by Sherri Conklin, Nicole Hassoun, and Eric Schwitzgebel
The Demographics in Philosophy project aims to increase diversity in the discipline. To this end, we have initiated a broadly consultative process to arrive at a list of potentially diversity-enhancing practices. So far, we have:
- Collected and analyzed data on under-representation in 56 philosophy journals from 1880-2010.
- Conducted a survey of 50 philosophy journals to evaluate current practices and results.
- Held an open meeting at the Pacific Division APA with the editors of 20 leading philosophy journals to discuss possible improvements.
- Circulated this list widely to those with expertise on diversity issues, including the editors of 100 journals, and recruited the editors of five journals to discuss their experiences at greater length on the Blog of the APA.
We are seeking feedback from the larger philosophical community on these ideas here.
Our main recommendations are just these:
- Set specific, achievable targets to make progress in increasing diversity in your journal.
- Implement promising practices to increase diversity in your journal and meet these targets.
- Collect data and evaluate progress at regular intervals and revise practices accordingly.
While we do not aim to defend any particular way of setting these targets here, and different journals may set more or less ambitious targets, we hope that all journals will set targets and take positive steps that will eventually yield proportional representation. This may require ensuring that members of under-represented groups can publish at least in proportion to their presence as faculty in the discipline or in proportion to their presence as researchers with a particular AOS. Targets even higher than proportional representation might be desirable to restore balance after a period of inequity or due to the special value of perspectives of members from some under-represented groups on some issues.
Some of our concrete ideas for improvement will no doubt be controversial, but editors seeking to increase diversity in the profession can implement the practices most compatible with their journal’s aims and needs, and we believe the evidence supports many of the suggestions we provide for positive change.
Ultimately, we believe that bringing about positive change just requires a bit of effort. We think that, if we really want to improve diversity in the profession, we can. We invite you to collaborate with us in doing so.
Editorial Practices to Consider to Improve the Diversity of Philosophy Journals
- Diversify representatives – editors, editorial board members, referees, trustees, staff, etc. – to include more people from under-represented groups and on important but neglected topics of interest to a diverse range of philosophers, utilizing a diverse range of methods.
- Commit to inclusion with influence. However, also be cautious about creating disproportionate burdens on members of under-represented groups, especially if those burdens do not come with public recognition.
- Set specific, achievable targets to make progress in increasing diversity in your journal.
- For under-represented groups, long-term targets might include publishing and promoting their work at least in proportion to their presence in the part of the discipline that your journal covers.
- Implement promising practices to meet these targets and increase diversity in your journal, such as:
- Solicit submissions of promising work by members of under-represented groups. (PhilPeople might be a useful resource.)
- Reserve more space for articles by members of under-represented groups to help meet specific targets.
- Publish more papers of interest to under-represented groups in philosophy and on important but neglected topics of interest to a diverse range of philosophers.
- When inviting authors always bear in mind the importance of increasing diversity in the field (potentially via special issues).
- Ensure fair practice in weighing the value of anonymity and non-anonymous editorial discretion, bearing in mind that evidence is mixed regarding the effectiveness of anonymous review in increasing diversity. Take special care to ensure that any non-anonymous parts of the review process do not omit or unfairly disadvantage authors from under-represented groups.
- Attend to your regional context as well as the overall global context (e.g. the importance of including adequate geographical and indigenous representation in your journal).
- Implement diversity-supporting referee practices, such as:
- Encourage referees and authors to avoid using language that is insensitive to cultural differences or that inappropriately excludes or offends any group of people based on their ability/disability, age, ethnicity and race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, nationality, etc.
- Encourage referees and authors to check that papers cite and discuss a fair representation of relevant work by members of under-represented groups.
- Encourage referees to consider accepting papers on topics of interest to under-represented groups in philosophy and on important but neglected topics of interest to a diverse range of philosophers.
- Encourage referees to not reject promising papers on grounds of writing quality, if the concerns are merely stylistic, can be repaired to an adequate level, and the philosophical content is good. This helps ensure fair consideration of work by philosophers who are not native speakers of English.
- Encourage timely and developmental reviews, since members of vulnerable groups are especially disadvantaged by long delays before publication.
- Implement promising practices to increase accessibility in journals, such as:
- Create structurally-tagged content.
- Utilize text-to-speech capability for print-impaired users in the absence of an audio book.
- Include a navigable table of contents within your publications, and provide a defined reading order (including, for example, appropriate links between the main flow of the text and any sidebar or box out text) to help those reading through audio to navigate their way through the article
- Include Alt-text descriptions to explain illustrations for readers with reduced access to graphic information.
- Give readers control over the font (size, style, and color), background color, and line spacing for online publications, and/or make them available in html.
- Consider trying to make your journal more accessible for those in developing countries by making your journal open access in those regions.
- Employ W3C web accessibility standards where feasible, and check for web accessibility.
- Collect data on diversity relevant publishing practices, e.g. submission and publication rates for members of under-represented groups, referee and editorial board composition, etc. and track progress in increasing diversity in your journal
- Evaluate progress at regular intervals and revise practices accordingly.
- Work with researchers to isolate and implement evidence-based practices that increase diversity in academic philosophy journals.
- Officially adopt these diversity-promoting practices and widely publicize your journal’s targets and commitment to promoting diversity.
- Inform all representatives and bind future representatives to uphold these standards.
- Publicly and explicitly adopt diversity-promoting practices, helping to create a culture of concern that enhances the journal’s reputation for welcoming diversity, attracting more diverse submissions.
Promoting diversity, if done well, ought to improve the quality of work in your journal, expanding the pool of contributors and the range of submitted work relevant to your journal’s mission.
Created by the Demographics in Philosophy Project
In addition to enhancing diversity in philosophy journal publishing, we would like to begin emphasizing things we can do to enhance diversity in the discipline more widely. We encourage feedback on this piece as well as ideas about how to implement inclusive practices for hiring and tenuring in philosophy departments and inclusive advising for PhD students. Please also help us in encouraging journals and departments to improve their practices!
Nicole Hassoun is a visiting scholar at Cornell University and Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Riverside. His most recent book is Perplexities of Consciousness. He blogs at The Splintered Mind. Sherri Lynn Conklin is a soon-to-finish PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. She works primarily in moral philosophy, and is the Co-Director of the Demographics in Philosophy Project.
Excellent steps towards ensuring diversity and inclusiveness!
Hope diversity and inclusiveness
steps will not end up akin to such steps adopted by political institutions, primarily around demographic criteria; this is a Philosophy group,so the emphasis hopefully would be more around subject diversification. Hope APA will show absolute openness towards accepting even unheard concepts and ideas more than focussing on demographic diversity, as her full commitment should be towards knowledge enhancement of mankind! APA team should abandon all preconceptions about knowledge.
I have to say that I find the suggestion to employ quotas, “targets” (in practice, typically, a euphemism for quotas), and the apparent retreat from anonymous refereeing regressive, illiberal, and profoundly disheartening. I’m pretty sure that if widely adopted, this would do tremendous damage to the credibility of our professional publications. But this one bit really caught my eye:
“Publish more papers of interest to under-represented groups in philosophy and on important but neglected topics of interest to a diverse range of philosophers.”
Given that the “groups” in question consist of racial, ethnic, and gender/sexual minorities, this seems to suggest that there are “black interests”, “Hispanic interests,” “gay interests,” “female interests” etc. (in the disciplinary, not the political sense of ‘interest’.)
This ghettoization of topics also strikes me as regressive and illiberal, not to mention the fact that it represents a point of view that elsewhere in the extended conversation going on in our society has been aggressively opposed — it seems to me by the same sorts of people pushing the current proposal — on the grounds that it is outrageous to suggest that females might have different interests from males, which might explain the differing representation of males and females in various professions (and by extension that it would be even more outrageous to suggest the same about racial or ethnic minorities)
I would very much oppose the pursuit of these sorts of measures, if I was running a professional journal and would strongly urge those who are in such a position, to refuse to do so.
I am a member of a minority group (gay, Arab) but I find the suggestions somewhat disheartening and playing into the worst of identity politics, from what I can tell. It also assumes that members of minority groups will be interested (primarily? only?) in the areas that pertain to their background. I hope that the diversity in question will focus ONLY on the diversity in the topics, not on the identity of the philosophers writing papers, though the above blog seems focused on the identity of the people, not the themes.
In response to a recent administrative request for evidence of “diversity” in my philosophy courses in fall 2018, I wrote this:
There being no definition for what is meant by “reading” I count all and only sources explicitly mentioned in the English version: 33.
Philosophers read: Philosophical Psychology (Aquinas, Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, Aristotle, Augustine, Gennadius, Plato, Averroes, Boethius, Alcher of Clairvaux, Avicenna, Peter Lombard, John Damascene, St. Paul, St. Jerome, St. Bernard, Democritus, Euclid, Empedocles, Wojtyła, Krąpiec): 20. Some occur only in an argument in an objection.
Islamic Philosophy: al-Kindi, ar-Razi, al-Farabi, Abu Bishr Matta, Yahya ibn ‘Adi, Abu Sulayman as-Sijistanti, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd, as-Suhrawardi): 12.
Logic: Oesterle: 1.
This term I have assigned reflection papers only in philosophical psychology and Islamic philosophy and propose to average in the best 5 of 7. To be conservative, let’s say 10. Each student is expected to provide an adequate summary of the position to be discussed before providing his or her own reflection.
I encourage students of logic in their written comments for the course evaluation to explain whether they are using the criteria in the IDEA matrix closest to the course content (in which case the maximum score the teacher should get is 66%) or the course description (in which case the professor is eligible to compete for 100% favorable rating), unless what is mean in IDEA by “point of view” is identical with the content of the first act of the intellect (simple apprehension).
Where we use English translations, I try to show also how the vocabulary of these translations can lead to refraction in our understanding of the author’s key concepts. For example, when the translator of Avicenna’s Metaphysics renders the Arabic term taṣdīq as “verification.” Today, we might appeal to experience or experiment to see whether a predicted result comes true; this is roughly what we would call “verification.” The translator, however, is using the word to calque the way the Arabic term is formed: the root ṢDQ Is used to express truth (the Latin verum) with a causative verbal form (indication the production or making—Latin facere—of the act). The English version thus rightly conveys the etymology of the Arabic word as “truth-making” or “veri-fication,” but does not render its meaning: the second act of the intellect expressing a truth-claim or proposition. Avicenna is not an empiricist.
On the other hand, the philosophical tradition employs synonymous aliases that can lead unsuspecting readers to think that entirely different sciences might be meant by “metaphysics” and “first philosophy” or “wisdom” or “theology,” in the Greek, Arabic, Latin, or English-speaking philosophical communities.
Sometimes people who agree talk angrily past each other, not knowing that they agree. Sometimes people who disagree are under the temporary illusion that they are in substantive agreement. And sometimes, when people are talking about the same thing, there can be fruitful conversation exhibiting in what respect there can be real agreement.
From an internal communication:
Dear Colleagues,
Perhaps we could reframe the notion of “diversity” in an appropriate way. To detach the diversity from the other transcendental features of being would probably lead to spiritual isolationism, but let’s recall that being gets its name from “is” (esse), that “thing” (res) designates what is affirmatively predicable (essentia) of every being, and that negatively, no being is not what it is, i.e., being undivided is one (unum). These three intrinsic features of being in itself, however, do not tell the whole story. Being can also be brought to encounter being in various ways: divergently as “something” (aliquid) and convergently as the “good” with reference to the appetitive appetite of the soul, which is somehow all beings, and as the “true” with reference to the intellectual power of the soul.
Our friends on the “diversity” band-wagon actually have something to teach us. As you recall, the traditional English translation of aliquid is the rather colorless word “something”; it took the Hippies from the sixties of the last century to help me appreciate how seriously we should take Aquinas’s gloss on aliquid as “quasi aliud quid”: When the Hippies would breathe out through the cloud of smoke, “Hey, man, you’re something else!” they expressed, with slurred speech, an important metaphysical truth: every being is other than every other being. On the other hand, they were not always clear-headed, and so they might be too ready to confuse existential otherness (what Aquinas calls the diversum), with categorical otherness (the differens).
I think *** is right to be concerned about a free-floating campaign to push diversity with no grounding in the rest of what is real. There is a countervailing free-floating campaign to homogenize the real: the bureaucratic imposition of things like the IDEA system falsify things by requiring things different to be treated as the same. Over-diversification often falsifies by making things essentially the same to be treated as essentially different.
I hope that our administrative superiors are alive to the need to balance our proper mission with the concerns of outside agencies not all of whom have goals even compatible with our mission. The great temptation of modern social science is to attempt to measure the higher in terms of the lower; this tendency distorts reality. The effort to be value neutral can punish the virtuous and reward the vicious.
A close look at the Thomas Aquinas College statement on diversity might be helpful to us here at ***. Might the way in which we convey our data to the Dean also help reduce the danger of distortion?
Ed