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Letters to the
Executive Director

Letters from APA Members concerning the Pacific Division Executive Committee's Decision not to Move their Meeting:
Lawrence Blum (March 14, 2005)
George Leaman (April 25, 2005)
Naomi Zack (March 16, 2005)

Academic Bill of Rights
Sara Dogan (August 15, 2005)

American Indians in Philosophy:
Robert L. Perea

An Issue in the Profession:
Joel Marks (May 12, 2005)

The Future of Philosophy:
John Lachs (May 17, 2005)
Nancy A.Weston (March 21, 2005)

Issues Regarding Philosophy Journals:
Richard Field
Bonnie Steinbock

Membership
Peter Boghossian (May 19, 2005)

Presses Dropping Philosophy?
David Weissman
John McCumber (May 12, 2005)

Teaching Philosophy & Graduate Student Education:
David Boersema
Bryan W. Van Norden

What Keeps Going Wrong With The APA
John Lachs (April 20, 2006)
David A. Hoekema (April 20, 2006)
Eric Hoffman (April 20, 2006)
Elizabeth S. Radcliffe (April 20, 2006)
Michael Kelly (April 20, 2006)
William Mann(April 20, 2006)
George Leaman (May 2, 2006)

Dear Executive Director:

Philosophy is the only human enterprise that has created a field of study out of puzzlement over its method of operation. Nearly from the time of the earliest practitioners, philosophers wondered about how they could do what they were doing and frequently even about what they were doing in the first place. Of course, there always were unselfconscious souls who pursued what was of interest to them without concern for method or the arbitrary limits of fields of study. But such people tended to be labeled amateurs and dismissed as lacking technical sophistication. This left philosophy in the hands of professionals who crafted novel concepts, gloried in minute distinctions, and spoke in a torrent of neologisms.

Uncertainty about the nature, scope, and value of philosophy was, in the history of the discipline, often combined with arrogance based on its purported excellence. People supposed that since philosophy may accomplish nothing in particular, it must be good for doing everything in general—that is, for serving as the thought behind or the self-understanding of all human endeavors. In graduate school, I was taught that, as philosopher, I needed to learn no facts; I had only to think. The reason offered for this remarkable luxury was the sheer power of philosophical thought: by means of it, my professors seemed to agree, we can understand, criticize, and improve the meager cognitive output of everyone else.

This extraordinary combination of self-doubt and swagger played a central role in the social history of philosophy. Groundless haughtiness tended to suffuse the attitude of philosophers not only toward those who worked in other fields, but also toward fellow practitioners who used different methods of reflection or reached unfavored conclusions. The intellectual history of philosophy is, therefore, as much a story of summary dismissals as of respectful controversies. Lucretius dismissed Plato and was, in turn, disregarded by almost everyone in the Middle Ages. Hegel and his followers paid no heed to Schopenhauer, and many philosophers—including Heidegger—failed to take Spinoza seriously. Nearly all Twentieth Century analytic philosophers thought and wrote as if idealists from Hegel to Bradley and Hocking had never existed. By no means least, for a long time, Nietzsche was considered a literary figure unworthy of philosophical attention.

As if being overlooked were not enough, thinkers who do not take the starting point or fail to follow the procedures currently in vogue are denounced as not doing philosophy. There is hardly a greater insult to philosophers than to be denied the benefit of standing as a respected colleague. Yet exclusion has become standard in the profession in the Twentieth Century, supported by such movements as logical positivism that declare much of what philosophers say literally nonsensical. Even those who manage to move past such juvenile charges are quite prepared to relegate much philosophy to psychology or literature, and treat colleagues who think in those ways with condescension.

Philosophers who deride other philosophers typically believe that there is a royal road to insight and that that road is paved with the latest technical innovations. For decades, people believed that doing philosophy without the language of Principia Mathematica was futile; at the other end of the spectrum, phenomenologists maintained that only language descriptive of human experience enjoyed any warrant. Even postmodern thinkers who are closely attuned to the pains of exclusion refuse to take seriously philosophers who don’t use such words as “excess,” “normalize,” and “decenter” a sufficient number of times.

Minimal attention to the history of philosophy is enough to see that the hope for such a royal road is illusory. Platonic dialectic, Cartesian doubt, the geometrical method of Spinoza, Kant’s transcendental method, Hegel’s historical dialectic, and Nietzsche’s genealogies, among countless other preferred ways of embarking on the philosophical enterprise, hold out hope for incontestable results for a short time only; soon, relentless critique wilts the promise and proponents of the great new invention find themselves as but another party in factional disputes. There is not a single proposition of philosophical substance on which professional thinkers agree, and it is highly unlikely that such a proposition will surface anytime soon.

I hasten to say that I do not think the world would be a better place if philosophers agreed in their views. Agreement is of value when its absence leads to bitter resentments, armed conflict or divorce, but it avails little when critical dialogue is the only vehicle on the road to truth. Philosophy deals with the most difficult of human problems; there is no reason to suppose that we can attain final insight or even general agreement on matters of such depth and significance. The point, however, is that absent that insight, no philosopher has a right to look down on the efforts of others. In philosophy, we are simply not in a position to be sure about who is closer to the truth. Every thesis has some arguments to support it, yet each is open to criticism and none can be established conclusively. Accordingly, the proper attitude of philosophers is to let a hundred flowers bloom and make only modest claims about their own achievements.

Such relative unproductivity does not compromise the value of philosophy. Physics and biology move cumulatively toward truth; their sidelined theories tend not to come back to life, and when they do, it is only because new evidence clearly supports them. Philosophy, by contrast, offers no compelling evidence for any of its captivating views. Its value lies in expanding our minds by developing imaginative new ways of looking at things and in sharpening our critical skills by offering rigorous objections to every theory. Examining the human condition suggests that we cannot give final or universal answers to questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the nature of the good. This does not mean that such questions are meaningless and should be avoided, only that their function is to occupy and agitate us perennially, instead of leading us down a road to satisfied, harmonious belief.

Not all worthwhile activities yield results. Like playing cards and kissing, philosophy is intrinsically delightful. As part of the flower of life, it needs no product to justify its existence; partaking in its movement is a spontaneous joy. Understanding the conceptual moves of the great philosophers, discovering the connection between seemingly unrelated events and seeing through the bluster of human self-importance are permanent sources of satisfaction. Drawing distinctions and defending conclusions engage all the active parts of the mind. The dialectic of ideas offers exhilaration at every turn, and a vigorous argument over some philosophical claim constitutes, for those in the know, one of the finest experiences of life.

Although philosophy is not useful in the way of the physical sciences, it can nevertheless result in desirable consequences. Not all lines of inquiry yield the same sort of fruit: some establish bodies of knowledge, others create better inquirers. Philosophical work makes humans more skeptical, more conceptually nimble and therefore more discerning as thinkers. Generally, better thinking makes for better life. The benefits of intelligence are not only private and psychological; they are on display in hospitals and businesses, where philosophers lend their trained sensitivity to the cause of more responsible and more humane practices. The recent vast growth of applied ethics aptly demonstrates the value of philosophical education: the critical examination of proposed courses of action, the detection of dissembling, the unmasking of lived contradictions, and the presentation of alternative perspectives clarify our social decisions and move us closer to a world of caring.

That metaphysics and epistemology are unlikely to generate a flood of new truths is therefore perhaps not such a great loss, after all. Although there may be little progress in philosophy, philosophers can grow greatly as they learn from the mistakes of their predecessors and develop their conceptual sophistication, their perceptiveness, and their critical skills. This is one of the reasons why the consideration of past thought is vital for philosophical education. The remarkable history of philosophy, including its recent chapters, is a vast storehouse of ideas that provides rich material for the critic. Students raised on the thin diet of the latest controversies, by contrast, may actually suppose that they stand a chance of developing decisive arguments for some final truth. This denies them a sensible view of their activities, and their inevitable disappointment, later in life, may turn them into people who cynically live off a profession whose value they silently dismiss.

Alternatively, individuals devoted to a single way of doing philosophy tend to retain their partisan zeal and compensate for their lack of final results by a sense of superiority. As all things intellectual, this claim of transcendent excellence does not have a purely cognitive basis: the school of one’s training, the fame of one’s teachers, and the reputation of one’s university all contribute to the impression that some professionals and their methods are much better than others. The appearance is supported by the fact that the standards of the profession are approach-specific. If argumentative prowess and analytical ability determine the quality of philosophers, Continentalists do not even rate. If the practical import of ideas is not a proper interest of philosophers, whoever focuses on James and Dewey must be a charlatan. And in the opinion of those who start from Peirce’s way of making our ideas clear, analytic philosophers cannot avoid irrelevance.

The contempt philosophers feel for colleagues who do not share their values and techniques is nothing short of bizarre and has served to undermine the honor and integrity of the discipline. In serving on National Endowment for the Humanities committees, I noted that members of the panel from English and history and anthropology tended to support applicants from their fields. Philosophers, by contrast, couldn’t wait to light into their colleagues; they tore research proposals apart, presenting their authors as fools or as championing out-of-date, inferior ideas and methods. As a result, scholars from other fields garnered much of the money that would, under normal circumstances, have gone to philosophy. These gatekeepers to our profession thought their actions were justified by the imperative to maintain high standards; in fact, they often undertook to judge work they did not understand, and condemned styles of thought and topics of investigation simply because they had no sympathy with them.

Something similar was occurring in the American Philosophical Association prior to the pluralist revolt that started in 1978. In the Association’s dominant Eastern Division, disciplinary exclusivity was wedded to institutional nepotism in such a way that it became nearly impossible for philosophers who were not analytic in orientation and who did not serve in Eastern seaboard graduate schools to break into the power circle or even into the program. As if there had been a dearth of talent in the Division, the same person from the University of North Carolina was tapped to chair the Program Committee twice within 5 years; the second time, he found room for no less than 17 individuals connected with his university on the notoriously small and limited program in December. The system of exclusion worked perfectly with regard to the presidency and the other offices of the Division, as well; one by one, the senior members of the Harvard and Princeton departments took turns in leading the Division, leaving room for one or two colleagues from Pittsburgh only as an accommodation to the provinces.

The stranglehold on elective offices was made nearly unbreakable by the voting procedure. Officers were elected at the Eastern Division business meeting in northeastern cities. Home institutions defrayed the cost of attending these meetings only if their faculty gained a slot on the program. Since members of the Association from colleges, from inland schools, and especially from the South rarely found themselves on the program, they were effectively disenfranchised. A tiny minority, consisting largely of those the leadership put on the program, determined the next set of leaders year by year. The Pacific Division operates its elections by this procedure to this day.

The astonishing thing is that people some of whom contributed to the development of political philosophy and who were therefore sensitive to the nuances of democratic participation never saw anything wrong with this system. The uncritical assumption of these acutely critical thinkers was that all and only philosophers distinguished enough to be elected president could lead the Association effectively. It didn’t seem to matter that there was not a shred of evidence for this view; the untenable conflation of philosophical excellence with practical sense and institutional savvy was never challenged and remains an operating principle of the Association even today. At least a part of the reason for the persistence of this illusion was the absence of a clear idea of what the APA was to do beyond organizing three divisional meetings a year and responding to issues in the life of the profession that it could not skillfully dodge. There was no agreed understanding then, as there is none even now, of how the Association might advance the good of the profession. Its committees rarely escaped being ineffectual, its national office staff was skeletal, and its Board seemed for the most part satisfied with the celebration rather than the active encouragement of philosophical achievement. As a result, it lagged far behind its sister organizations serving other academic fields in the effective promotion of the discipline. There is no better indication of the enduring power of philosophy than that it managed to survive these decades of institutional neglect.

Yet the power of philosophy was not so great as to penetrate the personal lives and professional behavior of many distinguished thinkers. In 1981, a collection of well-known Eastern Division presidents circulated a nasty letter accusing the pluralists of attempting to gain office in the APA by political means rather than on the basis of their philosophical accomplishments. Quine was one of the signatories. One would have expected him to form his opinion of the worth of pluralist publications on the basis of careful study. Yet when a reporter for the New York Times asked him if some of the pluralists might not deserve office after all, he replied: “I don’t know their work.”

At least since the 1970s, the APA fancied itself the guardian of philosophical standards, which rendered it so conservative that it lost contact with new developments in the field. The explosive growth of the group meeting program connected with the Eastern Division, for example, took the APA leadership altogether by surprise; the widespread interest in historical figures, practical issues, Continental thinkers, American philosophy, and interdisciplinary topics could not have been predicted on the basis of the papers featured on the “official” program.

The growing distance between the Association and many of its members was one of the reasons for the revolt that culminated in the election of John E. Smith as Vice President and President-elect of the Eastern Division in 1980. There were, of course, many other reasons, including social, political, economic, and geographical ones. The vast majority of APA members felt that paying dues earned them no say in the affairs of the organization. A Northeastern graduate school power elite held the keys to advancement in the profession by nearly exclusive control over grants, publications, and program participation. National Defense Education Act fellowships swelled the number of excellent graduate students in philosophy; since job creation in central graduate schools did not keep pace with the production of Ph.D.s, many fine young scholars had to take jobs in small colleges and provincial universities. This upgraded the quality of philosophy teaching across the land, but left students from even top-named schools abandoned by their teachers and stranded in forgotten small departments.

At the same time, a number of universities began offering new doctoral degree programs. Avenues to distinction were largely closed to faculty and students in these schools; judgment of the very legitimacy of the programs was left in the hands of reviewers from long-established departments. Small colleges from the South were particularly hard hit by haughty neglect: when it came time for committee assignments, Eastern Division Executive Committees could hardly ever think of anyone in the South capable of rendering worthy service. The revolt of 1978 offered an outlet for these and other frustrations. There was talk of founding an alternative organization, but it quickly became clear that taking over the existing structure would be easier and more efficient.

To be sure, there was also an ideological element in the revolt, though its significance can be overstated. The departments with a stranglehold on the profession were analytically-minded and professional or technical in their approach. The anger of those wanting reform, however, was directed not so much at the analytic style of doing philosophy as at the arrogance of declaring analysis the only proper method of thought. This exclusivity represented a danger to the small but quickly growing band of Continentalists, as well as to those serving in Catholic institutions committed to speculative metaphysics and the history of philosophy. The revolt aimed not at defeating or eliminating analytic philosophy but at establishing the legitimacy of alternative methods. It wanted to introduce a wholesome pluralism into the profession, and a look at philosophical activity today shows that in this it clearly succeeded.

Two additional developments chipped away at the hegemony of analytic philosophy. By the time of the revolt, its research program in epistemology—its central discipline—was nearly played out. Rorty announced its demise in 1976, and for this he was reluctantly honored with the presidency of the Eastern Division. Further, philosophers found that they could not fill their classrooms and retain the attention of their students in small colleges and provincial schools by presenting the abstract topics and dry distinctions of analytic thought. They responded by reaching back to the humanly more interesting figures in the history of the discipline and by tackling pressing moral concerns. The history of how much of the current boom in applied ethics is due to the necessity to fill classes and the opportunity to publish in journals not under the control of narrow professionals is yet to be written.

The success of efforts at institutional reform is notoriously difficult to assess. The pluralist revolt elected some presidents of the Eastern Division and placed a stream of individuals on the Executive Committee. Most important, it called the attention of the APA leadership to the level of disaffection of its membership and to the luxuriant growth of interest among philosophers in new fields, new topics, and new methods. The organization is more open now than it was twenty-five years ago, but each liberalizing concession had to be wrung out of it. For this reason, it is fair to say that it neither led the profession nor served it well; instead of stimulating or at least welcoming new sorts of work, it made room for them only grudgingly and when the pressure became too great to resist. That the pluralization of philosophy was accomplished by the spontaneous activity of thousands of practitioners who lacked organized institutional support constitutes convincing additional evidence of the vitality of philosophy. The pluralist revolt served as the voice of thinkers who were experimenting with the new.

Many of the narrow political goals of the pluralists were never achieved. The hold of rich and established graduate departments on the Board of the APA has been weakened but not eliminated, APA divisional presidencies are still viewed as rewards for excellence unconnected to practical sense or the ability to lead, and elections continue largely as popularity contests based on name recognition and current assessments of technical publications. Yet it is clear that academic philosophy is profoundly different today from what it was a couple of decades ago, and of this change ongoing pluralist agitation was both symptom and part cause.

The question of how pluralistic philosophy should be is easily answered: as pluralistic as its practitioners want it. There are, of course, limits to pluralism in the curriculum. Since faculty salaries are paid largely out of undergraduate tuition, instructional offerings must attract a sufficient number of students. Although the correlation between offerings and enrollments is loose, no department can afford to devote the bulk of its efforts to teaching marginal, arcane, or highly specialized courses. This does not mean, however, that the research programs of instructors must be restricted to what they are asked to teach; they are and should remain free to pursue any line of philosophical investigation and use any appropriate method in doing so. This leaves room for the intellectual development of tenured faculty members, who can—at least in principle—determine what they read and think and write.

Obstacles to pluralism often arise, however, in the hiring practices of departments. During the early stage of the pluralist revolt, Professor Burt Dreben spoke to an audience concerned about the openness of the profession and allowed that he was puzzled why the Harvard Department was considered narrow. “We have both Quine and Rawls, “ he said. “Isn’t that pluralistic enough?” Even though this comment is mind-numbingly naive, it points to the fact that pluralism is a matter of degree. A department that features Quine and Putnam is clearly pluralistic in one way: the two of them hold divergent opinions concerning at least some shared issues. Having Quine and Rawls introduces greater pluralism by diversifying the issues, though not nearly as much as adding Rorty would. Yet Rorty, Rawls, and Quine agree with each other on topics and modes of thought far more than any of them does with Derrida, John McDermott, or Irigaray. A department in which American, Continental, and analytic approaches to problems coexist, moreover, is not nearly as pluralistic as one that also features some of the concerns and techniques of Native American, Chinese, and Indian thought.

The tendency of departments is to diversify within the range of their interests. Communities largely analytic in orientation may insist on having someone who covers the early Wittgenstein, while departments of Continentalists feel satisfied only when they can add a specialist in the late Heidegger. In places where ethics is the center of gravity, emotivism and moral realism are thought to require separate champions; if the stress is on political philosophy, liberals, communitarians, and adherents of the Frankfurt School all need representation. Such hiring priorities have their ground and justification in value judgments about what is of significance in the profession. For the most part, these judgments are unconscious or have not withstood challenge, yet they serve to exclude large numbers of talented and highly trained philosophers from even consideration for employment.

A more vicious form of the same sort of selectivity occurs when members of a department agree that what some professionals in the field do is not philosophy or at least not philosophy of a type that deserves to be done or taught. Those who derive their inspiration from the great philosophers of the past may be dismissed as mere historians, thinkers who read Plato or Kant from a Continental perspective may be declared incoherent and individuals with a pragmatist streak may be thought to have made a poor choice of occupation. As a result, departments tend to hire young people closely similar to those already on staff and thereby perpetuate a narrow and stagnant culture. Philosophy is not like physics in which a research paradigm is firmly in place; we live in a sea of criticism and can progress perhaps only by permitting our deepest assumptions to be challenged.

No department can, of course, make room for every fashion of doing philosophy. But every department can avoid a monolithic orientation that makes for the cozy agreement about approach and method of all or most of its members. We are also well advised to avoid tokenism of the sort I observed in one distinguished department, in which a large staff covered a collection of then-urgent analytic topics, leaving the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and all of Continental thought to a single unproductive and overworked pariah. What may appear as institutional obstacles to pluralism in philosophy are in fact roadblocks constructed by philosophers in deciding not to hire, retain, reward, and promote professionals whose philosophical convictions fail to match favored or established patterns. The tendency to exclude the different is widespread and affects Continental departments no less than analytic ones. It is fed by the suspicion that if one or two individuals of another persuasion gain a foothold, they will want to turn the entire department into a partisan enclave.

Pluralism in philosophy, as elsewhere, is possible only if people approach each other with trust and show themselves worthy of it. Above all, it requires a fallibilistic attitude committed to the idea that since we may well be wrong, others can legitimately disregard our efforts and pursue their own. Philosophy is not alone among academic disciplines in suffering, or profiting, from lack of a single method; literary criticism, political science, and psychology are, to different extents and in differing ways, in the same situation. But no field of study shares the ambition, scope, and consequent uncertainty of philosophy. Making room for widely divergent approaches is, therefore, even more important in philosophy than in other contested disciplines.

The argument that the quality of methods other than one’s own is not high enough to warrant representation in one’s department does not stand scrutiny. Without extensive acquaintance with philosophical methods, it is impossible to judge their power. The frequently heard analytic objection to Continental thought that it is unclear cannot be taken seriously unless it is the outcome of long and sympathetic study. Kant is unclear to those who have not spent time examining his aims and technical terms, and Principia Mathematica remains obscure to people who refuse to attend to the details of its elegant structure. Even the claim that philosophers must present arguments in support of their views is unworthy of attention unless made on the basis of thorough familiarity with the works of religious thinkers and those who write interestingly and persuasively in the wisdom tradition.

Such casual arguments supporting a dismissive attitude toward alien or novel forms of thought do not do their proponents proud. Instead of succumbing to them, departments need to ask themselves if they do all they can to serve their discipline and their students so long as they refuse to make room for the out-of-fashion and the new. The image of merely accepting the different is, however, far too passive. Departments have an obligation to seek out not only promising young people, but also promising new lines of thought, no matter how strange they may at first appear. Only in that way can we be sure that philosophy remains vital and fertile, and that we escape the ossification resulting from narrow and unchallenged programs of research.

The APA must play a central role in opening philosophy to a variety of fructifying influences. It must welcome diversity in the profession and throw the gates of service and acknowledgement open to all its members, regardless of their philosophical method or position. This requires elimination of the attitude, still prevalent today, that some professionals do serious philosophy, while others play in the sandbox. It also demands expansion of the program of the Eastern Division, whose traditionally limited size makes inclusiveness difficult to attain. Program committees need to be large enough to accommodate people knowledgeable about and sympathetic with all major contemporary trends. By no means the least, instead of the yearly ritual of passively waiting for committee nominations, the National Office should aggressively seek out members highly qualified to promote the Association’s purposes.

Most important, the APA should at last devote itself to engaging the broader public that is the ultimate employer of its members. The personal value and social usefulness of philosophy are not widely known in this country, even though our daily choices, our social customs, and our public policy debates are in desperate need of intelligent critique. In spite of this need, and of the benefits to our profession of meeting it, distinguished thinkers subscribe to the preposterous view that philosophers get attention when they do good philosophy. They do, indeed, among the few dozen people who work in their narrow fields, but they and their writings remain unknown beyond the choking confines of the academic world.

There is no reason and no justification for restricting philosophical education to young people enrolled in classes; the out-of-school public is, if anything, more anxious to obtain it and more likely to make immediate use of it. As the premier national organization of philosophers, the APA must shoulder the task of fostering this audience and encouraging the profession to address it. Historians are untiring in their drive to educate the adult public; economists have persuaded the president to appoint a Council of Economic Advisors; half the world beats a path to the door of psychologists to gain self-understanding or at least some useful advice. Only philosophers seem satisfied with the safety of academic isolation, abandoning a historic mission of the discipline and surrendering its only means to increased influence and appreciation.

Pluralism in philosophy does not imply the elimination of standards. On the contrary, it means, as it does in social life, the structuring presence and legitimacy of multiple standards, each appropriate to a different method of inquiry in the field. A discipline as modestly endowed with generally accepted results as philosophy must be open to divergent approaches. Without such wholesome pluralism, we will continue to suffer the sequential hegemonies that dragged philosophy in the past century from Hegelian idealisms to positivist games and, beyond that, to a variety of failed analytic experiments. Philosophy is perhaps more pluralistic now than it has been at any time since the founding of the APA. Our task is to secure respect and toleration for this bounty of energetically different investigations and to help philosophy overflow its academic banks so that it may become a full participant in the intellectual life of our country.

John Lachs
Vanderbilt University
Teaching Philosophy & Graduate Student Education

Dear Executive Director:

I am writing in response to the recent and important letter from Professor John Lachs of Vanderbilt University, appearing on the APA website.

Professor Lachs' lucid and thoughtful analysis of the alarmingly prevalent practice of philosophers' excluding or deriding those working in areas other than the speaker or writer's own is accurate, and disturbing. Plainly there are personal costs to such exclusion - most dramatically, perhaps, to those drawn to work with unconventional questions or approaches but unable to secure adequate employment owing to the rigidity and desire for departmental self-replication Professor Lachs describes. This loss is not merely economic; to ask such a candidate to trim her thinking in order to "fit" such departmental constraints is to ask her not to be a philosopher. In addition, there is within such departments (though perhaps unlamented,there) the lost opportunity of philosophers' contact with new and possiblystimulating ideas from other areas and approaches. Finally, and mostgrievously, there is the loss to philosophy as a whole, for (as ProfessorLachs notes) such enforced insularity violates the spirit of free inquiry that philosophy calls for us to honor and exhibit, and within which alone it can flourish.

Professor Lachs asks for philosophers' conscious attention to the problem, calls for greater civility across the divisions that have arisen, and offers certain other concrete remedial recommendations. Certainly that would all be welcome, and might improve the situation. In addition, however, I wonder whether there aren't also philosophically significant contributing sources of the antagonistic situation he describes.

It is a curiosity of the present state of academic affairs that allegiance and loyalty are very often given to and withheld from people, rather than ideas. (To be sure, these people are usually powerful, but that - attention to where power lies - may be understood not as itself primary, but as arising from a more general
personality-orientation that makes that attention possible, even necessary.) Theories come to be associated with, and understood as the product of, a particular thinker, so that it is to him that allegiance is given, or from whom it is withheld. (Accordingly, much attention is given to what thinker X said, what he meant, and whether it is compatible with what else he said, and meant, elsewhere. Thus, even within the camps as Professor Lachs has described them, duels of citations are fought as suddenly, and as routinely, as a round of Rochambeau.) More conspicuously still, in the hothouse that is graduate school one is expected to develop a nearly filial allegiance to the professor who is one's advisor; the ideas he explores are taken up as interests, that is, as his, and embraced because they are his, rather than as calling for attention out of their own question-worthiness.

This allegiance to the person, taken as a proper, even principal guide for philosophical inquiry, appears at first glance to be inconsistent with Professor Lachs' observations concerning allegiance to schools of thought as what brings about the camp divisiveness he laments. I suggest, however, that the two phenomena - personality allegiance, and camp allegiance - may instead be wholly compatible, paired manifestations of a single and momentous deflection, now become general. For in both cases what is called for is allegiance, loyalty, subscription-to. - rather than the attention of inquiry, brought to the matter before us (whatever it is, in each case). The situation is precisely analogous to that in contemporary politics, where party allegiance, understood as calling for polemical opposition and exclusion, comes to supplant any effort to engage with the matter (e.g., the health of the polity), and to poison with suspicion and concern for strategic advantage any attempt by the "other side" to do so. I suggest that this distressingly widespread phenomenon may reflect not only clannish tendencies, but perhaps a genuine inability to see that there is any matter other than such clan interest before us. Thus it may be that the camp hostility Professor Lachs describes reflects not merely personal weakness in indulging in name-calling or philosophical nepotism and xenophobia (though they are involved, too) but what is far more philosophically disturbing, a general loss of attention to what is, or might be, true in the matter at hand. Plato said long ago that there is nothing less befitting of philosophy than concern with persons. Perhaps that is because to devote one's attention there is to turn away from the matter for inquiry itself.

Professor Lachs raises issues of enormous importance to the profession, going to the very heart of its self-understanding. His letter and its issues warrant wide notice and responsive discussion.

Yours truly,

Nancy A.Weston
University of California at Berkeley

Dear Executive Director:
The September 1988 Proceedings and Addresses of the APA documents a symposium on recommendations to philosophy graduate students. Then-APA Executive Director, David Hoekema, asked several prominent philosophers to offer such recommendations. Quine gave the following:

“Some look to an academic career as a way of indulging their intellectual curiosity and contributing to their subject. Teaching for them is primarily a means of supporting that pursuit. It does also contribute to the pursuit in other ways. It imposes a standard of clarity, it turns up points that could have escaped notice, and through feedback it helps to sustain one’s sense that one’s domain of research is worth cultivating.

Others look to an academic career primarily for teaching: the cultivation of inquiring young minds and the savoring and sharing of books and thoughts. They envisage a professorship on a small and congenial campus at a modest but adequate salary and the authorship of a few unpretentious pieces attesting to respectable scholarship. It could be a satisfying life and a useful one.

Not but that the research buff also may occasionally find satisfaction in the honing of fine minds.”

Intended or not, there is certainly here a sense that philosophy graduate students face, if not an outright dichotomy, a rather strong distinction between a career as a scholarly philosopher and as a teacher of philosophy. I suspect there is also here a sense that the good, serious young philosopher goes on to a career at research programs and the not-so-good, not-so-serious young philosopher goes on to a career at teaching programs. The philosophical winners go to Princeton University and the philosophical losers go to Pacific University.

Now, I certainly don’t want to suggest that there is no important qualitative difference between the philosophy department at Princeton and the philosophy department at Pacific or between the philosophers at Princeton and Pacific. Believe me, I am no Gilbert Harman and I know it! However, if statistics are to be believed, Pacific University is much more like the norm for academic philosophers than is Princeton. According to data culled from the Philosophy Documentation Center in their annual Directory of American Philosophers, there are 1630 philosophy departments in the US, with 9024 faculty listed. (This does not include graduate students or emeriti faculty.) This results in the average size department (i.e., the mean) of 5.54 faculty per department. In addition, of the 9024 faculty, more than half of them (4708) are in departments of nine or fewer faculty. Almost 1/3 of all academic philosophers (2841) are in departments of five or fewer faculty. Indeed, there are more philosophers total in departments of three or under (1626) than in department of twenty or greater (1554).

From these data alone, I don’t want to conclude that half of today’s graduate students will end up in departments of under six philosophers, but the data certainly point to the likelihood that they will end up in relatively small departments, at least departments that are small relative to the departments in which they are currently pursuing their doctorate.

What is life like in these small departments? First, yes, a fairly heavy teaching load. At Pacific University, faculty normally teach seven courses per year and these are seven different courses (no repeats in the same academic year). Given the pressure to provide service courses (i.e., lower-level courses that fulfill humanities general education requirements for all students), most upper-level courses must be taught on an every-other year rotation. This means that over a two-year period, a faculty member could easily teach ten or more different courses. Nor are these different courses, spin-offs on one’s specialty or on one area of philosophy. Rather than, say, a few courses in related topics in the philosophy of language, one is much more likely to be expected to teach, say, a survey of philosophy of language followed by bioethics or a course in ancient philosophy. In small departments, obviously, one is not expected to be a master of many philosophical areas, but is expected to be competent to teach undergraduate courses in a variety of areas. For the enterprising undergraduate majors, especially those who want to (and show genuine promise to) go on and ultimately succeed in graduate school, and who exhaust the regular offerings of the department, there is some pressure (usually internal) to grant independent study courses, for which there is appreciation but no compensation. That is, they are unpaid overloads in one’s teaching schedule.

Besides a fairly heavy teaching load, there is expected committee work. In addition to committee work, there is more committee work. And if that weren’t enough, there is also more committee work. A virtue of small schools is that there is much less bureaucratic red tape in getting things done and there is much more directly faculty influence in setting campus policies and priorities. The dark side of this, however, is lots of committee work, most of which has no immediate, direct connection to the discipline of philosophy or the philosophy department. But make no mistake, when it comes to committee work, one can run but one can’t hide. And while some committee work actually does matter and has tangible value, much doesn’t. So, for any graduate students who are reading this, I urge you to volunteer for some sort of committee now, so that when the day comes that, as a faculty member, you find yourself concurrently on the Assessment Committee, the Budget Advisory Committee, and the Student Life Committee (not to mention possibly the all-important Campus Parking Committee), you will already be prepared for some of the numbing pain.

Teaching and committee work (happily known as “campus service”) are two typical criteria on which one is evaluated as a faculty member. The third, and these are not noted in order of importance, is professional activity. This typically means publishing and conference presentations. However, even those humanoid creatures that go by the name of “administrators,” recognize that heavy teaching and service commitments leave not a lot of time for writing. So, while there is still a definite expectation of professional activity and scholarship, that activity and scholarship can be met in various ways. Quite a few small schools have adopted the Ernest Boyer categories of what counts as scholarship. Those categories include: (1) discovery of knowledge (work that contributes to the stock of human knowledge and to the intellectual climate of the University, and which includes original creative work in the arts), (2) integration of knowledge (work that gives isolated studies meaning by putting them in perspective, making connections across disciplines, placing them in a larger context, or bringing them to non-specialists), (3) application of knowledge (work that applies knowledge or that creates knowledge in the process of its use), and (4) transformation of knowledge through teaching (work that develops curriculum, addresses pedagogy and promotes teaching as the highest form of understanding). (From Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1999.) The intent of adopting these various categories is not to water down professional scholarship (though, sadly, I confess I have seen them used to that effect), but to recognize and encourage various forms of professional activity. And, while I don’t know if these categories are being adopted at large institutions, they are being adopted more and more at small institutions.

OK, what’s the point? At the 2004 Pacific Division meeting of the APA, Peter French, on behalf of the APA Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession, identified several concerns that were culled from graduate student responses to a recent survey. He noted three concerns about graduate education that seemed to emerge from those responses: (1) there was (or is) inadequate coverage of the sorts of topic areas and fields of philosophy that would prepare them in terms of content to teach the sorts of courses typically expected of junior faculty members in the majority of institutions, (2) there was (or is) the feeling that philosophy graduate students are receiving inadequate training and practice in teaching philosophy to undergraduates— pedagogical techniques, selecting texts, writing exams, etc., and (3) there was (or is) discontent at the lack of tutoring or mentoring they receive on the professional duties of a philosopher, especially in the area of publication. I am speaking here only as a representative of small philosophy programs and what is the typical experience (if there is such a thing) for a philosopher in a small department. At a small school—and, again, remember that many of you will end up at a small school—you will be expected to be able to teach a variety of courses, with your area of expertise (i.e., what you write about in your dissertation) as only one among them. (When I applied for jobs, lo! Many years ago, I listed Philosophy of Science as my AOS; I now teach it once every other year.) As for pedagogical training and practice, ask yourself what you want as a student. Clear, comprehensive syllabi are your friends! They provide structure and allow the class to plan ahead to balance their workload with other courses and other responsibilities. This is not a matter of straight-jacketing the professor to a rigid time schedule nor a matter of coddling needy students. It is simply a matter of providing appropriate structure and organization. This sort of thing (i.e., taking syllabi seriously), along with concerns such as how to select class-appropriate texts, will make a definite difference in successful teaching. If it isn’t happening in your graduate program, it should. This will matter at any institution, but probably even more so at a small one that evaluates your teaching success at least as highly (if not higher) as scholarship. With respect to the third concern (about professional duties, especially publishing), yes, it will be expected, but at many small schools will be understood via the Boyer categories. To put it bluntly, publishing an article in Teaching Philosophy will count as much, or almost as much, as publishing an article in The Journal of Philosophy. One last point about professional scholarship: most small programs don’t have a very large professional travel budget, so faculty can’t afford to attend many conferences in a given budget year (in fact, most likely it would be one outside of the local, drivable region).

Finally, if it is the case that statistically many graduate students will end up at relatively small schools and small departments, what can graduate programs do to ease the culture shock for their newly-minted graduates? I have several recommendations that I believe are noninvasive, inexpensive, and user-friendly. First, don’t discourage interdisciplinary work on the part of your graduate students. It is not at all unlikely that at a small school a philosopher will be asked to participate in some sort of “humanities” general education course. Team-teaching with someone outside of humanities is welcomed and encouraged. There is a depth of teaching expertise, as well (I believe) of scholarship, that comes from breadth of exposure. Second, to the extent possible, allow graduate students to actually teach a course and not merely serve as a TA. When they compete on the market for a job, small schools will look very closely for teaching experience. The more, the better. And the more variety of courses taught, the better. Having taught ethics once and logic once and some history of philosophy once will mean more than having taught any single one of them multiple times. Third, because philosophers at small schools are not simply teachers of philosophy, but they are also scholars who do try to stay current and who do publish, graduate departments could occasionally include them in their colloquia series. Invite one to your campus once a year or every other year. You will find that they do good philosophical work and that they care about scholarly activity beyond just pedagogy. One benefit of this would be to expose graduate students to those strange beasts that live in small departments in small towns. Since a fair number of the graduate students will find themselves in that same situation, it would be a good thing to get acquainted now. Likewise, graduate faculty, be amenable to serving as a colloquium speaker at a nearby small school. You will find some dedicated and talented faculty and students who will engage you. Contrary to Quine’s impression, “a professorship on a small and congenial campus at a modest but adequate salary” is not disjointed from serious intellectual curiosity and genuine scholarship. And, indeed, it is a satisfying life and a useful one.

David Boersema
Pacific University

Dear Executive Director:
In each of the preceding two years, I have been actively involved in national searches conducted by my department for a tenure-track assistant professor. In the end, we were very fortunate to hire an outstanding candidate whom we are honored to have as a colleague. We also interviewed a number of other extremely promising candidates. However, the hiring process was not always positive, and has left me with some opinions about the current state of graduate philosophy education. These are my personal opinions alone. They do necessarily reflect the views of my colleagues, my department, or my college.

The following generalizations seem true to me. Many students are going on the job market with all or part of their dissertations completed, when they have never had a detailed discussion with anyone, including their supposed “advisor,” on what that dissertation is about. Many students have never been asked the most obvious questions about their dissertations, nor formulated responses to the most obvious challenges to their theses. Many students are not even familiar with the work of their own advisors on the topics of their theses.

In each case, this failing is almost certainly the result of malign neglect on the part of the advisor and the graduate program. A typical graduate student is not in a position to know what professional standards she needs to meet, and even if she did, she would have difficulty meeting those standards without sustained dialogue and guidance.

It also seems clear that we have gone beyond recommendation-letter inflation, and have achieved recommendation-letter hyper-inflation. I now keep a personal list of philosophers whose letters of recommendation I will never trust again, because they clearly exaggerate the qualifications of their candidates on a routine basis. (I am sad to say that this includes some scholars whose professional work I respect very much.) I wonder if the inflation and the failures to properly train are somehow related. Is there a subconscious thought that one can atone for ignoring one’s students for six to eight years if one writes a hyperbolic letter of recommendation for them? This is like a parent trying to make up for years of neglect by helping his child cheat on a test.

There are many difficult and muddy issues in ethics. However, we know the simple truth that professors in a graduate program have an ethical obligation to train their graduate students. If you are supervising a student in a dissertation, you should be meeting with him at least once a month, at a bare minimum, to discuss his thesis. The Confucian philosopher Mengzi said, “The Way lies in what is near, but people seek it in what is distant. It lies in what is easy, but people seek it in what is difficult.” Maybe some of us need to spend a little less time worrying about passing resolutions to advise the federal government, and a little more time actually doing our jobs.

Bryan W. Van Norden
Vassar College
Issues regarding Philosophy Journals

Dear Executive Director:
Here’s an issue that has bothered me for some time: Why are philosophers limited to one-at-a-time journal submissions? Law professors can submit articles to as many journals as they like. It seems to work. We can submit book manuscripts to multiple publishers.

This isn’t a personal issue for me. I never have to publish again if I don’t want to, and am at the stage in my career when virtually all of my publications are requested. But it is very distressing to see young colleagues, whose very jobs are on the line, kept hanging by the most prestigious journals.

It wouldn’t be so bad if journals had a reasonable turnaround time, say, 3 months. But they can take up to a year—sometimes even longer! I understand that the journals are at the mercy of reviewers, who are busy. But the system is so unfair to younger philosophers—and the expectations keep growing.

Why can’t the APA do something about this? My first suggestion is that the organization force the journals to allow multiple submissions. My second suggestion is that we organize a little civil disobedience. People are afraid of breaking the custom (surely it’s not more than that?) but if enough people did it, it would cease to exist.

Bonnie Steinbock
University at Albany/SUNY

Dear Executive Director:
I wish to voice an impression of mine concerning trends in journal publication within the field in order to raise two questions: whether my own impressions correctly represent real developments in publication, and, if so, what might be done to address the situation. Some twenty years ago when I began sending articles to journals, I found generally that I would receive an answer, either pro or con, within the period of three to four months. Recently I have found that this is not the case. One paper I recently submitted elicited no response except the usual acknowledgement of receipt for some nine months, another, submitted to a different journal, was held for about a year, and a third, submitted to yet another journal, was held without a decision for a year and a half. Consultation with some colleagues has confirmed these impressions.

If my experience is indicative of a real trend in publication, then there is a clear problem to address. One issue, of course, is that questions in philosophy, as in other fields, can develop rather quickly, and untimely publication can therefore mean that a valuable insight might fail to appear in the public forum at the moment when it would be most useful for informing and perhaps redirecting discussion. A second issue concerns the impact of delayed publication on the careers of philosophers. For those of us, I take it the majority in the profession, who work in institutions that make little provision in time and resources for research (which seems now to be more often the case with increased student populations and declining financial resources), a major paper can represent a year or two of work. Given the fact that a paper may require three or four submissions before being accepted, extended periods of editorial review can mean that a philosopher’s only scholarly output for a couple of years might not be accepted for publication for another two to three years, making it difficult to plan reasonably to meet research demands for tenure and promotion decisions.

I would be pleased to hear from journal editors concerning whether the issues I am raising are real, and, if so, what obstacles they encounter in their attempts to offer timely decisions to authors. I would also be pleased to hear about possible solutions to the present situation. Can whatever obstacles present themselves be remedied to speed up publication decisions? Or, if not, could we lift profession-wide the longstanding practice of submission to only one publisher at a time, allowing multiple journals to consider a paper at once? I can imagine this might entail some extra effort for the editorial staff of journals, but it might be well worth it to ameliorate the problems caused by delayed publication.

Richard Field
Northwest Missouri State University
American Indians in Philosophy

Dear Executive Director:
I am a community college philosophy professor who has been in the American Philosophical Association for ten years. I am an American Indian (Oglala Sioux). Back in 1990, Dr. Archie Bahm, a former philosophy professor of mine at the University of New Mexico, did a survey of the make-up of the APA. Of about 8,700 APA members at that time, about 100 were Black, 100 Hispanic and around 8 were American Indian. Fourteen years later, I don’t think much has changed in the APA. There is supposed to be some sort of a new, updated survey, but I don’t know when it will come out. I know for sure that there has not been a significant increase in American Indian membership in the APA because I have contact with my Indian colleagues. You can come to your own conclusions, but in fourteen years the American Philosophical Association has basically made no progress in recruiting American Indians! Could it be that the 99% white APA is as racist as the Ku Klux Klan like Dr. Leonard Harris of Purdue University wrote in a letter, some years ago, to the APA?

I have had published lots of short stories, an essay, and a novel (Stacey’s Story/ winner of the 1992 “Native Writers Circle of the Americas”-First Book Award/ the only book award given to American Indians by American Indians). However, when I tried to get a journal article published in a philosophy journal that deals with a subject matter I specialize in, I got the biggest run around I have ever seen in my life. I won’t go into all the details, but the whole incident reeked of racism.

One final comment. Despite the fact that there are so few American Indians in the American Philosophical Association, we have managed to produce one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth Century: Vine Deloria, Jr. Wasicu (White man) Nanpe nisapelo (Your hands are dirty)….

Robert L. Perea
Central Arizona College

Dear Executive Director:

I hope that you and the APA's Board of Officers will consider an issue that is critical to the future of philosophy in America.

Several university presses, including California and Northwestern, have abandoned the publication of philosophy books. The President of another principal university has recently confirmed that this is also the policy at its press: "[W]e have decided to specialize our publications in certain fields. For instance, we still publish scholarly monographs in many disciplines other that philosophy, such as political science, history, literature and art history."

This policy impedes the exchange of ideas, and reduces opportunities for those who publish to win tenure and promotion. It mocks the title of the doctorates these universities bestow. Worse, it implies disregard or contempt for the reflection, analysis, and speculation that distinguish vigorous societies. One imagines that marketability and profit are also principal reasons for the policy, but these presses continue to publish in other disciplines whose books sell few copies. It is specifically philosophy they reject.

People respond to this development in one or more of four ways: philosophy has earned neglect; journal articles diminish the importance of books; electronic publishing will eventually save the day; or we must resist this practice for the benefit of the profession, and because philosophic reflection is critical to living cultures whether or not its benefits are apparent. If all four points are valid, the fourth is determining: we must respond.

But who should respond, and how? Noisy self-justification will be less effective than a plan appropriate to our self-scrutiny. Why are we so easily discounted: is it our scholasticism, or the condescension with which we respond to merely human problems? Why has the APA failed to represent the interests of the philosophic community to both academic publishers and the wider public? Is this an organizational problem? Or is it indifference?

I hope that you and the Board of Officers will give these matters your urgent attention.

Yours truly,
David Weissman

Dear Executive Director:

In the past 2 days the labor situation at the St. Francis has become clearer. The union, local 2, is boycotting the Westin-St. Francis and has asked organizations, including the Pacific APA specifically, not to hold meetings or conventions there. From a moral and professional point of view, this seems to me the central issue, not whether there will actually be picketers at the hotel during the weekend in question. Nevertheless, my understanding from Phil Gasper's memo is that there *will* be such picketers.

I think that the cost of holding our convention under these circumstances is very great. Whether we like it or not, to do so is to take a side in the labor dispute. In my opinion, it is taking the wrong side. After a wide polling of their respective members, the leadership of the OAH and the AAA decided to move their conference from similarly boycotted San Francisco hotels. Yes, there is of course a cost to a conference and to the activities included in it to moving a conference. But those costs and that disruption seem to me, as it seemed to the historians and the anthropologists, to be preferable to the greater moral cost of taking a stand against a vulnerable group of workers (who have the good fortune to be represented by a responsible union). It makes Philosophy as a profession look quite bad to stand with the hotel rather than the workers--among other academic professions and among members of the public tuned in to the issues involved. When we hold a convention at a hotel, we make the implicit assumption that the hotel is not treating its workers unjustly. By holding the convention we give our imprimatur to that proposition. If we then come to have reason to believe that proposition to be false, we have a strong reason to do everything we can to hold our convention elsewhere.

I don't think the argument that the executive of a professional organization is permitted to look only at the impact of a decision to move a convention on its own members, and is not permitted to look at larger moral issues, is very compelling. It is certainly less compelling regarding philosophers than it is regarding historians and anthropologists. We are supposed to be professionally concerned with these questions.

I do not think that it is acceptable to hold our meeting at the St. Francis, and I will not participate in a conference that is held there. However, I would very much like my own session to be held, and, with others, am in the process of negotiating an alternative site, perhaps at the University of San Francisco. If the official meeting is held at the St. Francis, I will be among those who will be outside joining the picket line. I feel that my professional self-respect requires this. I do not want the public, the workers, and members of other disciplines, to think that philosophers choose to ignore issues of justice in their professional decisions. I will be embarrassed and ashamed if we hold our meetings at the hotel, and will want to publicly dissociate myself from the stance that this is an acceptable decision.

I do not understand why your board did not inform the membership of this labor situation 2 months ago, as the historians did, so that there could have been a wider discussion, among the membership, of the issues involved, and so that people could have had time to make travel plans in accordance with their professional interests and their conscience. I think the current arrangement is fraught with peril. People will arrive in San Francisco without knowing that a large number of their colleagues believe that they should not be attending a conference at the venue in question. A fair number of them, at least, will think that if they had known about this, they would not have come to the conference. Others who are less clear on the moral issues involved will find a more chaotic, diminished, and disorganized conference than they had expected. I imagine that a large number of people will feel that the official leadership of the Pacific APA has not done a very good job of providing appropriate leadership.

If the conference is officially held at the St. Francis, I feel that the leadership is obliged to do everything possible to facilitate the holding of sessions elsewhere. You said you would let registrants and attendees know about alternative arrangements. That would be good. For example, you could perhaps publish and distribute a flier with the alternative sessions, and instructions as to how to get to the alternative site. Perhaps there are other ways to assist this process as well. For example, several years ago, when the OAH had a similar labor situation at their annual meeting in St. Louis, they provided transportation for their members from the downtown area where most of them were staying to the changed convention site (at the University of St. Louis). If there is an "alternative site" for us (e.g. at the University of San Francisco), perhaps the APA could provide some transportation (e.g. a shuttle) to that site.

It seems to me, in addition, that the Executive Board should now make available to the membership the list of hotels published by the union that are acceptable to the union, in order to facilitate members who do not wish to stay at the St. Francis finding alternative lodgings.

Lawrence Blum
Professor of Philosophy
University of Massachusetts, Boston
(scheduled participant in "author/critics" session at Pacific APA)
(member of APA Inclusiveness Committee)

Dear Executive Director,

Further to my last email [in support of moving the Pacific Meeting to another site]..., I am calling for an investigation of how the decision to keep the Pacific APA meeting at a labor-boycotted hotel was made. This investigation needs to be conducted by the APA, on a national level, as a matter of professional ethics. I am calling for this as a member of the APA who is on the current Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco.

Naomi Zack
University of Oregon

Dear Executive Director,

I'm writing to offer a publisher's perspective on the discussion of the conference organizers' lack of communication about the labor dispute at the St Francis Hotel in advance of the recent Pacific Division meetings. I think it's in the APA's interest to inform participating exhibitors in advance of any serious problem at a conference site that has the potential to reduce the number of actual participants and I'll explain this below. Exhibitors make significant investments in each divisional meeting and they
need enough information to make good business decisions about their participation if they are to continue to do so. I believe primary responsibility for sharing such information rests with the divisional conference organizers since they know the most about local conference venues and I've already contacted the divisional Secretary-Treasurers about this. I hope each division can work in cooperation with the National Office to adopt a uniform set of procedures in this matter and I'm sending this letter to further that objective.

The Philosophy Documentation Center first received word of the major labor dispute at the conference hotel in an e-mail from the National Office on March 16. While we certainly appreciated your message it was much too late to be of real value to us. We'd shipped our display materials for the meeting on March 9 and once we did this we were committed to the meeting. I'm sure other publishers had arranged such shipments even earlier. We selected a range of materials for this meeting on the assumption that we were sending a representative to manage a complicated display, and we sent enough material to fill three display tables on the assumption that there would be about 1,000 participants. For us this number still justifies the expense of sending a representative, something we don't do at smaller meetings. In those cases we select different materials in smaller quantity that don't require someone from our office to be on site. If we think a meeting is going to be very small or very poorly attended then we don't participate at all. We therefore have a range of display options with different costs for conferences of different sizes. Exhibitors expenses at conferences include the cost of display space, shipping of display materials, travel, and lodging. High energy costs translate into higher prices for these things and all publishers have an interest in reducing these expenses when possible. Had we known the extent of the labor dispute at the St Francis Hotel we probably would have reduced the size of our display in the expectation of fewer participants and perhaps also not sent a representative. This would have been a business judgement about the likely costs and benefits of our investment and at the very least would have helped us reduce our shipping expenses. We might not have participated at all, depending on the wishes of the dozens of organizations, journals, and publishers we represent. We should have had an opportunity to touch base with them about this, and they too might have wanted to change or reduce their participation through us. Either way timely notice would have made a financial difference to us and our participation in an event at a boycotted hotel may yet a topic of discussion among our many clients.

A source of particular concern to us in this instance is the fact that there was a financial incentive for the Pacific Division not to share information with publishers about the labor dispute. All money paid to the APA by publishers for display space goes to the divisions, giving them an incentive to sell as much display space as possible. Sharing information with publishers about the labor dispute might well have reduced the size of the displays and thus reduced the amount of revenue generated by publishers for this meeting. I've discussed this at some length with the Pacific Division's Secretary-Treasurer who has assured me that this was simply an oversight and I have no reason to question anyone's word. But even the appearance of this kind of conflict of interest undermines trust and is just not necessary. A commitment to communicate with the exhibitors would help address this problem and the Pacific Division has agreed to do this in the future. I think all exhibitors would appreciate an explicit commitment from all of the divisional conference organizers to provide at least two months advance notice of any serious problem that has the potential to reduce the number of actual conference participants. I understand that circumstances vary and that the APA can't control every aspect of each meeting. I'm only asking for an explicit, good faith commitment from all of the divisional conference organizers to communicate appropriately with exhibitors so they can make informed decisions about their conference investments. I think this can only benefit each division and the APA over the long term.

Finally, let me thank you and the members of the National Office staff for your work in San Francisco which helped all exhibitors manage a confusing situation in a professional manner.

Sincerely,

George Leaman, Director
Philosophy Documentation Center
P. O. Box 7147, Charlottesville, Virginia 22906-7147
Tel: 434-220-3300, Fax: 434-220-3301, Web: www.pdcnet.org

Dear Executive Director:

Some of us are more equal than others.

It may come as a surprise to some of the newer members of the professorial profession that professors in different disciplines are paid at different rates. Thus, a professor of finance could have a six-figure salary, while a
professor of philosophy having equal seniority and academic accomplishment could receive half that much at the same institution.

I must admit to never having given this a thought until quite recently, despite my two decades in the ranks. I entered the profession out of a combination of love and inertia; I liked what I had been doing in graduate
school and just wanted to keep on doing it.

I had also assumed that the professor's job is a calling, for which we are willing to accept less than top dollar compensation, finding satisfaction and value instead in the activities themselves. Granted also, there are numerous "perks" in this business: no boss, a flexible schedule with long "vacations," job security, the freedom to speak what is on our mind, and so forth. Why then worry about salaries? We only need enough money to continue
doing what we love to do. Concern with money is a distraction, and also happens to be the tail wagging the dog of what is, for us, a vocation.

Not so for everyone, it turns out. This was brought home to me when the faculty at my university were asked to devise a salary equity plan for themselves, which the administration promised to bring before the board if we could find agreement among ourselves. The proposal that was finally approved by the faculty set various equity targets not only by rank but also by academic discipline. In general those in the business and engineering fields have higher targets than those in the arts and humanities and sciences. Under pressure to achieve unanimity or have no plan at all, the latter caved to the former in the faculty vote.

The rationale for these differential targets was that they reflect the prevailing wages at comparable institutions of higher learning. Thus, it would enable us both to attract and to retain top-quality faculty in the various fields. In other words, the ultimate appeal was to the welfare of our university as a whole.

But those of us who theorize about ethics know that welfare is not always an argument stopper. The appeal to justice may have a wholly different basis and, furthermore, justice trumps welfare. The ultimate assertion of the
latter position is "fiat justitia ruat coelum" (let justice be done though the heavens may fall). But without insisting on that extreme, which is not relevant to the present case anyway, one can certainly call for some attention to be paid to considerations other than the optimum expected utility of a proposed course of action or policy.

Thus, it can be argued that salary equity has not only to do with our external position relative to comparable institutions but also to our internal relations. Why should, say, a professor of engineering receive a higher salary than a professor of art, all other things equal? Where is the fairness in that? Both are hired to do the same job: teach, do research, and perform service. Both are judged by those same three criteria when up for tenure or promotion. What, then, can justify the differentiation of salary levels as a matter of general policy?

I think an instructive comparison can be made to salaries based on sex. Suppose the facts showed that men and women command different average salaries at equivalent ranks, etc., across the profession. Would it follow that, according to these "market data," an institution should mandate comparably different "equity targets" for its own male and female faculty? Of course not. We recognize that this would be flat-out unethical (not to mention, illegal). The reason? Sex is not a relevant difference to our jobs as professors. But is not the same true of our respective academic disciplines?

One misconception, I believe, is that the professor of engineering is an engineer and the professor of art is an artist, and on this basis the former can command a higher salary. But it seems to me they are both professors
first and foremost. Let the professor of engineering quit her job and practice as an engineer if she prefers; then she may have the higher income, but without the security and privileges enjoyed by academics, nor, for that matter, the full-time commitment we professors are supposed to have to our teaching, research, and service to the institution that employs us.

This has been a bitter pill even for me to swallow, since I conceive myself as a philosopher. But I now recognize that that is not what I am getting paid for. (This also solves the puzzle of why I find I have very little time for philosophizing as a professor of philosophy!)

On the other hand, it is also not the case that we are simply educators. As noble a profession as that is, ours is the profession of professor. Our job description includes centrally the idea of research or the advancement of knowledge (or, in our case, whatever it is that professional philosophers do qua philosophers), not only its conveyance. It is certainly discussable which is the cart and which the horse, as research can of course contribute to one's teaching. But I maintain that our identity as professors includes research as an independent component as well as an instrumental one. Indeed, historically, folks like us probably started teaching as a means to supporting their researches.

My argument for genuine salary equity among professors in different disciplines has been based on the justice of the case. But in the end I would lay claim to a welfare advantage as well. It is simply demoralizing to a significant percentage of a faculty population to be officially deemed less valuable, in the crass material sense, than other colleagues of equivalent academic achievement and experience. From this I think it follows that, over time, the resentment felt because of this insult heaped upon injury will drag down the institution by distracting some of us from a sense of common purpose and dedication to institutional goals. We will be that much more likely simply to "retire" (while still drawing our paychecks) to more personal pursuits.

What, then, do we profess to be? Are we not professors?

Yours truly,

Joel Marks
Member, APA Eastern Division
Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of New Haven
West Haven, CT 06516

Dear Executive Director :

Not being a member of the APA, I do not normally have occasion to read its letters, either in print or on the Internet. I did, however, come across one on your web page from David Weissman claiming that the Northwestern University Press no longer publishes philosophy books.

This is untrue. As a philosophy series editor at Northwestern Press, I have experienced only helpfulness and support from the Press and its staff. Their commitment is ongoing.

That said, Weissman';s larger point stands. The American philosophical profession, I fear, is headed over a cliff, and Weissman's point--along with those of John Lachs and, indeed, of many others--need to be not only reflected upon but acted upon.

John McCumber
Professor
Germanic Languages
UCLA
212 Royce Hall, Box 95139
Los Angeles CA 90095-1539
310 825 3220
johnmccumber.com

Dear Executive Director

I don't think that this organization does enough to bring philosophy, or the tools of philosophy, to communities and individuals who are likely to never enter a philosophy class (e.g., K-12, prison inmates, seniors). I believe that social/educational outreach should play a major role in this organization's mission. Instead, the organization seems to be more about professional self-aggrandizement and advancing people's careers.

Some time ago (and I apologize for not remembering clearly the exact nature of what I received) I was asked to vote on a question about the Iraq war. But the way that the question was structured slanted it against the war. It's not about being for or against the war, but about engaging issues and questions honestly and fairly. Whoever wrote the question, and decided to send it out to be voted on, did so in such disingenuous way that I was turned off.

The organization has an extremely narrow view of philosophy, and what it means to "do philosophy". I work with prisoners using the Socratic method (Vlastos' formulation) to engage questions found in the Platonic dialogues. The APA seems to have little room for my project and others that occupy what it might consider to be on the fringe of philosophy. I've been told that because my project did not deal with "close textual readings of Plato's works" that it was "extra-topical" and not really appropriate for the APA and/or APA meetings.

This is an organization that could just be and do so much more. But it doesn't. In many ways it represents what's wrong about institutionalizing philosophy. That doesn't mean that it doesn't do good things, or doesn't serve a useful purpose as a professional organization, it does. What it does mean is that by limiting itself it simultaneously limits its audience and its potential to for educational outreach.

Regards,
Peter Boghossian

Dear Executive Director

I am the national campus director of Students for Academic Freedom, the organization responsible for the Academic Bill of Rights. Our organization has published a statement on our website today responding to the APA's commentary on the Academic Bill of Rights. We would be interested in any response from your organization, and would appreciate if you would publish this in the "letters to the executive director" section of your website.

Sincerely,
Sara Dogan

Philosophers' Empty Suits

What follows is a response to the American http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19029 American Philosophical Association's attack on the Academic Bill of Rights. This attack is typical of the entire academic campaign against the Academic Bill of Rights which, as we have pointed out previously http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17895, is almost entirely based on misrepresentation of what the bill actually says and a conflation of proposed legislation with the bill itself. Thus it has been claimed (falsely) that the Academic Bill of Rights would impose political criteria on the academic curriculum. In the first place, the Academic Bill of Rights is a proposed university policy. The legislation has been initiated because universities are not interested in holding their faculties to their own academic freedom standards. In the second place, all the legislation proposed is in the form of resolutions and therefore would also not impose any political restrictions on academic behavior. We recently invited two professors Russel http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18947 Russell Jacoby and Kevin http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19029 Kevin Mattson -- to debate these issues in FrontPage magazine. Both professors began by advancing arguments based on the standard misrepresentations of the opposition to the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately just as the discussion moved to real questions, both professors withdrew. At this point in the general debate with our opponents we are forced to conclude that their intellectual case against the Academic Bill of Rights is non-existent.--David Horowitz

Response to the American Philosophical Association

By Sara Dogan

The American Philosophical Association's new report Threats to Academic Freedom issued by the Committee for the Defense of the Professional Rights of Philosophers, echoes the tired and faulty rhetoric of the American Association of University Professors in criticizing the Academic Bill of Rights and the academic freedom campaign it has inspired.

False Allegations

Many of the allegations made against the Academic Bill of Rights and our organization, Students for Academic Freedom are demonstrably false. The report claims that our organization s website maintains a complaint center where students are invited to post instances of liberal bias they have experienced. This is simply untrue. The instructions for this site which are entirely non-political state: If your rights have been abused in a college course (e.g. unfair grading, one-sided lectures, stacked reading lists), please report this abuse. Several students have reported complaints about conservative professors to our site, which have been posted.

The introduction to the complaint site also underlines the reasons for its existence, which bear no relation to the APA s critique, notably that we are providing this bulletin board to illustrate the kinds of complaints that students have.Opponents of the Academic Bill of Rights have widely misrepresented it as giving students a license to sue professors and/or legislators a right to step in and fire professors or tell them what they can or cannot do. The Academic Bill of Rights does no such thing. Ideally we are asking universities to adopt these policies which are fully in accord with the principles of academic freedom established in American education over the last 90 years. Universities should put their own grievance machinery in place for assessing student complaints and providing a means of redress.

The report s authors again reveal themselves to be ignorant or simply disregardful of the facts when they claim that according to SAF, Support for abortion rights and environmental legislation and intolerance of religious faith (e.g. opposition to teaching intelligent design along with evolution) are also considered evidence of liberal bias.

This is manifestly untrue. Students for Academic Freedom has supported a liberal student at Foothill College in California whose conservative ethics professors used the classroom to indoctrinate students in anti-abortion views,