[Full disclosure: I’ve benefited immensely from the current system of evaluating academics]
Evaluating philosophers is fun (indeed, stay tuned this week for my list of ‘top ten most overrated New York Area philosophers’). But I’m increasingly suspicious of the way philosophers are evaluated in the field, and I’m sure my concerns here hold for many other disciplines besides philosophy. Academic evaluation in philosophy (e.g. tenure review) is performed by the most senior members of our profession. The views of the most senior figures carry enormous weight. I guess the natural thought here is that the most senior figures in an area are the most likely reliable and fair minded judges of who among younger participants is doing the best work. But I think there are a lot of reasons to think this natural thought is incorrect.
First, and most obviously, conflict of interest. It is in the interest of the most senior members of the profession to support the careers of those younger scholars who share their views, or at the very least their conception of what is important in the field. Supporting scholars who disagree with one’s views is dangerous; it may ensure a shorter lifespan for one’s work. Even more clearly, supporting scholars who have an alternative conception of the discipline is an even more reliable way to undermine one’s own interests. A system that expects senior scholars to make objective evaluations of younger scholars that obviously involve conflicts with the older statesperson’s public statements and stated views places an unfair burden on those senior scholars. Finally, and most worryingly, a number of academics possess what one might call “the limited attention space” conception of the field. They think that there is a limited amount of attention in the field, and any attention that is drawn to someone else is attention that is taken away from them. I myself am convinced that the limited attention space conception of the field is incorrect; my work has clearly been made better by engaging directly and openly with the work of many others. But whether it is right or wrong, the limited attention space conception of the field is widely assumed, often tacitly, and sometimes explicitly. If “the underlying dynamic is a struggle over intellectual territory of limited size”, as Randall Collins has maintained (p. 81 of his The Sociology of Philosophies), then the very fact that a younger scholar is particularly promising should lead a rational, self-interested senior figure to try to subvert her career, whether that younger scholar’s work conflicts with the senior figure’s work or not. A system that is predicated on the irrationality of its members is not a very good system.
Secondly (and I’m more hesitant here, since there are many exceptions) it is my experience that (generally) the more senior one becomes, the more one loses contact with (broadly speaking) the profession at large. My peers in the profession and their juniors have quite a good sense not only of what others around their career stage and younger are working on, but also have read a good deal of their work. When I meet a philosopher, if she has published a few articles in Metaphysics and Epistemology, broadly construed, I generally am aware of some paper she has written. But my sense is that this isn’t true of most very eminent philosophers over a certain age (I don’t hit the journals as much as I did three years ago, and I’m just 36). I don’t know what accounts for this, and certainly there are notable exceptions. But by and large, I encounter a lot of very distinguished philosophers who have only a dim sense at one is happening outside their sub-disciplines. Yet these are the people many administrations rely upon to give them a sense of “what is happening” (e.g. it is the most senior philosophers who make up the constituency of visiting committees). In my experience, the best way to find out “what’s happening” in the profession is to ask advanced graduate students.
It seems to me that the system of having the most eminent and distinguished scholars be the gatekeepers for advancement has failed in Europe. In most European countries, a few grand eminences control distribution of the jobs in that country. This has been very good for American academia, because they often choose their students or followers for distinguished chairs rather than the younger scholars doing the most innovative work, and the latter migrate to us. My suspicion is that the American system thrives because it is so large, relative to the systems of individual European countries. If one publishes work that attracts a lot of attention, then even if some senior figures think you are “getting too much attention”, some department will hire you anyway. But that suggests that what is guides advancement in the long run is doing work that attracts a great deal of interest, and the system of evaluation by the most senior members of the profession is only an impediment.
Now, what can be done about it? Obviously, evaluation of philosophers isn’t a science. But I have never encountered people appealing to citation indices in discussing whether to hire someone, or any other kind of measure along that dimension. I am not suggesting that this sort of data should be relied upon in a definitive way. Nothing is a substitute for close reading of work (and for the reasons given above, certainly “getting more letters” from senior figures isn’t either!). But the fact that someone has published a good deal of work, and it has generated a substantive literature among people who are not personally connected to them is a measure of objective evidence of some kind. Since there are good independent reasons to think that high-status academics are going to be particularly resistant to promising younger scholars (whether knowingly or not), we probably should have such evidence available in contexts of evaluation. Of course, one concern here is that the aforementioned measures are not a reliable guide to future productivity, given the short tenure clock. Perhaps this is an argument for extending that clock, then.
-Jason
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