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    • Diversity, publishing, and the Journal of the APA

      By Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director, and John Heil, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the APA

      No doubt you’ve heard, over the last year or so, about the impending launch of the new Journal of the American Philosophical Association. With the editorial board having been announced earlier this month, the journal is now a living, breathing reality.

      One especially notable feature of the journal is the commitment of the editorial team to diversity. The mission statement of the journal approved by the APA board of officers affirms that it will not only recognize, but in fact represent, the many facets of philosophy as a discipline. Members of the editorial board were selected not only for their scholarly abilities but also for their commitment to this aspect of thejournal’s mission. In the coming months, we plan to have representatives of the journal attending conferences in a variety of philosophical disciplines, seeking out good papers and encouraging submissions.

      The journal will aim for full coverage, actively soliciting the best work from every philosophical constituency. We are well aware that many analytic philosophers are skeptical of work in non-analytic areas, and vice versa. By seeking papers addressed to a broader philosophical audience, we hope to challenge this skepticism by encouraging contributors to write in ways that make the virtues of their ideas salient to philosophers from varied backgrounds.

      The journal is not just about publishing exciting work—although that is certainly a priority—it is about publishing exciting work that is accessible to the broader philosophical community, work that potentially blurs boundaries within the discipline and, where appropriate, reaches out to other disciplines. We do not hope, unreasonably, to produce a journal in which every reader finds every paper congenial—this is a philosophy journal, after all. Our hope, rather, is to provide a venue for papers that are interesting and important philosophically and wear their interest and importance on their sleeves.

      The editors intend the journal to be not simply another philosophy journal, not simply one more place to send papers in hopes of adding entries on CVs. We are responding to a complaint heard more and more nowadays to the effect that journal papers have become more plentiful without becoming more interesting. We suspect that one cause of the current situation stems from the refereeing process. Referees find themselves looking for reasons to reject papers under review. When authors receive the resulting comments they respond by adding material and inserting qualifications, with the result that an initially interesting idea becomes lost in a long discussion of the literature supplemented by preemptive responses to potential lines of criticism. The results are, too often, papers written by committee.

      As our editorial statement indicates, we favor clear, succinct papers that go out on a limb, papers that take a chance, papers exhibiting fresh perspectives on familiar problems. This is of a piece with our goal of encouraging discussion across a wide variety of philosophical areas. Once the journal is running at full speed, our goal will be short response times and useful feedback, both of which promise to help early career philosophers get the best of their ideas into print and build the kind of meaningful publication record needed to secure a permanent position and earn tenure.

      You might remain skeptical that any journal could live up to these goals—that any journal could be a truly generalist journal, representing the demographic and scholarly diversity of the field, publishing important work from across the philosophical spectrum accessible to philosophers of different persuasions, while addressing some of the biggest challenges in publishing. It is a tall order, to be sure. But we are confident not only that it can work and will work, but that it promises significant benefits to philosophers generally, APA members and non-members alike. At a time in which philosophy, the humanities, and higher education itself are under threat, it behooves us to come together in a way that preserves our interesting differences.

      So we hope you’ll join us in making the Journal of the American Philosophical Association a success. Submissions are open.

       [Please note: Our appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]

    • Site Visit Program: A Needed Service to the Profession

      By Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director, and Peggy DesAutels, Site Visit Program Director

      Since the report of the site visit to the University of Colorado Boulder went public, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the site visit program, how it works, what its reports are meant to do, and so on. In authoring this post, we’re taking the opportunity, now that the initial fervor over the report has died down to some degree, to reiterate just how important the site visit program (SVP) is for the profession, explain how and why the APA supports it, and begin to look forward to the program’s future.

      First and foremost, it must be said that members of SVP teams do an invaluable service to the profession—they have taken ownership of the climate issues in philosophy and are giving of themselves to help departments better understand how their own cultures and climates may be impacting the professional and educational experiences of faculty, students, and communities. The goal of the SVP is simply to help departments improve.

      The SVP is based on an established and successful program in physics—and experiences from that program show that it’s an effective methodology for improving departmental climates. In physics departments, SVP visits are a badge of honor. That is how they should be understood in philosophy as well. Departments that are confident that they have a welcoming and inclusive culture should request site visits to assess how well they are achieving their goals; departments with concerns about climate should request site visits to identify concrete steps they can take to improve. A number of departments have had or have scheduled site visits, and we encourage faculty members to advocate for bringing site visit teams to their institutions.

      We also want to take this opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings about the relationship between the APA and the site visit program.

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    • Hobby Lobby at SCOTUS today

      The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, in which the craft store chain is suing for exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate.  According to Hobby Lobby, it has religious objections to certain forms of contraception, and so should be exempt from the mandate on First Amendment grounds.  According to Dahlia Lithwick – who is usually pretty good at this sort of analysis – the oral argument didn’t go well for the government.  Conservatives on the court were signaling their support of Hobby Lobby, and Justice Roberts even has a way to apply the case narrowly (by declaring that only tightly-controlled or family-run companies can make the religious-objection  argument).  This case has broader implications than it might look like on the surface.

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    • as goes generalized philosophy of science?

      I had a weird visceral thought after reading two recent NDPR reviews:

      If Plutynski and Weatherall's reviews are right (and they read wonderfully) both books in different ways seem to me to mark decisive moves away from Generalized Philosophy of Science. The very first paragraph of Weatherall's reads:

      If this collection has an overarching theme, it is that the details matter. If philosophers hope to understand contemporary physics, we need to engage in depth both with the technicalities of our best physical theories and the practicalities of how those theories are applied. The authors in this volume brush aside an older tradition in the philosophy of physics — and the philosophy of science more generally — in which actual physics entered only to illustrate high-level accounts of theories, explanation, or reduction. Of course, by itself, dismissing this tradition is hardly worth remarking on: such an approach to philosophy of physics has been going out of fashion for decades. Taken as whole, however, this volume pushes the theme still further, in ways that mark important shifts in recent philosophy of physics.

      And Plytinski's second paragraph is:

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    • As Maine Goes, So Goes the Nation: A Brief Report from the University of Southern Maine

      “Whenever you have a 'southern' or a 'northern' or an 'eastern' or a 'western' before an institution's name, you know it will be wildly underfunded." –Richard Russo

      On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff in the Hannaford Lecture Hall, a spacious and new lecture hall (more often rented out than used for classes) to unveil the University of Southern Maine's new vision as a “Metropolitan University.” Two days later, on the twenty-first, twelve members of the faculty from such programs as economics, theater, and sociology met with the provost of the University to be "retrenched." Both of these events followed the proposal to eliminate four programs (American and New England Studies, Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and Arts and Humanities at the Lewiston Auburn Campus) the week before. It was a strange and tumultuous week, and one that I fear offers a frightening glimpse of a future of higher public education in the US.

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    • News from the Turkish crisis for Internet freedom and democracy in general

      Unfortunately various pressures on my time, including the flow of news about the struggle with the government block on Twitter in Turkey, led me to miss Catherine Dutilh Novaes very useful post The night twitter went down, and miss the opportunity to comment in a timely manner. As I am in Istanbul, teaching at Istanbul Technical University, a full length post on the complex changing situation here is probably the best response to make in any case. What follows is even a double post, the first part deals with the immediate situation. Those who wish to have more background can then go on to the second part of this post, or even go to it first as a basis for following the more immediate issues.

      The Twitter block was followed by an enormous growth of activity on Twitter as those interested in social media found very easy evasive methods, drawing on previous experience with a YouTube block. I was even able to use Twitter without any tricks as the block was not applied in my university campus where I live as well as work. The government then introduced more aggressive blocking to precude the more simple switches in DNS used at first and started working on VPN networks, and the apps using them like Hotshield. Nevertheless, I have been able to stay constantly on Twitter with minimum effort, using Opera mobile browser, which uses servers in Iceland on my smart phone, and the Google Chrome app ZenMate on my personal computer. Yesterday (24th March) evening normal twitter access strangely resumed at my university campus and some others, while still otherwise remaining in force. During the blockage conflicting reports have circulated on whether a critical article in The Guardian had been blocked, and whether that might be a sign of a very deep crackdown on the Internet, along with all the other indications for and against a deepening attack on freedom of communication.

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    • Data collection—where we are, where we want to be (Amy Ferrer)

      The following is a guest post by Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director

      When I wrote a blog post on diversity issues more than a year ago during my guest series on Leiter Reports, I said the following:

      Perhaps the most powerful tool we have to increase diversity in philosophy is data collection: there are many good ideas about how to make philosophy a more welcoming place for minorities and women, but we have no way of knowing whether our efforts are effective if we cannot measure their impact. And there are minorities about which we have little or no data: the prevalence of LGBT philosophers and disabled philosophers, for example, has rarely been tracked, so it’s very difficult to know how philosophy compares to other fields on inclusiveness in these areas.

      I believed then, as I do now, in the business adage that “you make what you measure”—that is, by measuring, you can (even unconsciously) begin to see patterns in your measurements, and do more of the things that improve the metrics that matter to you. When it comes to measuring, philosophy, and the APA too, have been lacking. But the APA’s strategic planning task force, which reported to the board of officers last fall, included data collection as one of its priorities for the APA in the next few years, along with "providing membership services in an efficient manner, … development, and improving the public perception of philosophy."

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    • Looking forward to guest blogging this week! (Amy Ferrer)

      The following is a guest post by Amy Ferrer, APA Exectutive Director

       

      Before putting up my first substantive post later today, I want to take a moment to thank the folks at NewAPPS for having me, and especially John Protevi and Eric Winsberg, who will be moderating comments and working with me along the way.

      Many readers will know that this is my second guest stint on a major philosophy blog, after an appearance over at Leiter Reports in late 2012. At that time, I was still new to the APA and my wide-ranging posts functioned, as much as anything, to introduce me and my priorities to the philosophical community. This time around, I’m going to be focusing on one particular area of interest: diversity and inclusiveness. Many conversations have happened online and off over the last several months on these important issues, so this week I’ll be talking about some of the APA’s ongoing work related to diversity and inclusiveness, joined on a couple of occasions by colleagues as co-authors. I can’t possibly take on every facet of this broad topic in just a few posts, of course, but I think we’ll have more than enough material for some lively and productive discussions throughout the week.

      Stay tuned!

      [Please note: My appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]

    • Highly adequate women

      A comment on Shelley Tremain's post Disabling Philosophy concerns a different, but related, issue. Commenter Tara Nelson said:

      Relatedly, a truly sexist and essentialist view of women's abilities in philosophy has reared its head on the blogosphere, and Showalter seems unable to respond to it effectively. Hope someone here can nip this in the bud. It's in the comments section.

      Tara is referring to comments by commenter "Highly Adequate"–comments which include this one:

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    • Bad Economics/Economists: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

      My friend Alan Nelson recently posted a link on facebook to the following article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/business/economic-view-when-the-scientist-is-also-a-philosopher.html with an appropriately snarky note that the author, N. Gregory Mankiw (the Chair of the econ department at Harvard, natch), seemed to be arguing that the only changes to the status quo permissible are those that are verifiably Perato efficient improvements.  An obvious corollary is that, since every reasonably substantive and complex policy change will have winners and losers, we should never change policies at all.

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