New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Will the web transform philosophical praxis? If so, how?

Let's stipulate an expansive notion of 'technology' such that (a) linguistic, mathematical, and logical developments also count as 'technology' and, thus, (b) a lot of philosophical breakthroughs are  preceded by technological ruptures. (Sometimes they redefine philosophy so much that we do not recognize the successor disciplines as "philosophy.") If so, is the web transforming or about to transform philosophical praxis? I use "praxis" to distinguish this question from the one about to what degree professional philosophy is being transformed by the web.

Let me first say what I do not mean with this question. The web *is* transforming philosophical scholarship by facilitating amazing storage & information retrieval (etc.) capacities. I used to spend huge amount of time in libraries (to look at old books and and to scan journals)--now I am genuinely surprised when I enter a library. There are regular on-line/skype seminars on papers, books, topics, etc. The web brings together distributed audiences previously unknown to each other. Blogs have created dedicated intellectual communities, and spawned philosophical movements and catapulted some echo-chambers to professional prominence. (We are probably living in a new golden age of philosophical correspondence--I bet Leibniz would have adored email.) Citation practices are being influenced by blog communities, phil papers, and google.scholar., etc. All of this is swell, but it does not challenge what we mean by "philosophy." (So here I am also ignoring all the exciting ways the web changes how we teach philosophy, and maybe I shouldn't.)

Intimidation of public universities (Turkey & Flanders) and the Rectors that play along

Disturbing stories are ongoing in Turkey and in Flanders: university administrators are eager to accede to demands of the government  (Turkey) or powerful politicians (Flanders) to silence and intimidate student and faculty protests against government policies/proposals.  The more serious one is developing in Turkey, where a student protest turned violent. The linked report claims that ODTU/METU (confusingly, there are two acronyms for same university) students threw Molotov cocktails. However, my Turkish sources claim there is no evidence of that, and have linked to this (Turkish) video, which suggests unprovoked police attacks, although I cannot guarantee, of course, there was no editing. (Maybe some of the police were trained in California?) I should say that the Rector of ODTÜ/METU, one of the most prestigious universities in Turkey, is showing backbone and is meeting with the government today. There is petition to show support here.

In Flanders, the philosopher, Lieven De Cauter, wrote an ill-tempered, satirical (somewhat funny) attack  (it's in Dutch, but enough is in English to understand how silly it all is) on the leading Flemish nationalist politician, Bart De Wever, who has a tendency to name-drop once famous philosophers (e.g., Adorono) in his editorials (this one preparing the way for future cuts in art-subsidies).  Yeah, Europe really is different. De Wever responded in brief to De Cauter. (The email exchange is linked in Dutch.) But what De Wever didn't tell De Cauter is that he also wrote Mark Waer, the Rector of the Catholic University in Leuven (one of De Cauter's employers), who has a poor record defending academics under attack, to complain about De Cauter. Waer responded, meekly, criticizing (I am freely translating) De Cauter's lack of civility. But the sentence that caught my attention was Waer's insistence that "there is also such a thing as academic restraint,"["Maar er is ook zoiets als academische terughoudendheid,"] clearly suggesting De Cauter failed in this duty.

What makes these stories interesting is that (a) the political establishments of both Turkey and Flanders are eager to invest in higher education as a means toward prosperous futures; (b) in both places important democratically elected politicians lack warmth toward an open, critical society (and a university professoriat that they see aligned with a discarded establishment); (c) in both places important parts of the higher education establishment much prefer being at the technocratic core of industry-government investment rather than presiding the kind of creative fertility and tension that is the breeding ground for creative industries (and what passes for independent thought) .

One (unethical) way to get a timely and friendly email referee report

Is to hack the editorial system, or to have unknown benefactors with a weird sense of humor (the story is here).

"Not you alone, but with the state and so on"

This is how Gary Becker concludes his impromptu remarks at a May 2012 University of Chicago seminar (set up by Bernard Harcourt [1] with François Ewald [2]) on Foucault's reading in Birth of Biopolitics[3] of Becker's human capital theory[4].  

Or if I look at the United States, how can I understand what young African-American men are doing? To me, this theory—and I’m not saying I fully understand what they’re doing—but the theory says, well, they have a lot of different options available.

What we’re pointing out to them is, if you drop out of high school in the United States, you’re pretty much destined to be unemployed, to have low earnings, to be in poor health, to have low marriage rates, and the like. That’s what the theory points out to them. And what it then points out to them is that you can overcome that in various ways. Not you alone, but with the state and so on.

 Discussion and notes below the fold.

Which one is the satire?

Cooper Union's new website: "Shake hands to new horizons, expansion and development! Syngerization of global leaders for the advancement of multidimensional growth prospects."

University of California's new brand attributes: "Visionary. Experimental. Optimistic. Awe-Inspiring. Essential. Audacious. Pioneering. Proven. Everything we say and do should embody these traits."

"Are you gay?"

I was asked the question in the title of this post during the closing moments of an Eastern APA job interview. I  believe I stammered "that's illegal," but maybe I only thought of that response in the bar later. In reality the conversation continued with the Chair of the department  after the interview and that was even less edifying. (I have shared more unprofessional interview moments here.) This by way of calling attention to our friends at Feminist Philosophy, who are having an important discussion about what to do in situations like the one I encountered. Those with wise council (I don't have any, alas) or in need of it should join in there.

A colleague in the discipline had warned me against the department with whom the 'are-you-gay-incident' occurred. (I was, in fact, trying to replace that person, but did not receive an 'on-campus-interview.') Given the deplorable situation on the professional philosophy junior/tenure-track job-market, we often forget that interviews are two-way encounters. Departments should be mindful that they are also 'selling' themselves not just to people desperate for a decent paying job in philosophy, but also to future professional colleagues in the discipline. I sometimes wonder if I will ever bump into the  self-described "philosopher of economics" who asked me the question about my sexual orientation/sense of self. I imagine the conversation starts with, "Actually, we have met before. You may not recall..."

You have to be narcissistic and regularly tap into your inner anger to succeed at blogging. Given that professional philosophy has treated me extremely generously during most of my career, my blogging floats along happily on my narcissism. But sometimes what animates my blogging are the memories of the many unprofessional experiences undergone and witnessed....

Will There Always Be Tenure?

Over on Leiter Reports, Amy Ferrer, newly appointed as executive director of the American Philosophical Association, has been writing a series of guest posts on the latest prospect for tenure track positions in North America. “According to much of public opinion, and unfortunately according to some in power in universities and our nation’s legislatures, tenured professors are paid too much to work too little, and can’t be removed from duty even if they’re doing a terrible job,” she writes. Currently, ¾ of teaching staff in post-secondary institutions are employed “off the tenure-track” and “The median pay per course, standardized to a three-credit course, was $2,700 in fall 2010 and ranged in the aggregate from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities,” according to a report from the Coalition of Academic Workers.

These are shocking trends, and it is perhaps natural to blame the poor economic climate and cling to the hope that things will turn around soonish. Of course, there is the right wing resurgence and that doesn’t bode too well. And as we saw, Ms. Ferrer puts some of the blame on public opinion. But surely things can't stay as bad as they have been for the last three years.

Hmm, yes . . . but this neglects one rather obvious fact.

Changing our frame of reference from "job market" to "political economy of philosophy instruction"

Th Dec 6, 5 pm CST: I'm moving this post back up as it's received some important comments from Ed Kazarian, in response to a comment I made at Leiter Reports to a post by Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director of the APA. By the way, all of Ferrer's posts at LR deserve reading. 

----

The past month (September 2011) we've had a series of interesting and informative posts on preparing graduate students to enter what is commonly called "the job market." The presupposition here is that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD. 

I don't want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

MOOCs: the newest online dating service

Employers willing to pay can now find their soulmates with Coursera's new escort, er, on-line dating, no, headhunter service to find students who like poetry, museum-going, and long walks on the beach. Or soft skills in addition to their raw performance. (Okay, now it's starting to sound like Craigslist.)

Providers of free online courses are officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs.... Both Coursera and Udacity show employers more than just student grades. They also highlight students who frequently help others in discussion forums. Mr. Thrun, of Udacity, said those "softer skills" are often more useful to employers than raw academic performance. 

To be serious for a moment, this is an excellent example of the Autonomia themes of "real subsumption" and the "social factory" (somewhat technical discussion here), that is, the incorporation of everyday social skills into capitalist production.

Bad News in US Student Loan default numbers [updated title]

[UPDATE M 3 Dec, 7:20 am, CST: Josh Miller in comments rightfully chides me for uncritically accepting the overly dramatic wording of the zerohedge article. So I've modified the title of the post.]

That's the take-away from this story at zerohedge.com. Their headline is even more dramatic than my post's title: 

The Scariest Chart Of The Quarter: Student Debt Bubble Officially Pops As 90+ Day Delinquency Rate Goes Parabolic

As I read the charts in the linked posts, the percentage of student loans now +90 days delinquent shot up from 9% to 11% last quarter. And the dollar value of newly delinquent loans went from $21 billion to $33 billion last quarter. Out of a total student loan debt (non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, let's not forget) of close to $1 trillion this post makes the claim that putting it all together, over $120 billion of student loan debt is now in default. I can't pretend to know what it all means, but it can't be good.

What happens to starting salaries if we abolish interviewing at the APA?

In my four years on the job-market I had about fifteen APA interviews--about a third of these include some of my most horrid experiences in professional philosophy (some favorites: being asked to respond to a series of quotes from my supervisor's letter of recommendation; the five minute silence after I answered a question about how I would teach medieval philosophy with "I would ask Profs. X and Y in your department for advice on that one;" not to mention far worse stories!) As an interviewer I have also left interviews , where I felt that my clarifying questions torpedoed (unintentionally, really!) some very worthy candidates' job-chances. Professional philosophers are not very good at this kind of thing. So, I am very open to just abolishing APA interviews (recall the discussion on the Leiter report and here at the PhilosophySmoker) [ht John Doris].

But I worry that if job-searches are not scheduled around the shared time-frame set by the Eastern APA that then there may be an unintended, bad side-effect: lower starting salaries. For, in the current situation most tenure track searches occur side-by-side. This generates at least the non-trivial possibility that at least some lucky folk may get multiple offers, which generate the opportunity for (modest) bidding wars. A few thousand dollars bump, say, in the first year can generate a huge difference in total salary at the end of one's career. Once the norm of interviewing at the APA dwindles I bet the tacitly-shared hiring calendar in philosophy will also disappear and a lot of universities will notice that they can hire philosophical talent cheaper than they do now.  I realize that even if I am right about this (not guaranteed, of course), this added benefit to the lucky few may not outweigh all the moral, psychological, and financial costs of interviewing at the APA. But with increasing downward pressure on academic salaries it is also in our shared financial interest to try to keep competition for talent alive. 

Do we have too many philosophy conferences?

A thought-provoking comment at Feminist Philosophers deserves discussion: 

Why not kill a bunch of birds with one stone and just have fewer conferences? They’re terrible for the environment and a completely decadent use of money that should be going towards financial aid for students or helping lower-income people heat their homes. Even at prestigious conferences, I find the papers are often lackluster, and at any rate, I consistently find that I could have learned just as much by staying at home, reading papers from authors’ websites, and Skyping or e-mailing them.

As to the present point — a gajillion conferences all across the globe, on hyper-specialized topics, often by invitation, with sketchy review procedures when not, and the prospect of being the only woman at quasi-party full of dudes in a faraway land — of COURSE you’re going to get gender disparities. So yay to the GCC, but I’d like to see an Anti-Conference Campaign (ACC) as well!

A Sokal Hoax in Mathematics, or is it Vanity Publishing?

Neil Levy kindly called my attention to the story: "A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’." As LRB reports, "The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator." Unfortunately, "Neither Marcie Rathke nor the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople is willing to pay the ‘processing charges’ levied by Advances in Pure Mathematics, so we will never know if the work would actually have made it to publication." The exchange between 'author' and journal is priceless.

So, what did this hoax expose? LRB concludes the following:

Academic journals depend on peer review to ensure the rigour and value of submissions. The less prestigious the journal, the harder it is to find competent reviewers and the lower they will have to set the threshold, until at some point we arrive at, essentially, accept-all-comers vanity publishing. The murkier the business model and the lower the standards outside the mainstream, the harder it is for academics to challenge the status of the prestige journals, locking academics into the situation Glen Newey describes.

 

Weekly Philo of economics: (Polling) Predictions, Modal Economics and the marriage of Philosophy & Technocracy

"It has been shown, for example, that a pollster can in principle always publish his prediction of an election result in such a form that, despite the reactions of voters to the forecast, the prediction is not falsified by those reactions. CF. Herbert A Simon"--Ernest Nagel ((1960) Structure of Science, 473, n 13)

"it was shown that it is always possible in principle to make a public prediction that will be confirmed by the event...It was shown that correct prediction requires at least some knowledge of the reaction function."--Herbert Simon (1954) 253; emphasis in original)

Simon won a Nobel in economics in 1978. (In his intellectual autobiography he recounts his debts to Carnap and his ongoing interests in philosophy of physics.) In philosophy he is probably now best remembered for his work on bounded rationality/satisficing. The work discussed by Nagel (who didn't just invent the category analytical philosophy as we know it, but was also a leading figure in the discipline in the 50s and 60s [Nagel's Structure was much cited]) above and from which I cite is part of a larger literature in which Simon played a non-trivial role as acknowledged in the key (1954) paper by Grunberg and Modigliani (who won the Nobel in 1985). Simon & Grunberg/Modigliani provide a framework for showing under what conditions social scientific predictions need not be self-refuting--a welcome result to the economics profession that was warming up to Milton Friedman's (1953) proposal that what mattered was not the realism of the assumptions in an economic model but its predictive power (Simon was critical by the way).

Nagel does not name his targets in dealing with a "difficulty confronting the social sciences, sometimes cited as the gravest one they face." (466) But if one goes to Simon's paper it's not so hard to figure out; after a nod to Aristotle, he names Frank Knight and Hayek in the first footnote. Now, there are very important differences between Hayek and the now-forgotten Knight  (not the least of which is that in TJ Rawls encouraged attention to Knight (he even tells us to read the footnotes) and not so with Hayek--a judgment of relative value that the discipline has reversed), but one important commonality is that in the 1940s and 50s economists from free-marketeers like Alchian to high theory types like Arrow were extremely eager to reject their skepticism about the technocratic turn of the discipline. Nagel is certainly aware of Hayek's skepticism. (In addition, Grunberg & Modigliani also point to another forgotten economist, Vining--recall my post.)

What happened to Philosophy of Social Science after Ernest Nagel (1961)?

The hazards of trying to draw conclusions about all of science, by focusing narrowly on physics were learned at the end of the last century. However, including biology and chemistry are only the beginning, not the end, of the project of trying to develop a more well-rounded picture of science.--Alisa Bokulich

The quoted passage is from a terrific NDPR review by Bokulich that Catarina discussed yesterday. Bokulich notes that "Conspicuously absent from this list are any of the social sciences." Bokulich goes on to call attention to the works of four recent leading philosophers of social science--all of which happen to be women. [By the way, when later in the review Bokulich calls attention to the lack of representation of women in the volume (and the lack of focus on philosophy race/feminism) she does not refer back to her earlier discussion. This justifies Catarina's claim that Bokulich should be praised for the "elegant way" in which these issues are raised. ]

As the epigraph to this post suggests, our current understanding of the development of philosophy of science is that we are "trying" to develop it away from an exclusively physics focus to other sciences during the last few decades. (It was gratifying to read Bokulich's claim that philosophy of economics is "thriving.") But this leaves me with a puzzle: if one opens Ernest Nagel's (1961) The Structure of Science, one notes that three out of fifteen of chapters are exclusively focused on philosophy of social sciences and history. These together comprise 25% of the text. (This understates the situation because  earlier chapters also discuss relevant material. There is is also a chapter on biology, by the way.) So, half a century ago one the most widely cited works in the philosophy of science (although probably unread these days unless one is interested in Nagel-reduction) by one of the professional leaders of the discipline (who arguably invented analytical philosophy as a category) at one of the then  elite departments already was offering a "well-rounded" picture of science. How come this was not the norm in the profession?

Stanford's Statisticians teach how "to weather financial crisis and regulatory reforms"

My online radio-station bombards me with advertisements for DSW shoes and Stanford University's online  Leadership and Management Certificates and Courses. (I am part of an interesting demographic.) My natural inclination toward procrastination made me follow Stanford's links. For a little over (US$) 10K  and B average over three courses, you can obtain a Financial Risk Analysis and Management Graduate Certificate. (There are serious prerequisites.) Not Stanford's Business School or Economics department, but the statistics department  sponsors this certificate, which is a bit surprising because the certificate "gives you the tools you need to prepare for and weather financial crisis [sic] and regulatory reforms." I didn't know statisticians were good at teaching skills that allow you to play regulatory reforms.  [The statistics department does have depth in financial mathematics (and proudly works with affiliates from the financial sector).] Of course, as regular readers of this blog know, I also have a pretty grim view of finance theory, which assumes that mathematical technique can tame genuine uncertainty (by relying on various mathematical notions of randomness). Luckily, the rich rewards available in statistics are given back to the Stanford Community (and indirectly the rest of us): for, the statistics department at Stanford does "a free, drop-in consulting service to members of the University community. Under the supervision of a senior faculty member, statistics doctoral candidates and experienced master's students provide assistance" in various lines of research. 

There are, of course, many things wrong with our current financial system. But we should not ignore the ways in which academics can sell conceptual technologies without reputational risk or (worse) being held liable for the social damage done with these. (No doubt Stanford's statisticians are not alone for trying to cash in.)

Allow me to keep DOIs in my References/Footnotes/Bibliographies

These days journal articles (and book chapters) have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) attached them. I include such DOIs in my bibliographies and citations. For some reason copy-editors at academic publishers (and their philosophical editors-enablers) still insist on removing DOIs and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) from bibliographies and footnotes. I do not get this. A lot of research is now found and read online. Why not tell people where to find the material electronically? Moreover, given that my references are about my sources, shouldn't my readers now where I found them?  (I am not saying a DOI/URL ought to suffice, although that has tempted me, too.) Also, I thought presses made money from electronic downloads, so why discourage the practice in one's citations?

Joshua Miller guest post: Proposal for a First Year Seminar

Joshua Miller (homepage; blog) has sent us this interesting guest post: 

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My university, Morgan State, is revising its general education curriculum requirements. Obviously, this is an exciting and anxious time, as the faculty gather to share their pedagogical methods and ideals while protecting our turf and trying to fend off managerial incursions on both ideals and turf. When we met last Spring, our president held up a copy of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift and suggested that we should use it as a guide. Though there are serious methodological problems with their research (and troubling substantiation for previous research showing that many students are not and will not be well-served by a college education) the book does help those of us in the humanities and liberal arts make the case for our disciplines.

Arum and Roksa use data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment to demonstrate that the only students who show significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication have taken certain kinds of courses. These courses had three factors in common: (1) more than 40 pages of reading per week, (3) more than 20 pages of writing per semester, and (3) high teacher expectations.

As a result, I have proposed that Morgan State (and other public universities) should require these types of courses at the start so that core critical competencies are available as they go on to their major coursework. (The longer proposal is more specific to Morgan’s needs but also includes lengthy details like book lists.) The best way to do this is the First-Year Seminar. Small liberal arts college faculty are probably familiar with this model, but it is uncommon at large universities.

Retracting faulty science

[A] At PLOS our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. We firmly believe that acceleration also requires being open about correcting the literature as needed so that research can be built on a solid foundation. Hence as editors and as a publisher we encourage the publication of studies that replicate or refute work we have previously published. We work with authors (through communication with the corresponding author) to publish corrections if we find parts of articles to be inaccurate. [B] If a paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong we will retract the paper. By doing so, and by being open about our motives, we hope to clarify once and for all that there is no shame in correcting the literature.--By Virginia Barbour and Kasturi Haldar (writing at PLOS) [HT retractionwatch]

[B] "If a paper’s major conclusions are shown to be wrong we will retract the paper" is very controversial. But the reason for it "in order to ensure that errors (from whatever means – unintentional or intentional) are not simply incorporated uncritically into the scientific literature" is not silly. But readers may wish to disagree.

But what about [A] "our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine." Maybe that is part of the problem?

Informal cartels in philosophy?

Have you ever been asked to referee a paper by a journal that never accepts your work? (I have!) The eminent metaphysician, Stephen Mumford, writes about it and much more. Here's an excerpt [HT to Jani Hakarrainen on Facebook]:

I will add straight away that clearly we cannot assume malpractice just because a journal publishes work by a board member or other editor. Academics gain such positions chiefly because they are excellent scholars who, of course, should not be excluded from publishing just because of their position. But what we lack is the transparency and public accountability that could reassure us that malpractice never occurs.

I will add straight away that clearly we cannot assume malpractice just because a journal publishes work by a board member or other editor. Academics gain such positions chiefly because they are excellent scholars who, of course, should not be excluded from publishing just because of their position. But what we lack is the transparency and public accountability that could reassure us that malpractice never occurs.--In Times Higher Education.

I doubt the "egregious case" occurs so blatantly in philosophy (although maybe a sociologist of knowledge will prove me wrong). But in philosophy there exists plenty of journal-capture, where an incrowd network protects its franchise around a relatively prestigious (or well indexed) journal and ensures that intellectual friends (and their students) of board members get 'competent' referees. 

As I have argued before (see also here, here) one way to create more transparency is to include the names and (online) reports of referees of published papers; Mumford argues for complete transparency over the editorial process. This way the networks become public information.

K-16 teacher solidarity

This little Facebook post, provoked by the Chicago Teachers Union strike (a nice post by Brian Leiter will get you started; see also here and here), got some good reactions, so I thought I'd put it here. 

Public university colleagues: let's start thinking in terms of K-16, so that we highlight our solidarity with our K-12 colleagues. Because we are the leading edge, the experimental subjects, of "flexible" labor practices for our TAs, adjuncts, instructors, and other colleagues forced into precarious labor, just as our K-12 colleagues are sites of experimentation for tying evaluations to standardized testing. The admins in each area look longingly at the practices of the other. In other words, we are each canaries in the other's coal mine.

CTU solidarity fund here; other support ideas here.

Why the classroom will not disappear entirely

I hate to be an optimist in response to Dennis Des Chene's dire predictions about the future of undergraduate education being turned into online distance learning environments. So, here follows a refresher course (recall this) on why folk choose to spend a lot of money to have their children join an elite liberal arts college education and the many quasi-elite institutions of higher learning that emulate the elite (I hope my debt to Veblen is clear) :

1. It is a form of status seeking and conspicuous consumption.

2. It provides a) a valuable social network, not to mention b) opportunities for assortative mating.

3. It is a life-style choice (see 1).  Moreover, The enormous residential infrastructure keeps retention/graduation rates very high (see also 4b).

4. It a) teaches a lot of important social skills in b) a protective environment.

5. And for a minority group of students it is an escape from one's class.

Good enough is good enough: on the future of teaching

US Stamp: Mark Hopkins, 1940.
Source: Wikimedia.

There is or was in economics a so-called law known as Gresham’s: bad money drives out good. Another law, of broader application, would have it that good enough dominates best.

The web, including Wikipedia—to which I just happily referred—, illustrates this point. Copying is easy, compiling is easy, finding new information is not so easy, even if that means simply reading journal articles and adding a bit to the existing common store. I have Fuch’s dystrophy, a hereditary disease of the cornea. Naturally I’d like to know all I can about it. I search online, diligently, repeatedly. What I find is the same half-dozen facts repeated again and again, often verbatim, from Wikipedia to the Mayo Clinic to NIH. As soon as one tries to investigate specific questions, e.g. about the risk of surgery, one discovers that the web has no answers. I would say that it is broad but shallow; yet even that conveys the wrong impression, since the “breadth” consists largely in repetition of a small core of fact and not obviously untrue speculation.

The information one gleans, with grains of salt for more dubious sources, is for many purposes good enough. Were you a journalist or a student needing two sentences on Fuch’s, you’d have them, quickly and without effort. But it is not much better than good enough. I think that that is a general tendency: the apparent wealth of the (publicly accessible) web belies a widespread poverty.

Good enough drives out best—and even better.

Apply this now to university teaching. Not long ago people were linking to, and praising, pieces in the Chronicle and the Globe and Mail written in defense of classroom teaching.

Empirical Ethics: not even getting the retraction right

"Of these 119 statements, only 41.2% mentioned ethics at all (and only 32.8% named a specific ethical problem such as fabrication, falsification or plagiarism), whereas the other 58.8% described the reason for retraction or correction as error, loss of data or replication failure when misconduct was actually at issue." See here. [HT Retractionwatch]

On Research money in Philosophy

"Not that philosophers are especially well practiced in negotiating the terms of million-dollar grants, much less in thinking about how such money might sway them...."

From a smart and funny piece (just skip the first two paragraphs) in the Chronicle on how Templeton is legitimately and cleverly trying to shape and expand, in part, our joint philosophical agenda.  [HT Prophilosophy] (Recall also my post on working in a state grant environment in the Low Countries.)

Political Affect: it's killing you

One of the things I focus on is "political affect." It's a multi-valent concept; one of the registers in which it works is psycho-somatic effects of political economic conditions. This article summarizes research which details the bad health effects of chronic job insecurity: 

Research shows that the purgatory of job insecurity may be even worse for you than unemployment. And it's turning the American Dream into a sleepwalking nightmare. From young temporary workers to middle-aged career veterans, Americans are being pushed to their physical and psychological limits in what has the makings of a major national public health crisis.

To turn this back to politics in the restricted sense, we should recall the classic distinction between anxiety and fear. Anxiety is free-floating arousal; fear is targeted. You're anxious about the dark and afraid of an approaching attack dog.

Consider then the brutality of contemporary US politics (and don't be so smug, my non-US friends; it's coming your way, sound bites and attack ads and all). If anxiety is worse than fear, anxiety-gripped people will be prone to accept the bogeys on offer by politicians, because at least you can focus your fear / hatred on a bogey, whereas with systemic insecurity, all you can do is suffer. So better to focus on some chimeric Islamomexikenyanian-gay-sex-having-and-abortion-loving-latte-sipping-arugula-eating-unionized-public-school-teacher-cultural-elite-who-are-sapping-and-impurifying-our-precious-bodily-fluids than to have to think your way through the anxiety to the social system that makes you insecure.

Or better, the contemporary political discourse blocks the path to an intellectual understanding of systematic insecurity by its relentless individualism and shaming, its victim-blaming. "Insecure? what a loser! You should have picked a better career."

Petition on the Québec situation

The petition is here. The preamble: 

Dear Colleague,

We are a group of high school and college professors from Quebec. We write to you today because we need the support of teachers everywhere.

As you know, students in Quebec have been on strike for the past four months to reject a government-mandated increase in university tuition fees – a 75% hike over the next five years. On May 18, the government of Jean Charest, the Quebec Premier, passed an emergency law (known as « Law 12″, previously known as Bill 78) which severely restricts students’ fundamental rights, such as the right to demonstrate and the right to strike.This law forces us to teach in an environment which does not recognize our students’ right to protest.

We are actively participating in the student demonstrations through a network called « Profs contre la hausse » (Teachers against the raise). Our teachers collective is determined to denounce this law and to exercise our rights in a context which respects our freedom to teach. In this spirit, we have drafted a manifesto to be co-signed by high school and university teachers from inside and outside Quebec. We send it to you now in the hopes that you will add your signature.

Amazon to its Education Customers: Good Enough to Buy from Us, but not Worthy to Trade With

Earlier today, I went to Amazon.com in order to look up a book-title. On the front page I was welcomed by a letter from Jeff Bezos to his customers. Two paragraphs caught my attention:

We want to make it easier for employees to make that choice and pursue their aspirations. It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills. So, for people who've been with us as little as three years, we're offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.

The program is unusual.  Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. [Emphasis added--ES; see here for details on the program.]

Now, normally I don't get too exercised by paternalistic compensation programs run by large coorporations. But I was struck that a company, which was originally built on (electronic) books and educational materials must have a lot of student and education-related customers at one point or another, would treat the value of education worth paying for as exclusively linked to income  and employment. It turns out that other "aspirations" are not very valued at Amazon.

Is the future of professional philosophy in applied ethics?

After working Stateside and the Netherlands, ever since I moved professionally to Ghent (201o) I have come to think I have a better grasp of the future of philosophy. While enrollments certainly play a significant role in long-term staffing decision, a good portion of our research funding comes from (i) block-grants that reward scientific 'output'; (ii) individual grants to (a) research groups and (b) individual researchers. The grants under (ii) also reward past and prostpective scientific output. During my job interview with the Research Council of my university (note, not the philosophy department!), I was told that if I were to be hired I should change my publication strategy (which had been informed by considerations of visibility and prestige as well as desire to see things in print quickly) and focus on refereed journal articles. (Turns out in Flanders that primarily means journals listed in Web of Knowledge.) Along the way, I have had to re-learn how to write focused articles for journal publication. Given (ii) I now understand myself, in part, as akin to a Lab-Director, who spends a considerable part of his time on grant-making and recruiting talent primarily for the research group I belong to, but also for the wider department/university. It's a zero-sum game, after all. To give you a sense of what is at stake: In addition to my own grant (which funds a cushy salary and low teaching load), I have seven Phd students on a variety of grants working with me. (That represents about two million Euros in taxpayer funded grants.) Of course, this also means that my most valuable skill is the ability to project an image of future scientific output; do you know your H index number? I am also no stranger anymore to all the problems that scientific labs encounter--folk that put names on papers they barely contributed to; I have learned that the interests of Lab, which needs publications, and PhD students, which need intellectual development and viable career paths among other things, don't exactly coincide.

One important way in which 'output' is measured is by publication in high impact journals which brings me to today's inbox. I received a kind note from Springer about "a list of the highest impact journals," in its philosophy portfolio. Like it or not, Springer is an important publisher philosophy (just go to the ESF list or the recent top-20 as compiled by Brian Leiter). It does not have a monopoly, of course, but Springer matters in a lot of important philosophy niches (recall the brouhah over editorial policies at Synthese.)

Below the fold Springer's top six journals with their impact factors (IF). Five of these are in applied ethics and one is in philosophy of biology. Given that funding decisions 'follow' impact factors in the increasing number of places where funding for philosophy research follows bureaucratic rules that aim to reward scientific excellence (not to mention perceived social utility), it stands to reason that we should see an ever increasing specializing shift toward applied ethics. 

Reed Elsevier on the precipice...

When markets start to bet against a company, its fall can be very rapid. So, a philosopher (and trader), Jared Woodard, may be the most dangerous analyst that Reed Elsevier has ever encountered:

We regard the common stock as an implicit naked short put option because, while the upside potential from the publishing division is limited, the downside risk from any revolt by its customers (libraries), laborers (academics), or funders (governments) is not. Elsevier's substantial profit margin has persisted for as long as it has partly because of the lack of awareness and the apathy among stakeholders; those factors are changing. (From The Street).

Rather than lobbying politicians and rewarding well-placed academic insiders, companies like Reed Elsevier need to think more about building mutually rewarding relationship withs their free labor force, that is, us.