{"id":7674,"date":"2014-09-25T18:42:47","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T18:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/09\/25\/susan-haack-philosophy-profession-in-thrall-of-dreadful-rankings\/"},"modified":"2014-09-25T18:42:47","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T18:42:47","slug":"susan-haack-philosophy-profession-in-thrall-of-dreadful-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/09\/25\/susan-haack-philosophy-profession-in-thrall-of-dreadful-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Haack: Philosophy Profession in Thrall of Dreadful Rankings"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following portion of an interview<\/a> by Richard Carrier of Susan Haack puts one in mind of Brian Leiter whose main disservice to academic philosophy has been his contribution to its hyperprofessionalization.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

S.H.:<\/strong> I had begun to express concern about the condition of professional philosophy well before 2001;[37<\/a>] and I\u2019m sorry to say that our profession seems to me in even worse shape now than it did then. It has become terribly hermetic and self-absorbed; bogged down in pretentious and pseudo-technical jargon; in the thrall of those dreadful \u201crankings\u201d; and splintered into narrow specialisms and\u2014even worse\u2014cliques identified, not by a specialty, but by a shared view on a specialized issue. A friend of mine put it in a nutshell when she described professional philosophy as \u201cin a nose-dive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The reasons for the over-specialization are no doubt very complicated. But one relevant factor, I\u2019m sure, is departmental rankings by area; and another is the ever-increasing pressure to publish, now extending even to graduate students. And behind this, there\u2019s that ever-growing class of professional university administrators who have long ago put their academic work on permanent hold and, unable to judge a person\u2019s work themselves, can only rely on surrogate measures like rankings, \u201cproductivity,\u201d grant money brought in, citations, and such. Inevitably, many professors and would-be professors soon internalize the same distorted values; and many soon realize that a relatively easy way to publish a lot, fast, is to associate yourself with some clique, to join a citation cartel, to split your work into minimally publishable units, and of course to repeat yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/div>\n
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The following portion of an interview by Richard Carrier of Susan Haack puts one in mind of Brian Leiter whose main disservice to academic philosophy has been his contribution to its hyperprofessionalization. S.H.: I had begun to express concern about the condition of professional philosophy well before 2001;[37] and I\u2019m sorry to say that our profession … Continue reading “Susan Haack: Philosophy Profession in Thrall of Dreadful Rankings”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-brian-leiter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}