[E]ven among the genuinely well-meaning, not that many seem to have internalised the fact that it is we ourselves and our friends who are (and have been for years) doing the things that make the environment in which we work unwelcoming, uninclusive, and unprofessional.
We haven’t all been doing all the things, obviously, although I think we’ve all been doing some of the things. I’ve been doing some of the things. And many of the things that I haven’t done myself have been done by friends of mine with my support (or, perhaps equivalently, my knowing non-intervention). More generally, I am inextricably part of the collective we who have made and now maintain academic philosophy the way it currently is.
Maybe I am just extra pessimistic today because I’m tired, but I can’t shake the feeling that we are not going to change much if we can’t take responsibility on a collective scale. There is an available strategy we can each take individually: that of exceptionalizing a few individual “bad apples” (not our friends) while excusing or normalizing anything that’s being done by our friends because they are good (individual) people.
If we all stick to that strategy, I guess, nothing much will happen on the larger scale that is the locus of our collective responsibility.--Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins
Recently I attended a Mandeville conference. I experienced variants of the following exchanges:
A friend after a Q&A: "Your questions are so constructive; you have mellowed."
Me: "Thank you."
A fellow scholar I have known for over a decade at the same conference: "I can see fatherhood has been good for you; you are more patient now."
Me: "Thank you very much." [My wife has taught me to accept compliments.]
After mulling a number of some such comments (while running through the many ways in which sleep-deprived fathers become less patient and more irritable, and reflecting on the fact that when my skin allergies are not bothering me I am always nicer), I realized that I was being told, among other things, that several of my peers used to find me a jerk--some compliment!
Collective responsibility is a very unpopular notion. Even leaving aside a strong cultural preference for (moral) individualism, it lumps the good with the bad; invoking 'collective responsibility' can become a cover for the very bad to evade being judged for their particular contributions. One way to limit some of the bad odour associated with collective responsibility is to apply it to the really privileged sub-set of the collective, say, (in the case of professional philosophy) tenured faculty at PhD granting institutions (and those faculty at top-ranked MA institutions, etc.): this is the group that "made and now maintain[s] academic philosophy the way it currently is." This particular sub-set, which picks out many of the de facto influential professional philosophers, has considerable influence in the replication of norms and practices in the profession; it's also the group that is most heavily involved effectively disciplining, policing, and promoting others in virtue of being the key gate-keepers of the profession. It's the group that benefits (most) from the existing status quo.
I think Prof. Ichikawa Jenkins is claiming that with collective responsibility also comes the obligation to change collective norms by applying a new set of expectations and behaviors to oneself. The way she has framed the situation, we are faced with a classic collective action problem. Conversations at conferences and on blogs, facebook, twitter, or within departments (etc.) are one means by which such a problem can be resolved. (You may recall that it is crucial to a prisoner's dilemma that folk can't communicate.) If these conversations result into new patterns of (hiring) decisions things will, in fact, change.
Many years ago, when I was a precarious post-doc, I was having a conversation with the most influential, senior member of my host department. At one point he commented:
I don't know what that means, "shared intellectual inquiry."
Unsurprisingly, he could be a bona fide jerk, especially in Q&A (for many years the best I could say about him was that he would knife you from the front). It would be hard for anybody, except the very stout, to call this person out in public for bad behavior. (I certainly was too intimidated and scared back then.) But through the years I learned that this smart and ambitious person also has intellectual and personal integrity. We need more social incentives that encourage the integrity.
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