Another suggestion: occasional separate threads for timely topics/events. People might be more inclined to make substantive comments if they could be more confident that they won’t be buried among…let’s call it random stuff.
It looks like Anne Jacobson just posted a comment at FP under the pseudonym “Dan Marino”.
There’s probably a logical explanation, but honestly I’m happy with my current state of knowledge. I’m going to take this as a harbinger of a fun 2017.
We are often thought just to censor anything we disagree with. In fact, below is a good example of the sort of thing I’d normally put in “trash”. I approve lots I disagree with, but not fact-free assertions that appear to be false.
Women already have all the rights that they need. If anything women have more rights than men. Women are holding women back, not men.
This place seems to have developed a nasty tone*, and most comments are not that clever or knowledgeable. Generally snark is mostly boring — it takes very unusual circumstances for it to be interesting or creative — so it should not be the default tone of this or any other blog. The writers here are also pretty naive politically, though they think they are sophisticated. Perhaps everyone could lighten up and tell jokes that didn’t involve personal attacks. We are living in times when intelligence is needed for other purposes.
*OK I know you might say it had a nasty tone from its inception, but I disagree.
You seem obsessed with me. If the Leiter comments have a nasty tone, maybe it’s because Leiter has waged a campaign to destroy the career of a young Phd and then announced another campaign to destroy the careers of the individuals posting at a conservative blog. The Chavist in Chicago deserves all the nasty comments he gets on anonymous blogs. The Leiter comments aren’t have as nasty as the old diabetic himself.
ok, so here’s my suggestion . . .
What I like about this blog is industry gossip – who is an asshole, who did not deserve some fancy job, who is really smart, who said something dumb/ridiculous, who did or did not send what to whom in the mail etc. Any juicy, salacious personal details about philosophers who are otherwise just names on papers or on faculty lists is interesting. Even when they are almost certainly false.
What is very tiresome about this blog is too much debate about fucking politics – male-rights shit versus feminist shit, left-wing shit versus right-wing shit, Trump vs Clinton, etc etc
So my plea before this blog finally becomes obsolete – gossip please! E.g. who should get that big Epistemology Job at Rutgers? Who should not but might? What is the real, hidden reason that Leiter is gonna blog less?
DeRose was offered the new Rutgers chair but turned it down. I assume BL’s decision has partly to do with his eye problems, or problems in one eye, something like that.
i guess DeRose would have been a fairly eminent, well-known name to list on the department webpage, but I’ve never thought of him as a genuinely first rate, heavyweight philosopher. He’s more like Bonjour or Audi – prolific and much cited but not dazzlingly original or important. Rutgers should be aiming for better anyway.
The talks labeled “WGAP” and “MPWG” are not job talks. The breakdown is as follows:
1. One white man with a strong publication record (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, PPR, Phil Studies, Phil Imprint, Phil Quarterly, Synthese).
2. One black man with a fair publication record (Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Phil Studies) and a prominent social media presence.
3. One white woman without any publication record at all.
February: 3 more non-white-men candidates
Candidate 1 = 1 paper in Philosopher’ imprint
Candidate 2 = apparently no publications yet
Candidate 3 = Phil Studies, Phil issues, Episteme + couple of book chapters. i.e. ‘Fair’ at best by Yale standards …
1. White man with a strong publication record (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, PPR, Phil Studies, Phil Imprint, Phil Quarterly, Synthese).
2. Black man with a fair publication record (Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Phil Studies) and a prominent social media presence.
3. White woman with a fair publication record (Phil Studies, invited papers).
4. White woman with a fair publication record (Phil Imprint)
5. Black man without any publication record at all.
6. White woman without any publication record at all.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to get a flyout at Yale? Now you know.
Don’t worry guys, I’m sure Jason Stanley will ensure that these applications are assessed on their merits, and not on the basis of irrelevant factors like gender(queerness) or race.
This is the sort of interesting stuff I want to see more of around here, by the way. Less raging about identity politics and left/right-wing lunacy, more interesting facts about philosophers, please.
see, I think the interesting thing here is that while candidates 1, 3, 5,and 6 are pretty much the sort of candidates you’d expect for a fancy LEMM job, 2 and 4 do the kind of lefty social metaphysics that more people say they like than read. (This isn’t to say that 2 and 4 don’t do good work–they might well, I have no idea–just that it’s the sort of work that, regardless of its merits, certain people are prone to liking because doing so makes them feel good about themselves.)
I wonder if Yale is really serious about hiring someone who does lefty social metaphysics, or if just wants to appease people in its department who tend to make a big fuss about that sort of thing.
It is astounding that papers in Phil Review, JPhil, PPR, etc. make for a record that is only “strong”. Back in my day, that kind of record would have been the better part of the application for promotion to Full. A sign of our times, I suppose!
I’ve served on a number of hiring committees now, so I thought I’d share my two cents. (I think that my views here aren’t idiosyncratic, so I’m just hoping to give people a look at the other side.) Outsiders who haven’t seen the letters and writing samples shouldn’t read too much into the publication records when looking at the people brought out for interviews or made offers.
A few things. First, it’s important to remember that interviews aren’t offers. We often invite people out for interviews even though we think it’s unlikely that we’d make an offer. (There are many reasons for this. I’ve been invited to APA interviews when it’s clear that I’m not really in the running for the position. Sometimes it seems that they’re trying to see if I’d be a good fit for another search. In one case I think they just needed bodies for seats and someone might have thought they saw something in my file that made them think they might as well have a quick look before writing me off.)
Second, it’s important to remember that different people in the room will have different agendas. Some people will want the best philosopher and won’t care about things like fit, ability to cover teaching, etc. Others won’t. Don’t assume there’s some single scale that’s used to rank applicants where those at the top of the scale will get an invitation. That’s way too rational. I’ve seen interview invitations go out where I’m pretty sure there’s just one very good philosopher on the list and many better philosophers didn’t make the cut. Those of us who prize wattage have to pick our battles with colleagues who care more about fit, teaching profile, etc. (Often it’s not worth having that fight if you have your preferred candidate on the invite list. If anything, inviting out a few high watt bulbs could just muddy the waters and you could end up with a dim bulb who made the cut because they could teach a lot of courses, they score well on fit, etc. When we had an open search, I was pleased to let my colleagues who cared more about teaching get their people on the short list at the expense of philosophers that were much more talented because it meant that the most talented of the bunch would have an easier time at the next round of competition.)
Third, please, please, please don’t confuse CV length with quality. If you haven’t read the work of all the candidates, you should recognize that your evidential basis is weak. Much of the work I read by young people published in good places (including Mind and JPhil (and especially PPR, Nous, and Phil Studies)) is dull, uninspired, derivative, or superficial. (It’s not better when it’s published by old men, but they tend not to be competing for these kinds of jobs.) It might be packaged nicely and framed to appear more ambitious than work in lesser journals, but much of it is bland and just barely adequate crap. Think about choosing talks at the APA. Suppose there’s more than one talk in an area of interest and/or competence. When forced to choose between talks, it might make sense to go by CV quality if you don’t have anything else to go by but it makes little sense to go by this and discount your own impression of them or their papers when you’ve spoken with them, heard one of their talks, or read some of their work. I don’t want to name names but in my particular areas, I’ve found that when someone works in the areas that interest me is publishing lots of work in top journals, it’s usually crap that’s packaged nicely. Some people have a knack for getting things into print that are either totally forgettable or memorable only because it’s surprising that someone has found a recipe or two for getting work of no substance into quality venues. The thought of having to spend decades with this kind of person depresses me. If there’s a philosopher that’s written one interesting thing (which might be in unpublished work) in a three year period, I’d like to learn more about them.
This is interesting. Regarding your third point: in the abstract, some of what you say about the top journals and people who publish a lot might be right. And of course, publication records are not the sole criterion of merit. But I think something very pernicious happens in practice when search committees let themselves be led too far along these lines. Downplaying peer reviewed publications — the one external, independent, blind measure of philosophical merit — seems almost inevitably to lead to a license to just give full reign to one’s biases. I’m sure it’s one of the reasons why we see what we do: people working on trendy shit, or people who are extremely well connected, or people who tick whatever diversity box is the flavor of the month, getting the nod over people with better publications records and who are better philosophers. Succumbing to the conceit that we, the hiring committee, are somehow able to discern True Philosophical Talent in our candidates, where this is somehow independent of the only objective measure of merit that we have access to, just seems like it’s guaranteed to lead to unjust results.
All fair points. I agree with what you’re saying. Fwiw, I do try to keep myself in check (e.g., by thinking about the quality of work of respected colleagues at earlier stages of their careers, checking letters, conversing with colleagues). It helps to be in a department where research is discussed at length before we get to the interview stage. It also helps to have something objective to back up the judgments about quality. In some cases people seem to say the same or very similar things in multiple places. (In one recent case, we had a candidate who had more publications than competitors in some top journals where a closer examination revealed that there were really two ideas being fleshed out in five or six places without much interesting differences between them.) In some cases people seem to say things that have been said by others before. (In one recent case, the person was presenting an idea that seemed not just gimmicky and unlikely to bear fruit but also one that had been defended by people on the search committee.) It’s nice to be able to point to these kinds of things and not just rely on highly variable impressions about quality.
That white woman would not approve of you calling *them* a woman. Read *their* work and marvel at its almost supernatural dullness – trivia stolen from Haslanger, then tarted up in ‘queer theory’. That’s what Princeton is selling, and Yale may well buy it.
Too easy for discussions to get lost/hijacked. Any chance we could follow economics job market rumours and political science rumours in terms of their layout: I.e. separate threads?
I agree this would be ideal. I looked into doing it at one point, but ultimately I don’t have the wordpress and BBpress skills. If anyone does, please let me know.
How is this a ‘counterpoint’? The issue is the alarmingly unequal standards applied to job candidates depending on their race, gender, and sex. If anything, the unquestionably strong credentials of those on the WUSL list further confirms the point.
i dunno, seems like a pretty safe bet to me that the four people who are all
(a) youngish
(b) epistemologists
(c) giving generic colloquium talks over a three-week period from late January to early February
(d) with titles “TBA”
These kinds of discussions are the worst thing about this blog. As if being on the job market wasn’t bad enough, now candidates – grad students for the most part – are being subjected to public speculation about whether or not they ‘deserve’ their interviews. This is not fun or interesting. Its just mean and pointless. Perhaps the people doing this have never been on the job market themselves, because I can’t imagine that anyone who had would be that cruel.
Compiling (publicly available) information about which candidates get which posts/offers/interviews/flyouts is extremely useful for people on the market and their advisors. For example, if white men have to publish more (or less, for that matter) to get posts/offers/interviews/flyouts than do people who aren’t white men, that is an interesting and useful thing to know. There’s nothing “cruel”, “mean”, or “pointless” about it. It’s data..
No, it clearly isn’t about ‘data’. There is already publicly available data about this, properly anonymized, which has been discussed endlessly on this blog. You’re just hiding behind that excuse. And it’s laughable to describe what is going on above as merely ‘compiling information.’ What is not useful for people on the job market is to be subjected to the added worry (on top of everything else) that any piece of public information on the internet about them might become fodder for people like you to use to try and trash them at what is already an incredibly stressful time. Try and have a bit of empathy.
Also, for those who actually care about gathering accurate data, this kind of behavior is extremely counterproductive. I know a number of people who deliberately kept their appointment information off the appointments page on philjobs exactly because they didn’t want to risk some asshole from this blog deciding to hold a public referendum on whether they really deserved their position. So this kind of shit comprises the collection of accurate and comprehensive information about appointments and such like.
Do you know anything about data gathering, 10:21? Do you think people gather data about STD’s by asking anonymous people on the internet to name people they’ve seen leaving the family planning clinic and taking a guess about whether or not it was for chlamydia?
Surely the criticism is better focused on the departments/committees/deans/HR officers making these decisions than the individual candidates who benefit from them. The candidates didn’t choose this profession’s current obsession. Honestly, if I were visibly diverse, I’d probably consider including headshots in my application materials. Committee members already go to candidates’ personal websites hoping to find exactly that.
Of course it is. The people pretending that they are just ‘compiling information’ in order to discuss an issue in the profession by publicly going through the CVs of minority individuals and anonymous;y passing judgment on whether or not they ‘deserve’ their professional achievements are either idiots, deeply nasty people, or both.
Who passed judgment about ‘desert’ here? I’m not seeing it. I don’t care about those judgments anyways, for what it’s worth. I’d rather just know what works: what kinds of candidates succeed, and which do not, etc.
Being on the job market is stressful for everyone. Of course it’s worse for people who don’t get any interviews, or don’t get the interviews they want. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to be an asshole to the people who do get interviews.
Who is being an asshole? Why is it wrong to draw attention to facts about job candidates that appear to affect one’s odds of getting a job? Or do you deny that publication record and demographics affect one’s odds of getting a job?
No one’s denying that. But facts about individual job candidates don’t give you any information about what sorts of things will affect your odds of getting a job. General demographic trends do.
And general demographic trends are collected by looking at individuals. Together with what I know about my department, stories I’ve heard about other departments, and what the ‘Gender and Prestige’ data linked below shows, we appear to be converging on a conclusion that gender does affect your odds of getting a job. So I ask again:
Who is being an asshole? Why is it wrong to draw attention to facts about job candidates that appear to affect one’s odds of getting a job? Or do you deny that publication record and demographics affect one’s odds of getting a job?
“And general demographic trends are collected by looking at individuals”
Sure. But no one here is actually making a sincere effort to collect data by posting this stuff about individuals. If they did want to actually collect that data, it’s an incredibly bad way of doing it. Its wrong to draw attention to particular individuals because a. there is no reason to do so if what you really want to know is information about things that might affect your chances b. it would be pretty unpleasant to be one of those individuals, especially while you are still on the job market.
Can you give one good reason why mentioning particular individuals, rather than discussing the overall demographic data that we already have, serves any purpose?
Oh for god’s sake. If you’re going to start crowing about getting me to ‘admit’ things I never denied in the first place and which are totally beside the point, there’s not much point in continuing.
In any case, any ‘data’ about a particular individual case would be consistent with overall trends. That’s why they are overall trends. If we’re talking about averages – which we are when we talk about publication rates – then you can take an individual with however many publications you like and that ‘data’ will still be consistent with the overall trend. If the average is 1, say, and the individual you’ve picked out has 0, these two facts are consistent. As they would be if the individual had 1, or 10 for that matter.
The question is whether the data here points in the opposite direction of the rest of the data. It doesn’t. It points in the same direction. And no one’s being an asshole to point out that Yale’s flyouts fit the trend.
1:31, I’m not keen on having individuals discussed by people here. But you have made no case that this discussion is either trading in false claims, or is doing an injustice to the candidates who are evidently getting flyouts in a market where most people do not, and do not know what it takes to get a flyout.
1:50, so you agree that we shouldn’t discuss individuals? Great. We probably have similar reasons.
And I have never claimed that people were ‘trading in false claims’ so I’m not sure how it is relevant to the discussion. What I have made a case for – multiple times – is the claim that discussing individuals isn’t useful, and is at worst counterproductive, and that it’s mean. So there’s no reason to do it. If you are having trouble with the last claim, imagine people here were dissecting your CV publicly in this way. How would you feel? Most people, I’m sure, wouldn’t like it very much if it were them. And given that it doesn’t achieve anything anyway, there’s no reason to do it. But I’ve explained this several times now.
You admit this data fits with the trend that the rest of the data shows. That is relevant for determining, in a case where this data didn’t fit, whether there would be some reason to think the trend was misleading. The rest sounds like concern-trolling.
“That is relevant for determining, in a case where this data didn’t fit, whether there would be some reason to think the trend was misleading.”
No it isn’t.
“The rest sounds like concern-trolling”
I think people are being assholes. I’ve explained why. If you want to call that concern-trolling, fine. I don’t see what’s ‘trolling’ about it though.
I didn’t say it shouldn’t be done. I said I wasn’t keen on it. And because this data is in line with the trends we already have data on, it is relevant for discussing those trends. We are probably a year or two away before Feminist Philosophers start a campaign to shame departments that don’t have enough non-white-male flyouts (if ever they occurred). And there can be no doubt if the data pointed in the other direction the usual voices would have something to say about it. I just do not think you have made any case for your position here, either on moral or epistemic grounds.
I’ve made the case multiple times. You haven’t even addressed the points I made, let alone undermined them. If your reasons for doing this are two things which haven’t happened yet and might not ever happen, then you need better reasons.
Hi 2:42. 2:12 here. I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere. No one’s being an asshole to point out that Yale’s flyouts fit the trend on hiring that the rest of the data we have over the last few years has been showing. You haven’t given any reason for thinking the data presented here is either being misused, or is doing an injustice to anyone. And for what it’s worth, you do come off like a concern troll. Take care, and good luck in the profession!
Hi 3:22:
“No one’s being an asshole to point out that Yale’s flyouts fit the trend on hiring that the rest of the data we have over the last few years has been showing”
They are being assholes when they say things that imply these people are only getting flyouts because they are a woman or minority.
“You haven’t given any reason for thinking the data presented here is either being misused, or is doing an injustice to anyone.”
Yes I have. I’ve explained, multiple times, why discussing individuals is both pointless and mean.
“And for what it’s worth, you do come off like a concern troll.”
I really don’t care that you think that.
“Take care, and good luck in the profession!”
For what it’s worth, you probably shouldn’t call people out for ‘coming off like a concern troll” if you’re going to end your posts like that.
If you really can’t understand why there are reasons against publicly subjecting people who are on the job market to this kind of shit, you’re severely lacking in empathy.
Jesus 349, no one said or implied anything about why anyone was ‘only’ getting flyouts. Demographics are not total explanations. Get a grip.
““Take care, and good luck in the profession!”
For what it’s worth, you probably shouldn’t call people out for ‘coming off like a concern troll” if you’re going to end your posts like that.”
Oh, I disagree! Just because I disagree with you over whether you’ve made your case, or whether you’re concern trolling, it does not follow that I cannot wish you well in the profession. You may not like being called out as a concern troll, and I get that. But that doesn’t mean I wish you ill will or anything. I just disagree with your politics (in a broad sense), and your assessment of the value of collecting and discussing information like we saw here.
You’re the one bringing ‘desert’ into the picture. That’s not necessary. We don’t have to speculate about who ‘deserves’ this or that interview or job, I agree. But it’s still useful to share information about who got this or that interview or job and the basic facts about their situation (“just the facts”, if you will — PhD in hand? teaching experience in hand? publications? pedigree? AOS? advisor?, etc.).
So no one used the word ‘desert’. But look a 10:50 and 11:28. They are both very clearly implying that the candidates didn’t deserve their flyouts, and/or only got them because they were black or a woman.
As for ‘just the facts’ being useful, it is not clear at all why info about flyouts (as opposed to hiring data) is helpful. It is also not clear why it is helpful to father this info piecemeal by scouring the web and taking a guess about what talks are job talks. This kind of info is unreliable and the sample size is way too small to tell anyone anything useful. And again, we already gave this info about hiring data. So it is clear that all this nonsense about “gathering information” is just a smokescreen people are hiding behind in order to try and justify their asshole behaviour.
If a person sincerely wanted this kind of data, there are responsible ways to go about gathering it. Publicly and anonymously implying that a specific black person only got their flyout because they are black is not it. Further, this kind of crap actually makes it harder to gather enough data to actually draw any meaningful conclusions.
Yes, I disagree. Especially in the middle of the hiring process. If it were the candidates themselves making things public, that would be different. But when its anonymous people guessing based on who is giving a talk, and publicizing this info , especially before a hire has been made, it’s not cool. Would you want anonymous people gossiping about whether you had a flyout, and talking about whether your publication record is good enough for the job you are currently in the process of interviewing for? (In any case, its pretty clear the the point of the posts above is decidedly not to “celebrate the successes of women and people of color”).
Oh my god, will you read the thread. People are looking at lists of who is giving a talk, and making the guess that those people are job candidates. As I have already said, no one used the word desert, But several commenters clearly imply that the candidates didn’t deserve their flyouts, and/or only got them because they were black or a woman.
Read the damn thread. For both schools listed, people have assumed that the list of speakers are all job talks, and other commenters have stated that some are not. People are making guesses about whether talks are job talks. If you can’t even be bothered to read the thread, don’t bother commenting.
“Data was collected a couple of years ago by Dr Carolyn Dicey Jennings, who placed the raw data in a number of spreadsheets. The dataset used for this blogpost used to be here and concerns philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013.
…
The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8.
The median number of publications for a woman hired was 0.
The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5.
The median number of publications for a man hired was 1.
… In particular, the column for “0 Publications” shows that a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men. … For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications. … The statistical findings, at least as far as philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013 were concerned, indicate the existence of both prestige and gender bias in philosophy job hiring:
Against lower prestige male applicants.
For high prestige female applicants.
As noted above, the correlation amongst those hired between being unpublished and gender is statistically significant.”
One suggestion qua question: why cant people make up, even if its just a random string of words a username besides anonymous? Would make tracking conversations more rational. As it is, this reads like a poorly written internal Socratic dialogue of a schizophrenic gossip.
There was a time when Jazz (like Rachel Dolezal) claimed to not be white. Progressive, trans* thinking at its best, hence “Tranley”. I never heard where the “Jazz” came from.
Surprise surprise. Exactly as predicted, the kind of bullshit above leads to information that may be of use to people – like who is giving a talk where – being made less available. Nice one, geniuses.
One less department participating in the questionable, counterproductive practice of moral grandstanding/virtue signaling? That sounds like good news to me.
I know some of the New Consensus types and they all read the PMMMB obsessively. More back in the days when this place had more traffic, but they are pretty much obsessed with it. Interesting thing to think about from a psychological perspective.
Have to agree with that post on LR, it is so annoying to have only 5 hours to decide whether or not I want to do a Skype interview at a place I applied! Additionally, it would have been nice for the author of the email to have noted in the body of the email, rather than the signature, that he was from Cal State Sacramento! Am I really expected to recognize the name of the chair of the department or deduce where the email was from based on the sender’s email address? So unprofessional….that’s one department I won’t be applying to, for sure.
Or were applying from a country in a different timezone? If you’re in London, then you had from 3am to 8am to reply. Sucks if you happened to sleep in that morning I guess.
I got the email. The signature was below the ‘…’ fold in gmail, so it really was unclear where it was from unless you knew what csus.edu stands for off the top of your head. All BL’s correspondent said was that it was another feature of the message that was outside the norm, which is true. It also fits a pattern of this department being indifferent to the experience of applicants, which is horrible enough even when professional norms are followed. Imagine opening the message at 11:55 PST after putting your kids to bed and grading papers for one of the four classes you’re teaching as an adjunct, and seeing that you have precious little time to respond and secure a spot, possibly in the next 8 hours. Wouldn’t it be nice for it to be immediately obvious what school you’re agreeing to interview with? Is that scenario so unthinkable?
Honestly 3:57, I hope you either work at Cal State Sacramento, and so are too close to this to see the problem, or are just having a hard time on the market and looking to lash out. This is really shitty behavior, and it doesn’t take much empathy to understand why.
Hey guys, 3:57 here again. I take back everything I said, and I’ll tell you why: I fell in love! Can you believe it?? LOVE! And let me tell you…She. Is. The. Greatest!! We’re hopping in her Ford Taurus in a few minutes here to drive to Niagara Falls, and I’m seriously considering popping the question. The best thing about her is, she taught me the value of self-respect. Before we met, I was giving handjobs behind the old Three Rivers Stadium for half-sandwiches. It never even occurred to me to bargain up to full sandwiches! Well no longer. From now on, a half-sandwich gets you nothing more than an unenthusiastic half-handie. Anywho, I totes get where you all are coming from now. Good luck on the job market, and I can’t wait for you to meet my special lady!!
Could someone post the Cal State-Sacramento interview questions? Would be helpful to those of us who didn’t even get their shitty time-limited offer of a Skype interview.
This kind of bullshit–and it is bullshit–is largely the result of market saturation. Alas, whenever anyone suggests that we put reasonable limits on the production of PhDs, the new consensus types start crying about “paternalism” or some such nonsense. One suspects this might be the only context in which they object to “paternalism.”
What if I happen to be rich and just want to gain a Phd in philosophy? Just because a lot of people overestimate the quality of their work should not prevent me from getting one.
In a more sane philosophical community, nothing would stop rich people who just want PhDs from getting those PhDs. They’d just have to be good enough to be admitted under more stringent admissions conditions. There are a decent number of schools that have no business offering the PhD; surely they shouldn’t keep doing so just to meet the needs of those who (a) want a PhD for its intrinsic value rather than as a credential AND (b) are incapable of being admitted to a strong program.
Wait, I don’t get it.
Why shouldn’t some weaker department continue to offer PhDs to people who have no interest in continuing in academia?
I doubt there would be real demand, but if there is, why not?
There are two basic reasons to get a PhD. First, to earn the credential needed for an academic job. Second, because the degree (or the process of earning it) has some value in itself. A number of weaker departments rarely place their students in stable academic jobs. Since these departments fail to offer credentials that can aid in securing academic employment, it would seem the only reason to enroll in their PhD programs is for the sake of the degree itself. But, of course, few of the students who enroll in such programs do so simply because they want PhDs. No. Through some combination of self-deception, youthful naivete, professional ignorance, and grooming from their undergraduate mentors, these students come to believe that they are special and thereby have a good shot at securing an academic job. I’ve been to many conferences where I’ve met plenty of smart, interesting, and friendly students who were enrolled in weak programs. I’ve met no more than a couple of them who were uninterested in pursuing an academic career. I find it both vicious and professionally catastrophic that we allow these students to spend five or more years of their lives prepping for jobs that no longer exist. That one member of their cohort may not care about joining the professoriate hardly justifies letting the rest persist in their doomed quest. Unless these departments make it explicit that they are not training students to become professors and will not enroll those who aspire to become professors, they should not admit graduate students.
1. why do you want this job?
2. what are your research interests?
3. what courses in your AOS do you want to teach?
4. what courses outside your AOS?
5. how do you meet the AOS needs of the position?
6. can/will you teach online?
7. how would you contribute to the applied ethics center?
8. what are your experiences with diverse people?
9. can you handle a 4/4 and do service and research? how?
10. any questions for us?
11. Are you prepared to pay a small fee to join PENMA and participate in weekly ‘ethical’ multi-partner orgies, as part of an APA-funded ‘research project’ we are running?
It was some other Cal State school that, last year, decided it didn’t need to send out requests for applicants’ letters if they hadn’t applied more than a week before the due date, and then told applicants they were rejected because their application was incomplete. Stay classy!
I demand that this white cis-gendered matriarch give up her position rather than fostering a fight among young untenured people forcing them to participate in the oppression olympics. If you are so concerned about diversity, step aside, you pale white bitch! And please be consistent across the board: no more Jews, they are overrepresented in academia. Think about the progress philosophy could have made if we had people like Nathaniel Coleman instead of Yablo or Kripke.
I was going to write a post mocking an article of Justine Weinberg’s, but then I realized that would entail finding and reading one of them. Some sacrifices are just to much great for one person to bear.
There are many remarkable things about that post and the defences of it in the comments. But by far most remarkable is how unfunny Justin W., Mark Lance, and ‘some person or other’ are while being at the same time convinced of their own comedic genius. Set to the side the philosophical ineptitude they show. The ‘performative’ shtick called forth such powerful groans that my throat has begun to hurt. The jokes about other people grandstanding are so obvious that they are beneath a tween on 4chan. The original post reads more like a conspiracy theory than a satire. Are they getting private congratulations from allies on their displays of wit? It is as if they are stand-up comedians who are bombing on purpose for practice. I am actually mad at them for making me feel so vicariously embarrassed for them. (Sorry for mistakes, english is not my first language.)
What really annoys me about Weinberg is that it’s so transparent who he wants to ingratiate himself with.
I wonder how successful he is. I mean, I’m basically sympathetic to the view on the politics/sociology of the profession he wants to align himself with, but I just think he’s a total wanker. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could actually respect him.
I suspect that even for those in the in-crowd with two brain cells to rub together he’s regarded as a useful idiot. Say what you will about Leiter, but he’s accomplished more than start a blog and rankings. He doesn’t need the blog to be raised above the level of a nobody whose tenure case was a coin toss. Weinberg’s only path to professional relevance is through blogging, so he has to stay in line and promote the interests of the powerful, or he loses everything.
whoa. Maybe I miscommunicated, or maybe you misread me, or maybe something, but I’m ‘some person or other’, and my depression about the post was about Justin’s post–like I genuinely found it really depressing that he felt the need to use up his time and energy to attack more junior people, and in a way that I found depressingly nasty. I just meant to be agreeing with (at least some of) the comments criticizing the post. Sorry if that wasn’t clear, and maybe it was and you have a problem with some other aspect of my comment. But for what it’s worth, I meant “I’m really depressed at the state of the philosoblogosphere/this post of Justin’s”.
My mistake. In a post with so much bad satire short comments sometimes do not have enough context to distinguish them from the garbage. I thought it was a bad joke about piling on (“I guess I don’t have any content to add to the worries raised above”) since many others were criticizing the post. I apologize. I share your depression. Weinberg has chosen the least constructive response to this paper. I continue to feel embarrassed for him and I hope he rethinks his decisions sincerely and not only because of public pressure.
Yeah, one wonders how much of the “it’s surprising that PPA even published this!” is sour grapes from someone whose publications top out at a PPQ paper five years ago and a few papers in third tier value theory journals.
This thread has actually changed my feelings about Justin. I used to feel anger towards him. As a person with power to help frame professional philosophy’s disciplinary narrative, I was angry at the way he used that power to passive aggressively bully people, silence dissent, and promote the excesses of SJW call-out culture. Now I mostly just feel pity towards him. Justin is an adult man who apparently has so little going for him (personally, professionally, and comically) that he thought it would be wise to make the post on grandstanding. Imagine a life in which the promise of getting facebook props from Sally Haslanger and Mark Lance is sufficient to motivate you to piss all over a couple of people who did nothing to provoke you. What a hollow existence.
I see that Weinberg has now posted an addendum responding to criticism his post has received, and that the self-humiliation continues, though now in a minor key. Two things seem worth mentioning.
One, though we cannot know what if anything has happened in private, the addendum falls far short of an apology for what has quite reasonably been interpreted by many readers as an intemperate attack on two junior members of the profession. I have found the following to be a helpful start at a set of criteria for an apology: https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/on-apology/
Second, Weinberg writes: “It’s not as if by saying that some moral complaint is an instance of virtue signalling or moral grandstanding one is issuing a substantive response to the content of that complaint. Rather, one is saying that the complaint isn’t worth substantively responding to, because it is being made in bad faith. It is a way of dismissing, rather than engaging.”
“Someone at Yale clearly reads the PMMMB. The job talks are no longer advertised.”
“Surprise surprise. Exactly as predicted, the kind of bullshit above leads to information that may be of use to people – like who is giving a talk where – being made less available. Nice one, geniuses.”
Likewise, short term jobs are going to be less widely advertised than they might otherwise be as a result of the kind of nonsense we see on PMMMB above and elsewhere. Stop your bitching about desert or there’s going to be no dessert.
Sure. Because of course as everyone knows the expectations about the number of publications someone needs to be a strong candidate haven’t changed at all in the last 37 years. And the writer has super special inside knowledge of what the head of department at Ann Arbor said to her. And if you have been successful in your career, you’re not allowed to complain about any aspects of it ever, on your own behalf or on behalf of others you think (rightly or wrongly) are getting a raw deal.
Come on, 12:19. You’re better than this. If you have an issue with what Haslanger says, state it.Don’t be lazy and drag into the discussion posts from RC which sound like they’re written by someone who’s auditioning for a job in Trump’s press team.
I wish the alt-right would teach their foot soldiers about more fallacies. It’s really boring just seeing people just shouting ‘strawman!’ and ‘ad hominem!’ every time they realize they are out of their depth and don’t have the smarts to be able to respond (especially when they don’t really know how to apply the terms properly).
“That meant I would have to have twice the usual number of tenure letters. It worked. [http://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/sally-haslanger/]
A stunning change: the department first lets her know that her research output is clearly inadequate for tenure, but then soon reverses itself and puts her under “heightened scrutiny”, which amounts only to asking her to submit more recommendation letters. And, unsurprisingly, “it worked”.”
Natural Lawyer has no idea how tenure works. A tenure letter is not “a letter of recommendation” and one doesn’t get asked to submit them on their own. Tenure letters are requested by departments. Getting twice the number is in fact hard work. Whatever one might think of Haslanger, the author of this screed is an idiot who knows nothing about academia.
Hi 12:19/7:50/7:56 (aka Natural Lawyer) if you’re going to try and use PMMMB to drive traffic to your blog, it might be a good idea to be a bit less transparent about it.
“An interview with Conway is like a game of Crazy Eights with one rule change: Every card is crazy. No matter what you say, she’ll pick a word from your question and use it to change suits. Use the word “fact,” and she’ll ask, “Chuck, do you think it’s a fact or not that millions of people have lost their plans or health insurance?”….You’ll never win this game because you’ll have to use words. She’ll pick the one she likes and throw out the rest.”
Clearly 7:56 doesn’t really have any idea how tenure works either. Yes, it is common practice for candidates to provide some but not all names (never more than half). But that’s not “submitting recommendation letters,” it’s providing a list of possible names for a department to contact. And, again, tenure letters are not “recommendation letters” like you might write for a job candidate or an undergraduate applying for law school. They’re a different thing entirely. Yes, writing papers is hard work, but that is, ahem, a non sequitur. Amassing double the amount of tenure letters for a candidate, especially one whose research output is minimal, is in fact very hard work for a chair and a higher bar for a candidate.
Given the stories I’ve already heard of him, my educated guess is that it is a very well-known philosopher of mind currently stationed in the southern United States (no, not McGinn).
I’m probably thinking of the same person, but might have a slightly different understanding of the region. (Disagreement about conventional facts, not genuine geographical facts.)
She says she sent it to a college newspaper, so obviously she’s not trying to keep the identities secret. But apparently the newspaper didn’t bite; anyway Googling doesn’t turn up anything.
In fact, although the WIIL post is entitled “Going public with sexual harassment”, this is one of the least successful attempts at going public I have ever seen.
I wonder what’s up with that.
Problem is the letter refers to “Y University’s” philosophy department not “University of Y’s” department. So it can’t be the guy who wears the tie, since he teaches at University of Y, not Y University.
Hardly conclusive. The author might have said ‘Y University’ precisely to invalidate this kind of inference, and so avoid the risk of defeating the whole purpose of anonymizing the place. Or, perhaps for this reason, she might have just decided to adopt a generic scheme of anonymity: X University, Y University, etc. If it were the College of Charleston, do you think she would have said ‘the College of Y’? She presumably would like this person’s identity to become known eventually, but there are good reasons for not wanting to be seen as helping to reveal it, beyond what’s strictly involved in describing her experience.
Not conclusive, but there are lots of “Universities of Y,” and lots of “Y Universities,” unlike your example of “College of Y.” Add to that the fact that the letter states it was sent to the Chancellor. The tie-wearing man teaches at a university with a President, not a Chancellor. By contrast, a “Y University” in New Jersey has a Chancellor. And this “Y University” has had an excellent grad program long enough that there might be female graduates now “established” enough to level these charges. As to who it might be, I don’t know.
Maybe the pronoun is a red herring: Professor Z could be Anna Stubblefield, and the whole letter could be the Stubbleghazi person taking their art to the next level!!
“At one point, McKinnon said, she slammed her hand against the lectern after a student suggested South Carolina’s deeply conservative Legislature would protect gay, lesbian and transgender rights if the new administration attempted to yank them away.”
This student is pretty stupid. Wouldn’t most people hit their own heads on the lectern after this clanger?
“in his derivation of the principles of non-coercion and assistance, Arvan makes a valuable argument…”
sure, the argument is valuable, but it can hardly be said to be Arvan’s. it’s just a particularly flat-footed version of the standard Kantian derivation of these principles from the CI; see e.g. any Rawls student, basically. (in the same vein, I was surprised the reviewer didn’t point out that the first part is just a shitty version of Possibility of Altruism.)
i’m really hoping Arvan responds at length on his blog.
Why? I haven’t been much impressed by what I’ve seen of his work, either. But I don’t get the glee with which some here dump on him. If you were tasked with making a list of 50 people in the profession who most deserve a comeuppance, would you really put him on it? If so you should look around a bit more. His main offence seems to be starting a blog that some find annoying for its relentless positivity, and posting about his work there. It’s not as if he’s become influential as a result and is abusing his power.
Having read the posted review, I’m left to conclude that Marcus doesn’t have an adequate network of philosopher friends to talk shop/share work with. The bad math in his book is something that someone should’ve caught right away. The overambitious project with far too many moving parts is probably also something a trusted critic should have been able to talk him out of. It appears he is the only philosopher on his campus who is even trying to carry out serious research. I know what that’s like. Perhaps those of us who are trying to do serious research while teaching in the trenches at mediocre schools should have some kind of digital working group.
I suppose it’s naive to ask why a reviewer wouldn’t catch it?
I admit to also getting some pleasure out of this, while feeling bad about myself for doing so. But also… I don’t think it’s just the chipper-ness of the blog that is annoying. There is more about the tone than just that. It all seems sort of smug while trying very hard to pretend not to be smug. And condescending. Or something. None of that is quite right, but that blog has bothered me for forever, and I’ve never been able to exactly state what it is. (Though to be fair it’s less annoying than most of the other philosophy blogs.)
I think I understand what you mean about the tone. My reading of it is that he’s usually trying very hard to be open and sincere. Sometimes that’s just bound to come off wrong to some readers, because I think that’s a pretty tough tone to maintain and get across on the internet. That may be especially true on a philosophy blog, since we’re pretty well conditioned to read those as self-aggrandizing and nasty. Then there are times when he’s obviously trying to be kind and encouraging and it seems strained. But again, that’s tough to pull off in some situations. I don’t read the blog regularly, but his initial posts about his own struggles in graduate school and on the market (in which he’s very sincere and vulnerable) color my interpretation when I do.
It’s also entirely possible that philosophy blogs just are annoying. I know I’m much happier when I read them only sparingly.
Most philosophers aren’t good writers. Combine that with the narcissism and middling intelligence of the average blogger and you have your explanation.
My sense is that the above article provides another data point in favor of the longstanding generalization that “transgressive” academics are self-important bores.
I appreciate that she is striking out into new territory beyond her early dissertation work, but honestly, polyamory is not a radical new idea. Only from a very conservative life history would it seem to be something that had to be worked out philosophically. To me the interview reads like someone who grew up Mormon was justifying the drinking of coffee, as something that could be enjoyable, good for you and not against god’s will.
yeah it’s kind of irritating. matter of factly talking about leaving your boyfriend’s apartment to go home to your husband, as if we’re all meant to go ‘oooh that’s so progressive’. gimme a break, it’s vain and embarrassing.
On the one hand, I share the general sentiment that Scratchy comes off as silly and vain. On the other hand, there’s something that genuinely worries me about the way narcissistic social justice types publicly express their sexual peccadilloes.
I don’t care about how many lovers this woman takes (diachronically or synchronically). But I sense that the public presentation of her sexual life is designed, at least in part, to elicit a side-taking response from others. Those who express disapproval can be shamed as “haters” and “bigots,” thus furthering the cause of righteousness (and providing information about whom to exclude from conferences). Those who express enthusiastic approval can be identified as “allies,” thus earning themselves a special social designation. What about those who just shrug at this kind of stuff? My sense is that they get grouped with the haters–and forced to pay the costs–unless or until they make a public affirmation of approval. And that strikes me as a kind of soft coercion.
naw, I think you’re reading too much into it. philosophers writing about emotions etc use concrete examples all the time, usually from literature or their own lives. done well, it’s great. done badly, it just comes off as pretentious (in the case of literary examples) or narcissistic (in the case of autobiographical ones). but that doesn’t mean the writer is actually pretentious or narcissistic–just that they’re not good at this style of philosophy. given that Jenkins is doing a really ambitious project in an area she has zero experience in, it’s not that surprising.
Well, in any case, pursuing an extremely ambitious project in an area you have zero experience in (and dismissing almost all of the voluminous literature in that area without citing it) is itself pretty pretentious and narcissistic if you ask me.
as far as I can tell they’re all about the psychology, sociology, or biology of love, not about what love actually is.
I mean, that’s fine. it’d be AWESOME if someone wrote a book about, say, the social construction of chairs and why if YOU wanted to call one of those bean-bag things a chair, that’s totally cool and you shouldn’t let anyone tell you otherwise. but you’d be a pretentious narcissist if you said you were doing mereology, and mentioned but just didn’t engage with people who worked on material constitution or whatever. afaict jenkins is basically just doing that with love.
If she loves both of them, why is she married to only one of them?
Case one: S is married. S also has several very close friends to whom S is deeply and lovingly committed.
Case two: S is married. S also has several very close friends to whom S is deeply and lovingly committed. and with whom S engages in sex acts.
If sexual non-exclusivity isn’t the defining feature of polyamory, then it would seem that anyone whose life conforms to case one is engaged in polyamory or something near enough.
This suggests the concept of polyamory is vacuous and that polyamorists are hardly conducting an experiment-in-living worthy of some kind of special acknowledgement. Indeed, it suggests most married humans are polyamorous!
In response, polyamorist might contend that it is “romantic relationship” non-exclusivity (rather than sexual non-exclusivity) that is the defining feature of his lifestyle. In that case, I want to know what distinguishes chaste romantic relationships from chaste loving friendships.
I wonder whether Jenkins’s Canada Research Chair will be renewed. It seems a bait and switch. They hired a philosopher of math because Crispin Wright was high on her, and now she’s serving up light fare fit for daytime TV.
I guarantee it will be renewed. Funding agencies eat this kind of thing up. Academic work that interests the broader public, and has a social justice angle? CRC is going to love it.
More successful than an adjunct, yes. But now exposed as a drama queen, narcissist, who staged a crisis. Very unCanadian, more like an upper class Brit.
The ’embarrassments’ you’re talking about aren’t anything funding agencies, the public at large, or most philosophers think are embarrassing. Her career is doing just fine, whether people here think she deserves it or not
Was this a fake post from this website? The letter hasn’t shown up in any paper as far as anyone knows. None of the many people who allegedly received it has acknowledged that it was sent to the faculty or administrators it was allegedly sent. If it was sent to a dozen or more faculty and administrators it’s highly unlikely nothing has leaked out about the situation.
Jenny Saul has pretty bad reputation in the philosophy profession for distributing false accusations. Maybe people are just wising up to this pretty serious misconduct?
Below is a list of current Canadian Research Chairs in Philosophy. I leave it to the reader to determine whether this is a distinguished group. (Some of these philosophers are clearly first rate.)
Tier 1
Baylis, Francoise, Dalhousie University
Deveaux, Monique, University of Guelph
Griffin, Nicholas J., McMaster University
Koslicki, Kathrin, University of Alberta
Kymlicka, Will, Queen’s University
Matthen, Mohan, University of Toronto
Narbonne, Jean-Marc, Université Laval
Waters, C. Kenneth, University of Calgary
Weijer, Charles, Western University
Tier 2
Brigandt, Ingo, University of Alberta
Cameron, Margaret A., University of Victoria
Claveau, François, Université de Sherbrooke
Crozier, Gillian, Laurentian University
Dilhac, Marc-Antoine, Université de Montréal
Dumont, Augustin, Université de Montréal
Dumsday, Travis, Concordia University College of Alberta
Heyes, Cressida, University of Alberta
Jenkins, Carrie Ichikawa, The University of British Columbia
Malaterre, Christophe, Université du Québec à Montréal
Pickavé, Martin, University of Toronto
Stang, Nicholas, University of Toronto
Turri, John, University of Waterloo
Below is a list of current Canadian Research Chairs in Philosophy. I leave it to the reader to determine whether this is a distinguished group.
Tier 1
Baylis, Francoise, Dalhousie University
Deveaux, Monique, University of Guelph
Griffin, Nicholas J., McMaster University
Koslicki, Kathrin, University of Alberta
Kymlicka, Will, Queen’s University
Matthen, Mohan, University of Toronto
Narbonne, Jean-Marc, Université Laval
Waters, C. Kenneth, University of Calgary
Weijer, Charles, Western University
Tier 2
Brigandt, Ingo, University of Alberta
Cameron, Margaret A., University of Victoria
Claveau, François, Université de Sherbrooke
Crozier, Gillian, Laurentian University
Dilhac, Marc-Antoine, Université de Montréal
Dumont, Augustin, Université de Montréal
Dumsday, Travis, Concordia University College of Alberta
Heyes, Cressida, University of Alberta
Jenkins, Carrie Ichikawa, The University of British Columbia
Malaterre, Christophe, Université du Québec à Montréal
Pickavé, Martin, University of Toronto
Stang, Nicholas, University of Toronto
Turri, John, University of Waterloo
By the way, I’ve long thought of her work as some of the most superficial and hole-ridden out there, long before she decided to make her mental health issues and boinking habits known the world over.
Genuine question: what are here mental health issues? I recall reading an interview where she obliquely referred to her disability but I couldn’t figure out what it is. And then, in the whole Leiter affair, it seemed to be a big thing, but again, I don’t know what it is. Is it depression? Anxiety? I don’t feel like she is trying to conceal it, since she refers to it in some of the pieces I’ve seen, but at the same time, I just haven’t common across what the disability is.
“It looks like shapely noise to me”
Can we please ask CDJ to step away from the regressions
I was on her side re leiter, but she isn’t helping herself with this halfbaked voodo
She probably means that some weak correlation might be evident, hence that graph is shapely, but that the correlation is barely strong enough to be
Noticed- hence just noise.
Philosophymetametametablog 
Suggestion: Block all comments that mention Brian Leiter unless they are positive. I’m not sure if you could set up a script to automate this task.
Not sure that’s necessary, but at least moderate a little and perhaps block some of the obvious trolls.
Another suggestion: occasional separate threads for timely topics/events. People might be more inclined to make substantive comments if they could be more confident that they won’t be buried among…let’s call it random stuff.
Happy New Year, jerks! I’ll be at the usual PMMMB bar if you want a free drink on me.
It looks like Anne Jacobson just posted a comment at FP under the pseudonym “Dan Marino”.
There’s probably a logical explanation, but honestly I’m happy with my current state of knowledge. I’m going to take this as a harbinger of a fun 2017.
I assume you mean this gem:
Dan Marino says:
January 1, 2017 at 7:44 pm
We are often thought just to censor anything we disagree with. In fact, below is a good example of the sort of thing I’d normally put in “trash”. I approve lots I disagree with, but not fact-free assertions that appear to be false.
Women already have all the rights that they need. If anything women have more rights than men. Women are holding women back, not men.
The second paragraph had a strikethrough at the original!
Mmm hmm.
It’s just so great in so many ways. Thanks, Santa!
This place seems to have developed a nasty tone*, and most comments are not that clever or knowledgeable. Generally snark is mostly boring — it takes very unusual circumstances for it to be interesting or creative — so it should not be the default tone of this or any other blog. The writers here are also pretty naive politically, though they think they are sophisticated. Perhaps everyone could lighten up and tell jokes that didn’t involve personal attacks. We are living in times when intelligence is needed for other purposes.
*OK I know you might say it had a nasty tone from its inception, but I disagree.
You seem obsessed with me. If the Leiter comments have a nasty tone, maybe it’s because Leiter has waged a campaign to destroy the career of a young Phd and then announced another campaign to destroy the careers of the individuals posting at a conservative blog. The Chavist in Chicago deserves all the nasty comments he gets on anonymous blogs. The Leiter comments aren’t have as nasty as the old diabetic himself.
Happy New Year, Karmakrazy! Or are you Jason Reza Jorjani, NeoNazi?
ok, so here’s my suggestion . . .
What I like about this blog is industry gossip – who is an asshole, who did not deserve some fancy job, who is really smart, who said something dumb/ridiculous, who did or did not send what to whom in the mail etc. Any juicy, salacious personal details about philosophers who are otherwise just names on papers or on faculty lists is interesting. Even when they are almost certainly false.
What is very tiresome about this blog is too much debate about fucking politics – male-rights shit versus feminist shit, left-wing shit versus right-wing shit, Trump vs Clinton, etc etc
So my plea before this blog finally becomes obsolete – gossip please! E.g. who should get that big Epistemology Job at Rutgers? Who should not but might? What is the real, hidden reason that Leiter is gonna blog less?
DeRose was offered the new Rutgers chair but turned it down. I assume BL’s decision has partly to do with his eye problems, or problems in one eye, something like that.
i guess DeRose would have been a fairly eminent, well-known name to list on the department webpage, but I’ve never thought of him as a genuinely first rate, heavyweight philosopher. He’s more like Bonjour or Audi – prolific and much cited but not dazzlingly original or important. Rutgers should be aiming for better anyway.
I agree. Who else is well known and prolific but ultimately a bit pedestrian?
Leiter is morbidly obese, that is why he has eye problems. He probably has heart problems as well.
Here is who Yale is interviewing the next two months, labeled as “Guest Speakers”.
One white man with a lot of publications… and five not-white-men with not a lot of publications.
A coincidence, I’m sure.
The talks labeled “WGAP” and “MPWG” are not job talks. The breakdown is as follows:
1. One white man with a strong publication record (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, PPR, Phil Studies, Phil Imprint, Phil Quarterly, Synthese).
2. One black man with a fair publication record (Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Phil Studies) and a prominent social media presence.
3. One white woman without any publication record at all.
You are forgetting February.
February: 3 more non-white-men candidates
Candidate 1 = 1 paper in Philosopher’ imprint
Candidate 2 = apparently no publications yet
Candidate 3 = Phil Studies, Phil issues, Episteme + couple of book chapters. i.e. ‘Fair’ at best by Yale standards …
Thanks! A more complete breakdown is as follows:
1. White man with a strong publication record (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, PPR, Phil Studies, Phil Imprint, Phil Quarterly, Synthese).
2. Black man with a fair publication record (Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Phil Studies) and a prominent social media presence.
3. White woman with a fair publication record (Phil Studies, invited papers).
4. White woman with a fair publication record (Phil Imprint)
5. Black man without any publication record at all.
6. White woman without any publication record at all.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to get a flyout at Yale? Now you know.
I don’t think one of those people you’ve identified as a woman is a woman.
Correct. Candidate #4 was once a woman but now identifies as genderqueer.
Don’t worry guys, I’m sure Jason Stanley will ensure that these applications are assessed on their merits, and not on the basis of irrelevant factors like gender(queerness) or race.
This is the sort of interesting stuff I want to see more of around here, by the way. Less raging about identity politics and left/right-wing lunacy, more interesting facts about philosophers, please.
see, I think the interesting thing here is that while candidates 1, 3, 5,and 6 are pretty much the sort of candidates you’d expect for a fancy LEMM job, 2 and 4 do the kind of lefty social metaphysics that more people say they like than read. (This isn’t to say that 2 and 4 don’t do good work–they might well, I have no idea–just that it’s the sort of work that, regardless of its merits, certain people are prone to liking because doing so makes them feel good about themselves.)
I wonder if Yale is really serious about hiring someone who does lefty social metaphysics, or if just wants to appease people in its department who tend to make a big fuss about that sort of thing.
On 2, the work is not so much atrocious as simply dead boring, without a single identifiable clever move
It is astounding that papers in Phil Review, JPhil, PPR, etc. make for a record that is only “strong”. Back in my day, that kind of record would have been the better part of the application for promotion to Full. A sign of our times, I suppose!
I’ve served on a number of hiring committees now, so I thought I’d share my two cents. (I think that my views here aren’t idiosyncratic, so I’m just hoping to give people a look at the other side.) Outsiders who haven’t seen the letters and writing samples shouldn’t read too much into the publication records when looking at the people brought out for interviews or made offers.
A few things. First, it’s important to remember that interviews aren’t offers. We often invite people out for interviews even though we think it’s unlikely that we’d make an offer. (There are many reasons for this. I’ve been invited to APA interviews when it’s clear that I’m not really in the running for the position. Sometimes it seems that they’re trying to see if I’d be a good fit for another search. In one case I think they just needed bodies for seats and someone might have thought they saw something in my file that made them think they might as well have a quick look before writing me off.)
Second, it’s important to remember that different people in the room will have different agendas. Some people will want the best philosopher and won’t care about things like fit, ability to cover teaching, etc. Others won’t. Don’t assume there’s some single scale that’s used to rank applicants where those at the top of the scale will get an invitation. That’s way too rational. I’ve seen interview invitations go out where I’m pretty sure there’s just one very good philosopher on the list and many better philosophers didn’t make the cut. Those of us who prize wattage have to pick our battles with colleagues who care more about fit, teaching profile, etc. (Often it’s not worth having that fight if you have your preferred candidate on the invite list. If anything, inviting out a few high watt bulbs could just muddy the waters and you could end up with a dim bulb who made the cut because they could teach a lot of courses, they score well on fit, etc. When we had an open search, I was pleased to let my colleagues who cared more about teaching get their people on the short list at the expense of philosophers that were much more talented because it meant that the most talented of the bunch would have an easier time at the next round of competition.)
Third, please, please, please don’t confuse CV length with quality. If you haven’t read the work of all the candidates, you should recognize that your evidential basis is weak. Much of the work I read by young people published in good places (including Mind and JPhil (and especially PPR, Nous, and Phil Studies)) is dull, uninspired, derivative, or superficial. (It’s not better when it’s published by old men, but they tend not to be competing for these kinds of jobs.) It might be packaged nicely and framed to appear more ambitious than work in lesser journals, but much of it is bland and just barely adequate crap. Think about choosing talks at the APA. Suppose there’s more than one talk in an area of interest and/or competence. When forced to choose between talks, it might make sense to go by CV quality if you don’t have anything else to go by but it makes little sense to go by this and discount your own impression of them or their papers when you’ve spoken with them, heard one of their talks, or read some of their work. I don’t want to name names but in my particular areas, I’ve found that when someone works in the areas that interest me is publishing lots of work in top journals, it’s usually crap that’s packaged nicely. Some people have a knack for getting things into print that are either totally forgettable or memorable only because it’s surprising that someone has found a recipe or two for getting work of no substance into quality venues. The thought of having to spend decades with this kind of person depresses me. If there’s a philosopher that’s written one interesting thing (which might be in unpublished work) in a three year period, I’d like to learn more about them.
This is interesting. Regarding your third point: in the abstract, some of what you say about the top journals and people who publish a lot might be right. And of course, publication records are not the sole criterion of merit. But I think something very pernicious happens in practice when search committees let themselves be led too far along these lines. Downplaying peer reviewed publications — the one external, independent, blind measure of philosophical merit — seems almost inevitably to lead to a license to just give full reign to one’s biases. I’m sure it’s one of the reasons why we see what we do: people working on trendy shit, or people who are extremely well connected, or people who tick whatever diversity box is the flavor of the month, getting the nod over people with better publications records and who are better philosophers. Succumbing to the conceit that we, the hiring committee, are somehow able to discern True Philosophical Talent in our candidates, where this is somehow independent of the only objective measure of merit that we have access to, just seems like it’s guaranteed to lead to unjust results.
All fair points. I agree with what you’re saying. Fwiw, I do try to keep myself in check (e.g., by thinking about the quality of work of respected colleagues at earlier stages of their careers, checking letters, conversing with colleagues). It helps to be in a department where research is discussed at length before we get to the interview stage. It also helps to have something objective to back up the judgments about quality. In some cases people seem to say the same or very similar things in multiple places. (In one recent case, we had a candidate who had more publications than competitors in some top journals where a closer examination revealed that there were really two ideas being fleshed out in five or six places without much interesting differences between them.) In some cases people seem to say things that have been said by others before. (In one recent case, the person was presenting an idea that seemed not just gimmicky and unlikely to bear fruit but also one that had been defended by people on the search committee.) It’s nice to be able to point to these kinds of things and not just rely on highly variable impressions about quality.
But why is merit considered important? Surely the crucial thing is to determine the gender of the applicants and then hire the woman?
That white woman would not approve of you calling *them* a woman. Read *their* work and marvel at its almost supernatural dullness – trivia stolen from Haslanger, then tarted up in ‘queer theory’. That’s what Princeton is selling, and Yale may well buy it.
Too easy for discussions to get lost/hijacked. Any chance we could follow economics job market rumours and political science rumours in terms of their layout: I.e. separate threads?
I agree this would be ideal. I looked into doing it at one point, but ultimately I don’t have the wordpress and BBpress skills. If anyone does, please let me know.
As a counterpoint, Wash U has its list of talks for their job up too. All men, almost entirely white. https://philosophy.artsci.wustl.edu/
How is this a ‘counterpoint’? The issue is the alarmingly unequal standards applied to job candidates depending on their race, gender, and sex. If anything, the unquestionably strong credentials of those on the WUSL list further confirms the point.
I can’t tell which talks are job talks. I know for sure that some are not. (At Wash U, I mean.)
i dunno, seems like a pretty safe bet to me that the four people who are all
(a) youngish
(b) epistemologists
(c) giving generic colloquium talks over a three-week period from late January to early February
(d) with titles “TBA”
are job candidates.
These kinds of discussions are the worst thing about this blog. As if being on the job market wasn’t bad enough, now candidates – grad students for the most part – are being subjected to public speculation about whether or not they ‘deserve’ their interviews. This is not fun or interesting. Its just mean and pointless. Perhaps the people doing this have never been on the job market themselves, because I can’t imagine that anyone who had would be that cruel.
+1
+1 from me too
Compiling (publicly available) information about which candidates get which posts/offers/interviews/flyouts is extremely useful for people on the market and their advisors. For example, if white men have to publish more (or less, for that matter) to get posts/offers/interviews/flyouts than do people who aren’t white men, that is an interesting and useful thing to know. There’s nothing “cruel”, “mean”, or “pointless” about it. It’s data..
No, it clearly isn’t about ‘data’. There is already publicly available data about this, properly anonymized, which has been discussed endlessly on this blog. You’re just hiding behind that excuse. And it’s laughable to describe what is going on above as merely ‘compiling information.’ What is not useful for people on the job market is to be subjected to the added worry (on top of everything else) that any piece of public information on the internet about them might become fodder for people like you to use to try and trash them at what is already an incredibly stressful time. Try and have a bit of empathy.
Also, for those who actually care about gathering accurate data, this kind of behavior is extremely counterproductive. I know a number of people who deliberately kept their appointment information off the appointments page on philjobs exactly because they didn’t want to risk some asshole from this blog deciding to hold a public referendum on whether they really deserved their position. So this kind of shit comprises the collection of accurate and comprehensive information about appointments and such like.
Do you know anything about data gathering, 10:21? Do you think people gather data about STD’s by asking anonymous people on the internet to name people they’ve seen leaving the family planning clinic and taking a guess about whether or not it was for chlamydia?
Sure is rough to have no publications and no Ph.D. but an interview at Yale. The job market is just so awful for those people!
Surely the criticism is better focused on the departments/committees/deans/HR officers making these decisions than the individual candidates who benefit from them. The candidates didn’t choose this profession’s current obsession. Honestly, if I were visibly diverse, I’d probably consider including headshots in my application materials. Committee members already go to candidates’ personal websites hoping to find exactly that.
Of course it is. The people pretending that they are just ‘compiling information’ in order to discuss an issue in the profession by publicly going through the CVs of minority individuals and anonymous;y passing judgment on whether or not they ‘deserve’ their professional achievements are either idiots, deeply nasty people, or both.
Where is judgement being passed on candidates rather than Yale?
Who passed judgment about ‘desert’ here? I’m not seeing it. I don’t care about those judgments anyways, for what it’s worth. I’d rather just know what works: what kinds of candidates succeed, and which do not, etc.
Being on the job market is stressful for everyone. Of course it’s worse for people who don’t get any interviews, or don’t get the interviews they want. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to be an asshole to the people who do get interviews.
Who is being an asshole? Why is it wrong to draw attention to facts about job candidates that appear to affect one’s odds of getting a job? Or do you deny that publication record and demographics affect one’s odds of getting a job?
No one’s denying that. But facts about individual job candidates don’t give you any information about what sorts of things will affect your odds of getting a job. General demographic trends do.
And general demographic trends are collected by looking at individuals. Together with what I know about my department, stories I’ve heard about other departments, and what the ‘Gender and Prestige’ data linked below shows, we appear to be converging on a conclusion that gender does affect your odds of getting a job. So I ask again:
Who is being an asshole? Why is it wrong to draw attention to facts about job candidates that appear to affect one’s odds of getting a job? Or do you deny that publication record and demographics affect one’s odds of getting a job?
“And general demographic trends are collected by looking at individuals”
Sure. But no one here is actually making a sincere effort to collect data by posting this stuff about individuals. If they did want to actually collect that data, it’s an incredibly bad way of doing it. Its wrong to draw attention to particular individuals because a. there is no reason to do so if what you really want to know is information about things that might affect your chances b. it would be pretty unpleasant to be one of those individuals, especially while you are still on the job market.
Can you give one good reason why mentioning particular individuals, rather than discussing the overall demographic data that we already have, serves any purpose?
So you admit this data is consistent with the overall demographic data we already have. That’s a start!
Oh for god’s sake. If you’re going to start crowing about getting me to ‘admit’ things I never denied in the first place and which are totally beside the point, there’s not much point in continuing.
In any case, any ‘data’ about a particular individual case would be consistent with overall trends. That’s why they are overall trends. If we’re talking about averages – which we are when we talk about publication rates – then you can take an individual with however many publications you like and that ‘data’ will still be consistent with the overall trend. If the average is 1, say, and the individual you’ve picked out has 0, these two facts are consistent. As they would be if the individual had 1, or 10 for that matter.
The question is whether the data here points in the opposite direction of the rest of the data. It doesn’t. It points in the same direction. And no one’s being an asshole to point out that Yale’s flyouts fit the trend.
1:31, I’m not keen on having individuals discussed by people here. But you have made no case that this discussion is either trading in false claims, or is doing an injustice to the candidates who are evidently getting flyouts in a market where most people do not, and do not know what it takes to get a flyout.
1:50, so you agree that we shouldn’t discuss individuals? Great. We probably have similar reasons.
And I have never claimed that people were ‘trading in false claims’ so I’m not sure how it is relevant to the discussion. What I have made a case for – multiple times – is the claim that discussing individuals isn’t useful, and is at worst counterproductive, and that it’s mean. So there’s no reason to do it. If you are having trouble with the last claim, imagine people here were dissecting your CV publicly in this way. How would you feel? Most people, I’m sure, wouldn’t like it very much if it were them. And given that it doesn’t achieve anything anyway, there’s no reason to do it. But I’ve explained this several times now.
You admit this data fits with the trend that the rest of the data shows. That is relevant for determining, in a case where this data didn’t fit, whether there would be some reason to think the trend was misleading. The rest sounds like concern-trolling.
“That is relevant for determining, in a case where this data didn’t fit, whether there would be some reason to think the trend was misleading.”
No it isn’t.
“The rest sounds like concern-trolling”
I think people are being assholes. I’ve explained why. If you want to call that concern-trolling, fine. I don’t see what’s ‘trolling’ about it though.
I didn’t say it shouldn’t be done. I said I wasn’t keen on it. And because this data is in line with the trends we already have data on, it is relevant for discussing those trends. We are probably a year or two away before Feminist Philosophers start a campaign to shame departments that don’t have enough non-white-male flyouts (if ever they occurred). And there can be no doubt if the data pointed in the other direction the usual voices would have something to say about it. I just do not think you have made any case for your position here, either on moral or epistemic grounds.
I’ve made the case multiple times. You haven’t even addressed the points I made, let alone undermined them. If your reasons for doing this are two things which haven’t happened yet and might not ever happen, then you need better reasons.
Hi 2:42. 2:12 here. I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere. No one’s being an asshole to point out that Yale’s flyouts fit the trend on hiring that the rest of the data we have over the last few years has been showing. You haven’t given any reason for thinking the data presented here is either being misused, or is doing an injustice to anyone. And for what it’s worth, you do come off like a concern troll. Take care, and good luck in the profession!
Hi 3:22:
“No one’s being an asshole to point out that Yale’s flyouts fit the trend on hiring that the rest of the data we have over the last few years has been showing”
They are being assholes when they say things that imply these people are only getting flyouts because they are a woman or minority.
“You haven’t given any reason for thinking the data presented here is either being misused, or is doing an injustice to anyone.”
Yes I have. I’ve explained, multiple times, why discussing individuals is both pointless and mean.
“And for what it’s worth, you do come off like a concern troll.”
I really don’t care that you think that.
“Take care, and good luck in the profession!”
For what it’s worth, you probably shouldn’t call people out for ‘coming off like a concern troll” if you’re going to end your posts like that.
If you really can’t understand why there are reasons against publicly subjecting people who are on the job market to this kind of shit, you’re severely lacking in empathy.
Jesus 349, no one said or implied anything about why anyone was ‘only’ getting flyouts. Demographics are not total explanations. Get a grip.
““Take care, and good luck in the profession!”
For what it’s worth, you probably shouldn’t call people out for ‘coming off like a concern troll” if you’re going to end your posts like that.”
Oh, I disagree! Just because I disagree with you over whether you’ve made your case, or whether you’re concern trolling, it does not follow that I cannot wish you well in the profession. You may not like being called out as a concern troll, and I get that. But that doesn’t mean I wish you ill will or anything. I just disagree with your politics (in a broad sense), and your assessment of the value of collecting and discussing information like we saw here.
You’re the one bringing ‘desert’ into the picture. That’s not necessary. We don’t have to speculate about who ‘deserves’ this or that interview or job, I agree. But it’s still useful to share information about who got this or that interview or job and the basic facts about their situation (“just the facts”, if you will — PhD in hand? teaching experience in hand? publications? pedigree? AOS? advisor?, etc.).
So no one used the word ‘desert’. But look a 10:50 and 11:28. They are both very clearly implying that the candidates didn’t deserve their flyouts, and/or only got them because they were black or a woman.
As for ‘just the facts’ being useful, it is not clear at all why info about flyouts (as opposed to hiring data) is helpful. It is also not clear why it is helpful to father this info piecemeal by scouring the web and taking a guess about what talks are job talks. This kind of info is unreliable and the sample size is way too small to tell anyone anything useful. And again, we already gave this info about hiring data. So it is clear that all this nonsense about “gathering information” is just a smokescreen people are hiding behind in order to try and justify their asshole behaviour.
If a person sincerely wanted this kind of data, there are responsible ways to go about gathering it. Publicly and anonymously implying that a specific black person only got their flyout because they are black is not it. Further, this kind of crap actually makes it harder to gather enough data to actually draw any meaningful conclusions.
Another perspective here: I think it is good to publicize the successes of women and people of color, including flyouts and offers. Do you disagree?
Yes, I disagree. Especially in the middle of the hiring process. If it were the candidates themselves making things public, that would be different. But when its anonymous people guessing based on who is giving a talk, and publicizing this info , especially before a hire has been made, it’s not cool. Would you want anonymous people gossiping about whether you had a flyout, and talking about whether your publication record is good enough for the job you are currently in the process of interviewing for? (In any case, its pretty clear the the point of the posts above is decidedly not to “celebrate the successes of women and people of color”).
Who is guessing? Where is desert mentioned? You appear to be attacking straw men.
Oh my god, will you read the thread. People are looking at lists of who is giving a talk, and making the guess that those people are job candidates. As I have already said, no one used the word desert, But several commenters clearly imply that the candidates didn’t deserve their flyouts, and/or only got them because they were black or a woman.
That’s not guessing. That’s how job talks are listed. So you really don’t have an objection backed up by anything.
Read the damn thread. For both schools listed, people have assumed that the list of speakers are all job talks, and other commenters have stated that some are not. People are making guesses about whether talks are job talks. If you can’t even be bothered to read the thread, don’t bother commenting.
You’ve made a number of unsupported accusations about what other people have said. And you’ve been called out on it.
“For both schools listed, people have assumed that the list of speakers are all job talks, ”
False.
I don’t think that’s right 828. It looks like the false assumptions were made about the people calling attention to job talks, not by them.
Jan 5, 6:11: “Here is who Yale is interviewing the next two months, labeled as “Guest Speakers”.
That commenter is assuming that the list of speakers are job talks. (Note the word ‘interviewing.’)
You can read the rest yourself.
“One white man with a lot of publications… and five not-white-men with not a lot of publications.” And this ended up being true.
That looks at worst mispoken 9:33. None of the demographic information collected here has been shown to be erroneous.
-1
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4098332/They-Kant-PC-students-demand-white-philosophers-including-Plato-Descartes-dropped-university-syllabus.html
London must have the dumbest student population of the world.
Best to take what you read in the Daily Mail without a grain of salt.
“Data was collected a couple of years ago by Dr Carolyn Dicey Jennings, who placed the raw data in a number of spreadsheets. The dataset used for this blogpost used to be here and concerns philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013.
…
The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8.
The median number of publications for a woman hired was 0.
The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5.
The median number of publications for a man hired was 1.
… In particular, the column for “0 Publications” shows that a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men. … For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications. … The statistical findings, at least as far as philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013 were concerned, indicate the existence of both prestige and gender bias in philosophy job hiring:
Against lower prestige male applicants.
For high prestige female applicants.
As noted above, the correlation amongst those hired between being unpublished and gender is statistically significant.”
http://genderandprestige.blogspot.com
I never thought I’d actually be relieved to see someone post this again.
KarmaKrazy is gone, and the metablog is alive again! Hurrah!
One suggestion qua question: why cant people make up, even if its just a random string of words a username besides anonymous? Would make tracking conversations more rational. As it is, this reads like a poorly written internal Socratic dialogue of a schizophrenic gossip.
The metablog was the first to out the FP bloggers some time ago. How about the Rightly Considered bloggers? Who is who?
Hi Brian!
Boring! Let’s have some names!
Who cares? They’re all nobodies doing nothing interesting.
The only one from the Fake Philosophers website who got outed (“Magical Ersatz”) was Barnes, and everyone knew that anyway.
I didn’t know it. Pogin was also outed.
Can someone explain the origin of the Jazz Tranley nickname?
There was a time when Jazz (like Rachel Dolezal) claimed to not be white. Progressive, trans* thinking at its best, hence “Tranley”. I never heard where the “Jazz” came from.
Someone at Yale clearly reads the PMMMB. The job talks are no longer advertised.
Surprise surprise. Exactly as predicted, the kind of bullshit above leads to information that may be of use to people – like who is giving a talk where – being made less available. Nice one, geniuses.
Please join me in 2 minutes of silence for all the fragile psyches.
I demand the right to be an asshole without people complaining about it!
I demand the right to determine who the assholes are!
One less department participating in the questionable, counterproductive practice of moral grandstanding/virtue signaling? That sounds like good news to me.
I know some of the New Consensus types and they all read the PMMMB obsessively. More back in the days when this place had more traffic, but they are pretty much obsessed with it. Interesting thing to think about from a psychological perspective.
Is the league of philosophers for ethical extramarital sex still active? Who boinks who?
Brian Leiter and Scott Shapiro, based on twitter flirting alone.
The scooter is a great ride, they say.
this is gross. stop it.
Who is scooter? Scratchy or Itchy?
Have to agree with that post on LR, it is so annoying to have only 5 hours to decide whether or not I want to do a Skype interview at a place I applied! Additionally, it would have been nice for the author of the email to have noted in the body of the email, rather than the signature, that he was from Cal State Sacramento! Am I really expected to recognize the name of the chair of the department or deduce where the email was from based on the sender’s email address? So unprofessional….that’s one department I won’t be applying to, for sure.
Would you feel the same if you didn’t have e-mail access the evening the invite came?
Or were applying from a country in a different timezone? If you’re in London, then you had from 3am to 8am to reply. Sucks if you happened to sleep in that morning I guess.
I got the email. The signature was below the ‘…’ fold in gmail, so it really was unclear where it was from unless you knew what csus.edu stands for off the top of your head. All BL’s correspondent said was that it was another feature of the message that was outside the norm, which is true. It also fits a pattern of this department being indifferent to the experience of applicants, which is horrible enough even when professional norms are followed. Imagine opening the message at 11:55 PST after putting your kids to bed and grading papers for one of the four classes you’re teaching as an adjunct, and seeing that you have precious little time to respond and secure a spot, possibly in the next 8 hours. Wouldn’t it be nice for it to be immediately obvious what school you’re agreeing to interview with? Is that scenario so unthinkable?
Honestly 3:57, I hope you either work at Cal State Sacramento, and so are too close to this to see the problem, or are just having a hard time on the market and looking to lash out. This is really shitty behavior, and it doesn’t take much empathy to understand why.
Hey guys, 3:57 here again. I take back everything I said, and I’ll tell you why: I fell in love! Can you believe it?? LOVE! And let me tell you…She. Is. The. Greatest!! We’re hopping in her Ford Taurus in a few minutes here to drive to Niagara Falls, and I’m seriously considering popping the question. The best thing about her is, she taught me the value of self-respect. Before we met, I was giving handjobs behind the old Three Rivers Stadium for half-sandwiches. It never even occurred to me to bargain up to full sandwiches! Well no longer. From now on, a half-sandwich gets you nothing more than an unenthusiastic half-handie. Anywho, I totes get where you all are coming from now. Good luck on the job market, and I can’t wait for you to meet my special lady!!
Niagara Falls (the town) is a total dump.
Could someone post the Cal State-Sacramento interview questions? Would be helpful to those of us who didn’t even get their shitty time-limited offer of a Skype interview.
I fucking hate the job market.
This kind of bullshit–and it is bullshit–is largely the result of market saturation. Alas, whenever anyone suggests that we put reasonable limits on the production of PhDs, the new consensus types start crying about “paternalism” or some such nonsense. One suspects this might be the only context in which they object to “paternalism.”
What if I happen to be rich and just want to gain a Phd in philosophy? Just because a lot of people overestimate the quality of their work should not prevent me from getting one.
In a more sane philosophical community, nothing would stop rich people who just want PhDs from getting those PhDs. They’d just have to be good enough to be admitted under more stringent admissions conditions. There are a decent number of schools that have no business offering the PhD; surely they shouldn’t keep doing so just to meet the needs of those who (a) want a PhD for its intrinsic value rather than as a credential AND (b) are incapable of being admitted to a strong program.
Wait, I don’t get it.
Why shouldn’t some weaker department continue to offer PhDs to people who have no interest in continuing in academia?
I doubt there would be real demand, but if there is, why not?
There are two basic reasons to get a PhD. First, to earn the credential needed for an academic job. Second, because the degree (or the process of earning it) has some value in itself. A number of weaker departments rarely place their students in stable academic jobs. Since these departments fail to offer credentials that can aid in securing academic employment, it would seem the only reason to enroll in their PhD programs is for the sake of the degree itself. But, of course, few of the students who enroll in such programs do so simply because they want PhDs. No. Through some combination of self-deception, youthful naivete, professional ignorance, and grooming from their undergraduate mentors, these students come to believe that they are special and thereby have a good shot at securing an academic job. I’ve been to many conferences where I’ve met plenty of smart, interesting, and friendly students who were enrolled in weak programs. I’ve met no more than a couple of them who were uninterested in pursuing an academic career. I find it both vicious and professionally catastrophic that we allow these students to spend five or more years of their lives prepping for jobs that no longer exist. That one member of their cohort may not care about joining the professoriate hardly justifies letting the rest persist in their doomed quest. Unless these departments make it explicit that they are not training students to become professors and will not enroll those who aspire to become professors, they should not admit graduate students.
paraphrasing the (pretty standard) list:
1. why do you want this job?
2. what are your research interests?
3. what courses in your AOS do you want to teach?
4. what courses outside your AOS?
5. how do you meet the AOS needs of the position?
6. can/will you teach online?
7. how would you contribute to the applied ethics center?
8. what are your experiences with diverse people?
9. can you handle a 4/4 and do service and research? how?
10. any questions for us?
11. Are you prepared to pay a small fee to join PENMA and participate in weekly ‘ethical’ multi-partner orgies, as part of an APA-funded ‘research project’ we are running?
It was some other Cal State school that, last year, decided it didn’t need to send out requests for applicants’ letters if they hadn’t applied more than a week before the due date, and then told applicants they were rejected because their application was incomplete. Stay classy!
This is amazing http://dailynous.com/2017/01/19/haslanger-issues-diversity-fund-challenge/
What a horrible lady
I demand that this white cis-gendered matriarch give up her position rather than fostering a fight among young untenured people forcing them to participate in the oppression olympics. If you are so concerned about diversity, step aside, you pale white bitch! And please be consistent across the board: no more Jews, they are overrepresented in academia. Think about the progress philosophy could have made if we had people like Nathaniel Coleman instead of Yablo or Kripke.
I was going to write a post mocking an article of Justine Weinberg’s, but then I realized that would entail finding and reading one of them. Some sacrifices are just to much great for one person to bear.
There are many remarkable things about that post and the defences of it in the comments. But by far most remarkable is how unfunny Justin W., Mark Lance, and ‘some person or other’ are while being at the same time convinced of their own comedic genius. Set to the side the philosophical ineptitude they show. The ‘performative’ shtick called forth such powerful groans that my throat has begun to hurt. The jokes about other people grandstanding are so obvious that they are beneath a tween on 4chan. The original post reads more like a conspiracy theory than a satire. Are they getting private congratulations from allies on their displays of wit? It is as if they are stand-up comedians who are bombing on purpose for practice. I am actually mad at them for making me feel so vicariously embarrassed for them. (Sorry for mistakes, english is not my first language.)
What really annoys me about Weinberg is that it’s so transparent who he wants to ingratiate himself with.
I wonder how successful he is. I mean, I’m basically sympathetic to the view on the politics/sociology of the profession he wants to align himself with, but I just think he’s a total wanker. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could actually respect him.
“… they are beneath a tween on 4chan”
delete your account
I suspect that even for those in the in-crowd with two brain cells to rub together he’s regarded as a useful idiot. Say what you will about Leiter, but he’s accomplished more than start a blog and rankings. He doesn’t need the blog to be raised above the level of a nobody whose tenure case was a coin toss. Weinberg’s only path to professional relevance is through blogging, so he has to stay in line and promote the interests of the powerful, or he loses everything.
whoa. Maybe I miscommunicated, or maybe you misread me, or maybe something, but I’m ‘some person or other’, and my depression about the post was about Justin’s post–like I genuinely found it really depressing that he felt the need to use up his time and energy to attack more junior people, and in a way that I found depressingly nasty. I just meant to be agreeing with (at least some of) the comments criticizing the post. Sorry if that wasn’t clear, and maybe it was and you have a problem with some other aspect of my comment. But for what it’s worth, I meant “I’m really depressed at the state of the philosoblogosphere/this post of Justin’s”.
My mistake. In a post with so much bad satire short comments sometimes do not have enough context to distinguish them from the garbage. I thought it was a bad joke about piling on (“I guess I don’t have any content to add to the worries raised above”) since many others were criticizing the post. I apologize. I share your depression. Weinberg has chosen the least constructive response to this paper. I continue to feel embarrassed for him and I hope he rethinks his decisions sincerely and not only because of public pressure.
If we can turn this idea into a positive, we may find out a cool new way to do philosophy from all this. Chin up, beautifriends! http://philosophymetablog.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-beautiful-example-of-performative.html
Yeah, one wonders how much of the “it’s surprising that PPA even published this!” is sour grapes from someone whose publications top out at a PPQ paper five years ago and a few papers in third tier value theory journals.
Ouch. This is exactly the kind of sick burn that keeps me coming back.
Hear hear! Me too! More withering evaluations of well-known philosophers please!
This thread has actually changed my feelings about Justin. I used to feel anger towards him. As a person with power to help frame professional philosophy’s disciplinary narrative, I was angry at the way he used that power to passive aggressively bully people, silence dissent, and promote the excesses of SJW call-out culture. Now I mostly just feel pity towards him. Justin is an adult man who apparently has so little going for him (personally, professionally, and comically) that he thought it would be wise to make the post on grandstanding. Imagine a life in which the promise of getting facebook props from Sally Haslanger and Mark Lance is sufficient to motivate you to piss all over a couple of people who did nothing to provoke you. What a hollow existence.
I see that Weinberg has now posted an addendum responding to criticism his post has received, and that the self-humiliation continues, though now in a minor key. Two things seem worth mentioning.
One, though we cannot know what if anything has happened in private, the addendum falls far short of an apology for what has quite reasonably been interpreted by many readers as an intemperate attack on two junior members of the profession. I have found the following to be a helpful start at a set of criteria for an apology: https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/on-apology/
Second, Weinberg writes: “It’s not as if by saying that some moral complaint is an instance of virtue signalling or moral grandstanding one is issuing a substantive response to the content of that complaint. Rather, one is saying that the complaint isn’t worth substantively responding to, because it is being made in bad faith. It is a way of dismissing, rather than engaging.”
I could not agree more.
Whatever else you may think of Brian Leiter, I think we can all agree that his face makes an amazing birthday cake:
https://mobile.twitter.com/cursedimages/status/783487094517735425/photo/1
Two comments above on January 14:
“Someone at Yale clearly reads the PMMMB. The job talks are no longer advertised.”
“Surprise surprise. Exactly as predicted, the kind of bullshit above leads to information that may be of use to people – like who is giving a talk where – being made less available. Nice one, geniuses.”
Likewise, short term jobs are going to be less widely advertised than they might otherwise be as a result of the kind of nonsense we see on PMMMB above and elsewhere. Stop your bitching about desert or there’s going to be no dessert.
>short term jobs
>less widely advertised
>and elsewhere.
What did 9:29 mean by this?
PHILOSOPHY IS FUCKED: THE SYLLABUS
Week 1: Contemporary French Philosophy
Week 2: Feminist metaphysics
Week Three: Epistemic Injustice
Week 4: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems in the Age of Trump
Who else got shit besides Richardson?
Huh?
CDJ and CIJ, and one other person, I think.
Haslanger gets roasted: http://rightlyconsidered.org/2017/01/25/a-raging-philosopher/
Sure. Because of course as everyone knows the expectations about the number of publications someone needs to be a strong candidate haven’t changed at all in the last 37 years. And the writer has super special inside knowledge of what the head of department at Ann Arbor said to her. And if you have been successful in your career, you’re not allowed to complain about any aspects of it ever, on your own behalf or on behalf of others you think (rightly or wrongly) are getting a raw deal.
Come on, 12:19. You’re better than this. If you have an issue with what Haslanger says, state it.Don’t be lazy and drag into the discussion posts from RC which sound like they’re written by someone who’s auditioning for a job in Trump’s press team.
Strawman & ad hominem, 7:54. Learn to argue.
I wish the alt-right would teach their foot soldiers about more fallacies. It’s really boring just seeing people just shouting ‘strawman!’ and ‘ad hominem!’ every time they realize they are out of their depth and don’t have the smarts to be able to respond (especially when they don’t really know how to apply the terms properly).
“That meant I would have to have twice the usual number of tenure letters. It worked. [http://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/sally-haslanger/]
A stunning change: the department first lets her know that her research output is clearly inadequate for tenure, but then soon reverses itself and puts her under “heightened scrutiny”, which amounts only to asking her to submit more recommendation letters. And, unsurprisingly, “it worked”.”
Natural Lawyer has no idea how tenure works. A tenure letter is not “a letter of recommendation” and one doesn’t get asked to submit them on their own. Tenure letters are requested by departments. Getting twice the number is in fact hard work. Whatever one might think of Haslanger, the author of this screed is an idiot who knows nothing about academia.
For a start Sesardic wrote those words, not NL. It is also common practice for tenure candidates to provide names for outside letters.
>Getting twice the number is in fact hard work.
So is writing a paper.
Hi 12:19/7:50/7:56 (aka Natural Lawyer) if you’re going to try and use PMMMB to drive traffic to your blog, it might be a good idea to be a bit less transparent about it.
From http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/tv_journalists_need_to_find_a_new_way_to_handle_kellyanne_conway.html
“An interview with Conway is like a game of Crazy Eights with one rule change: Every card is crazy. No matter what you say, she’ll pick a word from your question and use it to change suits. Use the word “fact,” and she’ll ask, “Chuck, do you think it’s a fact or not that millions of people have lost their plans or health insurance?”….You’ll never win this game because you’ll have to use words. She’ll pick the one she likes and throw out the rest.”
Or in this case, use the term ‘hard work’ …
Clearly 7:56 doesn’t really have any idea how tenure works either. Yes, it is common practice for candidates to provide some but not all names (never more than half). But that’s not “submitting recommendation letters,” it’s providing a list of possible names for a department to contact. And, again, tenure letters are not “recommendation letters” like you might write for a job candidate or an undergraduate applying for law school. They’re a different thing entirely. Yes, writing papers is hard work, but that is, ahem, a non sequitur. Amassing double the amount of tenure letters for a candidate, especially one whose research output is minimal, is in fact very hard work for a chair and a higher bar for a candidate.
Bonevac is a moron. And his publication record sucks, too. Just goes to show that this isn’t a meritocracy.
You forget to take your meds today?
The ones that make sacks of shit look like cuddly teddies?
who’s Professor Z??
https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/2917/
Given Saul’s track record in making false accusations, why would anyone be interested?
can you give some details of these false accusations? (genuine question)
Given the stories I’ve already heard of him, my educated guess is that it is a very well-known philosopher of mind currently stationed in the southern United States (no, not McGinn).
I’m probably thinking of the same person, but might have a slightly different understanding of the region. (Disagreement about conventional facts, not genuine geographical facts.)
Does he wear ties a lot?
He is certainly a tie kind of guy.
Does he enjoy Thai food?
She says she sent it to a college newspaper, so obviously she’s not trying to keep the identities secret. But apparently the newspaper didn’t bite; anyway Googling doesn’t turn up anything.
In fact, although the WIIL post is entitled “Going public with sexual harassment”, this is one of the least successful attempts at going public I have ever seen.
I wonder what’s up with that.
Problem is the letter refers to “Y University’s” philosophy department not “University of Y’s” department. So it can’t be the guy who wears the tie, since he teaches at University of Y, not Y University.
Hmmm. Fair point.
Hardly conclusive. The author might have said ‘Y University’ precisely to invalidate this kind of inference, and so avoid the risk of defeating the whole purpose of anonymizing the place. Or, perhaps for this reason, she might have just decided to adopt a generic scheme of anonymity: X University, Y University, etc. If it were the College of Charleston, do you think she would have said ‘the College of Y’? She presumably would like this person’s identity to become known eventually, but there are good reasons for not wanting to be seen as helping to reveal it, beyond what’s strictly involved in describing her experience.
Not conclusive, but there are lots of “Universities of Y,” and lots of “Y Universities,” unlike your example of “College of Y.” Add to that the fact that the letter states it was sent to the Chancellor. The tie-wearing man teaches at a university with a President, not a Chancellor. By contrast, a “Y University” in New Jersey has a Chancellor. And this “Y University” has had an excellent grad program long enough that there might be female graduates now “established” enough to level these charges. As to who it might be, I don’t know.
Maybe the pronoun is a red herring: Professor Z could be Anna Stubblefield, and the whole letter could be the Stubbleghazi person taking their art to the next level!!
Good catch, Anonymous999! As far as I can tell, that’s one of only two “Y Universities” with both a top-50 philosophy department and a Chancellor.
Rage gonna rage:
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/liberal-professors-conservative-students-clash-on-college-of-charleston-campus/article_9de17ee8-e1ae-11e6-8f86-938417ffedfd.html
This is sad, she may lose her job because she can’t control herself.
Not sad at all. Be a professional. If you can’t do it, there are 200 candidates who can.
“accusing McKinnon of having a mental breakdown and silencing conservative students in class.”
Surely not.
“As a professor, she said her duty is not to indoctrinate students, but to challenge power structures.” Read that contract a bit more carefully, eh?
“At one point, McKinnon said, she slammed her hand against the lectern after a student suggested South Carolina’s deeply conservative Legislature would protect gay, lesbian and transgender rights if the new administration attempted to yank them away.”
This student is pretty stupid. Wouldn’t most people hit their own heads on the lectern after this clanger?
One can only hope. At least she doesn’t post around here anymore…
Let’s hope so.
I think it’s Rutgers too. But who cares?
Posted without comment:
NDPR review of Arvan’s Rightness as Fairness
amusing, but too charitable imo. e.g.:
“in his derivation of the principles of non-coercion and assistance, Arvan makes a valuable argument…”
sure, the argument is valuable, but it can hardly be said to be Arvan’s. it’s just a particularly flat-footed version of the standard Kantian derivation of these principles from the CI; see e.g. any Rawls student, basically. (in the same vein, I was surprised the reviewer didn’t point out that the first part is just a shitty version of Possibility of Altruism.)
i’m really hoping Arvan responds at length on his blog.
Why? I haven’t been much impressed by what I’ve seen of his work, either. But I don’t get the glee with which some here dump on him. If you were tasked with making a list of 50 people in the profession who most deserve a comeuppance, would you really put him on it? If so you should look around a bit more. His main offence seems to be starting a blog that some find annoying for its relentless positivity, and posting about his work there. It’s not as if he’s become influential as a result and is abusing his power.
oh, desert has nothing to do with it!
look, he seems like a really nice person, and if I were more virtuous I wouldn’t take glee in the deficiencies of others.
but it IS comically bad philosophy.
Having read the posted review, I’m left to conclude that Marcus doesn’t have an adequate network of philosopher friends to talk shop/share work with. The bad math in his book is something that someone should’ve caught right away. The overambitious project with far too many moving parts is probably also something a trusted critic should have been able to talk him out of. It appears he is the only philosopher on his campus who is even trying to carry out serious research. I know what that’s like. Perhaps those of us who are trying to do serious research while teaching in the trenches at mediocre schools should have some kind of digital working group.
I suppose it’s naive to ask why a reviewer wouldn’t catch it?
I admit to also getting some pleasure out of this, while feeling bad about myself for doing so. But also… I don’t think it’s just the chipper-ness of the blog that is annoying. There is more about the tone than just that. It all seems sort of smug while trying very hard to pretend not to be smug. And condescending. Or something. None of that is quite right, but that blog has bothered me for forever, and I’ve never been able to exactly state what it is. (Though to be fair it’s less annoying than most of the other philosophy blogs.)
I think I understand what you mean about the tone. My reading of it is that he’s usually trying very hard to be open and sincere. Sometimes that’s just bound to come off wrong to some readers, because I think that’s a pretty tough tone to maintain and get across on the internet. That may be especially true on a philosophy blog, since we’re pretty well conditioned to read those as self-aggrandizing and nasty. Then there are times when he’s obviously trying to be kind and encouraging and it seems strained. But again, that’s tough to pull off in some situations. I don’t read the blog regularly, but his initial posts about his own struggles in graduate school and on the market (in which he’s very sincere and vulnerable) color my interpretation when I do.
It’s also entirely possible that philosophy blogs just are annoying. I know I’m much happier when I read them only sparingly.
Most philosophers aren’t good writers. Combine that with the narcissism and middling intelligence of the average blogger and you have your explanation.
This would seem ripe for discussion: http://www.chronicle.com/article/I-Have-Multiple-Loves-/239077
My sense is that the above article provides another data point in favor of the longstanding generalization that “transgressive” academics are self-important bores.
Yes, but did she find the tiara?
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/06/a-classic-metablog-moment.html
I appreciate that she is striking out into new territory beyond her early dissertation work, but honestly, polyamory is not a radical new idea. Only from a very conservative life history would it seem to be something that had to be worked out philosophically. To me the interview reads like someone who grew up Mormon was justifying the drinking of coffee, as something that could be enjoyable, good for you and not against god’s will.
yeah it’s kind of irritating. matter of factly talking about leaving your boyfriend’s apartment to go home to your husband, as if we’re all meant to go ‘oooh that’s so progressive’. gimme a break, it’s vain and embarrassing.
The above comes from a metabro who can’t get a job or girl, lolz
Owned by a concerned citizen not 30 minutes later, lolz
On the one hand, I share the general sentiment that Scratchy comes off as silly and vain. On the other hand, there’s something that genuinely worries me about the way narcissistic social justice types publicly express their sexual peccadilloes.
I don’t care about how many lovers this woman takes (diachronically or synchronically). But I sense that the public presentation of her sexual life is designed, at least in part, to elicit a side-taking response from others. Those who express disapproval can be shamed as “haters” and “bigots,” thus furthering the cause of righteousness (and providing information about whom to exclude from conferences). Those who express enthusiastic approval can be identified as “allies,” thus earning themselves a special social designation. What about those who just shrug at this kind of stuff? My sense is that they get grouped with the haters–and forced to pay the costs–unless or until they make a public affirmation of approval. And that strikes me as a kind of soft coercion.
Yes
naw, I think you’re reading too much into it. philosophers writing about emotions etc use concrete examples all the time, usually from literature or their own lives. done well, it’s great. done badly, it just comes off as pretentious (in the case of literary examples) or narcissistic (in the case of autobiographical ones). but that doesn’t mean the writer is actually pretentious or narcissistic–just that they’re not good at this style of philosophy. given that Jenkins is doing a really ambitious project in an area she has zero experience in, it’s not that surprising.
The other evidence that Jenkins is a pretentious narcissist is fairly substantial, though. This is just more of the same.
Well, in any case, pursuing an extremely ambitious project in an area you have zero experience in (and dismissing almost all of the voluminous literature in that area without citing it) is itself pretty pretentious and narcissistic if you ask me.
are you talking about Jenkins? she’s been working in this area for years, citing tons of the literature
where? the larb review says she basically ignores the contemporary literature in her book; are her articles different?
yes
the book is for a general audience, and regular people don’t like footnotes. the journal articles are more like what we philosophers are used to
as far as I can tell they’re all about the psychology, sociology, or biology of love, not about what love actually is.
I mean, that’s fine. it’d be AWESOME if someone wrote a book about, say, the social construction of chairs and why if YOU wanted to call one of those bean-bag things a chair, that’s totally cool and you shouldn’t let anyone tell you otherwise. but you’d be a pretentious narcissist if you said you were doing mereology, and mentioned but just didn’t engage with people who worked on material constitution or whatever. afaict jenkins is basically just doing that with love.
If she loves both of them, why is she married to only one of them?
Presumably, because the law.
Sigh … Polyamory is a solecism. It’s either multi-amory or polyphilia.
Your rejection of words with mixed roots is … dysfunctional.
Does that mean that “television” is a solecism? There are plenty of words with mixed Latin and Greek roots…
Actually, Sisters O Sisters is better.
ian dabney miller
Did anyone see Bonevac on Scratchy and Itchy?
Where?
Why do all the front page stories about philosophy on the Chronicle seem to be one of these:
Sexual Harassment
Sexual Habits of Canadian Philosophers
Philosophy Programs Closing
Fuck we need better PR people in this discipline.
pmb needs to work on reading comprehension, literally 0% of that che piece is about cj’s sexual activities
Let me fix that for you with two words: conversational implication.
https://theestablishment.co/dear-media-polyamory-is-not-all-about-sex-6216830b9d39#.fls7a8o3l
OK, then, let’s reword: I don’t care how many boys Carrie Jenkins holds hands with.
Case one: S is married. S also has several very close friends to whom S is deeply and lovingly committed.
Case two: S is married. S also has several very close friends to whom S is deeply and lovingly committed. and with whom S engages in sex acts.
If sexual non-exclusivity isn’t the defining feature of polyamory, then it would seem that anyone whose life conforms to case one is engaged in polyamory or something near enough.
This suggests the concept of polyamory is vacuous and that polyamorists are hardly conducting an experiment-in-living worthy of some kind of special acknowledgement. Indeed, it suggests most married humans are polyamorous!
In response, polyamorist might contend that it is “romantic relationship” non-exclusivity (rather than sexual non-exclusivity) that is the defining feature of his lifestyle. In that case, I want to know what distinguishes chaste romantic relationships from chaste loving friendships.
good questions
here is a book on the nature of love https://www.amazon.com/What-Love-Could-Be/dp/0465098851
tl;dr
I wonder whether Jenkins’s Canada Research Chair will be renewed. It seems a bait and switch. They hired a philosopher of math because Crispin Wright was high on her, and now she’s serving up light fare fit for daytime TV.
She’s long past logic chopping…now she’s following THE WAY OF RAY! For more: http://thewayofray.com/
http://induecourse.ca/the-problem-of-me-studies/
I guarantee it will be renewed. Funding agencies eat this kind of thing up. Academic work that interests the broader public, and has a social justice angle? CRC is going to love it.
You think? Even after the embarrassments of the last couple of years?
She’s still more successful than all of the adjunct losers that post here, just saying
great photo of Scratchy and her two cucks
Not so fast. The Freudian Elephant in the Room is “Whom is Mr. Scratchy banging?” The answer will plumb great psychic depths, I assure you.
More successful than an adjunct, yes. But now exposed as a drama queen, narcissist, who staged a crisis. Very unCanadian, more like an upper class Brit.
“Who staged a crisis” … Hey Brian, how’s the weather in Chicago these days?
NB, #2 “a bit of a ‘drama queen'” on http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/04/carrie-jenkins-electric-scooter.html
Yup that’s where I found it. We real Canadians are very concerned.
You found it on your own website? I’m confused.
No, this is Justin Trudeau’s site: https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
ahuh, and this is “Justin Trudeau”‘s: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/
Was he a guest-blogger?
lol
The ’embarrassments’ you’re talking about aren’t anything funding agencies, the public at large, or most philosophers think are embarrassing. Her career is doing just fine, whether people here think she deserves it or not
I really like the one thread per year approach — it’s like having a single loaf of white bread instead of a stack of slices.
Yeah, but this one is getting long…
https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/2917/
Was this a fake post from this website? The letter hasn’t shown up in any paper as far as anyone knows. None of the many people who allegedly received it has acknowledged that it was sent to the faculty or administrators it was allegedly sent. If it was sent to a dozen or more faculty and administrators it’s highly unlikely nothing has leaked out about the situation.
Jenny Saul has pretty bad reputation in the philosophy profession for distributing false accusations. Maybe people are just wising up to this pretty serious misconduct?
please elaborate – what were the false accusations?
No, she doesn’t. But it sure looks like you’re trying to give her one because you disagree with her political views.
Below is a list of current Canadian Research Chairs in Philosophy. I leave it to the reader to determine whether this is a distinguished group. (Some of these philosophers are clearly first rate.)
Tier 1
Baylis, Francoise, Dalhousie University
Deveaux, Monique, University of Guelph
Griffin, Nicholas J., McMaster University
Koslicki, Kathrin, University of Alberta
Kymlicka, Will, Queen’s University
Matthen, Mohan, University of Toronto
Narbonne, Jean-Marc, Université Laval
Waters, C. Kenneth, University of Calgary
Weijer, Charles, Western University
Tier 2
Brigandt, Ingo, University of Alberta
Cameron, Margaret A., University of Victoria
Claveau, François, Université de Sherbrooke
Crozier, Gillian, Laurentian University
Dilhac, Marc-Antoine, Université de Montréal
Dumont, Augustin, Université de Montréal
Dumsday, Travis, Concordia University College of Alberta
Heyes, Cressida, University of Alberta
Jenkins, Carrie Ichikawa, The University of British Columbia
Malaterre, Christophe, Université du Québec à Montréal
Pickavé, Martin, University of Toronto
Stang, Nicholas, University of Toronto
Turri, John, University of Waterloo
Below is a list of current Canadian Research Chairs in Philosophy. I leave it to the reader to determine whether this is a distinguished group.
Tier 1
Baylis, Francoise, Dalhousie University
Deveaux, Monique, University of Guelph
Griffin, Nicholas J., McMaster University
Koslicki, Kathrin, University of Alberta
Kymlicka, Will, Queen’s University
Matthen, Mohan, University of Toronto
Narbonne, Jean-Marc, Université Laval
Waters, C. Kenneth, University of Calgary
Weijer, Charles, Western University
Tier 2
Brigandt, Ingo, University of Alberta
Cameron, Margaret A., University of Victoria
Claveau, François, Université de Sherbrooke
Crozier, Gillian, Laurentian University
Dilhac, Marc-Antoine, Université de Montréal
Dumont, Augustin, Université de Montréal
Dumsday, Travis, Concordia University College of Alberta
Heyes, Cressida, University of Alberta
Jenkins, Carrie Ichikawa, The University of British Columbia
Malaterre, Christophe, Université du Québec à Montréal
Pickavé, Martin, University of Toronto
Stang, Nicholas, University of Toronto
Turri, John, University of Waterloo
I wonder how Canada Research Chairs are decided.
Peer review. There’s a big board of reviewers, with three assigned to each candidate.
Yeah, but departments nominate the candidates in the first place, and being Canada, they try to distribute them equally among the universities.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-what-love-is-and-what-it-could-be-carrie-jenkins-basic-books
What’s your take, Metablog Jenkins Fan? Where does it go wrong?
Jenkins Fan = Jenkins, obv.
tbh my guess was ichikawa, but yeah, something like that
Here’s another:
Neil Tennant’s review of Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge
By the way, I’ve long thought of her work as some of the most superficial and hole-ridden out there, long before she decided to make her mental health issues and boinking habits known the world over.
Genuine question: what are here mental health issues? I recall reading an interview where she obliquely referred to her disability but I couldn’t figure out what it is. And then, in the whole Leiter affair, it seemed to be a big thing, but again, I don’t know what it is. Is it depression? Anxiety? I don’t feel like she is trying to conceal it, since she refers to it in some of the pieces I’ve seen, but at the same time, I just haven’t common across what the disability is.
Narcissistic personality disorder with a dose of snowflake syndrome.
What I would like to know is, who was her dissertation adviser, given that her first book was based on it and is so comically bad.
https://philosophyfamilytree.wikispaces.com/Carrie+Jenkins
Simon Blackburn from the above link, but her dissertation is not listed on DIA or PQDT.
What was Simon thinking? Or was he wanking?
Maybe distracted, riding the scooter?
https://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.dreamstime.com%2Fz%2Fold-rusty-bicycle-there-damaged-near-wall-65146573.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dreamstime.com%2Feditorial-stock-photo-old-rusty-bicycle-there-damaged-near-wall-image65146573&docid=jFB2TPO2hAWMrM&tbnid=PcDAH-0IO1sqjM%3A&vet=1&w=1300&h=954&itg=1&bih=638&biw=1366&q=old%20rusty%20bicycle&ved=0ahUKEwiTuevMuIfSAhUEUBQKHXRjB9gQMwhbKDgwOA&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=954&imgrc=PcDAH-0IO1sqjM:&vet=1&w=1300
Picture was taken before. Don’t judge, you disgusting ableists!
Scratchiness is Polyamory plus Electrification.
“It looks like shapely noise to me”
Can we please ask CDJ to step away from the regressions
I was on her side re leiter, but she isn’t helping herself with this halfbaked voodo
David Wallace cooked her goose last time, he’s doing it again at Daily Snooze.
You do realize she says about three times on that thread that she didn’t find anything of statistical significance, right?
Only after prompting…
But please tell me what her fallback position, namely “shapely noise”, means? I’m literally all ears on this one…
Shapely Noise happens to one of Jazz Tranley’s many ex-girlfriends 😦
There aren’t many black women in philosophy.
She probably means that some weak correlation might be evident, hence that graph is shapely, but that the correlation is barely strong enough to be
Noticed- hence just noise.
How about a new thread?
Ay more shitty book review of Jenkins book we can send BL?