Professor Leiter has done a great service to the whole profession in using his blog as a posting board for those who are/will be/would be/will not be at the APA this year. So....
I hereby nominate Brian Leiter for the position of first president of a new national philosophical society-- The American Society for Philosophers (ASP).
ASP will be run almost entirely online, including a well-organized, sensibly programmed, free-access, searchable, and updatable "Philosophy Jobs" database. There will be one large national conference a year. All papers will be posted in advance, and sessions will consist of ten-minute presentations (no reading allowed) to be followed by 40-minutes of q&a from the audience. The meeting will be held in a geographically central location with predictably reasonable weather on Dec 27-30.
Or... if all of this seems too much to ask, at least let me propose a profession-wide toast to Brian Leiter. Cheers, bro!
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15 comments:
Huzzah!
Sign me up for the ASP asap!
Should we stipulate also that ASP will provide good free beer one night and reasonably-priced good beer on the next?
Kudos to Leiter too.
Agreed! (With everything except the date, which is an expensive time to travel.) But yes: the APA doesn't work and isn't going to fix itself. Time for a new one.
ASP:
Adjuncts
Should
Persevere
I second the nomination. Also, APA can learn a lesson from the Newark mayor:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20101228/bs_yblog_thecutline/newark-mayor-uses-twitter-for-snow-removal
Or, as it actually might be easier: we could all pay APA dues and vote the blankety-blanks out.
APA has money, has structure - however poorly managed - and has clout - however ineffectively used. It makes far more sense to fix the APA than to start a new group.
Best to all who tried to/managed to get to Beantown, especially the job seekers.
(WV: hyper. Really.)
Sign me up for the ASP. I third the nomination for Leiter. I'd like to add that I think the president of the ASP should hold this position for more than just a year. Make it three or four, so that policy changes and planning for new policies and projects can be implemented.
Since I'm among my peeps, cranky jerks both young and old, I'd like to air a pet peeve. It would be really great if, as CTS suggests, we could pay our dues and vote new people in. However, the structure of the APA--the divisions, gets in the way. I've been paying my dues and voting, but structural features of the APA seem to me to prevent changes. Spiros suggestion for a single national philosophical society could be much, much better. Take a look at the Australasian Association of Philosophy and how they operate.
And I am truly over the whole electing an APA president as a disciplinary honor. The person who should, I think, run the APA, does not to be honored for the work as a philosopher (sure, there can be some big sort of honorary vote for a talk or something). The person needs to have skills to run an organization and be able and willing to do this sort of work.
You really want to avoid the APA for the market issues? Then do so. There's no need for departments to use it to interview, except that it's traditional. (As we all know, it certainly isn't convenient.) So just stop. When your department hires its next person, don't schedule an interview there. Do it by phone or skype. Or instead of flying a hiring committee out to the APA, use that money to fly more candidates to campus for interviews. Get your friends to do the same.
As long as departments keep interviewing at the APA, there's no impetus for them to change.
I heartily endorse a yearly "Leiter Cheers Bro" event. But does it have to be between Christmas and New Years?
Excellent idea! But how about the New American Philosophical Society, instead (riffing on Benjamin Franklin's APS and the obvious need that I have had lately for some good NAPS)?
All for it!
Are you going to let us degenerate Continental types into this club of yours? Or does Leiter get to sneer at us at the ASP smoker as his thank-you gift for his blog heroics?
@ 8:55:
Yes.
Spiros, thanks for the good words. I'd sooner take gas than lead an organization of philosophers, though! But maybe by next year the APA will manage to set up a blog or twitter account, where they can post notices like the ones posted on my blog.
Being a Continental type myself, I do wish folks wouldn't use "Continental" as a code word for philosophically incompetent. But since I'm unlikely to soften on the incompetent, yet another reason I'll have to decline the nomination!
--Brian
Leiter is heavily biased against Continental philosophy, with an attitude reminiscent to the MaCarthy era. If you would cherish the values of the French revolution, and indeed the future of the profession as globally signifficant, you wouldn't trust him.
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