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Open thread on issues in the profession for the week of February 23, 2015

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT, GIVEN THE LIVELY DISCUSSION OF THE ADJUNCT ISSUE.  MUCH OF THE DISCUSSION OF MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES APPEARS TO HAVE MIGRATED HERE.

In light of Peter Railton's important lecture that everyone is discussing, may I suggest that one topic worthy of discussion is mental illness, and the experiences of faculty and students in dealing with it, what support they have found from universities and their departments, and related issues.  And whatever other issues arise, please, let's also take a hiatus from bashing the FP blog.

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50 responses to “Open thread on issues in the profession for the week of February 23, 2015”

  1. anonymous

    Detaching the "utilitarian trade-off making as psychopathy" theme from some surrounding issues in the last thread:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20445911.2015.1004334#.VOstdcbmM7B
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714002054

    Patil concludes: "the increased tendency in psychopathy to make utilitarian moral judgements is in part due to reduced aversion to carrying out harmful actions."

    Kahane et al, concluded that "… rates of ‘utilitarian’ judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy."

    Reply
  2. A Facebook User

    May I suggest a topic worth discussing? My topic relates to the class war (I don't know what else to call it) that has been threatening to break out in academia: between corporatized administrations & adjunct faculty. This Wednesday, Feb 25, 2015, is National Adjunct Walkout Day, & applies to those professional philosophers who are adjuncts: teaching part-time, often at two or even three campuses; & are paid starvation wages, with no benefits or job security. They often do not have private office space to meet with students, & are often not informed of class assignments until a few days prior to the start of a semester, making it difficult to prepare more than prepackaged courses, never a good idea in philosophy! They cannot afford to get sick, not even with the Unaffordable Care Act; there are cases of adjuncts living in their automobiles & showering on the sly in student dormitories!

    What began to bring this sorry situation to light was the premature death in 2013 of a former adjunct, Margaret Mary Vojtko, who had taught French for 25 years at Duquesne University without a full-time contract, was summarily let go when health issues began to interfere with her ability to meet with classes, only to die on her own front lawn from a stress-induced heart attack. Her house was unlivable during winter months because the electricity had been turned off; at age 83, she was flat broke!

    Adjuncts are now forming unions on a lot of campuses, despite administrative hostility, & the issue is gaining national attention (cf. http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-tall-task-of-unifying-part-time-professors/385507/). The person who originated the idea of a National Adjunct Walkout Day is remaining anonymous, for obvious reasons. One of the goals is to bring to light the role adjuncts play on campuses by showing how things look when they diverge from their normal obedience to authority. Given that in some states strikes by public employees are illegal (at least, this is my understanding; if this isn't the issue, Professor Leiter can correct me), they won't be striking, exactly, but instead will be holding teach-ins or other events with students intended to bring the situation to light, especially for students going to ridiculous levels of debt to get an education & are usually shocked to learn that their history or philosophy professor earns less than the girl who served them hamburgers & fries at McDonald's the other night.

    Why is this important? If philosophy programs aim, at all, ever, to produce occasional figures of historical importance, the present situation in academia is not working, not even in upper-tier institutions. Where are my generation's Quines, Kuhns, Rawlses, Searles, Kripkes, or Rortys? There simply are no such people! I can think of one person under the age of 50 whose work may prove to have lasting import: David J. Chalmers (who is Australian, not American). Are there no successors to the above, or have I just missed them? Are they simply too busy trying to survive in the hostile, corporatized environment U.S. colleges & universities have become? (Please don't someone post a list of whining feminists; I am talking about people contributing to major conversations in philosophy some going back hundreds of years, not bloggers trading personal attacks, or sniping about who slighted them last week.)

    Academia is in trouble, & absurdly low pay for what has grown to roughly 70% of faculty is a huge part of the problem. A conversation about the business model that was adopted, suspiciously simultaneous with the collapse of the job market back in the 1970s, is desperately needed.

    I post this as a public service, as this blog gets read! In the interests of full disclosure: I was an adjunct at a university in the South for 7 years before walking away & moving overseas. With an inheritance, I was lucky, financially at least; but I cannot forget where I came from. Steven Yates (since for whatever reason, this thing signed me in simply as "A Facebook User" & I don't know how to change that).

    Reply
  3. A Philosophy Grad Student

    Re Mr. Yates's complaint, above, I agree that a conversation about the business model of professional philosophy is warranted. But part of that conversation must be about what we ought to expect for ourselves in a world that does not revolve around ourselves or our interests.

    One possible explanation for the situation Mr. Yates finds so unacceptable is that professional philosophers are increasingly rarely engaging with topics anyone outside professional philosophy believes is a worthwhile commitment of time, energy, attention, or, frankly, money. I am thinking of what one typically finds discussed in metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of language: we focus on issues such as hyperintensionality, singular thought, and so on, and address ourselves to ourselves.

    But we live in the real world. One cannot expect to be funded, subsidized, or otherwise financially supported in the modern economy without providing some value in return. Think about it from the point of view of the persons whose money you are taking. Why should they fund your work? Just because you like it, or are interested in it, or others like you enjoy talking about it? Professors working in the academy are supported by student tuition, alumni donation, government subsidies, and university investment. These sources of funding flow to areas of research that show–and must continually show–themselves to be the type of work worth investing in.

    Now many people will decry this situation. Others will say that the idea of academics "taking" others' money is wrong-headed, because earning that money is made possible by good education, and so it's all ultimately connected. But what is the alternative? Why should a limited amount of funding go to *these* lines of research, as opposed to others? And why should relatively low-level workers in these fields be supported if they have not been able to demonstrate their value clearly enough to have better long-term employment prospects, and the demand for their services is already being met? Since when did we become so entitled?

    Far be it to complain about how everyone outside the academy does not appreciate us, we need to wake up and self-evaluate. A not insubstantial segment of the professional philosophical community believes its existence and financial support–is above the need for justification. Perhaps it is. But that means very little if nobody believes it but us.

    Reply
  4. Lania

    Brit Brogaard has posted on Facebook a number of times in the past few days about her disappointment at how the Central APA handled childcare. Namely, they didn't have any, and did very little to help people who needed it. This is so egregious, she says, that she will #cancelAPA her APA membership until the issue is resolved, and she encourages others to do the same.

    On the one hand, I think it would be fantastic were the APA to do more to help single parents, primary caregivers, and two-philosophers-and-at-least-one-child households. On the other hand, my parents were both accountants, and they went to conferences a lot — if one went and one stayed home, then the one at home took care of the kids; if they both had to go, we either stayed at home with a relative or babysitter or went along and they traded off looking after us and/or found us a babysitter in the area for particular times. They would have never dreamed that their accounting conferences should be responsible for providing for their kids. That said, I'm sure they'd have been thrilled if the conferences had done so!

    I'd like to hear what others think about this issue. And if the APA should do more, what they should do, and how it should be funded.

    Reply
  5. Junior TT Faculty with a family

    In reply to Lania: I play a similar "trade off" game with my wife when it comes to attending conferences. But it's rarely convenient, and sometimes close to impossible. For me, the question is: to what extent should having children impact one's career negatively? I'd like to support a culture where the answer to that question is: "As little as possible".

    An analogy: when I attend a conference, while I don't necessarily expect my meals to be provided free of charge, I certainly do expect the organizers to make readily available the opportunity for me to find something to eat. I would be pretty annoyed if I showed up at a conference where the only options for decent food were hard to get to and no effort had been made to, e.g., provide directions, arrange catering, etc. My expectations for childcare are similar, but the reality is that it's often an afterthought, if attended to at all.

    Reply
  6. tenured prof

    With due respect to the adjuncts, I hardly find their plight one of the greatest social issues of our time. They provide easily replaceable services; there are a ton of people willing to provide them. That fact that someone has done a Ph.D.–or, in some cases, M.A.–in philosophy does not carry with it an entitlement to, say, health care or living wages. Here's a novel idea that I'm not saying with animus: if you don't like the adjunct scene, then do something other than philosophy. There's too much labor in our field given the number of jobs there are, and we need to get these two figures more closely-calibrated. We need fewer graduate students–and graduate programs–and, in turn, fewer unemployed–or underemployed–philosophers. I'm not saying "go away" (if you're happy or close enough), but certainly am encouraging some humility and realistic expectations.

    Aside from the labor force issue, the argument is often that if universities didn't hire so many associate deans and football coaches, there's actually plenty of money to pay adjuncts more (i.e., claims of being unable to are either disingenuous or else superable). But even if money could be freed up, should it even go to adjuncts? I'd say, without hesitation, it should go to more (regular) faculty. Faculty lines are hugely down in the humanities, and I'd rather see, say, a 5% increase in tenure-track faculty than a 50% in adjunct pay/benefits; the former just does different things for a university and, in view, is where the priority should be. Also, per above, I'm not sure we should be incentivizing more adjunct work–i.e., by raising salaries–given the labor market right now; we'd be better off and less angsty after some attrition.

    Reply
  7. anonymous

    Following up on Railton's lecture, I would like to comment on how the culture of "smartness" combined with clinical depression (and other mental illnesses) can drive people out of the philosophical academy. I graduated with an M.A. in philosophy from one of the well respected terminal M.A. programs mentioned in the Philosophical Gourmet. After my M.A., I found myself moving from minimum wage job to minimum wage job with intermittent bouts of suicidal depression.

    While I was in school, I was always preoccupied with whether I was "smart enough" to do philosophy and it was difficult to determine if this self-doubt was a symptom of depression or whether I *really* wasn't smart enough. I also felt as though I could not discuss this issue with my professors for fear of looking weak (I am male) or, worst of all, dumb. After my M.A., my depression worsened. Not only was I not smart enough to do professional philosophy, I discovered that I wasn't smart enough to work at Wal-Mart or drive a car or get out of bed or stay alive. Looking back, I probably could have stayed on an academic career path if I would have received adequate treatment for my depression, but, at the time, I avoided treatment because, I thought to myself, "you're not depressed, you're just not smart enough and need to get over it."

    In light of Railton's lecture, I wanted to share this experience and I suspect that there are many others like me, but they disappear from philosophy departments and never open their mouths.

    Reply
  8. anonymous

    With due respoect to tenured prof, I hardly find the problem of tenured faculty being fired to be one of the greatest social issues of our time. They provide easily replaceabe services, there are a ton of us adjucts who would like their jobs. With no animus against you personally, I hope you get sacked.

    Reply
  9. Enzo Rossi

    One reason for the proliferation of adjuncts is, let's face it, the fact that they're a cheap way to free up research time for permanent faculty. Crudely, permanent faculty at research universities negotiate with management to strike a balance between maximising their research time and not undermining their own contractual power too much. Management are winning the long game, but in the short run many permanent faculty choose to buttress their individual contractual power by getting more research done, at the expense of the adjuncts. This is myopic on our part, but not that surprising when one sees it as just a symptom of the atomisation of the workforce under late (I wish) capitalism.

    Reply
  10. A Facebook User

    The response to Tenured Prof is easy: this is a species of the shady (because obviously fallacious) "Love it or Leave it" argument I never would have expected from someone I presume considers himself/herself a philosopher. Yes, this is our territory; if you don't like the way we do things, leave! Very much in line with my experience of tenured faculty, who were all about "social justice" unless it cost them something! "Those poor people," usually meaning federally-designated victims but never the people right under their noses. Incidentally, the majority of tenured faculty I've interacted with didn't revise lecture notes or tests, were often unavailable during posted office hours, much less publishing (a couple of colloquiums I attended began with embarrassing & went downhill from there). Exactly what entitles Tenured Prof & his/her colleagues to a 5% raise?

    Philosophy Grad Student, you raise some better questions, although it isn't as if we haven't thought about them. Yes, we do need to introspect & think about the value we are providing to the outside world. Volumes have been written on how philosophy can provide critical thinking skills (for example) to a nation badly in need of them! Surely questions of interest in the philosophy of language, or its intersection with political philosophy, could have been brought to bear on populations who fell hook, line & sinker for Obama's cognitively meaningless slogans about "hope" & "change," or (in fairness) to Dubya's "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" as he & his henchmen were busy lying us into the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. Or to the increasing obviousness that the U.S. is a plutocratic oligarchy, not a democracy.

    These are just the examples I think of first, where surely philosophers have something valuable to say.

    I fear, though, that this is not be the type of "value" wanted in our corporatized universities. Administrators would fear a loss of donors. Funny; I have a hard time imagining political philosophers worrying over such matters back when I was a student. How times change, & not for the better! Late capitalism? Perhaps. Another conversation worth having.

    Noam Chomsky once said (I am paraphrasing) that the job of intellectuals is to tell the truth & expose lies (such as the lie that there isn't sufficient money to pay adjuncts living wages). I very much doubt Chomsky would be considered employable were he just beginning his academic career today!

    BL COMMENT: I do not think you have correctly construed Tenured Prof's position. And I'm quite sure anecdotes about lazy tenured professors are not probative, or even relevant. All my anecdotes about tenured professors–dozens of them–are the opposite (with two exceptions). So let's leave silly anecdotes aside please.

    Reply
  11. David Mathers

    '. That fact that someone has done a Ph.D.–or, in some cases, M.A.–in philosophy does not carry with it an entitlement to, say, health care or living wages'

    Decent people think that rich developed socieites ought to *try* and provide all people with health care and living wages(!), at least all things being equal, since of course policies that attmept to do so may have other bad effects (Yes, in my view the category of 'decent people' excludes certain sorts of libertarians and conservatives, although by no means all.) Outside of the US, even conservatives in developd countries agree that *everyone* is 'entitled' (however that gets cashed out in political philosophy terms exactly) to health care. I agree that adjuncts are no worse off than many people without fancy degrees, and don't have some special entitlement to better treatment than say, autoworkers, but I don't think asking for enough to live on and health care (!!! only in America…) is asking too much.

    Reply
  12. Anon

    It is true that life is cruel and that not everyone gets to be a professor. But life is not unilaterally cruel: you don't have to support the people and the institutions who owe you nothing.

    Reply
  13. anonymous

    "Faculty lines are hugely down in the humanities, and I'd rather see, say, a 5% increase in tenure-track faculty than a 50% in adjunct pay/benefits; the former just does different things for a university and, in view, is where the priority should be."

    Adjuncts just do teaching, which is not an essential part of the mission of higher education.

    I'm sure a 5% increase in scholars such as yourself would have a profound impact on the world of ideas.

    Reply
  14. anonymous

    "we'd be better off and less angsty after some attrition"

    The TT professors suffer such terrible anxiety every time they pass an adjunct in the hall. The adjuncts should have to wear an identifying badge and be segregated into ghettos, before being carted of by attrition.

    Reply
  15. anon

    Someone over at DN on the getting a job in philosophy thread said "for God’s sake, don`t get interested in more than one topic at a time. This is the WORST THING you can do for yourself as people on hiring committees want to slot you as the-person-who-does-so-and-so. So, if you float between two fields, or worse, work independently in both, then you need to explain at a minimum why they are connected. But better not to do this at all so as to make yourself more categorizable. … Search committees want to see you as a person with a dedicated SINGULAR research profile. Save your other interests for after the job. (I wish someone had stressed this to me more when I was a graduate student.)"

    Do other people agree that it's prudent to focus on a single topic in grad school and only develop interests related to that topic? And if so, is this because spreading yourself too thin will decrease the quality of work in each area, or is it for some reason more like what this person suggests (that search committees want easily categorizable candidates)?

    As a grad student with several rather disparate interests, I hope this isn't the case.

    Reply
  16. Anon Grad Student

    I'm glad TLR is running the mental health survey. If I may offer a friendly amendment: attention deficit issues (broadly construed) should probably be included on that list. Those issues are both common and taken less seriously than they should be taken, and they plausibly present a great hurdle to philosophical engagement.

    Reply
  17. Adjunct Instructor

    Tenured Prof comments along with a reply by Prof. Leiter are both really offensive. I work as adjunct faculty member in philosophy and have done so for years. I am teaching nine courses this semester. I work just as hard as both of you and teach at least three times as many students. I put in an average of 70 hours a week. While I would be happy if colleges and universities opened more tenure lines, I think that I deserve to be properly compensated for my hard work. Just like you think you should be properly compensated for your hard work. I have no problem with you getting paid well, but it seems that you both support adjuncts being paid as little as possible to discourage them from teaching (why else would you ignore what "A Facebook User" said and only focus on the mild disparagement of some unnamed tenured faculty?).

    The fact of the matter is that universities and colleges have been relying more and more on adjunct faculty. We are not going away. While we wait for the small chance to gain a tenure-track job, all we ask for is a decent wage and some benefits. We do not want to be compensated at full-time levels. We just want to be able to pay the bills and feed our families, like everyone else. I like teaching philosophy, and I do not want to leave. The colleges I teach at would have to cancel over half of the philosophy courses offered each semester if they had no adjuncts. So even if I leave, someone else would be in my place. I consider myself lucky because I am able to get nine classes a semester (all in the classroom) because of where I live and my reputation as a high quality instructor. Many other adjunct instructors are not so lucky. Though these points I just made might all be considered "silly anecdotes" in some people's view, I hope they provide some context.

    There are certainly other social justice issues that are more important and pressing than the general plight of adjunct faculty members. However, that does not mean the way adjuncts are treated is right. To think otherwise displays a breathtaking level of arrogance and clearly puts you on the wrong side of the class warfare debate, at least on this matter.

    Reply
  18. Anon

    To Tenured Prof.: I think I can sum up the adjunct resentment fairly swiftly: We think (rightly or wrongly) that we are better than you were when you got tenure. That is why adjuncts complain about unfairness. It is harder for us now than it was for you back then.

    Reply
  19. Anon Childless Grad

    Junior TT Faculty with a family writes:

    – For me, the question is: to what extent should having children impact one's career negatively? I'd like to support a culture where the answer to that question is: "As little as possible". –

    I'm sympathetic, but it is not clear to me why the answer should be "As little as possible." Insofar as you freely commit to non-philosophical pursuits that limit your time, then you may thereby limit your ability to attend conferences. Having children is one such pursuit. Why is it the APA's obligation to minimize to the *greatest extent possible* your inconvenience?

    Reply
  20. Anon

    I am not offended by tenured prof's comment. On the contrary, tenured prof raises the question of how far market logic should determine access to the “…resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world." Why should market discipline stop at terminating adjuncts? Perhaps market logic hasn't gone far enough. Suppose that a scholarly article that might inform your work languishes behind a paywall. One might "let the market"–e.g., one's bank account–decide that such an article has priced itself out of the marketplace of ideas, and not cite it. Prior to a revaluation of academic values, one might object to the distortion of the scholarly record–but this begs the question of when to let the market decide. Someone might invoke power relations to justify not citing expensive articles behind paywalls; e.g., there is a history of abusive economic practice among for-profit academic publishers. The power imbalance of big corporations holding universities and scholars hostage to predatory pricing schemes overrides consideration of scholarly completeness. Sufficient numbers of summarily terminated adjuncts might realize such an outcome.

    Reply
  21. Derek Bowman

    "But we live in the real world. One cannot expect to be funded, subsidized, or otherwise financially supported in the modern economy without providing some value in return. Think about it from the point of view of the persons whose money you are taking. Why should they fund your work?"

    This would be a compelling argument if there were no philosophy jobs to be had, or if students were paying less for the classes taught by adjuncts. As it is, there's plenty of people who want our services but are simply unwilling to pay a decent wage for it and – the supply being what it is – they can get away with that.

    Reply
  22. Frank O'File

    Except in many cases it isn't, both in the US and elsewhere. For institutions to be required to find out whether it was in any particular case would require policies that would involve an unacceptable violations of privacy.

    Another thing which is often not voluntary and which seems relevant to the discussion of childcare is the state of being a single parent or sole care-giver for a child. Not every parent has a partner who can step in to provide childcare when needed, and it won't make the profession more inclusive to assume that they do.

    Reply
  23. David Wallace

    Brian: delighted to see you endorse Mill's wise words on freedom of speech. Never let it be said that "it is long past time to abandon the implausible idea that “free speech” simpliciter is an obvious force for further enlightenment and human well-being." (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2450866)

    (Please take the comment in the flippant spirit in which it's intended, not as a serious observation!)

    BL COMMENT: If there are contexts in which Millian liberty is utility-maximizing, I would hope it's among philosophy readers!

    Reply
  24. anonymous

    I have had adjunct colleagues with better publication records than their tenured colleagues (including a department chair). But that "rewards proportional to research" line is the way TT professors and admins think. The adjuncts mostly just think that they deserve to be treated better than they are, for doing a job that is similar to a major component of the job of their TT "betters".

    Reply
  25. Junior TT Faculty with a family

    In reply to 19: Thanks for your comment. First, let me make clear that I don't mean "as little as possible" in some perversely literal sense in which all else is sacrificed to minimize this one inconvenience. I don't think you're reading me that way, but I wanted to be absolutely clear. The real content of my statement is simply that I think it ought to be a priority.

    Still, one might push your line of argument and ask why it should be a priority at all. It's true that it's a free choice; why should others carry any responsibility for subsidizing it (with money, time, attention, or whatever)? This kind of objection has arisen before in similar discussions about "family friendliness". I'm not very convinced by it. As a matter of fact, lots of "non-philosophical pursuits" are subsidized in this way. For example, lots of philosophers seem to engage in a non-philosophical passion for the consumption of coffee. An lo, at conferenes there is often (read: always) coffee available! But suppose I don't care for coffee; suppose I made the choice to not become addicted to caffeine (in point of fact, I made no such choice). Could I not complain that the coffee-lovers are being subsidized for their non-philosophical pursuits?

    This example is a bit silly, but I think the general point carries over to other, more substantive "non-philosophical pursuits", like the desire to have a home-life (with or without kids), which requires that the profession "subsidize" those who do not or cannot work 80-hour weeks. At the end of the day, it's not an objective notion of fairness that's guiding our decisions on such matters, but rather the ideals of the professional culture that we hope to shape by making certain practices the norm.

    Somewhat orthogonal to the above point, but quite important, I think, is the fact that the negative impact of children on careers is disproportionately heaped on women, making this kind of issue relevant to other goals one might have, such as ameliorating the gender disparity in tenured philosophers.

    Reply
  26. Steven Hales

    I think there are deep and serious problems with the increased university reliance on adjunct labor, and that we can ALL get on board in recognizing this, without devolving to sniping in a class war. (1) The adjuncts themselves are frequently mistreated, marginalized professionally, and paid absurdly low wages without benefits. In this way they are being harmed. (2) The elimination of tenure-track lines in favor of adjunct, at-will employees is an end-run around tenure. The bosses could never get away with scrapping tenure outright, but if the tenured faculty fade away by attrition only to be replaced by adjuncts, the same end is accomplished. The loss of tenure protection is a profound harm to the fearless pursuit of the truth and to the academy itself.

    One way to push back is unionization. My university has a strong faculty union that limits the percentage of teaching that can be done by adjuncts, and requires that all temporary employees be paid on the union scale with benefits. For example, someone who is a one-semester sabbatical replacement teaching four classes will be paid a minimum of US$23,300 plus benefits. Unions may not be a one-size-fits-all solution, but it is one idea. I would love to hear others. Tenured faculty fight tooth and nail to keep tenure-track lines in our departments; we're on the side of the adjuncts who want fewer temporary, insecure positions and more permanent ones. But we have very little power.

    Reply
  27. anonymous

    According to Christos Papadimitrious ("Computation and Intractability: Echoes of Kurt Goedel," in the volume /Horizons of Truth: Kurt Goedel and the Foundations of Mathematics/, pg. 148):

    "Kurt Goedel, the greatest logician since Aistotolte, starved himself to death in a crisis of paranoia. Emil Post died of complications from electroshock treatment for his depression. Georg Cantor was in and out of mental hospitals for much of his life, suffering from bipolar disorder. According to Gian-Carlo Rota (/Indiscrete Thoughts/, pg. 4): 'It cannot be a complete coincidence that several outstanding logicians of the twentieth century found shelter in asylums at some time in their lives: Cantor, Zermelo, Goedel, Peano, and Post are some.' Although I am aware of no justification for the presence of Ernst Zermelo or Giuseppe Peano in Rota's list, the lineup is devastating indeed. Furthermore, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, the founder of intuitionistic logic (a point of view that scoffed at the foundations quest) and who, incidentally, introduced Godel to logic during a 1927 visit to Vienna, died paranoid. If one recalls that David Hilbert and Bertrand Russell both had schizophrenic sons, then the connection between the foundations quest and insanity becomes a mystery that cannot be easily dismissed."

    In a footnote Papadimitrious mentions that John Nash was not, strictly speaking, a logician but that game theory might rightfully be seen as the late 20th Century heir to late 19th and early 20th Century foundations research.

    Reply
  28. tenured prof

    From http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/02/national-adjunct-walkout-day-should-we-feel-sorry-for-adjuncts/:

    "So, here’s the problem. Adjuncts are people who played what they should have known, and in most cases did know, was a risky game, and lost. They are not like sweatshop workers in the third world who have no better options. They are more like formerly rich people who understand statistics, but who decided to bet the house in Vegas anyways. When they lose–even though they lose in a corrupt and unfair system–it’s hard to feel sorry for them. After all, they knew (or should have known) what the risks were and how bad the system is, and they played anyways. Further, there’s no reason why they have to wallow in adjunct poverty. They could just quit at any time and get a perfectly good job at GEICO."

    Reply
  29. s. wallerstein

    Tenured prof,

    Why do you assume that adjuncts are playing a game?

    Instead of seeing them as gamblers in Las Vegas who lost, one could see them as people with certain ideals, with the idea or illusion that they could make a contribute to philosophy and to getting people to think more critically in general and who found no space for that project in current society.

    I, who am neither an adjunct nor a tenured professor nor a professional philosopher, find it sad that there is no space for them because our society needs education in critical thinking and reasoning.

    While it is true that one can see our society as one big casino, with winners and losers, I find that depressing.

    Reply
  30. David Mathers

    Who could have guessed that someone as glib and callous as you about people's lives not working out for them as displayed in comment 28 would be a libertarian? Unkind, psycholgically shallow and just world biased as usual.

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  31. Anon

    What exactly does it mean that they knew or should have known what the risks were and how bad the system is? What did they know? What were they told? Is it beyond possibility that at least some of them were influenced by what game theorists call "cheap talk" about their prospects? Why do so many of them seem to view the prospect of leaving academia as if it were some sort of failure, rather than a matter of finding alternative employment? Were they explicitly discouraged every step of the way, or did they have to wait for bleeding heart libertarians to tell them "I told you so"? And if they did know, what does it say about working conditions in the paradigmatic example of optimal alternative employment, GEICO, if so many individuals prefer to work as adjuncts? (I myself avoided the adjunct trap.)

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  32. Anon Dissertator

    Thanks, tenured philosopher, for confirming my long-held belief that sociopathy is a requirement for being a libertarian. Human beings with normal emotional intelligence do not find it particularly difficult to feel sympathy for other human beings who are suffering, even when that suffering is caused in part by those people's own imprudence.

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  33. Cephalus

    I want to second Steven Hales' remarks about unionization. I am a recent PhD. I hold a non-tt teaching position at a large state university that is very well-regarded in philosophy but otherwise unremarkable. I do the work that adjuncts do elsewhere (e.g. teach multiple sections of large introductory courses) but I am paid a living wage and receive full benefits. Moreover, there is a system in place that protects me from arbitrary firing and/or non-rehiring. This system and the concomitant pay/benefits are the fruit of the unionization of non-tt faculty. The how and why of the unionization that took place is unclear to me, as it happened several decades before I arrived. The general point I want to make is just this: since there is very little about my institution that distinguishes it from directional state, unknown A & M, etc., there is prima facie good reason to think our model can be generalized.

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  34. Anon

    I think we can do better than to call the libertarians sociopaths: we can take them at their word. Are the adjuncts playing a casino game? The assumption is that this is a game of perfect information, and not an asymmetric information game. (It gets fun if you attempt to formalize the utility functions that libertarians actually use.) We need not press on the matter of corruption–though this is an interesting admission. We'll take "corruption" to mean that the odds are stacked in favor of the house, and that everyone knows this. A question then arises. Graduate students who contemplate exactly the move the libertarian expects the utility optimizer to make, a seamless transition to GEICO, are often apprehensive about approaching their advisers about their intention not to remain in academia. Why would that be if the interests of all parties were perfectly aligned with the market, which, the libertarians insist, knows best?

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  35. A Facebook User

    "So, here’s the problem. Adjuncts are people who played what they should have known, and in most cases did know, was a risky game, and lost. They are not like sweatshop workers in the third world who have no better options. They are more like formerly rich people who understand statistics, but who decided to bet the house in Vegas anyways. When they lose–even though they lose in a corrupt and unfair system–it’s hard to feel sorry for them. After all, they knew (or should have known) what the risks were and how bad the system is, and they played anyways. Further, there’s no reason why they have to wallow in adjunct poverty. They could just quit at any time and get a perfectly good job at GEICO."

    False analogy. When reading this, the first thing that came to mind was the classic line from one of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies; "Funny. I never thought of it as a game!"

    No indication what this guy's specialty is. I hope it isn't logic!

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  36. Adjunct Supporting Libertarian

    "Who could have guessed that someone as glib and callous as you about people's lives not working out for them as displayed in comment 28 would be a libertarian? Unkind, psycholgically shallow and just world biased as usual."

    He said, glibly generalizing about an entire group of people in a callous and unkind manner based on a single shallow example.

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  37. Anonymous Bioethics Prof

    The issue of health insurance for adjuncts is largely a red herring given the ACA. Although it would depend on specific universities' cost-sharing schemes and how much money one makes, many adjuncts would pay roughly the same amount in premiums through the university as they would through the exchanges given the ACA's subsidies; many would pay less through the exchanges than through their university for equivalent plans. These two groups probably comprise the vast majority of adjuncts.

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  38. anonymous

    See the Forbes article linked in the last open thread on psychopathic lack of empathy as a talent for a capitalist.

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  39. anonymous

    The website linked is called "Bleeding Heart Libertarians"; in About Us, they say "we are libertarians who believe that addressing the needs of the economically vulnerable by remedying injustice, engaging in benevolence, fostering mutual aid, and encouraging the flourishing of free markets is both practically and morally important."

    But as one would expect from their self-description with the "bleeding heart" slur against the libertarians' traditional opponents, their view on the academic labor market shows they just don't care about "the needs of the economically vulnerable", "engaging in benevolence" or "fostering mutual aid".

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  40. anonymous

    Universities should move to a model where all staff are paid the same base rate for teaching a course adjusted for student evaluations, and are paid for research as piecework, with an annual bonus for new citations. Research leave should be eliminated, as competitive market forces will ensure productivity.

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  41. David Wallace

    With apologies for the lengthy post:

    1) On the ethics of adjunct employment, I think there's a false dichotomy here.

    There's a libertarian view according to which
    (a) all this is market forces playing out: adjuncts have taken a high-risk gamble and lost, and they knew the stakes (more or less) when they decided to play. (A natural analogy is to a career in professional sports, where it requires both a lot of talent and a lot of luck to get one of the really desirable jobs.)
    (b) given (a), adjuncts don't deserve any sympathy.

    And there's a left-of-centre view that says that the system is systematically broken.

    But there's also a wishy-washy liberal view, with which I'm broadly sympathetic, that accepts (a) but not (b). That is, the academic career path is going to be high-risk, and people going into it should recognise that risk, but we still have a social obligation to treat reasonably people who don't win in the high-risk game. That means reasonable pay for reasonable work – not necessarily the sort of salary you might feel entitled to after a PhD, because I agree that a PhD per se doesn't entitle you to anything much, but the sort of salary that any working person ought to be entitled to, that lets them live a reasonable life in our wealthy society. (I'll pass over the question of whether they should be entitled to healthcare because from a British point of view the idea that the citizens of a wealthy modern country might *not* be entitled to healthcare is too barbaric to linger on.)

    2) In any case, there is an obvious case for providing reasonable pay and conditions for adjuncts that has nothing to do with their welfare and everything to do with the quality of the teaching they provide. In Oxford (the issues are non-identical, but related) I'm concerned to minimise the degree to which we exploit temporary teaching staff *partly* on welfare grounds but *primarily* because I believe someone who's desperately cobbling together a bunch of part-time jobs for a pittance is ceteris paribus going to do a less good job than someone who's less overworked and more secure.

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  42. David Mathers

    Well, clearly not all libertarians are glib and shallow. But I'd hardly have said that if tenured prof had been the *first* libertarian I'd seen display a striking nastiness towards other people's failures and misfortunes. Obviously not *all* right-libertarians are like that, but it does seem to be a position which attracts *a lot* of people who are like that (and put off by the anti-science, anti-free speech, preserve sacred cows side of conservativism.)

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  43. anonymous

    "The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders."

    https://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/

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  44. Anon

    There is an online community, http://versatilephd.com , serving academics interested in finding suitable employment outside academia. (Or within it, in what they call "alt-ac," which suggests the image of someone on the outside looking in, face pressed to the glass.) This category includes adjuncts who wish to find remunerative employment. There you will find recurring reports of perceived stigma attached to leaving. Accounts of exploitation are not uncommon.* This thread is, for the most part, an in-group discussion whose participants may prefer a neutral, straightforward account of the academic career trajectory as a lottery–or rather, a meritocracy morally indistinguishable from a lottery.

    *Two years after leaving a research group, I still receive peremptory, last-minute demands to edit NSF grants and to show up at meetings gratis. The notion that I have a place of actual employment is not important to them.

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  45. A Facebook User

    This slideshow offers, it seems to me, a very good perspective on how matters look to adjuncts / contingent faculty:

    http://www.slideshare.net/SmithJennyL/national-adjunct-walkout-and-awareness-day-public-accessible-presentation

    I've very little to add to this, except to observe that those obsessed with making this about "market forces" must be blind to such forces when graduating still more Ph.D.s knowing full well that universities aren't creating a sufficient number of jobs that pay living wages to absorb them all. Do the Tenured Profs of today's academic landscape really believe they have no obligation to help clean up the mess they've made?

    One final observation. Neither I nor anyone else have claimed that the "adjunct problem" was the only or even the most important problem in political economy today. Indeed, the "adjunct problem" is just a "microcosm": an extreme case of the driving down of wages all over the world, as a result of oligarchy-driven globalization. Last night I ran across the e-book version of economist Guy Standing's "The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class." I very much recommend having a look at it, since it is naive at best to think this group will not be flexing its muscles in the years to come against the mess globalization has made. You can most easily obtain the book here:

    https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-precariat-the-new-dangerous-class/

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  46. ThinkingItThrough

    I'm probably in David Wallace's "wishy-washy liberal" camp as I think people are often too quick to "blame the victim" in these difficult economic times.

    I do have a reaction to some of the "help the adjunct" camp though, and it may seem unsympathetic, namely: aren't the PhD holding, well out of school, cobbling together adjunct jobs for subsistence cohort unlikely to have won the tenure track lottery even in the past?

    Go with me for a second:

    Suppose in some glorious time in the past 75% of PhD holders could get a tenure track job in philosophy and that there were no adjunct jobs. Jobs are allocated on pure meritocracy and all candidates can be ranked. Then the top 75% of PhDs get tenure track jobs and the other 25% have to go out and fend for themselves in the world.

    Now fast forward to now. Let's say for the sake of argument that there are enough tenure track jobs for 40% of PhDs and cobbled together adjunct jobs for 25% and no philosophy jobs for 35%.

    I would argue that the 25% of PhDs taking these cobbled together adjunct jobs are not ranked between 40% and 65% of our theoretical ranking of PhDs. I would even say they are somewhere in the bottom 35% if not the bottom 25%. Why do I say this? Because, despite the hard-heartedness of libertarian tenured prof, s/he is right. Individuals who lose the TT lottery but stick around in adjunct land are not making rational economic decisions and seem to suffer from a lack of imagination. From my experience, of the many of my cohort in grad school that did not go on into philosophy (tenure track or adjunct purgatory) they were not the worst of the class. They were above average to good. They saw the reality of the job market and worked on a plan B accordingly.

    All of this to say: if those cobbling together adjunct jobs today are the same cohort that would have been shut out of the professional entirely in a "fabled past" how much do they "deserve" compensation and security approaching a TT job?

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  47. Adjunct Supporting Libertarian

    @ anonymous #39

    Well, to be fair, we’re talking about one post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, with a lot of apologetic throat-clearing by the author at the beginning, which gets a good bit of skeptical push-back in the comments thread. They seem to me to be discussing the issue in a fairly sober manner from a variety of angles. Sociopathy should be made of sterner stuff.

    It’s fairly easy to demonize large swaths of people, to assume that their disagreement with your preferred economic theory, for example, is evidence of their moral monstrosity and unworthiness of charity or good-faith engagement. If you spent some time poking around in the literature and blogosphere chatter surrounding contemporary libertarianism, you might be surprised to find a significant number of robust libertarian arguments in favor of positions like universal basic income, effective altruism, LGTBQ rights, non-aggression, anti-war, anti-carceralism, anti-surveillance, pro-science, anti-fundamentalism, etc. In other words, you might find that these sociopathic moral monsters actually agree with you on a number of fundamental goals, even if they disagree about the optimal means of achieving them.

    You’ve probably noticed by now that I’m also not-so-subtly gesturing towards certain other ideological turf wars currently popular in philosophy. Draw your own conclusions there.

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  48. Anon

    My beef with the libertarians is their peculiar practice of deducing a moral "ought" from a market "is." I will take my concerns with me to Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Nevertheless, I concede that I am with ThinkingItThrough. The days in in which a philosopher the likes of Hume could not find an academic post must lie forever in our past. Sidney Morgenbesser himself would have written more than he had, but not more than the necessary minimum, to land a job today.

    Morgenbesser once said in passing that the scientific method is institutionalized. This is not news to my scientist colleagues and acquaintances, but it was insightful. Likewise, what might be termed the philosophical method is institutionalized. A short while ago it was just barely possible for Williams to begin his masterwork by repeating Socrates' question, "How should we live?" Now the process of professionalization has advanced beyond the point where philosophy can productively ask (but fail to answer) the more limited question, "How should philosophers live? Instead, the question becomes one of "issues in the profession."

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  49. JushinThunder

    TL;DR version:

    "Adjuncts must be bad philosophers because they aren't making the rational economic decision to leave philosophy (somehow that means they lack imagination). I have evidence: the worst people in my graduate school class did not leave the profession."

    Now this is the sort of reasoning that lands one a TT position.

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  50. Ruprecht Blitzenharnessczech

    Anonymouse #14 said: "The TT professors suffer such terrible anxiety every time they pass an adjunct in the hall. The adjuncts should have to wear an identifying badge and be segregated into ghettos, before being carted of by attrition"

    This goes on everywhere in the corporate world (esp at technology companies on the west coast). At Google, only the "white" badges really matter (permanent employees who are granted stock). http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375850/googles-badge-of-honour

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