"Just because I am disgruntled don't mean I ain't right. Nor without a good reason."My department's Leiter ranking in Political Philosophy as of 2009: Top 3 My AOS: Distributive Justice, Social and Political Philosophy My AOC: Philosophy of Economics, Applied Ethics and Ethics of Information, Agent-based Modeling and Formal Epistemology, Philosophy of Science From what I hear from people and see in stats, the following is not an exception, so I do not mean to claim that our program is worse than others or is not even better in some respects than other programs. The reason I am interested in theories of justice is because I am interested in justice, not just theory. Initially I noticed a few problems and, wanting to make my department even better, I proceeded to develop relationships with faculty, served on a committee, watched my friends serve on committees, and talked to the chair and some faculty about the things that I thought needed urgent improvement. However, the situation here and my inability to do something about it and how faculty view it, over the years, has made me quite angry. The U of A's philosophy department is a strange place by my lights and might well be much better than other departments overall, both for students' futures and presents if they decide to try to make a living doing philosophy full-time and cannot get into MIT or NYU (or maybe Princeton). I suspect in the long-run it might suck any PhD program you go, especially outside fields with clear industry demand, but I do not claim to know although graduate student satisfaction surveys tend to look grim for many programs elsewhere. That said, some of our students have started taking anti-depressants after 3-4 years of being in the program. Common complaints by other students in the department: - Teaching loads are way too high and get in the way of doing one's own work. - There is virtually no conference travel money, which is a critical component of professional development. - There are way too many course requirements and hoops to jump through (17 courses at present plus other stuff. "I just want to focus on my own research!"). - Stipends are too low (even for Tucson) without adequate annual increases, while inflation is noticable. - The program takes too long: 7 to 9 years is typical, although some either drop out or linger for longer. - The standard workweek (if you want to keep up, whatever that means) is 80 hours a week, which in my opinion is not sustainable for more than two years without exposing the person to significant health and lifestyle risks. The program length becomes an issue as you get older because of the funding situation: it is easier to do good philosophy when you get paid 40k a year than 15k and have adequate healthcare and retirement benefits, and also because your funding is only guaranteed for 5 years and you'll be on your toes after that with not everyone securing funding. This will amount to a little over 600 bucks every two weeks before taxes, with three-month furloughs in the summer. Don't forget to take into account the need for a car here, as well as money for flying home and to conferences, plus books and an occasional computer. For comparison, NYU requires ten courses, much lower teaching loads, has better funding (you don't need a car in NYC either), and you will get to go to conferences and be networked into the North-East professional philosophy scene (because of its location and perhaps because they might have the kind of generous travel funding that Penn has?) Programs in Europe and Australia require no coursework (so you can only take what you need and focus on your own research from day 1) and no teaching (so again, you can focus on your work, get your degree in 3 years, and then start getting good at teaching with the dissertation behind you). Some good programs also offer much better stipends; the highest I heard of in a distributive justice-related program (at a top school with a famous advisor) was 27k with travel and good real healthcare. Penn's phil funding might currently similarly be around 22k during the year plus 5k for summer teaching plus two years of guaranteed fellowship time, humane teaching loads, and generous travel money from the graduate college. In my opinion, if you cannot get at least something like that, you should not even bother and should go work for a non-profit instead if you are so inclined (or do anything else for that matter that gets you at least 27k). My personal complaint is that the program is misadvertised on our department website raising false expectations in those who decide to come here. If you are promised a fellowship, (a) no matter what promises you hear, unless it is written in blood in your contract and there is no fine print in the contract or in university's handbooks, you cannot count on receiving fellowship time (relief from teaching) in the years ahead and (b) the department has also lured prospective students here with a promise, made in writing, to give the student fellowship time in the first semester of the first year and has then, without prior warning to the student, reneged on this promise, postponing the fellowship by a semester, and then by another semester still. One student I have in mind found about his/her situation in his/her first-year when, surprised, s/he saw his/her name assigned to three sections of 30 undergrads each instead of the promised fellowship, without even a prior courtesy in-person warning of this change. Different things seem to go wrong in different individual cases, so (b) is only an example. Some of our most successful graduates, for example, have had visa issues/fears because of the department's unwillingness to write a letter of support when the student left the country to spend a semester at a highly prestigious department to work with a very famous philosopher there. The department is sometimes also very accomodating (especially towards people the department likes and who work hard and do not complain), but the overall pattern is one I find questionable, especially because these accomodations are made as exceptions to the very treatment and conditions the department has created. The few students lucky to be on continuing fellowship support can easily forget this, as can those who get sporadic relief from teaching and are so overworked that they feel grateful and feel like they are truly being rewarded for hard work. There are also those who receive gifts from family and/or rely on spousal support and perhaps their experience is also different, though regardless of their financial situation, they would still likely be TA slaves. One student wrote to the listserv (rightly) saying that "We should not let the department administration marginalize individual students, and cut them off at the last moment." The student then wrote the following, which I think is right but which might, unfortunately, be wishful thinking: "At this point of uncertainty we should maintain a consistent front. We should make clear, if needed, that the administration is not merely an intermediary between the higher financial authorities and the students; they have responsibility to actively and exhaustively pursue every possibility to find funding for the senior students." My personal pet peeve is time-to-degree disclosure (the dept website gives the appearance that you should or can defend in your fifth year, which to my knowledge only three people were able to do in the last decade and all three had outside financial support -- their spouses -- and all three had significant relief from teaching). I voiced this complaint very loudly to the chair and some of the faculty and it was met with rationalizations and a surprising amount of resistance. Here are some of the things I was told by faculty when I questioned our practices, responses that left me speechless (and alas, yes, jaded):
At present, there is no union. Worse yet, the students are divided in opinion. Few transfer because of the high costs of starting over at another department. Teaching loads are a huge problem and are so high that they have caused health problems for some grads. If you TA for Mark Timmons or Shaughan Lavine or maybe even Chris Maloney's "Mind, Matter and God", a lecture of 400 to 1000 undergrads with scantrons, you'll manage it okay. If you TA for Tom Christiano (e.g. for TRAD104) who has a writing-intensive feedback-intensive syllabus in an attempt to give undergrads a quality education, you will likely be very strained. You will be caught in the dilemma of either preserving your own health and doing your own work or trying to be a hero and trying to provide quality teaching, a choice that might be made by you or by the instructor for whom you TA. There are at present no TA load standards across faculty and each faculty does his or her own thing. What I personally find odd is that the faculty impose teaching loads on grads that they themselves did not have to carry when they were in graduate school. For example, if you come from Princeton or MIT, you probably did not have to teach much. If the faculty were fair about it, they would, in my opinion, cap the teaching loads for their own TAs and their own dissertation students at what they themselves had to do and use their generous pay to hire graders for the rest -- though of course for the capitalist mindset this is too outside the box. Whenever the grads complain about something, our chair organizes or suggests that we organize a committee to address the problem and give us a sense of control to let off some steam from an overheating system. The impression many more senior grads are starting to get (and I share this feeling) is that no real changes get made as a result and there is a general feeling among senior grads of disempowerment and hopelessness that things will much improve. The main focus of the Teaching Load Committee, for example, has been to make sure things don't get worse, not better. Recently, grads got upset because instead of securing funding to those beyond their fifth year, the department admitted an incoming class for 2008-2009 of as many as eight students (which for us is high) instead of, say, admitting 1 or 2 students in light of our current budget crisis. The grads got so upset in fact that they compared our Department (i.e. our chair + faculty involved in the decision-making process) to the Octomom, sending this letter to our listserv. And, well, I think they are right. The Department gave no justification for its actions, but the grads hypothesized that a new class was admitted because the faculty want to / need to teach seminars to some new blood. (Because the quality and volume of faculty publications is one of the top priorities here, seminars are not unimportant for The Department, which might also be why in part their required number has increased.) I also ran some numbers as a department administrator would have to and realized that grads are a much cheaper way to satisfy the department's teaching needs (at 15k with virtually no employment benefits for 50 to 90 undergrads) and that by "hiring" new grads we only increase our long-term cheap supply of labor. The only thing that would, by my calculations, be cheaper than grads is adjuncts or "post-docs" and for us this is currently new territory. (This is where the idealistic grads call me "jaded" :-/) This department is highly inegalitarian and very libertarian in its practices and policies, which under scarce funds results in exploitation where over the years some lines got crossed and corners got cut that should have never been crossed nor cut. These cuts and crossings do not negatively impact our recruitment efforts come April 15th because prospective students are obsessed with the Leiter report (as are we) and once they are here it is too costly for them to transfer, so there is little incentive for the department to have done otherwise. If no one applied here or no one accepted our offers of admission, then perhaps department's priorities and fund allocation patterns would change. At present, however, funds are not properly allocated with an eye to grad student professional development and are instead used heavily to attract and retain high-ranking faculty. The wellbeing of students is ignored in the name of Philosophy (which I find ironic), although in my opinion reallocating funds towards professional development of students would make this a better philosophy department. If you will have sufficient resources here to do your work, not everyone else will and if you are an empathic caring person with a sense of comradery, this will bother you even if you get the teaching relief, conference travel, and extra money that others do not. The program's funding and teaching conditions alone are not sufficient to focus on one's own work and one's dissertation in my opinion, nor will you go to conferences. The program's high Leiter ranking is the product of a few famous faculty here and a large department, which is funded through excessive grading leaving students strapped for time, resources, and sometimes health, which can also result in loss of motivation after about 4-5 years in the program. Nor am I sure that you can be a good philosopher if you keep your nose in books all the time since you are then likely to theorize and overrationalize without testing your theories in practice and without gaining more life experience and interaction with people outside the profession which, in my opinion, is so critical to growing as a Philosopher. Logical consistency is not sufficient for your theories to be true; to be sound, not merely valid, your (and other philosophers') arguments have to be rooted in reality and experience outside the classroom, which with our workloads and with being a part of an isolated social network is unlikely (and, from what I hear, might be unlikely at any other [American?] PhD program in any other field). The only way to really learn about the world is to interact with it; knowing what a modus ponens is won't help you learn about the world about which you want to build your theory (which is what Philosophy is). Socrates was a very active guy, very involved with people (philosophers and non-philosophers) and very active in his community (outside philosophy). J.S. Mill was pretty active too. Neither of them just read and only talked to philosophers; instead, they theorized about their experience and about the World, whereas your world will be Graduate School and The Department (as well as philosophy written by people who lived long ago or who live presently but do not interact with the world given the strains of commitment to an academic career and who have likely spent their entire lives in school). You might be told that the excessive teaching loads will make you a better teacher, but that also simply isn't true. Concern for students and teaching while not being overworked makes you a better teacher, not excessive teaching loads. Instead, you will learn how to cut corners and not develop good working relationships with your students and not pay attention to their intellectual development because you will simply have way too many students to care and way too many assignments to grade to have the time to leave comments or require drafts or have the time and energy to get creative and design great courses. You might also be told that the teaching experience will help you on the job market; however, take Duke for comparison: they have very reasonable teaching loads (in terms of the number of students one has to teach or grade) and are not nearly as highly ranked as us, but they place people comparably to us. (No, Duke is not an Ivy, but in any case, burning out in grad school won't help you compensate for this.) Also, note that teaching experience isn't really measured by how many students you taught. Instead, your CV will have a list of courses you've taught and TA-ed for and you can always seek out additional experience in the summer or by defending quicker, having a PhD in hand, and then postdocing. So, anything you might hear to this effect in my opinion is either rationalization or a marketing ploy. I like many of the people here and I do not know what role they play in department decision-making, so this isn't about the people per se. What bothers me is that graduate students are not given good working conditions to do philosophy, while faculty have great working conditions which are funded by teaching which is done by graduate students (sounds like Cinderella). The faculty are then surprised that we take too long to graduate and that we are not placing people as well as we should given our Leiter ranking. (I am not sure, but I think this might have been part of Laurie Paul's frustration before she left our department for UNC's.) In my personal opinion, no PhD program should actually take longer than 3-4 years. Pay no attention to how many years a program promises to be; only pay attention to actual performance statistics (and these have to be actual and accurate statistics, not the graduate director's impressions since these tend to be overly optimistic) and assume that deviations from these statistics are not due to personal failure but are indications that the program is poorly designed. I cannot stress how much buyer beware applies here; even statistics, when they are available, tend to be calculated favorably. (The Nutrition Facts sheet I posted on the left is currently too optimistic as market and funding conditions got worse in the recent market crisis.) Some key players in the department are also considering replacing future tenure-tracks with glorified adjunct positions. The idea is to hire people with PhDs on (1-2 year) temporary contracts and have them teach 4/4 loads (for comparison: our tenured faculty teach 2/2 loads or less) at a salary of 35k a year (with what other benefits I do not know; e.g. retirement benefits?). To attract these people, the department might call these positions "post-doc". Traditionally, these types of jobs are called adjunct positions and a post-doc is reserved for a position that is research-only with no teaching duties; but "post-doc" sounds better and looks better on a CV too; hence the marketing idea here. If these "post-docs" materialize, they "will be to inexpensively replace all the faculty who will be laid off over the next few years." If this plan is put into action (with these target figures or with modified figures), I suspect it will be successful for the department's budget because (a) it is cheaper to cover 8 courses a year at 35k (said adjunct) than to do the same with a tenure-track faculty member or even a graduate student and (b) our Leiter ranking is sufficiently high and our building up of our political philosophy reputation is also sufficiently high to attract people who, in an otherwise desperate phil labor market, will be willing (and even very excited) to come here on those terms. Point (a) is clear if you do some simple business math to see the costs of covering 8 courses annually [source]:
If you are an egalitarian theorist at the U of A's philosophy department, you might be interested in the overall distribution of income at this department. As of 2008, it looks as follows:  Our department is a mini-society with three socio-economics classes: the lower class, middle classes, and upper class. Graduate students are (assuming they don't have trust funds or rich parents/ spouses) are the lower class, faculty who make under 100k are the middle class, and the six-figure club (at present 10 people) is the upper class, with the middle and upper-class perhaps thinking that they are not only entitled to their high income (at least incredibly high for philosophy) but that they deserve their income for their hard work and philosophical acumen. (75% to 100% of individual salaries in the six-figure club come from public state funds, a percentage that I take to be relevant here.) It might be interesting to apply to this distribution the egalitarian metric Christiano and I published that is meant to deflect the leveling down objection from egalitarianism [PDF]. The ideal distribution on Christiano's metric, as applied to this income distribution, would be one where each member got an equal share of the total, which is the total income pie ($3 million) divided by 73 members, yielding $40 each. Physicists test their theories empirically, so it might similarly be worthwhile to test the egalitarian measure of inequality using this realworld dataset. The score of income inequality that I got when I did this was 5405, which is incrediby high (with 0 being ideal equality without leveling down). This, however, doesn't really bother me. What bothers me is that student stipends are too low, their teaching loads too high, and there is really no travel money (to either attend conferences or visit one's family and friends that one left behind to come here). So, what bothers me is sufficiency (or prioritarianism, not sure), not inequality per se. The fact that some salaries are so high, however, when others are so low does rub this in. If each department member was willing to only keep $40,000 of their current salary, income equality would actually be possible. But it is unrealistic to expect people who get paid to care about equality so much, nor is it clear whether this would be fair since we often want to take into account seniority and experience. Given lack of sufficiency, the more sensible thing to do might be to bring up those who are too close to the poverty line, especially if they do not have spousal or parental support or a trust fund. If student stipends (they should really be called "salaries" if you are teaching) were increased from 15k to 25k, which the ten members in the six-figure club have the power to bring about with their salaries alone (bringing their salaries down to 90k each), then the distribution would look like this:  But alas, no one cares about actual justice this much. The fact that we are ranked so highly in political philosophy but do not place our political philosophy graduates adequately well is one sign that something is wrong. The issue isn't the 25k per se, but the resources needed for writing the dissertation that this gap symbolizes (which will be your single biggest and most important undertaking in graduate school). No six-figured faculty member would give up that much of his or her salary, or give up anything at all for that matter. My personal intuition is that this would actually make the department better as a philosophy department, even if its Leiter ranking dropped as a result because it would help groom students better and would channel sufficient resources towards their professional development and also make the program (especially the distributive justice part of it) accessible to students with more diverse backgrounds and perspectives, i.e. not only kids of the middle and especially of the upper-middle to upper class who will look for ways to rationalize libertarianism. And, if at 90k a year, we regrettably lost some members of the six-figure club (if, say, they decided to go to NYU or Princeton instead of endowing dissertation fellowships here or getting creative in other ways), then I'd bet we could still find amazing philosophers and great teachers/ mentors at these salaries. One excuse we usually get is that faculty lines come with strings attached, so they cannot be converted to dissertation fellowships or anything that would directly give graduate students adequate research funds and leave them free to focus on their own research: funding with strings is a "use it or lose" kind of argument. Another excuse I've heard is that the faculty are prohibited (by university policy?) from giving graduate students gifts. If true, then I still do not see how it could be illegal for someone with a salary of 100k to 180k to donate to a charity of their choosing: e.g. endow a dissertation fellowship, completely relieve their best student from teaching through the same donation process (which might even qualify for a tax write-off), buy a house for graduate students to live in free of charge, to found a conference travel fund, or a laptop and books fund. The Christiano egalitarian metric could be applied to wellbeing too instead of income. However, I do not have mental health stats for the department (e.g. stress, depression, number taking anti-depressants). Another possibility would be to analyze the total income or wellbeing of each person in this distribution across their entire lifetime, but again, I do not have this kind of data. My personal pony: time to degree When I came to this program, I was under the impression that I was entering a five-year program. To me this was extremely important for other external reasons (which included the fact that I had already spent 2 years on my MA and my mom had no savings, had to buy medical insurance, and was of retirement age). I thought that anyone who took longer was lazy or extremely unlucky or did so by choice. And, having industry-level work habits and industry-level respect for timelines and deadlines, I did everything on time: I was done with my coursework on time, took my exams on time (all at a cost to my health I think), got some stuff published (though my conference attendance ended shortly after I entered the program), and at the end of my fourth year passed my prospectus exam officially entering the gray areas of being an ABD. I entered this program in 2004 and in my third year I realized the following and so you could imagine how I felt when I gathered data on my hunch and saw the following: ("5/6" means that 5 students out of 6 of that entering class still remain in the program; our attrition seems to usually happen beyond the fifth year.)  The strangest thing I came across here is the resistance I encountered when I proposed to the chair and some of the political philosophy and ethics faculty that we post honest statistics about our program on our department website. The website, for example, has a timeline on which the dissertation defense is written into the second semester of one's fifth year of study. This, as far as I can tell, is a blatant misrepresentation of the program. Our median time to degree (as I was surprised to discover in my third year here) was 7 years and climbing (which means half will take 7-8 years or longer to defend) as the philosophy job market is incredibly awful, our coursework requirements have stayed at the high of 16-17 courses (without any substantial credit transfers for those with MAs, so having a prior is unlikely to help you, at least based on our stats) and our teaching loads haven't been reduced either. In the past decade, I can think of only three alumni who graduated in 5 years or less: Thony Gillies -- he had to teach for only one semester his entire time here, did highly formal/ techincal work, and had done prior graduating schooling elsewhere, Matt Bedke -- though his total time in graduate school was actually 8 years, not 5, because he had a prior JD. (Also, I suspect he wasn't fully ready for the insane academic job market when he defended because he did not, to my knowledge, get a single job offer his first time on the market and David Schmidtz ended up hiring him here on a temporary non-tenure-track basis; but don't get me wrong, Matt is very very good.), and Jay Brennan (who also was married, lucked out with the real estate market, and also had substantial relief from teaching). There might have been one other student, but I can't remember who. All three, in my opinion, had exceptionally favorable circumstances (including income support from their spouses, with two out three married to academics). I spent two years trying to convince Chris Maloney (the chair), as well as a few other faculty, that we have to be honest about the product we offer and, at the very least, be upfront about how long it takes and not lure graduate students here under false pretenses to be disappointed after moving their life to Arizona to do philosophy if this is something that matters to them (as it did to me; some people seem to care less and apparently can afford to spend their entire adult life in school living close to the poverty line). In a discussion in his office a few years ago, Dr. Maloney (our chair) told me that (a) ours is indeed a five-year program, but "you have to hit the ground running", (b) asked me why I was under the impression that incoming students thought it reasonable to graduate from here in five years or why I was under the impression that others thought most students got through this program in five years and asked me if I had "taken a survey" (a and b seemed to me almost contradictory responses) and that (c) we will not post time to degree stats or any other related statistics (why it is still unclear to me, especially after the actual reasons I was given and especially because I think it is dishonest and can matter hugely to some people and because we guarantee funding only for five years), while the few other faculty members with whom I have spoken about this told me things like "it is not our responsibility" and "why should it be on our website?" This reasoning seems to get extended to some other important facts about the performance of the program and the wellbeing of its senior students. Any failures on part of the student are typically attributed to lack of a work ethic, not being serious enough about philosophy, and other personal and professional shortcomings. When asked why everyone takes so long to graduate or why there is attrition, Dr. Maloney told me that students often come here to "soul search" (and I suppose he has a point: I certainly didn't expect this). Dr. Maloney also told me that while the department will not post any descriptively accurate figures (and will keep the "normative" figures without actually specifying that they are normative or that they diverge from actual facts and actual program performance), he commends my having posted the stats [I will leave it to the reader to interpret the politics of that statement]... Of course there is a world of difference whether the stats and accurate figures are posted on my page or on the department's official page where the program is marketed and described. Continuing Despite many deficiencies in the program and the hardships of the lifestyle (or perhaps because of it, to decrease cognitive dissonance?) some students are extremely loyal to the department and to their advisors. I think this is because personal relationships are developed and it is very difficult to get past this. The jaded grad that I am, considering that I also AOS in political philosophy, it has made me wonder whether similar personal relationships have kept slaves from revolting on plantations: psychologically, the situation seems remarkably similar to me. There is even a worship-like atmosphere surrounding some faculty with an ideology (i.e. some ethics and some political philosophy faculty), which I find a little disturbing because I think it gets in the way of critical thinking and improving philosophical theory in the right way. That said, egalitarians and libertarians accept each others' existence across the ideological divide among the political phil side of the department. The Freedom Center has remained rather inclusive, which is something I like. Dave Schmidtz has also, in my opinion, done an admirable job in cushioning the financial downfall: his fund raising efforts haven't made things better and things have still gotten worse, but I think they would have gotten much worse[r] without his heroic efforts. Stress levels can also be very high, which is supported by anectodal evidence as well as by actual studies. A fellow graduate student complained to me once: "Sometimes I get so stressed out I start dry heaving." Another senior student told me that s/he thought the department was "exploitative". Another said that s/he "wouldn't have tried to do a PhD if she knew how hard the process was going to be." I suspect what makes it hard isn't the dissertation per se (though for some that's hard), but the hoops and funding issues. And another still told me "I have spent 11 years in higher ed studying philosophy [4 yrs for college + 2 for MA elsewhere + 7 here] and my advisor still tells me that I am not ready for the job market and need to hone my dissertation. I feel so stupid [for having pursued this path]. And I am sick of being poor." The student then also confessed that s/he used to be very excited about philosophy. A large portion of senior grads also seem to have much lower self-esteem than they did when they first started grad school. (The self-esteem issue is true in all programs and fields in the U.S., not just here, from what I can tell, and I am not sure if it has to do with PhD programs per se or with one's position in the field or society outside the specific program.) These and similar complaints came from senior students in our department, but do not often get voiced and are never voiced to faculty or administration. There are also a few senior students who have had a very positive experience (though this usually correlates with healthy personal lives, which seems rare in academia, and/or spousal income support or other external means of support). Most perhaps fall somewhere in between, although almost every senior grad complains about teaching loads and about being poor (esp. when they can't afford to do things that relate to a rich academic life and a fulfilling personal life). Some have hypothesized that those who defend before the age of 30 do better mentally. Feelings about the lengthy program requirements tend to be mixed and often depend on whether or not the person had done graduate coursework prior to coming here (since a prior MA seems to not count for much here). The first year I taught here, I wanted to do a good job; I was TA-ing three sections of 30 students each with writing-intensive grading and I was also taking three courses (a typical load here in both respects). As a result, on weekdays I slept for 4 hours a night. (My immune system weakened after a few months of this and I contracted mono; normally, I have a very strong immune system; e.g. I had two people stay at my place for 3+ days on two separate occasions while they had the swine flu and I did not get sick.) For comparison: currently I am working a full-time job in industry and am also working on my dissertation and, while I don't get to do much else aside from Sundays, I do get 6-8 hours of sleep a night (hence the stronger immune response). That said, grads in their first 1-3 years tend to be very excited about being here, an excitement that seems to wane as the years go on and they realize that they're here for the longhaul of 6 (if they are lucky) 7, 8, 9, and sometimes 10+ years. When asked why the students don't go do something else if they are not happy with their current situation, I have received the following kinds of responses: "I'd have to retake most of my coursework and retake my exams at another program if I transferred", "There are no other graduate programs in Tucson, so I'd have to move again [and then again after that] -- I am tired of moving and getting socially uprooted", "What else would/could I do?" "I've sank so much into this already -- I should finish what I started." When asked why they don't complain to faculty or to administration or do something else to change the program, students usually say, "It won't change anything", "I have my own things to worry about -- I don't have time for activism" "I don't want to ruin/strain my relationships with faculty -- I will need glowing recommendation letters from them when I go on the job market", and "It's my own fault: I've lost my motivation/ I chose to come here -- no one forced me to", and so on. That said, there is huge variance in responses and in how people feel about things here and, outside the issue of teaching loads, little agreement. However, I was surprised to learn that many of those who have no complaints about being here actually take anti-depressants and have 1 or more times seen a campus psychiatrist or sought some other type of counseling. This is, however, consistent with survey stats done at other departments across fields. My guess is that many overachievers and people passionate about the field can handle all this for 1-2 years, but that once it gets into the 2+, 3+ and 5+ year range, it starts to wear on people. Moreover, while most senior grads clearly have issues (as compared to the background population), they often attribute it to things that are not related to the program or the field or to American academia in general, which I find odd. I think this is a result of not interacting with (having daily friends) people outside the academy or even the field or department. My personal view is that almost all the problems are structural and that things can be greatly improved. When I looked up depression stats among graduate students and, shocked, shared with a faculty member that more than half are depressed and 10% have considered suicide in the past year, the faculty member wasn't surprised at the stats but rather was surprised that I was surprised and said, "Aren't most people depressed?" My response was, "no, I've never actually met this many before and the background rate is only 5%, not 10% or 50%." [Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, etc; having worked in industry I've never seen anything like it.] Those who have a strong social circle outside school (for regular in-person interaction; e.g. daily or a few times a week) also do much better. A good example of this would be someone local to the area with high school friends here or someone who belongs to the cycling or rock climbing community here. And, all that said, I've met some wonderful and very interesting people in the department here, both among faculty and among students. Some other things I find odd, which might not be specific to Arizona, is that (a) faculty do not take their students to conferences with them and (b) do not meet with their dissertation-writing students regularly to discuss progress. Institutionally, if you are writing a dissertation, you are typically registered for 1 to 3 dissertation credit hours for which the department might even receive money (not sure). This, to me, seems to naturally imply that a dissertation writer should be able to schedule regular weekly meetings for that number of hours per week to meet with his or her advisor, as one would for an independent-study course. This, however, can be surprisingly difficult to arrange as it seems to be outside the academic social norm. Arranging any kind of schedule to know when you can submit drafts and when you can expect to receive feedback can be a similarly difficult and mysterious process. Needless to say, industry standards differ drastically from academic standards and might explain attrition, quality, and the level of motivation that some experience during the dissertation phase. What one needs to do dissertation-wise to successfully defend and get a job can be similarly mysterious and unclear. Talent development, people and project management skills, clarity of objectives, and personal relationships between advising faculty and students in academia often leave much to be desired. I suspect that what is happening at this department is the result of a faulty incentive structure and a skewed value system (reinforced by a set of deviant social norms). The career of a faculty member here will go well if (and only if) s/he publishes in the top journals. The more and higher up s/he publishes, the better for him or her (and for "the Department"). Job placement of one's own students, for example, or their professional development will not help advance the faculty member's career. ('Career' here includes recognition and fame in the philosophical community, climbing professor rank from associate to tenured assistant to full professor, and salary associated with this rank.) Thus, given limited resources (time, family commitments), it is not in the interest of a faculty member to groom students, find money for students to go to conferences or have time off from teaching, but instead to have students grade while focusing one's own resources on publications, conferences, and development and promotion of one's own philosophical theories. Most philosophers do not work on their theories in groups, but work alone, so a graduate research assistant would not be very helpful either, except maybe to run errands like photocopying, help with teaching, and maybe some discussion of philosophical theory (if the advisor thinks the student is on a par with him or her, which is unlikely). If the incentive structure were different, faculty would act differently and would rationalize their actions differently. Similarly, our department is evaluated by two chief criteria: its revenue (which comes from teaching, which is mostly done by graduate students) and prestige and volume of its publications (which comes from faculty). The PhD program's success, the college level, is usually evaluated by the number of PhD students in the program, not where they are placed or how long they spent in graduate school or how happy or satisfied they were. (If asking students yourself, make sure to ask senior grads (5+ year), not neophytes. Bear in mind that all this is done in the name of being the best research department possible. Kinda reminds me of religious zeal and the things that were (and are still) done in the name of religion and God; profit-driven people scare me much less. I suppose when you have a higher ideal in mind or a vision, it is easy to forget basic ultimate values, be they the environment, the wellbeing of other sentient beings that can feel pain, or the wellbeing of human beings (including taking good care of one's employees, workers, and one's own graduate students), and putting your money where your foot don't belong. Or so I learned from reading various theories of wellbeing and human welfare in graduate school (something from Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls, Nozick, and others). Men in a position of power and money will rationalize their position and the status quo, especially if they have the excuse of a higher ideal. And if armed with the toolkit of analytic philosophy, they might even convince you of your station and their policies as the best of all possible worlds (reminds of how the castes in India were justified) and come up with valid but completely unsound arguments, which can make them dangerous because it can make them resistant to common sense and empirical evidence and impervious to reason. The job of any good graduate program, first and foremost, should be to create the conditions necessary to grow good philosophers and/or good philosophy teachers (depending on the mission statement of the program) -- and, in my opinion, to stop with the pretentious and downgrade its PhD program to an MA program if it can't place everyone sufficiently well and in due time while offering decent working conditions to teaching assistants and have other humane HR practices, but that's besides the point -- and that requires attending to the wellbeing of its students and designing a program with an eye to their professional development, not with an eye to advancing the careers and research projects of those in power. If the latter is prioritized over the former, then this should be like ANU -- a research-only department, perhaps without a graduate program altogether. And if they cannot afford this on their own and need us, then they should treat us well. Who ought to be the judge of how well we are treated? Well, we should be, not they. Research environments don't have to suck to be productive and prolific; I learned this at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI)'s Summer School for Complex Systems, where we worked a lot, produced a lot in an incredibly short period of time, but also socialized and hiked and camped a lot and where we were actually given the material resources to focus on work and play and not be distracted by anything else. Happy workers are productive workers. Also consider this: in the two years before coming to Arizona, I had produced enough research for five publications (co-authored with two different sets of people), whereas in my four years as a full-time member of this department, I only produced one new published piece of co-authored research. Moreover, after my three years in this program during which I had to stop doing my own research, had to stop collaborating with people, and had to stop going to conferences, in the one short month at SFI when I could simply focus on research and collaboration instead of finishing up incompletes (i.e. coursework papers) or studying for exams or grading grading and more grading (or teaching summer or winter session to make ends meet), I produced enough research for a good research report (which I believe now lives in the SFI library and one of my co-authors in Australia has been trying to find the time to prep for journal submission). But here, because we get paid to be ourselves (and because our identity as philosophers gets even more reinforced by our being here, because it is so costly and risky to transfer, and because there is no industry for us to go to given a combination of our skill set and our professional identity), the premise is that they can treat us anyway they want. The combination of research and graduate-level teaching should be done only if no one's wellbeing is sacrificed. And, if there really is a conflict between individual wellbeing and the loftier goal of advancing Philosophy, then Philosophy is to take a back seat. Any Philosophy that tells you otherwise is wrong. (Haven't we been through this already? I thought we rejected Aristotelian perfectionist mentality of natural slaves and natural masters, along with Plato's dictatorial political ideals, and replaced them with the ideals of the Enlightenment that focus on everyone's wellbeing and prohibit the crossings of some lines and the using of people.) I suspect the personal relationships that students have with faculty students confuse when it comes to these basic things. Why the faculty are confused on these matters I am not sure. Teaching and grading loads From a listserv email by one graduate student: "90 students is already too many, and 30 too many for any discussion section . . . When I arrived here 7 years ago, we had a discussion about how the recent increase in individual class sizes to 35 was bad. We now teach 50 students in individual classes. With 42% more students we have not seen nearly a 42% increase in pay." Our stipends are too low as is. However, here's a puzzle I do not understand. While our TA assignments pay only 7k a course, our [voluntary] grading assignments pay 500 bucks a course. Teaching, in my opinion, is a joy, while grading is the dirty work of teaching that no one wants to do (especially in these quantities). So shouldn't a grading job be worth, say, 6k instead of $500? But, using this payscale, while overwhelmed by my teaching load and going through a medical emergency involving my eye which led to surgery on my eyelid -- surgery which I postponed till the class ended, I asked another TA (who was TA-ing for the same class) if he wanted to grade my portion of the final exam (along his, which was the same exam, so not twice as much work for him since he was already familiar with the material, etc) for $500, which was 3x what the Department and the faculty pay us for grading jobs since this was at most one-third of all the grading required for that course. The other TA said he would gladly do it, but didn't want to do it behind the instructor's back. Bear in mind that this was a class on the philosophy of economics sponsored by libertarian money, that the faculty instructor is not an egalitarian nor believes in the labor theory of value (in fact the class was designed to overthrow LTV and replace it by voluntary consent and exchange to mutual advantage which is how wealth and value were supposed to be created -- from asymmetry of value -- and, as far as I can tell, generally pave the way to justify free markets), and that I was offering 3x more money for this job than the department offers for equivalent jobs. So, I asked the instructor if I could hire the other TA to grade my finals. The instructor replied "No, that would not be appropriate." Now, if it is not appropriate for me, why is it appropriate for faculty and the Department to do the same (let alone at the same pay but with 3x the grading)? I asked the instructor this, but received no reply. Moreover, to see the absurdity of this situation, what if I were to follow the same libertarian practices that the department follows and figure that all kinds of offers, as long as accepted and perhaps even better than the student's other current options, were OK? What if I took a TA-ship from the department for a misely 7k with an insane teaching load of 90 students (or 50 for my own class) and then turned around and hired another graduate student for exactly how much money the Department offers us for grading jobs -- for 500 bucks, keeping the other 6.5k to do the fun part of teaching (leading discussion sections or lecturing)? If it's OK for the department to do, why isn't it okay for me to do? Moreover, I could even outcompete the department and offer much better conditions by offering 2x what the department offers for a whooping total of $1000. I waited for the semester to end, for the class to be over, and to boot took my scheduled prospectus exam too (and passed), and only after the semester was over did I fly back to New York to see my opthalmologist (as my eyelid was visibly getting worse). When I got home, I received the following email from the instructor for whom I had just TAed: "I will need your gradebook, since you blew town before the DRC grades came in" followed by a laundry list of complaints of how disappointing my performance as a TA was. The email ended the same way it began with "On top of all that, you left town before all your exams were in. Overall it was the worst performance I have ever had from a TA." (That said, I received good teaching evals from my students, most of whom were business majors with a few econ majors and a few others, who became very engaged with Aristotle's ideas on usury and other phil econ material by discussions of the industry practices I saw when I worked on a trading system at Bloomberg towards the end of the dot-com bubble right around the year 2000, including discussions about the value of microtrading, trading and lending practices, and so on.) Aside from the fact that the tone of the email was completely inappropriate, inconsiderate, and plain rude, I found the reaction to the DRC grades the most curious: this amounted to the instructor having to grade one exam while I had to grade the other 89. If grading one exam is so bad, then what about grading 89 exams? In closing The worst part of this experience for me personally has been the fear to write anything of the sort that I've written here and some weird desire to make excuses for faculty and the Department and seek out nice things to say to either avoid cognitive dissonance or simply out of the fear of shooting oneself in the foot. After all, academia is a very small world, you need glowing letters of recommendation to get a job (it is harder to get an academic job than to get into grad school, be it at a state school or at an R1 place or at a teaching school or a temporary post-doc position), and if you stay in academia, there are conferences and personal relationships. This is the fear of burning bridges when one is so dependent on the people who create the very abusive and unfair conditions one finds himself in, as well as the desire to rationalize on their behalf. I suspect this is a very similar psychological state that people experience in cults or women experience in abusive relationships with the people they love. How do you nicely tell these people that what they are doing just isn't OK? (I tried, but they were deaf as there was no change and what I heard back was rationalization after rationalization, excuse after excuse.) I've seen very negative articles written about PhD programs, especially those in humanities, in The Chronicle of Higher Education and they are often written under pen names. But really, what prospective student reads the Chronicle or even knows it exists? Moreover, I don't think faculty here read it either or think its concerns apply to this program; everyone is too busy publishing and reading Plato and The Journal of Philosophy. In general, very little of what happened in my four years of full-time presence at the department now makes sense to me (despite seeing it as "normal" and even as a challenge at the time), especially after returning to industry to work on my dissertation while working a regular full-time job. What I say here is harsh, but I hope it is fair and I hope it does some good; I hope that all that happened wasn't all in vain. Perhaps less by chance than not, I am currently working on a dissertation on the role of information in decision-making in the context of distributive justice, especially egalitarian theory and though my models and arguments there are very formal and abstract, I do harbor hope that they have something to do with the real world and can make it a better place, a hope that motivates me in my work. All that said, please realize two things. The first is that if you come here, you will be welcomed by the students as a comrade regardless of the second point that follows. The second is that by applying here, by accepting our offer of admission, and by ultimately coming here you will make things worse for the rest of us and everyone else in the profession (because you will take away from the funds of senior grads beyond their fifth year of guaranteed funding and because you will increase the supply of labor in the profession as a whole when there is already an oversupply, which I take to be the main cause of all the problems), so please come only if you literally cannot do anything else with your life. If you are coming to soul search, please soul search some place else, and if inclined to drop out and make the profession less crowded, you will also have my full support. And if you are a faculty member writing a letter of recommendation for a student, please realize all this too, as well as your hand in contributing to making a bad situation worse, simple supply-demand economics and all. "Some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen." -- Woodie Guthrie Good luck! Some relevant docs: docs/ not sure this page makes a positive difference in the long-run or that anyone even reads it. |
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