The late philosopher Susan Haack often discussed the cliquishness of the philosophy profession, particularly regarding her time at Oxford. Her essay “Out of Step: Academic Ethics in a Preposterous Environment” was later included in her book Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (2008, expanded 2013).
Haack was not a sociologist mapping the network from outside. She lived inside the network and named what she saw, at professional cost. That makes her a useful witness precisely because she cannot be dismissed as someone who never submitted to the protocols. She submitted, she saw, and she dissented. The clique still ignored her, which is itself a data point.
It is not that Oxford philosophers reasoned badly in the ordinary sense. They reasoned well by the internal standards of the game. The fakeness is that the reasoning served social sorting rather than inquiry. The conclusions were predetermined by who was allowed into the conversation. The demand for moral clearance precedes the description and determines whether the description will be taken seriously. People inside the institutions feel the demand for moral clearance, deploy it, and benefit from it. Susan Haack’s observation about Oxford philosophy captures the British version, where a small clique simply decides who counts, with no particular ideological dressing required.
At the real top, the mechanism disappears because it becomes unnecessary. Nobody at that level needs to invoke moral language as a barrier. The barrier is pedigree, which is to say, demonstrated submission to the right protocols at the right institutions. You either ran the gauntlet or you did not. If you did not, you do not count, and there is nothing personal about it. They simply have the power to ignore.
This is a more austere version of the protection mechanism. It does not need ideology. It does not need virtue signaling. It runs on credentialing and the authority that credentialing confers. The moral language is what middle-level gatekeepers use when they cannot simply ignore someone. The top tier rarely has that problem.
The virtue signaling version is the retail operation. The wholesale version, and it has less friction because it requires no justification at all.
Haack described the Oxford of her student days as a place where a small, powerful group determined the boundaries of legitimate inquiry. She argued that the fragmentation of modern philosophy into these small sub-specialties or cliques leads to fake reasoning and careerism.
Haack claimed that she remains beholden to no clique or citation cartel, preferring the respect of serious thinkers over the flattery of disciples.
[W]e have seen the rise and continuing growth of a new class of professional academic administrators, who perceive themselves as managers and faculty as employees (and sometimes, students as “customers”);
• the insistence on publication for career advancement has become ever stronger, and by now extends even to graduate students;
• even in the humanities where research doesn’t require large sums of money for equipment and such, there is ever-growing emphasis on grants and research projects;
• concern about “rankings” is growing ever more insistent;
• students (and their parents) increasingly think of higher education as an essential credential for getting a decent job, rather than as having value in itself…A new-style dean focused on climbing the administrative ladder will almost inevitably be much preoccupied with raising money, with presenting the institution (and especially his school) in the best possible light, and with impressing his bosses with the new programs he has introduced, the new “stars” he has hired and so forth. And because he is likely to have put his own academic work on permanent hold, and to be less closely in touch with peers engaged in serious academic work of their own, he may well feel he has no option but to rely less on his own judgment of the quality of a department’s program or of a person’s mind than on surrogate measures:22 a department’s position in some ranking the worth of which he cannot judge for himself; the sheer number of a person’s publications-perhaps, if he is scrupulous, adjusted by some weighting of journals or publishers the wm1h of which, again, he cannot judge for himself; or, better yet so much simpler and more “objective”!-on how much grant money a person, or a department, brings in; or, in the case of hiring, on the prestige of candidates’ home institutions. But systematically deferring judgment like this can have disastrous consequences-especially when, as we shall see, some of the people on whose opinions the whole edifice of deferred judgment depends may have built their reputations on relatively small contributions to a short-lived “niche” literature. (Many, it seems, have forgotten, if they ever knew, the etymological connection of “prestige” with “prestidigitation;’ “sleight of hand.”)
Judging a professor or a department by volume of publications is-well, as Jacques Barzun put it, it is preposterous. “Valuing knowledge, we pre-posterize the idea, and say … everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be deemed a knowledge explosion.”23 Of course, since Barzun wrote this in 1968, the pressure to publish has become much more severe. By 1994, Gary Gutting (then editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly) could write that publishing in philosophy journals had become less a way to communicate significant ideas than a form of professional certification. And indeed, it is hard to deny that credentialing professors, and would-be professors, is now the prime function of academic publication; communicating with others in the field runs a very poor second at best. When chairs boast that their faculty are “researchactive,”
what they mean, apparently, is that they run around to a lot of conferences (generally at the university’s expense), and publish a lot of books and articles. And by this time, even graduate students-who are, with luck, just beginning to find their philosophical feet-are also expected to present and publish papers.But as W. S. Gilbert taught us, “when everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody.”25 When everyone publishes, other ways are needed to distinguish the somebodies from the nobodies. One way is to give greater weight to publications in journals, or with publishers, deemed “prestigious.”26 Another is to look to success in the game of grants-and-research-projects. And a third is to rely on others’ judgments in the form of departmental rankings.
But reliance on these surrogate measures is a very poor substitute for the informed judgment of someone in close touch with the demands, the temptations, and the pitfalls of intellectual work. That X has published a lot, even in supposedly prestigious journals or with supposedly prestigious presses, is absolutely no guarantee of the quality of his work; to build such a record, good contacts and a good sense of what topics are fashionable, along with fluency in that blandly chewy, pseudo-technical writing style that seems increasingly de rigeur, are likely to be at least as useful as just (just!) doing genuinely good, creative, careful, illuminating work-I suspect, more so. Neither is the fact that Y is good at getting grants; to build an impressive portfolio of grant money received, a knack for writing appealing proposals and, again, good contacts, are likely to be
at least as useful as just (just!) doing genuinely good, creative, careful, illuminating work-again, I suspect, more so.And neither, in my judgment, is the fact that a department is highly ranked any guarantee that its faculty produces genuinely fine work, or that it offers its students a genuinely fine education. At any rate, the self-styled Gommet Report that has such an influence (I am tempted to say, such a stranglehold) on the philosophy profession not only has a structural tendency to sideline the most seriously cross-disciplina1y work and to encourage departments to over-specialize, but also concems itself far too much with what supposed “star” has moved from A to B, and far too little with how adequate, how effective, how realistic how serious-the education a department offers;29 which depends, rather, on a high preponderance of people strongly imbued with those academic virtues. Something I learned in a long-ago course on comparative political systems keeps coming· to mind: under the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, which set production targets by weight, one fact my manager realized that the easiest way to meet his target was to make heavier chandeliers-as a result of which several fashionable Moscow ceilings collapsed. It is no less bizarre to judge the real work of a university-educating intelligent young people and keeping the flame of inquiry alive-by numbers of students graduated, the amount of grant money brought in, its standing in this or that ranking, or (I can’t resist) by the weight of the publications its faculty chums out.
But chairs competing for scarce resources want to impress deans with how “research-active” their faculty are; faculty jockeying for promotions and raises want to impress chairs with their “productivity.” No wonder, then, that many professors soon adapt to the reliance of deans, etc., on rankings, number of publications, amount of grant money, and so forth: by giving more priority to their research than to their teaching, and more priority to graduate than to undergraduate students, by presenting and publishing more, and by putting time and energy into applying for grants and “promoting their department.” (Probably they also spend more time on that “other stuff,” since the more administrators there are, it seems, somehow the more administrative work there is for professors, too. Funny, that.)
And many professors, consciously or not, surrender their own judgment of the quality of a department’s program or a person’s work to the same surrogate measures on which deans, etc., rely. A couple of years ago, for example, the colleague who introduced the historian from another university giving a guest lecture admiringly listed all the grants she had been awarded, but said essentially nothing about the substance of her work. (Had I been the speaker, I would’ve been ve1y cross; but either our visitor didn’t mind, or else she had one heck of a poker face.)
Inevitably, the quality of teaching suffers: more and more introductory teaching is handed over to teaching assistants and ad hoc lecturers; and more and more graduate classes (and sometimes even undergraduate classes) are designed around “what I’m working on at the moment” rather than what aspiring professors of philosophy really need to learn. Graduate students may find the idea that they are “helping professors with their important research” flattering; and undergraduates who are too naive to know they’re being fed intellectual junk food, or who are too timid to protest, or who care more about getting a degree than about learning things worth learning, won’t complain-provided they get good-enough grades.
And as the quantity of research burgeons, its quality declines. Ever more journals are flooded with ever more submissions; the peer-review system (far from perfect even in the sciences, where it originated, 30 and much less effective as a quality-control mechanism in a field of schools and cliques) comes under intolerable strain. Inevitably, the average quality of what is published tends to fall; and sifting the good stuff from the dreck gets harder and harder. “Niche publishing” is on the rise: more and more work seems to be focused on what X said about Y’s criticism of Z’s interpretation o fW’s ideas about a question,31 and less and less directly on substantive issues. It’s easier, for one thing (and perhaps some are subliminally aware that, if they spell X’s, Y’s, Z’s, and W’s names right, one of them might recommend the paper for publication-lmowing that if it is
published, this will make him better known). Anyone with enough frequent-flyer miles to upgrade to publication-by-invitation does so; and many soon realize that you can quadruple those miles in no time if you join the right clique.Conferences seem to become more and more occasions for making contacts, for networking, and for talking yourself, or your department, up; and less and less occasions for the serious exchange of ideas. At one recent meeting, for example, I was struck by the frequency of mutually reassuring references from one speaker to others, and of shorthand phrases alluding to the very narrow seam of literature familiar to almost everyone present. Nor could I fail to notice that, though contextualism was much-discussed, David Armis-author of a pioneering 1976 article on the subject-was never mentioned. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this; in a discipline increasingly fragmenting into small circles, it is only to be expected that insiders’ work will take center stage, and outsiders’ contributions tend to fade from sight.
By the same token, we are also witnessing a growing “parochialism of the recent. The graduate student who told me, in all seriousness, that he had been taught that nothing published before 199434 was worth reading was only naively saying aloud what seems more and more to be taken implicitly for granted. Do I really need to say how utterly bizarre the notion is that what Joe Blow and Jane Doe published in the last decade or two is more significant than all the work of Plato, Aristotle, … , Descartes, … , Kant, … , Frege, Peirce, … , etc., etc., put together? It would be different if, like some areas of the sciences, our subject were advancing so fast that earlier work really was soon out of date. To the contrary, however: at the moment it sometimes seems that attention-grabbing niche problems-or even old problems in twenty-first century dress, as with the recent
revival of the “Gettier paradoxes”-are welcomed much more warmly than work that makes lasting headway on substantial issues. And now I’m reminded of Peirce’s complaints about the literary dilettanti of his day, who have “so perverted ‘thought to the purposes of pleasure that it seems to vex them to think that the questions upon which they delight to exercise it may ever get formally settled”; so that “a positive discovery which takes a favorite subject out of the … debate is met with ill-concealed dislike.”Graduate students are caught in the middle. They are indulged: by ”recruitment” efforts that feed their self-regard; by inflated grades and over-praise; and by the ever-commoner practice of relating to them as if they were already junior colleagues, rather than still students.36 But they are also exploited: often offered a smorgasbord of whatever their professors are working on rather than the genuinely rigorous, systematic, durable philosophical education they need; often carrying the most burdensome undergraduate teaching; sometimes acting as ·unpaid research assistants; sometimes waiting an unconscionably long time for input from faculty members preoccupied with their own agenda of presentation and- publication; sometimes obliged to do the scut work of organizing conferences for which a faculty member will take the credit; and generally faced by a conspiracy of silence and half-truths37 about how many of those who begin a PhD program ever finish, how many of those who finish ever get a real academic job, and how many of those real jobs will allow time for the important research agenda they have all been encouraged to imagine they will undertake.
It should come as no surprise that-dissipating the time and energy they should be spending exploring new ideas, building and stretching their intellectual muscles, trying and failing and learning from the failure how to do better-many graduate students become no less anxiously obsessed than their teachers with those wretched rankings, scrounge shamelessly for money to attend conferences, strain to publish, and stress over building their resumes or impressing visiting speakers who might conceivably give them a leg-up. In my experience, some thrive having already internalized distorted values; some don’t survive to complete the PhD; some are corrupted, sooner or later, in greater or lesser degree; and only a few-for whom I have nothing but admiration-somehow survive with their integrity, and even their idealism, intact. Sadly, not many of those admirable
few will be the somebodies of the next generation. Those, more likely, will be the confident products of “prestigious” departments, well-trained in survival tactics for the current climate: ambitious philosophical go-getters, capable, clever, quick, fluent, fully au fait with intellectual fashion-but blithely oblivious to the deeper demands, and rewards, of mature reflection.The erosion of the academic virtues is gradual: at first, some succumb to the temptation to cut comers in their teaching just a bit; rush to publish the paper or the book that could be made much richer or more rigorous with a little more time; write an easy critique of a wild idea rather than struggling to identify and build on the tiny grain of truth it contains; or persuade themselves that they really have made the remarkable breakthrough they promised in their grant application, or that the most recent fad coming down the pike really is worth their and everyone else’s attention; and so on. Judgment is weakened as more and more defer to surrogate measures; integrity is weakened as more and more embroider their achievements to others and then, almost inevitably, in their own minds; focus is weakened as the “narcissism of small differences” within a clique looms large,
and the dubious shared assumptions fade from notice; realism is weakened by more and more preposterous announcements of supposedly stunning breakthroughs; independence, consideration, and courage are weakened with every small compromise to careerism. And as time passes, the erosion feeds on itself, and the pace of decline quickens.
