Most departments have regular research seminars, usually weekly during term-time with an invited speaker, who talks for about an hour, followed by another hour or so of discussion. Speakers might be internal or external and the processes for nominating who gets invited vary considerably, although many UK departments conform to the BPA-SWIP (UK) Good Practice Scheme which includes various guidelines for seminars and conferences.
Such seminars are a staple of the disciplinary research infrastructure and can serve a variety of aims:
- To do philosophy.
- To create a vibrant departmental research culture, by listening to and discussing with our disciplinary colleagues.
- To contribute to the maintenance of local, national, and international academic philosophical communities by ensuring regular opportunities to meet, share news, encourage professional solidarity, and so on.
- To generate and distribute epistemic goods within the discipline through exchanges with colleagues (eg ideas, insights, criticisms, suggestions, ways of thinking, etc.)
- To generate and distribute professional goods within the discipline (eg contacts, opportunities for networking, raising one’s profile and prestige, boosting one’s professional confidence and self-esteem, etc.)
- To actively contribute to the progressive transformation of the discipline (eg seeking a more equitable distribution of these epistemic and professional goods; by creating more inclusive networks and collegial relationships; by trying to dismantle systems and practices that are epistemically exclusionary, invidiously discriminatory, cronyist or otherwise objectionable).
Without pretending to be exhaustive, these are hopefully attractive, important functions that can be served by a departmental seminar series. Unfortunately, not all seminar series actually serve these functions. Some of the functions might not be endorsed. Some might be endorsed in principle, but not achieved in practice, perhaps due to inadequacies in the seminar system. In worse cases, a seminar series has invidious effects, such as facilitating the persistence of aggressively agonistic, ‘take no prisoners’ environments or entrenching the gender-imbalanced culture of the discipline.
In an effort to guard against such cases, we decided to try to enact some practical changes to the seminar series of our professional home, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Matthew is the organiser and chair of the research seminars and Ian is a member of the departmental Diversity and Equality Committee. These initiatives were self-directed, although a commitment to good seminar practice is fortunately common to our departmental colleagues. There’s a lot of willingness to create a collegial intellectual and social culture, and one of the obvious places to do this is the weekly research seminar – a time we all come together to think and socialise together, with one another and with our visitors from other departments. In the past, the department had its share of disruptive and aggressively adversarial behaviour (albeit before our time, since we both arrived in the last three years).
Together, we want to offer a case study of how one can change departmental seminar series practices of invitation to better promote the variety of functions laid out above,
Stage one: data!
Start by gathering data on who has spoken at the seminar series. We chose three criteria:
- The gender of the invited speaker.
- Their professional rank: postdoc, lecturer/ assistant professor, senior lecturer / associate professor, and full professor.
- Their institutional status: whether the speaker is from a Russell Group university (the research-active universities generally regarded as being more prestigious) or from a non-Russell Group university (mainly ‘new’ universities and former polytechnics) and speakers from outside the UK. There are twenty-four Russell Group members and by out count fifty-five UK universities with units, departments, or schools that employ academic philosophers. (We therefore exclude philosophers working in other sorts of department, such as environmental philosophers in Departments of Geography).
We didn’t have the resources to track additional criteria, such as the speaker’s racial identity and the topic on which they spoke. We surveyed the six semesters from autumn 2016 to spring 2019, during which sixty-five speakers spoke at our department. During this period, our policies were that all staff are invited to propose speakers, that newly appointed staff are invited to speak (relevant, since we hired nine new permanent staff during that period), and any invitees who decline are standardly re-invited for the following year.
You can read the full report here, but here are some highlights:
- Gender: our overall gender balance, undifferentiated by rank, was 48% women. We achieved perfect parity in autumn 2016 and autumn 2018, with women also a slight majority, of 55%, in autumn 2017. Women are best represented at the lower ranks, at postdoc (67%) and lecturer (48%), and less well represented at senior lecturer (30%) and professor (44%).
- Professional rank: junior ranks made up just over half of all speakers, with postdocs 11% and lecturers/assistant professors 43% – twenty-eight speakers, of whom sixteen were internal speakers, due to a policy of inviting newly appointed staff to speak). The senior lecturers/associate professors made up 18% of speakers, and professors 28%.
- Institutional status: the overwhelming majority of speakers were from Russell Group universities (81% of speakers). Only three speakers were from non-RG universities (4%) and 9.5 speakers (eight speakers and one co-presented talk) from non-UK universities (15%). All our non-Russell Group speakers were women (and all of senior rank), whereas 78% of non-UK speakers were men of various ranks.
Stage two: analysis
Although collecting data is dull and time-consuming, it’s essential for a variety of epistemic, practical, and ameliorative reasons:
- It gives us an informed sense of the actual state of affairs (for instance, by exposing typical patterns in the institutional status of invited speakers).
- It helps us identify where we are doing well, and where we can improve.
- It helps us identify what sorts of aims our research seminar are implicitly serving.
- It helps us set achievable targets for improvement.
- It helps us reflect critically on our research seminar organisation practices.
- It helps us pursue national equality initiatives, like Athena SWAN accreditation.
- It is consistent with our obligations as signatories to the BPA-SWIP (UK) Good Practice Scheme.
The data was presented to the Department for plenary discussion at an all-staff meeting and timed to come just before recommendations were solicited for speakers for the following year’s seminar series.
Although the data indicated several places for improvement, we’ll focus here on what seemed a very egregious pattern—that we didn’t tend to invite speakers from outside the Russell Group, those institutions with greater prestige and power. Since there are fifty-five universities with schools, departments, or units of philosophy, it seemed to us unacceptable that we’re only really inviting from the twenty-four most prestigious.
Since only four out of fifty-eight UK speakers were from non-RG universities, that’s a clear place to improve, especially since the data showed the triple character of the failure: (i) we rarely invite outside the non-Russell Group and, even when we do, invitees were all (ii) senior ranked – meaning they had to meet a higher bar – and (iii) already personally acquainted with members of our department, rather than being procedurally selected.
Stage three: action.
The point of compiling the data is to inform corrective policies. Knowing where we do badly, we can work out where to focus our efforts. In the case of our under-representation of non-RG philosophers, we did the following:
- Informing.
Once you have the data, share it within the department. Make sure colleagues are informed about the problematic patterns. Discuss the data. If you’re going to add or change policies in ways that make additional demands of your colleagues, they should understand and accept the evidential basis. At Nottingham, a full written report was circulated to all colleagues and presented at a departmental management committee meeting:
- The underrepresentation of non-RG speakers was documented and affirmed as an area for improvement, consistent with our values of equality and collegiality.
- The department seminar organiser encouraged staff and postgraduates to bear the underrepresentation in mind when suggesting speakers.
- A full list of the UK’s philosophy departments was circulated to make it easier for staff to look up potential speakers from non-RG departments.
- Setting goals.
We didn’t set quotas or fixed targets for the number of non-RG speakers. Instead we used the Better Than Before policy: try to do better than you were doing before, where ‘better’, in this case, means:
- To invite a greater proportion of non-RG speakers than before.
- To invite junior as well as senior ranks, unlike before.
- To invite those without personal contacts in our department, unlike before.
Since BTB is incremental, a critic will worry that it’s too conservative and too modest. We’re sympathetic to that worry. But BTB has advantages. It avoids fights about quotas. It honours the fact that many contingent structural features of academic philosophy militate against the fulfilment of quotas. And we have the good fortune of being able to trust our colleagues to respect the BTB system – something not every department can count upon, alas.
- Acting
Once the data was in, our Departmental Research Seminar Organiser developed a series of new procedures for selecting seminar speakers:
- All staff and postgraduates were invited, by email, to propose speakers. These proposals formed the long-list of 71 speakers, including 30 women (42%) and 46 (58%) non-Russell Group.
- An initial shortlist was circulated to all staff and postgraduates for comment, which included the speakers name, institution, and the fields in which they work and are thus likely to speak. This lets us identify speakers who’d spoken at the department recently and be transparent about the overall character of the suggestions. Twenty-four names were shortlisted, out of a total of twenty slots, since of course some will decline.
- Five shortlisting criteria were used: one point each if a speaker was the nominator’s first choice, if they were nominated by two different nominators, if they were from a non-Russell Group institution, if they are a woman, if they are from another social group under-represented within philosophy.
- Since these five criteria yielded thirty names, two additional criteria were applied: (i) every nominator was given at least one nominee, and (ii) the organiser sought for a balance of philosophical areas, reflecting as best as possible the diversity of research interests of the department.
These criteria and procedures substantially transformed our invitee shortlist: 75% (=18) of the invitees are women, fifty-eight percent (= 14) are from non-Russell Group institutions, and the range of research areas is highly diverse, roughly reflective of our department:
- 4 x political and legal philosophy
- 4 x ethics including metaethics
- 3 x history
- 2 x epistemology including applied epistemology
- 2 x philosophy of mind and perception
- 2 x Continental philosophy
- 2 x logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophical logic
- 1 x philosophy of education
- 1 x aesthetics
- 1 x metaphysics
- 1 x feminist philosophy
- 1 x comparative philosophy
Granted, not all invitees can or will accept, for a variety of reasons, and those who accept invitations are not required to speak on the areas currently listed on their webpages. But we think that these changes in our practices offer a useful case study in how to research and transform seminar invitation procedures to better align them with certain moral and disciplinary values – such as challenging the prestige biases that distort the distribution of epistemic and professional goods.
Some brief reflections on the limitations of short-listing approach.
- There were no limits placed on how many speakers each member of staff or PG could suggest, meaning the list was weighted towards those who suggested more people. In the future, setting a limit on the number of suggestions per person might be better. We have twenty staff and around twenty seminar slots, so three invitees per person might be a good rule.
- Some colleagues pointed out that the areas aren’t evenly represented (eg there’s little metaphysics). We’re wondering if this reflects the demographics of specific sub-disciplines and the differential presence of certain areas of philosophy at non-Russell Group institutions). We also disagreed about whether we should invite people who work in areas of philosophy that none of us teach or research, such as philosophy of technology.
- The ‘Russell Group’ is only a very approximate proxy for prestige: the University of St Andrews has a highly prestigious philosophy department, but technically isn’t Russell Group. So, be aware of the variety of formal and informal indications of prestige.
- An obstacle to sourcing speakers is that many departments have awful webpages: an absence of a ‘Our staff’ page, or listing staff’s names and email addresses but not their research areas, and so on. (When testing this informally, the longest find-time for a staff page was fifteen minutes). So, rather than just urging people to invite from a wider pool of departments, get someone to do the dull work of creating and circulating a list of departments with hyperlinks to their staff pages.
- We wonder whether a more light-touch affirmative action measure might be just as effective (eg drawing up a shortlist and then simply ensuring that it includes a good proportion of women and non-Russell Group speakers). Sometimes, a looser system might deliver positive results just as well.
- There’s almost always a difference between who one invites and who can accept. It’s often the case that staff can’t accept invitations – maybe their teaching loads are too heavy, or they lack the research time to prepare a paper. We worry that this will tend to affect those at less privileged institutions, causing an attrition between our invites and our acceptances.
TL/DR: Get the data. Decide what aims you want to serve. Decide where best to act. Change practices accordingly.
Ian James Kidd
Ian is a member of the departmental Diversity and Equality Committee at the University of Nottingham.
Matthew Duncombe
Matthew Duncombe works in the philosophy department at the University of Nottingham. Matthew is the organizer and chair of the research seminars.
