Professor Leiter reports that "the APA has appointed four different task forces made up of a lot of senior philosophers who are quite aware of the very real problems and who want to do something about them," and then claims to be "guardedly optimistic" about this development.
I'm pleased to see that the APA at least recognizes that it has several serious problems. I'm also pleased that there's an effort to do something about them. So maybe I'm guardedly optimistic as well. But I'd be a whole lot more optimistic if the APA had also had the insight to seek help from people working in other disciplines that have better-run (albeit not perfect) national organizations, such as APSA. "A lot of senior philosophers" may be able to tell where the shoes pinch, but maybe it's a good idea to look to those who have built a non-dysfunctional national organization when trying to solve the problems.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
I have it on good faith that some of the senior philosophers in question are indeed seeking "help from people working in other disciplines that have better-run (albeit not perfect) national organizations". All is not lost. Not yet, at least!
Isn't it "senior philosophers" who got us into this in the first place? How about asking a lot of the people who have been making pointed complaints and who are bearing the brunt of the APA's stupidity - i.e., mostly junior philosophers?
Are you kidding? Go look at the suggestions made at the Smoker. That's why.
I think Aristophanes was right.
The suggestions at the Smoker leave the impression that junior philosophers are, by and large, clueless naifs, while past evidence indicates that senior philosophers are mostly out-of-touch know-nothings. Solution - we contract out the running of our national organization to someone else entirely. Look, we're philosophers. Practical considerations just make our palms sweaty anyway.
This is my first time chairing a SC. Any advice from the jerks for handling the on-campus interviews?
Yes!! As long as the APA is run by philosophers and/or old people (worse both!) we're always going to have big problems.
Anon 3:09,
Some advice: have the candidates out, subject each them to grueling scrutiny at all times, refute them in the q&a at the job talk, humiliate them at the post-job talk dinner, pepper your ordinary interactions with them with obscure and foreboding speech acts. Then, after they've all been out to visit, flip a coin and offer the winner the job. Works every time.
Anon 3:09 PM
Here's a bit of real advice. When you take the candidate out to dinner, let the poor tired, hungry bastard look at the menu before you start grilling him or her. You may well have been to that restaurant 50 times, and so know exactly what to order, but she or he doesn't. This was just one thing that made me happy to not get a particular job, but it was one that stuck with me.
To 3:09:
From a job-seeker's point of view, I can tell you that the two things that are at once the most difficult to handle and the least useful for making your decision are:
1) questions for which there are no good answers
2) borderline illegal questions
Let me elaborate.
Questions for which there are no good answers include, but are by no means limited to:
* What part of our mission statement did you find most compelling?
* How would your students describe you?
* Is what you do really philosophy?
* Is what you do really philosophy of X?
* Do you think that my work is really philosophy?
* What do you think of my work?
I have been asked all of these questions by SCs. Really. All of them. So far as I can tell, there are only two reasons people ask this kind of question. One of them is ignorance; the questioner doesn't realize that no useful information could possibly be gleaned from the answer. The other is sadism.
Borderline illegal questions are in a way worse than really illegal questions. When it comes to really illegal questions, the candidate can say things like, "I don't think I'm meant to answer questions like that." If you ask a borderline illegal question, though, it's hard for the candidate to give such a response without sounding like a jerk. Such questions include:
* What other positions are you still being considered for?
* Do you think this is a good neighborhood in which to start a family?
* You don't really want to come to X, do you?
Again, I've been asked all of these questions myself. All of them.
Trying to keep all this in mind might be a bit much. If it is, I'd just suggest that, before you ask the candidate a question, you ask yourself, "How would I react if my best friend / younger sibling / child / [fill in the blank] told me they'd been asked this question?" The virtuous response should then become crystal clear.
[One last thing: don't brag about how hard (or easy) it was for you to get a job, especially if you got your job before 2008.]
"Such ["borderline illegal questions"] questions include:
* What other positions are you still being considered for?
* Do you think this is a good neighborhood in which to start a family?
* You don't really want to come to X, do you?"
These aren't illegal questions. And they aren't borderl illegan questions. They are legal questions.
Way to be a douche 2:46. I took 4:12's point to be that these are wildly inappropriate questions, ones which are not (as you point out) proscribed by law. 'Borderline illegal' may not have been the best choice of terminology but the meaning was perfectly clear.
Post a Comment