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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

ACLS to Philosophy: “Drop Dead”

Brian Leiter

Several philosophers have called to my attention the ACLS "New Faculty Fellows" program, well-described by one correspondent as follows:

ACLS has a program designed to provide short-term jobs (at little or no cost to the hiring institutions) for deserving young scholars during this period of very bad academic employment prospects.  They are putting forward 53 candidates, the idea being that they will all get hired (for one or two years) by universities participating in this scheme, and these universities are now being invited to look at the candidates' materials and see if they are interested. Unfortunately, not a single one of these candidates has a Ph.D. from a philosophy department.

That's right, not one of the 53 is a PhD in philosophy, though in fact many philosophy PhDs were nominated.  There are 14 from History, 10 from English, 4 each from Comparative Literature, Classics, and Anthropology, and 3 from Art History, among other fields.  0 from Philosophy.  Perhaps the problem is related to that well-described by David Velleman (NYU) with regard to the Newcombe Fellowships, where philosophers have generally done pretty well.  Even so, it seems incredible, and evidence of substantial hostility on the part of the selection committee, that not a single philosophy PhD should have been chosen.  I would hope that the three Presidents of the divisions of the APA are sending a letter of complaint to the ACLS.

Those with insight into what happened here are invited to post comments; students who applied may also post, and may do so anonymously (though please use a real e-mail address, that will not appear).

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33 responses to “ACLS to Philosophy: “Drop Dead””

  1. Ken Taylor

    I'm on a panel for the ACLS this year — not this one, but a different one. I've also served on selection committees for the Ford Foundation and for our Humanities Center here. My ACLS panel meets in February to decide on our finalists. I haven't read through all the applications yet. But between serving for the Ford Foundation, our Humanities center and the files I've read so far for the ACLS, I think I can partly confirm but David Velleman's old remarks that you mention. But I'd put a little different spin on it.

    Philosophers fare poorly in these things mainly because we are not part of a sort of overlapping consensus about what the humanities are and should be up to. Folks in History, English, Comp Lit, the various language disciplines, Cultural Anthropology, etc have a lot that they can talk about to one another. Although their precise methods of inquiry differ from one another, they do basically understand one another and share overlapping intellectual goals. A cultural anthropologist reading a Comp Lit proposal gets it, almost instantly. And doesn't really need it spoon fed to her.

    Philosophy and philosophers are just outliers to this overlapping consensus. Take gender and race, as examples. Lots of humanistic disciplines have long been seized with the project of reshaping their disciplines by thinking very, very hard about gender and race. In philosophy, there's some of that, but not a whole lot. For example, we were part of a five department competition this year for a junior appointment for someone working on race and ethnicity. Five different departments were invited to search for candidates, each would be allowed to have three people come to campus, and each would be entitled to nominate one finalist to a central committee. We searched and in perhaps the worst or second worse market in decades we got a total of 18 candidates, many of them not really plausible. Now you would think that in today's market anybody who was even marginally qualified would have applied for our job. So assume that they did. That means there are precious few young philosophers out there working race and ethnicity.

    I mention this last thing just to illustrate that many of the intellectual issues with which the broader humanities are concern are just not on the radar screen of many philosophers. And, correlatively, many of our concerns are hardly on the radar screens of many humanists — even very smart, well meaning, well-read ones. So we start out at quite a competitive disadvantage in these things. And unless philosophers are very astute about selling themselves to panels of humanists, they are almost bound to lose out. Indeed, I anticipate it being something of an uphill struggle for many of the philosophy files I've read for the panel that I am on.

    Reply
  2. Manuel Vargas

    Michele Lamont (Harvard, sociology) has written a bit about philosophy as a "problem field" for fellowship purposes in her book HOW PROFESSORS THINK (The book is about decision-making and professional evaluation in the context of fellowship and grant competitions.) Much of it is consistent with David Velleman and Ken Taylor's remarks. For anyone thinking about applying to thinks like the NEH, ACLS, various institutes of Advanced Study, and so on, it is very much worth reading.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous reviewer

    Dear Brian et al.

    I was a reader/referee for the ACLS New Faculty Fellow program, one of two from my large state university. (Each participating university had to pony-up two readers to serve as referees for files from other universities.) My discipline is English, though I read files from all over the humanities and social sciences. I am quite friendly to analytic philosophy and would have been excited to read applications from philosophers. However, I was not given a single philosopher to read. I don't quite recall how many applications I read (about 20?), but they were largely from historians and literary scholars, with a smattering of linguists, anthropologists, musicologists and art historians. I am not saying philosophers didn't apply, but the numbers might have been low. At any rate, that is my own experience, for what it is worth.

    Reply
  4. Barry Loewer

    I agree with Ken that philosophy is an outlier (as is linguistics for some similar and some different reasons)and that this is a problem when applications and judges from outside of philosophy greatly outnumber those from philosophy. I have been on panels in which philosophy proposals containing mathematical and logical symbols were said not belong to "the humanities." Also philosophical questions sometimes strike outsiders as very odd. I recall one proposal that partly concerned the question of whether truth as such has value. One panelist considered the question trivial and the answer obvious and another thought it was naive since it presupposed that there are truths. Proposals from historians of philosophy concerning historical philosophers discussions of philosophical questions fared better since they could be understood as "scholarship."

    Reply
  5. Rob Reich

    There's an interesting discussion about this, building off of Lamont's book, on Crooked Timber:

    http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/20/michele-lamont-on-philosophers/

    Reply
  6. Martin Lin

    Michele Lamont's work is certainly interesting but it mistakenly attributes some of difficulties that philosophers face in obtaining funding to insularity and being inward looking. (She sometimes merely claims that other disciplines in the humanities view philosophy as insular, which is probably true, but sometimes she simply asserts that philosophy is inward looking.) But philosophy is not inward looking and there is plenty of interdisciplinary work going on in philosophy departments. It's just that the disciplines outside of philosophy with which philosophers make the most contact are not in the humanities. They are psychology, computer science, linguistics, physics, biology, cognitive science, etc.

    This is consistent with Ken's point. Philosophers have not been thinking about the same problems and using the same methods as the other humanities disciplines. But to this does not mean that philosophy is insular. It does mean that we are not, unfortunately, well positioned to compete for humanities grants and fellowships.

    Reply
  7. N.J. Jun

    Martin Lin claims that "the disciplines outside of philosophy with which philosophers make the most contact are not in the humanities. They are psychology, computer science, linguistics, physics, biology, cognitive science, etc." If this is true — and it almost certainly is of Anglo-American philosophy — then it is unclear to me why philosophy is still considered a humanities or liberal arts discipline. Why not classify it as a "social science" instead? Why not compete for grants and fellowships against economists and psychologists instead of art historians and literary theorists?

    Reply
  8. Dan Lowe

    Re: Ken and Barry

    I think your positions are overly indulgent of the idea that Philosophy should remain foreign to be authentic, that its place on this hill–or in this case the forgotten wing of the university–is actually preferable.

    I find it hard to believe that philosophers aren't capable of communicating the sorts of material covered by those in other disciplines, or of the thorough connections between Philosophy and the Humanities (not to mention the Maths and Sciences, something traditional Humanities notoriously need a bridge to). If today's Philosophy graduates are indeed so incapable of existing in that realm, then the role of philosopher as intellectual is in serious jeopardy going forward. I'm young and thus lack any first-hand recollection, but I had always been given the understanding that philosophers have never been mere paper weights confined to an office. Their influence was felt in literature, politics, art, history, the social sciences and on because they are writers, artists, historians, social scientists and, god forbid, politicians themselves. So, it's one thing to say that Philosophy graduates are at a disadvantage because they are regarded as being one-dimensional (or at least too foreign), but to assert that it's actually the case is truly a shame, either for perpetuating the notion or because it's actually true.

    In saying that philosophers should be entirely capable of existing in the realm of the humanities (much more adequately than in the sciences–to the chagrin of philosophers of science, I'm sure) I don't want to suggest that philosophy be marginalized or watered down, either. After all, the field of Literary Criticism has a firm hold on fingerpaint philosophy already. I wouldn't expect philosophers to merely consult, to chime in at opportune moments, which is what describing Philosophy as an outlier seems to suggest. The problems at the root of this are worn out: the ever-exclusive language of philosophy, the ever-increasing alienation from rational explication elsewhere. Everywhere there is only enough time and energy to explore things as they first seem, and in Philosophy never enough time to come to a conclusion once that initial barrier has been broken. And of course while it would be inaccurate to say the two positions could learn from one another (a dangerous thing compulsion is for Philosophy), it's not unworthwhile that they should at least intermingle.

    If there's anything to the idea that the Humanities are so appealing because their products are a fairly universal human capacity then even the most disciplined philosophers (read: brainwashed by their own lofty internal appraisal) are already quite appreciative and capable. Not being well enough read isn't a good enough excuse, because I don't want to believe it and if it is the case then it needs to be changed. Philosophy as an intellectual organ needs the blood circulated in its culture for some of its content and context, and unless you want me to accept that it's a merely vestigial discipline, then the rest of the academic community (and greater culture) also needs the input of Philosophy. And not as an awkward whisper from the fringe, but as an element of their own perception.

    Reply
  9. Dan Lowe

    Accounting for Martin's post, as well as some of the discussion on that Crooked Timber site, I might have been too hasty to read Ken and Barry's feelings as being insular. Perhaps they weren't expressing that at all, and it probably shouldn't be at the heart of the discussion. As Martin said (and I'm suggesting), Philosophy isn't insular at all, but pervades the disciplines. And so I don't think it should be relegated to just those which we've deemed to be progressive (Math, Science, Physics), but also an aspect of being critical in our classical products.

    Reply
  10. Laurence B McCullough

    Colleagues: When I was on the medical faculty at Georgetown in the 1980s the then-Dean, Dr. Milton Corn, wrote in a newsletter that he was consistently impressed that faculty could repeatedly discharge firearms into their lower exremities without activating pain receptors. It appears that his words apply to much of contemporary philosophy, including Brian's introductory posting, but with the exception of posters above, such as Ken, whose pain receptors have been activated.

    Reply
  11. Brian

    Laurence: you are without serious competition the strangest regular commenter here who signs his name to his comments. Congratulations!

    Reply
  12. Kate Abramson

    Martin! (exclamation point to be read with a smile) what about History, Classics, & (certain, especially the more historical and/or theoretical, branches of) Pol Sci? I don't know about most philosophers most of the time. But some of us, some of the time have lots of cross-disciplinary contact and work in & with those discliplines too.
    I have no good answer to the central question at issue here, however. I'd tend to lean more on the methodological differences than anything else, but that's really just guessing.

    Reply
  13. Laurence B McCullough

    Brian: May I respond. Philosophy has long isolated itself from the other disciplines of the university, not just humanities (with exceptions such as neurophilosophy, but these are exceptions, not "mainstream" phiosophy) and thus (translation of Dean Corn's comment is apparently required) shot itself in the foot. (Consider: how many non-philosohy majors like me (Art History) are admittted to our graduate programs?) Then, like your posting, others get blamed (lack of activation of pain receptors). This sort of (systematic) denial that our disipline is in mortal peril (as at UCL and essentially no new hires for the foreseeable future in California and other states smashed in this recession) is long standing: I recall vividly and with renewed dismay a session with APA leaders twenty years ago in which they acknowledged that the job market was turning bad, when it had turned bad in the early 1970s, fifteen or more years earlier. That ACLS did not include any philosohers means that we have a problem, Houston, a big problem and the problem is not the ACLS, a fact that your introductory posting evades. (For the record, I was awarded a competitive fellowship for 95-96 for work in the history of medical ethics, which, of course, is not "mainstream" philosophy.) I will take the liberty of assuming that this comment is not strange, but correct.

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  14. Brian

    I really wasn't blaming anyone: I was just recording the fact that Philosophy was excluded entirely from this recent round of awards. There are many possible explanations. One is the insularity of philosophy. Another is that philosophy interacts more fruitfully these days with the natural, social and cognitive sciences than it does with other parts of the humanities. The only normative recommendation my initial posting made was that the APA Presidents should protest to the ACLS the failure to award even one New Faculty Fellowship to a philosophy PhD.

    Reply
  15. Ian Proops

    I served on a humanities selection committee a few years ago—one charged with evaluating applications for fellowships from graduate students in the humanities at the University of Michigan. My non-philosopher colleagues sometimes (not always) seemed more impressed than I was by work that they believed “pushed the boundaries” by employing some new (or recent) framework for analysis. Among these analytic frameworks gender or race perspectives didn’t seem especially in vogue—more popular were such preoccupations as: maps, cultural boundaries, “boundary transgressions,” "subaltern studies," “queer theory,” and the body. (I expect I’m at least ten years out of date with this list). My sense is that part of the explanation for why philosophy proposals may not play so well is that, to the extent that philosophy does engage with the other humanities rather than the sciences (broadly conceived)—which, as Martin Lin correctly points out, isn’t so much– it rarely engages with these newer frameworks or preoccupations. Instead, there is a good deal of work that engages with more traditional and less modishly theoretical work in the humanities—especially, work in religion and the fine arts/ literature (e.g., metaphor), as well as work on race/ethnicity and gender that deals with more bread-and-butter issues such as gender discrimination, and the debunking of incompetent science purporting to pertain to race. I fear that humanities colleagues outside of philosophy might regard this lack of engagement with the newer organizing frameworks as indicative of naïveté or blinkeredness—especially when compounded by a “deceptively simple” (i.e., non-obscurantist) prose style, which (to them) is apt to sound hopelessly flat-footed. I don’t know what can be done about this, and I’m certainly *not* making a recommendation one way or another about whether philosophers ought to engage more with these newer frameworks. But I’m fairly confident that my own work will not.

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  16. Anonymous reviewer

    Might I remind everyone about the facts. We know that not a single philosopher was awarded a fellowship. We do not know how many applied or how many philosophers were among the referees. There were some 750 applicants and each folder was read by 3 people. I know that I was not given a single philosopher to read out of all the folders I read. So it might be that philosophers were reluctant to apply because of perceived hostility from the others in the humanities. Or it could that there was some invidious discrimination going on. But there seems to be a lot guessing based on nothing other than hurt feelings going on here. Again, for what it's worth, I'm an English Professor with great fondness for analytic philosophy and would have loved to have received a good philosopher file to read.

    I would also add, just a side note, that I think Ken Taylor exaggerates the state of consensus in literary study. Doubtless this has something to do with the search he was just on. But it's just not the case that literary studies is "seized with the project of reshaping their disciplines by thinking very, very hard about gender and race." Some do this, and some do this better than others. But literary studies as a whole is quite fragmented these days, and also senses that it is in great peril.

    Reply
  17. Keith DeRose

    My experience — I've never served on the selection committee for national or international fellowship committee, but have served a few times on selection committees for special Yale fellowships for advanced PhD students — leads me to conclusions very similar to those of David Velleman in the 2006 post linked to above. I'll add, first, that I think most worthy philosophical projects *can* be presented (both by the applicants themselves and by those who write letters evaluation for them) in ways that can effectively engage non-philosophy selectors and can be successful in such settings. Second, I think it's a good idea for philosophers to serve on such interdisciplinary committees, not primarily for the obvious reason that your presence might help the chances of philosophy applicants whose applications might need a little translation for nonphilosophical audiences, but because the experience can be helpful in getting a good idea of what kinds of presentations work in such settings, and can make you a much more effective recommender of your students for such goodies.

    Reply
  18. Martin Lin

    Kate! I don't want to exaggerate my position. There strong interdisciplinary connections between philosophers working on ancient and classicists. And there are philosophers doing work that connects with what people do in history, English, art history and other humanities departments. At my own institution, Rutgers, you'd be surprised by the quality and quantity of interaction between philosophers and members of the English department. But I guess my sense is that those interdisciplinary connections are not as well developed as those with say, linguistics and cognitive psychology. The ties between classics and ancient philosophy are very strong but classics is a very small field. And what Ian Proops says about the *way* that philosophy connects with the other humanities disciplines ring true. We philosophers tend to get excited about he perennial problems, which must sometimes strike others in the humanities as quaint.

    Reply
  19. Anonymous Graduate Student

    Having been a Ph.D student in both the disciplines of Philosophy and English, I want to register a disagreement with McCullough that Philosophy is in a state of "mortal peril." First, the problems at UCL and California which he cites are problems that confront all disciplines in the humanities, and so no conclusion can be drawn from them that applies *specifically* to Philosophy; second, it is by no means clear–does McCullough have evidence to the contrary?–that other disciplines in the humanities are more likely to admit for graduate study students that have majored in another field. Lastly, and admittedly anecdotally, the job prospects for philosophers seem to be at least equal to and more likely superior to those of literary critics, historians, and the like–both in terms of the number of positions relative to the number of applicants and to the salary.

    From my view here on the ground, Ian Proops observation seems much more to the point. The figures and topics who are "fashionable" in English, History, Classics, etc. change more rapidly, unpredictably, and with less continuity than they do in Philosophy. But from my experience, this has less to do with philosophers being naive or self-sequestering and more with what, in fact, is one of healthiest aspects of their discipline: its commitment to clear argumentation and its refusal to treat a change in critical vocabulary as sufficient evidence for an advance in thought. Unfortunately, Dan Lowe's description of literary study as having perfected, for some time now, "fingerpaint philosophy," is dead on; and one thing philosophers should *not* do is try to make themselves more attractive to these other disciplines by replicating their particular vices.

    All that said, I do think that philosophers not working in history, ethics, and political philosophy could do a better job of articulating the *significance* of the problems they think about on a daily basis–problems in the philosophy of language, perception, epistemology, metaphysics, and religion–in a way that speaks not only to people already invested in those problems, but to educated humanists at large. (And, as I recall from my own (failed) ACLS proposal–this advice is expressly given in the application.)

    Reply
  20. Mark Risjord

    I am a philosopher who has participated for many years in a grant writing program for the humanities and “humanistic social sciences” (that is, the kind of social science that wouldn’t qualify for NSF funding). One of the program’s goals is to get the participants to think about their projects as part of a field, not part of a discipline. This means that the questions need to transcend the specifics of an author, school of thought, place, or time. Framed in this way, the student's grant proposal will motivate the specific research questions so that a well-read and curious reader can understand their significance.

    Philosophy students sometimes resist the invitation to think more broadly about their questions, and insist on casting their projects in disciplinary terms. I see a couple of sources of this resistance. Philosophy students are not encouraged to read outside of the disciplinary literature. In the course of their PhD training, it is much more likely that an anthropologist will read Wittgenstein than a philosopher will read Geertz. This leads to the insularity mentioned in the foregoing comments, but the problem goes deeper than breadth of reading. Philosophy students do not tend to see their work as making contributions to an inquiry that spans the university. Philosophy students tend to write their grant proposals as if only philosophers have ever wondered what makes words meaningful, paintings beautiful, or actions good.

    The deepest source of insularity, I’d suggest, is methodological. To a graduate student studying issues of content (for example), work in Linguistics, Anthropology, or Psychology–not to mention English or Art History–seems too empirical. It does not answer the questions she (and her advisor) wants to ask. But this is a methodological decision on which we should reflect.

    So, the ACLS results do point to something deeper than an imagined prejudice. It exposes methodological uncertainty in philosophy. We are not entirely comfortable with our relationship to other disciplines, both the arts and the sciences. There was a time when philosophy was queen of the sciences, but many of us have rejected the epistemology (and meta-philosophy) on which that view depended. We need to rethink our relationship to other kinds of inquiry.

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  21. N. J. Jun

    Mark Risjord wrote that "Philosophy students are not encouraged to read outside of the disciplinary literature."

    This may be true of many or even most philosophy students, but it is decidedly not true of those who study 19th and 20th-century European philosophy. The typical graduate student at Rutgers, for example, could probably get by without ever having to read and understand Freud. The same is not true of a graduate student, regardless of program, working on 20th century French or German philosophy. And Freud is just the tip of the iceberg.

    So, yes, "in the course of their PhD training, it is much more likely that an anthropologist will read Wittgenstein than a philosopher will read Geertz," but only if we're talking about philosophers working in within the broadly Anglophone tradition. In fact, it is fairly likely that a student training in 19th and 20th century European/post-Kantian philosophy will read Geertz at some point.

    In fairness, I'm not sure that students working in M&E or any of the other core philosophical areas have any reason at all to study Holderlin, Proust, Freud, Weber, Durkheim, etc., whereas the same is obviously not true of students who study, e.g., German Idealism, Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism and postructuralism, etc. If the folks doing "mainstream" Anglophone philosophy end up being isolated from the humanities as a result, isn't that just evidence that Anglophone philosophy doesn't have much in common with the humanities any longer? If so, what's wrong with that? Most philosophers I already agree. It only becomes contentious when grants and fellowships are involved!

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  22. R. Lanier Anderson

    This is a reply to Anonymous Reviewer, who speculates that perhaps not many philosophers were in the ACLS pool, or (perhaps?) that there were not many good candidates from philosophy. I doubt that hypothesis.

    The selection process for this fellowship was complex: participating universities were asked to nominate candidates, and there were some stringent requirements as to the time the PhD was granted. That said, at my institution, two outstanding philosophers were nominated by the department, and both were sent forward by the University to ACLS. I think there is no reason to expect that other institutions would be terribly different. Naturally, large fields like History and English will likely have forwarded more candidates, but it is hard to imagine that Comp Lit or Art History would have forwarded any more candidates than Philosophy. (I run a humanities postdoc competition myself, and our pool of Philosophy files routinely matches or exceeds those two fields.)

    My own experience on interdisciplinary selection panels leads me to speculations more along the lines of Professors Proops, Taylor, Lin, and DeRose. As someone who does some work and teaching across the disciplinary boundary between philosophy and literary studies, I have to say that I find the consumption of philosophy proposals by colleagues on fellowship competition panels terribly depressing. For example, I have seen proposals dismissed as "not interdisciplinary" and "insular" where connections between a philosophical issue and (to me) interesting questions of literary interpretation or religious studies were *quite explicitly* drawn, and the philosophical work was (imho) outstanding. I have left such panels in a much darker mood than Keith DeRose— not only dubious that philosophical proposals get a the same kind of hearing accorded to those in history or literary studies, but with no real idea what *would* make my colleagues from other fields take an interest, and somewhat mystified what counts as a "good proposal" from their point of view. So I am reduced to the more cynical thought that it is very good to have a philosopher in the room for the final selection committee just to provide some check on overquick dismissal by those uninterested in or hostile to philosophy. Best of all, there could also be someone there like Anonymous Reviewer, or Prof. Lin's colleague Jonathan Kramnick, who is an intelligent consumer of philosophy from the outside, and can help to suggest possible sources of interest to those who are not— since there will *definitely* be some of those.

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  23. Anonymous applicant

    I was one of the philosophy PhD nominees. And, for what it is worth, when writing my application, I took pains both to stress the interdisciplinary nature of my own research and to situate my project within a broader framework of humanistic inquiry. So, hopefully I lost out simply on merit, but this discussion raises a number of worrying alternative explanations.

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  24. Barry Loewer

    Dear President Yu,

    I sent the following to Pauline Yu who is president of ACLS

    You have probably heard that there is consternation in the academic
    philosophy community concerning the fact that no philosophers are
    among the recent PhDs selected under the "New Faculty Fellows Program".
    There is an informative discussion of this on Brian Leiter's blog at "
    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/acls-to-philosophy-drop-dead.html."
    The speculative explanations discussed there range from "few philosophers applied"
    to the fact that contemporary academic philosophy has (as philosophy has
    always had) as much connection with the sciences as with the traditional
    humanities to the suggestion that philosophy has not been as friendly to
    recent fashions prevailing in other humanities. A number of the
    commentators raise issues concerning the place of philosophy in the
    humanities and the importance of writing proposals that can be
    understood by reviewers from various fields. In any case, the mere
    fact that no philosopher was selected should alert ACLS that there is
    something amiss. Imagine the outcry if no historian or no classicist
    were selected. There is very exciting work being done by young
    philosophers in all branches of philosophy that deserves and I hope will
    receive support from the ACLS. If you think it useful I would be happy
    to discuss this further with you.

    Best Regards,

    Barry Loewer
    Chair: Philosophy Department
    Director: Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences
    Rutgers University
    New Brunswick, NJ 08901
    http://rci.rutgers.edu/~loewer

    Reply
  25. Amy Lara

    Suppose philosophers do tend to be more insular than other humanities disciplines (a claim whose truth I'm not qualified to judge). Some might find that to be a good thing or a bad thing. The point is, does ACLS or NEH want to provide funding and support for philosophy as it is currently practiced? Do they want to support *this* discipline? If so, then they need to do what it takes to support it — i.e., require peer review by other competent philosophers. I don't know for sure, but I highly doubt that when the NSF reviews a grant proposal in physics, they expect the proposal authors to connect with biologists or speak only in terms that biologists can easily grasp. I'm guessing they fill the review committee with physicists, and even with physicists working in that same sub-field. The exception would be when they are explicitly supporting interdisciplinary work. If discipline-specific work in philosophy is at a disadvantage for funding by ACLS or NEH, then it is clear that they do not value or want to support discipline-specific work in philosophy. What philosophers should be doing is selling philosophy as a discipline to these funding organizations (hello APA?), not making individual applicants sell their philosophy projects to non-philosophers. I think Professor Loewer's letter is a great start.

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  26. Ken Taylor

    Barry:

    Great letter!

    We as a profession ought to say something as a collectivity to the ACLS. Ideally, this is something that could be spear-headed by the APA. Or maybe not. Maybe just a grass roots statement of concern — a letter signed by thousands of philosophers might make the ACLS stand up and take notice.

    It would be nice to gather some statistics on how philosophers as a body fare in not just the ACLS but other humanities fellowship competitions as well.

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  27. N.J. Jun

    Professor Lara,

    I also doubt that physicists who apply for NSF grants are required to make their proposals understandable to biologists. Presuambly this is because the NSF funds physics research or biological research, not interdisciplinary research in the sciences. Many humanities fellowships, like the Newcombe, specifically require proposals to have interdisciplinary relevance. To the extent that philosophy "as currently practiced" is not interacting much with the other humanities, this may very well be to philosophers' disadvantage when applying for such fellowships. If a fellowship simply provides generic merit-based grants for discipline-specific research in any area of the "humanities," then you're right — there's no reason philosophers should have to explain themselves to art historians, and failure to do so should not count against them. The question is: does the ACLS qualify as such a fellowship?

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  28. David Schrader

    Both the APA and the ACLS are aware of the striking absence of philosophers among the awardees in the ACLS New Faculty Fellows program. The issue arose at the most recent meeting of the ACLS Board of Directors, chaired (interestingly) by Chair of the APA Board of Officers, Anthony Appiah. We are assured that the ACLS is analyzing the process and the input and will be communicating the results of the analysis. The announcement of the New Faculty Fellows Program (10/15/2009) indicates that nominations for the fellowships were to come from “the 60 U.S. members of the Association of American Universities, each of which has a designated liaison for the ACLS New Faculty Fellows program.” I expect to find out how many nominees were made by the eligible universities. An important question will be whether the problem arose at the ACLS level or at the level of the university nominating process.

    David E. Schrader
    Executive Director
    American Philosophical Association

    Reply
  29. Ken Taylor

    I just finished my stint on a ACLS selection panel. While I cannot reveal anything about the details of our deliberations, I will say that I come out of the experience convinced that as a community, we philosophers need to think very hard about how to present ourselves to other humanists. The people at the ACLS are people of extraordinarily good will. Moreover, they are, as David Schrader says, very much aware of the situation. I also come away convinced that the people who serve as ACLS panelists are open-minded, serious, thoughtful, perceptive people, who are highly accomplished in their respective fields. These deliberations were, in fact, deeply engaging and highly satisfying in many ways.

    Nonetheless, it is clearer to me than ever that some combination of the following two factors stand in the way of philosophy on these panels: (a) on the part of our fellow humanists, a pretty thoroughgoing failure to appreciate what philosophy and philosophers are up to and any real basis for measuring what counts as exciting, provocative, and novel work in philosophy; (b) on the part of we philosophers, a pretty thoroughgoing failure to explain, in terms that you don't need to be steeped in philosophy to understand, what we are up to, why we are up to it, and how what we are up to connects with broader humanistic inquiry and concerns.

    David, if you are reading this, I think the APA ought to think hard about what it can do to: (a) help those outside of philosophy understand what philosophy is about and (b) help those within philosophy learn to explain themselves better. If the APA could put some effort into spearheading a sequence of "cultural exchanges," as it were, between philosophy and the other humanities that might be a great boon to us all.

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  30. Fritz Warfield

    Ken,
    Are you saying that the evaluations from expert philosophers that the ACLS gathers in order to help evaluate proposals are not taken by "our fellow humanists" to provide a basis for deciding what is important and novel work? Do our fellow humanists think that the evaluations of history proposals prepared by expert historians do provide such a basis for the history proposals?

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  31. Ken Taylor

    Fritz:

    Not sure what you are asking about.

    Every proposal reviewed by the interdisciplinary panels that meet and make final decisions have been initially screened by disciplinary specialists. But the interdisciplinary panels see no reports from those initial screenings, just the proposals themselves. The disciplinary specialists narrowed down something like 1,200 proposals to a set of 100 finalists, as I recall the numbers. But whatever information those disciplinary specialists provide to the ACLS is not shared with the final panels. We just had the proposals themselves. That seems to me to be a defensible policy. That way all finalists are starting out on an equal footing with the final panels.

    To be sure, each proposal is accompanied, all the way through, by 2 letters of recommendation, typically from two other experts in the relevant field. These are more or less the standard sort of letters of recommendation that we are all used to reading and writing all the time. And they have all the pros and cons of letters of recommendation.

    But I have to tell you that philosophy recommenders are typically no better at explaining philosophical proposals and why they should matter to non-philosophers, than the proposal writer him/herself is. So if one is struggling to understand the proposal — which is longer and more detailed than the letters — the letters often won't help overcome that struggle. And it's just not enough for a letter to say "this is brilliant, creative, provocative, novel, work that's the greatest thing since slice bread." Because EVERY SINGLE LETTER says essentially some variation of that. Again, these are the 100 strongest files, as judged by people in the relevant fields, out of well over a 1000 submitted. So the letters are uniformly extremely strong. This means that the proposal itself has to carry a LOT of its own water, as it were.

    Finally, I should say that when the letters do help in the sense that they better explain the significance of the proposal to outsiders more than the proposal itself does, that usually means the proposal wasn't effective in the first place. So it's very hard for letters to make up for the weakness of the proposal in these sorts of interdisciplinary situations.

    I don't know if that answers your question.

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  32. Fritz Warfield

    Ken – Thanks, this point of yours does address my question:

    "But whatever information those disciplinary specialists provide to the ACLS is not shared with the final panels. We just had the proposals themselves."

    I don't see why all finalists should start out as equal with the final selection panels. Some finalists have received stronger evaluations than others from disciplinary experts and that information should be relevant to the final selection panels. Imagine you and I both judge philosohy proposal A to be stronger than philosophy proposal B but both make the finals. Shouldn't a panel of mostly non-philosophers be provided with the information that the discipline-specific experts rated A ahead of B? I know I'd want that if I were on a final panel and evaluating proposals from outside of philosophy. Perhaps I'm missing something.

    Providing this information to the final panels would place more weight on the evaluations of experts and less weight on the ability of first rate researchers to explain their projects to non-specialists in writing proposals. Shouldn't ACLS want this? This wouldn't settle everything at the end stages — there'd still by the matter of comparing proposals across disciplines. But at least this would be done with additional relevant input from experts.

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  33. Sean McAleer

    I'm not sure if there's any causal connection between the discussion here and recent ALCS action, but I understand that the ACLS has just announced five additional New Faculty Fellowships, at least one of which has gone to a (very deserving) philosopher.

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