemed wholly unfamiliar with the relevant econometrics literature…
It made for a very uncomfortable ninety minutes. Afterward, we agreed that it was the worst presentation any of us had ever seen at the workshop, worse than any first-year grad student’s. Then, when he gained his notoriety it did not surprise me in the slightest that his other research turned out to be as shoddy as it was. When he continued to get backing by organizations like AEI in spite of the astonishingly poor quality of his work, it only confirmed my impression that the “idea factory” of the right is less concerned about the quality of those ideas than whether it can make the most noise.
P.Z. Myers saves me a great deal of trouble by writing the post I had in mind about Larry Summers’ under-informed views about the gender division of labor. I’m particularly glad he takes the time to deal with Steven Pinker’s much quoted line that “Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.” As Myers says, “If people started walking out on presentations of fact-free, unsupported hypotheses, Pinker wouldn’t have a career.”
In the spirit of adding a bit of empirical data to the discussion, have a read of Erin Leahey and Guang Go’s paper “Gender Differences in Mathematical Trajectories” which reviews a lot of evidence about the gender gap in math and analyzes some big data sets to find that it’s not nearly as large as you might think. (Erin is a colleague of mine at Arizona, by the way.) And to echo one of Myers’ points, the relationship between the distribution of measurable properties like math scores and the phenomenology of attainment within the social structure is (a) a very difficult question, and (b) something you might want to read up on, if you’re inclined to throw hypotheses around innate differences between women and men.
As Adams (1990) suggests a college “student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year”. I’ve been contemplating – but have yet to conduct rigorous data-collection to test this hypothesis – that perhaps the increasing importance of computers on university campuses may benefit the health of college students’ grandmothers. The number of crashes and other computer-related problems (“the dog ate my computer and my roommate’s computer, too”) seems to be surprisingly high when projects are due. Of course, it may just be that computers are crashing all the time, students never have online access, but it is only when assignments are due that we happen to hear about it. In any case, if all this means fewer deaths in college students’ families, that’s probably a nice side-effect of growing IT uses at universities.
Across the way on his other blog, John Holbo passes some acute judgements on the perplexed relationship between the traditional domain of humanities departments (classic texts), and the claim of literary ‘theory’ (or, more precisely, some theorists) to turn everything into text, explain it, and assert imperium thereover. It’s a problem shared by other disciplines with imperialist ambitions - economics too has disputes between those who see its domain as traditional market activities, and those who see it as a universal science of choice under constraints. Meanwhile, Richard Byrne at the Chronicle documents how scholars at the MLA are considering abandoning the outer provinces; retreating from their grand ambitions, and linking teaching and scholarship more closely. Interestingly, this year’s President, Robert Scholes, seems to see the answer (if I’m understanding him rightly) as lying in a stronger assertion of disciplinary standards, returning to the ‘harder’ aspects of literature, and advocating what almost sound to be law-like propositions.
“I can’t say just how long this will take,” he said. “But I do believe that this is happening. There is more interest in these things … grammar, rhetoric, and also logic. … There needs to be an overall recognition that what you say has to be reasonable. That it has to be answerable to certain disciplinary considerations. Within this discipline, you can only say x if y and z are in fact reasonable suppositions.”
Now I haven’t seen the speech, so I’m not exactly sure what he means by these statements. If this is just a call for higher standards and more consistent arguments that don’t do too much violence to to the text, of course I’m in favour. If it’s a call for something more than that - i.e. a more rigorous quasi-scientific literary theory, then I’m not at all convinced. If the desire of the humanities is to reconnect with the outside world, I imagine that they’d be better advised to follow the example of those critics who have maintained some general readership - Guy Davenport and Frank Kermode spring to mind, as (from an earlier era) does the poetry criticism of Randall Jarrell. As far as I can tell, quasi-scientific theories of literature (with a few exceptions, such as Propp’s work on folktales) have been a dead end. Trying to apply formal theories to literature (unless done in a playful, Oulipesque way) seems to me to be a very promising method for replacing one set of useless aridities with another. A renunciation of grand theorising, and a frank acknowledgement that criticism is an inherently subjective and partial enterprise seems to me to be a more fruitful direction (and, if I understand John Holbo rightly, what he too is advocating).
Update: attribution goof fixed.
Not only is it MLA Season, it’s also time for the meetings of the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division. The APA meetings are scheduled at this time of the year because, as is well known, philosophers hate Christmas — even if a good number of its senior wranglers do their best to look like Santa. So here I am in Boston. This year I even have a professional excuse to be here, because I’m doing some work on the relationship between specialization and status amongst philosophy departments.
Unlike most academic associations, the APA doesn’t have a proper national meeting, just regional ones. But the Eastern APA is the biggest, partly because there’s a high concentration of philosophers on the East Coast,1 but mostly because the job market happens at it. Like the MLA, Philosophy departments interview their shortlist of 10 to 15 candidates at the meetings, with a view to whittling them down to three or four for campus visits. Personally, I don’t believe this stage adds any useful information to the recruitment process, unless you are interested in whether a candidate can sit comfortably in a cramped hotel suite.
I nearly got an interview at the APA myself a few years ago, when I accidentally sat at the wrong table in an empty conference room, put my feet up and started reading some book or other. After about half an hour some people started filing in to the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. Then two guys (one with a Santa beard-in-training) sat down at my table. “Mr Robertson? We’re from East Jesus State University,”2 said one of them, “Shall we begin?” I should have said yes, but of course instead I was a coward and mumbled something about not being Mr Robertson. Pity: I’ve become quite good at bluffing my way amongst philosophers, and I might have gotten a fly-out.
1 Every single Mets fan, for instance.
2 Not its real name.
Tragic hipness, multicultural agendizing and an almost abject embrace of low/popular culture converge in titles like " ‘Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!’ Patterns of Semantic Widening in ‘Dude,’ " an entire session dedicated to papers on Mel Gibson’s "Passion of the Christ," "Urban Expressionism: Theater, Ritual, and the Hip-Hop Generation’s Black Arts Movement," "Utopia in the Borderlands; or, Long Live El Vez the King" (El Vez is a Latino Elvis impersonator), and "A Pynch in Time: The Postmodernity of Prenational Philadelphia in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon and Mark Knopfler’s ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’ " (Mr. Knopfler is a rocker best known for wanting his MTV). The clunkiness of all this suggests that eggheads are still nerds, but it that some of them are terribly self-conscious about it now.
The trouble is that the author is so sure it’s all nonsense that he is lazily lumping the patently silly and the just possibly serious. (No, really, when the target is this big you should really try for a clean hit.) What is necessarily wrong with having a panel discussion of "The Passion of Christ"? What is specifically ‘clunky’ about it? (Unless, as seems grammatically possible, the panel is actually called ‘Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!’ But I sort of suspect that’s not the case.) Also, calling English profs ‘eggheads’? Who calls anyone an ‘egghead’? (Sounds like Foghorn chuckling about widdah Hen’s genius kid.)
I have ever so much more to say but I’ll just declare this an open thread. I welcome reports from actual attendees of the conference. Be more informative and entertaining than the NY Times, if you please. (OK, here’s a specific question for discussion. If it’s alright for bloggers to give their posts very silly titles - which I mostly do - could the MLA solve all its problems, cross that fine line between stupid and clever, just by turning all the conference papers into blog posts?)
‘Angry Moderate’ made a comment on my post on plagiarism last week, which I’ve been meaning to respond to.
Richard Ellickson’s marvellous book, Order Without Law, notes that the first and usually most effective sanction against violators of a community norm is, “truthful malicious gossip.” In my experience, this is quite common with regard to plagiarists - and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it - and quite appropriate and quite effective. The only problem is the equally large circulation of untruthful malicious gossip.
This seems to me to be the beginnings of an interesting take on the problem of plagiarism - like Robert Ellickson’s cattle ranchers in Shasta county, we could resolve the problem of plagiarism informally, if only we had an effective means of spreading truthful malicious (as opposed to untruthful malicious) gossip about who has plagiarized. The problem is, of course, that the informal personal networks of academia don’t seem up to the task - as the Chronicle reported, even the department chairs of some offending academics don’t seem to know that they have plagiarized. Thus, part of the problem is poor communications among academics. Here, the new institutional economics suggests that centralized communications can play an important role. Work by game theorists suggests that a centralized communications structure in which one actor is an “honest broker” of information about who has behaved badly and who hasn’t, can support honest behaviour among a much larger group of participants than a decentralized structure which relies on one-to-one gossip alone. As Avner Greif, Paul Milgrom and Barry Weingast have pointed out, this was one of the key functions that guilds played in the late mediaeval period - they had centralized communications systems policing the behaviour of guild members to ensure that they all played by the rules. Any member of the guild who broke the rules (by trading with someone who the guild was boycotting) would find that he was boycotted himself by other guild members.1
Of course, in academia, the closest equivalent to guild structures - the various professional associations - don’t play this role. As the Chronicle documents, they seem loath to discipline their members - and even more loath to publicize their disciplinary actions when they take them. Clearly, they don’t have the powers to punish plagiarists themselves. But by identifying and publicizing incidents of plagiarism they could do a lot to solve the problem, leaving the actual enforcement to one-to-one interactions among academics themselves, so that identified plagiarists would find it difficult to get jobs and grants. The current situation in which it’s difficult to distinguish ‘real’ incidents of plagiarism from malicious gossip, is in many ways the worst of all possible worlds. Of course this wouldn’t be a complete solution - some of the kinds of plagiarism that ‘Angry Moderate’ identifies would be hard to police - but it would go a fair way towards remedying the problem.
1 Greif, Avner, Paul Milgrom, and Barry R. Weingast. “Coordination, Commitment and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild.” in Explaining Social Institutions. eds. Jack Knight, and Itai Sened. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995
I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but here goes. It’s teaching evaluation season again. Students fill out forms at the end of class rating their teachers on a range of qualities, and we carefully tot up the numbers (or rather, some computer does). I think this is nice for the students, and, so that I get something useful out of it, I ask them specifically to comment on issues concerning teaching style and topics in the course (I had one topic in my contemporary moral issues course this term that I definitely thought didn’t work, and was interested to see if they agreed). My department prides itself on maintaining reasonable teaching standards, and we take the evaluations pretty seriously when it comes to merit raises. I should preface these negative comments by saying there is no sour grapes here: my evaluations tend to be good, in fact better than I think I deserve and better than any other mechanism of evaluation would produce for me. Here are some observations.
I do not think the central problem with teaching evaluations is the ‘popularity contest’ problem. Students are reasonably savvy about attempts to ingratiate, and are frequently irritated if they feel that they are not learning much in a course. I am sure that an easy A makes for a better evaluation other things being equal, but it does not automatically produce a good evaluation; lots of students do want to learn too. (I realize that hard grading probably does damage evaluations, by contrast. I have no direct experience, because my grading standards are pretty constant across courses. Experimenting on this would be unethical, no?).
The main problem with evaluations is that students don’t reflect a great deal on teaching quality, and do not have a great deal of information on which to base their judgments. So they often make a judgment about the instructor that is really triggered by features of the experience over which the instructor had no control. The two key variables I notice are i) the quality of the TA and ii) the quality of the students.
The quality of the TA can work either way. A really bad TA can ruin a course, beyond the control of the instructor, and evaluations of both suffer. A great TA (and I have had a run of them) can make the instructor look really, really, good, if the instructor is good enough; but make the instructor look bad if the instructor is not good enough. (Relationships between TA and Instructor may have an impact here: I speculate that I do well from having really good TAs, and until this moment thought it was because I was good enough that they don’t make me look bad, but it may just be because I seem to be on good terms with them). In a department like mine, in which we get no choice over who TAs for us, we do not deserve the halo effect, or the reverse.
The other variable is the quality of the students in the course. My observation is this: if a course has a critical mass of good-natured, smart, and vocal students, it works well, and my evaluations are the better for it. Without that critical mass the course does not work, and my evaluations suffer. I suppose it is within my power to prevent a critical mass from emerging, but it is not within my power to ensure a critical mass. My worst ever evaluations were for a course at 8 am; I was lively and full of energy, but none of the students were; they took it because they were the group of students too off-the-ball to register in time for more reasonably scheduled courses. My best evaluations were last semester for the best course I ever taught. I co-taught with a much more experienced professor in another department, and our styles complement each other well. But what we were rewarded for was the once-in-a-decade accident of having not just a critical mass of serious, smart, and lively students, but a classroom full of them. All we did was refrain from wrecking it. But the students, who have not (in most cases) been taking 10 years of courses, attributed the fantastic classroom atmosphere not to their peers, but to us.
I don’t have a conclusion; I just think evaluations should be eyed with skepticism. Maybe, also, a preamble explaining to students what they re for, and emphasizing that they are being asked to make judgments, not merely to express their own reactions.
Two posts sit side-by-side at the Volokh conspiracy at the moment. In one, Eugene Volokh updates a post making fun of some women protesting about not being picked for parts in a production of The Vagina Monologues:
Auditions Are So Patriarchal: Early this year, I blogged about a controversy related to The Vagina Monologues, in a post titled “Life Imitates The Onion.” An excerpt:… In flyers handed out to audience members at the show, University graduate Nicole Sangsuree Barrett wrote that while there was “diversity” in the show, it was minimal. Women of “a variety of skin colors, body sizes, abilities and gender expressions” were not adequately represented, she said. …… It turns out that variety of abilities really did mean variety of abilities …:… Pete said the committee will select people who are “not necessarily drama-oriented” in favor of “people who work (toward) ‘The Vagina Monologues’ mission of ending violence against women.” … “The fact that they had auditions means that some people are automatically excluded,” [Women’s Center spokeswoman Stefanie Loh] said.Not just some people — some vaginas! “Not all vaginas are skinny, white + straight,” or, apparently, have acting ability.
But just to show that identity politics is a game anyone can play, Orin Kerr raises an eyebrow at the sad tale of an oppressed conservative assistant professor. Forced to sit through the odd joke about Michael Moore, park his Honda alongside Volvos and Subarus, and endure a “semiotics of exclusion” (i.e., Kerry-Edwards and anti-war bumper stickers on the Volvos) he suffered grave emotional pain when “anti-Republican tenor” at the lunch table “ached its zenith with this vehement comment from one colleague, ‘I’m not even going to watch [the convention]. I can’t stand it’.”
Update: The going theory in the comments is that our oppressed conservative is a hoax. The internal evidence for this is pretty good.
Ain’t University life grand? Bliss it was on these campuses to be excluded, but to feel oppressed when your crew controlled all three branches of government was very Heaven. The social organization of opinion on university campuses ensures that all available identity niches will be occupied eventually. It might have to do with the way that student groups get funded. People are encouraged to create organizations that, in turn, help generate social identities, appropriate resources, and provide a toolkit of protest strategies. This isn’t anything new. When I was an undergraduate the Gay and Lesbian society on campus got attacked by the (notional) bisexual community for not being inclusive enough. So it became the GLB Soc. But then they worried about Transgendered people. So it became the GLBT Soc. It was then suggested (though not by society members) that they should just include heterosexual people as well and be done with it. While organizations founded on inclusionary rather than exclusionary principles are more prone to this problem, the proliferation of identities and the organizational technologies that foster them is quite general. This is why well-funded College Republicans began adopting the language of oppression some time ago.
Discrimination and oppression are quite real, of course, though the most compelling examples tend not to be found on college campuses. If our conservative professor was denied tenure on the basis of his voting record, we should be worried. And Eugene Volokh’s horse-laugh notwithstanding, it’s pretty well-established that auditions can be very patriarchal indeed. A well-known study by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse found that blind auditions for orchestral positions increased women’s chances of making it past the first round by 50%, and of getting the job by 300%. (Though the number of jobs is so small that there was more uncertainty attached to this figure than the 50% one.)
Adam Kotsko has an extremely funny post up. The First Letter of Slavoj Zizek to the Corinthians. "To the academic community that is in Corinth and to all those who are called to get off on knowledge and to enjoy their symptom." It's part of a St. Paul week series, run to rather good effect.
Adam Anthony Smith also links to this Atrios post from a couple days back which I somehow missed. "A life of plenty, of simple pleasures." The school where the booklet in question is being taught claims to teach as well "the writings of Plato and Socrates." Indeed. WWSW?
The Chronicle of Higher Education isn’t a newspaper that you would normally associate with traditional investigative journalism. However, when it does investigate, it does a pretty good job; it’s just put up the report of an investigation into plagiarism where it names and shames four academics who look to be guilty on all charges. A cultural geographer who seems to have committed extensive serial plagiarism, including writing an article which had “several paragraphs that appear to be copied from a Web site on surf music.” A historian who was found guilty of plagiarism by the American Historical Association - but whose current employer seems to be unaware of the fact. Another historian who appears to have copied extensively from an obscure 1960’s book. And a British international relations scholar who copied five pages of the introduction to his book directly from an article in the well-known journal International Studies Quarterly. Another article (behind the Chronicle’s paywall) talks about a senior scientist (a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and member of the President’s Council on Science and Technology) who appears to have copied large chunks from an article written by one of his proteges without permission (something which I suspect is pretty common in many fields). As the Chronicle reporters suggest, this is almost certainly symptomatic of a wider problem.
While this article delves into a few cases we uncovered, our reporting suggests that what we found is not exceptional. Indeed, an editor at History News Network receives so many tips about purported plagiarism that he now investigates only those involving well-known scholars. A professor at Texas A&M International University was bombarded with hundreds of e-mail messages after writing about being plagiarized. Many of them were from graduate students and professors who believed that they, too, had been victims.
As the Chronicle suggests, there isn’t any very effective means of policing plagiarism given current structures in the academy. Professional associations are reluctant to take on plagiarism cases, or to publicize them when they do. Individual departments may punish plagiarists, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll take action - and if they do, very often, nobody outside the department in question knows about it. The reluctance to take serious action against plagiarists isn’t a conspiracy - it’s due to a combination of a lack of resources, a reluctance to get involved in controversy, and, perhaps, a feeling of ‘there but for the grace of God …” (it’s every academic’s nightmare to be accused of plagiarism because of carelessness or sloppy footnoting). Yet it means that in practice there’s an implicit tolerance for plagiarism. It isn’t an endemic problem, but it’s a real and persistent one - most working academics will know someone who has been plagiarized at one stage or another. Academics frequently hark back to the idea that they form a sort of guild. If this has any meaning at all, the academy should do better in carrying out the primary job of a guild; policing the behaviour of their members.
This post is pure response to a long critical comment by Michael Blowhard to my liberal groupthink post. I've clipped his comment, cut it up, responded point by point. There are many good comments to my post, which I will not respond to just right now, but Michael's seemed to merit complete coverage. Still, this post will only be interesting to the truly excessively interested.
I like Michael Blowhard and read his blog, but I think he has gone and straightforwardly misread me in ways I am actually getting quite used to being misread. So his comment will be the convenient occasion to correct these misreadings. Although I will be lengthy-lengthy, I'm not going to be picky-picky because it was just a damn comment and he confesses, in a subsequent comment, to over-caffeination. I shall make allowances for his state of mind. There are indeed substantive points of dispute between us, but I'll just start by mentioning that the simple misreadings seems to have two causes: 1) my strategy is to focus on problem cases, while ignoring obvious ones that are obviously easy to handle. This produces the erroneous impression that I am missing the obvious. I believe I am not. 2) my strategy is to assert things that are, in my opinion, trivial (but which I think have consequences.) Readers tend to look at these trivialities and wonder what substantive point I could be making.They infer some odious elitism, when actually I'm just saying that unless you think some opinions are better and some worse, you can't possibly see the point of education. Stuff like that. Trivial stuff. On we go.
Good to see you grappling with all of this, as well as going to the trouble of reading Kirk. I find him amazingly boring to read myself, if awfully smart.
How odd. I find him fun to read but surprisingly light in the ideas department (given his heavyweight reputation.)
But I fear you’re coming dreadfully close to saying something like, “Since the academic elite are Truly Smart People, they all agree on all the major points, because Truly Smart People must!And hey, in a practical sense, that means they’re all lefties! So why shouldn’t the left own academia?”
A thousand times no. I am saying nothing near this. I am sorry to be so emphatic but I get this every time I write these posts. First, I'm talking about how things should be, not how they necessarily are. Ideally, academics should be smart rather than dumb. Yes? But more on this below. A separate point first. Throughout the post I address the perspective of the lefty academic, who thinks conservatives are dumb, who therefore doesn't at present see why he should be be obliged, as a point of academic decency, to promote conservatives. You wrongly infer that this is my perspective. No, no, no. It is merely the only perspective that matters for purposes of the present debate. Why? Because conservatives don't see any problem hiring conservatives, so I don't bother addressing the conundrum 'why would a conservative ever think it was alright to hire a conservative?' And lefties who see great merit in conservative positions don't have any problem hiring conservatives, so this puzzler is likewise uninteresting: 'why would a lefty who sees great merit in someone's conservative positions ever think it was alright to hire them?' These are not post-worthy questions, yet their omission may make it seem I am missing the obvious. No, I'm just not stating it. (Post long enough without.) The challenge is to explain to a lefty why despite the fact that he thinks conservative positions really have little intellectual merit, as he well may, he is still under some obligation not just to tolerate them but to work for their promotion. You may say: but this is an unreasonable thing to think. Yes, it may be. You could, then, try to reason the lefty into seeing the intellectual merit, thereby turning him into one of those lefties (see above) who see great merit in conservative positions. But I take it the strategy under present consideration - the Millian strategy (see Bauerlein) - is in fact to try to convince the lefty that, even if he continues to personally see no intellectual merit in conservative positions, he is still under some obligation to promote these ideas by assuring that they are represented in the academic ecosystem. You may think this is a boring or futile strategy. But then your criticism should be that my post is boring and futile, not that I am a bad sort of elitist. And, of course, by the end of the post I turn to consider the right who is intolerant of lefties. Same problem in reverse.
A few points? First, if you think George Will is stupid or unschooled, let alone unfamiliar with lefties and leftie arguments, you’re kidding yourself. I’m no fan, I’m happy to make fun of his arguments when they deserve it, and he may often be wrong. But — sorry — he’s brilliant, he’s tough, and he’s worldly. I’d try to slyly suggest that your airy dismissal of Will is yet more evidence of the kind of arrogance that helps give academia a bad name, only I know you’d catch me out on that one.
My point wasn't that Will is stupid; he's not; merely that he is - as per his habitat - extremely narrow. The TV punditocracy exhibits an incredibly narrow range of political opinions, giving all their debates a potted quality. The range of opinions you can have, and be a talking head on TV, is a fraction of a sliver of the range of opinions you can have and be an academic. I could probably have skipped the Ghostbusters crack, particularly since I confused Murray and Ackroyd. Will would do fine in academia, but he would initially suffer agoraphobia and have to loosen his intellectual style, because the range of opinions tolerated in academia is much wider than any environment he is used to.
Second, you seem to be saying that what gets someone hired as a prof is that he/she is “unusually smart.” Trust me, that may not be how it looks from the outside. (What it tends to look like from the outside is that what gets one hired as a prof is that the person is able to play the academic game effectively. Which admittedly takes some smarts. But more smarts than it takes to play … oh, say, the media game that Will plays? As for whether a given applicant has some spare thoughts and some real depth after he/she is done playing his/her field’s game — well, that always remains to be seen, no?)
No no no. We are talking about IDEALS here, not reality. I take it our IDEAL is that the professoriate shall be unusually smart, or learned, or educated, or what have you. Suppose someone asks you, 'Ideally, should a professor be smart, or just have animal cunning?' I take it you would answer 'smart is better than animal cunning, ideally'. If so, we are in complete agreement. But why are we talking about ideals, not reality? Well, because the question is about what SHOULD be the case. (We can also argue about what IS the case. Very fair thing to argue about. Just not the subject of the post, for the most part. Can't talk about everything.) In short, the way it looks from outside is irrelevant. Because that's a view of how it is, not how it should be. Taking about how things should be is not, per se, a species of unrealism, I'm sure you agree.
Your assertion could also be taken — though certainly not by me! — as further evidence that academics really do think they’re smarter than everyone else.
Fair enough.
Third, even accepting the “unusually smart” thing, which I’m loathe to do, if you combine it with your “elitist” thing, it seems like the conclusion has to be that you think there’s only one way to be smart.
First, the 'unusually smart' thing is trivial not controversial. See above. I am just trying to thumbnail the intellectual virtues - cash them as you like - that make someone ideally qualified to be a professor. The alternative to saying professors should be smart is Harrison Bergeron equalitarianism. Every man a professor (on the model of 'every man a king', I guess.) I know you don't think that, so we agree. OK, the elitist thing is trivial. You don't deny it. Why should the conjunction of these two trivialities - which you obviously agree with - entail that there is only one way to be smart? Do YOU think there is only one way to be smart? (Why do I even seem to be hinting there is only one sort of smart? I'm honestly at a loss as to what could be sending you this false signal from my post. After all, you can easily lodge 'many different types of intelligence' under those reasons for thinking diversity is good. Which I list. And which I obviously approve in some way, since I say diversity is good and these are the reasons it would be.)
What world are you living in?
Emphatically this one.
One where smart people can’t disagree?
What in my post makes it sound like I think smart people can't disagree? The only thing I can think is this this is that first confusion, see above, coming round again. Of course lefties can disagree with righties and think they are smart. Happens all the time. But this really isn't an interesting question: why you would ever hire someone you think is smart? The answer is: because they seem smart. Again, I didn't talk much about this. It seems too obvious. The interesting question is: why would you ever promote (as opposed to barely tolerating, i.e. not sending to the re-education camp) someone you think is sort of dumb? And again - I've said it six times already - I don't think righties are dumb. But some lefties think conservatives are dim bulbs. You can either try to convince them they are not, on the merits; or - the present project - convince them that commitment to healthy diversity should oblige them to hire folks they really don't think are all otherwise all that intellectually worthy.
So, you’ve never been to the movies with smart friends, who had different reactions to the movie? Lordy, that’s not a world (or a set of friends) I’d want any part of.
Yes of course. See above.
Fourth, you seem to be assuming that any person worthy of taking part in an academic elite would necessarily be preoccupied with advancing the interests of his own political team. Why should this be so? (And, forgive me for saying this, but this tendency to automatically conclude that, since politics is inevitable, then let’s play it and play it hard seems to me to be far more widespread on the left than among conservatives, many of whom just wish politics would go away.)
No. But the politically neutral cases aren't really interesting. But why am I not interested in the possiblity of non-politically preoccupied people, you ask? Am I such a fanatic that I am bored with all non-fanatics? No. I'm just focusing on the problematic cases, which involve politically preocupied people. Not clear? Turn it around. Just consider the sort of question that is implicit in the possibility you raise. For example: why would a person who didn't care about politics think that a given job candidate - who happened to be smart but also conservative - deserves the job. Well, ex hypothesi, because the candidate seems smart. On the assumption that the person doesn't care that the candidate is conservative, the candidate's conservatism is no obstacle. Ah, but suppose the candidate seems dumb but conservative? What then? Well, then they don't get it because they seem dumb, not because they are conservative. In general, once you stipulate (what is of course often the case) that the people in the ivory tower don't care about politics the problem evaporates on its own, no? (Am I missing something?) And again 'smart' and 'dumb' are just flagrantly inadeuate shorthand for whatever basket of intellectual goods qualify (or disqualify) you to be a prof. And not in the real world. In an ideal world. We're talking how things should be. Not how they are. So long as you think it makes sense to discuss how things should be, as opposed to are, you should be willing to follow me in all this.
There are people who aren’t primarily political, for one thing.
Of course. See above.
For another: why shouldn’t it be permissable for, say, a departmental chair to have this kind of attitude towards his/her job: “Well, we’ll have a radical, and a stuffy old traditionalist, and someone who’s really good at teaching the basics, and someone who’s fabulous at the new ideas, even if he’s a bit flakey, and we’ll keep the visiting profs from other cultures circulating just to bring some fresh stuff in from overseas …”
Why should it seem that I am saying it isn't permissible? I would have thought it was fairly clear that I'm saying it should be obligatory, since I emphatically agree with Bauerlein, from which permissibility should flow. (Why shouldn't obligation at least tend to entain permission? Am I missing something?) But I am inquiring - purely in a Socratic spirit - into the roots of the obligation. Is that it? You think the thing is so obvious that you infer that I must actually be a secret skeptic about the obligation? Why do these roots need examining (you may be wondering?) Well, because everyone agrees there should be breadth, but there is a disagreement about how wide the breadth net actually needs to be cast. The way to figure that out is to examine further the reasons for favoring diversity. Come up with a fuller account of its utility. Which my post is an invitation to do.
Such an attitude would reflect a conviction on such a person’s part that maybe it’s through nurturing that kind of open-ended jumble and diversity that a department, a field, and maybe even students are most likely to flourish. It could also be taken to reflect a sub-conviction that looking out for the wellbeing of your field and the interests of your students is more important than playing politics.
Yes, obviously this is exactly my view. The only question is what 'well-being' and 'playing politics' mean. Everyone is in favor of 'well-being', but there is some disagreement about what constitutes it. Likewise, 'playing politics' is bad, but expressing authentic intellectual convictions - which may include the authentic conviction that other people's equally authentic political convictions are wrong - may also be good. It's not the case that there is no room for serious trouble here. (And again, the trouble may not arise. But it may. The trouble cases are more analytically interestintg.)
Fifth: and I may be misunderstanding you here, and if so, apologies. But you seem to be asking conservatives to demonstrate some consistent way to deduce their way from their own principles to the conclusion that faculties ought to be more diverse. Happy to be corrected here (as everywhere) if I’m understanding wrong. But if I’m understanding you right, I think you’ve gone off the rails a bit in your understanding of conservatism. The whole deducing-your-way-to-policies-from-abstract-principles thing? … That’s not, or not often anyway, conservative.
This is fair enough. Conservatives may just decide to say that the inexpressible mystery of it shows that they are right. This can't be turned into a principle, without entangling the conservatives in endless self-contradictions, probably. But that's just part of the inexpressible mystery. Ergo, lefties should hop to it and hire some conservatives. I take it the problem with this is obvious. The conservatives may be happy. But why should the lefty accept this sort of 'I am the great and powerful inexpressible mystery of Oz' sort of non-reason giving reason-giving structure? The temptation to draw back the curtain and see whether there is anything there is naturally very strong.
There is a deeper problem, too. In that old Timothy Burke post, he identifies academic structures as sometimes - well, (Edmund) Burkean, in their love of intertia and their reflexive drawing back from innovation and openness. They are rather hidebound. Hence Bauerlein's attempt to flay their hides with some Mill. Now: it is well and good for a Burkean to say that there is a certain mystery to his ways. But there are likely limits to our capacity to crucify our intellects by way of following along. If an avowed Burkean says that the trouble with the academy is that it is too Burkean (intolerably hidebound and intolerant) hence in need of a radical transformation into something more Burkean (wisely cow-like in its stolid prejudices), it doesn't take a Milllian to see there is some potential for conceptual embarrassment.
After all, it’s part of the conservative critique of liberalism and leftism that leftists and liberals are forever deducing conclusions and actions from abstract principles and then imposing them on a life that, reasonably, often reacts badly.
Of course, this presupposes that conservatism is right. Which conservatives may do. But they can hardly hope to convince liberals that liberals should be willing to presuppose that what liberals are doing are doing is fundamentally unreasonable. Conservatives really ought to try to come up with some reasons that they might hope liberals would accept. 'Liberals are mostly wrong' is not a plausible first premise for a liberal. But I think you see this. Moving along.
I suspect that a genuinely conservative response to your question would be to half-dodge it, and say something like, “Well, why wouldn’t you want a more intellectually diverse faculty, especially in the softer fields? It’ll promote vitality and health. It’ll probably serve the students better too.”
I take it the answer would be: because you might be a conservative who doesn't strongly believe in the value of intellectual diversity. Obviously everyone except the Borg collective believes in a certain amount of diversity, but one of the pillars of, say, Kirkianism, is that Millian openness - turning all prejudices into question marks by letting people question them - is bad; at best, a necessary evil of our modern world. it doesn't promote health. It promotes libertinism and Jacobinism. The conservative can say: but I'm not like Kirk that way. I'm really a liberal about this stuff. Well, then, we're all liberals now. Fine by me.
Where are the principles? Where’s the deduction? There’s a general feeling expressed in such a statement that vitality and health beat non-health and non-vitality, and there’s a feeling that one has a sense of obligation to the people whose interests you’re presumably employed to serve. And if you’re determined to, you could make some abstract program out of it. (And wouldn’t that be just like a lefty to do such a thing?) But why would you? Why not leave it a little rickety and open-ended instead?
But why shouldn't this be consistent with letting things stay the same? (The conservative needs to say something that implies that it should change, you see.) The thing we've is a little intellectually rickety, after all. I guess maybe you are saying we do need to go the constituent service way. I do think that makes a certain sense. But it's unclear how far it really carries you. Because it's at odds with the generally understood mission of the university as a place of free inquiry. To what extent, IDEALLY, ought the university to think it has an obligation to ornament popular public beliefs with professors, merely because the beliefs are popular (not because they have been deemed sound by an academic elite.) Possibly the answer is: to some extent.
In any case, I suspect that a conservative response to your question would be a raise of the eyebrows, followed by a quick sidestep, all the while thinking something like: “Oh, there he goes, trying to reason his way to action again. Not that we don’t need to check in with reason from time to time. But, lordy, these academic lefties sure are overly infatuated with their reasoning skills, aren’t they? Not reliable, not reliable …”
If it's better to be unreasonable, I fail to see what the problem is supposed to be - in principle - with lefties in the academy being infatuated with lots of fashionable irrationalist nonsense. Of course, conservatives might say it is just part of the mystery and proliferating diversity of it all that their unreasonableness is better than than the academically ascendant flavor. But I have a suspicion the irrationalist lefties might return the compliment, with a lot of mysterious and proliferating jawbreaking jargon just to make sure it's extra special good on top. Stand-off.
Thus, when you ask, “Do conservatives have any account of why, if they were in the academic catbird’s seat, they would be obliged to promote a smattering of liberals just to brighten the place up - even though they think liberals are wrong-headed?”, I just think you’re off. I think the conservative answer might be something like “Why wouldn’t any responsible person want to do what seems best for the health of their field?”
Everyone wants to do what is best for the health of their field. But there is serious dispute about what constitutes being best for the health of fields. More seriously, I am quite sure that David Horowitz - for example - doesn't think it would be better for the health of the fields he cares about that there should be lefties in them. He used to sell T-shirts, maybe still does, that say 'you can't get an education if you've only heard half the story', or something like that. But who thinks Horowitz thinks there are two sides to the stories he cares about? There's the right side. (In both senses.) And the wrong side. I don't think he thinks the left has wisdom to offer, so why should they get to be profs, by his lights? Maybe I'm too uncharitable. But there is a serious problem asking liberals to accept conservatives into a properly constituted liberal marketplace of ideas, if the not unreasonable suspicion is that (some) conservatives don't buy the liberal song and dance about diversity and pluralism. This is thought to be just wishy-washy relativism, maybe. You may say this is a nonsense worry. Conservatives are not tyrants. Well, then conservatives can allay this silly worry by explaining, by their lights, what they think should be done. If diversity and pluralism is the way to go, why do they think that? It is presumptively in conflict with much classic conservative thought, after all.
To conclude by returning to George F. Will and his "smelly little orthodoxies". This is - I know and love it - an Orwell tag from his essay, "Charles Dickens". Dickens is described as being of "a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxoies which are now contending for our souls." What type is that? "A nineteenth century liberal, a free intelligence". But Russell Kirk (just to stick with our example) dislikes nineteenth century liberals, and free thinkers, because he thinks they are Jacobins and libertins waiting to happen. So if we follow Kirk, against Dickens (and Mill, and so on and so forth) we will plausibly do so because there is some little orthodoxy we thinks smells sweetly. The burden is on conservatives to show this is NOT the case.
This is one of those 'liberal bias/groupthink in academia' posts. (Oh goody, you say; another for the pile.) Let me launch off from Mark Bauerlein's Chron piece, which I agree with almost entirely. And away from George Will's op-ed,
in which he is agreeing with Bauerlein, in the wrongest way. What makes Bauerlein right and Will wrong? (George F. Will? Wrong? Stop the presses! Get that JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR type we save for special occasions. DOG BITES MAN should do.)
Brian Leiter pretty says the necessary. The idea that George F. Will has earned the right to get his bowtie in a twist about "smelly little orthodoxies" is rich. (Ah, the exquisitely odoriferous narrowness of the human cranny that is the Washington punditocracy! The olfactory refinement of sensibility necessary to thrive!) Tom Smith, with whom I have certainly had my differences on this question, cannot suppress a snicker. "Washington lecturing academia on intellectual integrity is like Hollywood lecturing Wall Street on greed." Actually, I would say it's more like Wall Street lecturing Hollywood on greed. In a horrible sort of 'write what you know' way, it makes sense.
The thing that makes this obvious point against Will worth scoring is that academia is, in absolute terms, a bit stuffy - although a wide, open-air prairie of free inquiry compared to Will's cloistered cocoon. (It would be funny to do a spoof about George F. Will forced out of punditry and into the rigors of academia. Give him Bill Murray's lines from Ghostbusters: "You don't know what it's like out there - they expect results!")
At least sometimes we do. But, sadly, academic work in much of the humanities and soft social sciences (that's all we're really sure we're talking about here) is often afflicted by what Timothy Burke has well described as "a certain quality of conformist excellence within the heuristic constraints of what is considered appropriate disciplinarity." What is common to TV punditry and academic work is tension between intellectual ends - service to ideas - and a cultural medium that dilutes perception and pursuit of those ends. Burke made this point well against David Brooks, way back when, in a comment to this CT post. (I like Burke so much I remember his comments from a year ago.) After graciously granting several points he draws the line:
What Brooks misses, of course, is that this isn’t just about conservatism. Virtually anything that departed from a carefully groomed sense of acceptable innovation, including ideas and positions distinctively to the left and some that are neither left nor right, could be just as potentially disastrous. Like a lot of right-wing critics of academia, he generally thinks too small and parochially, and too evidently simply seeks to invert what he perceives as a dominant orthodoxy. If they had their druthers, Horowitz and Pipes and most of the rest of the victimology types would simply make the academy a conservative redoubt rather than a liberal one. The real issue here is the way that each successive academic generation succeeds in installing its own conventional wisdom as the guardian at the gates, and burns the principle of academic freedom in subtle, pervasive fires aflame in the little everyday businesses and gestures of academic life.
The difference between academia and the Washington Sunday morning TV punditocracy is that the former has a carefully groomed sense of acceptable intellectualism; the latter is carefully groomed.
Getting to the point: what's right about Bauerlein is his strong Millian line. The flame of academic freedom of which Burke speaks. Good stuff. What's wrong with Will is that it is almost impossible to believe he believes this Millian line, in principle, rather than as a matter of tactics. That goes triple for the fanatic likes of Horowitz. But I've said as much before.
The thing that makes the Millian line worth discussing at greater than op-ed length is that it is surprisingly hard to pin down in detail. (Turning the point around, pretty much all that can be said at op-ed length on this subject has now been said. Now we need books or, in a pinch, long blog posts.) The problem is: Mill's principles are exactly right for governing intellectual life in the academic arena. They are less clear guides for how to construct the arena. But, in an odd sort of way, after breaking down, these principles sort of pick themselves up and march along after all. (I love Mill.)
I think Bauerlein does a fine job covering in relatively short order the relatively smooth, Millian ground. The trouble comes when you try to leverage principles of toleration and non-coercive respect into directives for, say, academic hiring. Here I'll broaden out a bit from Mill proper, so you see what makes this sticky. In a moral sense, you can pronounce all individuals deserving of respect. (Mill even comes close to hinting, rather implausibly, that every opinion is infinitely valuable, if only as an infinitely valuable punching bag. Otherwise the utilitarian math might not work out right.) You can make a 'truth will win out in the free market of ideas' argument for letting everyone into the market free. You can make a more cynical checks-and-balances argument: everyone had better get a say and a vote - even if they are bloody idiots - because otherwise grievances are likely to pool and fester among the silenced and disenfranchised.
But none of these help with academic hiring. One man-one vote is fine. One man-one endowed chair is silly. Everyone can't be a professor just because they've got an opinion. (That's why there's blogging.) Similarly, it is fine to respect everyone in the weak sense that you leave them alone to do and think as they please so long as they don't hurt anyone. But it is absurd to demand that you respect almost everyone in the more robust sense of 'think that almost everyone is unusually smart'. (Like at Lake Wobegon. Sort of the opposite of Stephen Potter's writerman E.J. Workman, who is unusually ordinary in his habits, and infects everyone else with unusual ordinariness.) But 'unusually smart' is the strong sense of respect that gets you hired. Even the checks-and-balances argument, which you can almost always fall back on in arguing tolerance, doesn't work here. Dumb people may have legitimate interests that need protecting, by giving them votes. Dumb ideas do not have legitimate interests that need protecting, by the provision of endowed chairs for their study. Refuting wrong ideas is good. Don't start thinking of wrong ideas as some sort of repressed lumpenproletarian underclass of Plato's third realm, for heaven sake. Of course, it hurts the feeling of those who hold the wrong ideas to be told their ideas are wrong. But: tough. You'll just have to wait until 'everybody's idea gets a trophy day.' (Please note. I'm not saying conservative ideas are dumb. I'm setting up for a point about what people who happen to think conservative ideas are very wrong should be committed to, if they are committed to a healthy academe. Obviously there is no problem convincing conservatives that conservatives should be better represented in academe. The trouble is convincing lefties, without converting them to conservativism, that they have some obligation to aid and abet the academic cause of conservatism.)
In short, academia is aristocratic. This sounds elitist, since it is, but it's also trivially true. If you don't think some beliefs are better than others, why would you ever expend time and money to change anyone's beliefs by sitting them in a classroom? Why would you think education was a good thing if you weren't aristocratic about it?
This complicates the 'bias against conservatives' question, not because it is absurd to suppose that conservatives could ever be part of an intellectual elite. (Obviously conservatives think so. I've now said so twice.) But because it is unclear why leftists, who obviously believe that they are right and the righties are wrong, should think so. From behind a veil of ignorance, it might make a certain among of sense to hedge your bets - if you didn't know your political affiliation. But given that you have your convictions, and given that you are supposed to promote the best ideas, why promote ideas that you think are not the best ideas?
It's the vast difference between respecting your neighbor's right to be a Republican, which is a tolerance thing; and respecting your neighbor's Republicanism so much that you promote his campaign, which is not a tolerance thing but something very much more. Academic promotion is a form of promotion. Why promote that with which we do not agree? (I've been misunderstood on this point before. I trust I am clear this time?)
Now at this point someone is going to object that I am just making trouble where there is really none. It isn't unusual, after all, for folks to respect - in a strong, positive sense - their staunch intellectual adversaries. Yes, of course. I'm just asking what makes them do that. More to the point: why, even if they don't natively feel such strong respect, they might feel duty-bound to muster a certain amount of prosthetic ersatz respect, out of a sense of intellectual duty. What principles would demand that? I think it is quite crucial that the answer is, indeed: a commitment to diversity. But why should you think diversity is good, if you are an aristocrat, as everyone who thinks schools are a good idea is? One funny fact is that the friends of diversity are almost all fair-weather, just like friends of federalism. (Think about it.) More to the present point, diversity tends to a sort of relativistic leveling, no? How does that help us aristos?
Diversity serves aristocracy if diversity has appropriate instrumental value (although you might think it was also something more). As Mill rather vaguely puts it, it may 'promote the general interests of Man as a progressive being.' Something like that. But whatever can that mean?
Why should diversity do that? Three reasons.
First, intellectual. Here all the standard Millian considerations pile on, as per Bauerlein's piece. You always need lots of possible theories, ideas, views and perspectives, wedging everyone's mind open against the native tendency to snap shut. You need vigorous opponents attacking your theory, keeping it fit and strong. The difficulty, however, is that some version of the toleration-promotion problem remains. You can tolerate nearly everyone, but you can only promote a few. As Burke puts it in his latest post: "If tomorrow I persuaded my colleagues that the next job that opened in the humanities in Swarthmore should not be dedicated to any particular discipline or research specialization, but thrown open to the most interesting, fertile intellect we could recruit, I would be persuading my colleagues to join in an impractical catastrophe that would involve trying to winnow a field of 25,000 applicants down to a single person." To avoid the catastrophe you fall back on those old unreliable heuristics of disciplinarity. It is hard to see that just saying 'keep the flame of freedom alive', even in a true Millian spirit, does much to brighten everyone up. That's the challenge. Finally, regarding the political question, given that you can only promote a few - you cannot cast the net too widely - it is not self-evident why people should feel intellectually duty-bound to promote (as opposed to tolerating) their political opponents, whom they truly do believe to be mistaken in their beliefs.
Second, constituent service The University should look like America. Professors owe a duty to those who pay their salaries - the public - to not wander too far away from the public's beliefs. The public is paying to have their ideas developed and defended, not mocked and criticized. This is an important part of the university's public duty. I trust the potential epistemological downside of this 'every idea that can afford a lobbyist gets a professor' model is obvious, even if it were flexibly implemented. Nevertheless, there is a minimal, recoverable core of plausibility to the idea that a higher education system that is not sensitive to - sympathetic to - the values of the public is going to generate those pools of toxic grievance mentioned above. You give people votes, even if they are stupid, to avoid certain predictable (and very real) problems. Why not give them professors, even if they are stupid, to avoid them becoming aggrieved or unduly abused (even beyond what their stupidity inherently warrants)? I leave it to others to develop this hint in a way that does not fall foul of the looming epistemological absurdities. (You might begin with the conclusion of my post on Nathanael West: "the right of every American boy to go into the world and there receive
fair play and a chance to make his fortune by industry and probity
without being laughed at or conspired against by sophisticated aliens." No, seriously. I don't think the sociological argument is totally absurd.) And, in case it isn't bloody obvious, I'm not saying the public is stupid. I'm saying: what if the public were stupid. If the public is smart, there's no interesting problem.
Third, pluralistic. Speaking of values, you could just come out and say that there is a mysterious, irreducible plurality of values in the universe. Perhaps they are inscribed in the firmament, perhaps in our hearts. But they aren't going away, so we'd better deal with it. Furthermore, some of these values are progressive, and vote Democrat, some conservative and vote Republican. And so we need progressive professors, and also conservative ones, to speak for these diverse values. No one sort of professor can contain within him or her all values. They'd explode, plainly. Way back the last time I had a go-round at all this I quoted a favorite passage from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio A vignette in which a rather grotesque old man write a book about grotesque people:
In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
So you say the professoriate is grotesque unless, collectively, it reflects all these different values. Is that clear enough? Obviously it is not. Needs development.
So far, so repetitive. I've said this before if you've been reading carefully. But now that I've got some old pieces in place, a few new steps. I want to ask, in a Left2right sort of way. What do conservatives think about all this? Do conservatives have any account of why, if they were in the academic catbird's seat, they would be obliged to promote a smattering of liberals just to brighten the place up - even though they think liberals are wrong-headed? (Dont' say 'simple tolerance', that's not enough.)
My suspicion is that the answer is: no. What we've got in place of reasons are some fairly evergreen rhetorical devices.
Exhibit A. The Diversity Petard Hoist
Conservatives enjoy the petard hoist of advocating diversity - i.e. affirmative action for conservatives - because it is a sort of reductio ad absurdum on sloppy left rhetoric. By all means, have your fun, hoist away. All's fair in war. But poetic justice as fairness isn't justice, as I've said before. At the end of the day you've got to have a positive conception of how the university should be populated with profs of different kinds. Something that flows from your conservative philosopy, thank you very much. Otherwise advocating diversity is just hypocrisy.
Exhibit B. Play the Populism Card
Way back in olden days, when I was arguing with Tom Smith about all
this (I truly do not wish to reheat all that old cabbage we
slung at each other), he got indignant
about the suggestion that higher education is aristocratic, especially
when it was further suggested that this fact complicates attempts to
mitigate the sufferings of conservatives trying to land jobs in the
humanities and soft social sciences. Now I don't fault him for failing to see (at least when he was arguing with me) that the aristocracy point is per se trivial (which isn't the same as inconsequential). He read it as substantive and ancien regime-grade absurd, mistook the direction of thrust of the sword, parried fiercely that just because
education is elitist, doesn't mean the educational elite should be a liberal elite. Fair enough. Touché, even, if that were where the thing was really going. (And all this is truly ancient history and I don't want to pick a fight with Smith today. I'm just using him as an example.) But, recovering the triviality of the aristocracy point: when you complain about liberal education elites, make sure to keep the accent on liberal if you are feeling honest.
There is a very well-worn groove along which conservatives do so like to slide. (Oh, I see Jonah is in rare
sans-culotte form. Well faked, sir. Or feinted, as we aristocrats say.) Railing against liberal elites. Accent on elite. Put the accent on elite and it sounds like you have some democratic or populist way to run the university (or media) which would be different than the elite way. I guess you can work on the sociological conception outlined above and even make this come true, but you'd have a pretty weird, Harrison Bergeron-style university. Pending that happy day, griping about elites remains a pure debater's trick. (The media case is a little more complicated, but not much.)
OK, having removed the jokers from the deck: if conservatives are made to play fair, what chance have they got? Specifically, can conservatives think of any reason - consistent with their philosophy - why the vigorous Millian ideal Bauerlein sketches out should be upheld. I take it: not. They aren't Millians. They cannot advocate Millian liberalism without ceasing to be conservatives.
>I've been reading Russell Kirk pretty seriously and carefully of late, The Conservative Mind. Now I realize the book is half a century old, yet an acknowledged classic. Conservatives speak well of it, don't repudiate it. Given what the book says, it seems there is plenty of room for hanging conservatives up on its awkward contents. (They can, of course, choose to respond by explaining that they don't believe that stuff. They believe some totally other stuff.) Kirk is incredibly, unapologetically elitist. This makes the populist card a double-cheat, if you are a smirking Kirkian. Furthermore Kirk is not elitist in a way that would help make sense of, say, the tolerant, open elitism of the university. Free inquiry, the market of ideas. That stuff. He is expressly in favor of groupthink, although of course he doesn't call it that. Following Burke, he speaks approvingly of the 'sureties of prejudice' and compares the ideal populace to contented cattle, huddling together under English oaks - i.e. expansive orthodoxies - deaf to the buzzing of any strange new ideas. It is hard to see why the worst abuses Bauerlein exposes should not be tranformed into the finest Kirkian virtues, if only the players are changed.
Finally - and this is what really struck and surprised me most - Kirk has nothing useful to say about diversity or pluralism. I'm not kidding about the surprise. This isn't some Potteresque 'I'm Surprisedmanship' gambit, (although that is a wonderful writership trick, well played.) Russell Kirk says that conservativism needs "affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems." After I heard this well-known Kirk tag, before I read the book, I always figured this would eventually be levered into a critique of, say, Bentham, in terms of an alleged incommensurable plurality of values that cannot be cranked through the clattering calculus of etc, etc. But no. As it turns out, it's a get out of philosophy jail free card for conservatives, pure and simple. If anyone catches you in a contradiction, and you are conservative, you say about the variety and mystery and you walk! Like 'open sesame'. Wonderful stuff.
A case in point. I was struck not so long ago by Prof. Bainbridge's truly indignant screed against liberal elites, while out of the other side of his mouth he smugly self-identified as a follower of Russell Kirk against the chirping sectaries of libertarianism. Kirk, it is worth noting, identifies anti-egalitarianism, i.e. elitism, as one of the truly essential pillars of conservative philosophy. Kirk defines proper freedom, more or less, as the privilege of the true elite to do and dictate as it sees fit, the privilege of the rest to do as they are told. No, really. That's what he says. He isn't normally one to talk rights. But he is willing to acknowledge the "natural right" of those less elite than himself "to be restrained from meddling with political authority in a fashion for which they are unqualified." Yet professor Bainbridge is fierce against 'elitism'. How unaccountable. Ah, well. Proliferating variety and mystery must explain it.
The one sentence version of this post is: conservatives cannot advocate the proper reform of the academy without turning Millian. But if they turn Millian they are not conservatives.
Obviously libertarians and those Republicans who are only in it for the money can sit this one out on the sidelines and watch the conservatives, if any care to play. This is part 1 of a series (unless I don't write the rest). I need to talk about how the phrase 'liberal bias' almost invariably has the same effect on conservatives as does Mr. Myxlplyk saying his name backwards: banishment from our dimension for a significant period of time. This is not to say that liberal bias does not exist, merely that there are at present no conservative media critics with whom you can raise the subject. (That I know of.) We also need to solve the whole framing problem. Man, I don't like that Lakoff guy's ideas. Ballot box poison.
There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading Left2Right. Here’s its mission statement, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.
In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.
Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.
The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.
Timothy Burke’s latest post needs a comment box. Well, now it’s got one.
As a follow-up to my recent post about academia and blogging, I have compiled a brief informal survey for academic bloggers, broadly defined to include all academics (any rank) who either read and/or write blogs. Please consider filling it out. It should take no more than five minutes. The material will not result in any scientific publications, it is merely meant as an informal exercise to inform some conversations. I am collecting all information anonymously. I will post a summary of the material on CT at a future date.
UPDATE (Saturday, Nov 27, 2004): I have now closed the survey, thanks to all those who participated.
Kai von Fintel links to one of the newest (and coolest) toys in the toolbox.
It returns academic papers matching a search phrase you look for, ranked by number of citations. Hours and hours of fun to be had!
The Guardian has a report on what academic life is actually like in the UK today: the pressures of the RAE, invasive management practices, requirements to mollycoddle students, requirements to provide an audited paper-trail documenting the mollycoddlling etc. It also comments on the fact that for many academics there is no clear boundary between home and work. As the report say, we get no sympathy, because the public image is of people giving the odd lecture and reading at the leisure in the library.
One of the advantages of not being a philosopher — and, in particular, not being a metaphysician — is that you don’t get emails like this:
Dear Mrs Paul,may I offer you a final (as I think) ontological argument and ask your disproof on it? I’d be very thankful to you for answer.
Sincerely yours,
etc.
I imagine Brad DeLong gets similar stuff on why gold is the One True Measure of Value, and Jaques Distler has a folder of proofs that String Theory was Anticipated by the Ancients. When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.
In the aftermath of the elections, it doesn’t look as if anyone in government will be calling on me for frank and fearless advice1 any time soon. So this seems like a good time to get my records in order. My piece on time management elicited some follow-up discussion along these lines, notably here, with followup here . For those who are looking for moderately constructive routine activities in the wake of recent catastrophes, here are some (not very organised) thoughts.
I’ve never found a satisfactory “one size fits all” solution, though I’ve acquired lots of experience in the associated search. For my main bibliographic file, I’m using a Mac-only product called Bookends, the product of a one-man show called Sonny Software. I tend to go for obscure products like this2. The industry standard at the moment is Endnote, but I had some problems with this (can’t remember exactly what) and decided not to adopt it when I shifted from Procite a couple of years ago. When I get time, I plan to work out how to use BiBTeX - Bookends produces output in this format. The physical copies of papers I’ve accumulated are stored in filing cabinets, and marked in Bookends. I’m also trying to keep my PDF files in a similar fashion, but I’m well behind on that.
Email is another gigantic database in itself. I’ve been using Eudora, which has pretty good filtering and search capabilities, but I’m now dipping my toe into Google’s Gmail - I’m just a bit worried about Google having access to all my mail, black and otherwise.
Then I’ve got a bunch of Filemaker databases. As well as the usual contact lists and so on, I’ve got a system of two linked databases which is supposed to keep track of my articles, where they have been submitted and rejected, and so on. As I’m both quite active and somewhat out of the mainstream in economics (both geographically and ideologically), I tend to get a lot of rejections, and I live in fear that I’ll resubmit a paper to a journal where it’s already been rejected. The system also lets me know how long things have been in process, so I can send polite reminder notes in cases of extreme slowness (I normally wait a year, but unlike some authors I’ve heard of, I don’t mark the event with a birthday card).
If I can summarise my views on this kind of organisational stuff, they are
Anyway, back to my new working paper database, which is going to make all my stuff available on RePEc
1 They’ll get it anyway, of course, but only in my spare time, and only through channels like blogs and opinion columns
2 I also like Nisus Writer as an alternative to Word.
While the Republicans are clearly enjoying the benefits of the hack gap, Christopher Shea suggests in the Boston Globe that the Democrats’ ‘professoriate gap’ doesn’t count for much. According to Shea, (1) the recent poll of academic economists in the Economist where 70% of economists judged Bush’s fiscal policy to be bad, or very bad, (2) the letter signed by Harvard Business School professors suggesting that Bush flunked his tax policy, and (3) the letter from over 700 foreign policy scholars denouncing the Iraq adventure are so much hot air.
Shea’s article is lazy, one-sided, and intellectually sloppy. It tries to squash two, quite different arguments into an incoherent whole. The first is undeniably true - that academics don’t have much power to influence elections. The second is false - that this means that polls or petitions signed by academics are politically irrelevant. Academic economists and international relations scholars have real expertise in their areas of interest - that’s why they’re frequently tapped by both Democratic and Republican administrations for middle-to-senior policy positions. They’re not just living in ivory towers. Furthermore, both economics and international relations departments are ideologically and intellectually diverse - it’s notoriously hard to get them to agree on anything. When international relations scholars from both left and right unite to denounce a major foreign policy initiative, it’s a pretty good signal that there’s something horribly wrong with the policy in question. Likewise, when the great majority of economists are convinced that Bush’s fiscal policy is bad-to-disastrous, it tells us something important about how truly awful Bush’s fiscal policy is.
Update: Chris Shea responds, defending the article in comments.
If you’re reading this, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re in need of time-management tips1. On the other hand, the idea of a blogger giving time management tips is problematic, to say the least. Undaunted by this contradiction, I’m going to offer a few. The details reflect my main activity, which is academic research but may be more or less adaptable to other kinds of jobs.
First, the best way to avoid a piled-up in tray is to deal with jobs immediately, either by doing them, or by deciding never to do them. This won’t work for every kind of job, but the more types of jobs you can handle in this way, the better. So to implement this tip you need a way of classifying jobs. One way is by the time they are likely to take (see tip #2). IF you take this approach you can decide to do all 5-minute jobs immediately, or not at all. I prefer to focus on discretionary jobs where an immediate decision not to take the job is feasible. For an academic, refereeing for journals is like this. I try to deal with requests for referee reports in the same week I get them. If I have free time, and the job looks straightforward on a first reading, I try to do it within two days. Editors who are used to waiting for months really love a quick turnaround like this, and I live in hope that it will build up good karma for my own submissions. If I can’t manage a report within a week then, unless the paper looks to be very important, or I am obligated to the journal in question, I reply immediately that I’m not available. Editors usually don’t mind this, especially if I can suggest someone else.
My second tip is that the average 5-minute job takes about half an hour. This is an example of asymmetric risk. If all goes well, I might do a five-minute job in three minutes, saving a bit of time. But when things go badly, a job that should have taken five minutes cascades into a series of tasks that chew up an hour or more. The person you had to call doesn’t work there any more and when you eventually find their replacement it turns out that you’re missing some crucial piece of documentation, and while you’re searching for it the computer crashes and so it goes on. So, if I’ve accumulated 8-10 jobs that ought to take 5 minutes each, I find that setting aside an entire morning is usually realistic.
My third tip is particularly relevant for people prone to distraction, which obviously includes all of us here. My core business is producing academic journal articles (and the occasional book). In this business, it’s easy to drift along, reading lots of interesting stuff, making notes, and imagining you are making progress, but not actually getting anywhere. So in homage to Taylor and Stakhanov, I discipline myself by setting word targets. I try to write 500 to 750 words of new material every day. 500 words a day might not sound much, but if you can manage it 5 days a week for 40 weeks a year, you’ve got 100 000 words, which is enough for half a dozen journal articles and a small book. So, that’s my target. If I haven’t written enough one day, I try to catch it up the next day and so on. Blog posts don’t count, of course, though occasionally I can get myself an easy day by reworking blog material into academic output. This may sound crass, and it’s not appropriate if you’re a creative genius, but it works pretty well for me, and I think would work well for others in similar circumstances.
1 The obvious one is “Get back to work!”, but that wouldn’t do much for our pageview counts.
Kudos to Duke for collecting and making public data about the time to degree and the rates of completion in their PhD programs. I would be curious to see similar data from other campuses. It’s unclear how many schools collect such data systematically and they certainly don’t make them public very often as the details are usually not very glamorous and can seem pretty discouraging. But it’s important information for people to have as they prepare for their graduate school experiences. It can also help students from other campuses as they try to argue for better/longer support for their training.
Jacques Derrida has died; Jack Balkin has a good and nuanced appreciation here, while the New York Times has a somewhat cooler summation of his life here.
Update: Scott McLemee has the best short summation of Derrida’s intellectual life and influence that I’ve seen so far.
Few academic institutions put anything concrete in writing when it comes to promotion and tenure review so it seems an informal discussion on a blog about the topic will be as informative as most other opportunities to consider the issues.
I have been pondering the pros and cons of co-authoring articles during one’s junior faculty years. How does a co-authorship count toward promotion and tenure? Obviously the answer is going to depend on a myriad of factors, but a discussion may still be interesting and illuminating. I realize that in some fields co-authorship is more the norm than the exception. In most lab sciences one rarely sees a sole-authored publication. But in the social sciences – the home discipline of several CT authors – it is less common. Since there are tenured faculty around here who have likely participated in promotion and tenure reviews, I would be curious to hear about their experiences. Of course, others are just as welcomed to contribute their thoughts.:)
What types of publications are possible regarding authorship?
Sole authorship. These publications have one author. These papers are the most straight-forward in terms of whose work they reflect and are highly desirable, it seems.
Co-authorship with senior faculty. These papers are co-authored with senior scholars. Junior faculty are often advised not to have a CV solely consisting of papers written in collaboration with senior scholars. It is important for a junior scholar to show clearly his or her distinct contributions to a field and by co-authoring with senior scholars, some will be inclined to dismiss the work as that of the senior researcher. This is not necessarily the case, but it may happen and so a junior scholar will likely want to diversify.
Co-authorship with peers (other junior scholars). These pieces are co-authored with peers of a similar tenure rank. If both authors are known for the particular topic of the paper (or it is an area new to both of them) then the contributions will likely be considered equally. Neither author will be given more credit than the other for the publication so assuming equal contributions to the project, credit will be assigned reflective of actual work contributed.
Co-authorship with students. On these publications, the junior scholar becomes the senior author due to his or her seniority as compared to the student co-author(s). None of the authors may be well known so credit is likely assigned equally. It is unlikely that the junior scholar will be given less than half the credit for the work (or more generally speaking, in the case of n co-authors, less than 1/n credit of the work).
I was “raised” in the tradition that if students participate in a research project actively and contribute to the writing of the paper then they receive co-authorship. I was also “raised” in the tradition that if a graduate student did most of the work on his or her own paper then the faculty member advising the paper does not put his or her name on the publication as a co-author. It is the graduate student’s work, the faculty member played an advisory role. This is clearly very different not only across disciplines but even across departments or simply individual scholars. I mention this to clarify that in the preceding paragraph I am not referring to projects of graduate students.
So how should a junior scholar proceed? Pursuing only sole-authored publications is not always viable because some projects greatly benefit from - or are only possible with - multiple contributors (e.g. projects where the different members of the project bring very different skills to the table). It is also easier to pursue different interests if collaborating with others partly because there is some division of labor, and depending on the co-author, there is regular prodding to advance the project.
If given the choice of writing a sole-authored piece (one that the junior scholar could pull off on their own given enough time) or bringing a graduate student on as a co-author (making the project more likely to reach a publishable state thanks to the division of labor), which is the better approach? Is it better to wait to finish a piece (given another dozen pieces in the works with varying levels of priority) and have it be sole-authored, or is it better (or just as well) to bring on a collaborator who will help get the piece out quicker?
That’s just one possible question. There are lots of others, feel free to raise your own. I am involved in projects of all types described above so I have some experience with all variations. They all seem to have their pros and cons.
Belle below and Edward at Obsidian Wings have already said most of what needs saying about Prof. Martin Kozloff’s fear- and hate-filled letter. I knew people like Prof. Kozloff in Ireland, where terrorist groups in the North spent twenty-five years or so plumbing the depths of pointless, evil violence. But frustration is not a strategy. It’s easy to give in to blind anger, but if you don’t follow it up with any tangible action it’s just political onanism, and if, God help you, you do follow through then you just find yourself in the same boat as the people you despise.
Prof. Kozloff is Watson Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. What sort of values does he think schools should try to embody? What sort of values does he think make it possible for there even to be such things as Distinguished Professors of Education in the first place? Yet he says “We will … muzzle or remove anti American professors,” and “We will burn your mosques,” and “We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun.” In the face of this, I’m not ashamed to say that my view is best expressed in, of all places, a comic novella by Alexander McCall Smith:
The Master then rose to give a short address.‘Dear guests of the College,’ he began, ‘dear Fellows, dear undergraduate members of this Foundation: William de Courcey was cruelly beheaded by those who could not understand that it is quite permissible for rational men to differ on important points of belief or doctrine. The world in which he lived had yet to develop those qualities of tolerance of difference of opinion which we take for granted, but which we must remind ourselves is of rather recent creation and is by no means assured of universal support. There are amongst us still those who would deny to others the right to hold a different understanding of the fundamental issues of our time. Thus, if we look about us we see people of one culture or belief still at odds with their human neighbours who are of a different culture or belief; and we see many who are prepared to act upon this difference to the extent of denying the humanity of those with whom they differ. …
‘Here in this place of learning, let us remind ourselves of the possibility of combating, in whatever small way we can, those divisions that come between man and man, between woman and woman, so that we may recognise in each other that vulnerable humanity that informs our lives, and makes life so precious; so that each may find happiness in his or her life, and in the lives of others. For what else is there for us to hope for? What else, I ask you, what else?’
It is not weakness to master your fear and anger and think clearly about how to understand and properly solve a problem like Islamic Terrorism. It doesn’t imply any indulgence or softness toward terrorists: wanting to be good doesn’t mean having to be stupid. Certainly, our principles may imply far more than we can hope to live up to, but isn’t that the point of them? And, as the Master says, what else is there for us to hope for? What else, I ask you, what else?
In a move that might shock some in the philosophical community, NYU is about to commence a hiring campaign.
New York University is on a hiring campaign that it hopes will put its graduate and undergraduate liberal arts programs on sounder footing and give them the stature of some of its most prominent professional schools. Over the next five years, it plans to expand its 625-member arts and science faculty by 125 members, and replace another 125 who are expected to leave. (New York Times)
If hiring Ned Block, Hartry Field, Kit Fine, David Velleman etc etc was what they do in normal times, it could get a little scary to see what they do in an expansionary era.
Today’s Guardian Online has a piece by Jim McClellan about academic blogging . I get quoted quite a bit and accurately too. But, as always, I’m not sure that what comes across is exactly what I meant to say. So I guess I wanted to make two points: (1) that blogs can be used as an interactive teaching tool but that rival courseware technologies which lock out “outsiders” pose a threat to that expansion of the medium (a point that Eszter makes more eloquently here ); and (2) that concerns over intellectual property and corporate liability on the part of universities are in tension with academics increasing use of the blog medium. Those points get rather run together in the piece (that’s probably my fault, not Jim’s). As for my own experiment to use a blog in teaching — it wasn’t a great success, as the article says. But others have done better, and I’ll have another go this year.
I realise that we at Crooked Timber are too ethereal, pointy-headed creatures to get involved in mere political mudslinging, but as the resident Morlock employee, I occasionally frequent obscure Democrat blogs like Eschaton. It is my professional opinion that this video clip is enough to make a cat laugh.
As a supplement (or possible corrective) to my last post, this article by David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that six out of seven quantitative models presented at the APSA yesterday predict that Bush will win the popular vote. Note that these models aren’t trying to do the same thing as Erik and Paul’s paper - they’re predictive (sort of) rather than analytic. Note also that modelling has had a mixed success in predicting outcomes in the past. Still, all caveats aside, it’s an interesting datum.
Updated thanks to comments.
A point that’s possibly worth reiterating:
The Islamic world has ample reasons for legitimate criticism. Anti-Semitism, sexism, lack of democracy, lack of opportunity, nurturing of terrorism… these are sad realities, not the hallucinations of right-wingers. Anger and criticism are appropriate, but our approach has to start with the assumption that Muslims are not going away. Short of deliberate genocide, there’s no way forward in the long run except for “hearts and minds.”
There is much, much more to say about this. Luckily, an organization called Americans for Informed Democracy is taking a few steps in this direction. They’re putting on a series of thirty events in September and October on the subject of US-Islamic world relations.
The series will finish on October 12 with six “Face to Face” videoconference dialogues between young leaders at six universities in the U.S. and six in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey. The series is intended to commemorate the three-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks with a call to action out of the ashes of tragedy. As you know, the recently released report by the 9/11 Commission stressed that the U.S. must “act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world” and to share America’s “vision of opportunity and hope.” We hope that our efforts can help to build understanding between non-Muslims and Muslims in the U.S. and then to extend that understanding to the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.
No one initiative like this will change history. But what other option is there, really?
A student was referred to the diversion program for possession of marijuana in the courtyard between Coronado and La Aldea, 822 E. Fifth St., Friday at 10:23 p.m., reports stated.Police smelled burning marijuana coming from the area and saw the student who had red, bloodshot eyes and whose breath smelled of marijuana, reports stated.
Police asked the student if he had any marijuana on him and he said he had smoked earlier but didn’t have any on him and said, “You can check me,” reports stated.
At that point he put his hands in his pockets and said “Oh yeah, I have a little,” reports stated.
These are the people I have to interest in the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. As it turns out, it can be easier than you might think (when they’re not stoned). For instance, you can go a long way with a discussion of the division of labor that begins with the question “Why the hell are there nearly a million people living here in the desert?”
I had rather taken my eye off the ball, but was informed by a pal this week that a charge of civil fraud has been confirmed in a US Court against Andrei Shleifer and one of his assistants for investing in Russian companies while they were running the Harvard Institute for International Development’s project in Russia, contrary to their agreement with USAID not to do so. To be honest, it all looks pretty sleazy stuff, and not at all good for the international reputation of the American economics profession (Shleifer was a recent John Bates Clark medal winner).
On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get wrapped up in moral outrage over this particular charge; the actual charge on which Shleifer and Hay were found to have committed civil fraud was that they acted in concert with Hay’s girlfriend to set up a mutual fund company and try to become the Fidelity of Russia. Which strikes me as a pretty silly idea at the time, but hardly on a par with Pol Pot.
On the other hand, it appears that nobody at the HIID is going to jail (or even being seriously criticised) for the genuine crime that was committed by that institute during the 1980s; their partisanship of Anatoly Chubais and the disastrous privatisation program associated with that government (here’s a potted summary by FAIR of why you should care, and my own analysis of why it was such a bad idea). This, in my opinion (which I hope to flesh out a bit next week) was a crime which does bear serious comparison with some of the middle-ranking atrocities of the last century. And of course, nobody cares, because such is the nature of things. JK Galbraith has a book out this week called “The Economics of Innocent Fraud”, in which he suggests that innocent frauds perpetrated by people acting in good faith are in general far more damaging than culpable frauds perpetrated by people who know what they are doing. It looks like l’affaire Shleifer is proving once more that even at 96 years of age, he’s got more marbles than most of the rest of us put together.
Oh, happy day! Timothy Burke is back and blogging after his long hiatus! He’s got a nice post up about alleged third-party infantilism, responding to Henry and others; and a long outline proposal for a new model ’21st Century college’. Now all he needs is a PayPal button to help him raise $500 million; and a comments box for all the feedback he’ll needs to help hone these revolutionary ideas. Allow me to solve half these problems by providing the comments box. (No need to thank me, Tim. It’s the least I could do.)
Bit strange to run across one at this time of year - like Christmas in July - but this is one of the better “I went to the MLA” pieces I’ve read. It deserves a comment box. (Also, I’m sort of curious whether this post will work - sort of like a bat signal - to draw Chun out of retirement.)
There’s a lot here that exercises me tremendously. But if I started I’d never shut-up. You go first. But here’s a polite suggestion. Since the piece is in “The Believer” - and they so stern against snark - let’s try to keep the anti-MLA hatchet-work sub-Peckish, shall we? (Just a suggestion.)
Via Ralph Luker comes a quite astonishing story from Margaret Soltan at University Diaries. (The link doesn’t seem to work: scroll to Wednesday June 23rd.) In March I wrote about Diploma Mills like Glenncullen University (a non-existent college in Dublin), which offer a range of degrees upon receipt of a fee, without all that tedious standing in line, taking exams, writing theses, and so on. Last month, an ongoing investigation headed by Senator Susan Collins called for a crackdown on such places.
Degrees from the Glenncullens of this world pad out the CVs of people from many walks of life. But University Diaries reports that the investigation has also found evidence of bogus credentials on the CVs of some … unexpected … people. People like Isaiah Berlin, for instance:
The committee’s zealous detective work has produced a list of contemporary and posthumous fake degree holders that is now making the rounds … Perhaps the most stunning revelation involves Sir Isaiah Berlin, an intellectual and moral icon whose death a few years ago prompted hundreds of tributes, festschrifts, conferences, and books. … How then can it be that Berlin graduated not from Corpus Christi Oxford, as his curriculum vitae claimed, but rather from the similar-sounding, and now defunct (by court order) diploma mill, the University of England at Oxford? And that his Ph.D. in philosophy was granted on the basis of a one-page essay he wrote describing his “life experience” as a “a real pluralist” who “likes everyone”? (Quotations are taken from UEO records confiscated by the Department of Commerce.) “It’s an intriguing story,” says Madelaine Jovovich, a member of Collins’s staff. “Berlin was born in Riga; his father was a timber merchant. His father was very unhappy that his son wanted to become an academic, because he wanted Berlin to go into the family lumber business… It turns out that this business was not just wood but wood products, including paper, and that Berlin’s father was, among other things, the proprietor of an early and very lucrative diploma mill, which his son did eventually agree to help run, so long as it could be kept quiet. The business was so successful that the Berlins opened a branch in Romania which continues to operate today.” … Given this new information, scholars are reviewing Berlin’s somewhat enigmatic life - in particular, his various overseas trips and contacts - with greater care.
So Berlin might not just have gotten his Ph.D from a diploma mill, he might have actually been in charge of one? That popping noise you hear is the sound of heads exploding at Oxford, and possibly also in various political theory seminars around the United States. University Diaries quotes (but doesn’t source) the likes of Ronald Dworkin, Tom Nagel and Michael Walzer expressing their astonishment and dismay at these revelations.
And if you are not disturbed that the Pope of Liberty might turn out to have feet of clay, then how does the actual Pope grab ya?
Academics are bracing for what Senator Collins promises are further, equally staggering, revelations. “I can’t be definitive just yet,” she said to a reporter yesterday, “but I can tell you that we are scrutinizing Albert Schweitzer’s activities in Africa very carefully. The committee is also looking into allegations that one ‘Karol Wojtyla’ graduated not from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, as his cv claims, but from the University of Jagellionia at Fort Lauderdale.”
Can all this be true? Am I just being wound up?1 If the Pope got his degree from Fort Lauderdale, then that means Ian Paisley (Ph.D Bob Jones University) is better qualified than him. I really, really need to read more detailed original reporting on this story, not just quotes at a few removes. Anyone got any news items to link to?
Update: Of course it’s a wind-up. It’s amazing what six hours of sleep will do for one’s clarity of mind. But I have to say the possibility of truthfully using the phrase “Crooked Timber Merchant” with reference to Berlin was just too tempting to pass up. If only she’d left out the bit about the Pope, I think I’d have swallowed it whole.
1 By the way, if some Oxbridge product leaves a comment to the effect that of course this has been common knowledge in the Senior Common Room for years, I’m going to be even more annoyed than I will be if it turns out to be a false report.
A couple of people have emailed me about this story. In 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a study in which a group of women who wanted to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization were prayed for, without their knowledge, by others. Astonishingly, the paper found that being prayed for doubled your chances of getting pregnant. We all know that praying for oneself can have positive medical consequences if it makes you happy, relaxed and gives you a positive outlook on life. But this paper got a lot of coverage at the time because, obviously, it went so far beyond this. The authors were Daniel Wirth, a lawyer and believer in the supernatural, Kwang Cha who directs a fertility clinic in L.A., and Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Lobo is also on the board of the journal. This week, taking time off from his scholarly research, one of the authors pled guilty to federal charges of fraud.
Daniel P. Wirth … was accused of conspiring with another man to defraud several banks, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and Adelphia Communications, a cable-television company. According to the charges, the two men bilked Adelphia of $2.1-million. They pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit mail fraud and bank fraud. Both men will face as much as five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines when they are sentenced, in September. They have agreed to forfeit more than $1-million seized during an investigation of the case.
The fraud case isn’t about the paper. But what do Wirth’s co-authors think now? Well, in the best traditions of being the Senior Author, Lobo now denies all knowledge of the research:
Dr. Lobo’s secretary, Reba Nosoff, described Dr. Cha as a visiting professor and said he had completed the study without Dr. Lobo’s help … Dr. Cha, said Ms. Nosoff, “brought this study to Dr. Lobo to go over because he could hardly believe the results. Dr. Lobo said it’s a good study, and it is proper. So he put his stamp of approval on it, that’s all.” … [The DHHS’] research-protections office said in the letter that it would not take action against Columbia in part because Dr. Lobo “first learned of the study from Dr. Cha 6-12 months after the study was completed. Dr. Lobo primarily provided editorial review and assistance with publication.”
Ah, the old stamp of approval. I need to get one of those, to increase my publication count. Dr Cha was not available for comment. As Bellesiles had his Cramer and Lott his Lambert, these guys had Bruce Flamm, an OB/GYN who teaches at Irvine. He wrote letters to the journal, but didn’t get any satisfaction so he wrote an article for Skeptic Magazine instead. Apparently he and others had complained about the paper, which had a bizarre and indefensible research design on top of everything else. The Journal dropped the paper from its website after Flamm published his article and are claiming the “paper is being scrutinized, and there will be a statement that will appear in a forthcoming issue.” Meanwhile, both Cha and Lobo have managed to avoid getting quoted directly about their role. I pray that we’ll hear from them soon.
In case anyone’s suffering a burst of Invisible Adjunct nostalgia, here’s a story about bright-eyed young things being lured into expensive an time-consuming graduate programs with unrealistic hopes of rewarding employment at the far end, and here’s the first rumblings of discontent from “the academy”. Yup, and pace a lot of grass-is-greener talk by commentors on the old IA site, MBA programs are subject to more or less exactly the same supply and demand economics as the fine arts brigade. I would be an avid reader, btw, of an “Invisible Associate” site if a lowly MBA-grunt at a managment consultancy were to set one up to gripe about the vagaries of consultant life and the difficulty of getting on the partner track. But I don’t think there is one … yet.
Brian Leiter has a nice response to an article in the Village Voice on the job market in the humanities. I mostly agree with Brian’s points, though I have one or two nits to pick.
First though one point Brian is too modest to mention. We know a lot about departments, especially top departments, have done recently on the job market. And in large part this is because of the pressure Brian brought to bear on them to release data on their recent successes (or otherwise) at placing grads in jobs. This is really valuable information for prospective graduate students to have, and Brian deserves thanks I think for getting it out in the open.
OK, onto the criticisms. I’m not sure Brian is right that philosophy is typical. I suspect philosophy graduate students might be better off than English or history grad students when it comes to the job market. At the very least, the anecdotes from other disciplines sound worse than ours. More data from more disciplines on completion rates and placement rates would be good.
I would also heavily qualify Brian’s assertion that “one’s [job] prospects are directly a function of the quality of the graduate program you are enrolled in.” I think that’s somewhat true, but misleading, especially when it is taken as a reason to choose one graduate school over another. It’s true that a higher percentage of graduates from better schools end up with jobs, especially good jobs. But there’s some reason to doubt that means it is important for prospective students to go to those departments if they want to be employed.
For one thing, as Richard Heck notes in the comments here, differences in perceived quality of philosophy programs, at least at the top, don’t make a huge difference to placement rates.
Second, even if grad schools had no effect on how frequently their graduates got jobs, you’d expect a correlation between grad school quality and placement rates. That’s because better schools have a larger choice of incoming graduate students, and the qualities we’re looking for in incoming graduate students are often the same qualities departments are looking for when hiring. In other worse, as far as the data shows, Princeton’s success rates may be largely due to good recruiting not good training. This isn’t to say the data suggests at all this is true, it just suggests that the null hypothesis, that all good departments do equally well in preparing their graduates for the job market, is not refuted by the differential placement rates, because they are a non-random sample.
My gut feeling is that at some stage as you go down the ‘perceived quality rankings’, the quality of the school starts to seriously tell against the graduates looking for work. I don’t know quite when that happens - maybe once you’re outside the top 20, probably once you’re outside the top 30. But to really check we’d need examples of students who could have got into Princeton or Michigan but turned them down to go to a school outside the top 20 or 30, and see how well they did on the job market compared to their couldabeen classmates. I don’t think there’s enough data points to run such a study. There are examples though of philosophers who went to non-top-20 schools doing badly early in their careers and then doing very well later on, and I take those cases to be some evidence that going to a not-top-20 school hurts your initial job market prospects, though we’re really talking about a small sample here.
Having said all that, I agree wholeheartedly with Brian that the profession would be better off with fewer PhD programs and more terminal MA programs of the quality of those offered by Tufts, Arizona State, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and their peers. 110 PhD programs in American does seem too many to me, and I shudder to think what the placement record of some of those schools must be. As Brian says, the trend of dropping good MA programs in favour of yet more PhD programs is really regrettable. It’s hard to see how this benefits students, the profession, or even the schools making the change.
Philosophical Quarterly has announced an essay competition with a prize of £1000. Here is the announcement:
This is to let you know that the Philosophical Quarterly has an essay competition on the topic of Severe Poverty and Human Rights. The essay prize is £1000, and we’ll produce a special issue of the best essays if there are enough good submissions. The deadline is November 1st 2004, and the maximum length is 8000 words. Electronic submissions are especially welcome, to: pq@st-andrews.ac.uk, or they can be sent to: The Executive Editor, The Philosophical Quarterly, The University of St Andrews, KY16 9AL, Scotland. Please email Dr Elizabeth Ashford at ea10@st-andrews.ac.uk if you’d like any further information.
John Sutherland in the Guardian looks back over 40 years in British higher education and tells us what has changed for better and for worse. The goods include the breakthrough of women and the provision of decent coffee; the bads are salary erosion, the PhD as a sine qua non for appointment, overspecialization and worsening staff-student ratios. And in between? Surprisingly, the RAE is on that list.
This is the follow-up to my previous academic literary studies and blogging post. (Memo to self: need snappier handle than ‘academic literary studies blogging’ - but not yet, lest we snap off some corner of the subject prematurely. ‘Bookchat’ not it - since it is vague and probably refers to a thing possibly necessary but hardly sufficient, if you see what I mean.) WARNING: post of interest to few.
After this post I swear I am going to settle down to just doing the sort of thing I have in mind, rather than talking about how nice it would be to do it. Proof in pudding. But I do want to be as clear as I can be beforehand, especially since – in my first post – mouth wrote a few checks brain can’t cash. Oh, and let me thank those who commented or wrote in response to my polite request for them to do so, thereby keeping me from looking like a fool. Erin O’Connor, Chun, Scott “we don’t need no stinking permalinks” McLemee [scroll down to April 19], Daniel “the Reading Experience” Green, Amardeep Singh, Adam Kotsko. Oh, and let me take this opportunity to plug The University Without Condition, which is really already doing something very close to what I want, getting more and more impressive, and getting more attention I think. Which is a good thing. And there were other responses to my post, but I gotta get on with it.
For the sake of effective diplomacy and intellectual hygiene, a rough subdivision of the topic. One pile of all the things I think are – or damn well should be - agreeable to a truly broad coalition of people who might have any interest in this topic. Another pile of all my highly incandescent dissatisfactions with the state of academic literary studies. The flames of the garrulousness of my wrath, glinting off so many axes to grind - brilliant, if you ask me, but today let’s mostly talk about the first pile, i.e. the agreeable stuff. (Aw, you came for the other stuff?) Chun called me out in comments for mixing the two, though that isn’t how he put it: “Your remark about the relative sophistication of non-academic blogs versus the professional journals of the field would be comically ignorant if you actually meant it, which of course you do not.”
It’s true. I didn’t exactly mean it. I crossed at least three wires, producing the more than faintly absurd hint that the bloggy likes of Maud Newton are in direct intellectual competition with the top academic journals, and holding their ground just fine. (“Why, reading one post by Maud, I feel my head filling up with a whole year’s wisdom from PMLA!” Some sort of universe in a grain of snark phenomenon, apparently.) This is absurd not because there’s anything wrong with Maud, or because the journals are better than Maud – they’re not - but because it’s apples and oranges. What I really meant was:
1) I intensely dislike most literary studies journals. This frustrates me, since I would like to like them. They seem to me obstinately bad. Like back when Americans all drank instant coffee and ate sullen wedges of iceberg lettuce and called that ‘salad’ (so I’m told by Alice Waters. If she’s exaggerating for effect, make up your own example of something preposterously less nice than it quite easily could be.) In his post in response to mine Chun says that blogs fuel resentment. This is probably true since practically everything does. But I really do think, at least in my own case, it’s more an irritable inability to utter the liberating word. These problems ought to be put-rightable with the right words. But you say what seem to be the ones, or near enough, and the problem persists, like a stone on your tongue, keeping you from being heard – gagging you. So, in frustration, you emit less than articulate noises. Maybe that’s resentment.
2) I do truly and honestly believe academic literary studies needs a dozen Maud Newtons by yesterday, delivering smart, snappy, short, insightful, informative posts about what things - good and bad - are going on in academic books and journals and so forth. This would not be a substitute for writing scholarly articles and books, but a supplement to it. (What Maud does is obviously parasitic - in a good way - on other people doing other, mostly longer sorts of stuff.) This is really the point I made in comments to my first post: literary studies has rotten circulation, and will not get off the floor without vigorous massaging to get the blood flowing. Traditional academic journalism is lousy for this purpose. And I don’t mean to imply hereby that we now need a lot of EXACTLY what Maud does. It’s not like I singled her out because she’s got some magic formula. No, we could use a whole range of offerings, many of them quite academically non-traditional. I have this dream in which academic literary studies is not so much carpet-bombed with constant snarks - naw, more just a constant, low-level pelting with brusque and disarming frankness, if you please. Maud is a good example. So I linked her.
3) I think good literary journalism, of a lengthier length than Maud purveys, is indeed in direct intellectual competition with the likes of PMLA, and pretty much winning. Ray Davis and Scott McLemee and Daniel Green and others I mentioned - and more whom I promise to mention - tend to be more interesting and incisive. At least there is a clear point to it. This isn’t to say smart stuff doesn’t appear in academic lit studies journals and books, but tragically inhumed alongside masses of such dreadful dreck it’s hardly worth digging to find the live ones. Which takes us back to 2): the need for a bunch of smart, heroic Mauds with powerful bloggy mandibles, capable of gnawing through mounds of bad to find good. This point is worth underlining in red sharpie, lest my anti-theory surliness and habitual snarkiness be misunderstood: I don’t think everything in the journals is bad. If that were the case, you wouldn’t need a group blog. You’d need a shovel. Or something.
I persist in finding 3) so self-evident that I am always a little surprised when folks like Chun sincerely and earnestly and forthrightly deny it. Chun is, I believe, quite an intelligent, clever fellow. I like him. Damned hilarious, most days. Sometimes he is overly … that way. But if there were no Chun, he would have to have invented him. (Do you have a better explanation?) Chun believes, on grounds that are obscure to me, that there is at present some sort of disciplined superiority, or at least commendable separateness, to academic literary studies. Go figure. So I am going to try to work around this elephant squatting in the middle of our would-be literary salon. As David Lewis says: “It is difficult to refute an incredulous stare.”
Maybe (not quite sure) what I will offer today amounts to a toned-down, slightly more diplomatic formulation of point 3), plus a clearer, less polemically inaccurate articulation of point 2). Point 1) should cool its spring-heels. (It will get loose at multiple points. I’m not made of stone, you know.) The point of trying to be at least a little bit diplomatic is to emphasize that – although I am personally motivated by profound discontent with academic literary studies – less profoundly discontented souls ought to find it a good idea, too.
One further note, which isn’t really on point but can be finessed into a sort of launch pad. A reasonable question to ask an academic philosopher who sets out to reform literary studies: this isn’t really your department, is it?
There is, to judge from comments and a few emails, a teensy suspicion that I am pulling a Silver Surfer, herald of Galactus number, announcing philosophy on its way to eat defenseless literary studies (under cover of blogging.) I take it this provokes a touch of resistance, not because it is scary but because it is ridiculous. Analytic philosophers, bless us, are unsuited, by temperament and training, to be philosopher kings of lit studies, let alone eat it for lunch. Anyway, I renounce imperial ambition. My reason for being enthusiastic and long-winded on behalf of literary studies blogging is that, frankly, I see room to do a lot of substantial good. This has quite a bit to do with me being a philosopher, yes; but more to do with being a blogger who is addicted to literary and cultural criticism.
No, really. Why lit blogging, not philosophy blogging?
In philosophy it seems to me the benefits of blogging are real. It is a fine intellectual utility and we ought to realize its potential and not be falsely modest. On the other hand, there is no defect of academic philosophy that seem to me to necessitate blogging. (Which isn’t to say there aren’t defects of the discipline.) With regard to literary studies, by contrast, it seems to me there are clear and serious and systemic infirmities of the beast that are really only treatable by something like blogging. (Well, not JUST that. But something UNLIKE conventional academic journalism is necessary to get us out of this rut.) And, if treated, the beast might be a much healthier, nobler beast in surprisingly short order. Which it certainly should be.
In part it’s the publishing crisis. But for once in my life let me not cram absolutely everything that pops into my head into one post. I’ll just link two fun-sized Timothy Burke mini-jeremiads (here and here) on the subject of the badness of journals and the goodness of electronic publishing. Electronic publishing not the same as blogging, let alone literary studies blogging, naturally. That’s why I’m setting it aside. But it’s related. And lit studies is squeezed as hard as it gets right now. And when I read stuff in PMLA and “Critical Inquiry” about the crisis in humanities publishing – i.e. when I’m not reading sensible discussions of the subject on blogs – no one seems to be talking sense. The phrase ‘and a pony’ springs to mind. So I don’t think the patient can heal itself. I figure Burke is right and there’s a shakeout coming. Shrewd folks ought to position themselves to live like Max, in the post-apocalyptic ‘two journals enter, one journal leaves’ world of … Oh, sorry. Lost it there. I’m back now. I’ll talk about blogging and electronic publishing some other time. Not like I’m an expert or anything.
Why do I think literary studies needs blogging so all-fired much, eh? The diplomatic way to put it is: literary studies is fundamentally Romantic at this moment in time. (The undiplomatic way: literary studies is irredeemably decadent Romanticism, i.e. a surprising amount of it is really just sentimental kitsch. I think so. But don’t take my word for it.) A passage from Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer as Educator” (§3):
“An Englishman recently described the most general danger facing uncommon men who live in a society tied to convention: ‘Such alien characters at first become submissive, then melancholic, then ill and finally they die. A Shelley would not have been able to live in England, and a race of Shelleys would have been impossible.’ Our Hölderlin and Kleist, and who knows who else besides, were ruined by their uncommonness and could only endure the climate of so-called German culture; and only natures of iron, such as Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Wagner are able to stand form. But these too exhibit many of the effects of the wearying struggle they have had to engage in; they breath heavily and their voice can easily become too loud.”
This is the very most positive spin I can bring myself to put on the contemporary academic lit scene, in good conscience. English profs are all Shelleys with respect to English (if not England.) They wouldn’t be able to live in an actually disciplined English department. So actually existing institutional literary studies is a race of Shelleys. That is, it is impossible.
I have argued incidentally for the thesis that theory is basically (decadent) Romanticism in my big fat dialogue. And I happen to be reading an OK book called The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, by somebody named Justin Clemens. (Just picked it off the shelf because I liked the title.) The basic thesis seems to me manifestly sound though I quibble sorely with Clemens’ exposition, and perhaps I shall post about it (he does make some genuinely good puns): scratch any big name in literary studies or cultural studies and what do you find underneath? A Romantic soul. Some strayed son or daughter of Schlegel or Novalis.
You have your doubts? Well, that is very reasonable of you. But, what with there being 200 different possible senses of ‘Romanticism’, ditto for ‘theory’, you can probably find some sense of ‘theory is romantic’ that makes the sentence come true. In all semi-seriousness, it seems to me it comes really surprisingly close to coming down to just this:
1) Literary studies is no longer held together by any ‘field coverage model’ (I think that’s Gerald Graff’s term.) Periods. Genres. National literatures. Not that there aren’t still curricular divisions and specializations, mind you. But many more people are ‘interrogating’ them – torturing them into confessing, whether they are guilty or not - than dutifully observing them. These former divisions, now fallen on hard times, are so busy serving as scapegoats and whipping boys that they aren’t exactly performing a regulative function. (Yes, it’s more complicated. This is just a blog post. If you find what I just wrote inadequate, do you disagree with it? If so, state your reasons.)
2) There are so many theories and methodologies that basically there are no theories or methodologies. If you have twenty theories to choose from, from vaguely rationalistic, scientistic stuff to complete irrationalism; and if you have no method for settling on a method; and if you are allowed to pull it apart and stick it back together any which way, so it’s just eclecticism all the way down; then what you are doing is not in any meaningful sense ‘critical’, let alone ‘theoretic’. So literary studies is at present radically uncritical. And radically undertheorized, due to a glut of critical theory. As the great Romantic poet once said: “Smell how you like.” So long as you smell like the rest of us. The word for that is: rigor.
OK, this is an undiplomatic thing to say, even if it’s true. Let me soften it ever so slightly: maybe there are a few brilliant ‘theorists’ doing something pure and genuinely critical and rigorous out there. But the mass of lit studies denizens are patently engaging in eclectic ‘little of this, a little of that’-type stuff. Whatever its improvisational appeal, this is not a critically rigorous theoretical procedure. It just can’t be. (Think about it.) And yes, there are rationalists, but their sensible arguments don’t get a lot of traction. If someone doesn’t like your compelling rational argument to the conclusion that they are wrong about something, it’s easy just to glide away on any of a dozen irrationalist cross-currents
3) No one knows what the point is. Literary studies exhibits an eminently Romantically disordered bi-polar, manic-depressive oscillation between despair at its atrophy and moribundity and extreme transformative, transgressive imperial ambition to run around setting the world on fire – culture, politics, society, philosophy, the whole banana.
2 & 3 interact in particularly kitschy fashion. If your method is basically ‘mix and match methods to get the result you want’, and if you don’t really know what you want, you do not behave in a disciplined fashion. You sneak lots of peeks at the neighbors, to see what they are doing, and you do the same. And they are peeking at you. Also, since I happen to be quite sure literary studies cannot be doomed - since there will always be literature to lean on; and since I don’t think it’s going to set the world on fire - well, why should it? - I find this resolute avoidance of all the views that have any chance of being actually correct to be uncannily inaccuracy. (Call it the Unheimlich maneuver.) Also, Romantic students of literature who pretend they are all above the whole aesthetics pretty-pretty appreciation thing because they’ve got an ounce of Fredric Jameson in the belly? In my book that’s just Romanticism minus self-knowledge. And calling it ‘critical theory’ doesn’t do a lot to make it look not so silly.
OK, once again: maybe not such a diplomatic thing to slap the face of lit studies with, these accusations. But I am reaching across the aisle to the following degree: many academic lit studies folks see a sort of brilliance and glory – or at least necessity - to the near total, transgressive anarchism of lit studies. They think the boundaries NEED interrogating, for deep reasons; there MUST be an inconsistent riot of theories and methods, travelling and hybridizing. And the point – ah, the point. So elusive, is it not? In short, it is all so Romantic.
But, you know, there is a lot to be said for Romanticism and anarchism – if not in literary studies, then where? Turning the point around, it is all well and good to speak on behalf of a return to sober, rational standards of argument and evidence. I often get all hot and bothered in that vein. But, frankly, literary studies has never been – never will be – a Popperian realm of disconfirmable hypotheses. (Yes, I know: neither is science. But perhaps you see my point. Literary studies too old and honorable to turn quite honest, so we can’t just make the point that theory is dishonest, as though that implied a solution.)
At any rate, I expect there are serious limits to the degree to which the field of literary studies can possibly be de-Romanticized at this stage of the game, even if it should be (which is a serious question in itself.) It is especially hard to see how to get to an even semi-organized (let alone rationalized) point B from the point A at which we stand. Romantics, like cats, simply won’t stand in line and be counted, let alone be disciplined. They wander away and take naps or lick themselves.
So anyway, folks like me who think literary studies is a big, kitschy mess, and folks who think things need to be this way for deep, Ursprunglich reasons can maybe agree about this much: darn hard to find your way around. No street signs. No streets. It is that most Romantic of look-outs: picturesque rubble. Evocative decay, plus the possibly lying promise of fecund, semi-random new growth over the old. (Rhizomatics, if you prefer the French for ‘annoying weeds that spring up between every crack’.)
Now here are two compounding factors.
First, literary studies is big. How many members of the MLA? 30,000? (Something like that?) All these teachers of literature. When in the history of the world has such an absurdly large guild of subsidized literary scribblers existed? But they are all needed to teach and grade and so forth. (The number itself is not wrong, although it does seem rather miraculously grandiose. Good for us for having so many colleges and universities at which droves of young folks can get liberal arts degrees. May this state of affairs long endure. Yes, I know. The employment situation is wretched and scandalous. We all mourn the Invisible Adjunct. And I see that Erin O’Connor is now leaving academia, which is astonishingly principled of her, and I wish her all happiness in her new career. I’m just trying to be a little upbeat: it’s nice that there is liberal education, even if at present migrant field workers - in history, English, so forth - are needed to make it work.) As I was saying: frankly, since many more would-be teachers are clamoring after the few new jobs, they all have to be made to compete. And how else than through some sort of writing and publishing? There must be hoops to jump through.
Second, whenever you make people compete in this way, they find little ways to pad and inflate and hyperventilate. Not to mention they just plain publish too much for their own and everyone else’s good. Publish stuff too soon. And stupid dissertation tricks (as Timothy Burke calls them.) So we have more scholars than ever. Publishing more than they strictly should. We have, then, I don’t know how many orders of magnitude too much stuff, measured by the only sane benchmark: produce that which is genuinely good, or genuinely wanted. (Yes, not all 30,000 actually publishing. I know. But you see my point. It’s a lot. The drive to produce is enormous and substantially unhinged not just from serious considerations of quality but even from the desire – let alone need – to consume.)
Now all this is obvious and well-known. But it is worth emphasizing that much of the deep loathing I (and many others) have for the state of literary studies is, in fact, a function of a rising gorge upon contemplation of the fruits of overproduction. And if it weren’t overripe, Romantic fruits of contemporary theory, it would be something else. So this problem we have is not new, and French fashionable nonsense (et al.) is not exclusively to blame. Read Edmund Wilson’s “Fruits of the MLA” for a picture of how, not long ago, the tribe of literary scribes was overproducing along very different lines. Reams of pointlessly dry, pedantic, overly-complete textual scholarship that few readers really find interesting. (Nothing wrong with a little pedantry, mind you. Been there, done that. But a little goes a long way.)
So it is easy to criticize contemporary literary studies ineffectively – since unfairly - due to a failure to conceive any genuinely realistic, i.e. institutionally comprehensive, alternative. Here is a personal case in point from my previous post. I approvingly quote the estimable, re-quotable Ray Davis (who is not an academic):
“Clearly my notion of “real scholarship” is as one with my notion of good fannishness. Again, I think of the amateurish era of Joyce studies, when the bulk of a journal could be taken up by “Notes” - aperçus, speculations, elucidations, emendations, and jokes - and its later aridity, talking long and saying little. Grad school can’t alone be responsible for thinning that fannish energy. As proven by the tender verdancy of academic weblogs, the joy of shared discovery continues ready to burst out, given half an opportunity. There’s something herbicidal about professional academic publishing itself.”
Now I think I know what Chun would say about me (an academic) quoting such stuff. “Congratulations. You have now discovered, at great length, and considerable bother to other folks, that you really don’t like actual scholarship, for which you blame scholarship. You like to have your brain and spinal column diddled with enthusiastic, moderately high-level bookchat. Fine. Now hush. There are scholars at work here.” I don’t think this is fair, but the barb does graze the flesh. I may be a little guilty of talking as though my distaste for certain necessary features of academia (e.g. it is not a fanclub) is a plan for reforming academia. This would be a quite fundamental - and rather funny - sort of confusion on my part. But I’m pretty sure that can’t be the whole story. Largely because, as per above, literary studies is presently not a well-regulated scholarly community, with busy little bees storing away new honey of knowledge in neat little compartments. It’s anarchy and Romantic riot. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s bad, but – under the circumstances - might as well please yourself. (Isn’t that the Romantic thing to do?) Certainly vain pantomime of sober scholarship hardly seems called for. Chatting about what you like in the ruins is at least not flagrantly inconsistent with the actual nature of ruins.
Where am I going with all this? I’m supposed to be talking about academic lit studies blogging. Well, so I am. It seems to me that blogging offers literary studies the chance to grow something that it desperately, desperately needs: a less flagrantly non-functional circulatory system for its massive, bloated corpus.The publishing crisis is symptomatic: circulation down, in terms of the bottom line. And this is because circulation is down in so many other senses; folks just plain not talking to each other.
But why is lit studies substantially worse off than other fields – even other humanistic fields – which must be equally afflicted with the problems of large population and overproduction, leading to skewed supply and demand in publishing? I think mostly it’s the straw of Romanticism that breaks the beast’s back. Consider the following email from Lawrence La Riviere White, published by Ray Davis over at Pseudopodium. It is the specific occasion for Ray’s confession – quoted and linked above – that basically he’s a fanboy about scholarship. Lawrence (with whom I myself have shared the occasional, edifying epistle) writes:
“How much of “actual scholarship” turns out as (to use Kierkegaard’s word) chatter?
For example, during the last Cornel West debacle, UC’s John McWhorter weighed in against Professor West. Professor McWhorter cited his own current project, some modest essay modestly proposing modest new perspectives on some modest problem in linguistics (& from my small experience w/that field, those folks really can pare down an issue to the thinnest shavings). At this point I say to myself, “Yes, we should all be working hard & earning those paychecks, & I’m sure Professor McWhorter does fine work in his field, & I have no doubts as to his fine intentions, but what are the odds that this essay will make any difference to anything?” Given my own experience trolling through journal after journal, I’m not going to bet my mortgage on it. & I’m not alone in this belief. Professor Wai Chee Dimock, a one-time guest of honor at our school’s graduate American Studies conference, advised us to remember that the shelf life for our writing is about ten years. In other words, no one reads this stuff anyway.
What’s to be done? Professor Dimock seemed to be arguing for lower standards. Don’t get too hung up on anything you’re doing just now, because you’re going to be on to something else soon enough. If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes & it’ll change. This smacks of rank professionalism to me. Don’t worry about the point of the game, just play it. I am too much of a romantic, but also too much over-invested in artifacts, to keep that down. If it’s pointless why don’t we just skip it? More silence, please. & when we do speak, perhaps a formal recognition of the insubstantiality of our discourse. Essays instead of books. Feuillitons (why I feel that word should be translated as “firecracker”?) instead of essays. If we can’t prove anything, why not have fun? Put a bit of sparkle in it!”
Needless to say, I agree. Except it is impossible to have silence. Academy won’t stand for it. Must be hurdles for scholars to clear, by way of earning and keeping their jobs. (I wish I could think of another way.) So this is the hard thing: we have to learn to live, with dignity, with the effluent of institutionalized logorrhea. Better plumbing is a notion that springs to mind.
Also, there is a crucial difference between a field like linguistics – or philosophy – and a field like literary studies (or American studies, interpenetrating with literary studies the way it does.) For better or worse, linguistics and philosophy are just plain better ordered. (Not necessarily better, but more orderly. That’s all I’m strictly taking to be obvious.) Let me stick with philosophy, which I know a little about. You may dislike analytic philosophy, think it is a meaningless sort of scholastic sideshow about nothing. You may think our problems are just updates of good old ‘how many angels can dance on the head of of a pin?’ But at least you can find signs directly you to the room in which that little puzzler is being intensely pondered. And little cubbies off from there: morris dancing on the head of a pin. Breakdancing on the head of a pin. Maybe it’s all meaningless. But if you have some modest contribution to make – on the assumption that it’s not all meaningless – there is a place to make that contribution where it can be heard, in all its modest non-glory. And for sure the system isn’t perfect. But you don’t always need to shout to be heard. The people in your room agree about what counts as an argument, so can just make your argument. Everyone else has read a lot of the same books, and there is considerable overlapping consensus about which ones were actually good. That’s nice. (Maybe it’s all desperately wrong-headed at bottom. But it is orderly on the surface.)
[HINT: I don’t actually think analytic philosohpy is scholastic nonsense. I’m just saying. If you did think that, you’d still have to admit its pretty well-regulated nonsense.]
In literary studies, you have to shout to be heard. 30,000 people having a conversation, no settled fields to subdivide this conversation; no agreed methods – not even in the most elementary sense; no agreements about what counts as evidence, or if there is such a thing as evidence, or whether it would be a good thing if there were. No agreed aims. It is all but structurally impossible to be frank and modest and positive and get noticed hereabouts. A modest, sensible scholar could not survive in an English department of Shelleys.
And speaking of Shelley, the closest this massive body – literary studies - has to a circulation system are occasional eruptions of sheer celebrity. Discussion grativates to, orbits around, a few ‘stars’, in the absence of any other agreeable focus point. And being frank and modest about what one is doing is no way to become a star.
What I have just said is grossly oversimple, but I do think there is a lot of truth to the thought that literary studies evolved a ‘star system’ as a way of getting any sort of circulation, when other stuff gave way. Whether you think these ‘stars’ really are bright and admirably energetic, or just so many metastasizing cancers on a sick body, you’ve got to admit that trying to facilitate a scholarly conversation between 30,000 people by means of a few nodes, which are basically single persons who specialize in being noticeable (e.g. often outrageous if not shamelessly self-promoting) is not self-evidently optimal. It is worth considering whether alternative communication lines could be laid.
I snarked mercilessly at an essay by Peter Brooks a few months back. Well, he deserved it. But the piece did have a few ‘alcoholic’s moment of clarity’-type moments, for which I hereby commend Brooks, and requote him lamenting the sorry state of the journals:
“We have placed a premium on “original published scholarship” that leads to a certain critical hyperventilation, the promotion into books of what should not be books, and the claim to significance where one would prefer a modest elucidation.”
Brooks advocates that English profs get together and lobby for money (and a pony?) to start new journals of review – mediating organs – to get things moving again. But I think there isn’t a lot of money for that sort of thing. Anyway, it is most likely simply to reproduce the hyperventilatory problems we have already got. The journals need a new journal like they need a hole in their head. (Some might say the hole would be preferable.) Really a new kind of reviewing – a whole new style of academic journalism – is needed. Because people are obliged by the dynamics of the system to hyperventilate. Because they have to shout to be heard. And then everyone else is obliged by the self-same dynamics to cultivate a certain deafness, except to the most earth-shattering noise. Lest they be eternally distracted by stuff that isn’t really worth bothering with. And so it goes.
So Romanticism makes for heavy-breathing and the pressure to overpublish leads to hyperventilation. And yet the blood just isn’t flowing, is it? Big thing lies on the floor, gasping in and out in great gusts like a landed fish. Nothing doing.
What we need - what blogs could (I hope) provide - is more or less what Lawrence White is asking after: more frank yet faintly sparkling modesty about what it all really amounts to. That’s why I seized on chat – not the right word; but it connotes enthusiastic modesty, which I like very much. Brief thoughts presented as brief thoughts, not puffed into articles. Article-length thoughts not made to pad out their bosoms to look like books. Everything what it is, not another thing. I shouldn’t use absolutist language like that. It ticks people off. It shouldn’t tick them off, but it does. But maybe you see my point about institutionally obligatory pretension having a downside as well as a potentially Romantic upside. And really I’m just saying: after decadent Romanticism, i.e. kitsch, a touch of Modernism goes nicely. Less functionless ornamentation, if you please.
And, on the positive side, academic lit blogs not just should but absolutely MUST hunt for, expose and ruthlessly advertise good stuff that really is out there. Very important to realize this potential, positive, boosting effect of academic lit blogging.
An anecdote: when I told some English prof friends that I was reading many issues of the PMLA cover to cover, back to back, to see if it was any good, they all looked at me as though I told them I whittled my own grape nuts for breakfast. Reading the PMLA, just to see if it’s ‘interesting’, struck them as an inherently absurd sort of activity. But they admitted that PMLA is a top journal. So we have a problem. PMLA precisely ought to be the sort of general organ lit studies types go to just to find something new and engaging that isn’t quite in their area. It ought to be readable that way. It needn’t be popularized, by any means. But it must not pretend to be more than it is – which, frankly, it now tends to do. And folks know it. So they stay away.
If someone told you which two out of ten pieces in the latest issue of PMLA were good, you just might go and read them. At least you might be interested to read a sharp, insightful digest of them. And that’s just the start. 500 journals and nuthin’ on. But actually: there are things on. But how will they get found and promoted? I’m not going to read 500 journals to find 50 good articles. It would be easier to research and write them myself. And don’t even get me started about the shelves and shelves of scholarly monographs. But a couple of them are probably OK. I wonder which ones.
In his post in response to mine Chun unbraids me for hubris in thinking I’ve got an Olympian perspective on the lit studies scene – just because I’ve read a few back issues of PMLA blah blah blah. Well, maybe I sound that way sometimes. In fact, I do. But in my sober moments I see that the problem is in fact that the place is so flat – no roads or signs or maps – that I can’t get anywhere, or see much of anything. So my complaint is not that everyone should be compelled to bow down voluntarily before my Zeus-like overview. My complaint that I don’t have, and can’t achieve, any such thing. And I don’t ask to see the whole universe sub specie aeternitatis, mind you. I just want something good to read when I want something good to read. I’ve read the ‘top’ journals; they are not good. Worse, they are not functioning as effective communication points to points beyond. Sometimes, poking around in minor journals, plucking books off shelves, I find very good stuff. But that’s just luck. That’s no way to run a discipline.
One of the main objections to academic blogging, predictably, will be that blog posts (comments boxes be damned) are not peer reviewed. Another objection will be that blogs are not exactly cures for ‘500 journals and nuthin’ on’ syndrome. (Treating the disease with the disease.) But these points miss the point, at least with regards to lit studies. Taking them in reverse: the blogosphere has (is?) a reputation economy, and of course it is most imperfect. Crap by the cartload. But, considering the size of the thing, it isn’t half bad. With a little effort you figure out where the good stuff is and you go there and you steer clear of the bad. That’s more than I can say for lit studies journals.
And the objection that academic blogs are not peer reviewed misses the point that I am advocating that blogs BECOME a giant, distributed network of peer review in literary studies. It is precisely efficient, comprehensive, fair, sane peer reviewing of this mass of stuff that is presently so desperately unreviewed that is needed. I simply don’t see any realistic way to achieve any leverage over this stubborn mass of overproduction, barring the discipline of literary studies disciplining itself, putting up street signs, building roads, even instituting traffic regulations that people try to obey (like: if you contradict yourself, that’s probably bad, not a sign that you are ready to move on to the next level.) Barring unforeseen development – e.g. discipline - literary studies will just be everyone breathing heavier and heavier and increasingly ingoring each other until it finally occurs to someone to cut funding. Which would be a damn shame.
OK. That’s enough for now.
Mylast couple of goes at a solution to the Adjunct Problem were, to be honest, more in the nature of an extended buildup to a slightly mean joke than a real attempt at social policy. But post-Invisible Adjunct, I remembered that shortly after posting the joke solution, a real solution occurred to me, which has been festering at the back of my mind for a while.
The issue is simple; management is measurement. You manage what you measure, and if you can’t measure something, you ignore it. You can’t measure what adjuncts do, so they have no value. This is not a view I hold, btw, it’s just a simple capsule description of “the facts on the ground”1, in terms of the current state of the art of managerial thinking in the education industry.
But is it really so impossible? Let’s think about the university as a business. Again, please be aware that if you have used the word “guild” or “scholarship” in your conversation recently, or if you regard “the academy” as primarily an abstract noun, then you may find the rest of this post to be somewhat on the reductionist and brutal side. Please try to remember that there are no normative implications; this is merely an exercise in positive business economics, of the sort that John Kay practises.
A university exists in order to maximise the size of its endowment fund. From semester to semester, the change in the endowment fund is equal to:I’ve grouped terms together and ordered them to reflect what I understand to be the managerial economics of a university business; in other words the interest on the endowment pays for the running costs of the physical property, plant and equipment, tuition fees pay for the variable costs and donations pay for investments in further capacity which ought to produce tuition fees and donations in future time periods. If the numbers don’t add up, the government funds the deficit (and if there isn’t a deficit, you invest in more capacity until there is). Also note that this model assumes a sizeable endowment fund and an active alumni donor base; casual empiricism of the Invisible Adjunct discussion boards suggests to me that nobody really cares about institutions that aren’t swanky enough to have both these things.
So you can see here that the Crisis of the Adjuncts is that they only really appear in this process in line 4, as a variable cost of commoditised labour. In order to run undergraduate courses (and thus pull in fees on line 3), you have to have adjuncts, but given supply conditions in the PhD labour market, you don’t need any particular adjunct. Adjuncts are a homogeneous production factor, whose cost needs to be minimised. It also helps that in general the consumers who generate revenue in line 3 are a) in general, too young and stupid to know the difference between good and bad product and b) mainly spending someone else’s money, so they hardly ever complain. We should all be so lucky as to have such customers.
Contrast with tenured faculty. They are very definitely not homogenous, fungible or commoditised. Tenured faculty pull in donations in line 5 and government transfer payments in line 6, and in general they are not interchangeable for this function. If you’re going to knock on the door of the Hugh Jampton Foundation trying to get cash for a graduate program in Modern Disreputable Literature, then you need to have a big name professor in place to lend an air of credibility to the whole enterprise. The bigger the name of your professor, the more and more lavish special research programmes (and grants) his reputation will support.
This is why the tenure track faculty (still) have such a sweet deal relative to the adjunct proleteriat. They are all either actually or potentially in a position where there is a clear and measurable chain of causation between them and the revenue line. Hence, they’re valuable “talent”.
This is the line of thinking that leads me to my solution. In actual fact, my guess is that there is a fair old pool of the revenue coming in line 5 which is attributable to the people who actually taught the undergraduates of yesteryear. If alumni or their parents have warm fuzzy feelings about the university which lead them to open the old chequebook, then it seems quite likely to me that the reason they are prepared to do this has something to do with the educational experience that they or their offspring had there, which in turn probably comes back to the work of an adjunct. All one needs to do is to make this connection between activity and revenue measurable.
Hence, the solution. All one needs to do is to create a (probably web-based) organisation which channels donations from alumni to universities, but which allows the donors to specify the name of the individual faculty member who is responsible for their having donated. If the smaller alumni donations, which curently come in as an undifferentiated lump to the university franchise, could be pooled and attributed to individual staff members, then management would have a better idea of the value to them of a) good adjuncts rather than bad ones and b) particular adjuncts. It would also mean that universities would be less keen on adjunct turnover, if it meant that they weren’t able to take donations from loving former students of faculty who they’d previously sacked.
All in all, I believe that my ill-thought-through back of the envelope scheme is a simple technological solution to all aspects of a large social problem. I suggest that somebody else puts it into oepration without delay.
Footnotes:
1 A recently coined and highly useful phrase meaning, AFAICT “an utterly unacceptable situation about which I intend to do nothing”.
Eugene Volokh points to a very good Chronicle article on Invisible Adjunct’s decision to call it a day. The piece does an excellent job in capturing why her site was important. Adjunct faculty often find themselve systematically excluded from the collegial supports that allow tenured and tenure track faculty to chat, compare situations, and figure out common problems. It’s hard to engage in corridor talk when you’re a non-person. Invisible Adjunct’s site created a very real space for conversation.
As it happens, I was talking about Invisible Adjunct with friends this weekend, trying to figure out why so many tenured and tenure-track faculty are dismissive or hostile towards adjunct faculty. Some tenured or tenure track commenters on IA’s site were quite convinced that the distinction between adjuncts and tenure track faculty reflected the judgement of the market on their respective quality as academics. This is Max Weber’s thesis on the origins of capitalism replayed as farce. Weber argued that Calvinist theology provided capitalism’s tutelary spirit. Calvinist beliefs in predestination led believers to distinguish between the elect and the preterite - those who were destined to go to heaven, and those who were destined to go to hell. Because it was impossible to be sure whether they were going to ascend to paradise or to burn, Calvinists sought evidence that they were favoured by God through accumulating goods without consuming them. If you did well in worldly affairs, you could take this as a sign of God’s favour.
This may or may not be a good historical explanation. Still, it captures a set of attitudes expounded by some (although certainly not all) exponents of free markets. In many important respects, markets are political creations - they reflect differences in the bargaining power of different social groups. If you’re a freshly minted humanities Ph.D., even if you’re a wonderful humanities Ph.D., you’re going to have real trouble in finding a tenure track job because there are many, many others just like you. It’s easy for employers to exploit you - and you have relatively little recourse when they do. Some few get good jobs, but they’re lucky as well as talented. [1] It is almost certain that there are other, equally qualified individuals who don’t get jobs, simply because they didn’t get the lucky break (and lucky breaks are rare when you’re in a group with a systematically weak bargaining position).
The Calvinist illusion is that luck has nothing to do with it - markets reward virtue. Success in selling your wares is the only necessary proof of one’s innate superiority. I imagine that some tenured and tenure track professors are quite convinced that their privileged position is an appropriate reflection their academic virtue. Indeed, to the extent that most successful professors are good at what they do, they’re right - the problem is that there are almost certainly many others out there who are equally talented, but just haven’t gotten the breaks. Calvinist reasoning isn’t unique to academics (take a look at some of the comments in this thread to see it in its raw form). But it makes for lousy reasoning and self-serving arguments that markets produce the best possible outcomes in the best of all possible worlds (which isn’t to say that there aren’t more subtle and thoughtful arguments for free markets out there).
1 The centrality of luck to academic success - connecting with the right person at interview, getting friendly reviewers for an article in a good journal at the right stage of your career - is grossly underestimated.
A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.
The entire report can be downloaded from HM Treasury’s website hereA BREAKDOWN OF TRUST
7.29 A side effect of a modern university’s far-reaching role and breadth of activities is the increased number of stakeholders who hold the institution to account. The result is an uncoordinated and often unnecessarily burdensome system of accountability and regulation. Two independent reports have highlighted the need to reduce the accountability burden on universities. While a number of the recommendations from the Better Regulation Task Force report have been implemented, progress has been slow.
7.30 At the same time, there has been a marked increase in the Government’s use of hypothecated funding to achieve its strategic objectives, creating more regulatory pressures and accusations from the sector of micro-management. HEFCE, for example, is currently running between 40 and 50 separate funding initiatives on behalf of government departments.
7.31 Universities in the UK are operating on the margin — of 131 institutions in England, for example, 47 ran operating deficits in 2002, with the remaining 84 averaging only a 2.2 per cent surplus on revenue. This puts pressure on universities to chase every available pound of funding. With each new funding stream comes new regulatory burdens. In 2003, HEFCE is budgeting to channel 14 per cent of its funds through hypothecated schemes. About half of these funding initiatives were “top-sliced”: that is, the cash to fund them originally came from a reduction in core funding, rather than from additional government funds. In such cases, universities are often required to apply and account for money that had previously been delivered to them through the core grant. The unintended consequence of central government initiatives is that the sector is in a defensive mood and feels micro-managed.
7.32 In Scotland, the Scottish Executive, through the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, makes less use of hypothecated funding, and this is one factor contributing to a much closer, more respectful relationship between the funders and Scotland’s universities. The other perhaps more important factor is that with only a relatively small number of institutions, it is easier to build close and trusting relationships. Similar considerations apply in Wales and Northern Ireland.
7.33 Public funding needs to be carefully supervised and institutions held to account. But the level of burden is often disproportionate to the money involved, and policies can be untargeted. In many cases, initiatives are designed around the lowest common denominator and all universities, however well-managed, are treated in the same way. The constant layering of new initiatives on top of old, often uncoordinated across government departments and agencies, creates an overly complicated regime.
7.34 The overarching problem, however, comes down to a matter of trust. The Government does not seem to have enough confidence in the way that universities run themselves to give them extra funding without strings attached. Some of this is justified – the sector has in the past suffered from poor management and a lack of strategic thinking. Yet if universities are to become more creative and play their full part in regional and national economies, then ways must be found to give them more room to develop a strategic vision and take entrepreneurial risks.
Recommendation 7.4
The Review recommends that the Government and all funders should minimise the use of hypothecated funding streams.
Funders should continue to consolidate individual funding into larger streams, more proportionate to the necessary level of bureaucracy and regulation.
Smaller hypothecated funding streams should, where possible, be allocated on a metrics or formulaic basis, rather than by bidding.
Funders should minimise audit requirements on hypothecated funding streams.
“Top-sliced” funding streams should have a limited life of no more than three years, after which they should be rolled back into core funding, unless policy is explicitly renewed.
It’s the fate of market innovators to be undercut by new entrants. As noted by Henry, Bill Tozier has hit on the idea of auctioning co-authorship rights, including the acquisition of an Erdös number of 5. As of this posting, the Ebay high bid stands at $US 31.
But Bill has apparently failed to learn the lessons of the dotcom era. The first is to patent everything. As far as I can tell, Bill has failed to file for a business methods patent on his idea, leaving it open to new entrants to imitate him, or even to patent the idea themselves.
The second is that the best way to undercut the competition is to give your product away. Following on this lesson, I’ve decided to set my co-authorship price (including free Erdös number of 4) at zero. That’s right, potential co-authors! Send your paper to me with a space for my name on the front page, after yours1. SEND NO MONEY! If I like it, I’ll insert my official stamp, and send it off to an appropriate journal. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier!
Just to be boringly clear, my offer is a joke. Bill asserts that his offer (which actually involves doing his share of the work) is serious, and I have no reason to disbelieve him.
1 Yes, that’s right! You get to be senior author, on no stronger basis than that you do all the work. How many big-science labs would offer a deal that good?
Want to lower your Erdös Number in a hurry? Bill Tozier is flogging off the right to co-author a scientific paper with him on eBay. An undoubted bargain for social scientists, humanities types and others with high Erdös counts. Given Bill’s chops in complex systems and agent-based modelling, I’m half tempted to bid myself.
Still, prospective bidders should note his strict caveat emptor.
However, the seller retains the right to refuse (and publicly ridicule) proposals for research in non-scientific fields, such as “Intelligent Design”. Such kooks need not apply.
An interesting topic of bar-room discussion at the Mid-West - the peculiar psychology of rejection at elite universities. Several of the top universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc) are notorious for how rarely they give tenure to assistant professors in the social sciences and humanities. Smart young people come to the university as assistant profs, teach for several years, are refused tenure en bloc, and depart for other jobs, usually at less prestigious institutions. The tenured professors in these places have usually come from outside - they’re nearly all recruited at a senior level from other universities (sometimes including former rejectees who have done well in the meantime). This creates a very strange atmosphere among junior faculty - they all know that the odds are against them getting tenure, hope that they will be among the rare exceptions, and point with admiration to the few who have managed to buck the system. What’s even more intriguing is the story of those professors who get rejected by an elite university and expelled into the outer darkness, but are then invited back to tenured jobs in the same place a few years later. Anecdotal evidence over beer suggests that a surprisingly large percentage of them accept the offer from the place that rejected them, even when they have other, more attractive offers from equally prestigious universities. If there’s a psychological mechanism to explain this, it’s one that goes against my expectations - ex ante, I would have predicted that people would take some pleasure in rejecting offers from places that had previously rejected them. Revenge, after all, is a dish that’s best served cold. Instead, quite a number of people seem to have a different set of motivations. So what’s going on?
The hackneyed story about technology is that the young are always faster to pick it up than us old folk. So you’d expect in an academic department the graduate students would be the ones leading the way, and the professoriate would be constantly learning tricks from them. And while that’s true sometimes (I had to recruit Paul Neufeld of ephilosopher fame to get started on Movable Type) my impression based on anecdotes as casual observation is that really doesn’t seem to be the general run of things. And certainly there’s lots of things about grad students could learn about technology from computer specialists. This suggests a professional question. How much technical knowledge/ability should we require our graduate students to have.
Here’s some suggestions for skills graduate students should have.
And by ‘skills’ here I don’t mean the basic ability to do these things without looking really stupid, but the ability to efficiently integrate them into your daily routine when they are needed. Future faculty who can do these things will be better academics. At the very least they will be better teachers and better at running things like job searches and graduate admissions, and of course they can do much more than that. If the academic job search market were efficient, these skills would be rewarded. Even in the real world, departments would be doing the profession a service by turning out colleagues-to-be with these technical skills.
On one of these points I think there is a clear economic benefit to the students from acquiring technical skills. I think a well-maintained webpage, with your best work prominently displayed, is very helpful in a job search. And a fully functioning course site looks very impressive to those looking to evaluate your teaching ability. This isn’t going to override the crucial things like being able to write and teach well, but it certainly helps distribute the evidence that you can write and teach well. I think all grad students, should have web pages and departments should do what they can to provide these pages for just this reason.
I wonder which of these skills (or similar skills) will be viewed as being as basic as typing in a decade or two? I don’t know how long ago it was that one wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the new academic you hired couldn’t type. But whichever skills they are, I’m sure that soon some skills that we now view as esoteric will be basically expected of new hires.
Philosophers have a particular reason to be interested in these questions. Some of us write about artificial intelligence, and many others cover it in their teaching. And a good working knowledge of what computers can and can do, preferably gained ‘first-hand’ while hacking around with some code, will be helpful to either role. Many philosophy departments dropped their language requirements over the last decade or so - maybe it’s time to reinstate something similar.
(Much thanks to David Velleman for suggesting practically all the ideas in this post.)
I’m flying to Chicago for the Mid West Political Science Association meeting tomorrow, and will be there until Sunday morning. If any of you spot me wandering between panels, feel free to accost me. Other non-native attendees may also want to check out this NYT article on eating out in Chicago.
Suppose you’ve been given a sizeable pot of money to fund an annual lecture. Leaving the question of topics aside, who do you invite? Who are the best speakers in academia today? Is there someone you’ve heard speak who you think is underrated—as an academic, or as a public speaker? Now imagine you had to publish the speaker’s talk. Does that change things for you? Or is your top choice still the same?
There are lots of people we enjoy reading whom we’ve never heard speak—especially when they’re from fields in which we don’t attend conferences. I thought it might be helpful to get comments from those outside my immediate fields (which are law, political theory and philosophy), though I’d certainly be interested in reactions within those disciplines as well.
I think the most impressive academic speaker I’ve heard is Ronald Dworkin. (Will Brian Leiter ever forgive me?) His Hart Memorial Lecture in 2001 (for which I couldn’t find a link) was probably the single best academic presentation I’ve seen. He gave the lecture without notes. By itself, that wouldn’t be anything all that extraordinary. But I’d read the manuscript that the speech was based on, and it was as if Dworkin had a teleprompter in his mind. You might have thought he’d delivered it from memory, except that it was clear he was just moving through his ideas systematically. I’ve heard a lot of excellent talks over the last few years, but none that stands out as much as that one.
As Sappho’s Breathing notes, Carlin Romano wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about two recent collections of autobiographical memoirs by philosophers. There’s some interesting, and important points, to be made, so naturally I’d like to start with a cheap joke. Here’s a sample of what we’re likely to see if more philosophers turn their hand to autobiography.
The facility of my pen (I write everything by hand!) has enabled me to produce a system of philosophical thought that is more many-sided, complex, and far-reaching than has been the case with any other living American philosopher. (Nicholas Rescher)
I’d be jealous of Rescher’s philosophical achievement if I wasn’t wittier, more charming, better looking and generally just a more excellent human being than any other living philosopher. No, really.
One theme of Romano’s piece is that it might be better if more philosophers worked more autobiography into their philosophy. My first thought was that this was a ridiculous idea. My second thought was that blogging, at least the way some of us do it, seems to deliver just what Romano wants. See, for instance, this post where I work a drinking story into an argument about imaginative resistance. My third thought was that there’s no contradiction between the first two thoughts.
Interestingly, I’ve never been tempted to write a post with such a personal angle on Crooked Timber. This hasn’t been because I’ve had instructions from on high that CT is not to be used for personal posts. It’s just that it has never seemed appropriate to use up the real estate here to tell long stories about the time that I was stuck in an elevator with a circus elephant, or whatever other boring thing might have happened to me that day. It would feel self-indulgent. Since anything I do on a personal blog is self-indulgent, I don’t feel as constrained there.
The more important point raised by Romano’s piece is the very different experience of men and women in academic philosophy. As the commentators at Sappho’s Breathing note, Romano is possibly not the best choice to have writing about this, but the point still comes through fairly clearly. Here’s a long quote from Martha Nussbaum’s entry in Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (edited by Linda Martin Alcoff).
Men’s ways of being infantile vary. Some are flirtatious and silly in a relatively harmless way. Some fear old age dreadfully, and believe that continual exercises in seduction will produce something like erotic immortality. Some long to tell you in no uncertain terms that you are a whore, because it makes them feel power. Some hate themselves and have contempt for any woman who is nice to them. Some — and these are the worst, I think — are satanic, by which I mean that they have an emptiness at their core that they fill with exercises in domination, which they market with a frequently dazzling charm.
…
The main problem of feminism in philosophy is the infantile level of human development of many of the men who are in it.
Naturally, I’d like to think that my generation is better than this, though I guess I suspect that if they (we) weren’t (aren’t) I wouldn’t be able to tell.
I do think ‘satantic’ is a wee bit over the top though. I thought demonic possession went out of fashion with witch-burnings.
To my eye the common thread behind Nussbaum’s tropes isn’t misogyny as much as pretty severe depression. That might be disheartening, or it may suggest that there’s a way around the worst of the problems. At least to the extent that we regard depression as effectively treatable. Of course if depression is that big a thread running through philosophy, that’s a story, and one we should be doing something about.
Thanks to Tamar Szabó Gendler for first pointing out the Romano piece to me.
As Kieran says, social scientists are very easily seduced by their models, even when these models are actively misleading. Good social science should not only develop models, it should test them. Which is all in the way of an extended health warning for the following argument, which I’ve no intention of testing, and am not even sure I subscribe to myself. It’s indisputable that US social scientists look down their noses at their mainland European colleagues, who in turn are quite naturally resentful. Americans often justify their snobbishness by pointing to the failure of most mainland European academics to publish in the top journals of the field (which are usually US or UK based). Europeans tend instead to publish in edited volumes or non-peer reviewed journals. What I want to argue is that this difference isn’t because Europeans are any stupider than Americans, or less able to write interesting pieces - it’s because both Europeans and Americans are responding rationally to different systems of resource allocation.
Consider the major differences between peer reviewed publication, and publishing a piece in (say) an edited volume from an university press. The first is all about burnishing your own independent reputation as a researcher and a scholar. If you publish an article in one of the top journals in your field, you’ve demonstrated your ability to conduct research that meets the (supposedly) disinterested standards of your peers. Publishing a chapter in an edited volume is quite different. Except in unusual cases, you don’t enhance your own independent reputation as a researcher very much by publishing a book-chapter. Because the controls are fairly lax (edited volumes often aren’t peer reviewed, and when they are, the standards are usually quite low), outsiders aren’t likely to think very much more of you as a scholar for publishing a book chapter. What it does is to enhance the reputation of the editor of the volume, who has another book that she can put on her curriculum vitae. Thus, when you publish a chapter in an edited volume, you’re usually doing it as a favour to the editor of the volume in question.
What this means, I reckon, is that academics in market-based systems will rationally choose to publish in journals whenever they can. In a relatively impersonal academic marketplace, you want to signal your individual accomplishments - your ability to publish, and thus bring lustre (and additional resources) to the institution that you’re working in. This is your best way to persuade people to hire you, to promote you, and to give you research leaves and other goodies. But if you’re in an academic system where advancement depends on personal contacts rather than a semi-impersonal marketplace, your incentives are going to be quite different. Publishing in peer reviewed journals is often going to be a waste of resources. What you want to do is to show potential employers that the big gorillas in your field on your side. One good way to do this is through gift exchange - through doing them favours (publishing chapters in their edited volumes) in the presumption that they will eventually return them. Thus, you have little incentive to make the major investment of time and resources that it would take to publish in a major peer-reviewed journal. Instead, if you want to get a good job, it makes much more sense to publish in books edited by important figures in your field. In a sense, your attractiveness to employers doesn’t depend on your intellectual prowess - it depends on your connections.
As I say, I don’t know how far I want to push this argument - at the very, very best, it’s a crude approximation. But it does accord somewhat with my perceptions of the North American and continental European systems (I’ve worked in both for substantial periods of time). To the extent that it’s true, it suggests that the key explanatory variable for different patterns of academic publishing isn’t language differences, or even differences in academic training - it’s incentive structures. This would not only explain the paucity of Europeans publishing in top journals. It would explain the difficulties that some of the few Europeans who do publish in these journals have in getting good jobs at home, especially in Southern Europe. If they haven’t invested enough time in making the ‘barons’ happy, they’re liable to have enormous difficulty in getting jobs, no matter how good their publication records appear to be in objective terms.
Update: see Timothy Burke’s more general remarks on incentives in academia
Seth Finkelstein comments on Ed Felten’s blog that perhaps one reason why we don’t see much mixing of people from legal and technical backgrounds at conferences is that neither lawyers nor technologists get points within their own communities for attending conferences with experts from other fields. I can’t tell if Seth agrees with this point or is merely raising it, but it’s worth considering either way. My reaction to the above approach is that it seems short-sighted to assume that you cannot gain something valuable - something that could eventually score you points in your own community - from attending a conference that isn’t solely made up of people from your own field.
At conferences, we have the opportunity to meet new people, hear new ideas, be exposed to new arguments. These all have the potential to shape our work and thereby improve the contributions we can make. Maybe this all sounds too optimistic or idealistic. Nonetheless, I have rarely been to a conference where I did not hear at least one thought that made me see something in a new light or did not meet at least one person whose acquaintance or eventual friendship made my attendance worthwhile. Meeting new people with different perspectives is more likely to happen when the meeting is for people from more than one discipline so that would seem to favor attending such events.
This got me thinking about collaborations among people in various disciplines. I have noticed that interdisciplinary collaboration is less common for people in some fields than in others. I think sociologists, political scientists, communication scholars and demographers find themselves on research teams with people from other fields. In contrast, it seems less common among economists (yes, I do know exceptions to this) and from the post on Ed’s blog and my own limited experience it also seems like legal scholars may not engage in much cross-disciplinary collaboration either [see update below]. Why is that?
It is interesting that this would come up on Ed’s blog of all places. Ed Felten has done a great job of communicating with the legal community while being a top-notch technologist. Of course I have no idea how all this played out in his tenure review (and I guess if I recall, he may have done most of it post-tenure), but I doubt at this point he gets no benefit from speaking across disciplinary boundaries. In fact, his blog is so insightful precisely because he considers more than the technical aspects of technologies putting much weight on the legal implications as well.
Perhaps the dividing line is between junior and senior status, not so much field of study. Maybe it is too risky to cross disciplinary boundaries before tenure. But post-tenure one would hope one could either “get points within one’s own community” for communicating with those whose work relates to one’s interests or one would be less concerned about this issue.
Of course, there are some areas of work that are less prone to collaboration, period, regardless of whether that collaboration is interdisciplinary or not. But overall, would people agree that scholars in some fields tend to collaborate less than others or are my observations incorrect? Is it more a question of seniority (which then doesn’t quite justify the overarching concerns stemming from the need to gain points in one’s own community noted above)? Can anyone point to studies on this? I am just curious.
Update
1. Sorry, the links were broken, I’ve fixed them.
2. My comment about legal scholars not collaborating was silly (probably tainted by the post about lawyers and technologists). As Tom T points out in the comments, legal scholars and economists do collaborate quite a bit. In fact, they even have it institutionalized to the point of having an organization: the American Law and Economics Association. I don’t know why I didn’t remember that especially since I knew that their annual meeting is being held at my univ in a few weeks. There’s also the Law and Society Association.
The question remains: is there any pattern to who collaborates and who does not, and if yes, what explains it? Is it perhaps more related to the type of research interests one has and less to one’s disciplinary affiliation? And what implications does that have for “gaining points in one’s community” as per the issue raised by Seth?
Over at Anggarrgoon, Claire is worried about losing the hidden benefits of graduate school.
I finished my dissertation today. … What excuse will I use now when I try to eat cereal with a fork? or have no clean clothes? or when I eat porridge for dinner? probably that I’m making the most of it before I stop being a grad student and have to be respectable…
, dissertations are so useful….
Here’s a true story. When I was reading that a few hours ago, all the talk of food made me kinda hungry. So I headed over to the kitchen, washed a bowl, pulled out the cereal box, and then looked at the clock and realised a bowl of cardboard-flavoured cereal wasn’t what I needed at that time of day. But had I not noticed the clock, I think I’d think that being an academic would have been a pretty good excuse in the circumstances. So provided the job market for Australian linguists is as strong as it should be, Claire will have all the excuses she needs for a long long time.
More seriously, congratulations to Clare on finishing the thesis. I wonder how many people there are so far who have finished a PhD while maintaining an academic blog?
Harvard Law Review recently published a sympathetic note of a book by a certain Francis Beckwith on so-called “intelligent design” (that’s creationism with bells and whistles on, to you and me). Brian Leiter took them to task for this (as well he might) and became the object of a vitriolic polemic in the conservative National Review . The pompous and moralizing tone of the National Review’s article starts to look a little inappropriate, though, one we realize that the author — who is described as “a freelance writer in Texas” — is, in fact, the aforementioned Beckwith’s graduate student and teaching assistant . It’s a small world.
The phenomenon of recommendation letters for students being written by the student was discussed a few months back, but, as recommendation letters aren’t a big deal here in Australia, I didn’t pay much attention. Today, however, I met a new version of this. I got an email from someone in the US, previously unknown to me, attaching a CV and a draft recommendation letter, and asking me to sign it. I declined without reading the CV, and without formulating a precise reason. Has anyone else encountered this?
From today’s Telegraph :
Oxford dons are biased in favour of female applicants, especially if they come from independent schools, according to a study by four eminent academics. One of them, A H Halsey, emeritus professor of sociology at Oxford, said: “I fear that the male lust hypothesis is part of the explanation.”
Would any of the Oxford admissions tutors who read CT care to comment? (Hat tip JW).
I’m just back from a trip which included a visit to Manchester for a conference to honour the academic career of Norman Geras . Chris Brooke of The Virtual Stoa asks how it went. Very well indeed, I think. I gave a paper in the morning on the relationship between Marx and Rousseau, Ian Kershaw gave a most interesting paper on the singularity of the Holocaust, Shane O’Neill spoke about Richard Rorty and Simon Caney about the concept of a crime against humanity. The discussion was all very friendly and civilised and I got the impression that Norm enjoyed the event (though he hasn’t blogged about it yet). Anyway, thanks to Norm and Hillel and the other folks in Manchester for inviting me: it was an honour and a pleasure.
Thank you for your email. President Spanier is out of the country so I am responding on his behalf. I will be sure he is aware of your opinion. I can assure you that there is much, much more to this than you are reading in the papers. I hope you realize that the University is also limited in what it can say publicly about this case at this point in time, especially given that the faculty member has already indicated she plans to file a lawsuit. I can also assure you that the University’s hearing process was followed explicitly at every step of the way.As it happened, I recently received an almost identical letter in relation to a property dispute in which I am peripherally involved. In both cases, I’m tempted by the simple response MRD> But I think it might be worth exploring the issues a bit further.“We have never taken away anyone’s job for criticizing the quality of a program, and we never will. You should also know that when five members of the University community who heard over 40 hours of testimony in what was a quasi-legal proceeding would vote unanimously that the faculty member was guilty of grave misconduct, there is not just smoke but a lot of fire. For the faculty member to make public statements about due process not being served is understandable in her circumstances, but simply untrue.
“What you have been reading in the press has simply not reflected the whole story.”
There are really two implications in this kind of letter. The more creditable is that the information on which the decision relied must be kept confidential for reasons of due process but that, if it were public, the decision would be seen to be reasonable. The problem is that this kind of claim is hard to sustain when the information that has been made public about the case seems clearly inconsistent with the claim. In the Gerard case, for example, the statements that Gerard “demonstrates difficulties accepting supervision.” and that “the hostile communications of Professor Gerard go beyond what is permitted as free speech.” do not sound as if the grounds for dismissal were much different from those made public by Gerard herself. It’s hard to believe that the charges were so radically different from those described by Gerard as to justify, on their own, the extraordinary step of dismissing a tenured professor without notice.
The second, less creditable, implication, typically associated with phrases like “no smoke without fire” is that the real offence on which the decision was based is something other than that on which the committee made its finding. The classic example of this kind of thing is the case of Sir Roger Casement: convicted of treason following the Easter Rising, his execution was ensured by the secret circulation to jurymen and others of his private diaries, which included explicit descriptions of his homosexuality. Some Irish writers maintain that the diaries were forged, though this seems unlikely. But this is beside the point. Even accepting the harsh view of homosexuality that prevailed at the time, this could not justly have played any role in a decision on the death penalty.
I don’t take an absolutely purist line on this kind of thing. If a proper process found appropriate grounds for Gerard’s dismissal, knowledge of unrelated bad behavior might be relevant in rebuttal to a claim that leniency should be exercised in view of long and meritorious service. But it’s easy to make unsourced and unspecific imputations of this kind and effectively impossible to rebut them.
In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. The Guardian has the story . And staff at Birmingham have a campaign to defend their right to host personal material.
Two items from academia. First, a serious one. Following up on my post about academic freedom a couple of days ago, Michael Bérubé argues that the Nona Gerard case at PSU and the suspensions at USM are quite different, because there was a formal review process at PSU whereas the USM President just acted like an autocrat. I agree with Michael that the USM case seems wholly indefensible on its face, so maybe it shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as the Gerard case, which just looks highly suspicious. As I said before, there just isn’t enough information available to make a judgment. But I think the bar for revoking tenure is pretty damn high. It took Yale a couple of years to fire Antonio Lasaga, and he’d pleaded guilty to specimen charges of sexual abuse and possession of child pornography. Of course I don’t mean that this is the minimum required to get fired, and Yale didn’t handle that case very well. But it reinforces Michael’s argument that “The Penn State decision should be pursued, and the grounds for Gerard’s dismissal made available for broader review,” so we could make up our minds about what kind of case it is.
Meanwhile, via Invisible Adjunct, the Chronicle carries a piece by David Lester, who wants people who complain about the stress of academic life to shut up. It’s a marvelous essay. He starts out sounding like just the kind of straight-talking no-bullshit kind of guy you could have a beer with, but then — just after he tells you about his 300 articles and his third wife — he says “I have made some decisions over the course of my career that have allowed me to be productive, yet not feel overwhelmed,” and suddenly all the wheels come off. Read it yourself and see. He ends up sounding a bit like Dr Johnson in Blackadder III:
Dr. Johnson: Where is my dictionary?
Edmund: And what dictionary would this be?
Dr. Johnson: The one that has taken eighteen hours of every day for the last ten years. My mother died; I hardly noticed. My father cut off his head and fried it in garlic in the hope of attracting my attention; I scarcely looked up from my work. My wife brought armies of lovers to the house, who worked in droves so that she might bring up a huge family of bastards. I cannot—
Last week it was the apparently unjustified firing of a Professor at Penn State Altoona. This week it’s the suspension of two professors at Southern Mississippi, again for what looks like no good reason. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria has more, with links to various commentaries. Here also is a news story from the student paper found via a blogger who knows more about the situation on the ground. Looks like there’s been some student reaction to the suspensions, together with criticism from benefactors and a vote of no confidence from the USM faculty senate. (Hat tip: Matt Weiner.)
And while we’re on the subject … Erin O’Connor’s blog performs a useful service; a bit one-sided to be sure, but then we all have our particular bugbears to belabour. Still, could she please cease and desist from calling her ham-handed academic comedy-by-installment (apparently contributed by an anonymous reader), “Pictures from an Institution”? Poor old Randall Jarrell’s corpse must be up to 1,500 rpms by now. Jarrell certainly had his conservative side, and a caustic turn of phrase when skewering academic pomposity, but he wrote like an angel. He could never, never commit a sentence like:
Erwin R. Sackville had made a career out of staying ahead of the field’s steep curve of philosophical abandonment.
to pick just one of many. It’s flabby, saggy, and doesn’t really mean anything. The reference to Jarrell’s novel doesn’t do O’Connor’s ersatz academic satire any favours; she’d be much better off abandoning it. Read the original instead; it’s a delight (an academic comedy of manners that is one of the saddest books I know).
Via Volokh comes news of the controversial firing by Penn State Altoona of Professor Nona Gerard. Penn State aren’t talking about it. Erin O’Connor gives the Prof’s side of the story. Gerard was dismissed, it seems, for making what in diplomatic circles would be called a full and frank assessment of her colleagues. The details of what she said do not appear to be public. Given the lack of information I make no judgment either way, though on its face firing tenured Professors because they are opinionated jerks seems to set a dangerous precedent. Eric Rasmusen, whom you may remember is everyone’s favorite homophobic economist, is on Gerard’s side. He comments:
We see also that her criticism was indeed stinging. Her mere words were so effective that they led one person to retire and another to resign. To me, that implies that her criticisms must have had merit— otherwise, why react so strongly?
Revealed preferences strike again! It must be true, otherwise why are you reacting like that? QED! My students sometimes try a variant of this idea, viz, “You’re only giving me an F because You Can’t Handle The Truth, man.” It’s a useful rule to live by, especially late at night, in bars, when talk turns to the personal qualities of people’s mothers.
Over on my other blog, a discussion started up about whether it is valuable to do a terminal MA before starting a PhD. My impression is that in philosophy, the answer is sometimes yes. The obvious costs are that you spend longer in grad school, and may have to move once more often. The benefits are that you may get into a better PhD program after an MA than after a BA, that you’ll be better prepared for the PhD, and you’ll have an opportunity to tell whether you want to be in grad school before making a serious commitment. I think that if you don’t get into a top PhD program, and you do get into a top MA program1 on balance it probably is better to do the MA. Is this true across the humanities in America? Is it true even in philosophy? The structure of graduate degrees in the UK and Australia is quite different to America, so I’m not sure how well this would generalise across the oceans.
1 Assuming these exist in all fields. In philosophy a few schools offer highly respected terminal MA programs, and many of the graduates of those programs are placed in top PhD programs. The most prominent examples are Tufts and Arizona State, but there are several other such programs.
Kerim Friedman has an interesting idea; rather than inviting guest-bloggers to come on board for a period of a week or so (as we and the Volokhs do) he’s inviting academics to come on board for just one post, a mini-essay on some topical subject. As he says:
Often I’ll see academics post short statements on professional e-mail lists which I feel deserve wider attention, or I’ll see news story on a topic which I know someone else would handle better than myself. Unfortunately, many of my efforts in this direction are in vain, since most academics aren’t yet comfortable with the format of a blog. The idea of rapidly responding to current events, or popularizing a specific idea without the extensive preparation and editing that goes into a published article scares a lot of scholars - not to mention the fact that they are just too busy.
It’s an interesting way of getting academics to dip their toes in the blogosphere, and I imagine it will be attractive to a lot of people. Most professors have more ideas rattling around in their head than they’ll ever be able to write up in articles. As Brian says, blogging is a nice way to play with ideas that you think are interesting, but that you’ll never have time to develop properly, or even just to help flesh out a thought that’s still in its early stages. Even if most academics don’t want to start their own blog, I imagine that a fair few of them wouldn’t mind hiving off their excess ideas by posting occasionally on somebody else’s. It’ll be interesting to see how Kerim’s experiment works out (not that I think we’ll be moving that way ourselves anytime soon).
“Goddammit, Morris, what are we going to do with this guy Swallow? He claims he ain’t got a field.” Morris has recommended putting Philip down to teach English 99, a routine introduction to the literary genres and critical method for English majors, and English 305, a course in novel-writing. As Euphoric State’s resident novelist, Garth Robinson, was in fact very rarely resident, orbiting the University in an almost unbroken cycle of grants, fellowships, leaves of absence and alcoholic cures, the teaching of English 305 usually fell to some unwilling and unqualified member of the regular teaching staff. As Morris said, “If he makes a fuck-up of English 305, nobody’s going to notice. And any clown with a PhD should be able to teach English 99.”
“He doesn’t have a PhD, ” Hogan said.
“What?”
“They have a different system in England, Morris. The PhD isn’t so important.”
“You mean the jobs are hereditary?”
I quote this passage from David Lodge’s Changing Places in reaction to reading some of the comments about Simon Schama over at Invisible Adjunct. As is happens, I don’t have a PhD either, and nor do several prominent British philosophers of my generation (such as UCL’s Jo Wolff, a contemporary of mine on the M.Phil at UCL in the early 80s). In the previous generation hardly anyone did the PhD or DPhil, most people got appointed after doing the Oxford B.Phil or the London M.Phil or something similar (these are both two-year postgraduate degrees involving a combination of examination and dissertation).
I guess things really changed in the UK in the mid 1980s when, thanks to Mrs T, there were suddenly no jobs at all in British academia. Those who wanted an academic career had to get one in North America or not at all, and for that they needed the PhD. By the time there were jobs again back in the UK, that had become the requirement for us too. (Though the best young British political philosopher still hasn’t finished his PhD, though he has managed to land himself another permanent job - you know who you are!)
Naturally, in a field now dominated by people with the qualification, I feel the occasional twinge of inadequacy. It isn’t clear to me, though, that we are all better off as a result of the norms having changed. Some very good British philosophers have flourished in the post-war period without the PhD and it isn’t obvious that either scholarship or good teaching are best served by making prospective educators pass through a long period of hyperspecialization and impoverishment. Many fail to get through at all, and plenty of others do so but find that they don’t really have much prospect of getting a job.
(No doubt those who have invested years in getting their doctorates will take a different view.)
I think I have to register one of my occasional dissenting opinions, from the view expressed by Ed Felten and semi-endorsed by Eszter below, that the world would be a better place if we forced a bit more science down the necks of schoolchildren.
It’s a pretty well-established fact (source: “Adult Literacy in Great Britain”, ONS, 1997) that just under half of all Britons can’t cope with mathematical operations more complicated than addition and subtraction. That is, can’t divide up a restaurant bill or calculate the area of a room, even with a calculator. This makes rather a mockery of any proposals to raise our national savings rate via “financial literacy classes” in schools etc; half of the people being taught can’t really cope with percentages.
Lots of UK commentators regard this as a national scandal; however will we compete with the Japanese etc. My view has always been “Well, the old country isn’t doing too badly; just goes to show that percentages aren’t as important as you might have thought”. I suspect that the same is true of science.
It’s a joke you humourless bastards, it’s a joke. The Basic Skills Agency researched this one and discovered that poor numeracy matches up to low income better than almost anything else. Although, one has to note that “numeracy” is very definitely being used here as aproxy for “school education”; as this paper notes, in between chucking around Gramsci’s name like it was a rugby football, most “innumerate” adults are pretty damn shapr when it comes to calculations that affect their daily life; try ripping one of them off one day if you don’t believe me. Tacit knowledge, once more …
Update: Sophisticated readers will have noticed that the fact that there are about a hundred misspellings in this piece, and appreciated that it is a deliciously ironic comment on “Adult LIteracy”. Or something.
Further update: “About a hundred” above is pretty innumerate too.
I’ll be on strike on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I’m sure that the bourgeoisie are making plans to flee the country and that their lackeys in the capitalist press will be uttering their denunciations … but I don’t care.
Actually, I feel duty bound to participate because I’m a member of the union, and the ballot went in favour of a strike. But since the union is possibly the feeblest one in the TUC, has no ideas for how to get money into higher education, is challenging a deal that every other campus union has signed up to already and is most famous for marching under the stirring banner Rectify the Anomaly! , I hold out no hope of success. The BBC has some details on the dispute, as does the Guardian , but most of the newsmedia have so far chosen to ignore the strike completely.
Comrades! To the barricades!
To my chagrin, it was Laurie and not I who received this letter yesterday:
Dear Mr [sic] Paul,2000 OUTSTANDING ACADEMICS OF THE 21st CENTURY The International Biographical Center of Cambridge, England, has published more than 1,000,000 biographies of people of note from all over the world in more than 200 editions of its reference works. Housed in libraries and research institutions in every country of the globe, these books provide vital information for academia, industry and private use. … It is my pleasure than to invited you to complete the enclosed form for this exciting new publication — 2000 OUTSTANDING ACADEMICS OF THE 21st CENTURY. This, the inaugural edition, will be published in late 2004 and will be distributed throughout the world immediately … Demand promises to be great but I have reserved a limited number of copies for the use of biographees only. Each copy is offered at a substantially reduced pre-publication subscription price as a means of thanking yo for completing the enclosed questionnaire. There is no obligation to purchase whatsoever as selection is based on merit alone. We are also proud to offer a fine range of Commemorative Awards to celebrate your significant achievements…
Priority Biographee Reservation Form: … Please supply EITHER
… On the OUTSTANDING ACADEMICS OF THE 21st CENTURY DIPLOMA please inscribe the citation as follows: “In Honor of an Outstanding Contribution in the field of (Max 40 letters): .
- Copy/ies of the case bound Grand Edition at US$225 or £135 Sterling each.
- OUTSTANDING ACADEMICS OF THE 21st CENTURY DIPLOMA, printed in three colours, inscribed with my name and chosen citation at US$225 or £135 Sterling each.
- OUTSTANDING ACADEMICS OF THE 21st CENTURY MEDAL, silver finished, engraved with my name and supplied in a presentation case at US$225 or £135 Sterling each.
I’m thinking I need one of these Diplomas, for my Outstanding Contribution in the field of Excellence.
Just a pointer: be sure not to miss John Holbo’s post on conservatives in academia and Belle Waring’s memoir of one she knew in the Berkeley Classics Department.
The NYT has an article on anonymous reviews on Amazon, and how they’re manipulated in different ways by authors, authors’ friends, and authors’ most bitter enemies. It’s a real problem with a system that allows uncontrolled anonymity or pseudonymity - the information content of the average review quickly drops to zero, unless (like Tyler Cowen you’re interested in the degree of controversy that surrounds the book, rather than the ratio of positive to negative reviews). For an academic, the obvious point of comparison is peer review. Most halfway decent scholarly journals1 get anonymous scholars to review any articles that are submitted to them so as to assess publishability. Although the editor of the journal usually has the final say, the anonymous reviewers’ findings count for a lot. There’s a lot of bitching and griping about this in the particular, especially because it’s sometimes not too difficult for the paper’s author to guess the identity of the ‘anonymous’ reviewer who did a hatchet-job on their cherished piece. The identity of particularly venomous reviewers is the subject of (frequently lurid) speculation and gossip.
Still, the system works reasonably well in the general, for three reasons. First, even if the reviewers are anonymous from the point of view of the article’s author, the journal’s editor knows who they are. This encourages at least some degree of responsibility on the part of the reviewer; even those with malice in their hearts may prefer not to run the risk of becoming known as a partisan hack by a journal editor, who may be receiving their own pieces in the future. Second, most journals will solicit at least two, and very likely three or four reviews, which ideally will be written by people from a variety of backgrounds, so that neither the author’s friends nor foes determine the article’s fate. This doesn’t always work as well as it should - but most journals at least make good-faith efforts to ensure that a piece receives a fair hearing. Finally, anonymity does provide some protection for fair criticism. Even in contexts where the disgruntled author of a rejected article can make a fair guess at who the reviewers were, they can’t be entirely sure; thus, it’s hard for them to retaliate, even when they’re powerful figures in the field. Anonymous peer review isn’t perfect - but by and large the articles that get published in the better known journals in the social sciences are reasonably good, interesting pieces (I don’t know other disciplines well enough to comment properly on their journals).
1 Legal journals are the most obvious exception.
Ed Felten reports that the entire editorial board of a journal has quit to protest the high price of the journal. I agree with Ed that it is somewhat surprising this does not happen more often given the increasing price of many academic journals (a topic we’ve discussed here on CT several times). It looks like these computer scientists were able to take this action at least in part because they found a good alternative for publishing a similar journal. Such alternatives may not be quite as obvious in other fields, unfortunately. After all, the ACM is a very established organization with numerous high-quality publications already so it seems like a good candidate for publishing a new journal. The major associations in some other disciplines do not seem to have this kind of infrastructure in place to support such a cause, which may explain why we do not see such en masse editorial-board resignation more often.
A copy of the letter [pdf] that seemed to initiate much of the above is available online. It contains lots of interesting information - including a summary of this informative piece [pdf] - about academic journal publishing especially with respect to cs/math fields.
Two interesting perspectives on literary theory and related pursuits; one from Elaine Showalter 1 and one from Scott McLemee (scroll down to January 10).
Showalter is reviewing a recent book by Terry Eagleton, once described unkindly in the pages of the LRB as a purveyor of Ladybird primers in cultural theory. Eagleton’s latest purports to revive cultural theory from its decline by demonstrating its potential to counter the growing hegemony of the right. By Showalter’s account, Eagleton doesn’t do a very good job; whenever he starts talking about practicalities, he either gets hazy or reaches for trite slogans.
The most serious drawbacks of After Theory are its internal contradictions — between an appeal to hard thinking and Eagleton’s prejudice; between the call for depth and analysis and the temptation of superficiality and vilification; between the endorsement of disturbing complexity and the surrender to comfortable simplification.
I suspect that Showalter has her own axe to grind, but it’s still a fair cop. Why study Lacanian theory if you want to discover the ‘insight’ that Tony Blair’s government is composed of “craven overseas lackeys of United States power”? It’s much easier to slip a quid to the bloke on the street selling Socialist Worker.
McLemee, who’s a fair bit to Showalter’s left, makes a related claim from a Marxist perspective. He quotes a nice (if slightly tendentious) summation of the problem by John McGowan:
Current criticism’s political content can only be assured if we believe in a ‘talking cure.’ The primary axiom of the whole edifice must be that the way we talk makes a difference. As someone rather attracted to both vulgar Marxism and to populism, the idealism (strictly speaking) and elitism of this position bothers me, especially since so many of its adherents believe they are Marxists. (I’m not playing St. Karl games here, just asking for truth in labeling.) To put the point vulgarly, the history of twentieth century capitalism attests to its thus far unthreatened capacity to endure all and any kinds of deviant talk without its essential economic and political structures being in the least altered. Furthermore, to bring in the populist element, highly deviant talk (as in modernist poety and various experimental novels) has proved itself of interest only to very small audiences of specialists. At the very least, I think the neo-Marxists need to formulate some theory of how deviant talk works its political miracles if we are to accept their attachment to it…. But idealist and elitist positions have not even begun to address the fact that they need a theory of change.”
This seems to me to connect back to some of the arguments that Crooked Timber and other folks have been having about literary theory and bad writing. Ever since its beginnings in the (excellent) work of Williams, Hoggart and Thompson, cultural theory has had the stated aim of opposing hegemony, speaking truth to power and all of that good stuff. But in the hands of Eagleton and his mates, it’s failed miserably. As McGowan says, there isn’t the hint of an argument about how poststructuralist theory is supposed to translate into political change. Even worse - the theory doesn’t serve to generate politically useful analysis. There’s tangled and knotty prose, there are trite slogans, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much in-between. If Eagleton’s version of cultural theory is a means of countering the shift toward the right, it’s not doing a very good job. There’s a rather substantial incongruity between the complexity of the theory and the banality of its political conclusions. Which suggests to me (opinions may differ) that the complexities aren’t as helpful as they were cracked up to be in the first place.
1 Hat-tip to my friend Carl Caldwell for pointing me to the essay - he bears no responsibility for the consequent post.
Via Cosma Shalizi, a very nice article on the economics of academic publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors provide compelling empirical evidence of a large differential between the price of commercial journals and the price of journals put out by professional societies and academic presses, which isn’t explained by journal quality. The graphs almost jump from the page - there are dramatically different relationships between price and number of citations, depending on whether you are looking at commercial or non-commercial journals. Furthermore, according to the authors, the differential between the two has increased over time. Commercial journals are lousy value for money - but they’re apparently hard to displace in the marketplace.
The authors’ wider argument is also interesting - and worrying. Increasingly, academic publishing is moving towards a model based on the licensing of electronic access to a bundle of journals to universities and other research institutions. The authors’ model suggests that site licensing of journals by commercial publishers will leave scholars worse off on average than if each scholar purchased individual licenses to the journals that she wanted to read. While site licences to larger groups are more efficient, these efficiency gains are more than absorbed by the sellers, if the sellers are profit maximizing firms.
Economists who are interested in new economy issues, like Brad DeLong, usually focus on the massive productivity gains that we can expect from information technology. While these are important, so too are the distributional consequences - the ways in which new technologies affect who gets what. Even if new technologies, such as electronic publishing, are more efficient in some broad sense of the term, the efficiency gains may be distributed in ways that are difficult to justify.
Brian writes below :
it will be a long time before I start listing any especially good blogposts on my CV.
But the latest thread from Invisible Adjunct suggests that he won’t have to, and that the good ones (and the bad ones) will be taken down in evidence ….
IA cites a member of a job search committee:
I’ll be interviewing people at MLA, and, trust me, we’ve ‘Googled’ every job candidate to establish whether they are a good ‘fit’ for our institution. Watch what you say.
Oh dear.
Brian Leiter has two interesting posts up (one two) on the question of whether academics should be able to claim scholarly credit for blogging. It is fairly clear that good blogging should count as service. Indeed in all my recent self-promoting activities I’ve been plugging my work on various blogs as a service both to the public and the profession. But whether this counts as scholarly work is a tougher question.
I’m mostly in agreement with Brian’s position that the standards in the blogosphere are too loose to justify calling our posts scholarship. One reason this is not likely to change anytime soon is that the posts reflect the lack of standards. Most of what I write for blogs barely deserves to be called a first draft. Others I know are more careful, but I suspect there are very few bloggers who take as much care over their blog posts as they would over passages in a journal article.
On the other hand, it’s certainly possible that scholarship is advanced by our efforts on blogs, especially when blogs are used to trial genuinely new ideas. And if anyone wants to give me a pay raise on the basis of blog work, I won’t let my principles get in the way! But it will be a long time before I start listing any especially good blogposts on my CV.
I have a guilty secret: I’m a PowerPoint user. Why do I use PowerPoint? Because it is an easy way to get text and graphics up on a screen to illustrate a lecture. I’m sure there are other and better ways of doing this, but don’t know what they are. I’ve been feeling bad about this since reading some of Edward Tufte ‘s anti-PP writings, and my guilt and shame are compounded after reading John Naughton’s attack on PP in todays’ Observer . Sample quote:
As an addiction of the white-collar classes, PowerPoint ranks second only in perniciousness to cocaine.
(Actually I have sometimes wondered whether my lectures would be improved by prior self-medication — a stiff drink perhaps — but have never run the experiment.)
Naughton links to Peter Norvig’s rendering of the Gettysburg address in PowerPoint — funny and effective.
Incidentally, this reminds me of Oliver Jensen’s “The Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowese” from Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm—And After which begins thus:
I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals….
Good to see Ophelia Benson writing in the Guardian on the topic of academic bad writing. Her piece contains the following quote from a volume edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin: as open an admission of deliberate obscurity as you’ll find anywhere:
Any discourse that was out to uncover and question that system had to find a language, a style, that broke from the constraints of common sense and ordinary language. Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully - say those of Lacan or Kristeva - that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer.
(noticed via normblog )
UPDATE: John Holbo has yet more on bad writing to supplement his earlier efforts and reply to critics.
What does John Lott have to do to get fired from the American Enterprise Institute?
UPDATE: Just a thought- in an unimportant way, Internet sock puppetry is pretty self-defeating. If I see a commentor defending him on a thread, there’s a big part of me that will wonder, “Is that him?”
UPDATE II: Sock puppetry: 1000 flowers bloom…
Without consulting my esteemed colleague, Doctor Krauthammer, I’m unable to identify the syndrome which best describes the kind of nut who would create a fake website and then mock the fictitious author of that website and the presidential candidate supported by the make-believe author.
Oxford University Press has put a large number of recent books in economics, political science, philosophy and religion online here. Unfortunately you need to subscribe, or be part of an institution that does, to get to most of the best parts, but for those of us with computers attached to university networks, this is an incredibly good service. (Hat tip: Michael Green, and to Enthymeme in the comments for reminding me where I saw this.)
In a post yesterday about the later age at which academics get proper jobs nowadays, I focused on how this means that academics now have fewer children later (or none at all). But there’s another consequence of the way the job market and accreditation process have changed: pensions. Academics here in the UK still have a final salary pension scheme (which is nice). The scheme assumes to that to receive a full-value pension (50 per cent of final salary) you have made 40 years worth of contributions. I’ve even met some academics — appointed at around age 23 in the 1960s — who’ve managed this. But those who have entered the profession late (and burdened with debt) from the 1990s onwards, at age 30+ will never pay in their 40 years (given retirement at 65) and will therefore receive a lower income in their old age. I’ve assumed in this post that the system is the UK one, but obviously the point generalises beyond final-salary schemes. Those who earn proper salaries later (and are debt-ridden) will not contribute so much towards their pension — especially if they are trying to bring up a delayed young family! — and will suffer in their retirement.
Kieran’s post immediately below focuses on the different pressures on men and women in academia. That difference is certainly there, but the extraordinary thing is that changes in academia over the past thirty years have exacerbated the pressures at the same time as universities have become more verbally supportive of gender equality, have implemented “family friendly” and “work—life balance” policies, and so on.
Why? It isn’t hard simply to do some sums. Here’s a typical career path in philosophy in the UK, circa 1960:
Take first degree (BA, say in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford) graduating at age 21.
Take a two-year postrgraduate degree such as the Oxford B.Phil or the London M.Phil, finishing at age 23.
Get a permanent academic job on a salary that enables you to live in a good part of town and support a family at age 23—4.
Wind forward to say, 1990, when there are far fewer jobs because the higher education expansion is over, but lots of people chasing them.
Take first degree (BA, say in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford) graduating at age 21.
Take a one or two year postgraduate degree (now insisted upon by funding bodies as a condition of admission to PhD programmes, finishing at age 23.
The PhD has now become essential to those wanting an academic career, so enter a PhD programme for a minimum of three, but up to five years. Finish at age 26—8.
Spend three years in temporary teaching positions and, at the same time, try to get enough published so hiring committees will even look at you. (Age 29—31)
If you are very lucky, get hired to a permanent position (but perhaps with a three year probationary period).
But your problems aren’t over. Your academic starting salary hasn’t kept pace with other professions. If you want to get promoted, get a good reputation, be valued by your colleagues then you’ll need a healthy research output including several papers and/or a book. Unpromoted, you don’t earn enough to start a family anyway, and you are living in cramped conditions in a bad part of town. So add another five years to give us age 34—36.
Obviously we can add further years here and there for various reasons, and also mention the fact that the pressure to perform, to publish, to compete is intense even for those who have secured permanent jobs and an initial promotion. But in about 30 years in the history of academic life a 13 year gap has opened up! A woman of 23 will find it much easier to conceive than one of 36 and will probably contemplate more than one child. But for academics of either gender having a family is a much more daunting and potentially career-damaging prospect than it used to be.
The University of Toronto has recently had a minor to-do about free speech, and the circumstances under which it can be exercised on campus. A Palestinian group, Al-Awda, which is officially recognized on campus, wanted to book university facilities for a conference on “Palestinian Solidarity.” It required that all people attending the conference sign up to a six point “basis of unity” in order to be admitted. Inter alia they had to sign up to the statement that “Israel is a racist apartheid state,” and that “[w]e support the right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli and colonialism (sic) by any means of their choosing.” The University told Al-Awda that it could not the conference unless it removed the requirement that all participants sign up to the “basis for unity.” Al-Awda declined to do this, and the University revoked Al-Awda’s booking of the room.
What interests me is that both sides in this dispute have invoked the principle of free speech to defend their actions. Al-Awda has described the University’s actions as “blatant trampling on students’ right to organize” and “a horrible precedent for all other student groups, because the university would be able to dictate the conditions under which [groups could] organize.” The university, for its part, has said that it didn’t ban the conference because of the views that would be expressed, but because the conference organizers were making sure that dissenting views would not be expressed.
Requiring attendees to agree to the Basis of Unity excluded persons with dissenting views and was thus in violation of the University’s Policy on Recognition of Student Groups, which, among other things, confirms that “the essential value of the University must remain that of preservation of freedom of enquiry and association.”
In other words, the university seems to be saying that it isn’t obliged to provide opportunities to groups to exercise free speech, unless these groups themselves accord the right to free speech to their critics. Thus, in order to preserve the openness of debate, it’s necessary to prevent exclusionary forms of discussion from taking place.
I’m of two minds as to whether the university is justified in this. It seems to me that in this particular instance, the university has a reasonable justification for its actions. I agree that universities should take a strong line against groups that require people to sign a blood-oath in order to participate in a public event that uses university facilities. Still, the principle underlying the university’s decision is open to abuse. It’s quite legitimate for groups to want to conduct some of their business on a private and (to some extent) exclusionary basis, and the question of when and why authorities should interfere is a vexed one. But in general, unlike many in the blogosphere, I’m in favour of some restrictions on the right to political free speech; I’d be interested to see what the more vigorous advocates of free speech, such as Eugene Volokh, have to say on the issue.
Update: David Bernstein too argues that U of T did the right thing. Matt Yglesias ripostes, saying that Bernstein’s conclusion likely reflects his distaste for the speech in question rather than an underlying principled position.
I just got some voting slips for participant proposals for the TIAA-CREF accounts that I have. I assume many readers of this blog have similar accounts, which is why this might be interesting.
One of the proposals was to stop investing in all companies that support gun control. It almost goes without saying that this is a Very Bad Idea, and one that I’d strongly recommend people vote against. I doubt the proposal has much chance, but just in case a few gun-lovers with college jobs get behind it, it is worth taking the time to vote it down.
The accompanying documentation to the vote included a mealy-mouthed pro forma objection to the proposal from the board, that basically just said “We’re Friedmanites about business ethics, so we don’t think we should care what the companies say or do as long as they make a lot of money.” (Obviously they did not put it quite like that.) I’m not a Friedmanite so I think this is a lousy argument. But I still think there are plenty of reasons to vote against the proposal.
1. Gun control is a Good Thing, so we should be supporting companies that support it, not opposing them.
2. It’s inappropriate to choose which companies to invest in on the basis of their political views.
3. Based on recent NFL results, it seems that groups that support gun control are likely to exceed expectations, and hence should be supported. [1]
I should say a little more about 2. I think it is appropriate to choose which companies to invest in on the basis of their social practices. Indeed, I think shareholder activism, backed by a willingness to move funds, is sometimes a better way to promote social goods than political agitation. To that end, I have most of my investments in so-called socially responsible investment funds. (This isn’t entirely by choice - my other investments took a pretty bad hit in the crash, but the touchy-feely ones held up pretty well. The way they seemed to do so well in bad times might be another proof that there is a God.)
But I think we should distinguish here between which political platitudes a company mouths and what actions it does. The latter may be grounds for taking dramatic actions like removing all institutional funds from them, but the former are not. I wouldn’t sell off my shares in a company because it lends its name to anti-abortion petitions. (Though I would obviously vote against supporting such petitions.) I would be much more tempted to sell them off if the company restructured its health care policies to ensure that its employees could not be covered for abortions.
The current proposal, apart from being on the Wrong Side of the political debate, seeks to punish companies for what they say, not what they do. And I don’t think that’s appropriate, especially for a large investment house.
Having said that, I was quite offended by the way the various proposals were laid out. As well as the “More Money for Gun-Lovers” proposal, the ballot included various proposals put forward to reform various aspects of the fund governance, some other social policy oriented proposals, and the re-election of two trustees. The board approves the re-election, but not the proposals.
So the dead-tree ballot paper is split into two columns, with the one thing supported by the board in one column headed “The Board of Trustees recommends a vote FOR item 1” and the others in a column headed “The Board of Trustees recommends a vote AGAINST the following items.” Subtle, eh? Then when I went to vote online, there’s a single check-box for those who want to vote exactly as the board recommends. Needless to say, there was no such check-box for those wanting to vote against the board’s recommendation in every case.
If the fund is going to have this kind of ‘participant involvement’ it should not be stacking the deck in favour of the status quo this way. It’s entirely proper for the Board to investigate proposals and report on their consequences before they go to a vote. It’s not permissible to draw the ballot paper up on the basis of those reports. This is about as ridiculous as ordering candidates on a ballot paper by the number of votes people from their party got in the most recent election.
[1] The NRA Blacklist includes the Kansas City Chiefs, who, before an unfortunate stumble last weekend, were tearing up the league. They still look like having a pretty good season, and should give the Pats quite a scare in the AFC title game. If this is the kind of organisation that supports gun control, I want shares in them!
Keith Burgess-Jackson provides an interesting defence of the fairness of tenure over at AnalPhilosopher. (You have to scroll down a bit to get to it) The defence is this: academics are capable people who could have chosen to compete in a variety of fields. Academia provides a particular mix of goods — including the ability to teach, the freedom to research, and tenure, which compensates us for our low (relative to other professions we might have chosen) pay. There’s nothing unfair about people enjoying a benefit which is part of a package which includes countervailing costs. He rightly suggests that if you really abolished tenure you would be raising the costs of competently delivered higher education.
I have made the same argument about the purported efficiency effects of privatizing schools — schools that face hard budget constriants can’t provide tenure, and without tenure you have to pay more to access the same talent pool. But, of course, we do have an example of a place where academic tenure has been abolished, but pay remains pitiful — the UK. One hypothesis would be that this has lowered the quality of British academics. I don’t really think that’s true, though certainly other factors (like the government insistence on ever more paperwork) have lowereed productivity. The other hypothesis is that tenure was abolished in name only — once you are in its not that hard to stay in, partly because the authorities simply have no idea how to measure quality. (There’s an interesting problem here in schools too — managers can identify complete incompetence with some success, but have no idea how to make comparative judgments between teachers above some quite low level of competence). I’ve experienced both the US system (with tenure) and the UK system (without it, but, I have to say, in a very priveleged part of academia). I’d be very curious what the Brits think.
The Guardian reports that US-style paranoia about biased professors has crossed the Atlantic with something called the Young Britons Foundation compiling dossiers about leftie academics. A Manchester student newspaper contacted them with made-up examples
of so called left-wing bias at the University of Manchester - such as a professor who “forced” students to chant Karl Marx during lectures…..
The YBF swallowed the bait and
said the incidents would be added to a database of complaints being made across the country that would go into a report to be presented to the government next year.
Expect to see that chanting professor denounced on a blog somewhere soon!
Who knew such a thing existed? And who would have guessed that if it did exist, it would exist in Belgium?
SynopsisThe Philosophy of Cricket encompasses a series of reflections upon the nature of cricket, its forms of practice, its history and its influence in shaping the human form physically, emotionally and morally. A recurring theme throughout is the interplay between the matter (what the game is) and spirit of cricket (ideals concerning how one plays the game). What are these ideals and how do they impinge upon cricket’s conditions of existence? Furthermore, is cricket’s ratio essendi exhausted by a set of prescriptive laws or does it encompass a broader ethos, a body of conventions and connotations, a history and tradition that bind the game to realities beyond its constitutive boundaries?
I think it was Louise Vigeant from whom I heard about this collection. If so, thanks Louise! If it was someone else, apologies and thanks. (If I was a real journo-blogger I’d have been taking notes at lunch so I wouldn’t have to make these disjunctive acknowledgments.) Here’s the full call for papers.
Submissions criteria
Contributions are accepted from a broad range of philosophical disciplines discussing issues relevant to the game of cricket. Possible themes include, but are certainly not limited to, the aesthetics of cricket; ethics in cricket; cricket and the nature of man; cricket and education; cricket and culture, etc. Topics related to broader philosophical themes, such as the phenomenon of sport in general, may also be accepted provided they are predominantly illustrated with examples from cricket. All submissions must be of a philosophical nature, meet high standards of rigour and display an obvious command of the language and subject matter.
Papers should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length, though longer papers of exceptional quality and focus may also be accepted. No papers should exceed 10000 words in length.
All submissions must be written in (British) English and should follow the MLA standards for footnotes, citations and bibliographical references.
Deadlines
Abstracts are to be received by 27 February 2004. The final deadline for submissions is 30 April 2004.
Contact
Contributions for review may be sent in electronic form to the editor:
Institute of Philosophy
Kardinaal Mercierplein 2
B-3000 Leuven
Belgium
+32 16 326356
+32 16 326311 (f)
UPDATE: Normblog suggests some topics for the collection below. Anyone who wants to write on them should send me their efforts, with appropriate credits to Norm. I think consequential vs deontological approaches to walking might be fun to work out. I think I can will the universalised rule “All batters should walk iff they are playing against Australia or Victoria”, which probably messes up the deontological solution.
The depressing state of debate over the British university system is well explored by Stefan Collini in the LRB . He ponders this paragraph from the White Paper on Higher Education:
We see a higher education sector which meets the needs of the economy in terms of trained people, research and technology transfer. At the same time it needs to enable all suitably qualified individuals to develop their potential both intellectually and personally, and to provide the necessary storehouse of expertise in science and technology, and the arts and humanities which defines our civilisation and culture.
And observes
Even those statements which are clearly intended to be upbeat affirmations of their importance have a way of making you feel slightly ill. It is not simply the fact that no single institution could successfully achieve all the aims crammed into this unlovely paragraph, taken from the introductory chapter to the Government’s White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, published earlier this year. It is also the thought of that room in Whitehall where these collages are assembled. As the findings from the latest survey of focus groups come in, an official cuts out all those things which earned a positive rating and glues them together in a straight line. When a respectable number of terms have been accumulated in this way, s/he puts a dot at the end and calls it a sentence.
As a certain person would say, read the whole thing.
There’s much to amuse in David Cohen’s survey of education journalism in today’s Guardian. Those of us who are fed up with league tables evaluating and ranking university departmant can take heart from one published by Canada’s Globe and Mail which awarded high marks to some nonexistent institutions: York’s medical school and the medical and law schools at Waterloo. The methodology does seem somewhat suspect:
According to the market research firm responsible for the rankings, the results had been based entirely on student responses to an online survey on issues such as the quality of teaching assistants, class size, availability of courses and the library services at their colleges.
A quick addendum to my recent post on bad academic writing; it turns out that Steven Berlin Johnson was a student of Said. Which is quite an interesting intellectual trajectory. Johnson recalls that Said
was largely responsible — some might say to blame — for importing French cultural theory into the American intellectual scene, particularly Foucault, who obviously had a huge influence on Orientalism. But he always resisted the inane wordplay and self-absorption that characterized so much of American theory in the eighties and early nineties. He absolutely despised “radical theorists” like Judith Butler, for instance. I remember him bristling anytime someone used the word “discourse” in one of our seminars — and I remember thinking at the time that I had first starting using the word myself after reading Orientalism during my freshman year. … on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I’ve ever met in my life — handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing Butler on the world).
The SF Chronicle reports that two UCSF scientists are leading a boycott of six journals published by Cell Press, a division of Reed-Elsevier. The immediate cause of the boycott is that Cell wants the UC system to pay $90,000 for electronic subscriptions to the six journals, and the scientists regard that as exorbitant.
A few things stand out about the boycott.
It is being supported by the university administration. The vice dean of research and the vice chancellor of academic affairs at UCSF are quoted in the article supporting the boycott. This is not just the kind of peasant revolt that I’ve occasionally encouraged.
I don’t know enough about the area to judge whether this is accurate, but one of the journals being targetted, Cell is described in the article as a ‘must-read’ journal. It looks like this is no mere skirmish over third-tier publications. We’ll see how serious the scientists really are when they have to decide whether to boycott the New England Journal of Medicine, or The Lancet if similar disputes arise. But if Cell did publish important work on AIDS in recent years, as the article says, this is already an important dispute.
Finally, this isn’t something that can be solved by going electronic, because the dispute is over the cost of electronic subscriptions. I know UC is a big system, and it’s fair that they should pay more than your average site for a licence, but $90,000 for six journals still seems ridiculous, especially if they are not available unbundled, and really only one of the six is strongly wanted.
Thanks to Kent Bach for passing along this link.
I’ve recently taken on the job of department head for a couple of years. I’ve done it before, but my successor’s early retirement has meant that I’ve had to step in again. Dennis Baron in the Chronicle of Higher Education published a heads-up on what the job really involves (allegedly). (Link via Michael Froomkin )
Via Randy Barnett, I see that John Lott isn’t the only disgraced gun researcher who likes playing dress-up on the internet. It looks like Michael Bellesiles has a sock puppet too. “Benny Smith” knows a lot of things that only Bellesiles would know. Bellesiles hasn’t admitted it, but having read the story, I can’t think of another explanation.
That’s really embarassing for Bellesiles. What’s more embarassing, though, is the way that Lott’s fiercest critics have continued to stick up for Bellesiles. Even after his work was debunked, Bellesiles is being promoted on a speaking tour by People for the American Way. Just this week, the editors of the American Prospect published a piece by him as if he was a trustworthy source. And of course, any respectable think tank would have fired him a long time ago, but he keeps hanging on at Brookings.
Sad, really.
UPDATE: (Irony hat off) Now that I think of it, what in the world is Bellesiles doing nowadays? I just realized that I have no idea, and googling didn’t help.
(Also, now that my hat is off, I should reiterate without irony that the story about Bellesiles does seem true, and it really is embarassing for him. Don’t want to be misinterpreted.)
Brian Leiter suggests that philosophers will start fleeing California now that Arnie! has become governor.
Already the “buzz” among philosophers is that the election of the absurd Schwarzenegger, in a state already facing enormous problems, is going to lead philosophers in California, especially at UC system campuses, to start thinking about leaving. We’ll see whether Schwarzenegger can pull a “Thatcher.”
That’s not the buzz I’ve been hearing, but I’m a long way from California. Do any readers who are closer to the action want to leave any impressions?
I should say that given the relative unimportance of the governor’s office in state politics, especially when the governor is comprehensively outvoted in both houses, it seems a little absurd to leave California on this account. If there’s about to be a flood of west coast philosophy positions open up I predict there’s lots of un(der)employed philosophers from the rest of the world who will be more than happy to take them. Maybe Arnie! can be good for philosophy, even for California philosophy, after all.
Via the British philosophers listserv comes notice of a “Capitalism and Philosophy Lab” on the theme of “Libidinal Economics”. The programme is as follows:
Mark Fisher will discuss Baudrillard’s “Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign”.
Nick Midgely will discuss Klossowski’s “Living Currency”
Luciana Parisi will discuss abstract sex and viral trading.
Commenters are invited to speculate (or even to write authoritatively) on the possible content of the third paper.
There’s an interesting communication on Brian Leiter’s site about the price of the notoriously expensive philosophy journal Synthese . The incapacity of academics for any kind of concerted collective action has long been demonstrated by the failure of university libraries to organized a boycott of Kluwer (publishers of Synthese and a number of other overpriced journals). [Update: See also Brian Weatherson’s site and Leiter’s comment there.] But I wanted to comment on this paragraph in order to report something I heard in Belgium last year:
With respect to the institutional pricing, things aren’t quite as simple or as bad as the raw number implies. The way things stand now, the number of paper subscriptions from institutions is slowly decreasing. However, the number of libraries buying electronic subscriptions to a bundle of journals (including Synthese) now outnumbers those subscribing to the paper copy. As libraries stop renewing their paper copy, they have tended to shift to the online version as part of an arrangement where they subscribe to all or a selection of the Kluwer journals. Consequently, the price that libraries pay for the e-version of Synthese is considerably less than /$1652. I can’t give you a precise figure because the price varies depending on the arrangement that libraries or consortia of libraries make with Kluwer. Chances are, if your library now carries the print version of Synthese, they will soon within the next few years and will adopt it in electronic form as part of an electronic bundle of journals instead.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
A report I heard from a seminar on electronic publishing in Brussels in October 2002, suggests something more sinister is at work. Kluwer — and to some extent other major journal publishers — are now focusing on selling bundles of electronic journals to university libraries. These bundles are expensive, and are provided on an all-or-nothing basis. Now academics in fields X,Y, and Z just have to get journals P, Q, and R. The reasoning is then, the the subscriptions to the bundles provided by major publishers will constitute an ever growing proportion of overstretched library budgets.
As many academics know, there’s constant pressure to cut expenditure on journals. When the next round of cuts comes, the all-or-nothing bundle will mean that cutting, say, Kluwer journals, isn’t a realistic option. It will be those journals which are published independently, or by smaller presses that will be the focus of cutting attention. Not only does this threaten the diversity and number of journals (there may be too many, but we want to lose the right ones), it also pushes editorial teams into the arms of large bundle publishers if they want to survive.
If I’m right about this — and I’m just reporting a conversation — the advent of e-publication may not bring the diversity we all expect. People who want to sell online content (rather than just giving it away) may find themselves pressured to do so via one of the existing journals conglomerates (Kluwer, Blackwell, Sage etc) because those are the ones the libraries hand their money over to.
Matt Yglesias linked to this very interesting exit poll from the last Presidential election. Like Matt, I thought some of the voting breakdowns are striking. I knew Jewish voters tended Democratic, but I had no idea it was 79-18. I wasn’t as shocked to see that voters with no religion favoured Gore 61-28, with another 9% for Nader, but that’s still a noticable gap.
Do these results have anything to do with the ‘liberalism’ (meaning, in this context, disposition to not vote Republican) of American academia? Perhaps. At a guess, I would say that atheists, agnostics and Jews are pretty well represented in the academy, and Protestants are not as well represented, at least relative to their size in the broader community. As noted the well represented groups tend much more Democratic (and even Green) than the under represented groups.
I doubt this can explain all of the data about the Democratic (and Green) preferences of university professors, but it explains a lot. It would be very interesting to see a breakdown of the professoriate by religion and politics, compared to a similar breakdown of the whole electorate, to see what the differences were. My guess is that within each religious (or non-religious) professors will be mildly more pro-Democratic than the electorate. The really dramatic differences will be in the religious makeup of the two groups. But because the religion and political disposition are correlated, the overall effect will be that the professors are much more pro-Democratic than the electorate, even without any religous group of professors being much more pro-Democratic than their non-academic counterparts.
There’s a bunch of things you might conclude from this.
First, you might think that you’d rather get your sociological speculations from someone who knows something about the empirical data than from someone’s a priori guesswork. That would probably be prudent, but just in case you’re feeling like taking some intellectual risks, let’s continue the thought experiment.
Second, you might think that even if the absence of conservatives can be explained by the absence of Christians, there’s still reason to promote conservatives because of diversity needs and the like. I don’t think this is an entirely absurd argument, but it is an argument for a very strong form of affirmative action. As an affirmative action supporter I don’t dismiss such arguments. Affirmative action for a group that is rather powerful politically is always a little dubious I think, but diversity is a good, so this would have to play itself out a bit before we could reach any firm conclusion.
Finally, you might think this shows that universities are biased against Christians. We’ve had this debate on CT before, and I don’t expect any easy consensus. There is certainly discrimination against one class of Christians, the class that takes the inference The Bible says p therefore p to be a decent argument without any extra reason to believe p. This is a content neutral form of discrimination. We also discriminate against people who take the argument Book X says p therefore p to be a decent argument without any extra reason to believe p for any given book X. (Well, unless the book in question is by Richard Montague or David Lewis.) And I think it’s an entirely justified form of discrimination in all cases. (Even when the book is by Montague or Lewis.) The interesting question is whether there are forms of discrimination against Christians that are not content neutral, and are not possible to defend by independently justifiable intellectual standards. And here I’ll stop making empirical speculations, because I simply do not know whether such pernicious discrimination exists. (See the comments thread to the earlier post for some strong anecdotal evidence that it does.)
Even if my (ill-informed) sociological speculations are correct, there’s still a lot of reason to be on the lookout for political discrimination in academia. The absence of systematic discrimination would not mean the absence of discrimination in any particular case. It’s perfectly possible for someone to have abhorrent or unintelligible views on the latest war or the latest economic reform and still be a great academic. (Chomsky keeps providing a shining example of this phenomenon.) If our colleagues are confusing political misguidedness for academic deficiencies, they should be ashamed and we should be taking action.
Do conservatives have a hard time getting tenure in American universities? David Brooks suggests as much in a NYT op-ed today. This isn’t David Horowitz-style ravings; Brooks makes a real argument. He quotes various conservative professors to say that:
A person who voted for President Bush may be viewed as an oddity, but the main problem in finding a job is that the sorts of subjects a conservative is likely to investigate - say, diplomatic or military history - do not excite hiring committees.
Brooks’ respondents may be right about history (although military history is making a bit of a comeback; look at Niall Ferguson). Even so, I think that Brooks exaggerates. While the average political scientist is somewhere to the left of the average punter, she isn’t all that far to the left. In my experience, most political scientists are moderate liberals, with substantial minorities who are real leftists, centrists, or mild to moderate Republicans. There aren’t many hardcore conservatives in top political science departments, but there aren’t many Marxists either. Indeed, I’d guess that there are rather more conservatives than Marxists - conservatives dominate certain areas of political theory (classical political philosophy) that most pol-sci departments have to offer courses in.
There’s also another factor that Brooks doesn’t talk about (although he hints at it at the end of the article). If you’re a young conservative, who’s just gotten a Ph.D. in pol. sci. or pol. theory from a good school, you have many attractive options outside the academy. Conservative think-tanks like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute are remarkably well-funded (thanks to the charming Richard Mellon Scaife and other mega-millionaires), and provide direct access to the US policy process. They offer better pay (usually), more immediate recognition and more influence. It’s a wonder that any bright conservatives stay in the academy at all.
There are several interesting discussions going on at the Invisible Adjunct’s, Chun the Unavoidable’s and Brad DeLong’s about scholarly publishing. The basic theme is that universities are currently making incompatible demands. Their tenure committees demand books for promotion. Their finance offices demand that the presses be profitable. And the kind of books that get published for tenure aren’t profitable.
I’m mostly posting this to link to the interesting discussions, but I thought I’d also add some points about how philosophy differs from the humanities in these respects, and how things look a little more hopeful from our shores.
First, book publishing hasn’t been required for tenure in philosophy for a long time. You can become a very important philosophical figure without having a book at all. Donald Davidson never wrote a book, and Saul Kripke reached the peak of his philosophical influence before his first book came out (as a book). More locally, my colleague Jamie Dreier, who just got promoted to Professor on the basis of some very good articles, has never written a book, and that doesn’t seem to have hampered his career prospects.
So here’s a simple solution to the scholarly publishing crisis. Stop requiring books! If philosophers can do it, so can sociologists and historians and literary critics. Quality is more important than quantity. This is meant a little flippantly, but at some level I’m not entirely sure why the quantity standards are so different in different fields. Maybe philosophers are missing something.
Brad DeLong’s solution to the crisis was to cut costs by moving to e-publication. This is a great idea, but of course a problem is that e-publication may not be taken too seriously. This fact is not entirely independent of the fact that it is affordable. When there are barriers to entering the publication market, the mere fact that something is published is at some level a sign of quality. When those barriers fall, there is no such signal. So it might not be unreasonable to be a little suspicious of e-publications at first.
On the other hand, judging a publication by where (or whether) it appears is pretty crude to start with. Much better to try actually reading the publication.
If we are judging quality by location, it’s not clear, at least in my fields, that our current practices make it easy to judge book quality. The problem is that the book publishing market is not as finely segmented as the paper publishing market. Currently in areas I follow, Oxford is publishing by far the best work. Almost all the books I’m reading from the last seven years are Oxford books. (Not that I read a huge number of books, but the ones I do read tend to be Oxford.) Still, that a book is published with Oxford is nowhere near as reliable a sign of quality as that a paper is published in Mind or Nous. Not that no Oxford books are at the level of those journals. Many are. But there are so many Oxford books that many more are not. And that’s the very best press. There are so few presses, relative to the number of journals, that looking at the imprint just can’t give you detailed quality information.
If the current book industry doesn’t provide detailed quality signals to those of us too lazy to read the books in question, an e-industry wouldn’t be much worse in this respect.
Finally, if you want an electronic press to have a high reputation, there is some evidence you can do it, provided you put in enough work. No one’s tried for books yet, but some electronic journals are establishing themselves as major players. The Philosopher’s Imprint, based out of the University of Michigan, has built up a very good reputation over its three year life span, in part because of the high reputation of the people running it, and in part because it has been very selective about what it publishes. This year, one of its articles (Do Demonstratives Have Senses? by Richard Heck) was selected to be reprinted in the Philosopher’s Annual. The Annual is an interesting attempt to find the best 10 articles from the previous year and reprint them in a prominent format. I don’t want to get into debates about their accuracy in actually getting the best papers, or into philosophical debates about what might constitute the best papers. I just wanted to note that the fact they are even considering articles from an e-journal is a sign of how well respected an e-journal could be. (The Imprint by the way is free, so it’s doing its bit to help the library funds crisis.)
Now it’s not clear that what goes for article publishing goes for book publishing. But there’s a hopeful sign here that academics can adjust to new forms of publication, and take seriously publications in electronic format, even in relatively short spaces of time.
Chris’s post below notes some disturbing ways in which Amazon seems to be backing out of the academic bookselling business. This would really be too bad if it happened, because online booksellers have been a boon for people wanting access to academic books but without access to New York quality bookstores. So just to make people feel a little better about Amazon’s business plans, you can, in America at least, get a Journal of Philosophy subscription through Amazon. I was rather surprised by this, and it’s a kind of involvement with academic publishing that I hadn’t expected at all from Amazon.
If there starts being competitive distribution of academic journals, this could really put downward pressure on prices. (Of course, I get all of these journals for free through my department, but not everyone has jobs which allow them access to all the journals they want, and this kind of development could be good news for them.)
Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.
Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done - both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.
Strategy A is the Anthony Burgess method. I read an obituary of Burgess which revealed that he would write 1000 words every day before retiring to the nearest bar to sip a martini. I’m sorry to say that I skipped the martini part, but, for a long time managed the routine of 1000 words. Many of those words, certainly most of those words were garbage and got thrown away, but gradually, like whisking mayonnaise, publishable material started to emerge. Indeed my best ever paper (IMHO) came from following this writing strategy.
Strategy B I think of as the “football method”. Whilst I can spend whole mornings (and afternoons) getting absolutely nothing done, everyone who watches football (soccer) knows just how much can happen even in a few minutes of extra time. (I spend far too much of my life watching football matches.) I’ve found that 45 minutes of intense writing activity, followed by a 15-minute break (half-time) followed by a further 45 minutes, is also very productive (repeat as required).
The two methods are similar in that they allow you to get a lot done (cumulatively) in a little time, though one is like piecework and the other is like payment by the hour. Given I know their effectiveness, I think the complaint academics make that they don’t have enough time for writing and research is probably misconceived. Time, strictly speaking, isn’t the issue. What is a problem — as I know from the fact that I’m having to manage a department for the second time in my life — is that it is far too easy for other matters to colonise your head. To work effectively you need to be able to do a combination of concentration and daydreaming (self-hypnosis is good here!) but that isn’t possible if your thoughts are full of finances, staffing problems and achieving the next government target.
I just got the offprints for my most recently published article, as it happens a reply to the article mentioned by Brad DeLong last night in his theology post. It’s quite pretty too, since The Philosophical Quarterly put nice covers on their offprints.
This article was interesting from a blogging perspective for a few reasons. First, I got the idea for it from reading blogs. Second, I even cited the relatively well-known blog from which I got the idea. Third, the paper itself grew almost entirely out of some blog entries.
(If you want to see the original blog posts, and see how closely the final paper resembled them, they are here and here. Be warned though, these files are rather large, since I wasn’t using any blogging software at the time, just adding text to a poorly designed HTML file.)
Now as you might see by looking at our sidebar, there are a lot of academics who have blogs. I suspect their numbers will start exploding in the next year or two. Very soon I imagine keeping anything like a comprehensive list of them will be impractical.
But it’s not clear to me from skimming through the list just how many scholar-bloggers use their blogs to advance their scholarship. Very few have posts directly about their research, and fewer still it seems use their blog as a place to try out ideas, or paragraphs, for forthcoming papers.
This isn’t a universal principle. Some of the Conspirators have posts closely related to their research from time to time, as does Lawrence Solum. And the oldest philosophy blog I know of, Wo’s Weblog, is another notable exception. Plus, it’s not always easy for me to tell what is intended as passing commentary and what is intended for scholarly publication, so I might be underestimating how much blogging is intended for scholarly publication. But the general trend seems to not be to use the blogs as a forum for first (or zeroth) drafts of papers.
In a way this is understandable. Blog entries tend to be short and topical, academic papers tend to be long and concerned with more long-term affairs. So I can understand why people would be tempted to keep their two forms of writing separate. (And if you have a pseudonymous blog, keeping your academic work off it may be necessary in order to preserve the disguise.)
But to me that is a waste of a good audience. Not everyone who reads an academic’s blog will be interested in the technical details of his/her work. But some of the audience will be, and some of them may have interesting comments. I’ve learned quite a lot from my commentators about problems with proposals I’ve been making, about alternative solutions I should be considering, and sometimes even about reasons why the project should be abandoned. It’s a lot easier to learn about those two days into a project than it is after two months, or two years, into it.
The upshot of all this is that in my case blogging isn’t interfering with scholarly writing. If anything it is promoting it, which is useful for a pre-tenure academic.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who is using their blog this way. Or from anyone who’s made a particular decision to not do so. If I’m right there’s a large potential use for blogs that hasn’t really been tapped into yet.
UPDATE: Norman Geras has a very interersting series on Crimes Against Humanity on his blog, that should be turning into a paper shortly. There’s lots of good stuff there, and I highly recommend reading through it. (I don’t trust Blogger permalinks, so you’ll have to scroll down to find the series - head to the first post headed CAH n for some integer n and track back from there.)
Norman has taken a different approach to mine - he’s serialising a paper on his blog. This is a nice move, because it gives the blog readers a worked out series of ideas (in managable chunks). I’m more inclined to do a brain dump onto the blog and let the readers find their way across, if they care to. As you might have guessed, my way of doing this is less work.
These days many academics, including I would guess most who read this blog, keep collections of their papers available on their websites. (If you’re interested in seeing some samples, Dave Chalmers keeps a fairly comprehensive list of people with online papers in philosophy.) In the last few years several issues about the relationship between posting something to a webpage and publishing it in a book or journal have become a little pressing.
There’s actually a tangle of inter-related questions here that could use sorting out. For one thing, there are both legal questions (about copyright) and moral questions (about whether such posting is stealing from editors who’ve agreed to publish things) about the practice. For another, the answers to those questions may be different for articles that have been published, or have been accepted but not published, or are as yet homeless. For another, it might make a difference whether the journal in question is electronic or dead tree. So there’s potentially ten or twelve different questions here.
I hadn’t thought much about the moral issues until my colleague Dave Estlund raised them. I think they are interesting, but my first inclination is to think there probably isn’t a major moral problem here. I suspect there are other duties I have that override any duties I may have to journals. For instance, I suspect there is a general duty on academics to promote the growth of knowledge, and in this case it overrides duties to provide journals with virgin pages, for instance. (I also think Brown pays me to promote the growth of knowledge rather than to provide copy for journals, and that’s already a duty that might justify posting papers to websites, I think.)
Having said that, there’s a few restrictions I keep to when posting papers that might indicate I really do (at some level) take the moral questions more seriously.
First, I never post PDFs of an article as it will look in print to a freely accessible website. I know some people do this, and I think it’s probably defensible, but I think there’s a plausible argument that the journal has a right (i.e. a moral right) to have a say over where those PDFs go. After all, it was their layout work that made it look like that. (In philosophy at least there’s still layout work done by journals - we don’t send LaTeX files in ready to print.)
Second, I don’t normally post articles that are intended for (exclusively) online journals. Again, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but I feel a little bad about doing something functionally equivalent to what that journal will do eventually.
I’ve noticed a few people keep to a third restriction, which I usually do in practice if not by intent. That practice is to only post penultimate drafts to their personal webpage, not the final copy. Now I’m normally too lazy to make the corrections I make on the page proofs (adding ‘not’ in the right places etc.) on my online copies, so I suppose most of my online papers are penultimate at best. But this isn’t a deliberate policy.
I can’t tell if keeping to these rules is an indication that I really do care about theiving from journals and so posting anything is really wrong, or I think there are trade-offs to be made here and so I’m following a reasonable, even sophisticated, policy.
The legal issues raise different complications. Most journals seem to have conceded that they can’t block everything that has appeared online, so they have de facto conceded that articles can appear on web pages before they appear in print. This concession isn’t universal. The New England Journal of Medicine won’t (or at least wouldn’t last I checked) publish papers that have previously appeared online. But it seems most of them have practically conceded defeat here.
What happens with articles that have been accepted, or even appeared in print, might be different. Several people keep available papers that have appeared in print, as the briefest scan through Chalmers’s list will reveal. (Indeed, many people only post printed articles.) But it’s not clear to me that journals couldn’t fight back a little here. If I were running a journal I would consider asking writers to remove personal copies of papers from their websites once they had appeared in print, and if I did ask that it wouldn’t be a throwaway line - I would make some efforts to enforce it. I certainly think journals (and book publishers) would be within their moral rights to do this, and it’s hard to see how they would be out of their legal rights.
I’d be very interested to know what the experience has been in other disciplines. Philosophy has been quite different to some other fields in that we have never had a central archive for papers, nor even a really active mailing list culture for distributing preprint papers. People send papers to their friends, but they don’t announce on mailing lists that papers are available. (Nowadays I make an effort to make those announcements, but I’m running a pretty small scale project.) So we don’t really have the experience that other disciplines have.
Appendix
Here’s the policies that two prominent online paper archives I follow have about the connection between posting to the archive and publication.
Semantics Archive
This third point is the tricky one. Strict legal rules do not currently quite match commonly accepted practice in Linguistics and other fields, and there are some difficult cases where conflicting interests must be balanced. On the one hand, if a journal owns the copyright, they have the legal right to decide where and how the paper is made available to the public. On the other hand, if it takes two years or more for a paper to go through the refereeing and publication process, you, the journal, and the field will all benefit from making a pre-print version available sooner: wider exposure generates feedback, which improves the quality of the revised paper and generates interest in the published version. Will anyone cancel their subscription to L&P because of the archive? We strongly doubt it.We’re not lawyers, of course, but our rule of thumb is: if it’s appropriate to post a paper on your publicly-accessible professional web site, it’s appropriate to post it on the archive. Think of the archive as a meta-web site that gathers in one place some portion of individual semanticists’ web pages. Also, bear in mind that you can always delete an item when it finally becomes available in print.
Rutgers Optimality Archive
Publication status. Archiving is not a form of publication. By accepted academic convention, well-established in the hard sciences, electronic archiving is completely independent of publication, future or prior. It is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues.Electronic archiving shares and generalizes the advantages of private circulation of papers. Authors are put in a position to receive maximal feedback from the entire community of interested researchers. Ideas and results are disseminated rapidly and widely, unchanneled by sociological limitations. Journals, volumes, and other venues of publication receive a boost in quality from the vastly broader pre-publication review of work, and benefit commercially from the visibility accorded to the material they publish. Authors should, of course, take care in the matter of signing over their intrinsic copyright.
It’s also notable I guess that the very biggest preprint archives, SSRN in social sciences and arXiv.org in physical sciences, seem to have no policy whatsoever on this. On the other hand, eprints.org has quite detailed information on just this point. Their position seems to be that bans on pre-publication do not rule out electronic posting (self-archiving as they call it) but some journals could explicitly rule this out if they wanted to.
From one to the next … having just gotten back from the annual American Political Science Association meeting, I attended one day of the science fiction Worldcon in Toronto, stopping only to go listen to my cousin’s band, who were playing in a small club here last night. Caught up with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow, as well as China Mieville, who apparently sometimes reads CT. Indeed, I’ve met people who know the blog at both conferences; it’s a little unnerving for me to find out that we actually have readers, and to meet them in a non blogging context.
Early, banal impressions of the differences and similarities between the two conferences …
(1) Science fiction conference-goers are no more nerdy than political scientists. They’re just unafraid to embrace their inner nerd. As Dan Drezner says, it’s good practice for political scientists to take off their badges when they leave the conference; they don’t want to come across as geeky conference goers to the mass public. In contrast, Worldcon attendees are proudly parading their badges around downtown Toronto as I write this post.1 Not only that, but they really represent with their conference badges, attaching little stickers to show their allegiance to this or that cause, subculture or individual within fandom.
(2) Both political science conferences and science fiction conferences oversample heavily on bearded, slightly to very overweight guys with glasses.
(3) SF conferences are, by and large, more fun. Worldcon had more outre panels, more entertainment from simply sitting, watching the people go by. Also, a much better book room - scarfed a nice first of John Crowley’s Aegypt, as well as a few early M. John Harrisons.
(4) But panel discussions from the floor are, probably inevitably, much more mixed in quality in sf conferences than in pol sci ones. I attended a pretty good panel today on scarcity and economics, which I’ll blog more on later; the discussants, most notably Charlie Stross, knew their stuff. The commenters from the floor, in contrast, didn’t, leading to a pretty confused discussion. People who ask questions from the floor at pol sci conferences almost always have some intellectual axe to grind - but they usually know what they’re talking about.
1 But as one conferee observed to me, it doesn’t take much extra bottle to wear a SF conference badge in public when you’ve already constructed yourself into a Dalek outfit.
While many other CT bloggers muse about conference etiquette, I find myself daydreaming about just getting into a PhD programme. Tacitus posted a question on how to get into a US grad school (poli sci or thereabouts) with a low GPA.
As someone who spends far too much time surfing through admissions and advice pages, and wondering what’s behind all the rhetoric, I think there is more good sense concentrated in Tacitus’ comments than I’ve seen anywhere else. Good luck T.
I’ve blogged before on Junius about retired British philosopher Ted Honderich and his lamentable book After the Terror. It seems that Honderich is now involved in a fierce spat with his German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag who have withdrawn the book after charges that it is anti-semitic were levelled by Micha Brumlik (Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Study and Documentation Centre for the History of the Holocaust and Its Effects). Jurgen Habermas, who originally recommended the book to Suhrkamp, now agonises about and seeks to contextualise his recommendation. Honderich in turn, angrily rejects the charge of anti-semitism and calls for Brumlik to be dismissed from his post by the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.
For what its worth, Brumlik’s charge of anti-semitism is, in my view, technically unwarranted. I doubt that Honderich bears any animosity towards Jews as such. But Brumlik is correct to state that Honderich “seeks to justify the murder of Jewish civilians in Israel.” In Honderich’s recent essay “Terrorism for Humanity” he gives a list of propositions including “Suicide bombings by the Palestinians are right.” He says of his list: ” These are some particular moral propositions that many people, probably a majority of humans who are half-informed or better, now at least find it difficult to deny.”
There’s probably some possible world where I’m moved by freedom of speech considerations to the thought that Suhrkamp shouldn’t have withdrawn Honderich’s book (though it hardly amounts to censorship, since they’ve relinquished the rights and he can presumably disseminate it himself). But I can’t summon up any indignation on behalf of someone with his odious views who also calls for his critics to be sacked from their academic posts.
(Honderich’s site has links to the text of Brumlik’s letter, Habermas’s thoughts, Honderich’s replies and “Terrorism for Humanity”.)
From the curriculum vitae of renowned Columbia sociologist, Chuck Tilly.
Among his negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.
Actually, more like Conference Rock’n’Roll. The American Sociological Association’s annual meeting got off to a decent start last night, with a performance in the main ballroom by a band called Thin Vita. It’s made up of, amongst others, John Sutton (guitar/vocals) and current ASA President Bill Bielby (bass). So I think Bill easily tops the list of Heads of Social Science Associations That You’d Want To Have A Beer With. Towards the end of the night, my Ph.D adviser Paul DiMaggio appeared onstage as guest vocalist. Bielby and Sutton are at UCSB, which is a pretty relaxed place, and I’ve seen Paul perform before. But I have to say I got a fresh perspective on the Midwestern tradition of occupational mobility and stratification studies by watching Bob Hauser and other Wisconsinites tear up the dance floor.
Now it’s time to consult the brick of a program and figure out what sessions I’m going to go to.
We all know there are lots of horror stories about trying to find work in academia. The smart money is on not even starting a PhD unless you are prepared to sell your soul on the job market. Just say no to those fancy scholarships. Unless, it seems, they’re from a good school in philosophy, where the numbers don’t exactly support the bad tidings.
Thanks to lobbying from various sources (prominent amongst them being Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report) we now have quite a bit of data about how philosophy PhDs do on the job market. And the news on the whole is fairly good, or at least much better than I had expected.
Here are the recent placement records of (most of) the top 15 U.S. philosophy departments.
Princeton: 48%, 81%
Rutgers: 36%, 85%
Michigan: 33%,70%
Pittsburgh: 40%, 84%
Stanford: 27%, 72%
Harvard: 63%, 96%
MIT: 33%, 77%
Arizona: 13%, 91%*
UCLA: 19%, 75%
UNC: 20%, 80%
Berkeley: 35%, 82%
Notre Dame: 11%, 80%
Texas: 4%, 60%
Note that the omissions are NYU, which hasn’t had a PhD program long enough to have a meaningful placement record, and Columbia, who either don’t want to share this information with us, or (more likely) have posted it somewhere too hard for an amateur sleuth like me to find.
So what are those numbers after the records. They are my rough estimations of, first, the percentage of grads that ended up in great jobs, and second, the percentage of grads that ended up in good jobs. The ‘great’ classification is fairly subjective, and I don’t think I really kept to a constant standard throughout. The ‘good’ classification is meant to be 3/3 load or better, tenure-track or tenured, plus the occasional 2-3 year research-oriented position at a good school (provided it is a first job). I count those as good jobs because people take them over 3/3 load tenure-track jobs. I don’t know the teaching load at every school in the country, and I probably counted too many jobs as good. Arizona had lots of grads at schools I hadn’t heard of - I counted most of them as good, but plenty might not be so good. The 91% is probably high - but it is still over 70%.
(This concession is not meant to mean I stand by all the other numbers. The margin of error on my calculations is probably +/- 20%. But I think they’re a fair approximate indication of what is happening.)
Overall, I’d say, those are pretty good numbers. The Texas percentages aren’t great, but Texas has a very big PhD program. In numerical terms they were placing as many people as most of their peers, just they had lots of non-placements (several apparently voluntary) as well. The top 14 schools had placement rates of 70% or better. It’d be suprising to even find an average student from one of those schools who didn’t have at least a decent job.
There are of course limits to one’s optimisim. Things get tougher for students not from a top 15 school. The data on these schools starts to get sketchier as well, perhaps not coincidentally. (For one thing schools suddenly stop listing how many of their grads didn’t get jobs, something all the schools listed do.) And obviously there are people even at the best departments who aren’t getting good jobs. And even good academic jobs occasionally leave something to be desired. It’s hard to tell from the publically available information whether some of these people have, say, never been offered a job within 10,000 miles of their home. That can be a little annoying, even if there are very good jobs offered 11,000 miles away. And of course many of these people don’t start in good jobs, even if they end up in them. (And some start in good jobs and don’t get tenure or leave for other reasons. But I don’t think it’s fair to chalk those up to a bad job market.)
So it’s not all a bed of roses. But the impression the information creates is that in philosophy at least, median to somewhat below median students at good to great departments will get pretty good jobs. And that’s a lot better both than the impression I have of most humanities disciplines, and that many people in philosophy have of the state of play within our discipline. I don’t know if there’s been any good cross-disciplinary studies done on this recently, but I would be surprised if philosophy isn’t one of the better humanities to be in from the point of view of finding work.
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