This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in. I like how the author explains the pyramid scheme of academia:
>The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon.
As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.
> This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject.
I don't think he's talking about professorships, just research positions in general. My institution is ranked about 50th in the world in computer science. And basically all of our PhD graduates can get good research positions.
There are PhD research subjects and then there are PhD research subjects.
Happily (/s) by the time people are done with their PhD's many know not to continue and the odds improve. I think the over-subscription on PhD positions is far worse than the one on post docs, the latter in general being very specialised and so restricting the application pool.
Of course you can. Maybe not at work, "on the record", but if there's a social gathering, you might, say, offer your view in a frank conversation about their future prospects.
I can, and do. But I am mostly ignored by my friends and co-workers who are PhD students. All of the Postdocs I know seem to be far more aware of their situation.
>This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in.
No, it's far worse. For one thing, the people who do actually get professorships do very valuable research,at least a large proportion of them, whereas the philosophy professors are mostly doing junk.
For another, there are lots of biology jobs in industry and government, but basically none outside academia.
I know it's not exactly a sympatic line of inquiry, but how good are you actually at philosophy, if you expect a philosophy degree from a 25-30-rank university to be a marketable credential?
I agree fully that education for educations sake is valuable, but that line of argument generally explicitly rejects first class consideration of commercial applications. Just don't be surprised when there turn out to be no commercial applications (or very, very few, and those few getting snapped up by the top members of the field).
Reminds me of an anecdote. GE Moore's wife met Wittgenstein, at the time GE Moore and Wittgenstein were some of the most famous philosophers in the world. Wittgenstein asked what she did, and she said "I work at a jam factory". Wittgenstein was apparently delighted and said, "thank god someone is doing something useful."
Some of the things described are eerily similar to what I observe in IT.
> As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game of who’s-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure committees.
Not specific to IT: This description applies to management behavior in large corps as well. In fact, a lot of things humans do end up popularity contests.
> I could hear [the protesters outside the lecture hall] chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable.
Programmers arguing about indentation styles while their inventions drastically change how society works on all scales.
> [Image]
> An accurate representation of your average philosophy grad student.
Also an accurate representation of your average Silicon Valley startup "C" "E" "O" if you add a Macbook and a Starbucks cup.
There is some point in history of a profession where the people engaging in this profession begin to look and sound like a parody of it. When the stereotype (stuff of jokes) is status quo and any deviance or individualism is considered "not serious enough" or unprofessional. Why is that? Is that a thing of academia? Can we do something about it, or is it just the way it goes?
In business. I'm kind of a jerk of all trades, with a science degree and some tech skills that got me into an engineering job. From there, to project management, and eventually to people management. I got sick of it and went back to being a regular worker. Oddly enough they were willing to promote me out of management, so I made out OK in the bargain.
I realize it's a bit cynical of me to say this, but this is the free market at work.
There can only be oh so many philosophy professors. Assuming a professor career lasts 40 years and each of these programs produces 10 graduates a year, how can they fit in academia? Maybe before you enroll you need to be made to sign a disclaimer that the opportunities are very scarce in the field.
It's not goods, it's a labor market. And when supply is out of whack with demand, your bargaining power goes through the floor -- which leads to situations like this.
What is really nasty is the fact that there is a huge demand for phd students as they drive research forward. So they deduce there will be demand once they graduate, which is not the case.
In STEM there is certainly a shortage of academic jobs for qualified PhD holders. Not everyone who gets a PhD is equal, but academic stem wouldn't lose anything by being able to recruit more of the people they train.
Why does one even need a PhD to teach philosophy? A certain rather famous philosopher spent his days milling about the city center, accosting random passers-by and instructing them in philosophy whether they were interested or not.
If you're referring to Socrates, then yes, but it helped that he was a bit like Erdős in his utter lack of interest in physical comfort and financial security.
I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.
I admire the work of academic philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer or David Chalmers (which, yes, includes the "metametaphysics" mocked in the OP). And the few philosophers I've talked to in person, like Huw Price, left a very good impression on me. And their work is important to the future of humanity: I've talked to many people who changed their whole careers after reading Singer's The Life You Can Save or Bostrom's Superintelligence.
At the same time, it's true that academic careers are surprisingly terrible on average and fewer people should choose them.
Philosophy was actually pretty popular in the US up until 1950 or so. In particular, for the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century the country had Pragmatism, a philosophy designed for America.
But then the field got taken over by Logical Positivists and Analytic philosophers following Russell and early Wittgenstein,and they tried to turn it into a rigorous and mostly irrelevant science. And in the meantime in the humanities people turned to continental philosophy and eventually postmodernism,and in political science there were the Straussians. All of these went off in very different directions from the country, and as a consequence attracted followers who didn't have much useful or persuasive to say to the vast majority of people.
There are exceptions, like Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer. But academic philosophy today is mostly irrelevant.
How can you be smart enough to get into an elite graduate program in Philosophy and not be aware that this is exactly what academic life is going to be like?
In the 1990s in Computer Science people were well aware that being an academic could result in Professors getting less money than their graduates first jobs.
Is it because everyone still thinks they are a special snowflake and they will get great prizes immediately or something?
(edit) Should have added. Some of the smarted people I know also went into academia and some have really made it. It's just that well, there are so many academic 'refugees' who leave because the job prospects are dire and this has been the case for decades. And so many of those people are very bright and hardworking too.
Lets consider the other side, how can a "elite" graduate program in philosophy be dumb enough to accept someone with very incorrect expectations? A PhD student dropping out is costly for them too.
You don't become a philosopher when you are a researcher at a philosophy department. If departments do this, they are mistaken. What you do is basically history of philosophy. You can be a philosopher / thinker at the same time, but you are not necessarily a philosopher if you are a researcher in philosophy, or you don't necessarily need to participate in academia if you want to do philosophy.
You left out the combativeness, the fact that hardly anyone will read your work, the unnecessary inaccessibility of the field, the low pay of post-grad work and poor odds of getting tenure, and the academic equivalent of pagerank gaming to gain notice.
Even by an analytic philosopher’s standard, your summary is rather uncharitable and reductive.
I would characterize that as the standard “I didn’t like it” for academia, listing its well known problems. More interesting would be a discussion about why the support systems in place didn’t protect her from them, but this is simply a list of common problems.
That's common for many kinds of specialised work of any kind I feel, and certainly for academia. Or just in general actually, how many man-years of work aren't floating around unread on the bottom ends of amazon book lists for instance?
Also, the number of people that have to read it should be more like 5: yourself, your supervisor, and the examination committee that is at least 3 other people.
Seems true for academia in general. Most CS papers are utterly useless drivel, too (speaking from my own stuff; nice projects, but completely useless from an academic point of view).
> The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities.
Or an even better explanation which also explains STEM disparities: men tend to like subjects that deal with things, women tend to like subjects that deal with people (things vs. people is well studied gendered phenomenon). Notice how she seems to spend a lot of time talking about how boring, unimportant and disconnected her topic is from the real world...
Considering that one of the main points of the article was that academic philosophy was disconnected from the 'real world', the fact that the demographic spread within academic philosophy is so narrow and and out of whack with the world at large is probably fairly relevant.
It’s the way it was written. A negative point then point out they’re white men to amplify the negativity.
I think she has some good points but seems to have a strong world view that is biasing the article away from her key points. Not that there is anything wrong with expressing your self this way but she does seem to have something against white men.
Would you say that a disproportion alone is an indication of racism? If so, would you expect every single metric to be a perfect 50/50 proportion or are we doomed to always be confined to - a bigger or smaller - discrimination, because we'll always deviate in some metrics?
Not necessarily, but for a field that concerns itself with drawing conclusions about the human condition, often relying on experiential evidence, something has certainly gone very wrong if so few women are part of it.
Well if it's not racism, then what explains it? And what explains why the ratio of women to men gets significantly lower past Bachelor's level degrees in philosophy? I really don't think it's contentious to say that that there's a severe cultural exclusion within philosophy and the way it tends to be taught.
what do you propose is happening in these philosophy classes that is so racist and sexist to chase away all the women and ethnic minorities? It must be like an Ivy League frat house to go from 50/50 to 95/5 in gender representation.
It's a number of things: some of which the article explains. I think the two most important reasons are that there's a culture that often mistakes aggressive debate for good philosophy. Not that white men tend to have these traits, but the people with these traits tend to be white men. Secondly, your perception of how relevant, or how alien and detached current philosophical thought seems to be, is going to depend on where you sit yourself; someone with a privileged upbringing is going to be much more comfortable sitting through a course that treats injustice, for example, as an abstract concept.
so correct me if I'm wrong but the serious problem with racism and sexism in academic philosophy is that academics want to debate (which involves critiquing ideas) and that they want to discuss ideas and concepts rather than taking to the streets in protest or otherwise skipping the ideas and going straight to execution? I recognise I'm being a bit reductionist but you have to see these criticisms are insane.
[edit] or at least, to call them racist/sexist is insane. I can somewhat understand the latter criticism coming from the perspective of someone who wants to do something about injustice, but then why are you in academic philosophy? That isn't where real-world change happens, people like that would be better off getting involved in social activism, whether they continue working in academia or not.
It is of course more akin to anti-semitism. Which is in essence a resentment against a more successful and influential class of people.
To be sure in all of these divides there is some substance to both sides (otherwise there wouldn't be an issue, all racism would marginalised flat earth level nonsense).
Also there are big problems with your conclusion. Philosophy departments are going to be overwhelmingly left leaning, so shouldn't that be an environment that doesn't exclude? Unless we conclude that virtually all left wing positions are just posturing, or that the problem isn't racism.
>The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon.
As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.