philosophysmoker-Mstarz

(Just so we're clear, the Pinker text is bold and      offset; my text justified normally and in italics.)

STEVEN PINKER
Harvard College Professor
Johnstone Family Professor 

So far, so good. He knows who he is and where he works.

Professor Edwin Ervin 

I'm kinda sure it's 'Erwin' with a 'w', not 'Ervin' with a 'v'. Somehow I don't get the idea that this is going to be Pinker's most thoughtful work.  

Department of Philosophy
University of Miami
Miami, FL

 Coral Gables. 

June 13, 2013 
Dear Professor Ervin, 

Again, it's Erwin. With a 'w'. At least he's consistent.

I join you and other scholars, writers, and activists in protesting the threat of dismissal

According to McGinn, any threat of dismissal has been neutralized by the fact that he resigned. 

Also, activists? What activists?

of a brilliant and distinguished scholar, Colin McGinn, from the University of Miami for apparently nothing more serious than exchanging sexual banter with a graduate student.

McGinn claims that the only charge the University was considering was a failure to disclose a consensual but non-sexual relationship. But since the University has yet to publicly comment on the matter, it's difficult to know with any confidence what they thought he was up to, how serious they thought it was, how serious it actually was, or whether he would have been dismissed over it. 

Also, depending on whether the student was interested in engaging in sexual banter, the exact nature of the banter, and whether the student's participation was strictly and completely voluntary, engaging in sexual banter with a student could be fairly serious misconduct. Again, who knows what was really going on? Certainly not Pinker.

Even if the University had a clear policy that regulated communications between professor and student,

As far as I can tell, the University of Miami does have a pretty clear and sensible policy on this stuff. As I read the policy, very little in the way of professor/student communication is prohibited, though they are careful to point out that the uneven balance of power inherent in the professor/student relationship creates practical difficulties in establishing that the student has genuinely consented. 

It also says, and I have no idea whether this is strictly relevant, that faculty are required to disclose certain kinds of "amorous" relationships to a supervisor, and that they must do whatever is necessary to guarantee that they are not in a position of evaluative authority over someone with whom they are in such an "amorous" relationship. Failure to do so would create a clear conflict of interest, it says. It threatens the faculty member's ability to evaluate the person's work objectively. It can create the appearance (or fact) of favoritism. It creates a risk that the junior person might be exploited. It creates a risk that the faculty member or the University will be sued for sexual harassment, it says. Now, I'm not saying this is the kind of wisdom you'd consider going all the way to Dagobah to receive. But at the very least, it's fairly decent advice, and McGinn seems to have largely ignored it. At his peril. 

the punishment is ludicrously disproportionate to the alleged offense.

Again. McGinn says he wasn't "punished" or even charged by the University. He says he resigned and thereby halted any disciplinary procedures before they began. There's no such thing as the punishment. It doesn't exist.

As well as harming the reputation and intellectual quality of the University of Miami,

There's some low-hanging fruit here, but I'm not going to take it. Instead, I'm going to point out that this is one of the things that makes it so hard to square McGinn's version of the facts with reality. The story doesn't jell. 

McGinn really was one of the more prominent members of the UMiami philosophy department. Though I don't mean to disparage the other members of the department, it seems to be widely acknowledged that McGinn was disproportionately responsible for the department's overall reputation. The administration would have to have known this when they called him into a meeting and told him whatever they told him about what they found out about his "relationship" with his RA, explained to him that he was required by University policy to have disclosed it, and informed him of his options going forward. And whatever they told him must have been at least kind of bad news, or else he wouldn't have resigned rather than fight the charges or accept sanctions. It is at least a little unlikely that they would have done that unless they thought it was sort of serious. Add to that the disconnect between what he seems to have done and what he says the charge was going to be, and I'm not sure how to make it add up. 

Of course, for all I know, the administration was mistaken about how serious it was, or they were out to get him even though they knew he didn't do anything wrong. 

Of course, for all I know, they were not mistaken, or he is paranoid and has a persecution complex. 

On the other hand, maybe Pinker knows more about the case than I do. No he doesn't. 

such an action would put a chill on communication between faculty and graduate students and on the openness and informality on which scholarship depends. 

Perhaps Pinker's scholarship and teaching habits differ from mine (McGinn's seem to, after all), but I have not had to rely in my teaching on lurid puns about handjobs. To a captive audience. And from what has been made public, McGinn didn't get into any actual trouble until he inserted the RA herself into the jokes, and made handjob puns that were literally about her. I don't think I'd be chilled by a policy prohibiting handjob puns involving the students themselves in my communications with them. I don't think that would make me less "open" with them--and if it would make me more closed off, that just speaks to the necessity of the policy. A policy like that would really just codify what I've already been doing this whole time, in an attempt to avoid being thought of as a creep or having to explain my offbeat sense of humor to the Dean. 

There is such a thing as too much openness informality, you know. 

If the dismissal proceeds, I will certainly bring it up with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose advisory board I sit. 

Pinker can rest assured that the dismissal will not proceed, because of the apparently little-known fact that McGinn has resigned his post. 

But really. Although McGinn's posting of the Pinker letter suggests that he substantially approves of it, it doesn't really seem as though FIRE's involvement is something that McGinn would welcome--and I base this entirely on McGinn's statements and actions, and not at all on my own suspicions concerning his innocence or guilt. He says doesn't want to spare the time or resources that a serious defense would require; he's unsure whether his passion for teaching could survive the ordeal; he's concerned about how it would affect his wife and family; he didn't like working at Miami anyway. He says he wants to put this whole mess behind him and move on. So he decided not to contest whatever charges an investigation might have turned up and resigned instead. Take this job and shove it, as the fella says. 

(On the other hand, McGinn doesn't totally act like someone who wants to put this whole mess behind him and move on. Someone who wanted to move on from this might begin by not posting fifteen blog posts about it, including seven following the one where he said he was done talking about it.)

I'm also far from convinced that this is the kind of case that FIRE could really dig its teeth into. I don't follow FIRE's activities very carefully, but it seems like they tend to go after freedom-of-speech/freedom-of-religion/due process cases where there's a relatively compelling prima facie case that someone's Constitutional rights were violated, or that the University jumped the gun in applying discipline, such that the accused didn't get a fair shake. Whereas, based on what has been made public, this seems like a case where the accused really did kind of break the rules, and where it's not possible to know whether he would have gotten a fair shake because he resigned before any shaking took place. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but it's hard for me to see where FIRE might find a handhold.

Feel free to circulate this letter, and to add my name to any list of McGinn’s supporters. 

Shorter Pinker: I'm not sure who I'm writing to, and I don't have any idea what's going on, but I have chosen sides and am attaching my name to this half-baked letter, which you should feel free to spread around. 

Man, what a pointless waste of everyone's time.

--Mr. Zero

Some of you are getting ready to move into new jobs this summer. Woohoo! Grad school, postdoc, and adjunct teaching did not prepare me for a tenure-track job in some important ways. Here's a few things it would have helped me to know from the get-go.

1. Once you've landed a TT job, you cannot rest on your laurels. The quest for tenure begins before you've got your books unpacked. Seriously. Hit the ground running, kid. (If you're in a department that lets you go up for tenure early, this is doubly true.)
2. Find out what the specific tenure requirements are for your school and department. Start doing those things right away. Departmental committee work. Some number of p-r publications. A book. Grants. Teaching. If your dept doesn't have some kind of orientation for new faculty, talk to someone on the P&T committee about what you have to do.
3. Keep track of what you do. I find it useful to keep a yearly log of my work activity, with dates, brief description of activity, and time spent. It includes things like meetings, guest lectures, conferences, papers submitted and accepted, papers I reviewed for journals, interviews and promo stuff, training, etc. It just takes a minute to enter the info, and when it comes time for the annual P&T review, it's handy to have it all there in front of you.
4. Keep a "self-promotion" file of stuff that supports you and your work. Print out nice emails from students or colleagues, copies of favorable comments from student evals, reviews of your work, awards and recognition, those stupid certificates you get for completing training, etc. Put notes in there about stuff you've done for others (e.g. helped a student get an internship). If you have anything that shows how awesome you are, put it in the file.
5. Keep your CV up to date all the time. Add all the stuff you never had on it before, like departmental service.
6. Keep track of when/where your papers are cited (I use Google Scholar for this) if you're at a research (or other) school that cares about that. If your papers are not listed on philpapers.org, submit them yourself.
7. Volunteer for the minimum number of committees you can get away with, and volunteer for the ones that are likely to meet the least often. You will not get tenure just for being that person who volunteers for everything and publishes nothing. Here it pays to know what you're expected to do by your department (e.g. smaller departments may expect/need more committee work from each individual, etc.)
8. Find a trusted mentor in the department, a senior person who can advise you on tenure-related matters, fill you in on departmental politics/squabbles/history/culture. Someone you're comfortable talking to. The first several faculty meetings are bewildering. I didn't know what the hell people were talking about half the time.
9. Find a focus in your research. Most Some places (e.g. research-oriented departments) will expect you to at least start to gain a national reputation as a scholar by the time your tenure review comes along (typically 6 years), and to do that, you will likely need to specialize your research and have a coherent and important research agenda. This might not be true of SLACs. If someone knows, please enlighten.
10. Make time to write/do research in proportion, more or less, to how important it is to tenure. This can be especially tough in the first year, if you're teaching new classes and doing preps, but it has to be done. You hopefully have some pubs in the pipeline already, so that one or two of them will be published in your first year. But if you don't do any new work in the first year, your pubs will be scanty to nonexistent in your second year, which is probably when your first probationary period will expire and your first review happens.
11. Build a network/alliance of people in your department or school (for social and professional support) and also start building a network of people nationally/internationally who can support your tenure review by serving as external references. Join the relevant professional societies/groups and go to conferences. Join faculty groups on campus that are relevant to your interests.
12. Juggling work and family is tough, especially when you're moving to a new community and don't know anyone. I wish I had excellent advice on how to do that, but I don't (although it is super helpful if your kid(s) are in school or daycare). Try to make friends with other people in the department who can tell you about useful resources, places to go, reliable daycare, good doctors, dentists, veterinarians, hair salons, etc. Taking care of that day to day stuff can suck up a lot of time when you first land in your new town.

I reckon others will have useful advice. Or questions. Chime in.

~zombie

An "Expat Grad Student" writes with the following question:

I realize that this is not really in your wheelhouse, but I am going to be staring a my PhD in the US/Canada in the autumn and was hoping your readers would  clear something up that I have been wondering about. I am American, but I did my bachelors and terminal MA in a small, but well regarded department in the UK where, by the time of my MA I was on a first name basis with all of the academic staff in the department - in fact, all of the grad students were. Furthermore, most of the lecturers were happy to discuss anything relating to philosophy whenever they were not in the middle of anything else. It was also not uncommon for profs, grad students and even some undergrads to go to the pub and socialize or drink a fair amount at department events (Holiday party, etc.)

I realize that there is a great variation in departments even in the same area, but I am under the impression that things are a bit more formal this side of the pond. Am I correct in this assumption? Either way I would be grateful for any guidance as to what to expect with regard to  departmental culture.

... in a big way, and not just because of the way that it always kicks my ass. It's bad for the discipline. It's bad for philosophy.

I've been here for a few years now, and in that time I've seen a lot of undergraduate students come through our major program. I've had the opportunity to watch a number of them over their entire undergraduate careers: I see them in their first, introductory-level philosophy classes, and then their second or third, then in upper-division classes that are required for the major, and in department functions and extracurricular activities. I get to know them and their work. I see their ideas get more sophisticated. I see them develop an enthusiasm--a "passion," I guess, even though it sounds corny--for philosophy. Finally, they graduate, and sometimes they ask me to serve as an employment reference or write them a letter of recommendation for law school or something. Usually they let me know where they end up going, and sometimes we keep in touch after that. It's a nice thing to see, and it's one of my favorite parts of this job.

A lot of them are really sharp, clever people who really love philosophy. They tend to be good readers and writers. They tend to be clear-thinkers who have been well-served by the philosophical education they got here. Some of them would, at least potentially, make good philosophers. It's hard to say, obviously, how they'd handle grad school, or whether they'd finish the dissertation, or how they'd fare at writing for a professional audience rather than their professors. I can't see the future. But I've had at least two students whose grad-school recommendation letters would basically write themselves, and maybe two or three more who I could see being highly successful in the program I come from. I don't know if that's a "good number" or whatever; I'm really just thinking about the particular people, not the numbers. But it's about one a year, give or take.

But none of these students, however enthusiastic, have indicated to me a substantial interest in a philosophical career, and I don't try to talk them into it. Once in a while someone will express a casual, not intense, interest, and I give the same "don't do it if you can think of anything else" speech my undergraduate professors gave me, and it's always dissuasive. If we've sent anybody to philosophy grad school in the time I've been here, I didn't hear about it. They all go into other fields, which I can't imagine are remotely as interesting as philosophy.

The thing that bums me out is, I want to feel like that's a mistake. I want to feel like they've cheated themselves. I want to feel like they've blown the chance to pursue an incredibly interesting, and fulfilling, and fucking amazingly fun way to make a living, in exchange for a career that has no chance of being close to as good or rewarding or whatever. But that's not how I feel. I feel like not going into philosophy probably wasn't a bad idea. I feel like they're probably better off where they are.

This does not reflect how I feel about my own choices. I love my job and I can't believe I'm able to make a living this way. It's incredible to me that I can spend the day doing the things my job consists of and call it a solid day's work. I almost feel like I'm getting away with something.

But I don't feel like I can recommend this career to my students, even if I think they'd be good at it; even if I think they'd be deserving of success; even if I think that, if they found success, they'd be happier with this career than the thing I wrote them a recommendation for. I wish I could encourage them to continue their studies--to try to make a life out of doing philosophy. Like I did. And philosophy is missing out on their contributions. I wish that the prospects for a career in this discipline were such that I could recommend it in good conscience to my students. But they're not, and I can't. And that bums me out.

--Mr. Zero

This was posted by Anonymous on the previous thread, and warrants attention:

Wow. So I just read a letter of rec for a job candidate (I'm on a SC). Absolutely brutal. It wasn't just unenthusiastic; it outright insulted the candidate along numerous dimensions. Why would you agree to write a letter if you are going to go out of your way to say that the person is bad? I understand not going in for hyperbolic praise. I read tons of letters like those where it is clear that the letter writer isn't giving full support. But a letter this damning is a rare find.

Obviously, pretty scary.

I have questions:

• Were the other letters equally bad? Was this just one rotten letter from someone who really did not like the student? (One must wonder, as well, why the student didn't know this person thought so poorly of him/her. Was s/he being set up? Was this a personal vendetta? Sexism/racism/bias?)
• What moral/legal/professional duties do SC members have in such matters? Are they prohibited from writing to a candidate and saying, e.g. "One of your letters really stinks -- maybe you should ask someone to look into that." Or some such.
• What moral/legal/professional duties do letter writers have to the persons for whom they write letters? If you are asked for a "letter of recommendation," that seems, to me, to imply that, at minimum, you are going to recommend the subject of the letter. Insulting, demeaning, trashing, and not recommending would seem to be excluded from the mission of the letter of recommendation. Which is not to say that you have to offer a complete and unqualified endorsement of the student, but you have to endorse them to some extent. It would seem that this letter writer engaged in deceit and intentionally undermined the student under the guise of "recommending" them, unless they actually told the student that they could not and would recommend him/her. But then why write the letter at all?

So, this also points to the value of having someone look at your letters before they're sent out. My school/dept did not do this (the placement help was pretty lousy). I was tempted, a few times, to use Interfolio to send my letters to myself or a friend. But I couldn't convince myself that it was ethical to break the confidentiality, so I never did it. I'm curious though, to know from those who have had their letters evaluated by a third party, whether there were bad letters among them, and what happened.

~zombie

Questions about CC jobs come up periodically, and in the current job climate, some philosophers who previously would not have considered teaching at a CC are probably giving those jobs a good, hard, longing look. My experience with CCs is pretty limited. (I took an art class at a CC once, and I'm a big fan of Community.) I applied for a few CC jobs in my last go-round on the job market, and found the application process to be quite different, and in some ways, quite onerous. I was in contention (early on) for one job, and remember having to respond to a lot of very specific additional questions with fairly lengthy written answers. As I progressed through different levels of the process, it seemed the search committee demanded more and more from me. Still, the particular school was in a desirable city, and I was willing. But I can't say I was heartbroken when I was eventually eliminated. So maybe a CC job wasn't for me.

Here's what I've gleaned about CC jobs from fellow Smokers:

• The teaching load is relatively high, with the usual expectations of service.You should really, really love to teach.
• The students are far more diverse socially, economically, educationally, and in every other way, than the typical four year college student.
• There is generally no research requirement for tenure.
• The pay is equivalent to (or better than) four year college salaries.
• Expect a multidisciplinary atmosphere.
• It is not at all unusual for CC jobs to require a PhD these days.

Those in the know are invited to correct any inaccuracies. This is an open thread for those of you who have questions about CCs, and those who have experience and answers.

~zombie

In a recent thread, anon 4:07 asks,

I'm wondering if anyone else would be interested in a thread on the timing of having a family in the midst of a philosophy career. I've heard from many that the only reasonable time for female philosophers to have children is during grad school or after tenure. Is it really death to one's career to have a child after grad school, but before tenure? I can imagine the difficulty of doing so, but would think that it would be highly dependent upon one's personal circumstances.

Anon 1:52 posted the following response:

My spouse and I did when we were both on the tenure track, with enough published and under review to feel fairly confident that tenure was likely. That cuts a few years off the "grad school or tenured" model you mentioned. We both found that there was a relative "lull" after the manias of grad school, the job market, and the early t-track push to develop the portfolio of work that would form the basis of the tenure case. By year three on the t-track, that portfolio was partly published and partly under review.

We had a kid in year four and another in what would have been year six but became year five because the first kid gave us a do-over on year four. We also took a kid-two-driven do-over on year five, even though we probably didn't need to. So the tenure track became eight years, with the second half mainly devoted to placing the portfolio developed in the first half.

As everyone knows, placing pieces of a project -- responding to R&Rs, rewriting from scratch when it becomes clear that an argument doesn't work, etc. -- is just as hard as developing the original ideas. So there was lots of hard work to be done in 20-minute work sessions while the baby napped. (I developed an analogue of carpal tunnel syndrome in my left ankle from rocking the cradle to keep the kid sleeping while I typed.) But, as others have noted, becoming a parent helps provide a focus and grounding that makes you much more efficient in your work. I think I got more work done in early parenthood than I had before despite having much much less time to do it. But it would have been especially difficult to develop completely new ideas in those briefer work-sessions, with so many more demands on my attention.

I think my spouse would make a similar report. In any case, we did both -- one male, one female -- recently get tenure with toddlers in tow.

Of course, it's useless advice to those who haven't yet landed a t-track job. But those starting on the tenure-track may find that they need not put off family till after they're tenured.

I am still pretty new to being a parent and stuff, and I don't by any means consider myself to be an expert on this. But in my admittedly limited experience, taking care of an infant is shockingly, incredibly time-consuming. I'm not sure I'd want to take this on while I was in the coursework phase of graduate school. When you're doing your coursework, you've got a lot of demands on your time, and the demands tend to be somewhat inflexible, and if you're anything like me, anyway, you're pretty much completely broke all the time. That doesn't mean it can't be done--I know it can be done because I saw people do it. But I don't know how they did it.

The ABD phase is somewhat better, I guess. Your schedule is probably more flexible, since you probably don't teach very many classes and you probably don't have to take any classes at all unless you want to, and your writing deadlines are probably more negotiable than they were when you were writing term papers. But you're probably still pretty broke. But then when you get a job, it's a double-edged sword (whether it's tenure-track or not): you make a lot more money, but you have a lot more responsibility. Obviously. I know you know that.

What I'm trying to get at is this: there's no ideal time. There's no time when the responsibilities of caring for a child can be fit seamlessly and without trouble into your already-existing lifestyle. Stuff gets majorly shifted around and reorganized, and nothing is unaffected. Obviously it helps to have access to lots of money, and to have a flexible schedule, and to be able to work from home a lot, and to have other people--spouses, family members, paid staff--to keep an eye on the child/ren while you do other stuff.

And so, at first Mrs. Zero and I wanted to wait until I was on the tenure-track and we were settled in somewhere before we started thinking about Junior. That way we'd have more money and more stability, we'd have a pretty good bet that we wouldn't have to move across the country for at least a few years, it would make sense to think about buying a house, and stuff like that. But at a certain point we started to think that we didn't feel like waiting anymore. We started to think that if it was really important to us to start a family, we should just do it. Not that the problems we foresaw would cease to be problems, or that we just decided to pretend they didn't exist. But we felt that if it was genuinely important, we shouldn't try to wait until we were fully or maximally prepared, because that was never going to happen. But if we're not waiting until we've achieved maximal preparation, what are we waiting for? So we decided not to wait.

And as we were making the decision, I thought a lot about the things people said in this thread from 2009. The things John Turri, Asstro, and others said about how you'll just kind of figure a way to make things work. I guess the thing is, when something is important to you, you find the time for it. (However, the consensus view back in '09 seemed to be that although this is true of one kid, having two is pretty much unmanageable.)

--Mr. Zero

I've been teaching an online course this summer, which more or less requires me to use Canvas. (I guess I could have built a website and such, but Canvas is there, and set up for this kind of thing, so...) But what I've noticed, at least at my school, is that the Canvas gradebook totally enables the instant gratification neediness in students. They freak out if their grades are not posted RIGHT AWAY. They send me emails asking WHY grades have not been posted. They are SURE that there must be some mistake that accounts for that void sitting there in the gradebook.

Me, on the other hand, I hate posting the grades, because as soon as I do, the grubbing starts. The demanding-to-know-why-I-only-got-an-A-minus starts. Which makes me want to not post grades. I'm required to let my students know how they're doing before the drop deadline each term. Freshmen and transfers get midterm grades as well. But I'm not actually required to let them know how they're doing at every moment, and I'm disinclined to do so because of the grade-grubbing and the whingeing and whining.

On the other other hand, the gradebook feature is handy and easy to use, except that it is visible to students. It's not that I think their grades should be a complete surprise to them at the end of the term. They should get enough feedback to know if they're doing OK, or not. And my assessment and pedagogical strategy is to give them more frequent assignments rather than a couple of high-stakes ones. But that only increases the frequency with which they are inspired to complain.

I suppose I could do what I did before Canvas, which is keep my own grading spreadsheet, and make students ask me about their grades. I'm curious about how the rest of you deal with this, and if you see the same instant gratification syndrome in your students.

~zombie

Here's what happened: sometime in the somewhat recent past, Mrs. Zero and I somehow ended up with a kid. We named it Junior Zero, which was the obvious thing to do, and things have been going pretty well. He's healthy and super duper cute, and it's been a pretty amazing experience so far. The only real problem we've been having is that taking care of Junior sort of cuts into the time we would ordinarily spend doing other things, such as sleeping, keeping the house clean, staying in shape, reading philosophy papers, writing philosophy papers, keeping up with sports, keeping up with the news, keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, reading books, reading blogs, approving blog comments, and writing blog posts. Among other things. So that's why I haven't been posting very much lately.

Things do tend to slow down around here in the summer, of course. Even under the best circumstances, there's just less Smokery stuff to write about in the summertime. And then lately whenever I sit down to write a post, I usually don't get very far before some other responsibility presents itself. Sometimes this takes the form of preventing Junior from getting killed or destroying something important, but often it just means spending time with him. (This post, for example, has taken me a week to write. (Also, I don't like to just sit down and quickly dash something off--whenever I do that, I end up saying something stupid.(Which is not to suggest that I successfully avoid saying stupid stuff the rest of the time.))) Maybe this is weird, but I've felt more like spending time with my kid than writing. And then, when I do sit down to write something, my actual philosophy projects have been getting most of my attention.

But I thought I should come out of the woods to let you know that I'm still here, and that the blog hasn't died, and let you know what's going on with me. I'm just a lot busier than I used to be, and I guess the reality is that I'm not going to be posting as regularly as I used to. I think I'll get better as things settle down and I get more accustomed to the new stuff I have to do now. And I expect that I'll post more as job-market season approaches, and as school starts in the fall. And I expect that, at least sometimes, I'll be interested in discussing how one goes about balancing attempts at career advancement with successfully keeping one's children alive.

One thing I can tell you right now is that being a father adds an entirely new dimension to the stress I feel about the job market. I'm worried about all the things I was worried about before, but now, in addition to the length and breadth they always had, the worries have a previously inconceivable depth. I feel like a Flatlander experiencing Spaceland for the first time. Man alive.

Anyways, sorry about the no new posts in a long time, and thanks for hanging with us even though there have been no new posts in a long time.

--Mr. Zero

I've had a number of unpleasant interactions with students in the past couple of months. One in particular involved a student to whom I had to assign an "F" in an introductory ethics course. Although it was a high F, it wasn't close to a D and there was no way in good conscience to give her the benefit of the doubt--there wasn't any real doubt that this was a failing performance. She emailed me as soon as final grades were released to students, informing me that she does not fail classes and demanding to know why I found it necessary to grade her various assignments unfairly.

(I thought this last was kind of interesting. Not that it's literally impossible, but there's a clear sense in which you just can't accept the premise of the question. It's possible, I guess, that The Joker was going to poison Gotham City's water supply unless you gave this student an undeservedly low grade and that's why it was necessary to grade the assignment unfairly. Or that you were just being malicious; but it seems to me that in that case the unfairness was clearly optional, not necessary. Other than that, it seems to me that if you were really trying to grade it, you were trying to grade it fairly. I feel like there's something akin to Moore's Paradox here.)

Anyways, I wrote back with a set of detailed explanations of the grading of her various assignments--her work suffered from the same set of problems all semester. She didn't listen when I had explained what I was looking for, and kept making the same mistakes. She replied a day or two later with an iPhone screenshot of her report card, showing all As and Bs and one F, and some accompanying text about what a shitty teacher I am, what a shitty person I am, how much more valuable to society than philosophy her major subject is, and which contained sarcastic mockery of language I employed in my previous message. The screengrab was taken at 1:00 in the morning; she sent the email shortly after 5 AM.

I thought for a long time about whether to respond, and if so, how. For example, I thought about telling her to try to see this as a learning experience, so that she could understand how this happened and thereby prevent it from happening again. But a) I wasn't sure that it's really my place to offer advice like that, and b) I didn't think she'd accept the advice coming from me, anyways. I ended up just saying that I understand that she's unhappy with the grade she earned, and then I encouraged her to file a formal appeal with the dean's office if she really thinks that the grade is unfair. She didn't write back. I don't know if she went to the dean.

The reason this exchange stood out to me is this: I got a few shitty grades when I was in college, and I got a grade or two that I thought was unfair, to the point where I actually did inquire about filing a formal appeal or grievance of some sort. But I never even considered the idea of throwing a temper tantrum like this. Of sending an insulting letter to a professor and including a copy of my report card. What in the fuck? And although I don't have anything like a set of empirical measurements that would support this claim, I feel like I've witnessed an increasing tendency of students to treat their professors with what I would describe as profound levels of disrespect. I mean, I don't want to be one of those old people who says, what the hell is wrong with the kids today?!?!?!?!. And I'm open to the possibility that there's something I'm doing that is inviting or otherwise failing to discourage this behavior. So I guess I'll just ask: is there something wrong with the kids today? Is there an increasing level of disrespect? Or is it me?

--Mr. Zero

I realize this is a little late, for which I apologize. You know how it is--you get busy, and then you fall behind, and so you get busier, and then you fall a little more behind, and then you look around and it's been two weeks since you posted anything on your blog. Shit.

Anyways, there was a relatively recent exchange starting about here that warrants further discussion. Anon 6:16 said (this is long, but worth reading in full),

After a number of years on the job (and several search committees), I feel comfortable saying that one reason so many people end up unhappy is that they were unprepared for what a full-time job as an academic requires. Grad school is wonderful in many ways: the teaching load is low, the service expectations are almost non-existent, and one is encouraged to spend most of one's time in research. Further, while conferences and publications are celebrated, they are not required. (That is, I have never heard of a grad student losing funding because he/she was not publishing.) Because of this, many graduates become frustrated very quickly when they realize that the job is not at all like grad school.

Recent hires (and I've noticed this in my program, other programs at my university, and other universities) are often unprepared for certain aspects of the job. Advising students (which requires learning how the major, the minor, and the college gen-ed programs all work) is both new and time-consuming for new faculty. As is service. Both of these are - for the first few years - a huge time-suck, and many get frustrated at how this works takes away from the parts of the job people are expecting (teaching and research).

But just as importantly, even if one is prepared for the teaching, new hires (particularly at my school, with a 4/4 load, or a SLAC with a 3/3 load) often end up teaching more courses/semester on the job than in grad school. So one must spend more time on teaching, *and* find time to sit on the department curriculum committee, meet with the faculty senate, and schedule 20 advising appointments just when you finish grading midterms. Additionally, one is often preparing new courses for the first couple of years (especially in small departments, where one is expected to cover more areas). Though this is no less the case at research schools; even if one is hired to a sweet 2/2 load at an R1, one may still find oneself preparing a graduate seminar for the first time (which, while fun, still takes time).

And additionally, one must research. Not that one should research, but one must research. Unlike grad school, research on the job is most certainly tied to your funding: publish or perish. This is true for all levels. "Teaching schools" may have lower publication requirements for tenure and promotion, but those requirements are still higher than what one found in grad school. In grad school, presenting at conferences and publishing articles was a job well done; in a TT position, they are how you survive reappointment. And given that many people want to publish their way into a better job, they are taking on R1 publishing expectations in addition to all the advising, service, and additional work on teaching expected of new hires.

In my first two years on the job, it didn't matter where in the country I was, because most of my time was spent in the office anyway. Rural Mississippi or mid-town Manhattan wouldn't have mattered; I spent more than 12 hours a day on campus. Yes, location will matter in the long run, but in those first few years on campus, most new hires are run so ragged that they have no idea where they are anyway.

Good schools do what they can to minimize this culture shock: no advising first year, reduced teaching load first year, easy committee assignments at first, etc. Even still, it's a huge change, and one that few PhD programs seem to prepare their graduates for. I think it's a shame that hD programs don't do a better job of preparing grads for the jobs they are sending students out to. It's frustrating that so many grad programs assume that they only job worth getting is a TT job in the field, and then turn a blind eye to what such jobs will actually require of their graduates.

Then, Squid Pro Quo said,

Anon 6:16 makes several excellent points - especially about the transition from grad school to teaching a 3/3 or 4/4 load. This is why I strongly disagree w/Dr. Kelsky's claim that there's no point in teaching more than 3 courses in grad school. I taught or TA-ed for 8 courses in graduate school, and have found that experience invaluable now that I'm teaching a 3/3 load. Having lots of teaching experience as a grad student enables you to know how to quickly and effectively design syllabi, grade, lesson plan, etc. All this experience has made the adjustment to a 3/3 teaching load much smoother for me.

And then 6:16 replied (in part),

Maybe we could have a thread based on 7:15's comment? That is, for those who have recently been hired (and have spent at least one year in that job), what do you wish you knew ahead of time? What kinds of training/preparation/etc. was helpful for the transition, or would have been helpful? [...] Similarly, what should hiring departments do? In my department, new hires have a year off from advising and are given easy committee assignments at first. In the second year, new hires are given advisees. In the third year, they are expected to branch out from department service to university service. But even with this system, the shock to many new hires is still profound.

When I was in grad school, I taught at most one class at a time, and was responsible for maybe 50 students per semester. I made myself pretty much always highly available to them. For example, I'd answer emails immediately whenever they came in, even if it was pretty late at night or on the weekend, and I'd offer to read and comment on their exam study-guide practice essays, which, since I employ blue-book essay exams, could be as much as eight or ten essays per student who took me up on it.

Nowadays--and this connects with some stuff Second Suitor was talking about the other day--I generally teach four classes at a time, with two or three preps, and am responsible for at least 200 students. This is a lot more work, and I can't do that stuff anymore. I generally always respond to every email (once in a while one slips through the cracks), but if it comes in after I've started working on/eating dinner or watching baseball, it's going to wait until morning. And if it comes in on the weekend, it might wait until Monday. And while I'm happy to answer specific questions about the study guide, I don't offer to read whole study guides and say what all is wrong with it, and I decline any such requests.

I guess what I'm getting at is, because the teaching duties of my VAP job involve a lot more work than my grad school teaching duties (duh), I've found that I have to put a wall around them. This is partly to protect my personal life, so that my wife knows that I'm spending the evenings with her and not my students. But it also protects other aspects of my professional life, since I also need to spend time writing papers, refereeing, and staying current on the literature. And I did not find that I needed any such wall in grad school.

--Mr. Zero

I was reading this post at the Atlantic over the weekend, in which Alan Jacobs complains about the terrible user-interfaces of scholarly databases:

Librarians want students to specify their search terms, but that rarely happens: "Regardless of the advanced-search capabilities of the database they were querying, 'Students generally treated all search boxes as the equivalent of a Google search box,'" simply clicking into a text field and typing away. Problematic, yes -- but why shouldn't they be able to do that? Why shouldn't the software be able to help them out?

Not long ago I was using a research database to try to get a PDF of an article published in a journal to which my college's library has a digital subscription. I knew the title of the article, the author's name, the title of the journal, and the issue date. I plugged all those in to the appropriate text boxes, clicked "search" . . . and got hundreds of results. But the one that I wanted wasn't on the first several pages.

I sent an email to a reference librarian describing this event, and he wrote back saying, "Oh, see, you should have entered the journal's ISSN." Really? Exact title of article and journal, exact name of author, exact date of publication -- that's not enough?

I guess I think that's somewhat of a fair criticism. Jacobs goes on:

...And a Google search does some things that the research databases don't: for instance, when I'm searching for an article in the enormous JSTOR academic journal database, I don't use their search box, but instead go to Google using the "site" delimiter: site:jstor.org my-search-term. Why? Because if I spell a name wrong Google knows the correct spelling and asks me if I meant that. On JSTOR itself I just get inferior results.

So maybe our greater emphasis shouldn't be on training users to work with bad search tools, but to improve the search tools. Especially since serious research questions aren't as afflicted by spammy SEO as many other queries, by this point in the development of online life we ought to be doing a lot better than we are.

This seems right to me. When I was first in grad school, I spent a lot of time on the Philosopher's Index. But I never really got the hang of it, and if I'm honest, I'll admit that I haven't looked at it in years. I haven't checked to see if my current institution subscribes to it. And I can't remember the last time I tried to use the search utility on JSTOR. With either of them, if I'm looking for something specific, I can never find it; and if I don't have anything specific in mind, I'm not going to find anything I can use.

Jacobs alludes, on behalf of the Index/JSTOR search utilities, to the argument that this is because I don't know how to use them, and that if I understood the logic of these search engines I would get better results. But I guess I don't see that as a criticism of me, and I definitely don't see it as a suggestion of a way to improve myself. I see that as a fairly conclusive criticism of the logic of the search engines. If the search engines employed better logic, it would be possible to use them effectively without having to go out of your way to learn a complicated and unintuitive way of thinking.

The research database I make most use of is Google Scholar, and the two features I find come in handiest are the "Related Articles" and the "Cited By" tools. If you, like Jacobs, know the title of the article and the author's name, your search will be successful. It will work. And if you spell something wrong, it will be Google and help you spell it right. And if you want to see how other people have responded to the article, the "Cited By" results will tell you. You'll have to sift through the results to sort the articles that mention it in passing from those that mention it more prominently, but you'll know. And it helps you to see which articles made a big splash and which ones have had a more modest impact. And then it links you to the paper on JSTOR or Springer or whatever. I'm open to the possibility that I'm being really irresponsible with my research, but I sort of doubt it. Google Scholar works really well. If I'm using it to look for something I find it, and it has helped me discover I-don't-know-how-many papers I would never have found otherwise.

--Mr. Zero

Yesterday's post on advertising for your class was not, of course, really about advertising for your class. I have been persuaded that it would be worth having a post that actually was about how to keep your courses from getting cancelled by advertising for them.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have a tiny bit of experience with this sort of thing, from grad school and people I went to grad school with. However, it is not at all clear to me that the posters we were putting up were very effective. It seemed to me that there was no clear relationship between the posters and cancellations. One of my friends had the idea to aim his poster at people who'd failed [notorious professor X's] intro class and to suggest that the summer-school version would be easier, but this person was made to take the posters down after an uncomfortable discussion with the department chair. Although we didn't get to see how it worked, the suggestion of easiness is one potentially effective strategy.

Another thing I often see, mostly in the class-advertisement posters around my current campus, is that they try to make the class seem like it would be fun (in addition to being easy). These posters are for classes in other departments, though, where they can make up a class on the study of some pop-cultural topic that is marginally amenable to academic study. So, like, a class on Calvin and Hobbes as literature or anthropology or something. These classes seem like they'd be pretty fun, and also like they wouldn't be too tough. And you also sort of get the idea that this might be the only opportunity to take it. But they also seem like there's a better-than-average chance that the class is total bullshit--that it's not of any academic value whatsoever. And I guess I wouldn't be willing to make this kind of suggestion in order to attract students. I wouldn't want to be the guy who runs easy, potentially worthless classes for the sake of enrollment. And I wouldn't want to attract the kind of student who is attracted to easy, potentially worthless classes.

And I also don't have any hard data about these classes: I don't know anything about how full they get, how often they get cancelled, or whether the ads themselves are effective.

All this is a kind of long-winded way of saying that I don't know very much about how to make an effective ad for a philosophy course. It seems to me that some effective ways to increase enrollment might include making the class seem fun, easy, frivolous, and unique. But I'm not at all convinced that this is helpful in any way.

However, I can say that, in my somewhat limited experience, the best way to increase enrollments and to make sure your classes don't get cancelled is to make them required for something. In the departments I been associated with, the core gen ed requirements are very popular. Major requirements are somewhat less so, but still popular. Courses that serve as prerequisites for other popular majors and degree programs are also very popular. Straight-up electives can be a tough sell.

What say you, Smokers?

--Mr. Zero

When I was in grad school, none of the faculty taught any summer school; summer courses were the exclusive domain of the graduate students. And since there were a lot of us, competition could get pretty stiff--it wasn't at all unusual for classes to be cancelled due to low enrollment. As a result of this, there was a real incentive to advertise for your summer courses, and for those advertisements to make the courses seem interesting, relevant, and worthwhile to people with little background, experience, or prior interest in philosophical topics. People would put posters up around campus with funny slogans and pictures and stuff, trying to attract students.

But (while I was there, at least) nobody ever thought to advertise his course by putting himself in a photo surrounded by a bunch of barely-dressed women in schoolgirl outfits. And if somebody did do that, my sense is that the person would have been made to take the posters down immediately, had an unpleasant discussion with the department chair, and been thought of by the department at large as having behaved foolishly (to say the least).

It is also my sense that this person would have to have been a fucking moron. It's pretty obvious, I think, that that kind of thing isn't appropriate for an advertisement for a university-level philosophy class. And it's pretty obvious that for every person who would be attracted to the course on the basis of something like that, there's at least one who would be turned off in a big way. And it's pretty obvious that the people who would be turned off by it would have a pretty solid point. And so I think it's pretty obvious that it would be a piss-poor advertisement qua advertisement, apart from the disrespect for women in general such a thing might display.

Just an observation, for no particular reason.

--Mr. Zero

Over the last four or five years, I've noticed that an increasing proportion of students demonstrate an increasingly difficult time understanding how conditionals work. To the point where a huge proportion of them now seem incapable of understanding sentences of the form "if P, then Q". They act as though it means the same thing as plain old "P and Q".

This causes problems. For one thing, it makes it hard for them to understand, in a general way, what in the hell is going on with things. It's as though they see the world as a series of fundamentally unconnected, independent occurrences. They see two facts sitting there by themselves, and it doesn't occur to them that they might have anything to do with each other—that they might be somehow connected. (And I find it very hard to believe that this accurately reflects how they see the world. It can't be that they don't see a connection between the drinking and the drunkenness, for example. They can't see the drunkenness as unconnected with the drinking. Can they? They can't.)

For another thing—and this is where the confusion really makes itself known—it causes problems when they try to explain how the philosophers we study defend arguments in which they employ conditional premises. Which is almost all of them. And it causes real trouble when they try to defend a conditional that comes up in the context of an argument in the form of modus tollens. In that case, they're trying to explain why some person thinks that "P and Q" is true, when they know that the very next thing is to explain why the same person thinks Q if false. They tie themselves into highly confused, contradictory knots.

Relatedly, students often find it hard to explain how to defend a premise when the student him- or herself believes that the premise is false. That is, they find it hard to explain why someone would think that P is true when they think (or maybe they even know) that P is false. I think this is closely related to the conditionals thing. They don't realize that you can use P even if you don't believe that P. Maybe there are interesting hypotheticals involving P; maybe Socrates believed that P; maybe reasonable people disagree about P. But they can't see it, or at least they act like they don't. If they believe that P is false, they find it impossible to consider what things would be like if it were true, or why someone else might disagree with them.

I think this is pretty strange. Right? I don't really remember when I learned that if/then sentences don't just mean that P is true and so is Q; that they assert some kind of connection between P and Q. But I think I don't remember because it's so obvious that this is what it means that I didn't find it noteworthy (or else it happened so long ago that I forgot about it). So, I guess the question is, how can these students be so oblivious to something that's at once so obvious and so crucial to understanding how the world works?

--Mr. Zero

John Protevi at NewAPPS writes:

In reaction to Michael Bérubé's recent work pushing the MLA, of which he is now President, toward greater activity in support of NTT (non-tenure track) faculty, Josh Boldt has created a crowdsourced document on NTT working conditions. Please have a look at it, whether you are NTT or TT, and enter relevant data if you have it.

Please read Prof. Bérubé's post at Crooked Timber (here, again), and please do what Prof. Protevi says.

--Mr. Zero

My favorite thing about Andrew Sullivan's blog, the Daily Dish, is the "view from your window" series. I was thinking it would be a good thing for the Smoker to rip that idea off.

So I'd like to invite Smokers to take pictures from your windows and send 'em in. Submissions should include a photo of the view from your window (obvs.), the name of the school (I'm assuming most submissions will be from windows on campus, though that's not a requirement), the city, state/province (or equivalent), country (if other than US or Canada), and what time it was when the photo was taken. I'll try to post them all, but I'll also try to space them out a little (so don't worry if yours doesn't show up right away). Let's see your views, Smokers.

DOUBLE UPDATE: Oh yeah, send 'em here: "zero.mrr at gmail.com" (In the original update, I put the email address between brackets, because I am dumb. Sorry.

(The photo above is stolen from here, and is the view from a window the Ginkgo Reading Room, Olin Library, Washington University, St. Louis.)'

--Mr. Zero

Anonymous asks here about potential interview bias/hiring against non-native English speakers:

In a recent comment here, Christopher Hitchcock says some important things about search committees, how they function, and how they ought to function. I reproduce the comment in full here:

Let me follow up on one thread of this discussion where some unpleasantries were exchanged. Again, I am only drawing on my own experience conducting searches.

When I am involved in a search, I am genuinely interested in finding the best candidate for the position. That involves making as accurate an evaluation as possible of the candidate's research (actual and potential) and other qualities as a colleague. I do not think that it serves this purpose to treat the process like the compulsories of Olympic figure skating. (Oh, she wobbled on the landing, that's a .2 deduction. Oh, the candidate had parsley on her tooth, that's a .3 deduction.) I would be very surprised if most other don't proceed in the same way. (When I was on the job market in the 90's, one of my fellow job-seekers discovered that s/he had submitted a writing sample with "Freeedom" in the title. It did not seem to do any harm. One distinguished senior philosopher sent him/her a funny short essay on the importance of distinguishing true 'freeedom' from mere 'freedom'.)

That said, I think it would help all job seekers to have some sense of what it is like on the other side. Conducting a search is a full-time job for six weeks. Even with all of that, we can afford to read the writing samples of about 25% of the applicants. This means that we have to eliminate the majority of candidates before we even look at the writing samples. So we definitely read the files looking for reasons to throw them on the discard pile.

I have been involved in about 8 searches in past 10 years. During that time, I have read the work of a lot of young philosophers. There are many excellent philosophers whose work I first got to know through this process. I admire and respect them. Unfortunately, even among those whose work I admire and enjoy, the vast majority will not get job offers from us.

That was the lead up to a confession. When I and my colleagues are immersed in files, pretty much every waking moment spent sorting through the pile, it is as natural to talk about them as it is to, e.g. complain about the weather or the republicans in congress. Sometimes we say things that are disrespectful of the candidates or make jokes at their expense. I recognize that this is not ideal behavior, and I would be mortified if any of these got back to the candidates. But it is pretty much impossible to work that hard, become that immersed in the process, and always comport oneself with the utmost seriousness of purpose. (Many of you may be familiar with this from grading stacks of papers.) But I do make every effort not to let such joking affect our treatment of the candidates, or evaluation of their work.

Good luck to those of you applying for jobs, I wish you well.

I think that the phenomenon to which professor Hitchcock alludes is unavoidably human and something to which job-seekers themselves are not immune. We here at the Smoker are, after all, fond of mocking job ads and rejection letters. And I think it is basically harmless if it is successfully compartmentalized in the manner in which Hitchcock suggests.

However, I worry that it is often not successfully compartmentalized. Over the years, people claiming to be search committee members have written in comments on this blog and its immediate ancestor about how such things as typos, copy-and-paste errors, spelling errors, and what they perceive to be the applicant's attitude about the various job-market procedures function for them as criteria for automatic rejection. To take Prof. Hitchcock's grading analogy, it is one thing to complain about a student's spelling errors and to take those spelling errors into account when assigning a grade. But it's something else altogether to say, Anyone who would spell 'catigoracle emparative" that way doesn't care enough about my class to deserve an A.

--Mr. Zero

I glanced at this NewAPPS thread this afternoon in which people say what courses they are teaching this fall, and what the enrollment caps for those classes are. And now I notice that In Socrates' Wake was getting in on the action. (Although so far there hasn't been much action.)



What stood out to me was this: a lot of people seem to have pretty favorable course loads, and a lot of these people also teach classes that are capped at low, low levels. I'm teaching a large introductory-level lecture-hall class that's capped at 200, an introductory ethics class that's capped at 55, and an upper-division ethics class that's capped at 35. So I guess I'm kind of jealous of the people who are teaching two classes to a total of under 50 students.



--Mr. Zero