David Velleman (NYU) writes with the following interesting information about the Newcombes and the selection process; I would particularly urge graduate students and young philosophers to heed the points about presenting one’s work to non-specialists. Professor Velleman writes:
Having served on the final selection committee for the Newcombe Fellowships
(though not in the most recent years of the competition), I’d like to add some
background to your comments on the distribution of the awards.The
Newcombes were funded by an endowment from a nonacademic family, but the
inspiration for them came from the philosopher Robert Adams, who was a friend
and personal advisor to the family, having been (as I recall) a neighbor when he
was young. Bob’s role in the early years of the program may explain why it
elicited more applications, and better applications, from philosophers than from
students in other disciplines. To my knowledge, there has always been a
philosopher on the final selection committee, but these days the vast majority
of applications come from English, History, Anthropology, Politics, and so on.In my experience, the applications from philosophers look weak by
comparison. The very best applicants from other disciplines display truly
stunning feats of scholarship, fieldwork, and intellectual synthesis; they write
vivid and stimulating descriptions of their projects; and they can make the
significance of those projects clear to nonspecialists. In my years on the
committee, its membership was highly inter-disciplinary, but everyone could
discuss the merits of all the applications — except those from philosophers. When
philosophical applications came under discussion, the other committee members
would often turn to me and say, "Can you explain the point of this — if there
is one?" There were years when the committee said, in effect, "Well, we want to
give some fellowships to philosophers — tell us which ones."I’d like
to be able to say that these remarks manifested a prejudice against philosophy,
but they didn’t. The other members of the committee were widely read, highly intelligent, and open-minded. The fact is that in the context of the entire
appllicant pool, I too found the Philosophy applications unimpressive, sometimes
embarrassingly so. I did my best to advocate for the philosophers, but it was an
uphill climb, even in my own mind.Now, part of the problem may be that
graduate students in other disciplines have more experience writing grant
applications. Anthropology students, for example, have to apply for funds to
support their dissertation fieldwork, and the Anthroplogy applications were
among the most impressive. But our applicants tended to do poor job of
presenting themselves even when compared with the applicants in English, where
grant opportunities are just as rare as in Philosophy.Another part of
the problem may be that doing original philosophy is simply harder than, for
example, doing fieldwork in a region or archive that no one else has studied.
Ph.D. candidates in Philosophy are understandably immature when compared with
candidates in other fields.Still, I have to attribute much of the
problem to our discipline’s indifference to making itself understood outside a
fairly narrow region of academia. The Philosophy applicants came across as not
having bothered to explain themselves. I managed to explain what they were up
to, but the mere fact that I had to explain it, when the applicants from other
disciplines had done their own explaining, put me at an obvious disadvantage as
advocate for the Philosophy applications.I don’t know whether our
insularity contributes to our underrepresentation among recipients of other
national honors. I suspect that it does.
I wonder what others who have served on these kinds of selection committees think? Non-anonymous comments will be very strongly preferred.
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