the [APA] is defined to me (and other marginalized academics...) by its membership’s total hand-wringing ineffectuality, which frets about “adjunctification” in general terms, but simultaneously insists that it’s most effective to make “change from the inside” and yet refuses to do a single goddamned thing to change the fate of adjuncts in their own departments across the country.
...my issue isn’t with the [APA]’s leadership—it’s with the [APA]’s membership, which consists almost entirely of people who can both afford to pay the dues, and haven’t been so traumatized by the convention that they drop out for their psychological health...
The [APA]’s membership consists largely—not wholly, but largely—of people who have had more good luck than bad in the [philosophical]-humanities subset of academia. Some are lifeboaty about it; others are not; almost all have little to no direct experience of what it is like to be in academia’s not-so-silent majority, and thus little to no incentive to help.--Rebecca Schuman writing on the MLA Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature
I have inserted "APA" (that is, the American Philosophical Association) where Schuman writes "MLA" (the Modern Language Association). Even though we are in an opaque context, the substitution does not impact truth values of the propositions on the whole. There are some notable cultural differences, of course: philosophers almost never say, “I don’t have a question so much as a comment. Your research fails to be exactly like my research.” (We tend to say "You are wrong about X because...")
So, I belong to the talkative minority that has had mostly good luck. Along the way, I have had a few setbacks in my career (some noted here, here, and here), and I certainly recall my own transformation of being utterly invisible even to my own teachers at the Smoker at the APA with no interviews, and then a year later being able to join what has felt like a very privileged club (here). Nevertheless, professional philosophy has treated me amazingly well.
Besides my vanity, my blogging has been fueled by a sense that professional philosophy is both (i) too sanguine about the the environment we operate in (the political economy of higher education, the development of a grant-based culture, the exploitation of cheap labor, our complicity in government abuses of research, etc.) and (ii) too complacent about the culture within the profession (which generates systematic patterns of exclusion among women and darker-skinned fellow citizens (among others), celebrates bullies (and here)/harrassers, etc.) These (i-ii) are connected, of course, by the incentive/reward structure within the profession and the too eager embrace of the idea that we're actually recognizing and encouraging the best work among our peers more or less in real time--not to mention the hierarchical ideologies this sustains. I don't share Schuman's evident rage, but I recognize some of causes that might motivate it. I also agree that the incentives within the profession are stacked against meaningful reform.
What makes life tricky, of course, is that "the membership of the APA" are my friends and often folk whose work I admire, whose favors I ask (if only for my PhD students), who referee me, and whose help I might need when I want to switch jobs. My luck in the profession has been so great that I have received many privileges (invited keynotes, cool publication opportunities) that inevitably I am caught in a web of mutual gift giving that characterizes the political economy of higher education. There is, in fact, no greater professional thrill than to help, in however modest a fashion, a deserving, junior person land a position or receive a leg-up in a competitive environment; but, of course, each time I do this, I keep entrenching the system. (And I have not even mentioned the ways in which unscrupulous types exploit their privilege in the system (recall).) Because time is scarce, I, too, have given less attention to deserving young scholars that reached out for academic help from me; instead I wrote, say, another grant application, an attention-grabbing blog on Piketty, or jetsetted to a lovely conference somewhere. (I have an inbox with unread draft dissertation chapters!)
This is not to deny that many of the quiet minority of the lucky few, do make a local difference behind the scenes. We all know examples of colleagues that have sacrificed on our behalf to serve on administrative committees that exhibit the best of faculty self-governance. We all know examples of folk that turn a blind eye to injustices within professional philosophy, but that make genuine difference in ameliorating or battling much larger injustices outside the profession.
Even so, Schuman's charge also can be applied effortlessly to professional philosophy. It's great that the APA Committee on the Status of Women now has a Site Visit Program; I hope it will lead to meaningful improvement. (Given the standard use of non-disclosure-agreements in universities I am not holding my breadth.) Maybe it will encourage others to join, say, an adjunct site visit program (etc.) a book-review club, to start more open-access journals, or maybe to explore 'philosophy' that falls outside the reward mechanisms sustained by one's buddies?
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