Over a decade ago, Jennifer Whiting (Pittsburgh) asked us to seriously consider an idea of Annette Baier‘s regarding tenure and promotion decisions. Recent technological developments speak in favor of revisiting it.
Initially, Baier’s proposal was meant to address how pregnancy and childcare may interfere with or delay the research productivity of women, and hence unfairly affect tenure decisions.
Baier put the proposal this way: “One possibility, perhaps the best solution, would be to make all tenure decisions rest on evaluation only of what the candidate selects as say, her or his four best articles.”
In her post about Baier’s idea, “A Modest Proposal: Slow Philosophy“, Whiting suggested we take this idea seriously. She wrote:
What would happen if the APA were to set guidelines for the maximum number of pages on which a tenure decision should be based? Suppose, for example, it were 100 pages—or even 175—of what the candidate takes to be his or her best work. Of course no one would be prevented from writing—nor even from publishing—thousands of pages. But the letters of referees and departmental recommendations to deans, as well as the deliberations of departments, ad hoc committees and administrators, would all be restricted (officially at least) to the merits and demerits of the designated corpus.
This would not only address Baier’s concern, Whiting noted, but other issues, such as the massive production of writings incentivized by the current system, which leads to bottlenecking at journals, and raises questions about how much of any of it actually gets read.
She says:
Just think. Candidates would be encouraged to focus more on the quality (and less on the quantity) of their work. They might also have an easier time balancing work with other responsibilities (including civic and family ones). Referees, as well as colleagues expected to vote on the candidates’ cases, might have more time to read their work carefully and arrive at well-informedjudgments—especially if as a result of the proposed limits these colleagues and referees had fewer book manuscripts and journal submissions on their hands. Time spared could be used—by referees and candidates alike—reading work that had actually been selected for publication by discerning referees and perhaps even improved before publication in response to the sort of insightful comments that less harried referees would have time to provide. Reviewing itself might even prove more rewarding if authors spent more time on their manuscripts before sending them out, with the result that reviewers might provide more thoughtful comments, which might lead in turn to higher quality publications.
As we enter an era in which philosophers can use AI to write papers in hours that might have otherwise taken months, perhaps the consideration of Whiting’s “Slow Philosophy” proposal takes on greater urgency.
This was and remains an outstanding idea
I think this is an excellent idea. I’ve been talking about it a lot over the past year, as the impacts of AI on how quickly people can write papers were becoming clear. Even aside from stunt papers Claude writes for you in a morning, AI can speed up paper writing. It makes it easier to find relevant literature more quickly, summarizes things for you (in an imperfect and biased way, admittedly), and can potentially streamline writing the references section. I think people of good faith can disagree about whether any of this is a good idea, but I don’t think those things look like obvious integrity violations (at most the summarization is worrisome, but that is complicated). And they can speed up submissions to our already overburdened publishing system, including by people who are good philosophers acting in good faith. They also can’t really be policed.
All this adds up to the need for some kind of slow philosophy plan. I’m highly in favor!
The number of words that makes sense to me is a length that tenure committees can actually read: 50 to 80, 000 words (roughly 3-6 articles or a book) Once you’ve written that much, only publish more if it’s better than what you’ve already done! I argued for Whiting’s model in April: https://realnous.substack.com/p/time-for-slow-philosophy. Whatever their rate of improvement, LLMs will consistently be better at helping authors produce barely-publishable work than at finding groundbreaking insights. Writing an article tweaking an existing problem or finding one more counterexample is far easier than transforming a whole debate.
It seems weird to me to have the APA / the profession as a whole dictate a specific number of pages to count in a tenure case. The potential for harm strikes me as very clear: people who have made valuable contributions to the discipline being punished for not fitting their contribution into a particular page limit that we all agree is arbitrary. People who write books, for example. (Imagine evaluating a book based on the first 100 pages.) Or people who make their contribution by publishing 1 or 2 extraordinary papers, because in a market where there are massively more qualified candidates than jobs, “no more than” easily becomes “exactly.” Having the APA codify 100 (or 175) pages makes it harder to make the case that 90 really good pages is enough.
In short, it seems like the thing that’s likely to be best for individuals is to leave these questions to departments. Not to have a discipline-wide policy that inevitably forecloses certain perfectly valid ways of being a researcher in philosophy by trying to put a box around what’s “slow enough.”
So if there’s to be a benefit, it must be a community-wide benefit. I see the case that people are making for that — disincentivizing the behavior that causes journal bottlenecks, etc. — though I must admit I’m not sold on the mechanism here. Publications don’t just matter for tenure and promotion: they matter for raises, for grants, for meeting university-wide initiatives, for getting jobs, etc. And many of the relevant decisions wouldn’t be influenced by APA guidelines either way. My university doesn’t care if the APA has a T&P recommendation for philosophy when they’re trying to figure whether I deserve a project completion grant more or less than someone in architecture. But they do care about publication numbers.
So while I broadly agree with the motivations here, the specific proposal seems like it can’t avoid being arbitrary, has clear potential for harming individuals, and promises benefits to the community that I’m skeptical we’d see. Maybe I’m too pessimistic — or maybe I just publish “too much” and don’t want to admit I’m part of the problem — but I struggle to see this as a good idea.
I agree with Corey’s points here. Additionally, for some folks, if you try to write just 5 articles they might not be as good as if you write 10 and pick your best 5. (and you may not be the best judge of which are your best 5). So even if your tenure case only rests on your best 5, you might need to write more to get there.
Similarly for Caleb’s point about wanting to have more articles that transform a debate rather than finding a counterexample. It may be – for many folks – that the best way to get to the “transformative articles” is to start smaller and write less ambitious papers.
Here’s an analogy: Imagine telling some great artist (e.g., Picasso) that you should’ve “skipped your blue period” or “made 90% fewer artworks” so that the ones you did make were all super-great. That MIGHT work for some folks, but for many (artists or philosophers or scientists or…) that could very well be terrible advice for how to produce the most best work.
I agree with worrying about fitting everyone into a template. But that argument cuts both ways. In many places non-humanities fields and more loquacious humanities fields often set the bar for philosophy publications. A department, by itself, is rarely in a position to set the bar for tenure when it comes to college committees and such. So we get swept up in broader trends whether we endorse them or not.
The APA (nor any other body) is never going to be in a position to dictate to the field or to the education bureaucracy generally. But it or other field-wide groups could perhaps suggest different models of evaluation. And there are likely better ways to do it than numbers of pages (given that different parts of just philosophy require different numbers of pages to generate what the subfield takes to be a contribution). 30 years ago we had a good vice chancellor at my institution who suggested something like the five best/most substantial works. That is more flexible than a page length model. Since this blog is at best a place to brainstorm, it is worth thinking about alternatives.
In any case, the arms race at the level of the job market is also creating pressures that are hard to resist. I wish I knew what to do about those even while I work at a department at the low end of the pecking order where our students have to publish to be noticed.
These are fair points but I think the benefits would seriously outweigh costs
This is long overdue. The way to implement it is a collective action or coordination problem. My suggestion is that the top PhD granting departments decide to do this in both hiring and promotion and see if this presents a good Schelling point.
Echoing support of this idea. Something I have heard from faculty across the disciplines is that lack of standardization disproportionately affects faculty of gender and racial minorities.
This raises a question about standardization between and not just within disciplines: how this would work in tandem with local university tenure and promotion committees that do not have regular representation from philosophy? Would the tenure criteria from other disciplines continue to bleed into those for philosophy if ultimately the decision making power lies with admins or committees that have no awareness of or interest in slow philosophy?
It’s not obvious that it’s desirable at hiring (the case is better for promotion). Whether or not it’s better to hire someone who writes a few great papers than someone who writes many okay papers, it’s better still to hire someone who writes many great papers. There are people like that, and they’re exactly the people a top department is going to want to prioritize for a senior hire.
I am not a professional philosopher, but a prof in an adjacent field–I look at this site because I was a philosophy undergrad. Is one issue here what kind of output is expected of philosophers? That is, are all philosophers expected to produce articles of a certain kind? I served on a university tenure committee several years ago, and we saw two candidates from the economics department. One was an empiricist, and had more than a dozen articles. The other, a theorist, had four. The chair of the department wrote a letter explaining how each candidate’s output was appropriate to their subfield–turns out empiricists just write a lot, and can turn out an article based on a single study, while theorist/econometricians think a lot and don’t write very much (at least so the chair claimed). If all philosophers turn out the same kind of product, then the proposal here is fine, but if there are philosophers whose subfields allow or expect them to turn out a great many articles, they would be disadvantaged by this proposal.
This is probably why an APA standard would end up backfiring, but an APA explanation of how publishing–re quality, quantity, and differences in subfield–works in philosophy would be helpful.
Then people submitting applications for grants, promotion cases, etc.–or philosophy departments when communicating with other departments or their overall universities–can point to the APA’s explanation as the reason for why they have approached things the way they have.
It would not bring about all the changes people need or want, but it may be a more realistic first step.
Here in Taiwan we already partly do this. Promotion applications nominate one representing work and up to four others, and that’s all the external reviewers evaluate.
The system is absurdly bureaucratic when it comes to teaching and service – x points for every letter of reference written: y points for every meeting with an adviser, etc. – but I think the research component is fairly well done.
To be blunt, this likely produces lazier philosophers–in the unlikely case of being implemented–instead of better philosophers. Enlighten me: how many of us are actively sacrificing quality of our papers to order to increase quantity? My thought: very few/rarely. But I am open to being wrong. In my observation, even the current philosophers who focus on getting fewer papers at the tiptoe top journals are often lazier, not better than, who keep writing and don’t care too much about top journals.
P.S. By “lazy” I do not mean personal critism–they may be highly active in charity work or family matters.
What does lazy mean?
“Enlighten me: how many of us are actively sacrificing quality of our papers to order to increase quantity?”
I would say a great many of us. I certainly give up on making a paper as good as it could be when I finally give in to the pressure of meeting my publication quota. And by “as good as it could be” I mean “as good as I have often been capable of making my stuff when I wasn’t giving in to that pressure.”
And I know I’m not the only one. If, instead, we put that same energy and diligence into writing fewer, better articles, we of course wouldn’t be lazy (though I suspect that’s how we’d look to you).
People send out stuff they would not have sent out for publication 20 years ago. And they send it out earlier in the process. They wind up sending out two papers which back then would have each been 1/2 of a different paper that through the interaction of the ideas would have been a larger contribution to the field than the two papers published separately. The phenomenon is amplified the further back you go. I recently had occasion to reread some of Gil Harman’s papers from the 70s. The contributions in one of them would now be parceled out into 5 papers.
I’m not blaming anyone. We are responding to market forces. But they don’t make us better philosophers.
I suspect that the one idea-per-paper tendency has a knock-on effect. People can’t cope with papers that develop two or more distinct ideas or that straddle different areas of philosophy. I have a paper in which I argue that a mistaken principle in Nietzsche interpretation parallels a mistaken critique of the error theory in recent meta-ethics. A reviewer of the collection in which it appeared complained that I was confusing the meta-ethical issue with all this extraneous Nietzsche-related stuff which would have been better excised The idea that Nietzsche interpretation might be of independent interest or that the parallel might be illuminating obviously did not occur to them. Why couldn’t I stick to the meta-ethical point? I thought then that the reviewer was simply an idiot but perhaps they were victims of the over-production culture, linked as it is to over-specialisation.
Fair enough. the proposal however seems like a pipedream pretending that we don’t have vastly more people who can produce four really good papers than the spots they deserve. Also remember that the quality judgement is not as objective as you might think, and can be either too coarse grained or dependent on the taste of the powerful few and their clubs.
It is true that philosophers who don’t produce much are often lazy. It is also true that philosophers who do produce much publish many mediocre papers. One way to confirm this is to open a journal and read it.
I am one of those early career scholars who sacrifice quality for quantity. At the same time, I don’t dislike the system. Writing papers is a way to think – it’s part of the very activity of doing philosophy. I wouldn’t have had as many great ideas and discoveries if I had focused on writing a few papers of higher quality.
The answer to this, Clueless is that writing subpar papers may be good for you but that it does not follow that it is good to publish them, good for other people to read them or good to impose the task of reading on reluctant referees. I hope that once you have a permanent post (if you don’t have one already) you will be able to consign your intellectual exercises to your desk draw, reserving only your best work for the public domain.
I hope so too!
I found this entire exchange quite humorous. I’m quite in agreement with Clueless that:
While I respect Charles’ empathy for the public domain, I think it would instead be more advantageous to make room for various stages of output and then allow readers to self-select.
It’s like producing professional musicians – you have to give people a place to play out in public: even when they’re bad, haven’t figured out their sound yet, or are learning how to manage their stage presence. It’s part of the process, and some of us do enjoy how messy it all is.
As a more direct analogy, other academic disciplines appear to have more room for papers in progress, public drafts (see arXiv), short papers, non-archival workshops, posters, etc.
Philosophy already does this to some extent, but it could do more. The perfectionism in philosophy feels especially palpable.
Some arguments take a long time to figure out and get right. Some concepts are really hard to think through much the less find something worth saying about them. I do agree that some philosophers will be lazier, but I don’t think reading less papers by lazy philosophers is necessarily a disadvantage. Assuming people still read papers.
why would they when claude can do it for them?
or kind of do it?
or make it look somewhat like it had been done?
Because Claude can’t do it.
I think if philosophers became lazier, that would be a wonderful thing. Too many people feel forced to burn the candles at both ends to produce a long CV full of papers mostly short on substance.
This is, I’m afraid, not a very good suggestion. Respectfully, in my opinion, there is far too much laziness in this day and age. Hard work, drive and ambition (indeed, including ambition to publish excellent work and rise to the top of the profession) is exactly the kind of admirable quality that tracks success in athletics, music, business, law, and other areas where elite performance and results are prized. Laziness is for, well, the layabouts and the obscure.
But surely we can all agree that, for any possible population of at least ten billion philosophy articles, all with a very high quality of argument, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have a quality of argument that is barely worth reading.
The repubnant conclusion?
I am in favor of greater adoption of AI in philosophical writing and research, and indeed many things that Goldstein advocated for. I also believe that Whiting’s proposal is an excellent one: it matters that the AI use in philosophy is supposed to increase the quality of scholarship and better advance philosophical knowledge (as it has been in many other academic fields), not to produce more passable but subpar stuff. An excellent recent article in BJPS, for example, credits Codex and Claude for coming up with a more economical and elegant proof for a central result. Slow philosophy seems to be not just compatible with that goal but can also act as a check on the worst tendencies of greater AI use.
The problem with the Baier proposal is that it is unlikely to work unless nearly every hiring department adopts it simultaneously. Suppose that it’s just a few prestige departments that adopt this policy, restricting their attention to the candidates’ few best papers. This won’t significantly reduce the incentive to publish in bulk which results in the flood of subpar over-specialised, one-idea-at-a-time papers. Candidates can’t be sure of getting a job in the Baier-policy departments but have to worry about making the grade at the other hiring departments that do NOT adopt this policy, departments at which *quantity* of output continues to be at a premium. So candidates will continue to pump out the papers, hoping that their best work is good enough to help them get by at the Baier-policy schools, whilst producing enough quantity to satisfy the others. The over-production problem with all its attendant evils will persist. Indeed the incentives won’t change much if (say) half the hiring departments adopt the Baier policy. Candidates will still have to worry about satisfying the other half. It’s a Hobbesian problem that cannot be easily solved in the absence of a Hobbesian sovereign imposing the Baier policy from above (a point that Annette herself would have appreciated).
I deeply appreciate the reasons for why Baier proposed ‘her or his four best articles.’ and find I also value it for additional reasons.
I think quality over quantity is almost always a superior evaluation framework. Some writers / researchers / artists are quite prolific, others not quite as prolific, and yet they may each have a similar impact with regards to their best work.
Even if there happens to be some highly prolific researchers who seem to have an ease with both generativity and impact, it is hardly beneficial to the discipline as a whole or to the diversity of contributions which could be made, to expect others to emulate such a behavioral anomaly.
Besides, evaluations favoring quantity tend to create all kinds of unintended consequences which may be holding back people’s ability to create their best work.
What I like most about ‘his or her four best’ is that it allows for all different types of working styles (e.g. slow, methodical, faster, iterative, broad, deep, etc.) to meet on relatively equal footing when it comes time to formally evaluate the work.
It feels both more egalitarian and more meritocratic than the present alternative.
The idea that the APA should dictate a general policy for promotion/tenure that would be adhered to by every philosophy department at every university in the USA strikes me as overreach. Universities (and departments) can govern themselves (for better or worse), and are (for better or worse) best situated to do so. Even if departments wanted to play along, it’s unlikely university administrations will relinquish their prerogatives to an outside non-governmental organization with no enforcement powers.
I don’t think anyone was ever suggesting the APA literally dictate a general policy for USA philosophy departments for exactly the reason you say – the APA lacks the standing to make any such dictates at any (much less all) universities. The idea, as I understood it, is just that the APA can recommend best practice guidelines which departments are encouraged to take up – though what would be binding at any given university is going to be ‘grounded’ in just whatever the rule is at that university, whether it takes on the best practice guidance or not.
I have yet to see a case where someone was denied tenure because they had published high-quality work but just didn’t have enough quantity. But I have often seen the sort of case where someone doesn’t have much quantity and then tries to argue implausibly that what little they do have is of very high quality, and then their political allies jump on that bandwagon and try to drive it hard. For absolutely everyone, some publications turn out better/more important than others, but that doesn’t mean that more quantity equals less quality.
I agree entirely with the spirit of Baier’s proposal. In particular, I agree that market forces are pushing us towards smaller, less impactful papers and that we should reward philosophers for dedicating a lot time to working on a big idea. Of course, I also agree with Baier’s idea that tenure standards should be sensitive to the way that pregnancy and childcare may interfere with or delay the research productivity of women.
Still, I think there is a serious problem with Baier’s proposal. Quality and quantity both matter to some extent, even if quality “matters more” in some sense. It is not a good idea to assess someone’s work based solely on the number of papers they have published: we care about the quality of the papers. But it is also not a good idea to completely disregard the number of excellent papers that someone has published, when we are assessing their work. The four paper limit throws out a bunch of valuable information about the quality of the candidate’s research as a whole. This can lead to inaccurate or unfair assessment of candidates’ research. Here are two examples to illustrate:
I’m not sure whether these problems are significant enough to outweigh the reasons in favor of the proposal. But they at least give me serious reservations about the proposal as a general policy for assessing tenure files.