AI Slop and Evidence about Evidence: Why Philosophy Journals Should Reject AI-Written Prose

I don't want to read your AI-generated email. Lots of reasons why, but here's the core of it: I want the text to reflect your thoughts. I want to know that you, the human, actually had those ideas and had them authentically enough to express them in exactly the form I see on the page. For personal emails, I want this for personal reasons. For philosophically substantive emails, I want this for evidential reasons. Philosophy journals should also want human-generated rather than AI-generated text for the same evidential reasons.

There Probably Are Good Reasons You Phrased It the Way You Did

The evidential reason: Human experts think differently and better than LLMs. Their word choices, even subtle ones, reflect sensitivities that they might not themselves be aware of. Typically, an expert's prose will be more sensitive to the matters on which they are expert than the output of a language model. When I receive a philosophical email from you -- and more so when I read a journal article -- I want your expert word choices, not blurry LLM approximations.

You might object as follows: Of course I read the LLM outputs before sending, and I wouldn't send the email, much less submit the article, unless I endorsed every word! So, the objection continues, you did think the thoughts expressed. The text reflects your expert best judgment -- maybe even something better than your expert best judgment: your expert best judgment combined with the expertise of an LLM.

I reply: There's a huge cognitive difference between nodding along while reading something and actually productively generating a text. Two reasons: First, once the text is on the page, it's easy to passively let the approximate word suffice, rather than thinking about word choice in the same effortful, active way we do when generating prose de novo. Second, as I suggested above, I doubt that human beings, even experts, have a good sense of all the factors that shape word choice -- everything they're being sensitive to. You would have phrased it slightly differently, and even if you don't know that, or why, a different signal is sent and received.

Evidence about Evidence

I'm talking about evidence about evidence: meta-epistemology. Your email or your article presents evidence for a particular philosophical view (alternatively, evidence that you support a particular philosophical view). In a simple world, I could evaluate this evidence entirely on its face: How good is the proposed view? But in the actual, complex world, it helps to have evidence about the quality of the evidence. The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about -- more so than if the text were generated by an LLM. This holds even if the text is exactly the same, which of course it wouldn't be.

An increasingly large part of the function of journals is to provide evidence about evidence -- the value of their imprimatur. The fact that an article appears in Nous or Ethics is evidence that it has been through rigorous review and was judged worthy by several expert humans applying unusually demanding standards of quality and importance. Its appearance in those journals is thus evidence (imperfect of course!) that the reasoning is of high quality and the arguments worth taking seriously.

Similarly, if I know that an email or an article was written by a respected colleague, reflecting their positive creative exertion in trying to choose the right words, guided by their intuitive expertise in how to phrase things, I have better reason to take it seriously than if I know that it was generated by an LLM and reflects only their passive after-the-fact assent.

Philosophers sometimes suggest that we shouldn't care if an argument was human-generated or AI-generated -- that insisting on human-generated prose is fetishizing personal human interaction rather than facts and argument quality. In a way, that's true: A sound argument is a sound argument. Similarly, we shouldn't care if an article was written by David Chalmers and published in Philosophical Review or whether it was written by someone with no institutional affiliation and published on an obscure blog. If the argument is good, it's good -- of course, of course!

But at the same time, we have limited attention, limited time, limited ability to understand the nuances when matters drift even a little from our tightest foci of expertise, and in these cases it's helpful to have meta-evidence. What should I read? How far should I trust the author has the details right, versus how much should I pause critically and chase down independent sources? How much should I let their way of phrasing things, their habitual patterns of thinking, the presuppositions hidden in their word choices and sentence structures, slip gently into my brain, silently strengthening my own associations and predilections?

An Example

To better capture the phenomenon I have in mind, I've selected a random sentence from my most recent outbound email (as of the first draft of this post):

This lack of self-respect is manifested both in her willingness to consider being killed to somewhat improve Josie's life and in her incapacity to develop desires and interests of her own independent of Josie's, as manifested by her being content to rot in a junkyard once her usefulness to Josie has ended.

The topic is Klara from Klara and the Sun, the story of a robot servant who is designed to be utterly dedicated to serving the human girl to whom she has been assigned as an "artificial friend". (I discuss the case in detail here.)

I asked ChatGPT "high" to "write the sentence better", and here is the output:

This lack of self-respect is evident both in her willingness to contemplate her own destruction for the sake of a modest improvement in Josie’s life and in her failure to develop desires or interests independent of Josie’s—as shown by her contentment to decay in a junkyard once she is no longer useful to her.

At first glance, the revised sentence is slightly better -- smoother, more natural. My double use of "manifested" was awkward, and rereading it now I think I should have changed at least that stylistic detail. I could even see approving the LLM output as expressing my own thinking about Klara, if someone asked whether it accurately reflects my view.

However, in several subtle ways the edited version is philosophically worse.

I wrote that Klara's lack of self-respect is "manifested" in her willingness to such-and-such. ChatGPT replaced "manifested" with the slightly more common and natural "evident". Close enough, seemingly? But no. They differ subtly, in an important way. "Manifested" is ontological, "evident" is epistemic. "Manifested" emphasizes the relation between the underlying lack of self-respect and the particular thoughts Klara is having -- that those thoughts arise from a broad insufficiency of self-respect. "Evident" emphasizes that the particular thoughts are evidence of that attitude. Either word might do, but "manifested" is better: I'm not really talking about what evidence we have that Klara lacks self-respect but rather what types of thinking constitute lack of self-respect.

The second change: "consider being killed" is replaced by "contemplate her own destruction". The LLM phrasing is again a bit smoother, more common, more natural. And again, it's not exactly wrong; it's a phrasing I might easily approve. But on careful thought, my original phrasing is again truer to what I really want to say. "Consider" suggests that Klara is seriously weighing the choice. "Contemplate" is vaguer: She might only be thinking idly about it. "Being killed" is vivid and suggests that someone else would be the agent of her death. "Her own destruction" is not as vivid: "Destruction" flattens things a little, morally and emotionally. And it's not quite as clear that someone else, rather than Klara herself, would be the agent of her death.

And so I could continue with the other revisions.

I am focusing on line-by-line prose, not main ideas. Main ideas are a different issue and require a different analysis. One might wrongly think that only the main ideas are important. My point here is that subtle differences in line-by-line prose matter too, and that an LLM's word choices will differ from an expert's, and that there's reason to respect experts' intuitive word choices. If experts yield their writing to a language model, it is probably too easy for them to allow their expert word sensitivities to be blurred away.

Thus, people should prefer human-expert-generated prose in emails and journal articles, for at least this meta-epistemic reason. That a passage was written by an expert human is evidence that the prose accurately tracks important nuances. Being hand-written by a human expert is an (imperfect) high-level indicator of quality.

Those of us who receive emails, or read journal articles, or even who edit and referee journal articles cannot evaluate every sentence with the same close attention to nuance I demonstrated in my example above. We often need to read at two minutes a page, not two minutes a sentence. We all reasonably rely to some extent on the writer's expertise in phrasing.

This is one reason journals should require human-written rather than AI-written prose, even if the latter is endorsed post-hoc by a human expert.

Using LLMs Well

This is not a call for blanket rejection of the use of LLMs in philosophical (or other) writing. They can be useful for generating criticisms and for suggesting topics and readings to explore, as long as one takes the outputs with a cautious grain of salt.

They can also be useful for copyediting after the initial prose is written -- but only either

(a.) for minor grammatical/spelling corrections, or

(b.) in a thoughtful, effortful way, ideally with mechanisms to reduce passivity such as (b.i) having to type in any adjustments by hand rather than simply approving them in a revised document and (b.ii) receiving suggestions from more than one LLM to force you to contemplate several alternatives rather than simply accepting one, and

(c.) in a way that preserves or amplifies, rather than averages away, your distinctive way of expressing yourself.

Such an approach to LLM-aided revision is time-consuming rather than time-saving, a matter of "cognitive onloading" rather than "cognitive offloading" -- an occasion to actively consider your word choice line by line, via input from a few not-very-insightful copyeditors. Had I subjected my email to LLM copyediting, I'd have noticed the awkward double use of "manifested" and consequently considered whether that was the best way to express myself. The result of AI-assisted copyediting following principles (a)-(c) might be prose that even more accurately reflects your best individual thinking than your independently produced drafts.

This argument against using LLMs to generate expert prose is bounded and possibly temporary: If someday LLMs surpass human experts at subtle word choice, this particular argument will no longer apply -- though other excellent reasons might remain not to use LLMs for expert prose writing.

[Mud: image source]

Every Scholar Should Feel Relatively Underappreciated

Yes, all parents can rationally think that their children are above average, and everyone could, in principle, reasonably regard themselves as better-than-average drivers. We can reasonably disagree about values. If we then act according to those divergent values, we can reasonably conclude we're better than average. If you think skillful driving involves X instead of Y and then drive in a more X-like manner, you can justifiably conclude you're more skillful than those dopey Y drivers.

It's the same with scholarship. Ideally, every scholar should feel more underappreciated than most other scholars.

Suppose you're a philosophy grad student. You could choose to focus on area X, Y, or Z. You decide that area X is the most interesting and important, and you come to that conclusion not unreasonably. Other students, equally reasonably, judge that Y is the most interesting and important, or Z is. These differences in opinion might, for example, arise from differences in what you're exposed to, or the enthusiasm levels of people you trust. Consequently, you focus your research on X. Your disagreeing peers equally reasonably focus on Y or Z.

Committing to area X leads you, understandably, to even more deeply appreciate the value of X. It's such a rich topic! You hear the names and read the articles of senior scholars A, B, and C in area X. Your impression of the field understandably reinforces your sense of the interest and importance of X. Senior scholars A, B, and C become ever bigger names in your mind. You publish a few articles. You are now in conversation with leading senior scholars on one of the most important topics in the field.

Your peer in area Y of course similarly comes to more deeply appreciate the value of Y and the contributions of senior philosophers D, E, and F. If you and your peer both publish what might, from a third perspective (that of another peer focusing on topic Z), seem to be equally important topics, you might -- wholly rationally -- nonetheless see your own article as more important than your peer's, and vice versa.

Similarly for quality judgments: You and your peers might reasonably disagree about the relative importance of, say, formal rigor, clear prose, creative examples, and accurate grounding in historical texts. If you regard the first two as more central to philosophical quality and your peer regards the second two as more important, it is then reasonable that you each work harder to make your work better in those particular respects. Your work ends up more formally rigorous and more clearly written; theirs ends up more creative and historically grounded. Each of you will then, quite reasonably, regard your work as better than your peer's, each better adhering to the different quality standards that you reasonably endorse.

Similarly for other features of academia: Philosophers reasonably think philosophy is especially valuable. This starts as a selection effect: Those who relatively undervalue philosophy will tend not to seek a degree in it. As scholars dig deeper into their field, its value will become increasingly salient. Likewise, chemists will reasonably think chemistry is especially valuable, historians will think history is especially valuable, etc.

Scholars who think research articles are especially valuable will tend to produce disproportionately more of those. Scholars who think books are especially valuable will produce more of those. Scholars who find editing valuable will edit more. Scholars who value supervising students will supervise more. Scholars who value classroom teaching will put more energy into doing that well. Scholars who value administrative work will do more of that. And of course there's room for reasonable disagreement here. Whatever part of academia you tend to value, you will tend to invest in, with the result that you reasonably think that what you are doing is especially important.

The entirely predictable consequence is that you will feel relatively underappreciated. You are working on one of the most important topics, doing some of the highest quality work, and focusing on the most important parts of the scholarly life. Most of your peers are focused on less important topics, doing work that doesn't quite rise to your standards, and are distracted with less important matters. If you're awarded with raises and promotions, you'll probably feel that they are overdue. If you're not awarded with raises and promotions, you'll probably feel that others doing less important work are unfairly getting raises and promotions instead.

And this is how it should be. If you devote yourself to the areas of academic life that you reasonably but disputably regard as the most important, and if the system is fair and you aren't excessively modest, you should feel relatively underappreciated. It's a sign that you're adhering to your distinctive values.

[ChatGPT image of six scholars arguing around a seminar table with stuffed bookshelves in the background; the original image was all White men; this image was the output when I asked the image to be revised to make two of the scholars women and two non-White; see the literature on algorithmic bias.]

Grade Inflation at UC Riverside, and Institutional Pressures for Easier Grading

Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023, compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% of grades were As in 2020-2021, 10% Bs, and only 1% Cs. It's not just elite universities, however: Grades have risen sharply since at least the 1980s across a wide range of schools.

I decided to look at UC Riverside's grade distributions since 2013, since faculty now have access to a tool to view this information. (It would be nice to look back farther, but even the changes since 2013 are interesting.)

The following chart lists grade distributions quarter by quarter for the regular academic year, from 2013 through the present. The dark blue bars at the top are As, medium blue Bs, light blue Cs, and red is D, F, or W.

[click to enlarge and clarify]

Three things are visually obvious from this graph:

First, there's a spike of high grades in Spring 2020 -- presumably due to the chaos of the early days of the pandemic.

Second, the percentage of As is higher in recent years than in earlier years.

Third, the percentage of DFWs has remained about the same across the period.

In Fall 2013, 32% of enrolled students received As. In Fall 2023, 45% did. (DFW's were 9% in both terms.)

One open question is whether the new normal of about 45% As reflects a general trend independent of the pandemic spike or whether the pandemic somehow created an enduring change. Another question is whether the higher percentage of As reflects easier grading or better performance. The term "inflation" suggests the former, but of course data of this sort by themselves don't distinguish between those possibilities.

The increase in percentage As is evident in both lower division and upper division classes, increasing from 32% to 43% in lower division and from 33% to 49% in upper division.

How about UCR philosophy in particular? I'd like to think that my own department has consistent and rigorous standards. However, as the figure below shows, the trends in UCR philosophy are similar, with an increase from 26% As in Fall 2013 to 41% As in Fall 2024:

[click to enlarge and clarify]

Lower division philosophy classes at UCR increased from 25% As in Fall 2013 to 40% As in Fall 2023, while upper division classes increased from 26% to 47% As.

Smoothing out quarter-by-quarter differences, here is the percentage of As, Fall 2013 - Spring 2014 vs Winter 2023 - Fall 2023 for Philosophy and some selected other disciplines at UCR for comparison:
Philosophy: 27% to 43% (28% to 42% lower, 25% to 46% upper)
English: 20% to 33% (15% to 28% lower, 38% to 64% upper)
History: 28% to 52% (23% to 52% lower, 48% to 52% upper)
Business: 28% to 46% (20% to 24% lower, 29% to 49% upper)
Psychology: 32% to 51% (33% to 51% lower, 31% to 51% upper)
Biology: 22% to 38% (28% to 36% lower, 17% to 41% upper)
Physics: 26% to 39% (26% to 37% lower, 40% to 41% upper)

As you can see, in some disciplines at some levels, the percentage of As has almost doubled over the ten-year time period.

UCR is probably not unusual in the respects I have described. However, if other people have similar analyses for their own institutions, I'd be interested to hear, especially if the pattern is different.

I doubt, unfortunately, that students are actually performing that much better. UCR philosophy students in 2023 were not dramatically better at writing, critical thinking, and understanding historical material than were students in 2013. I conjecture that the main cause of grade inflation is institutional pressures toward easier grading.

I see two institutional pressures toward higher grades and more relaxed standards:

Teaching evaluations: Generally students give better teaching evaluations to professors from whom they expect better grades.[1] Other things being equal, a professor who gives few As will get worse evaluations than one who gives many As. Since professors' teaching is often judged in large part on student evaluations, professors will tend to be institutionally rewarded for giving higher grades, ensuring happier students who give them better evaluations. Professors who are easier graders, if this fact is known among the student body, will also tend to get higher enrollments.

Graduation rates: At the institutional level, success is often evaluated in terms of graduation rates. If students fail to complete their degrees or take longer than expected to so do because they are struggling with classes, this looks bad for the institution. Thus, there is institutional pressure toward lower standards to ensure high levels of student graduation and "success".

There are fewer countervailing institutional pressures toward higher rigor and more challenging grading schemes. If classes are too unrigorous, a school might risk losing its WASC accreditation, but few well-established colleges and universities are at genuine risk of losing their accreditation.

At some point, the grade "A" loses its strength as a signal of excellence. If over 50% of students are receiving As, then an A is consistent with average performance. Yes, for some inspiring teachers and some amazing student groups, average performance might be truly excellent! But that's not the typical scenario.

I have one positive suggestion for how to deal with grade inflation. But before I get to it, I want to mention one other striking phenomenon: the variation in the grade distributions between terms for what is nominally the same course. For example, here is the distribution chart for one of the lower division classes in UCR's Philosophy Deparment:

[click to enlarge and clarify]

The distribution ranges from 11% As in Fall 2014 to 72% As in Fall 2020.

Some departments in some universities have moved to standardized curricula and tests so that the same class in each term is taught and graded similarly. In philosophy, this is probably not the right approach, since different instructors can reasonably want to focus on different material, approached and graded differently. Still, that degree of term-by-term variation in what is nominally the same class raises issues of fairness to students.

My suggestion is: sunlight. Let course grade distributions be widely shared and known.

Sunlight won't solve everything -- far from it -- but I do think that in looking at students' teaching evaluations, seeing the professor's grade distribution provides valuable context that might disincentivize cynical strategies to inflate grades for good evaluations. I've evaluated teaching for teaching awards, for visiting instructors, and for my own colleagues, and I'm struck by how rare it is for information about grade distributions even to be supplied in the context of evaluating teaching. A full picture of a professor's teaching should include an understanding of the range of grades they are distributing and, ideally, random samples of tests and assignments that earn As and Bs and Cs. This situates us to better celebrate the work of professors with high standards and the students in their classes who live up to those high standards.

Similarly, grade distributions should be made available at the departmental and institutional level. In combination with other evidence -- again, ideally random samples of assignments awarded A, B, and C -- this can help in evaluating the extent to which those departments and institutions are holding students to high standards.

Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the context of institutions' and departments' grading standards. This would allow viewers of the transcript to know whether a student's 3.7 GPA is a rare achievement in their institutional context, or simply average performance.

--------------------------------------------------

[1] A recent study suggests that grade satisfaction might be the primary driver of the correlation between students' expected grades and their course evaluations, rather than grading leniency per se -- these can come apart when a student is satisfied with their grade as a result of their hard work for it -- but grading leniency is an instructor's easiest path to generating student grade satisfaction, generating the institutional pressure.

Against the Finger

There's a discussion-queue tradition in philosophy that some people love, but which I've come to oppose. It's too ripe for misuse, favors the aggressive, serves no important positive purpose, and generates competition, anxiety, and moral perplexity. Time to ditch it! I'm referring, as some of you might guess, to The Finger.[1] A better alternative is the Slow Sweep.

The Finger-Hand Tradition

The Finger-Hand tradition is this: At the beginning of discussion, people with questions raise their hands. The moderator makes an initial Hand list, adding new Hands as they come up. However, people can jump the question queue: If you have a follow-up on the current question, you may raise a finger. All Finger follow-ups are resolved before moving to the next Hand.

Suppose Aidan, Brianna, Carina, and Diego raise their hands immediately, entering the initial Hand queue.[2] During Aidan's question, Evan and Fareed think of follow-ups, and Grant thinks of a new question. Evan and Fareed raise their fingers and Grant raises a hand. The new queue order is Evan, Fareed, Brianna, Carina, Diego, Grant.

People will be reminded "Do not abuse the Finger!" That is, don't Finger in front of others unless your follow-up really is a follow-up. Don't jump the queue to ask what is really a new question. Finger-abusers will be side-eyed and viewed as bad philosophical citizens.

[Dall-E image of a raised finger, with a red circle and line through it]

Problems with the Finger

(1.) People abuse the Finger, despite the admonition. It rewards the aggressive. This is especially important if there isn't enough time for everyone's questions, so that the patient Hands risk never having their questions addressed.

(2.) The Finger rewards speed. If more than one person has a Finger, the first Finger gets to ask first.

Furthermore (2a.): If the person whose Hand it is is slow with their own follow-up, then the moderator is likely to go quickly to the fastest Finger, derailing the Hand's actual intended line of questioning.

(3.) Given the unclear border between following up and opening a new question, (a.) people who generously refrain from Fingering except in clear cases fall to the back of the queue, whereas people who indulge themselves in a capacious understanding of "following up" get to jump ahead; and (b.) because of issue (a), all participants who have a borderline follow-up face a non-obvious moral question about the right thing to do.

(4.) The Finger tends to aggravate unbalanced power dynamics. The highest-status and most comfortable people in the room will tend to be the ones readiest to Finger in, seeing ways to interpret the question they really want to ask as a "follow-up" to someone else's question.

Furthermore, the Finger serves no important purpose. Why does a follow-up need to be asked right on the tail of the question it is following up? Are people going to forget otherwise? Of course not! In fact, in my experience, follow-ups are often better after a gap. This requires the follower-up to reframe the question in a different way. This reframing is helpful, because the follower-up will see the issue a little differently than the original Hand. The audience and the speaker then hear multiple angles on whatever issue is interesting enough that multiple people want to ask about it, instead of one initial angle on it, then a few appended jabs.

Why It Matters

If all of this seems to take the issue of question order with excessive seriousness, well, yes, maybe! But bear in mind: Typically, philosophy talks are two hours long, and you get to ask one question. If you can't even ask that one question, it's a very different experience than if you do get to ask your question. Also, the question period, unfortunately but realistically, serves a social function of displaying to others that you are an engaged, interesting, "smart" philosopher -- and most of us care considerably how others think of us. Not being able to ask your question is like being on a basketball team and never getting to take your shot. Also, waiting atop a question you're eager to ask while others jump the queue in front of you on sketchy grounds is intrinsically unpleasant -- even if you do manage to squeeze in your question by the end.

The Slow Sweep

So, no Fingers! Only Hands. But there are better and worse ways to take Hands.

At the beginning of the discussion period, ask for Hands from anyone who wants to ask a question. Instead of taking the first Hand you see, wait a bit. Let the slower Hands rise up too. Maybe encourage a certain group of people especially to contribute Hands. At UC Riverside Philosophy, our custom is to collect the first set of Hands from students, forcing faculty to wait for the second round, but you could also do things like ask "Any more students want to get Hands in the queue?"

Once you've paused long enough that the slow-Handers are up, follow some clear, unbiased procedure for the order of the questions. What I tend to do is start at one end of the room, then slowly sweep to the other end, ordering the questions just by spatial position. I will also give everyone a number to remember. After everyone has their number, I ask if there are any people I missed who want to be added to the list.

Hand 1 then gets to ask their question. No other Hands get to enter the queue until we've finished with all the Hands in the original call. Thus, there's no jockeying to try to get one's hand up early, or to catch the moderator's eye. The Hand gets to ask their question, the speaker to reply, and then there's an opportunity for the Hand -- and them only -- to ask one follow up. After the speaker's initial response is complete, the moderator catches the Hand's eye, giving them a moment to gather their thoughts for a follow-up or to indicate verbally or non-verbally that they are satisfied. No hurry and no jockeying for the first Finger. I like to encourage an implicit default custom of only one follow-up, though sometimes it seems desirable to allow a second follow-up. Normally after the speaker answers the follow-up I look for a signal from the Hand before moving to the next Hand -- though if the Hand is pushing it on follow-ups I might jump in quickly with "okay, next we have Hand 2" (or whatever the next number is).

After all the initial Hands are complete, do another slow sweep in a different direction (maybe left to right if you started right to left). Again, patiently wait for several Hands rather than going in the order in which you see hands. Bump anyone who had a Hand in the first sweep to the end of the queue. Maybe there will be time for a third sweep, or a fourth.

The result, I find, is a more peaceful, orderly, and egalitarian discussion period, without the rush, jockeying, anxiety, and Finger abuse.

--------------------------------------------------------------

[1] The best online source on the Finger-Hand tradition that I can easily find is Muhammad Ali Khalidi's critique here, a couple of years ago, which raises some similar concerns. 

[2] All names chosen randomly from lists of my former lower-division students, excluding "Jesus", "Mohammed", and very uncommon names. (In this case, I randomly chose an "A" name, then a "B" name, etc.) See my reflections here.

Research Funding: The Pretty-Proposal Approach vs the Recent-Past-Results Approach

Say you have some money and you want to fund some research. You're an institution of some sort: NSF, Templeton, MacArthur, a university's Committee on Research. How do you decide who gets your money?

Here are two broad approaches:

The Pretty Proposal Approach. Send out a call for applications. Give the money to the researchers who make the best case that they have an awesome research plan.

The Recent-Past-Results Approach. Figure out who in the field has recently been doing the best research of the sort you want to fund. Give them money for more such research.

[ETA for clarity, 09:46] The ideal form of the Recent-Past-Results Approach is one in which the researcher does not even have to write a proposal!

Of course both models have advantages and disadvantages. But on the whole, I'd suggest, too much funding is distributed based on the pretty proposal model and insufficient money based on the recent-past-result model.

I see three main advantages to the Pretty Proposal Approach:

First, and very importantly in my mind, the PPA is egalitarian. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. If you have a great proposal, you deserve funding!

Second, two researchers with equally good track records might have differently promising future plans, and this approach (if it goes well) will reward the researcher with the more promising plans.

Third, the institution can more precisely control exactly what research projects are funded (possibly an advantage from the perspective of the institution).

But the Pretty Proposal Approach has some big downsides compared to the Recent-Past-Results Approach:

First, in my experience, researchers spend a huge amount of time writing pretty proposals, and the amount of time has been increasing sharply. This is time they don't spend on research itself. In the aggregate, this is a huge loss to academic research productivity (e.g., see here and here). The Recent-Past-Results approach, in contrast, needn't involve any active asking by the researcher (if the granting agency does the work of finding promising recipients), or submission only of a cv and recent publications. This would allow academics to deploy more of their skills and time on the research itself, rather than on constructing beautiful requests for money.

Second, past research performance probably better predicts future research performance than do promises of future research performance. I am unaware of data specifically on this question, but in general I find it better policy to anticipate what people will do based on what they've done in the past than based on the handsome promises they make when asking for money. If this is correct, then better research is likely to be funded on a Recent-Past-Results approach. (Caveat: Most grant proposals already require some evidence of your expertise and past work, which can help mitigate this disadvantage.)

Third, the best researchers are often opportunistic and move fast. They will do better research if they can pursue emerging opportunities and inspirations than if they are tied to a proposal written a year or more before.

In my view, the downsides of the dominant Pretty Proposal Approach are sufficiently large that we should shift a substantial proportion (not all) of our research funding toward the Recent-Past-Results Approach.

What about the three advantages of the Pretty Proposal Approach?

The third advantage of the PPA -- increased institutional power -- is not clearly an all-things-considered advantage. Researchers who have recently done good work in the eyes of grant evaluators might be better at deciding the specific best uses of future research resources than are those grant evaluators themselves. Institutions understandably want some control; but they can exert this control by conditional granting: "We offer you this money to spend on research on Topic X (meeting further Criteria Y and Z), if you wish to do more such research."

The second advantage of the PPA -- more funding for similar researchers with differently promising plans -- can be partly accommodated by retaining the Pretty Proposal Approach as a substantial component of research funding. I certainly wouldn't want to see all funding to be based on Recent Past Results!

The first advantage of the PPA -- egalitarianism -- is the most concerning to me. I don't think we want to see elite professors and friends of the granting committees getting ever more of the grant money in a self-reinforcing cycle. A Recent-Past-Results Approach should implement stringent measures to reduce the risk of this outcome. Here are a few possibilities:

Prioritize researchers with less institutional support. If two researchers have similarly excellent past results but one has achieved those results with less institutional support -- a higher teaching load, less previous grant funding -- then prioritize the one with less support. Especially prioritize funding research by people with decent track records and very little institutional support, perhaps even over those with very good track records and loads of institutional support. This helps level the playing field, and it also might produce better results overall, since those with the least existing institutional support might be the ones who would most benefit from an increase in support.

Low-threshold equal funding. Create some low bar, then fund everyone at the same small level once they cross that bar. This might be good practice for universities funding small grants for faculty conference travel, for example (compared to faculty having to write detailed justifications for conference travel).

Term limits. Require a five-year hiatus, for example, after five years of funding so that other researchers have a chance at showing what they can do when they receive funding.

[ETA 10:37] In favoring more emphasis on the Recent-Past-Results Approach, I am not suggesting that everyone write Pretty Proposals with cvs attached and then the funding is decided mostly based on cv. That would combine the time disadvantage of writing Pretty Proposals with the inegalitarian disadvantage of the Recent-Past-Results Approach, and it would add misdirection since people would be invited to think that writing a good proposal is important. (Any resemblance of the real grants process to this dystopian worst-of-all-worlds approach is purely coincidental.) I am proposing either no submission at all by the grant recipient (models include MacArthur "genius" grants and automatic faculty start-up funds) or a very minimal description of topic, with no discussion of methods, impact, previous literature, etc.

[Still another ETA, 11:03] I hadn't considered random funding! See here and here (HT Daniel Brunson). An intriguing idea, perhaps in combination with a low threshold of some sort.

Related Posts:

Related Posts: How to Give $1 Million a Year to Philosophers (Mar 18, 2013).

Against Increasing the Power of Grant Agencies in Philosophy (Dec 23, 2011).

The Meaning of Life Quiz as a Learning Outcomes Measure

Somehow universities survived for centuries without any rigorous attempt to measure "learning outcomes". Fortunately, those days are over! Faculty must now prove to administrators that our students have learned something by taking our classes. And that means rigorous quantitative assessments of learning outcomes, with internal and external validity, test-retest reliability, and other desirable psychometric properties.

The aim of philosophy is to discover the meaning of life. To properly assess whether students have in fact discovered the meaning of life by taking our classes, I propose a new Meaning Of Life Outcome Measure (MOLOM).

[Update Mar 23: Poll results are in!] Please answer the following philosophical questions:

1. Every moment, every breath, every success and every failure is a treasure to be cherished.
(strongly disagree - disagree - neither agree nor disagree - agree - strongly agree)

2. The world is a pointless cesspool of suffering and death.
(strongly disagree - disagree - neither agree nor disagree - agree - strongly agree)

3. There is value in living, either value that we can find if we search for it, or value that we ourselves can create.
(strongly disagree - disagree - neither agree nor disagree - agree - strongly agree)

4. All the uses of this world are weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(strongly disagree - disagree - neither agree nor disagree - agree - strongly agree)

5. Everything is just atoms bumping in the void, so nothing you do really matters.
(strongly disagree - disagree - neither agree nor disagree - agree - strongly agree)

6. It is better to have strived and struggled than never to have been.
(strongly disagree - disagree - neither agree nor disagree - agree - strongly agree)

7. How confident are you of your answers to the questions above?
(not at all confident - slightly confident - moderately confident - highly confident)

8. What is the meaning of life? (Or if life is meaningless, explain why.)
(fill in the blank)

Alternatively, take the SurveyMonkey version of the MOLOM.

Your Meaningfulness Score:

Score -2 to +2 points for strongly disagree to strongly agree on questions 1, 3, and 6.
Score +2 to -2 points for strongly disagree to strongly agree on questions 2, 4, and 5.

Interpreting your Meaningfulness Score (revised March 23):

-12 to -2: Life is meaningless.
-1 to +1: Meh.
+2 to +12: Life is meaningful.

Recommended Usage as an Outcome Measure:

Administer the test at the beginning of philosophy instruction, then re-administer the test at the end of philosophy instruction.

If a student's Meaningfulness Score rises, this shows that the student has discovered that life has meaning (or at least is not as meaningless as they had previously thought). If a student's Meaningfulness Score declines, this shows that the student has shed their foolish illusions (or at least that they have made progress toward shedding their illusions).

If the student's confidence score rises, this shows that the student has solidified their understanding of the issues. If the student's confidence score declines, this shows that the student has begun to challenge their earlier presuppositions.

If the answer in the text box changes, this shows that the student has come to a new understanding of these fundamental issues.

Also examine the standard deviation of the scores (after first reverse scoring questions 2, 4, and 5). Compare the SD at the beginning of instruction with the SD at the end of instruction. If a student's standard deviation increases, conclude that the student has learned to see nuanced distinctions between these various claims. If a student's standard deviation decreases, conclude that the student has matured toward a more coherent worldview.

The Meaning Of Life Outcome Measure is not yet fully validated, but I am optimistic that the MOLOM will prove to be the rigorously quantitative learning outcomes assessment tool that we need in philosophy.

Philosophy Relies on Those Double Majors

Happy Valentine's Day! Because I love you, here are some statistics.

Following a suggestion by Eric Winsberg, I decided to look at the IPEDS database from the National Center for Education Statistics to see how commonly Philosophy is chosen as a second major, compared to as a first major, among Bachelor's degree recipients in the United States.

I examined data from all U.S. institutions in the database, over the three most recent available academic years (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016), sorting completed majors by the IPEDS top-level major categories (2010 CIP two-digit classification), except replacing 38 "Philosophy and Religious Studies" with 38.01 "Philosophy". Separately I downloaded the grand totals of completed first and second majors across the U.S.

In all, across all institutions, 5,680,665 students completed a first major. Of these, 289,639 (4.9%) also completed a second major. Not many students earn second majors!

However, the ratios vary greatly by discipline. In all, 24,542 students earned a Philosophy major, of which 5,015 (20.4%) earned it as a second major. At a minimum, then, 20% of Philosophy majors are double majors. If half of those double majors choose to list Philosophy as their first major, then 40% of Philosophy majors in the U.S. are double majors. Unfortunately, the NCES database doesn't allow us to see how many of the people with first majors in Philosophy also had second majors in something else. Forty percent might be too high an estimate, if double majors who have Philosophy as one of their majors disproportionately list Philosophy as their second major. But even if 30%, rather than 40%, of Philosophy majors carry Philosophy along with some other major, that is still a substantial proportion.

Here's another way of looking at the data: 0.3% of students choose Philosophy as a first major, while among those who decide to take a second major, 1.7% choose Philosophy.

Across all 37 top-level categories of major (excluding from analysis the top-level category Philosophy & Religious Studies), only two had a higher percentage of students completing the major as a second major: Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics (28.5%), and Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender and Group Studies (26.2%). Let's call this the Second Major Percentage. In this respect, Philosophy is quite different from two of the other big humanities majors with which Philosophy is often compared: English Language and Literature (7.2%) and History (9.3%). Interestingly, Mathematics, which is often regarded as a very different type of major, ranks fourth, with a Second Major Percentage of 14.4%.

Here's a breakdown among all top-level majors with at least 10,000 completed degrees in the three-year period:

[apologies for the blurry rendering; click to enlarge; correction: the second "Engineering Technologies" should be simply "Engineering"]

Last fall, I presented data showing the precipitous decline in Philosophy majors in the past few years -- from 0.58% of all graduates to 0.39% of all graduates. One hypothesis, which I thought worth considering, is that Philosophy tends disproportionately to rely on double majors, and it is increasingly difficult for students to earn a second major. However, I now think that a decline in second majors can't be the primary explanation for the decline of the Philosophy major. First, although the percentage of students earning a second major has declined somewhat in the period -- from 5.4% in 2009-2010 to 5.1% in 2015-2016 -- that is small compared to the magnitude of the decline in Philosophy, where completions are down by 19% in absolute numbers and about a third in relative percentages. Second, we saw similar declines in English and History, and those disciplines don't appear to be as reliant on students' declaring a second major.

That said, Philosophy does appear to rely heavily on double majors, so we might expect policies that reduce the likelihood of double majoring to disproportionately harm Philosophy programs. Such policies might include increasing the requirements for other popular majors, increasing general education requirements (apart from G.E. requirements in Philosophy, of course), and increasing pressure to complete the degree quickly.

To further explore the question, I divided the colleges and universities into two categories: those with a high rate of double majoring (>= 10% of graduating students have two majors) vs those with a low-to-medium rate of double majoring (< 10%), excluding institutions with < 300 Bachelor's degree recipients over the three-year period. As expected, at institutions where students commonly complete second majors, about three times as high a percentage of students completed Philosophy degrees than at institutions where students less commonly complete second majors: 9240/935419 (1.0%) vs. 14876/4656563 (0.3%; p << .001).

Direction of causation is of course hard to know. These groups of institutions will differ in many other respects too, and that is very likely to be part of the causal story, maybe most of the causal story. And yet, the following fact is suggestive: The four majors that differ most in percentage between the two groups of universities, as measured by the ratio of percentage of students completing the major at the high-double-major schools to the percentage completing the major at the low-double major schools, those are exactly the same four majors that have the highest rate of second majors in the overall dataset.

That's a little abstractly put, so let me give you the breakdown for the highest-ratio majors, so you can see where this is coming from:

Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender and Group Studies: 1.5% of majors at high-double-major schools vs. 0.4% at low-double-major schools, ratio 4.1.
Philosophy: 1.0% vs. 0.3%, ratio 3.1
Foreign Languages and Literatures: 3.2% vs. 1.1%, ratio 3.0
Mathematics: 2.8% vs. 1.1%, ratio 2.7

I need a good name for this ratio, but I can't think of one, so let's just call it The Ratio. Of course, the median Ratio is about 1.0. History and English both have Ratios of 1.9, which is substantially above 1.0, but not as high as these other four.

In other words, perhaps unsurprisingly, the four majors that students are disproportionately most likely to declare as second majors are exactly the same four majors that show the greatest difference in completions between schools where lots of students have double majors and schools where few do.

With a few exceptions, most notably Biology (a Second Major Percentage of only 2.7%, but a Ratio of 1.7), the relationship is reasonably tidy. The correlation between the natural log of each major's Ratio with each major's Second Major Percentage is r = .76 (p < .001; excluding majors with < 1000 completions in either group of universities; natural log to improve spread near zero). Here it is as a scatterplot:

[click to enlarge]

So although it seems unlikely that the recent sharp decline in Philosophy majors is due primarily to a decline in the overall proportion of students declaring two majors, it remains plausible that conditions that are good for double-majoring in general may be good for the Philosophy major in particular.

Related posts:

Sharp Declines in Philosophy, History, and Language Majors Since 2010 (Dec 14, 2017)

Philosophy Undergraduate Majors Aren't Very Black, but Neither Are They as White as You Might Have Thought (Dec 21, 2017)

Women Have Been Earning 30-34% of Philosophy BAs in the U.S. Since Approximately Forever* (Dec 8, 2017).

Should You Referee the Same Paper Twice, for Different Journals?

Uh-oh, it happened again. That paper I refereed for Journal X a few months ago -- it's back in my inbox. Journal X rejected it, and now Journal Y wants to know what I think. Would I be willing to referee it for Journal Y?

In the past, I've tended to say no if I had previously recommended rejection, yes if I had previously recommended acceptance.

If I'd previously recommended rejection, I've tended to reason thus: I could be mistaken in my negative view. It would be a disservice both to the field in general and to the author in particular if a single stubborn referee prevented an excellent paper from being published by rejecting it again and again from different journals. If the paper really doesn't merit publication, then another referee will presumably reach the same conclusion, and the paper will be rejected without my help.

If I'd previously recommended acceptance (or encouraging R&R), I've tended to just permit myself think that the other journal's decision was probably the wrong call, and it does no harm to the field or to the author for me to serve as referee again to help this promising paper find the home it deserves.

I've begun to wonder whether I should just generally refuse to referee the same paper more than once for different journals, even in positive cases. Maybe if everyone followed my policy, that would overall tend to harm the field by skewing the referee pool too much toward the positive side?

I could also imagine arguments -- though I'm not as tempted by them -- that it's fine to reject the same paper multiple times from different journals. After all, it's hard for journals to find expert referees, and if you're confident in your opinion, you might as well share it widely and save everyone's time.

I'd be curious to hear about others' practices, and their reasons for and against.

(Let's assume that anonymity isn't an issue, having been maintained throughout the process.)

[Cross-posted at Daily Nous]

Academic Pyramids, Academic Tubes

Greetings from Cambridge! Traveling around Europe and the UK, I am struck by the extent to which different countries have relatively pyramid-like vs relatively tube-like academic systems. This has moved me to think, also, about the extent to which US academia has recently been becoming more pyramidal.

Please forgive my ugly sketch of a pyramid and a tube:

The German system is quite pyramidal: There is a small group of professors at the top, and many stages between undergraduate and professor, at any one of which you might suddenly find yourself ejected from the system: undergraduate, then masters, then PhD, then one or more postdocs and/or assistantships before moving up or out; and at each stage one needs to actively seek a position and typically move locations if successful.

In contrast, the US system, as it stood about twenty years ago, was more tubular: fewer transition stages requiring application and moving, with much sharper cutdowns between each stage. To a first approximation, undergraduates applied to PhD programs, very few got in, and then if they completed there was one more transition from completing the PhD to gaining a tenure-track job (and typically, though of course not always, tenure after 6-7 years on the tenure track).

Philosophy in the US is becoming more pyramidal, I believe, with more people pursuing terminal Master's degrees before applying to PhD programs, and with the increasing number of adjunct positions and postdoctoral positions for newly-minted PhDs. Instead of approximately three phases (undergrad, grad/PhD, tenure-track/tenured professor), we are moving closer to five-phase system (undergrad, MA, PhD, adjunct/post-doc, tenure-track/tenured).

This more pyramidal system has some important advantages. One advantage is that it provides more opportunities for people from nonelite backgrounds to advance through the system. It has always been difficult from students from nonelite undergraduate universities to gain acceptance to elite PhD programs (and it still is); similarly for students who struggled a bit in their undergraduate careers before finding philosophy. With the increasing willingness of PhD programs to accept students with Master's degrees, a broader range of students can earn a shot at academia: They can compete to get into a Master's program (typically easier to do for people with nonelite backgrounds than being admitted to a comparably-ranked PhD program) and then possibly shine there, gaining admittance to a range of PhD programs that would otherwise have been closed to them. A similar pattern sometimes occurs with postdocs.

The other advantage of the pyramid is that being exposed to a variety of institutions, advisors, and academic subcultures has advantages both for the variety of perspectives it provides and for meeting more people in the academic community. A Master's program or a postdoctoral fellowship can be a rewarding experience.

But I am also struck by the downside of pyramidal structures. In Europe, I met many excellent philosophers in their 30s or 40s, post-PhD, unsure whether they would make the next jump up the pyramid or not, unable to settle down securely into their careers. This used to be relatively uncommon in the US, though it has become more common. It is hard on marriages and families; and it's hard to face the prospects of a major career change in mid-life after devoting a dozen or more years to academia.

The sciences in the US have tended to be more pyramidal than philosophy, with one or more postdocs often expected before the tenure-track job. This is partly, I suspect, just due to the money available in science. There are lots of post-docs to be had, and it's easier to compete for professor positions with that extra postdoctoral experience. One possibly unintended consequence of the increased flow of money into philosophical research projects, through the Templeton Foundation and government research funding organizations, is to increase the number of postdocs, and thus the pyramidality of the discipline.

Of course, the rise of inexpensive adjunct labor is a big part of this -- bigger, probably, than the rise of terminal Master's programs as a gateway to the PhD and the rise of the philosophy post-doc -- but all of these contribute in different ways to making our discipline more pyramidal than it was a few decades ago.

What Kinds of Universities Lack Philosophy Departments? Some Data

University administrators sometimes think it's a good idea to eliminate their philosophy departments. Some of these efforts have been stopped, others not. This has led me to wonder how prevalent philosophy departments are in U.S. colleges and universities, and how their presence or absence relates to institution type.

Here's what I did. I pulled every ranked college and university from the famous US News college ranking site, sorting them into four categories: national universites, national liberal arts colleges, regional universities (combining the four US News categories for regional universities: north, south, midwest, and west), and regional colleges (again combining north, south, midwest, and west). I randomly selected twenty schools from each of these four lists. Then I attempted to determine from the school's website whether it had a philosophy department and a philosophy major. [See note 1 on "departments".]

Since some schools combine philosophy with another department (e.g. "Philosophy and Religion") I distinguished standalone philosophy departments from combined departments that explicitly mention "philosophy" in the department name along with something else.

I welcome corrections! The websites are sometimes a little confusing, so it's likely that I've made an error or two.

***************************************************

Results

National Universities:

Eighteen of the twenty sampled "national universities" have standalone philosophy departments (or equivalent: note 1) and majors. The only two that do not are institutes of technology: Georgia Tech (ranked #34) and Florida Tech (#171).

Virginia Tech (#74), however, does have a Department of Philosophy and a philosophy major -- as do Stanford, Duke, Rice, Rochester, Penn State, UT Austin, Rutgers-New Brunswick, Baylor, U Mass Amherst, Florida State, Auburn, Kansas, Biola, Wyoming (for now), North Carolina-Charlotte, Missouri-St Louis, and U Mass Boston.

National Liberal Arts Colleges:

Similarly, seventeen of the twenty sampled "national liberal arts colleges" have standalone philosophy departments, and eighteen offer the philosophy major. Offering neither department nor major are Virginia Military Institute (#72) and the very small science/engineering college Harvey Mudd (#21) (circa 735 students, part of the Claremont consortium). Beloit College (#62, circa 1358 students) offers the philosophy major within a "Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies".

The seventeen sampled schools with both major and standalone department are: Swarthmore, Carleton, Hamilton, Wesleyan, Richmond, DePauw, Puget Sound, Westmont, Hollins, Lake Forest, Stonehill, Hanover, Guilford, Carthage, Oglethorpe, Franklin (not to be confused with Franklin & Marshall), and Georgetown College (not to be confused with Georgetown University).

Some of these colleges are very small. According to Wikipedia estimates, two have fewer than a thousand students: Hollins (639) and Georgetown (984). Another four are below 1300: Franklin (1087), Hanover (1133), Oglethorpe (1155), and Westmont (1298).

Regional Universities:

Nine of the twenty sampled regional universities have standalone philosophy departments, and another three have a combined department with philosophy in its name. Twelve offer the philosophy major (not exactly the same twelve). Seven offer neither major nor department: Ramapo College of New Jersey, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Delaware Valley University, Stephens College, Mount St Joseph, Elizabeth City State, and Robert Morris. Two of these are specialty schools: Wentworth is a technical institute, and Stephens specializes in arts and fashion.

Offering major and/or standalone or combined department: Simmons, Whitworth, Mansfield of Pennsylvania, Rosemont, U of Northwestern-St Paul, Central Washington, Towson, Ganon, North Park, Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Northern Michigan, Mount Mary, and Appalachian State.

Regional Colleges:

Seven of the twenty sampled regional colleges have a standalone philosophy department, and another four have a combined department with philosophy in its name. Seven offer a philosophy major, and one (Brevard) has a "Philosophy and Religion" major. Offering neither major nor department: California Maritime Academy, Marymount California U (not to be confused with Loyola Marymount), Paul Smith's College (not to be confused with Smith College), Alderson Broaddus, Dickinson State, North Carolina Wesleyan, Crown College, and Iowa Wesleyan. Four of these are specialty schools: California Maritime Academy and Marymount California each offer only six majors total, Paul Smith's focuses on tourism and service industries, and Iowa Wesleyan offers only three Humanities majors: Christian Studies, Digital Media Design, and Music.

Offering major and/or standalone or combined department: Carroll, Mount Union, Belmont Abbey, La Roche, St Joseph's, Blackburn, Messiah, Tabor, Ottawa University (not to be confused with University of Ottawa), Northwestern College (not to be confused with Northwestern University), and Cazenovia College.

Summary

In my sample of forty nationally ranked universities and liberal arts colleges, each one has a standalone philosophy department and offers a philosophy major, with the following exceptions: three science/engineering specialty schools, one military institute, and one school offering a philosophy major within a department of "Philosophy and Religious Studies".

Even among the smallest nationally ranked liberal arts colleges, with 1300 or fewer students, all have philosophy majors and standalone philosophy departments (or similar administrative units), with the exception of one science/engineering speciality college.

The schools that US News describes as "regional" are mixed. In this sample of forty, about half offer philosophy majors and about half have standalone philosophy departments. Among the fifteen with neither department nor major in philosophy, six are specialty schools.

I'll refrain from drawing causal or normative conclusions here.

***************************************************

Update 8:53 a.m.: Expanding the Sample:

I'm tempted to conclude that, with the exception of specialty schools, almost every nationally ranked university and liberal arts college, no matter how small, has a philosophy major and a large majority have a standalone philosophy department. But maybe that's too strong a claim to draw from a sample of forty? So I've doubled the sample.

Doubling the sample supports this claim. Among the additional twenty universities sampled, nineteen offer the philosophy major, and the one that does not, UC Merced, is a new campus that plans to add the philosophy major soon. Sixteen have standalone Philosophy Departments, and three have combined departments: Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern and Tulsa, Politics and Philosophy at University of Idaho. The sampled universities with both standalone philosophy departments and the philosophy major are Tennessee, Nevada-Reno, Colorado State, South Dakota, New Mexico, Dartmouth, UC San Diego, U of Oregon, Columbia, Indiana-Bloomington, Kentucky, Alabama-Huntsville, Brandeis, George Washington, Azusa Pacific, and UC Riverside.

Adding twenty more nationally ranked liberal arts colleges also confirms my initial results. Nineteen offer the major, with the only exception being Thomas Aquinas College, which appears to offer only one major to all students (Liberal Arts). Three colleges have combined departments, all with religion: Washington College, Wartburg, and College of Idaho. Sixteen have both major and standalone department: Wooster, Wheaton, Hampton-Sydney, Muhlenberg, Houghton, Colgate, Middlebury, Washington & Lee, New College of Florida, Transylvania, Sweet Briar, Knox College, Colorado College, Oberlin, Luther, and Pomona.

***************************************************

Note 1: Some schools don't appear to have "departments" or have very broad "departments" that encompass many majors. If a school had fewer than fifteen "departments" I attempted to assess whether it had a department-like administrative unit for philosophy, or if that assessment wasn't possible, whether it hosted a philosophy major apparently on administrative par with popular majors like psychology and biology.

[image source]

Storytelling in Philosophy Class

One of my regular TAs, Chris McVey, uses a lot of storytelling in his teaching. About once a week, he'll spend ten minutes sharing a personal story from his life, relevant to the class material. He'll talk about a family crisis or about his time in the U.S. Navy, connecting it back to the readings from the class.

At last weekend's meeting of the Minorities And Philosophy group at Princeton, I was thinking about what teaching techniques philosophers might use to appeal to a broader diversity of students, and "storytime with Chris" came to mind. The more I think about it, the more I find to like about it.

Here are some thoughts.

* Students are hungry for stories, and rightly so. Philosophy class is usually abstract and impersonal, or when not abstract focused on toy examples or remote issues of public policy. A good story, especially one that is personally meaningful to the teacher, leaps out and captures attention. People in general love stories and are especially ready for them after long dry abstractions and policy discussions. So why not harness that? But furthermore, storytelling gives shape and flesh to the stick figures of philosophical abstraction. Most abstract principles only get their full meaning when we see how they play out in real cases. Kant might say "act on that maxim that you can will to be a universal law" or Mengzi might say "human nature is good" -- but what do such claims really amount to? Students rightly feel at sea unless they are pulled away from toy examples and into the complexity of real life. Although it's tempting to think that the real philosophical force is in the abstract principles and that storytelling is just needless frill and packaging, I think that the reverse might be closer to the truth: The heart of philosophy is in how we engage our minds when given real, messy examples, and the abstractions we derive from cases always partly miss the point.

* Personal stories vividly display the relevance of philosophy. Many -- maybe most -- students are understandably turned off by philosophy because it seems so remote from anything of practical value. What's the point, they wonder, in discussing Locke's view of primary and secondary qualities, or semi-comical far-fetched problems about runaway trolleys, or under what conditions you "know" something is a barn in Fake Barn Country? It takes a certain kind of beautiful, nerdy, impractical mind to love these questions for their own sake. Too much focus on such issues can mislead students into thinking that philosophy is irrelevant to their lives. However (I hope you'll agree), nothing is more relevant to our lives than philosophy. Every choice we make expresses our values. Every controversial opinion we form depends upon our general worldview and our implicit or explicit sense of what people or institutions or methods deserve our trust. Most students will understandably fail to see the connection between academic philosophy and the philosophy they personally live through their choices and opinions unless we vividly show how these are connected. Through storytelling, you model your struggle with Kant's hard line against lying, or with how far to trust purported scientific experts, or with your fading faith in an immaterial soul -- and students can see that philosophy is not just a Glass Bead Game.

* Personal stories shift the locus of academic capital. We might think of "academic capital" as the resources students bring to class which help them succeed. In philosophy class, important capital includes skill at reading and evaluating abstract arguments and, in class discussion, skill at working up passable pro and con arguments on the spot. Academic capital of this sort also includes knowledge of the philosophical tradition, comfort in a classroom environment, confidence that one knows how this game is played. These are terrific skills to have of course; and some students have more of them than others, or at least believe they do. Those students tend to dominate class discussion. If you tell a personally meaningful story, however, you can make a different set of skills and experiences suddenly important. Students who might have had similar stories from their own lives now have something unique to contribute. Students who are good at storytelling, students who have the social and emotional intelligence to evaluate what might have really happened in your family fight, students with cultural knowledge of the kind of situation you describe -- they now have some of the capital. And they might be a very different group from the ones who are so good at the argumentative pro-and-con. In my experience, good philosophical storytelling engages and draws out discussion from a larger and more diverse group of students than does abstract argument and toy example.

If philosophers were more serious about engaged, personal storytelling in class, we would I think have a different and broader range of students who loved our courses and appreciated the importance and interest of our discipline.

[image source]

French, German, Greek, Latin, but Not Arabic, Chinese, or Sanskrit?

[cross-posted at the Blog of the APA]

When I was graduate student in Berkeley in the 1990s, philosophy PhD students were required to pass exams in two of the following four languages: French, German, Greek, or Latin. I already knew German. I argued that Spanish should count (I had read Unamuno in the original as an undergrad), but my petition was denied since I didn’t plan to do further work in Spanish. I argued that a psychological methods course would be more useful than a second foreign language, given that my dissertation was in philosophy of psychology, but that was not treated as a serious suggestion. I'd learned some classical Chinese, but I thought it would be pointless to attempt 600 characters in two hours as required (much more daunting than 600 words in a European language). So I crammed French for a few weeks and passed the exam.

I have recently become interested in mainstream Anglophone philosophers’ tendency to privilege certain languages and traditions in the history of philosophy. If we think globally, considering large, robust traditions of written work treating recognizably philosophical topics with argumentative sophistication and scholarly detail, it seems clear that at least Arabic, classical Chinese, and Sanskrit merit inclusion alongside French, German, Greek, and Latin as languages of major philosophical importance.

The exclusion of Arabic, Chinese, and Sanskrit from Berkeley’s standard language requirements could not, I think, have been mere ignorance. Rather, the focus on French, German, Greek, and Latin appeared to express a value judgment: that these four languages are more central to philosophy as it ought to be studied.

The language requirements of philosophy PhD programs have loosened over the years, but French, German, Latin, and Greek still form the core language requirements in departments that have language requirements. Students therefore continue to receive the message that these languages are the most important ones for philosophers to know.

I examined the language requirements of a sample of PhD programs in the United States. Because of their sociological importance in the discipline, I started with the top twelve ranked programs in the Philosophical Gourmet Report. I then expanded the sample by considering a group of strong PhD programs that are not as sociologically central to the discipline – the programs ranked 40-50 in the U.S.

Among the top twelve programs (corrections welcome):

* Four appeared to have no foreign language requirement (Michigan, NYU, Rutgers, Stanford).

* Seven (Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Pitt, UCLA, USC, Yale) had some version of a language requirement, requiring one of French, German, Greek or Latin -- always exactly that list. Some programs explicitly allowed another language and/or another relevant research skill by petition or consultation.

* Only Princeton had a language requirement that did not appear to privilege French, German, Greek, and Latin. Princeton only requires a language “relevant to the student’s proposed course of study” (or alternatively “a unit of advanced work in another department” or “completion of an additional unit of work in any area of philosophy”).

You might think that, practically speaking, Arabic or classical Chinese would be a fine language to choose. Students can always petition; maybe such petitions are almost always granted. This response, however, ignores the fact that something is communicated by other languages’ non-inclusion on the privileged list. For a tendentious comparison – maybe too tendentious! – consider an admissions form that said “we admit men, but also women by petition”. One thing is treated as a norm and the other as an exception.

Interestingly, the PhD programs ranked less highly by the Philosophical Gourmet had more relaxed language requirements overall. In the 40-50 group, only two of the eleven mentioned a language requirement or list of languages. Still, the privileged languages were from the same set: “French, German, or other” at Saint Louis University, and optional certification in French, German, Greek, or Latin at Rochester.

I do not believe that we should be sending students the message that French, German, Greek, and Latin are more important than other languages in which there is a body of interesting philosophical work. It is too Eurocentric a vision of the history of philosophy. Let’s change this.

------------------------------------

Related Op-Eds:

What’s missing in college philosophy classes? Chinese philosophers (Schwitzgebel, Los Angeles Times, Sep 11, 2015)

If philosophy won’t diversify, let’s call it what it really is (Garfield and Van Norden, New York Times, May 11, 2016)

And on the opposite side:

Not all things wise and good are philosophy (Tampio, Aeon, Sep 13, 2016)

The image is, of course, from the Epic Rap Battle, Eastern vs Western Philosophers!

Survey on What Is Important in Philosophy

... conducted by Valerie Tiberus.

She writes:

In my capacity as the president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and as part of the research for my 2017 presidential address, I have created a survey for philosophers: “What Matters to Philosophers”. The point of the survey is to gather the views of philosophers regarding what is valuable in our academic discipline, so that we can address questions about philosophy’s future and its role in the academy on the basis of values we share as a community. They survey is anonymous and the data will be shared.

Survey here.

This is an important topic, and the results might have some impact on APA policy and general perceptions of the field. It takes about 15 minutes to complete. I would encourage readers to complete it, regardless of their degree of formal connection with the field. In fact, I would especially encourage non-philosophers to express their perceptions of the field, since I expect non-philosophers will not be well represented among survey respondents, and it would be valuable for the APA to get a sense of their views about what is important in philosophy. (At the end of the survey there are demographic questions so that the responses of people with different degrees of philosophical training can be distinguished.)

The Ethics of Gauging the Interest of PhD Applicants Before Offering Admission or Financial Support

Here's one way philosophy PhD admissions could go: Your program offers admissions to the N top-rated applicants, figuring that X% will accept. If the acceptance rate looks like it will be unexpectedly low, then you expand admissions to the N+M top-rated applicants. Financial support packages could be done in a similarly neat way.

Often, things aren't quite that neat.

One way that they can be less than neat involves a department's gauging the interest of an applicant before offering admission or financial support. Here's an experience I had as an applicant in the 1990s: A professor called me from one of the schools to which I'd been admitted, and he told me that they had only a few "top tier" financial support packages to offer to prospective graduate students. He said they would be happy to offer me one of those packages if I was likely to come, but they didn't want to waste it on me if I was likely to go somewhere else. I told him I hadn't ruled out his school yet, but that I had a greater level of initial interest in a couple of other schools. I did not receive that financial support package and decided not the visit the school.

That was a fine outcome for me. I'd kind of thought of the school as a "safety" school anyway. The professor correctly guessed that my application was strong enough that I'd been admitted to higher prestige programs than his. It would have been unusual for an applicant in my position to choose his school over those others.

Although that was a couple of decades ago, I think the practice isn't unusual. Recently the APA's Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession, of which I am a member, discussed an email from a former PhD applicant suggesting that the APA adopt a policy against departments' contacting applicants to gauge their level of interest before making offers. Apparently she had been contacted by the Director of Graduate Studies at a department to which she had applied but to which she hadn't yet been admitted. Her sense of the conversation was that the DGS was prepared to offer the student admission if the student committed in advance to accepting the offer. She felt that this constituted illegitimate pressure to decide about a school before the conventional April 15 deadline.

In general, it seems to be in the interest of the profession if applicants can see the full range of offers and then choose the offer that fits their interests best rather than being pressured into accepting early offers out of fear, possibly at schools that are relatively poor matches for them. (Here's the official APA statement on the April 15th deadline for accepting graduate student aid offers.)

I, and some other members of the Status and Future Committee, are interested in others' thoughts about this issue. The APA might be willing consider clarifying or revising the APA's April 15 deadline policy, if that seems desirable.

The official wording of the APA policy is that "Students are under no obligation to respond to offers of financial support prior to April 15". Situations of the sort described above don't appear to violate the letter of this policy, since support has not been formally offered. However, it could be argued that informal conditional offers violate the spirit.

On the other hand, we might use hiring as a model, and it's common in both academic and non-academic hiring for the hiring department to gauge applicant interest before making an offer. Also, practically speaking, some departments have "hard caps" on enrollment or funding so that they cannot make more than N offers for N slots. Departments with hard caps will be in a difficult situation if several candidates who are unlikely to accept wait until April 15 to decide. Other departments, even with softer caps, still might not be able to rely on higher-level administration to return the slots to them if applicants decline. Departments in either of these positions might understandably want to reserve some of their primary offers or waiting-list offers for applicants they think are likely to accept; and part of this process might involve informally asking applicants about their about likelihood of accepting an offer if one were to be made.

Discussion welcomed below.

[cross-posted at the Blog of the APA]

My Workday as a Philosophy Professor

[cross-posted from The Philosophers' Cocoon, "Real Philosophy Jobs Part 3"]

How hard does the typical tenured professor work, and on what? Good information is hard to come by. I will describe my own workload and typical workday, as one data point.

I am a full professor of philosophy, with a six-digit salary and tenure at UC Riverside, whose philosophy PhD program is ranked 28th in the US by the Philosophical Gourmet. Our normal teaching load is four 10-week courses (plus final exams) spread over three “quarters” (hence 1-2-1), plus independent supervision of graduate students.

Unlike most of my colleagues, I try to work regular workdays – about 8:00 to 5:30 Monday to Friday, with evenings and weekends reserved for home life (below, I’ll add some caveats to that). I also try to have relatively normal holidays: the official US holidays, a couple weeks for family vacation during the summer, about a week over winter break, and a smattering of other days off.

My typical day:

Email:

Email is a major part of the job. After arriving at the office around 8:00, I’ll usually spend my first hour reading and answering email. I’ll also check and answer email through the rest of the day. The distinction between “answering email” and “doing tasks that were precipitated by receiving an email” is vague, but I’d estimate that I spend about two hours a day reading and answering emails. Last week I received 359 email messages, almost none of which were junk mail from corporations. (I use a separate email account for that.) Approximately one half were group emails that I could skim or ignore. The other half I had to actually read. About half of those, I replied to. I of course also send emails that are not simply replies. Last week, I sent 107 email messages. That’s an average of 36 substantive incoming and 21 outgoing messages per weekday. If I spend one minute per message, that’s already an hour a day right there. Of course some messages require less time, others substantially more.

Here’s a Monday morning sample, which includes Friday evening through 10:00 a.m. Monday: a few emails discussing dinner plans after a talk at the APA; two submitted blog comments which I approved (including one where I followed a link to an interesting article that I’d already read); an email from a potential coauthor about an op-ed piece we’re considering writing together; A-V information about an upcoming talk; three emails in a four-way philosophical discussion about Asian philosophy and oneness; an undergraduate request for me to write a letter of recommendation, which I replied to with substantial advice; a reminder about some written interview questions that I got last week and haven’t yet managed to answer; a question from another philosopher about my data collection methods from a recent paper; an email trying to coordinate a meeting with a colleague at the coming APA; two requests to referee articles for journals (one accepted, one declined); three emails of thanks for reference letters I wrote last week; an email confirming that my request for $10,000 to organize a mini-conference has been approved, precipitating a message to my collaborator about next steps; a link to a recently published article citing one of my articles, interesting enough that I read the abstract, downloaded, and quickly skimmed for possible later reading; two emails from my wife with info about getting my son organized for applying to colleges next year; a couple emails about arranging the hotels for my trip to Hong Kong in May; an email from a speaker I’ve invited to talk at UCR next year who is unsure whether he’ll be able to fit it into his schedule; and two emails concerning getting the overhead lights in my office fixed. That gives you the flavor, I think!

Classroom teaching:

Most of my undergraduate classes are already prepped from previous years. I’ll spend about 60-90 minutes refreshing myself on the material and reviewing and tweaking my overheads. (If it’s material I haven’t taught before, it takes several hours.) Then I’ll spend 50 minutes on a lecture stage in front of hundreds of students (for a lower-division class), 80 minutes in lecture-and-informal discussion with about 30 students (for an upper-division class), or three hours in focused discussion with about 8 students (for a grad seminar).

Teaching the giant lecture classes is stressful, but also a thrill when it goes well. When I switched from the ordinary “Introduction to Philosophy” material to material that more students cared about, with real emotional resonance – lynching, the Holocaust, sex and death, the role of cognition and emotion in moral development, starvation amid wealth – I found my passion for the lower division teaching. One time, the two hundred students were so still in the lecture hall that the motion sensors decided the classroom was empty and the lights turned themselves off. Whoa. When I can bring that intensity to students on topics like these, that feels meaningful and worthwhile.

In upper-division courses and grad seminars, I rely on more from the students. Classes become a mix of semi-structured mini-lectures, freewheeling tangents, and informal debate among students. UCR students are strong enough that their discussions are reliably interesting as long as I can do two things: (a.) draw out the best in students’ sometimes half-baked ideas, and (b.) succeed in expanding the conversation away from just the most assertive talkers.

Research:

On days when I’m not teaching, probably about half of my time is research. On teaching days, research is sometimes squeezed out altogether. Research is mostly reading and writing, but I also (unusually for a philosopher) also do some experimental work and data analysis.

Reading. I don’t read many books cover to cover. I read a mix of happenstance material and targeted material. The happenstance will be recent articles from journal tables of contents, articles or books or book chapters that people have mentioned or emailed to me as possibly of interest (including their own work), work that cites my own, and other work that catches my eye for whatever reason. The targeted material will be current or classic or historical work that is relevant to an article or blog post that I am currently writing or thinking about. For example, for my recent paper on rationalization with Jon Ellis, I read through bunches of relevant psychological literature, some fun classic work from the history of psychology, a whole bunch of Habermas (which I ended up only barely citing but seemed worth knowing anyway), relevant work by philosophers on rationalization and on self-knowledge, and various tangentially related material.

Writing: Blog. I have an active blog, The Splintered Mind, where I try to post at least once a week, usually about 500-1000 words with a fresh idea about something I’ve been working on recently. Typically this takes me a few hours, plus maybe another hour replying to comments on the blog or on social media sites where I’ve linked to the blog. I find it good discipline to get my ideas out there in some sort of comprehensible shape on a regular basis, and to get some feedback about them. I usually try not to spend more than five hours blogging per week.

Writing: Articles. I am always bursting with writing ideas – far more stuff than I can actually write up. (The blog is a good vent for ideas that won’t make it into articles.) A first draft will normally take me about an hour a page. Most of my non-empirical articles go through one to five top-to-bottom rewrites from beginning to end, plus multiple smaller-scale revisions and rereadings. For me, a typical full-length published article reflects about 100-200 hours of writing and revising. I try to write always for two audiences simultaneously: the fast skimming reader who just wants the big picture and the careful nitpicking reader who is looking to critique me on details. I care about prose style. I care about trying to draw the reader in, about revealing the importance of the issues, about being fun and accessible rather than dry and technical, to the extent that’s compatible with rigorously covering the issues. I love the craft of writing.

Writing: Other. I’ve also recently started writing science fiction and op-eds. Because why not? These can, of course, take a lot of time, and it’s a challenge to acquire the relevant skills. (I rather enjoy the challenge.) It helps that I’ve recently been getting grant money for teaching release, so that I don’t have to compromise my other research to do these things.

One of the things I love about this job, especially now that I’m tenured, is the enormous freedom I have to read and write whatever I feel like reading and writing, at whatever pace and schedule I feel like doing so. Especially during the summer, my office is a playground for my mind. Of course, it’s not always like that – when I commit to particular writing projects with deadlines and/or co-authors, I have to prioritize them on a schedule I might not prefer, and there are the frequent scheduled demands of teaching and meetings that can feel like they get in the way of my passionate desire to think and read and write, and of course there’s always the stack of email which if I ignore for even one day becomes quite daunting by the next.

Other Stuff:

Meetings. During the term, I probably average about 1-2 hours in meetings per day. This includes university committee meetings, faculty meetings, departmental talks and receptions, graduate student oral exams, open-door office hours, and one-on-one meetings in person or by phone or Skype with students, collaborators, and colleagues.

Grading. Grading undergraduate exams and essays is a pretty tough slog, and probably my least favorite part of the job – though those occasional “A” papers are like lights in the mist. When I’m teaching upper-division without TAs, this will be several hours a week several weeks of the term. Evaluating graduate student essays and dissertations is not as grueling, but is still quite a bit of work – in combination amounting to hundreds of comments over hundreds of pages.

Miscellaneous Tasks. These typically come via email – things I can’t just respond to with a quick email in reply. They include: writing letters of recommendation; writing referee reports on articles submitted to journals; organizing events; organizing travel and financial matters (including applying for and managing grants); dealing with students with special issues; keeping up to some extent with what’s going on in the philosophical corners of social media and the popular press; evaluating research proposals as part of a committee or review board or as an outside evaluator; planning new courses or course material; evaluating graduate admissions applications if I’m on the admissions committee or job applications if I’m on a hiring committee; evaluating the promotion and merit files of my colleagues; completing well-intentioned administrative forms; and other such – I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.

Although I don’t conceptualize this “other stuff” as research, most of it does expose me, in one way or another, to work going on in the field.

I’ll take about 15 minutes for lunch (walk to the student cafeteria then walk back, often eating en route) and maybe another 30 minutes over the day for non-philosophy stuff like internet news, humor items, non-philosophy social media, and family-related things.

When I’m Not in the Office:

Morning walks. I walk an hour every morning – often my favorite part of the day. I’ll let my mind drift. Maybe a third of the time I’m drifting off into philosophical thoughts, things I’d like to write or revise, blog post ideas, project plans, etc. Sometimes I’ll listen to a podcast or a text-to-speech article (philosophy, science fiction, or otherwise), or I’ll look a bit at social media. When I’ve slept well and in a good mood, I’m just bursting with enthusiasm and fun ideas – sometimes ideas that seem a bit too silly in my more sober moods later.

Evenings and weekends. Evenings and weekends, I prioritize family. I’ll check social media a bit, sometimes reading or commenting on philosophical things, but always in a light way – never in a concentrated-this-feels-like-work way. I won’t check email, except maybe to scan headers if I think there might be something urgent. I always read before going to sleep – about half an hour, often something related to philosophy but which doesn’t feel workish, such as a popular book of history or psychology or some speculative science fiction.

Travel. I have a deal with my family: four out-of-town trips per year, one of which is overseas. The overseas trip will usually be about two weeks, and I’ll try to string together a bunch of talks at different places, in quick succession. The other three will normally be 2-4 nights, and I’ll try to string together two or three talks in nearby places if it can be arranged.

So How Much Do I Work and on What?

If we figure that the travel approximately cancels out the arbitrary days I take off, that leaves me with about 49 weeks per year, at about (9:30 minus 0:45) x 5 = 43.75 hours per week, plus some hard-to-count off-the-clock stuff like light reading at night and philosophical thinking during my morning walks. Maybe about 40% my work time is reading and writing with research ends in mind, about 25% of it teaching related, and 35% everything else.

But all this task-and-hour-counting omits something essential: the extent to which my work has shaped my sense of who I am and what I value. I could not simply cut it away. As my children will attest, I am a philosopher even in my light-hearted play with them. I have become what my work has made me.