When Is It Time to Retire?

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

My tenure of guest-blogging here at the Splintered Mind is coming to an end. My thanks to Eric for having me, and to all the thoughtful comments and responses I received from commentators. In keeping with my retirement from this bit of guest-blogging, I thought I’d post something about retirement and its norms, since I know so little about it.

Everyone knows at least one professor, whether a colleague at their own institution or some other, of whom it is painfully clear to everyone EXCEPT that person that he or she should retire. So I’ve been told. I don’t actually know such a person myself, but it seems a common enough refrain that I’ve started to think about the phenomenon. In particular, I’m worried that some day I’ll be THAT guy, the guy whom everyone (except me) knows ought to retire. So, in support of my then-colleagues and chagrined students of the future, I’m trying to work out some general principles of retirement far in advance, so that I might apply them to my own circumstances. Will you help me?

In what follows, I offer some initial thoughts about the matter, with the acknowledgment that I will surely retract everything I write in this post at some point in the next 40 years.

First, some caveats about the scope of the involved ‘ought’:

(1) Let’s suppose we are talking about professors who have no real financial need to teach, nor whose psychology would collapse in some profound way if he or she were not teaching any longer.

(2) Let us also suppose that retirement here does not necessarily mean that the professor emeritus ceases to participate in life of the profession or perform research in some guise. We are only concerned with retirement from one’s regular full-time faculty position at the university.

And, (3) let us suppose that in surrendering said position the department is left not dramatically worse off from a long-term staffing or workload standpoint. And to anticipate, no, having to hire a replacement doesn’t count as making a department dramatically worse off in the relevant sense. So, the ought in my usage of the phrase “ought to retire” should be regarded as ranging over a somewhat limited set of circumstances.

Given the aforementioned restrictions of scope, then, I’m inclined to put the sense of ought that is my concern in those circumstances as something like this: when ought a (philosophy) professor to retire, from the combined standpoints of the professor’s dignity and the general well being, given no powerful or important disincentives for doing so, but given that there are finite jobs in the profession at large and in one’s own department.

Some further caveats and refinements:

(4) I recognize that some professors have no dignity and/or no aspirations of dignity. Indeed, I may be one. But that is the sort of dirty, specific kind of detail that we shall discretely to the side. It is better to pretend that all professors (and departments) have aspirations of dignity.

(5) Our considered question is manifestly NOT about age. Or, at any rate, it is not directly about age. Age may or may not be correlated with whether some of the conditions I suggest, but chronological age itself is irrelevant to what follows. There are plenty of philosophers working now who, despite having known Kant personally, are under no “ought of retirement” of the sort under present consideration. And, presumably, there are people could never have heard a David Lewis talk but who, if they had any good sense, would do themselves and their departments a favor and would retire from the profession— if only their university had the good sense to offer them a reasonable retirement package!

(Randy Clarke once called my attention to a principled argument to this effect made by Saul Smilansky in Moral Paradoxes, an argument that concludes that most of us should retire immediately in light of the numbers of people who could do our jobs at least as well as we are doing them. Still, let’s ignore this too for the moment.)

These considerations having been noted, I suggest that a professor should retire when some weighted cluster of the following conditions are satisfied (the weights given by contextual features of the person’s dignity and the department’s aspirations for itself and what one’s university values in their faculty members):

When, after 7 years or more since tenure . . .

(a) One’s classes are repeatedly cancelled for low enrollment at a much higher rate than other full-time faculty members.
(b) One’s published research has not been cited in more than 7 years in a scholarly context.
(c) One has not been invited or induced to participate in an extra-departmental committee in more than seven years.
(d) When one has not served the discipline in any notable professional capacity in 10 years (e.g., editing a journal, refereeing papers, organizing conferences, etc.)

Do these conditions seem about right? Should something be added or deleted? How would you weight the conditions for, say, a teaching institution or a research institution? Is there some other sure-fire indicator for when someone should retire?

Admittedly, some of these conditions and numbers are arbitrary. And this is all way too rough and foolish. That’s okay, so long as the arbitrariness and foolishness don’t preclude a useful discussion. And anyway, we shouldn’t expect more precision that then subject matter permits, which must be true since Aristotle said it.

Please bear in mind that I’m not supposing that retirement means retirement from participating in the life of the profession. I’m simply assuming that one is walking away from a formal position that will be promptly filled by a new philosopher delighted by the prospect of employment in a profession with grotesquely fewer jobs than qualified applicants.

So help me out here . . . how will I know when I should retire from the active, full-time professor gig?

Why the Gourmet Report is a Failure

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

I’m a long-time fan of the Gourmet Report.* Nevertheless, I’ve recently started to wonder whether the Report fails to measure faculty quality, even when it is construed in roughly reputational terms, that is, in terms of concrete judgments of faculty quality as seen by the mainstream of research-active elements in the Anglophone portion of the profession.

(Before you start to roll your eyes let me note I’m still a fan of the report, and despite the problem I’m about to note, I think it is like democratic government— deeply problematic, but better than any of the alternatives. Moreover, it isn’t like my department or my work is at stake in anything the report does— I’m in a department with no graduate program and my career, such as it is, is beyond the point at which the reputation of the institution that awarded me a Ph.D. is of much consequence to it. So there.)

Here’s why I suspect that the Report is a failure at measuring faculty quality: we are bad judges of our own estimates of quality. That is, I suspect that we are unreliable reporters about the work that we regard as best, in something like a stable, all-things-considered sense. (I certainly think students are unreliable judges of what teaching they learn the most from, and I suspect something analogous is true of philosophers.**) I suspect the quality of my quality assessment is a function of lots of different things— what I’ve read recently, what first springs to mind when I see their name, whether I had reason to attend very closely to something of theirs, what I’ve forgotten about their work, and if so, whether I disagreed vehemently or lightly with it, and so on.

Even bracketing framing effects, though, I suspect that my explicit deliberative judgments of quality fail to perfectly track my actual positive regard of quality for philosophers and their work in some complex ways. Here’s one way my judgments might fail to track my actual regard: X’s work was underappreciated by me simply because the ideas sat in the back of my mind, and later played a role in my own judgments about what would work and what wouldn’t, but I never picked up on the fact that it was X’s arguments about Y that did that for me.

Here’s another way that might happen: I could be aware of X’s work, and think well of that person’s work, but underrate its importance to my own thoughts in the following way: I might not realize how much of that person’s work I cite and respond to in a way that takes it seriously. That is, I could think that work is of very high quality (perhaps worth more of my time than any other work on the subject matter!) but unless I counted up citations or counted up the number of times I focus on responding to that figure, I might simply fail to realize how significant that person’s work really is for me, and so I might fail to accurately assess the quality of work. (Of course: I might also overinflate importance for a related reason—I spent a lot of time criticizing someone’s work because it is easy, but that makes their name loom larger in my mind than my actual regard for it.)

Here’s another way “under-regarding” might happen: I could be subject to implicit bias effects of a peculiar sort. That is, I could unconsciously downgrade (or upgrade) my global assessment of quality on the basis of perceived race/class/gender/age etc., even if, when asked, I sincerely disavow that these things have anything to do with it. On this picture, the relevant test might be closer to something like: what would I think of this work if I had never known anything about the author? A: We’ll never know.

(Relatedly, implicit bias might work in a more targeted way, only affecting my overall assessments of worth, and not my assessments of a particular argument, or even a specific paper even when conscious of race/class/gender/age/etc.)

Here’s another way that might happen: I could be less good than I think at blocking halo effects of various sorts. So, knowing that X is at Wonderful Institution Y may inflate my estimate of that person’s work unconsciously. Or, my agreement with X on matter M may lead me to think better of X than someone else when filling out a survey, because we share the same beleaguered position on some matter. Or, knowing X has published many times in some journal I think well of might lead me to cast doubt on my own assessments of the quality of the work.

Suppose you thought people in general are subject to these effects. Are philosophers vulnerable to such effects? I think yes, but I’ve been repeatedly told that philosophers are special, and alone among humans immune to these sorts of effects because of our marginally greater reflectiveness. So, I must be wrong.

Still, there is some evidence that at-a-time global self-assessments are subject to priming and framing effects. There is some literature on the way in which people are good at monitoring their own discriminatory behavior only when they have reason to think it will be observed (so, for example, you probably aren’t very good at monitoring your discrimination against groups whose salience is not raised for you: think age, disability, non-black/non-white racial groups, etc.). There is also the fast-growing literature on implicit bias and the way it operates. And, there is a large body of work in cognitive science and psychology casting doubt on the accuracy and efficacy of conscious, deliberative judgments with respect evaluative matters (something that Leiter himself, writing with Joshua Knobe, wrote about in the context of Nietzschean moral psychology!).

I don’t know how to correct for any of this, given the Report’s aim of measuring faculty quality in terms of conscious, explicit, global judgments of quality. Keeping track of citation impact corrects for at least one of the possible misalignments I mentioned, but not all of them. And anyway, citation impact rankings are subject to their own difficulties as well. (Although I think it would be a useful supplement to the Report to track this data, too.)

In sum, although I think the Gourmet Report probably fails to accurately report in fact estimations of faculty quality, it nevertheless is likely the best thing we’ve got going for judging philosophical reputation of departments and their specializations, as seen by the mainstream of research-active elements in the Anglophone portion of the profession.

*Indeed, I may be one of the longest of the long-time fans of the PGR: somehow I stumbled across an early version of it, back when Mosaic was my browser of choice, using email required some degree of sophistication with UNIX commands, and the Report appeared to be something produced on a typewriter. Anyhow, the Report was a big help when thinking about graduate schools and a nice supplement to local advice about where I should consider applying. In several cases the Report highlighted departments than individual advisors had never mentioned, but when I asked them (because it was listed on the Report), the response was invariably something like “Oh yeah— so-and-so is there; that place would be pretty good, too.” I think the report has improved in numerous ways since those early days, and I think that it continues to be excellent at its ostensive function as one of several tools for those thinking about graduate school in philosophy. Indeed, it is out of a sense of its ongoing utility for graduate students that I’m happy to serve as one of the folks providing specialty rankings in philosophy of action.

** Regarding student unreliability, the matter is complicated. But see Mayer et al. “Increased Interestingness of Extraneous Details in a Multimedia Science Presentation Leads to Decreased Learning” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (2008) Vol. 14, No. 4, 329–339. And think about research on what teaching evaluations track. One might worry that too often teaching evals track those things irrelevant to learning, or even—if the Mayet et. al. data proves correct, impediments to learning!)

Armchair Sociology of the Profession IV: Splintered Fields

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

UCR’s Peter Graham once mentioned to me that if you go to different departments, what you’ll find is that different figures will be really prominent in the local conception of a field. So, all the graduate students at School A read figure Y and all the grad students at School B read figure Z. What it takes a while to realize, he said, was that half of the time mostly the same views are in play, just filtered through whatever figures have local prominence. So, everyone is getting their dose of externalism, anti-realism, or whatever, but filtered through the concerns of whichever figures loom large in local graduate education. (Peter had a nice example of this, but I have since forgotten what it was. Go ask him yourself and see if he remembers what he had in mind.)

That picture seems mostly right to me. In different departments, different figures are more and less likely to be taught, even if there is widespread professional consensus outside the department about which figures are worth teaching and which issues are important. Local variation can be explained away in several ways: partly in terms who faculty members are reading or responding to in their own work at the time, partly in light of the literatures faculty members were trained in, and (without a doubt) whether any of the big cheeses in a field are members of the department in which one is getting trained. In many (most?) fields, the overlap is substantial enough so that if, for example, you study metaphysics at Notre Dame, right out the gate you are going to be able to have fruitful, meaningful conversations with people who study metaphysics at Princeton.

Still, there are cases where there are vast gulfs in the conception of fields, both in terms of what positions are worth serious engagement and in terms of what the assumptions are that are governing inquiry into the field. Some places take Wittgenstein seriously. Others don’t have more than the vaguest idea of who he is. Some places love them some Davidson. Other places haven’t had him on a syllabus in decades.

This year, I’ve been struck by some surprisingly deep fractures in philosophy of action. I’ve sat in on a couple of seminars in philosophy of action at my host institution this year and it has been incredibly fascinating to see how different the conception of the field looks in these courses than it did in my own graduate training, my own teaching, and my own work in related parts of the field. Even though all these accounts are in some sense concerned with agency, the will, and the relationship of agents to actions (that’s why it counts as philosophy of action) it seems to me that the local differences are manifestly not a case of the same basic positions, substantive concerns, and the like being presented through a different constellation of figures. (For those who are wondering, it seems to me less of a Causal Theory vs. non-causalists, and more of a divide between those-who-start-with-Davidson and those-who-start-with-Anscombe, where starting with either does not necessarily entail substantial agreement.)

Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t say any of this by way of criticism of anyone’s conception of their field—please, let those flowers bloom. Indeed, I feel fortunate to have gained a sharper sense of my own philosophical presuppositions as a result of the experience. And, I think we all benefit from a variety of conceptions of a field, from a range of philosophical concerns, and from a broad range of philosophical methods and approaches. (I take it that something like this phenomenon is common enough that at least some departments used to resist incestuous hiring precisely out of a concern for limiting the intellectual vision of their local ecosystem.)

Anyway, what I’m wondering is what other fields have gulfs internal to them that make challenging any substantive discussions across these splintered portions of the field. Maybe Nietzsche scholarship is one instance, with the Frenchified Nietzsche interpreters on one side and the broadly “analytic” Nietzsche scholars on the other side. I imagine that there would be lots of head scratching about how to talk to each other, if (assuming the unlikely) either group had any substantial interest in doing so. But surely there are other instances of a big divide in presuppositions that significantly hinders intelligibility across camps internal to the same subfields.

Any thoughts about good candidates for other deeply fractured fields? I’ve heard suggestions of something similar internal to ethics, with (broadly) sentimentalists on one side and a priorists (rationalists, contractualists, etc.) on the other, but I’m less confident that we’re at a very significant degree of head scratching puzzlement about what the other camp(s) are doing internal to ethics. Any of this going on in phil mind? Epistemology? Political phil? Elsewhere?

Armchair Sociology of the Profession, part 3: A Manifesto on Geography and Social Networks

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

I’ve spent most of my philosophical life hanging out in philosophy departments up and down California, partly by luck but also by disposition. This year, however, I’ve been living on the East Coast and I’ve been struck by the difference geography makes to the profession. (Caveat: In what follows, I frame things mostly in terms of differences across coasts, but I expect that many of these factors are at play to lesser and greater degrees in the interior of the U.S., and these issues will certainly be salient to philosophers coming into the US from abroad. But I write in terms of coastal examples since that is what I know firsthand. Also, I'm going to focus on West Coast disadvantages, ignoring some of its clear advantages in non-professional ways.)

Consider the dense network of terrific departments in the Boston and New York areas. This proximity is conducive to a range of interactions and a degree of inter-departmental familiarity that is much harder to reproduce nearly anywhere else where geographic clustering of departments is not so tight. MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, and Tufts are all closer to each other than are two schools that are frequently thought of as relatively close, geographically speaking: Berkeley and Stanford. The latter are more than 10 times as far apart from each other as those Boston area schools! Although I didn’t bust out Google Maps to check, I’m pretty sure the same is true of the L.A. area schools vs. those Boston schools, too— the distances on the left coast are much larger. So, in places like NYC and Boston, you’ve got a density of philosophers and departments that can’t be matched elsewhere. And, indeed, something like this is true on the North Atlantic coast as a whole, at least in comparison to the West Coast.

This isn’t to say that there is as much interaction in the greater Boston and (I imagine) New York areas as an outsider might expect—professors everywhere are over-extended and can’t participate in everything. Still, there are lots of effects, many indirect and apart from philosophical feedback and interaction. Here are some:

First: financial effects. It is cheap to go to local talks and conferences in at least the North Atlantic states, because the distances are not huge and the transportation options are good and comparatively inexpensive. So, if you’ve got a fixed research account, you can afford to go to comparatively more conferences than your West Coast brethren on the same budget. Similar economies of distance come into play on the interpersonal axis as well. If you have a family, and a partner who is willing to put up with you going away for professional travel without family, it is surely easier to do so when you can be gone for shorter periods of time, which closer geographic proximity permits.

Second: effects of professional esteem. In a previous post, Eric wondered about the curious stability of UCR’s rankings. I had some things to say about it in the comments, but one of the things I floated was the hypothesis that departments will fare less well in reputational rankings if they are not part of a densely networked collection of departments. Since, if I’m right, this is partly driven by geographic proximity, geography ends up having an impact on things like the Gourmet Report, the perceived quality of degrees for a given graduate program, and so on. That is, philosophers will more highly rate departments they are familiar with, but if familiarity is partly a function of geographic relationships, than geographically isolated departments will suffer from a geographic bias among evaluators, and this propagates through the profession in complicated ways.

Third: early careers. A big problem here is the Eastern APA, where everyone goes to look for a job. Pretty much everything about the Eastern is bad, but for West Coasters it is invariably more so. It is more expensive to get to, more time-consuming to go, and one is less likely to have faculty advisors and supporters present when you get there. It would be interesting to compare how East and West Coast job candidates fared over several iterations of the market if all the East Coast candidates and none of the West Coast candidates had to suffer the effects of jet lag and time zone changes, of having diminished numbers of advisors, committee members, and departmental mentors present during the hiring bloodbath, and so on. My bet is that putting the meeting in San Diego for a few years would help the performance of West Coast folks and hurt the performance of East Coast folks. Anyone want to try?

Armchair Sociology 101, part 2: Further Ruminations on The Two Models

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

Belated introduction

Last post was my first post as a guest blogger here at The Splintered Mind, and I realized I neglected to introduce myself. Anyway, I’m Manuel Vargas, and my day job is philosophizing at the University of San Francisco. I mainly publish papers on issues connected to agency, responsibility, moral psychology, and various topics in Latin American philosophy. In my heart of hearts, though, I am an armchair sociologist of philosophy. Since I can’t blog much about that at my usual place of bloggery (the Garden of Forking Paths), I’m doing it here for the next few weeks.

Armchair Sociology 101, part 2: Further Ruminations on The Two Models

In my previous post I discussed two models of philosophical production, a traditional one emphasizing cautious, precise, and highly elaborated ideas, and a newer (to philosophy) model emphasizing novelty as paramount with a somewhat downgraded (but not rejected) emphasis on caution, precision, and conceptual elaboration. For better or for worse, my bet is we’ll see the second, newer model (and variants that lean in that direction) proliferate over the next couple of decades, making up a larger and larger chunk of how philosophy gets done in the English-speaking world. I can think of several reasons, which I mention in the Underblog. My main interest, though, is to think about the consequences of this trajectory if indeed it is the case that this approach will proliferate.

I’m inclined to think that we all benefit from the presence of a mixture of varied strategies in the general philosophical population. However, I wonder whether what we’re likely to see is (1) fragmentation across communities that reflect judgments about these different models, followed by (2) diminished interaction across these communities, followed by (3) greater entrenchment of the newer model across the profession, followed by (4) further fragmentation of subfields developed internal to those fields working on the newer model.

As some of the commentators noted on that earlier post, something like this seems to be what happens in the sciences, and one might think it is simply the general trajectory of fields. But there is also a temptation (also expressed in the comments in the earlier post— go read ‘em!) to think that philosophy should be different, more synoptic, more concerned with how everything hangs together. It is harder to see how you do that if the discipline suffers from field fragmentation of the sort I’m gesturing at.

At any rate, what, if anything follows from all of this? Should awareness of this trajectory affect how we encourage graduate students to think about their own publication strategies? Does the traditional way of doing things need defense? Is so, how? If not, why not?

Armchair Sociology of the Profession 101: Two Models of Philosophical Production

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

I take it that for any one reading this blog, it is not news that philosophical publication matters for disciplinary reputation. What I think is less widely recognized is how there are increasingly two main models around which philosophers organize their own writing, and what consequences this might have for individuals and the profession as a whole.

(By identifying two models I do not meant to suggest that these are the only models, that there are no mixed models, or that there are not differences internal to these models, broadly conceived. As seems necessary, imagine the relevant qualifications in what follows.)

The older, traditional model is one that aspires to produce only careful, precisely worked out, and exhaustively defended works. Doing this takes time, and on this model, quantity of production is not nearly so important as quality of production. Indeed, on this model, too much publication suggests a kind of shallowness, or a failure to carefully think things through.

In recent years, an alternative model has emerged in various parts of the profession, especially those that interact with the cognitive and social sciences. On this model, it remains a virtuous to produce careful, precise, and exhaustively defended works. But these virtues are not paramount. Instead, what is paramount is the presentation of a promising new idea, a novel argument, or a relevant datum that does not already have currency in the discussion.

Philosophers working under the newer model tend to publish more frequently. It is a model where one can justify a publication by presenting the new idea even if the presentation of it is not maximally careful, precise, or exhaustively defended. Moreover, to the extent that one’s interlocutors also operate with this model, one needn’t be especially worried about the old virtues: if the idea is a good one, the marketplace of ideas will do much of the precisifying, along with the articulation of objections and replies. It is a model that relies on something like a division of cognitive labor, where the marketplace of ideas does much of the work that old-model philosophers regard as a prerequisite to publication. Of course, a mangled presentation never benefits any idea, so the old virtues are never completely abandoned even on the new model. They are merely downgraded, and (partly) off-loaded.

There are I think, lots of things to say about how this plays out in the life of the profession. It is certainly relevant in hiring, tenure, and promotion, and in how subsets of the philosophical community regard one another. Philosophers working under the older model tend to regard the work of philosophers on the younger model as superficial, ill-conceived, not very philosophically rigorous. Philosophers on the newer model tend to regard philosophers on the older model as (let’s be honest) stuffy, remarkably unproductive (especially if at a Famous Institution), and oftentimes disconnected from the larger field or profession.

What I wonder is if, over time, there is any difference in useful philosophical production generated by these models? Take two communities, one working on the old model and one working on the new model. Add a hundred years. I wonder which community will, after a hundred years, have made more philosophical progress by whatever standard you measure such things?