By Sam Duncan (Tidewater Community College)
I’ve noticed in discussions here and elsewhere that many people react with a truly remarkable degree of outrage at the mere suggestion that publications, especially publications at elite journals could ever hurt a job applicant. I’ve seen people say that this is a conscious choice to hire an inferior candidate and that anyone who does so deliberately sabotages their own department and institution. I think this is wrong, but what interests me here is that these reactions reveal some value judgments that, while common in academia, are extremely dubious and harmful to both the people who hold them and to our profession. I hope that by getting clearer on these judgments and explaining why I find the values behind them dubious and harmful I might spur a larger discussion about what our values as a profession are and what they should be.
However, before beginning I want to clarify something. My intent in writing this post is not to blame struggling job-candidates for their predicament, or otherwise ‘punch down’ at vulnerable early-career people seeking permanent jobs. As someone who suffered on the job-market in non-tenure-stream positions myself, I know all too well how unfair the job-market is. My aim in this post is to merely to suggest that a certain set of values—values commonly conveyed in grad programs, and which job-candidates often appear to espouse themselves—are misguided and bad for candidates, by leading them to misunderstand the market. To put it another way, my aim in this post is to be helpful. I want to explain why I think grad students, job-candidates, and the people who mentor them should question certain types of value-judgments about ‘merit’ in philosophy—and how questioning these values might put help job-candidates put themselves in a better position to be successful on the market.
Let’s start by thinking about the sort of job I have at a community college and why we might justly be worried about applicants being a poor fit. It’s a public job and like practically all public jobs it is incredibly difficult to get permission to hire someone in a full-time position and, while full-time positions here aren’t technically tenure track, it is also hard to fire anyone once they’re out of the probationary period. Suppose then that we hired someone who does not really want a teaching focused job and who then goes on to do only the bare minimum on teaching and service while spending his time cranking out publications. If such a person did his job with minimal competence it would be very hard to get rid of him. This would be a huge loss for the students since they could have had a professor who really wanted to teach at a community college and would put their efforts into that. This is even worse for our students than it would be at other sorts of institutions since many of them have been out of school for many years, are working full-time jobs, are making up for deficits in their high-school education, or some combination of all of these. So, we simply can’t rely on extremely well-prepared students with few distractions to pick up the slack for indifferent teaching in the way that colleges with high rejection rates can. Getting stuck with someone like this would also be a pain in the neck to the other faculty since committee work and such needs to get done and every slacker means more work for someone else. And keep in mind that it’s quite possible that someone might not come in with any intention to do the bare minimum but might simply have no idea what he’s getting in for and burn out after a few years or decide his priorities are elsewhere.
Now let’s go further and suppose we hired someone who was so indifferent to his job that he did get fired or that our person trying to publish his way out succeeded and left for the research job he actually wanted. That would be disastrous. Most of our adjuncts work at other local institutions and actually don’t have very flexible schedules, so they likely couldn’t cover the classes that would now be open. It’s also extremely difficult to find new philosophy adjuncts. So, if a full-time professor left there are a good many scheduled philosophy classes that we would simply have to cancel. This would cost the college tuition revenue of course but more importantly it would make it much harder for students to get their degrees as ethics classes are required courses for a number of our degree programs. At a community college those sorts of delays would almost certainly mean that some students simply wouldn’t finish. Even many of those who did would be out money, time, and opportunities. Even given the need the vacancy would create there’s a pretty good chance the position simply wouldn’t be filled in the foreseeable future and even if it were it would take a lot of time and effort to do so. We could well be stuck with a long-term problem of understaffing.
Given all this it should be obvious why it would be incredibly irresponsible for anyone hiring at my institution or any like it not to put a lot of weight on how likely the candidate is to stay in the job and how likely they are to be engaged at work. The taxpayers of Virginia and our students don’t pay us to reward philosophical merit or to support great philosophers while they write their philosophy. They pay us to teach, and for us to try to use our positions to reward philosophical merit would count as ignoring or even deliberately sabotaging the mission of our institution.
This brings me to a deeper question: What is philosophical merit anyway? I can’t help but think that the way that many people react to the thought that teaching schools might actually value teaching over research reflects a very low estimate of the importance of teaching. I’ve never seen real outrage in any online discussion over the fact that working in a teaching focused position might hurt one’s chances of a research focused position, or even disqualify one entirely. No one seems too angry at the fact that R1s put practically no weight on teaching, and yet the fact that teaching schools might not value research inevitably draws outrage. To put it bluntly, no one is surprised that someone who works as an adjunct at a community college for several years has no realistic chance for an R1 position. So why should the mere possibility that a slew of elite journal publications could even pose an obstacle in getting a community college job be so outrageous? I hate to say this, but the only possible explanation I can find for that reaction is that people set a low valuation on teaching and assume that teaching, even novel and excellent teaching, has very little philosophical merit or perhaps even none at all. That is to say the least an odd value judgment given the history of philosophy. Socrates didn’t publish anything after all, but he does seem to have been a pretty good teacher.
Let’s take a contemporary example. I have a friend who’s spent years developing innovative teaching techniques based on role playing games for his applied ethics classes. Would you be outraged to hear that for many institutions that sort of thing counts for infinitely more than publications in say Philosophers’ Imprint or Mind or even one in the Philosophical Review? I’m certain some readers will be. If you are why is that? Do you think that teaching is so easy that anyone can do it well with minimal effort? If you do, then you’re simply wrong. Do you think that, whether it’s difficult or not, teaching has less philosophical merit than research? Does teaching any number of classes well count as less of a contribution to philosophy than a publication in an elite journal? If you think it does, then I would like to see you explain what grounds you have for that judgment. After all, good teaching techniques in classes like applied ethics have the potential to get hundreds or even thousands of students to engage more effectively with work in ethics. How many people even read the average article in any philosophy journal? Which one then is likely to have the bigger impact on society at large? My bet would be on teaching. After all, it’s not too much to hope that good ethics classes might help someone to behave better, and if a future real estate developer, financier, lawyer, doctor, or engineer remembers his philosophy classes fondly that could be a huge help for our profession. (If you don’t believe me then look at the sorts of people who governors of both parties appoint to the boards of trustees at public colleges and universities.)
There isn’t just a bias against teaching in many common judgments of philosophical merit. There is also a pretty open bias against many kinds of research. The so-called generalist journals that many regard as the most excellent places to publish philosophy disproportionately publish in LEMM and often publish little to nothing in areas like applied ethics, continental philosophy, and non-western philosophy. Many of them even expressly bar contributions in these areas, and some even refuse to consider submissions in any area of ethics or the history of philosophy. Why are we so confident that a publication on say epistemic contextualism or the ontology of possible worlds is intrinsically worth more than one on al-Ghazali’s conception of philosophy or the ethics of whistleblowing? I would imagine that many people would think it outrageous if someone were to say that for their hiring committee a publication in Business Ethics Quarterly was much more valuable than one in Synthese, but even taken on its own that’s hardly outrageous, and it would be simple common sense if the hiring committee expected the applicant to teach Professional Ethics every semester.
Let me close with a final thought on merit more generally. Anyone who’s studied any political philosophy knows that it’s incredibly hard to define merit in any way that commands wide agreement. A good many philosophers, and I would include myself in this group, doubt that the term makes any sense unless it’s defined relative to some particular context or other. But probably the least controversial definition of merit would be one that identifies it with moral merit. Suppose then that a hiring committee justified their decision to hire the candidate they did on something like the following grounds: “We know they have no publications at all, but they’re a skilled teacher who has shown commitment to becoming an even better one. Beyond that though they are just the kind of person we want to have as a colleague. They have served on committees even though was no expectation to in their position, taught classes they didn’t want to teach after a colleague got ill (and for less pay than that tenured colleague), and served as a faculty advisor to several student clubs with no expectation of any kind of remuneration or other reward.”
Would those seem odd reasons to prefer my fictional candidate with no publications over someone with say a publication in the Philosophical Review? I imagine it would to many. But why? All the things this person has done show moral merit, while there’s not necessarily any moral merit to doing the kinds of things that lead to a publication in the Phil Review. Not only are these things more relevant to the job they would do at a community college, or indeed most teaching-focused colleges, than publishing in Mind, Philosophical Review, Nous or any journal you can name they are precisely the sorts of things that ought to be rewarded if anything is. There’s pretty good evidence that the wider culture of academia doesn’t value attributes like conscientiousness, hard work, or self-sacrifice and even actively disvalues them. But if anyone ought to be able to see past the warped values of their particular subculture, one would hope philosophers could.
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