Has there been a “marked decline” in the “meaningful presence of faculty members in both formal and informal scholarly events—those that contribute to intellectual exchange, research development, collegial support, and community-building” in philosophy departments?
It seems that way to Annalisa Costella (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Kritika Maheshwari (Delft University of Technology), who shared their impressions in a post here in July, and ran a poll to gather others’ opinions on this.
Below, they discuss the results and continue the conversation about departmental participation and academic citizenship. As they write, “if we care about the future of our departments—not just as sites of output, but as spaces of collective inquiry, growth, and mutual recognition—then declining trends in faculty participation deserve our sustained attention.
Philosophy Departments as Sites of Collective Intellectual Activities: A Follow-Up to the Poll
by Kritika Maheshwari & Annalisa Costella
Poll Results Summary
Following our recent Daily Nous post on shrinking departmental engagement, we ran a follow-up survey. To our surprise—and delight—more than four hundred people, from MA students to senior professors, responded. We are grateful to everyone who completed the poll and to those who shared thoughtful remarks, both publicly and in private.
What did we learn? Interestingly, regardless of people’s experience of a decline or an increase in faculty participation, people’s satisfaction with faculty participation is split in half. Roughly half judge faculty participation in their departments to be unsatisfactorily low; the remainder regard it as adequate or very good. That divide appears across career stages and institutional types: even among those who disagree about the direction of recent change, overall satisfaction still lands close to fifty–fifty.
On perceived trends, most respondents report a decline in faculty participation in recent years and share the concern we expressed in our original post. A sizable minority reported no change, and a few even expressed a slight improvement. It is worth pausing over notable “virtuous” exceptions—by our count, roughly one in four departments are bucking the sense of downturn. (Due to the survey’s design, we lack fine-grained data to identify which departments are exceptions.) For those interested, the initial survey and a complete overview of the results can be found here.
Why do these results matter? The engagement and attention our post received—including dissenting opinions and a wide range of views about the role and importance of departmental life—suggests to us that faculty participation is not a parochial worry but a profession-wide question about how we do philosophy together as a community. Both the poll and subsequent discussions emphasized and raised important questions about the seemingly tight link between patterns of participation and two domains that we care about: scholarly development and well-being. These (limited) findings set up the next step: clarifying what we mean by “participation,” which norms should guide it, and what arrangements would help it thrive. What follows are tentative reflections, with an invitation to colleagues to annotate the margins.
Diagnosing the Decline
By “decline in departmental intellectual life,” we mean more than just reduced attendance at seminars. We mean an erosion of the shared inquiry—whether in person, hybrid, or online—that once energized our collective work and, for many, drew us into the profession in the first place. By collective work, we have in mind any broad spectrum of practices through which students and colleagues participate in a shared intellectual life: discussing ideas with peers; taking part in seminars, workshops, and reading groups; providing feedback on drafts and talks; informal intellectual conversation that extends beyond formal events. Responses to our survey suggest several converging factors behind declining participation (note that these are merely representative):
Institutional pressures: Universities increasingly emphasize quantifiable research outputs while providing fewer resources for the intellectual community. Faculty face mounting administrative burdens, teaching loads, and productivity metrics that leave little time for sustained collegial engagement.
Market anxieties: Graduate students and early-career faculty, facing an increasingly competitive job market, often view seminars as poor investments compared to conference presentations and publications.
Technology and fragmentation: Digital tools enable new forms of engagement (online reading groups, virtual conferences) but may also fragment attention and reduce spontaneous interaction.
Changing academic culture: Philosophy has become more professionalized and individualistic. Where previous generations might have seen department life as central to intellectual identity, many now view it as optional community service.
What is genuine participation?
In reflecting on this loss, we might start by asking: what counts as genuine participation? Traditionally, participation has been equated with physical presence – seminars, workshops, reading groups, and sometimes informal gatherings. One commentator cautioned that an exclusive devotion to “oral culture”, understood as in-person, real-time interactions, risks sidelining colleagues and students who already enjoy fewer opportunities to have their voice heard (perhaps due to caregiving duties, chronic health concerns, or remote appointments). It also excludes them from the very sites where our field is made: both professionally, in the practices and social norms we adopt, and intellectually, in the research agendas, methods, and collaborations that take shape in those moments.
We think that the worry about elevating oral culture to the pinnacle of genuine participation has (at least) two forms. First, it may be that we, or departments, do not necessarily overemphasize in-person, real-time exchange per se; but, rather, that there is an underemphasis of other modes of engagement that many colleagues rely on and wish to preserve. Second, the harms that may ensue from an emphasis on oral culture may stem from a failure of making these in-person, oral formats genuinely accessible (for example, by better scheduling, hybrid design, or offering childcare support). In this latter case, colleagues who face constraints may in fact prefer live discussions and find them professionally indispensable, but are prevented from accessing them.
Thinking carefully about “genuine participation” therefore requires addressing two distinct questions: For one, we should ask whether our credit-giving practices systematically discount non-oral (perhaps also online) contributions. That is, whether there is some kind of valuation bias that treats oral, in-person engagement as the only “real” or “genuine” participation. For another, we should ask whether our oral practices can be redesigned so that those who value them can participate on equitable terms. Keeping these questions apart helps us avoid a false choice between abandoning oral culture and entrenching it unchanged, and it clears space for a more plural—and a more exacting—account of what genuine participation ought to mean.
Towards pluralism?
Should we then embrace a pluralistic vision of departmental engagement—one that treats in-person seminars, hybrid gatherings, and other forums not as a hierarchy but as an ecosystem of legitimate modes of inquiry? We suspect such pluralism already exists in our profession to some degree, but it prompts two clarifications.
First, it is an open question whether our respondents counted online and asynchronous activity as “genuine” participation. If not, the reported “decline” may partly reflect some kind of reclassification—a shift in mode of engagement rather than an absolute contraction. Second, proliferating formats and venues for interaction do not conjure more hours. Each additional channel competes for the same finite attention and risks splintering the conversation. Paradoxically, the very expansion of mediums for philosophical exchange may itself be contributing to the experience of thinning faculty participation.
Pluralism thus carries promises and pressures. While diverse modes of engagement enable different ways of making meaningful contributions to our collective inquiry, there are also worries about attention, credit, and quality of our engagement. As a community, we are faced with a wide range of questions about what to prioritise; how to prevent fragmentation of engagement across platforms; how to gauge ‘genuine’ participation; how do we distribute our scarce time and attention; which mediums do we cultivate most vigorously, and how do we ensure that the associated benefits are accessible to all.
These questions may be settled somewhat organically, simply by dint of how participatory practices in our profession naturally develop over time. Yet, as we observed in our original post, the natural development of professional habits and social norms may be undesirable, even in the eyes of those who are responsible for their development. Rather than waiting for drift to choose for us, we need an explicit conversation about potential social arrangements and norms that could govern a pluralistic practice of faculty participation.
Academic Citizenship: Going beyond the Club–Corporate Binary
One commenter cautioned against framing departmental life on a social-club model. We can set this against a corporate model, where faculty participation is structured by formal recognition of duties and expectations woven into contracts. We are wary of the corporate model, for it carries its own hazards such as quickly drifting towards managerialism—a tendency to which many institutions are already predisposed. At the same time, treating departmental life “like a club” can invite people to treat colloquia as optional and import expectations better suited to friendship than to professional relations.
Yet, we think that neither worry is inevitable. It is crucial to avoid conflation between what can be reasonably expected of one in one’s professional role and what can be expected of one “as a person”. Club-style expectations need not be inappropriate if articulated and endorsed within accepted professional norms (civility, hospitality, intellectual focus, etc.) rather than as demands for (forced) intimacy. Likewise, a low-pressure ethos need not collapse into “everything is optional” if we distinguish core intellectual events from elective social add-ons (for example, sunrise hangouts at conferences).
A more candid stance—one we prefer—is that faculty participation is neither supererogatory nor merely transactional. Instead, it is constitutive of something like academic citizenship. This framing helps us navigate between the club and corporate models by drawing on familiar parallels with political citizenship: just as civic participation involves both rights and responsibilities, voluntary engagement and legitimate expectations, academic citizenship encompasses both the freedom to choose how we contribute to collective inquiry, community building and the recognition that sustained certain forms of non-participation may fall short of what we owe to our peers.
The citizenship analogy requires careful development. Unlike political citizenship, academic citizenship is voluntary—we choose to join the academy. The citizenship model illuminates several aspects of our current predicament. First, it may help explain the decline itself: one hypothesis is that universities have systematically undermined the conditions necessary for meaningful academic citizenship. When faculty time is consumed by administrative burdens, when genuine intellectual community-building is squeezed out by productivity metrics, when departments lack resources for substantive gatherings, expectations for robust (voluntary) participation is put under pressure.
Second, this framing may help address important normative questions—what makes someone a good colleague, what forms of engagement we should value, and why they matter. Academic citizens have responsibilities: to engage thoughtfully with colleagues’ work, to contribute to intellectual discourse, to mentor junior members, and so on. But they also have legitimate claims: to institutional support for meaningful participation, to recognition of this labor, and to working conditions that make citizenship sustainable rather than exhausting.
The citizenship analogy also helps us think more clearly about individual duties under suboptimal (and often exploitative) systems. When universities extract ever more administrative labor while providing fewer resources for intellectual life, we might ask: do faculty still owe full “genuine” participation to a community that institutions do not seem to aptly value? The citizenship framework suggests a nuanced answer. Even under suboptimal conditions, we retain some obligations to our immediate scholarly community—much as citizens under flawed governments still owe certain duties to fellow citizens. But it also suggests that our primary obligation may be collective: to advocate for structural changes that make genuine academic citizenship possible, rather than simply demanding more individual virtue within non-ideal systems.
Notwithstanding, we acknowledge that this framing comes with risks. First, it may idealize academic life in ways that obscures real power differentials. Political citizenship, after all, presupposes some meaningful equality among citizens—but academic hierarchies are steep and often entrenched. Graduate students and contingent faculty occupy fundamentally different positions from tenured professors, and expecting equivalent “citizenship” from unequal participants risks further entrenching power dynamics under the guise of shared responsibility. Second, citizenship talk might become another form of moral pressure that ultimately serves institutional interests. If universities can frame unpaid intellectual labor as “citizenship duties,” they may feel less compelled to provide actual resources and structural support. The model works best when it accompanies, rather than substitutes for, genuine institutional reform.
Institutional Scaffolding and Interventions
Of course, our reflection here is incomplete for a variety of reasons. First, we don’t offer a full account of why collective inquiry matters (though we believe there are compelling reasons that appeal to, amongst others, epistemic and communal goods). Second, our proposal does not settle the question of where to draw the line between collegiality and inappropriate social pressure. Third, it does not account for the discretionary power that departments retain over prioritizing what they consider to be in their best interest (i.e., maximizing research outputs, climbing rankings, and so on) over investing in less traceable activities that sustain genuine participation and academic citizenry. Despite its limitations, we believe that the academic citizenship model helps think about institutional structures and interventions for meaningful participation— but only if institutions commit to supporting the responsibilities it entails, rather than using it to pile on new burdens.
Take the case of graduate student disengagement. Several commenters noted that some students skip seminars and reading groups because they perceive little direct CV value in attending. This strikes us as a pragmatic response to ongoing institutional failures: in a competitive job market, students often prioritize activities with visible, quantifiable returns. Admittedly, this logic can obscure important goods. Seminars and workshops foster habits of inquiry, expose students to new ideas, and enable the informal networking that shapes scholarly life (and if we are being honest, these are often advantages on the market).
Besides, one of the main reasons for why many enter the profession, as we already claimed in our original post, is to do philosophy. And when we reduce doing philosophy to a handful of rewardable outputs, we severely impoverish the breadth and potential of our discipline. If, and this is a big if, the market continues to ignore these “invisible” benefits, we must ask whether to recalibrate our expectations or to find ways for students to earn formal recognition for active departmental involvement, for example, by integrating departmental participation into coursework or training requirements as some commentators suggested.
Similar dynamics invite us to rethink the responsibilities of senior faculty – a point that was raised by many commentators. Senior professors exert a powerful signaling effect simply by showing up—or not. When they regularly skip talks or reading groups, it risks normalizing disengagement across ranks. Meanwhile, in many departments, early-career scholars do much of the invisible labor that sustains community—organizing events, hosting visitors, running workshops and conferences—yet receive little recognition or support.
The citizenship model suggests tenured professors have greater obligations to model engagement and mentor junior colleagues—but only when institutions provide corresponding support. One modest intervention might be a “chair’s seminar hour,” where department heads commit once a month to attend a talk and host an informal debrief, modeling the value of collective inquiry without reducing it to a perfunctory checkbox exercise. Alternatively, departments could hire dedicated seminar leaders or at least create transparent rotation systems and small stipends or course releases that acknowledge the time and energy required to sustain a vibrant intellectual community.
We’ve emphasized that norms of participation inevitably exert some normative pressure. And rightly so: seminars, workshops, and reading groups are often the fertile soil in which ideas grow, collaborations form, and intellectual community takes root. But for all the reasons we’ve discussed, such activities must still remain genuinely optional—not performatively so, but in a way that protects autonomy and accommodates life beyond work. If norms of engagement become indistinguishable from norms of exhaustion, we will have lost the plot. (Norms alone are insufficient without institutional scaffolding. Even seemingly non-coercive norms of participation become problematic under exploitative institutional structures.)
If we care about the future of our departments—not just as sites of output, but as spaces of collective inquiry, growth, and mutual recognition—then declining trends in faculty participation deserve our sustained attention. Our survey and reflections here are merely a first step—a call to acknowledge what many of us already sense. We hope this triggers the serious institutional conversations and changes our profession urgently needs.
