Academic Labor

Does Referee Gender Make a Difference?

Once again, Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), one of the managing editors of Ergo, looks at the journal’s data to see what, if anything, can be learned from it. This time, he focuses on what difference the gender of an article’s referee makes. (more…)

Influences on Faculty Salary

A new study reveals the effect that various factors, apart from scholarly productivity, have on faculty salary, according to a new study reported on by Inside Higher Ed. The data is for political science faculty, but probably displays a pattern common to most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. (more…)

Who Is On The New APA Graduate Student Council?

The American Philosophical Association (APA) announced plans last fall to launch a graduate student council that would be responsible for “reporting to the board of officers on issues of interest, concern, and relevance to philosophy graduate students.” The council has 12 seats. Four positions will be filled by graduate students elected by a vote of the student asso..

A Broad Conception of Philosophical Skills (guest post by David Wallace)

The following is a guest post * by David Wallace, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, on the skills an academic philosopher needs.

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Academia and Unselfishness

Academia is a selfish sport. From the time you begin graduate school, you are rewarded for self-absorbed fixations on your personal advancement and narrowly focused research… Opportunities are rare, time is short, and prioritizing yourself at the expense of others is encouraged, even as there is a veneer of service, public engagement, and commitment to your own s..

Philosophers Develop Free Recommendation Letters Service

Philosophers David Faraci (Georgetown) and Graham Leach-Krouse (Kansas State) have developed a new automated, secure, and free system for emailing confidential letters of recommendation. It’s called MARGY (Managing Academic Recommendations Gratis Yay). (more…)

Faculty on Strike at Public Universities and Colleges in Pennsylvania

Faculty at 14 public institutions of higher education in Pennsylvania are on strike owing to a failure in contract negotiations. According to Inside Higher Ed, the faculty had been working without a contract in place for 477 days. (more…)

The Job Insecurity of Philosophy Instructors: A Case Study

“I love being a professor. I have been a professor my whole life. I don’t know what I am going to do.” That’s Pamela Ryan, who has been a philosophy instructor at Morehead State University for 15 years. This past Friday she was called into the office of the Dean of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Morehead, M. Scott McBride, and told t..

When To Say Yes & When To Say No in Academia

An assistant professor of philosophy writes in with an important question that I imagine a lot of academics spend time pondering: (more…)

Altmetrics in Philosophy

An article on assessing faculty activities in The Chronicle of Higher Education (mainly on the controversy concerning the services of Academic Analytics) notes the question of how schools should calculate and weigh the impact of academics’ research in the news, online contexts and social media:

Some say the next faculty-productivity battlefield might be altmetric..

Academic Employment Numbers: A Closer Look

Articles about employment in higher education sometimes mention that 75% of today’s college instructors are adjuncts. That number—or at least the idea that there are very many adjuncts employed by universities—seems to inform various discussions about academic training and employment (such as whether there are too many philosophy PhDs — here and here, for examp..

What Should Academics Do About Journal Prices?

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-ac..

The Philosophy of Adjuncting: A Syllabus (Guest Post by Kevin Temple)

The following is a guest post * by Kevin Temple, a PhD candidate in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. It appears here courtesy of Adjunct Commuter Weekly, where it was first published. Adjunct Commuter Weekly is the first magazine to address the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic. Edited ..

Challenges of Chairing Philosophy Departments

One thing that a Philosophy Head or Chair has to bear in mind continuously is “out-of-sight, out-of-mind.” I’ve always made it a point to tell higher administrators about the many accomplishments of Philosophy faculty—probably to the point of annoying them somewhat. But there’s simply no substitute for self-promotion with administrators who often don’t think of th..

Should Professional Philosophy Be More Like Grad School?

Graduate student Nick Byrd (Florida State) sends in an interesting thought to ponder: maybe professional philosophy would be improved in certain respects if it were more like graduate school. He writes:

If grad students were paid better, I’d be a serial PhD student. Grad school seems more fun than many of the post-grad experiences I hear about. Now I am beginnin..

Philosophical Insights for Good Professorship

A good professor “will be able to put philosophical insights to practical use,” argues Robert J. Bloomfield, a professor at the School of Management at Cornell, in an extraordinarily useful paper, “How to Be a Good Professor.” The paper offers an impressive range of good advice, including a section on the value that an appreciation of philosophy has for all professo..

APA Responds to Threats to Tenure in Wisconsin

The American Philosophical Association (APA) has released a statement in response to the recently approved Wisconsin state budget legislation, which removed tenure protections from state law and weakened employment protections for tenured faculty. The statement includes the following:

Tenure is the most important safeguard of academic freedom, and academic freedo..

Renewed Call to Reinstate Salaita

Kirk Sanders of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign passes along the following:

A group of forty-one Executive Officers and campus leaders from across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has released an open letter to Acting Chancellor Barbara J. Wilson and President Timothy Killeen. In the letter, the forty-one chairs, directors, and heads ..

Back To School Supplies

As the end of summer break is in sight, it is time to get ready for school to start. The following are some back-to-school ideas, for yourself or for the other academics in your life…

Replenish your supply of pens. These write very well, especially for the price, and they take refills.

If you need a suitable way to keep track of the minutes ticking by as you..

The Endarkenment at Home: Benchmarking Academics (guest post by Elijah Millgram)

The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization is a new book by Elijah Millgram (Utah). In the book, Professor Millgram looks at the implications of our becoming, more and more, “a society of specialists” in which “communication across the barriers between the professions and disciplines is our own very pressing problem,” a problem that “threat..

Iowa Bill Proposes Faculty Play “Survivor” (updated)

A bill (Senate File 64) under consideration in the Iowa legislature, proposed by State Senator Mark Chelgren, would turn faculty positions into something like Survivor. Or maybe the Hunger Games. The bill would:

Require that any professor employed by an institution of higher learning under the control of the board teach at least one course offered for academic c..

Sexism in Academic Hiring — A Myth? (updated)

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences produced findings that appear to show that hiring practices in certain fields are not biased against women. Here is the paper’s “significance” summary:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist ..

On Warwick’s Outsourcing (a few updates)

A few days ago news surfaced of the University of Warwick’s plan to outsource some of its teaching to a company called Teach Higher. According to the website Fighting Against Casualisation in Education (FACE):

Hourly paid academic staff… will no longer be employed directly by the university but by a separate employer: ‘Teach Higher’. Teach Higher has been set u..

Solutions to the Jobs Problem Revisited

Last year, Daily Nous reported that Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at University of Reading, had been collecting various possible responses to problems associated with the high ratio of PhD holders to academic jobs. The full report is here, and the helpful summary, which groups the more popular responses by type, is here.

Professor Dickey (et al) report th..

Honoraria in Philosophy

A philosopher writes in with a query about paying philosophers for talks and the like…

I’d like to learn more about honorarium practices for philosophy talks. How common is it to offer an honorarium? Under what circumstances (e.g. departmental colloquium, conference, public lecture, etc.)? What is a typical amount? It would be especially helpful if respondents ..