Grading

What I enjoyed the most being a professor was teaching. Being in the classroom, engaging with the students, pursuing collaboratively ideas and lines of argument, seeing the students discover their voices and doing what I could to help with that.

What I enjoyed the least about being a professor was grading. Even more than the pressure to publish. To not put too fine a point on it, but I hated grading. When I had a stack of papers to grade, I would go to the local Starbucks and some other cafe, fill myself with caffeine and sugar, and plow through the essays. 15-20 minutes per 5 page essay. If I had a stack of 20 essays, that's five to six hours. And more if I tried to not give the same set of hackneyed comments on paper after paper.

I was lucky to be at a small liberal arts colleges, where, compared to big universities, I didn't have that many papers to grade. I taught five courses a year. Two intro courses, with about 25 students in each. A couple of mid-level courses, with anywhere from 10-25 students in them. And a seminar with 6-12 students. So maybe a 100-125 students a year. Not bad. A semester is 13 weeks, and I had roughly 4-5 papers in each class. Since I wanted students to have the opportunity to write a fair bit, they had essays due every three weeks or so. Teaching 2 or 3 classes a semester, that ends up meaning grading every week or every other week. There were no teaching assistants, and so the grading was up to me.

However, what I disliked the most about grading wasn't the time, or reading similar essays over and over again. My current job is a bit repetitive, and I don't mind it. I can handle repetitive work; doing the same thing over and over again. No, what bothered me about the grading was the question which nagged me at the back of my mind every time I picked up an essay to grade: Am I being unfair in the criteria I am using to grade this paper? There are three aspects to this worry. A) What criteria am I using to grade? B) What justifies the criteria? And C) Can that criteria really be applied neutrally to all the students in the class?

Friendship Moderates

In the previous post I said there are two ways in which academic philosophy is being professionalized: what I called Internal Push, which is academics trying to professionalize themselves so that there are some explicit, discipline wide norms, and External Push, which is the discipline being professionalized due to the broader commercialization of academia. Both Internal Push and External Push are a threat to Protection, which is the ideal that as an academic one is given some money to basically think about whatever one wants, and which is supposed to guarantee that an academic job will have the freedom unavailable in non-academic jobs.

I also distinguished in the last post three approaches one might take to professionalization in academia. A conservative is an academic who resists both Internal Push and External Push as a way to retain Protection in its old fashioned form. A moderate is one who tries to have Internal Push but without External Push; so which tries to have autonomy as a profession from broader economic forces, but then seeks to use that autonomy to legislate laws to itself which apply to the profession as a whole. And a radical is one who embraces both Internal Push and External Push, and gives up on Protection in the old-fashioned sense and accepts that in important ways an academic job is just another job like any other.

The appeal of Conservatism is obvious: if one has a very robust sense of academic freedom, then one doesn't want anyone, including fellow academic philosophers, telling one how one should be an academic. The problem with Conservatism is equally obvious: without a push to have discipline wide norms, the status quo remains as it is, and so doesn't address the pressing issues concerning minorities, lack of jobs, etc. A conservative in this sense, like conservative Republicans in politics, can acknowledge that academic philosophy has many big problems, but sees doing anything that endangers Protection as going from the frying pan to the fire. The process of change has to be slow and individual: over time the norms will change if each person chooses to be different, but, on this view, no one should be forced to change. Forcing change, either from the administrators or from people sympathetic to, say, Feminist philosophy, is seen by a conservative as akin to coercion.

I can understand the conservative's argument, but I am not moved by it. The concept of freedom and Protection that underlies Conservatism is too extreme, and I don't think it is worth retaining. The conservative makes it seem as if the freedom as an academic is something intrinsic to each academic, as if just in virtue of being an academic one acquires a special freedom. But here intrinsic is being used just as a code word for untouchable, as if no one should disturb it. There is, however, nothing intrinsic about academic freedom in the sense that it is granted from on high, or from within one's soul as an academic. The freedom one has as an academic is bought at the cost of other academics not having such freedoms, and the ideal that every academic can have the freedoms of a Wittgenstein or a Rawls is a fantasy. Fill in here one's favorite liberal argument for welfare, universal healthcare, etc., and apply it to academic philosophy.

If one gives up Conservatism, and wants to be a moderate, then one faces a pressing question: what binds all academic philosophers together such that they can agree the laws they legislate to themselves bind them all? It can't be something as abstract as rational beings, since that would apply to non-academic philosophers as well. And it can't be something as concrete as culture, since academic philosophers come from a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

And So It Begins

Since I was in college twenty years ago I have been hearing of a time in the future when America will become majority minority, and it won't be a predominantly white country any more. When will this be exactly? It always felt somewhere in the future, twenty or thirty from now.

Demographically it is still 20-30 years away. But the awareness of that future is now here. I feel it in myself. The refusal I sense within me to listen any longer to only a Eurocentric tradition of philosophy - it is the refusal to let myself be defined by how society has been, and it is the will to claim that society has to reflect who I am, and not the other way around. No more will I cower and hide, thinking I am just a Indian-American who has to adjust into, and be grateful for my place in, the big white world of Abe Lincoln, Clint Eastwood and John Rawls. No. I am also an American, and if the society doesn't reflect the reality of my experiences, then it is not me that has to change, but it is society that has to change. And so it begins. In myself and in the millions of people who have hitherto been happy to just be in America, but who can no longer be happy that way, who can no longer just fit in.

It is sometimes said that academic philosophy has lagged behind the other humanities. That the other humanities have for the last thirty or forty years already started to become open to other cultures and traditions, and that yet, philosophy has remained doggedly unchanged.

 

I say it is the other way around. Academic philosophy is not lagging behind. Academic philosophy is not confronting something that Literature departments already confronted decades ago. No, because what academic philosophy is confronting is something much more radical than what the Literature departments had to confront. Academic philosophy is the cornerstone of the Eurocentrism of American society. And as it changes, it is a harbinger of the changes to come. It is the last, biggest and deepest foundation of America's claim to be mainly a white country, and the growing pains academic philosophy is starting to go through is but the beginning of the growing pains that America as a whole has to go through.

Out of the Fly Bottle

"Don't think, but look!" This is one of Wittgenstein's main exhortations. It is a recurring theme in the Investigations, where Wittgenstein in case after case tries to highlight how often in philosophy what we tend to think reflects a picture we have become captive to rather than a reflection of how things actually are.

One way Wittgenstein himself failed to live up to this idea is his general ahistoricism. For someone who emphasized so much looking to the use of sentences, it is striking that he let himself make claims about the nature of philosophy without looking to see how philosophy actually functioned in the past. Or in different traditions. When Socrates in 5th century BC Greece asked, "What is justice?", in what ways was such a question used? When Shankara in 8th century India asserted that our ordinary experience of objects in an illusion, what was the use of that assertion? When Descartes in 17th century France asked himself if he was being deceived by a malicious demon, what was the use of that question?

 

Imagine Socrates asking, "What is justice?" Now imagine a contemporary philosophy professor raising in class the question "What is justice?" What are the differences in use between these two instances of the question? Are the two uses different? Wittgenstein seemed to assume they were the same, that he could dismiss in the same breath Russell, Descartes and Socrates altogether. As if there was some one bad thing all of them did. That philosophers throughout history have done. It is an amazing to see Wittgenstein essentialize philosophers, treating them as if there was some one thing they all have in common.

 

Wittgenstein's ahistoricism, together with his idea that much contemporary philosophy was confused, lead him to a dead end. It led him to the idea that all there was to do was to get rid of our confusions, and then move blissfully on. It led him to give up the idea of positive projects in philosophy. After all, if philosophers through out history have been making the same mistakes, then how can there be any positive philosophy?

 

But Wittgenstein was in the grips of a picture, and it held him captive.

Money

It occurred to me yesterday I have been thinking of this PGR issue in too limited a way. I have been thinking, as has much of the recent online discussion, about whether evaluators should fill out the PGR surveys. Some evaluators have said they are not going to. And some have said they will. As usual, Leiter is up to his transparent rhetoric: after listing a bunch of well known people in the profession who filled out the survey, he continues, "If you were nominated as an evaluator, please try to make time between now and Friday to join this distinguished group of philosophers in contributing to the 2014-15 PGR."

In the midst of debate about the 2014 PGR, it can feel as if it will make a big difference if it is one way or another. That the profession is choosing its future, and what it decides to do will determine that future. But how much of the future of the profession is actually in the profession's hands? Much less than one might think. Or at least not in the way one thinks.

Imagine if PGR was now stopped and it no longer existed. What would happen? Would the philosophy profession no longer be hierarchical, or no longer be narrow in its focus? Would it suddenly become all-inclusive and become pluralistic in a way it isn't now? Not quite.

What PGR fundamentally tracks is money -- which departments have it more and which have it less. Why is NYU ranked #1? Because its philosophy department got a bunch of money which it could use to lure lots of big shots, and so lure the prestige of those thinkers to NYU. How did Rutgers get to be ranked #2? Because, even though it is a state school, it got a bunch of money for philosophy, and so it was able to make great financial offers to its faculty.

I remember once a Rutgers faculty member giving a talk at Harvard, and at the dinner afterwards mentioning a particularly high offer Rutgers had just made to a philosopher. Some of the people at the table gasped. One Harvard faculty member said in disbelief, "Even we don't make that much." It was a telling scene. The same philosophers who bemoan the commercialization of academia are nonetheless perfectly happy, when thinking of their positions as jobs, to benefit from that commercialization.

But for most academics money is not an end in itself. What money buys is research time and intellectual autonomy. The more financially well off a department is, the more it can get out of the way of its faculty. The less the faculty then have to teach. Less they need to feel as if they have to fight day in and day out to create spaces for themselves to pursue their interests. The dream of academics is to be given some money and then asked to go think. The richer one's department, the more this dream can feel like a reality.

Hence the power of prestige: it brings together a sense of material and intellectual flourishing into a halo of overall well being. Of course, Jerry Fodor isn't as materially well off as Bill Gates or even a high end doctor or lawyer. But as far as philosophers go, I imagine he is up there. Just like Parfit or Dreyfus or McDowell. They have prestige, which means that not only do they have material well being, but they also have the luxury of seeming as if that the material well being is incidental to the intellectual well being. Prestige enables material well being, but then also brackets it, sets it off to the side, as if it were something irrelevant or uncouth to mention. Even as it is obvious that it is those very material benefits which provide one with the time and the resources to focus on one's intellectual interests.

1979 and 2014

In a previous post I suggested that discussion of the PGR is best seen in the context of changes in the profession from the 70s which lead to the current institutional structures for job placement. Prior to the 70s, for the most part job placement happened through personal connections one's advisors had. This started to be replaced in the 70s by a "neutral" system of applying for jobs.

A positive of this new system was that presumably anyone could apply for any jobs and so the profession became more open. A downside of this new system was that the departments which controlled the institutional structure which oversaw the job placement process - namely, the American Philosophical Association (APA) - had a built in advantage when it came to placing their graduate students. If the APA positions and meetings were dominated by philosophers at Princeton, Pittsburgh and Berkeley, then it would suggest, or reinforce the idea, that those were the best departments in the country, and that their graduate students were the best candidates on the job market. Naturally, departments which were not well represented at the APA would see their lack of inclusion as cause of concern, and worry that their mode of philosophy and their graduate students were being marginalized under the very rubric of "neutrality" which was being used by other departments to position themselves as the best.

It is amazing how similar this is to the current issues regarding plurality and the PGR. The main thing that has changed in the past 35 years is that whereas in 1979 the locus of the "neutral" evaluation of the profession was a physical organization (the APA), now in 2014 it is an online organization (the PGR). But the concerns regarding insularism and lack of plurality in the self-representation of the profession, especially as concerns the institutional structures most closely connected to the job market, are strikingly the same. 

In this light, Chapter 8 of Neil Gross's Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (published in 2008) is very interesting. Gross describes how in 1979, when Rorty was president of the Eastern APA, tensions regarding power dynamics in the APA came to a head at the eastern division meeting. Here are some snippets from that chapter:

"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was a successful and controversial book almost as soon as it was published. In 1979, however, the year of its release, the main controversy to occupy Rorty’s attention involved not the book but the APA. The year before, Rorty had been elected president of the prestigious Eastern Division of the Association, a testament to his standing in the profession. No sooner did he take the helm than he found himself embroiled in a major challenge to the APA’s leadership: the so-called pluralist revolt. The pluralist revolt centered around the demand of nonanalytic philosophers that analysts relinquish their control of the APA and allow philosophers associated with other intellectual orientations and traditions the chance to serve in leadership capacities and present papers at the organization’s annual meetings. These demands were not without justification." 

"Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, graduate departments where analysts predominated ranked highest on reputational surveys, journals devoted to analytic work were the most well regarded, and nonanalysts felt looked down upon by their analytic colleagues. Analysts parlayed their intellectual influence into control over the APA. Between 1960 and 1979, nearly all the presidents of the Eastern Division were analytic philosophers. Because analysts held top positions in the APA, they could appropriate for themselves one of the organization’s key resources—slots for papers at the annual meetings. In a report drafted in 1979, Rorty observed that 'many ‘non-analytic’ people feel that the chances of their papers getting on the program are so small that they don’t bother to submit them. . . . Some such feelings may be exaggerated. But I don’t think all such feelings are. . . . [Analytic philosophers], who make up most of the membership of the Program Committees, tend to have . . . suspicions about Whiteheadians, Deweyans, or phenomenologists, not to mention bright young admirers of Deleuze or Gadamer.'"

PGR's Supposed Altruism

The main defense of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) is that it helps students. But which students does it help? And how does it help them?

Does PGR help all students of philosophy? There are at least three groups of students PGR does not help.

1. Given that PGR has limitations in the forms of philosophy that it evaluates, PGR does not help students who want to pursue graduate studies in those forms of philosophy. For example, if you want to study Latin American philosophy, PGR would not be much help to you.

2. Even assuming that a prospective student is interested in the kinds of philosophy evaluated in PGR, it is not much help to students who do not get into the ranked programs for graduate school. If you are a graduate student at an unranked program, you might benefit from PGR in knowing who some people think are the best philosophers in this or that sub-field. But there is no way to have this benefit without the implication that you, in virtue at being at an unranked programs, are not getting educated by the best philosophers. Hence, in order for a student at an unranked program to benefit from PGR, they have to disassociate from the department they are actually at, and be always mindful of where they are in the hierarchy. A student at an unranked department has to always have their heads tilted up to where the supreme scholars in the profession reside. No doubt for some students this kind of head titling doesn't feel bad, and can seem like nothing other than having standards, with the hope that one day they could be part of the elite group. But given that the majority of the students at the unranked programs can never be part of the limited positions in ranked programs, "standards" have the practical effect of making one feel second rate, and having to fight through that feeling in order to  thrive as a philosopher.

3. Even for students who are at ranked programs, PGR doesn't help them if they do not identify with PGR. Perhaps a student doesn't think philosophy can be neatly divided into sub-fields. Or perhaps they are ambivalent about whether philosophy departments can be ranked. Or they have worries about the ways that PGR might reinforce implicit biases. Here it is paternalistic to say that in spite of these students' own concerns, PGR is nonetheless of benefit to them.

It cannot be denied that PGR is of benefit to some students. People testify to this. But this cannot be taken as a blanket statement of how PGR helps, or can help, all students. In effect, PGR helps the students who want to do philosophy in the way that the editors, Board and evaluators of PGR think of philosophy. The phrase "PGR helps students" really means:  if you want to be like us, and like that we use these rankings a way to understand the profession, then this will be helpful to you. 

In a way, this is perfectly understandable. Some philosophers want to pass on how they conceive of the discipline to some students who are inclined to see the discipline that way. That is, PGR is the way that some philosophers pass on their image of philosophy to younger versions of themselves.

However, this is no defense at all against objections to PGR. Imagine someone defending racism by saying it is beneficial to some people and that those people deeply identify with, and are able to succeed within, it. Of course this would be true: young people who identify with racist structures will find racism is beneficial to them and they would be affronted with the idea of dismantling racist structures. But what does this tell us about whether one ought to support the structures themselves? Not much. Pointing to the younger generation is just a way of saying, When I was young I found it helpful, and, by Golly, I am a good person and I turned out well and I didn't do anything wrong, so the structures must be fine! It is a way of refusing to hear the objections to the structures by just saying, I was a good person when I was younger and liked these structures, I am still a good person, so they didn't corrupt me in any way, and so the structures must be good!

Placement Data

In order to better understand the departments ranked in the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) and how they are connected to non-ranked departments, in the past few weeks I went to the placement webpages of PGR ranked departments and tabulated the information on those websites.

I broke down the placements into five categories: 

• Tenure track positions at PGR departments ranked in the top 25 (including US, UK, Canada and Australia).
• Tenure track positions at the other PGR ranked departments (25-75).
• Tenure track positions at non-ranked departments (including research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, departments in other countries and so on).
• Non-tenure track positions (including visiting assistant professors, adjunts, lecturers, post-docs and so on).
• Positions outside of academic philosophy.

A few notes:

1) I am not as familiar with how positions are categorized in other countries, and so I focused only on the placements of the fifty ranked programs in the US.

2) For a given student as listed on a placement webpage, I only counted the "highest" position they had. So if a person first had an adjunct position and then two years later had a tenure-track position, for that person I only counted the tenure-track position. If the person went from a non-ranked tenure track position to a ranked tenure-track position, I only counted the latter. And so on.

3) The information provided on departments' placement webpages differ greatly in terms of how many years back they go. Some go just 5-10 years back, and others go 30 years back. So what is tabulated are not all of the placements made by these departments, but rather just what they have listed on their placement webpage.

4) My sense is that departments are often adding or otherwise changing information to the placement pages. So what follows is based just on the data on departments' webpages in October 2014.

The main fact that jumps out from the data is that only 13% of the graduates from US PGR ranked programs obtained tenure track positions in PGR ranked programs. Meaning that in order to place their graduate students in jobs, the ranked departments are undeniably dependent on the unranked programs. Not just a little dependent, but mostly dependent.

Overall on the US ranked departments' placement websites there were 3,573 placements listed. 217 got TT positions in the top 25. 256 got TT positions in the other ranked programs. 1,772 got TT positions in unranked programs. 936 got non-TT positions. And 392 pursed non-academic philosophy positions.

In terms of percentages, it is as follows.

The illusion of Separation

By The Academic Philosopher’s Vision, I mean the combination of the following three ideas:

1) Separation: Academic philosophy is set apart from the mundane aspects of our society. If you have a 9-6 office job, you just have to go by the norms of society and be a cog in the machine. One of the herd. But by becoming an academic you get to be separate from this. The normal rules don’t apply.

2) Reflection: Separation enables academic philosophers to gain reflective distance from the general impulses in society. Because an ordinary person is just a cog in the machine, she doesn’t have the ability to reflect on the machine as a whole. But the academic philosopher does have such distance, and that enables her to think new thoughts and be creative.

3) Change: By reflecting on society without the normal constraints, the academic philosopher is able to think more clearly than most about the direction of society, and so suggest and lead regarding how society can be improved.

Separation by itself suggests a person might become an academic philosophy just to not be a cog in the machine; and there are academics like that. Separation and reflection together suggest that a person wants to be an academic so that she can think freely for herself or for gaining knowledge and nothing more; and there are academics like that. Separation, reflection and change together suggest that there is a normative and communal dimension to separation and reflection: that they are not just benefits for oneself but lead to benefits for everyone.

But what if there isn’t really much separation at all? What if academic philosophy is itself becoming more and more part of the mainstream of society? Not in the sense that society is becoming more philosophical, but in the sense that academic philosophy is becoming more like any job, just with its special perks and struggles?