When this issue first arose my university's provost said that we would pay health insurance for adjuncts who taught enough that they were working for us over 30 hours a week. Then, however, our Governor declared that no state entity could let part-timers work enough hours that they would be due healthcare. After much arcane calculating, it was decided that adjuncts could teach an average of three courses a term. That means six for the year if they only teach fall and spring; if they're used in the summer, too, it could get up to nine courses a year. In my department we generally limited adjuncts to four in the fall and spring terms and didn't use them during the summer, which means that we haven't had to cancel any fall courses but will have to limit several to doing two in the spring. Across my college, though, I've heard that they're looking at having to cancel 40 courses fall courses because of this. In our state, each four-year university is being treated as a separate employer, as is the community college system. This means that an adjunct could potentially teach six courses for us in a year and six more for one of the local CCs (or six between the two local CCs). Frankly, I expect that most of our virtually full-time part-timers will be able to make roughly as much money by picking up CC courses, and the CCs will certainly be needing more instructors. Overall, though, I'm sure their lives won't be as good; they'll be driving more to teach the same amount. One bright side: over the last several years our Provost has upgraded around 50 of our best adjuncts, including one in my department, into full-time positions as lecturers. She's crunching the numbers now to see how many more conversions we can afford. It shouldn't be any shock that the Obamacare provision is having this result. It was an unintended consequences, but perfectly foreseeable. I talk about the plight of adjuncts in my business ethics courses, and one question I always ask students is what would happen next if we were told that we had to provide benefits to adjuncts who teach over a certain number of courses. Answer: No one gets to teach more than that number of courses.

I haven't read all of the discussion, but contrary to what was expected, the only case in which I thought that the agent might be less responsible for E than case 1 was case 3. This was the only case in which the agent's contribution was superfluous.

One thing that I've noticed is that institutions vary widely in their practices about how much much "academic credit" people receive for being co-authors. I've co-authored papers with someone whose university required him to state, in his promotion materials, what % of the work on each paper was his. My university doesn't ask, and I was told explicitly at one point that I would receive "full credit" for co-authored papers. Still, since I had already determined what percentage of our co-authored papers I was responsible for, I went ahead and submitted this information in my own promotion materials. At no stage in the process, from the department committee to the provost, did anyone even mention this: when they said that "Miller has published X journal articles," the co-authored papers were always counted just as if I was the sole author. I have no idea how cases from sciences are handled, where papers might have many co-authors, but at the higher level of review I would have scientists looking at my file and the co-authorship was still ignored. I can't really defend or explain my university's practice here, but it certainly makes a difference to the advice that I'd give junior faculty about whether to co-author.

I may not understand David Robjant's proposal correctly, in which case apologies. As I understand it, however, it ignores the fact that you can have too close of a relationship with someone for it to be appropriate for you to review her papers and yet not realize that a particular paper belongs to her. Of course, this would mean that in this particular instance your recommendation on the paper was not influenced by the relationship. But once the author's identity was revealed to the editor, the editor could never be sure that you had truly been ignorant of the author's identity.

Thanks, guys!

Glad to see David come on board, sorry to see anyone step down. Thanks to Dan, Doug, and Josh for their role in getting the soup rolling.

I first became involved with IHS as an undergraduate, when I was a young Robert Nozick clone (albeit without the hair), attending a week-long Liberty and Society seminar. In grad. school I attended a couple of career-development seminars and won some fellowships, including a couple of larger ones. Even when I was at my most libertarian, I was impressed by the fact that there seemed to be a fair amount of intellectual diversity at IHS events (and that this was welcomed), which wasn't necessarily the case at events I attended that were sponsored by other groups. In grad school I started drifting away from libertarianism, but IHS still continued to be generous with their support. I didn't have much contact with them after I finished, however, and so I don't have a good read on what they're like today. The Koch connection makes me less than anxious to try to reforge ties. I do continue to notify students with libertarian leanings about them, though.

I note that the average time to review for Mind in Andrew Cullison's journal survey site is 7.14 months. That's based on a fair number of data points (107 surveys). I looked at the raw data the other day and saw that the average over the last 6 months has remained at around 7 months. Of course, there could be many factors that would lead the survey data to misrepresent the true average.

Perhaps open access journals that decide that submission fees are a necessary way to raise revenue could follow the APA's practice with membership dues and have a sliding scale based on the submitter's income. Some people might pay less than they really ought, but probably most wouldn't and this would alleviate some of the concerns about effectively barring unemployed philosophers from submitting.

I'd submit that for Interfolio to charge $6 per application is really quite reasonable. I doubt that many current applications cost less, between postage and duplication. If graduate students would be hurt by the move to Interfolio, it's not because the real costs of applications would be higher but because Ph.D. programs will use this as an opportunity to shift more of the costs of preparing applications to students. I know of one Ph.D. program that was apparently doing this even before Ms. Ferrer's announcement. Maybe we need to see the move toward making applicants pay costs that were traditionally borne by their Ph.D. programs as the problem, rather than the APA's arrangement with Interfolio per se, and apply what pressure we can to programs not to go in this direction. In other words, maybe Ph.D. programs should be subsidizing their students' use of Interfolio in lieu of providing more traditional sorts of placement services. When I think about the expenses that my Ph.D. program shouldered to support students on the job market, including not just duplication and postage but the salary of a 9-month full-time clerical person to assemble and mail dossiers, I'm pretty sure that they would have jumped at the chance to pay our Interfolio bills instead.

In response to Heidi Savage's comment about the variation in deadlines for job ads... I understand what would be attractive about a standard deadline, but sometimes exogenous factors can compel a school to search earlier (or of course later) than usual. In one of our recent searches we had one of the earliest deadlines in the country, I'm sure. This was because we had been advised that at some point in the year a hiring freeze was likely to be imposed, and we knew that there was a much smaller likelihood that the school would renege on a signed contract than that they would terminate or suspend a search that was still in progress. We made a hire in December, I think, and the hiring freeze was imposed in January or early February. Given what budgets have been like at state schools recently, we may not be the only ones who have had an early deadline for this reason.

In general, our practice has been to continue to advertise in the JFP in addition to putting ads on the newer sites. This isn't so much because we believe that people are likely to see the ad in the JFP who wouldn't have seen it elsewhere, but because we want to be able to assure our institutional equity and diversity office that we have advertised in the standard venues. We did depart from this practice once recently, when the timing of an ad was such that it was going to appear in the JFP's web-only ads rather than in the print edition. This wasn't a problem for us, except that they were going to charge us $20 more. The money doesn't even come out of our department's budget, but I was so annoyed that they would charge more for an ad that they didn't have to print on paper and mail out to people that I told them to forget it. I've not checked to see if they've jacked up their rates for all ads now that the print edition has been abolished.

I think that a couple of general principles might influence my handling of this kind of case. One is that I think there ought to be some rough consistency in grades between instructors who teach the same course. So if one of my colleagues teaches the course, and my grades had been typically running lower than hers, that would incline me more toward option B. If my grades had been running higher, that would incline me more toward option A. Another principle is that the more time that has passed between semesters, the weaker the obligation on me to treat students in those semesters consistently. So whichever option I decided to adopt, I'd probably start off by splitting the difference between the two (option B+/A-), and then evolve toward where I eventually wanted to end up over the course of a few terms.

This seems very sensible on the whole, but a couple of quibbles: 1) Once you've reached the point in your career where you're being asked to referee, being a good citizen of the profession probably means agreeing to review considerably more than two articles for every one you submit. Many people who submit will be graduate students or recent Ph.D.s who aren't reviewing yet. 2) There is some tension between items 2 and 5, and frankly 5 seems a little fishy to me. If you'll freely grant an extra two weeks to reviewers on request, then perhaps that's what the initial letter should specify.

@ Eli At my school, our knowing that you had a partner and child would not hurt you. At the same time, though, I don't think that removing that information from your professional web page should be thought of as 'concealing" it. No one should expect someone's professional web to give a complete picture of who they are as a person, anymore than they would expect their CV to give such a picture, even if some people do use their pages for this purpose.

@Roman I'd really advise just an Academia.edu page, but I'm a big fan of that site. I'm not sure if my earlier comment was part of what you included in the shared opinion or not, but I had someone write to me who had already done a very slick personal webpage and wanted my opinion on how she might tweak it. Given the work she had already done I advised her to keep it and start an Academia page in addition, but if she had come to me earlier I'd have advised her not to fuss with a personal website.

I wouldn't be deterred from work that has been submitted to journals on a personal website. A potential reviewer will only discover your identity that way if they are cheating, and I'd like to think that that doesn't happen very often. Besides, if the paper title is on your CV, or if you presented it at a conference and there is a conference webpage, the cat will be out of the bag anyway. I've never found applicant websites especially useful when I was involved in a search, but I've never seen anything on one of them that lowered my estimation of a candidate either. I did just encourage a former student now going out on the market to keep hers, however, and to start an Academia,edu page in addition. In my mind, the benefit of these is not so much that a search committee might see them but that someone looking for people who work in your area for some other reason might stumble across them. That might get you invited to be a commentator at a conference, invited to review a book, invited to referee a paper, etc. which will give you something else to put on the CV and (indirectly) help you on the market.

If I understand the example properly, concerns about moral worth don't seem to give you any reason to eschew EAC. At least not if you assume that actions that are in conformity with duty always have at least as much moral worth as alternative actions that aren't. EAC doesn't act in any case in which you would have done the right thing without it, so your actions in those cases have no less moral worth than they would have anyway. It only makes you act in conformity with duty in cases in which you wouldn't have otherwise, and so any action that you perform because of it will always have at least as much moral worth as what you would have done without it.

David, I think that libertarians would want to say that prima facie, every violation of a property right calls for compensation. This doesn't mean that I am justified in violating your property right as long as I am willing to pay compensation later, of course; normally, I'm required to obtain your consent in advance, which may mean negotiating a price. Given this, there seems to be an ambiguity in your discussion between two possible meanings of the statement that I am justified in violating your property right. One is that I am justified in violating your right but will still owe you compensation for doing so. The other is that I am justified in violating your right and need pay no compensation for doing so. The fact that a minor rights violation would produce a considerable social good might mean that the violation is justified in the first sense---e.g., eminent domain---but I'm not sure that it would mean that it is justified in the second unless the person whose right is being violated herself benefits from the violation and the magnitude of the benefit exceeds the amount of compensation owed. If this is right, then the upshot would seem to be that you can't tax anyone for purposes of redistribution past the point where they gain more than they lose from the redistributive policy. Beyond this point they would be owed compensation, to wit, a tax refund.

The suggestion that I need to show consideration for the rights of my future selves raises the question of whether I can give consent on their behalf or contract away their rights.

Aeon, It sounds like what you're implying is that whether I have a right that you not engage in some activity that poses a risk to me or merely a right to compensation if you cause me actual harm depends on the degree of risk, the amount of potential harm, and the social benefit of the activity. So that even someone who has a nonconsequentialist theory of rights has to be a consequentialist about this. Is that accurate?

There are some good suggestions here, folks, for which I'm appreciative. I think that we already do a fair job of marketing ourselves to pre-law students; we have a special "political-legal studies" track in the major for that purpose. (I agree with Brad that any department not already pursuing this population should start.) I like the idea of an intro class aimed at math and science students; that is something we don't really do enough of. (We already teach the right course, I think, but only for honors students and only once every couple of years.) I should mention one thing that we are doing with some success, which is selling the idea of philosophy as a second major to people who are too worried about job prospects (not having seen the data posted above!) to major in it alone. There is one specific good idea (or so I think, but then it was my idea) that we have implemented that should be about to bear fruit. Our dean created a policy whereby double majors can double count a certain number of courses that are part of both majors. This was done with departments in mind whose majors are interdisciplinary, like women's studies. But we worked out a deal with political science whereby we will count a couple of their classes toward our major, for students who double major, and they will do the same. Now students can double major only taking a few more courses than they need for a major + minor. Quite a few students had been majoring in PS department and minoring with us, so we hope that we will get more double majors this way. We're also planning to increase the number of hours in the major by 3 next year, but we want to find ways to let double majors count one of the courses in their major toward their philosophy degree, whatever the other major is. Maybe with some majors we won't be able to do this with a clear conscience, but many offer a "foundations" course that deals with issues of some philosophical interest.

Mark, I think that nearly every high school offers business courses and courses that might be viewed as introductions to engineering ("shop," drafting, etc.). Every high school offers introductory political science, i.e., government. My not especially large or well-funded public high school offered economics, sociology, and psychology (I took the first two). Perhaps you're right about linguistics and anthropology, although I wonder whether at least the latter of these wasn't covered in an introductory way in various social studies courses K-12. But I don't see any utility in debating this point further.

Mike- Thanks for the input. We still have a role in the new gen ed system, but it is diminished. Currently, students must take one of three courses from us: generic intro (not the real title, although the real one is no sexier!), a sort of critical thinking course, or World Religions (we are a philosophy and religious studies department, at least technically). The new system replaces the philosophy requirement with a "philosophy and ethics" requirement. We will add a fourth introductory course, an ethics course, which is a good thing. However, if another department wants to teach its own ethics course (accounting ethics, whatever) and require its students to take it, then those students don't have to take a class from this at all. I've been sending a lot of emails this week trying to get a handle on how many departments will do this. Needless to say that we aren't entirely thrilled with this change, but something even worse for us had been mooted and so we're still somewhat relieved.