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    • It takes a village. . .

      One of the worst things that can happen to someone is that they become so powerful in their field that the community no longer works as a check on their behavior. We should pity their victims more, but we should also have some sympathy for people like Dov Charney and  Terry Richardson. Who in their right mind would want to be so controlled by the awful desire to control?

      Reformed Christianity speaks to this. Not only do we believe in Calvin's (insert Schopenhauer if theism isn't your bag) "depravity of man" thesis, but we also believe that the solution involves moral communities willing to publicly call people on their depraved behavior (Presbyterians call this "discipline"). 

      When I screw up even in little ways there are lots of people near and far who publicly call me on it. I don't know what kind of monster I'd be if I had the resources to silence them.*

      Academics are a little bit like the fashion industry, like rock and rollers, like dictators. We have this awful cult of genius where someone's awfulness can be evidence that they deserve to get away with being awful. I don't know if philosophy is worse than other fields in this respect.

      [*UPDATE 7/7/2014 I removed a parenthetical involving people who threaten lawsuits that some readers with justice took to be both unfair and passive-aggressive. When writing it, I didn't mean for this post to single out one person. But we know what good intentions pave. And to be honest, while writing it I was pretty depressed about the latest brouhaha concerning Brian Leiter reacting to criticism in ways that strike me as frankly abusive. So the criticism is fair.

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    • Bad news for academia in Europe

      A Portuguese colleague (who has good reasons to remain anonymous) has brought to our attention some very important and worrisome recent events/developments pertaining to research funding in Portugal and Europe, which are described below. Academics in Europe (and also outside Europe) wil do well to pay close attention to these developments.

      UPDATE: Perhaps my original phrasing was ambiguous, so to be clear: I am not the author of the post below, rather it is a guest post by the Portuguese colleague in question.

      ============================

      This post serves as a warning, and a plea for help, to academics around Europe.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Faroeste Caboclo’

      It’s Friday evening, so I’m just in time for another BMoF. The reason for the ‘delay’ is that I just came back from Munich, and the notorious paucity of German youtube did not allow for a timely BMoF. But it was also in Munich that I finally got to meet Steven French, who besides being an accomplished philosopher of science and the editor of a ‘small, provincial journal’ (his words), is a big fan of Brazilian music. (He lived in Brazil for some time in the 1980s.) I asked Steven what his request would be for today’s BMoF, and his answer was: ‘Faroeste Caboclo’ (1987). It is an interesting choice: an extremely long song, with even longer lyrics (not a single line gets repeated), by a band that was hugely popular in my youth, Legião Urbana. (I posted a few songs by them a few years ago.) After the tragic death of leader Renato Russo (a victim of AIDS) in 1996, the band ceased to exist, but their music remains immensely popular among successions of younger generations.

      ‘Faroeste Caboclo’ tells the story of João de Santo Cristo, a criminal who ends up dying as a hero. The story is so elaborate that a whole movie was recently made based on the song. Below I am posting a video of the song illustrated with scenes from the movie, so that gives listeners who do not understand Portuguese at least an idea of what the whole thing is about. So all in all, a terrific suggestion by Steven, who I hope will like the video I'm posting below.

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    • An Ideal Ranking

      I recently signed a pledge with the aim of being more respectful toward my colleagues and of trying to uphold a culture of respectfulness in our profession. Following conversation over a previous post, I have come to the belief that I should provide a safe space for people to discuss departmental rankings in philosophy. When I made critical comments at the Leiter Blog on the inclusion of women among the rankers of the PGR in 2011 as a graduate student, I felt shut down. My comments were edited without permission in a way that made me appear less reasonable, while the original post and other comments were edited to make my interlocutors appear more reasonable. I think that it is healthy to evaluate ranking methodologies critically and openly and I think that there must be a public space for this. Since I have already earned the ire of those who appear to be opposed to a public discussion, I am a good candidate for putting forward a post that will allow for discussion. I will thus allow anonymous postings and will aim to respect that anonymity both privately and publicly (except when required by law or conscience to do otherwise).

      I will start with some of my own thoughts: I think that reputational information is helpful and important, but that it would be better to combine this information with data on placement, publications, and other such objective measures. (With this in mind, I sent my original findings on the job market to Brian Leiter and Kieran Healy in April 2012 without response.) An ideal ranking, in my mind, would be customizable. The viewer would have to choose metrics before a ranking would be created. I am open on what the relevant metrics might be. This is where you come in. Should we have rankings at all? What metrics do prospective graduate students care about (a variety of voices is of value here)? How should this work be completed, and by whom? Comments that appear to violate the norm of respectfulness will not be admitted as is, but anonymity is both welcomed and encouraged. Update: commentators should feel free to leave off their email addresses when posting comments. 

      Update: Creating (or updating) a ranking of this kind, with multiple objective values, is beyond my current capabilities. I fully and wholeheartedly welcome someone with more time and competence than me to take on this task. Better yet, I think, would be a task force involving those familiar with the PGR, since they already have lots of expertise. I am welcoming discussion here not because I plan to create a new ranking, but because I think it is important to have a discussion about all such rankings in the open. I am limiting my personal contribution to the placement data for now.

    • In support of Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      Most readers have probably been following the controversy involving Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Brian Leiter concerning the job placement data post where Carolyn Dicey Jennings compares her analysis of the data she has assembled with the PGR Rank. There have been a number of people reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of Carolyn Dicey Jennings’s analysis, such as in Daily Nous, and this post by UBC’s Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins on guidelines for academic professional conduct (the latter is not an explicit defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but the message is clear enough, I think). UPDATE: supportive post also at the Feminist Philosophers.

      It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that we, NewAPPS bloggers, fully support Carolyn’s right to post her important analyses of job placement data, and deplore the tone and words adopted by Brian Leiter to voice his objections to her methodology. (This is not the first time that episodes of this kind involving Brian Leiter and junior, untenured colleagues occur; I for one deem such episodes to be inadmissible.)

    • Placement Data 2011-2014

      As promised, here is the link to the data set I have been using in the placement posts. Most of you will probably be most interested in the "Department Trends" tab. If you find that data should be added, please email me with the following information, preferably in order and separated by commas OR add the relevant information to PhilAppointments, which I will use to update this data set from time to time:

      1) Year of placement

      2) Name of placed candidate

      3) PhD-granting institution of placed candidate (and department, where relevant)

      4) Type of placement and name of hiring institution

      5) AOS (if known)

      6) Prior positions (if known)

      Enjoy!

    • Job Placement 2011-2014: Comparing Placement Rank to PGR Rank (Updated 9/17/2014)

      As discussed here in the comments, one of the advantages of comparative data on placement is that they help fill in gaps left over by the PGR. That is, the PGR aims to measure the collective reputation of a department’s faculty, but faculty reputation does not necessarily predict the likelihood of placement by that department, perhaps because it does not necessarily predict the overall quality of education in that department nor the quality of preparation for the job market by that department. Comparative data on placement has the potential to provide insight on these factors. To illustrate this, I below bracket the top 50 departments by tenure-track placement rate** (Note: I removed three universities from the top 50 that reported fewer than 2 graduates per year, since small numbers may yield misleading placement rates), providing for comparison these department’s ranks from the 2011 “Ranking Of Top 50 Faculties In The English-Speaking World” by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Please note that placement brackets are provided only to demonstrate the potential utility of these data. Since the data set is not yet complete, I do not recommend viewing these as authoritative brackets. Update: Please see this post for an idea of how I envision this project developing. I have released the spreadsheet containing the raw data and methods I have been using to compute these results, and welcome any/all corrections. As a reminder, I do not have data on the yearly graduates from many departments, listed below. (Those departments are welcome to send me their data, if available.)

      Update 7/1/2014: It has come to my attention that Brian Leiter has aired some criticisms of this post on his blog and has publicly suggested that it (this post, not his blog) be taken down. I respond to these criticisms below. 

      Updates 7/2/2014:

      1. I changed some wording above from “ranking” to “brackets” and added a link to the spreadsheet. I have also changed the numbers in the below ranking to a grouping by bracket (where departments are listed in alphabetical order within brackets). This was a suggestion of Ned Block’s. We have been corresponding on statistical significance and I decided that his suggestion would help avoid making small differences between placement rates appear more important than they are. I have left in the PGR rank for comparison, although the difference in rank has been omitted for the reasons provided above. 
      2. I have also added updates to my responses to Brian, based on some new statistical tests. 
      3. I am adding a link to a chart that will help readers to visualize the total number of reported tenure-track placements and estimated graduates from each department, rather than just percentage of tenure-track placements. 

      Update 7/6/2014: I ran a completeness test for 5 departments selected at random using a random number generator. The tenure-track numbers for these 5 departments appears to be accurate. More below.

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    • Google Scholar Metrics Doesn’t Tell You The Average Quality Of Papers In Philosophy Journals

      Brian Leiter criticizes the new Google Scholar Metrics, which uses h-index and various similar measures to assess journals. He writes that "since it doesn't control for frequency of publication, or the size of each volume, its results are worthless." Some of my friends on Facebook are wondering why he's saying this, so I'll try to offer a helpful toy example here.

      Consider two journals: Philosophical Quality, which publishes 25 papers a year, all of which are good and well-cited; and the Journal of Universal Acceptance, which publishes 25 equally good and well-cited papers a year as well as 975 bad papers that nobody ever cites. Google gives both journals the same score along all its metrics. Since tacking extra uncited papers onto a journal doesn't affect the number of papers in it with at least that number of citations, JUA's additional bad papers make no impact on the h-index (or on Google's other measures defined in terms of h-index, like h-median or h-core). But if you're looking at someone's CV and they've got a paper in one of these journals, you should be more impressed by a Phil Quality paper than an JUA paper. The Phil Quality paper is likely to be good, while a JUA paper is likely to be bad. Still, Google will see them as equal.

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    • Working for The Man: Reflections on the Hobby Lobby Opinion

      Suspecting that a disappointing Court decision is coming doesn’t make it any better when it arrives, as did the Hobby Lobby opinion this morning, in which a 5-4 majority (led by Justice Alito) said that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1992 to require a “closely held corporation” (“family-owned,” but expect lots of litigation; apparently some 90% of American corporations may qualify!) to purchase a health insurance policy that provided free contraception to which the owners of that corporation object on religious grounds (nice summary here).  There is a substantial silver lining, which is that the Court seems to endorse an opt-out like the one provided for non-profits: certify that you object to providing contraception coverage, and you don’t pay for that part of the plan.  Either the insurer or the government does.  Accordingly, today’s ruling would also appear to  pre-emptively resolve (see also here) the next round of religious objections to the ACA, where some of those non-profits contend that even signing the paperwork saying they object to providing contraception somehow violates their religious beliefs, because signing the paperwork means they start a process the end of which is contraception (so would employing women at all, but never mind that, apparently).

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    • The Future of the European Polity III: Policies (part 1)

      Discussing the ideal policies of the European Union raises a kind of controversy not so apparent when discussing the idea of Europe and political structures, since people who agree on these may have very divergent views on the relative merits of capitalist and socialist economics, social liberalism and conservatism, and so on. In any case, policies are going to the product of the middle ground in European Union nations at that time. We are certainly very far from a model of European government in which there are sharp shifts according to temporary electoral majorities, and as I've explained in previous posts, I believe a more consensual model is appropriate at the European level, compared with the national level. 

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