New APPS

58 responses to “Why Recency and Time Frame Matter”

1. 

   Carolyn Dicey Jennings

   July 17, 2014

   “Omitting such information” is not the same thing as just not gathering the information. As I say above, it is a lot of work to do so. Further, it requires more judgment calls. I have tried to avoid making too many of these (e.g. do I use the “Spec/Faith” Carnegie classification, do I try to assess the mission statement, or do I try to figure out which universities require statements of faith?). More judgment calls, more distinctions, more statistical tests all leave one more open to error, taking away from accuracy. One thing that is clear to me is that graduate students care about the distinction between tenure-track and temporary contracts. In so far as the data I have presented are accurate with respect to placement in the former, it should be helpful for students. I think that students likely care about many other distinctions, too. If I manage to bring those to bear on the data, the same point about accuracy and helpfulness will probably apply there. The very nature of this type of effort means that I cannot provide a full picture of what is happening at each department. And anyhow the point of these types of enterprises is to help students with what is otherwise an overwhelming amount of information. So some factors will necessarily be lost. Balancing accuracy, efficiency, clarity, and informativeness is a tough call. I think I could probably add more on the side of informativeness. But I do not concede that what I have done here is misleading on this front. It should be perfectly obvious that the data only capture tenure-track jobs, and not types of tenure-track jobs.

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2. 

   anononymous

   July 17, 2014

   Hi Carolyn, I agree with you that trying to make finer distinctions about quality of jobs, beyond appealing to things like the Carnegie classifications, is unwise. The vast majority of philosophers vote Democratic, and would prefer not to work in Red States. Many I know do not even apply for positions in those areas. Should those jobs be discounted? Most philosophers are uncomfortable with the sort of plutocracy that the Ivy Leagues are believed to sustain and perpetuate. Should those jobs be worth less? Many don’t want to live in “fly over” states, because they think they are not culturally rich enough. Etc. Etc. Thinking this way quickly becomes ridiculous, especially when so many false and irrational beliefs lie behind these judgments. Pretty soon the only jobs “worth having” would be in the UC system. 🙂

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3. 

   Darius Jedburgh

   July 17, 2014

   Christy Mag Uidhir at 49: Catholic schools ‘actively condemn or marginalize’ drinking and smoking, which are ‘more or less institutionally ignored at secular schools’?
   This strange claim seems to express a conception of ‘secular’ culture as largely free from religiously-infected norms. This conception is very widespread but I think it is quite wrong.
   The infrastructure of US ‘secular’ culture is emphatically protestant. The mainstream of that culture, including its manifestations in ‘secular schools’, condemns and marginalizes drinking and smoking much more actively than any catholic institution qua catholic. This is just an example; the point is general. Another example would be the unmistakably white, protestant character of much of the current ethical thinking of academic feminists. (This is to point to a deficiency in the cultural-historical self-consciousness of that thinking; it is not to criticise that thinking itself. That would depend on what one thinks of the ethical inheritance of white North American protestantism.)

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4. 

   Pastrami

   July 17, 2014

   I think that even among TT jobs it is highly relevant whether one is most likely to compete for research-oriented TT jobs (2/2 and less), teaching-oriented TT jobs (3/2-3/3), or research-killing TT jobs (<3/3). This makes a huge difference. It is true that a lot of people are happy to accept, say, a 3/3 or even 4/4 job, but this is usually not because they were shooting for it to begin with. I think most people come to the graduate school because they want to become serious contributors to the field and only once the gloomy job market is upon them (or once they see their work might not really position them in that way), adopt a more humble attitude. Let’s put it this way: how many PhD’s from Fordham are at departments comparable to the Fordham department itself, that is, at departments producing PhD’s for the market at which Fordham mostly competes or at departments/universities with similar standing? And what is the market for Fordham’s own hiring – places comparable to Fordham or places, say, higher in the PGR food of chain? Now take UCLA and ask the same questions. I do not suppose we would like to employ these sort of comparative acrobatics to achieve some rankings, but it seems to me that something like this, if anything, is of each students must figure out for herself from her own perspective. Ranking Fordham and UCLA as, say, equal in placement, without these kinds of comparisons does not seem to me particularly useful when it comes to choosing the department for its program’s quality. One can check whether people get jobs simpliciter pretty easily now.

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5. 

   Christy Mag Uidhir

   July 17, 2014

   Darius, at no point did I target any particular school let alone Catholic institutions as a whole. The overtly religious schools in to which Fordham placed its recent graduates, while mostly Catholic, are certainly not exclusively so but also include Seventh-Day Adventist, Methodist, and Non-Denominational Christian. I merely pointed out that atheists, as most philosophers are, might find employment at such institutions problematic and as such a program’s overwhelming tendency to place their graduates at such places might reasonably for many potential graduates militate against viewing their TT job prospects as equal to those at programs with comparable placement rates into secular institutions. This, I claimed, becomes especially important when considering that some (but certainly not all) overtly religious schools at either the institutional or cultural level explicitly prohibit or actively encourage the condemnation or marginalization of those violating or perceived as violating the religious beliefs or doctrines upon which the school’s mission is in part based. This isn’t some anti-Fordham, anti-Catholic, or even anti-religious screed, and I find it remarkably uncharitable to see it as such.

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6. 

   Carolyn Dicey Jennings

   July 17, 2014

   Some interesting points here, although I disagree with the very last point. Perhaps I should point out that Fordham and UCLA come out as similar only for a particular method and time frame, which I use here as an exercise. The method that I used for my full data set, which I think does a better job with respect to time frame, actually puts UCLA ahead by quite a bit. Nonetheless, many departments that are not ranked by the PGR come out as strong in that accounting.

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7. 

   Jacob Archambault

   July 19, 2014

   I received my M. A. from the University of Houston, Dr. Mag Uidhir’s home institution, in 2011, the same year Dr. Mag Uidhir was hired (hence, though we do not know each other, we know and have worked with many of the same people). I am currently a Ph. D. candidate at Fordham University.
   There is an underlying tension in Christy’s responses above that, since I think it shared by a large constituency of academic philosophers, it will be useful to bring it to light.
   Christy begins one of his posts above with the concession that only one of the schools a Fordham student was hired at required an explicit statement of faith. He then goes on to state that Fordham “overwhelmingly” places their students at “overtly religious” institutions, and that “75% of recent Fordham grads placed into overtly religious schools”. Earlier in the same post, he defines an overtly religious institution as one “having a mission statement explicitly reflective” of a “certain Christian denomination.”
   If, as the most straightforward reading suggests, the 75% number is meant to reflect Fordham’s overall placement rate, it amounts to the claim that the only places Fordham places their graduates– presumably because it is the only place they can place them – are “overtly religious institutions”.
   If, on the other hand, it is meant to convey that 75% of those placed are placed at religious schools in the sense defined by Dr. Mag Uidhir above, then it is still incorrect and, perhaps more importantly, unjustified. Concerning the first, of 15 TT or comparable placements, 10 (66%) are at schools with some nominal religious affiliation, and 7 of these are at Catholic institutions. This is, of course, quite different from placing students overwhelmingly at overtly religious institutions. I don’t, for instance, know anyone, Christian or otherwise, that would characterize Boston College in such terms.
   More importantly, if Christy is like most of us on this, he simply has no idea whether the schools at which Fordham students have been hired are overtly religious schools, since he likely knows little to nothing about those institutions: he simply assumes it as an explanans for Fordham’s comparatively high numbers.
   And this is just the problem. One simply assumes that the there is some hidden element, determining them to get the posts they do, and demanding that the data capture that. Carolyn’s omission of information concerning distinctions in kinds of TT jobs may be ‘actively misleading’ and ‘almost criminal’, and yet she isn’t obligated to factor these distinctions into her data; Fordham’s placement record success is ‘significantly narrowed in a way that UCLA’s is not’, though the schools at which UCLA places its grads are not ‘better’ jobs; Fordham’s placements are not worse, even though those placements are into schools some of which may ‘actively condemn or marginalize’ things like ‘certain racial affiliations.’ How are we not supposed to get the impression here that a program’s placing graduates into schools with some religious affiliation somehow counts less than placing the same graduate in a secular institution, when the erasure of this distinction is misleading? When doing so suggests that the university has less ‘placement record potential’? When the schools into which these placements are made are, by a series of associations, prima facie made to look like Bob Jones University in the 1970’s?
   It’s rather easy to be ignorant of the fact that to the degree that Fordham’s placement record is dependent on hiring networks of religious schools (and given standard perceptions of Catholicism in e.g. 7th day Adventist and evangelical circles, I’m only really inclined to grant this at most for placements of Fordham students into Catholic institutions, i.e. 7 of its 15 placements, or 47% – and even there I think it’s success has more to do with a shared broadly humanistic conception of education than religion, either a particular one or in general, as such), this is in part (though, I submit, not totally) a function of the kind of soft oppression inherent in the kinds of mischaracterizations above, whereby it is excluded from more secular networks.
   Something quite unfortunate about all of this is that those who serve to be harmed the most from this kind of stereotyping are non-religious students at nominally religious institutions like Fordham. One cannot safely put an ‘atheist buyer beware’ sign around the neck of schools like Fordham and pretend this very action were not perpetuating the very thing one is warning against.
   Maybe it’s about time we change that.

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8. 

   philosopher

   July 20, 2014

   I think many do not see Boston College as you do. Here is a statement from the College’s webpage.
   “Jesuit, Catholic Tradition
   finding god in all things
   Boston College is committed to maintaining and strengthening the Jesuit, Catholic mission of the University, and especially its commitment to integrating intellectual, personal, ethical, and religious formation; and to uniting high academic achievement with service to others.
   Jesuits are active in all aspects of University life with a community of more than 150 Jesuits serving as faculty and administrators or studying for advanced degrees within Boston College’s various schools. Members of the Jesuit community also offer Ignatian retreats and spiritual direction to faculty, staff and students.
   Gifts from the Jesuit community have helped establish the Jesuit Institute and the Center for Ignatian Spirituality at Boston College. The Institute sponsors personal research, academic exchange and collective inquiry about the issues that emerge at the intersection of faith and culture. The Center helps members of the University community to understand and implement Jesuit/Ignatian traditions and promotes conversation among other religious traditions represented at Boston College.”
   http://www.bc.edu/about/tradition.html

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