The dialogue below is between the outgoing and incoming chairs of the APA board of officers. Dominic McIver Lopes finished his three-year term on June 30, 2023, and R. Lanier Anderson began his three-year term on July 1, 2023.
RLA: The recent past has been an exciting and challenging time to lead the APA; what are your reflections about it?
DML: The past three years have tested the APA mettle, and I see us as better equipped than ever to face a major challenge to learned societies across the academy. However, it’s going to be crucial for individual philosophers (that’s you, reading this post!) to rethink their relationship to the APA.
The pandemic threw us all for a loop, to put it mildly, and it would have been easy for the APA to scale back, retreat, and wait things out. That’s not what we did. We realized that our members needed to connect with each other more than ever, so the divisions moved their meetings online. We realized that our members needed help transitioning to teaching online, so we launched a webinar series to pass along concrete advice—that’s now morphed into APA Live and APA On Demand. We also realized that the pandemic would exacerbate the vulnerability of some departments and some members, and we stepped up advocacy.
This was a tremendous amount of work. The APA’s tiny staff shouldered the extra burden. Volunteers are behind a lot of what we do, and they stepped up, undaunted. I’m always humbled by the selfless dedication of our staff and volunteers.
Having weathered the pandemic as we did, I see an opportunity for the future.
Across the academy, in every discipline, younger scholars have tended to take a more transactional stance to their learned societies, paying membership dues only when needed. Ironically, younger scholars also tend to be more socially engaged as scholars and to expect that all of us in the academic ecosystem should pull together to confront serious social problems. Now the APA has proved that it can intervene effectively where individuals can’t. It’s time to make the case that we should once again embrace the model where membership dues are like an annual tax or insurance premium to support an association that’s there when things go south—either for us all, as during the pandemic, or for those among us who need tailored resources from time to time. Can the APA fix everything? Of course not, but it can make headway on some of the issues that philosophers care about, with their backing.
Lanier, I predict you’re going to find it very gratifying to work with Amy Ferrer and the board of officers at an exciting time for the APA!
RLA: I could not agree more, Dom, with your point that we (all of us) need to recommit to a new level of engagement with the association. The APA’s response during the pandemic showed how important it is to have an organization within which we can all come together as philosophers to cooperate on common problems. But we have a lot of work ahead to rejuvenate the APA so that it will be capable of serving us into the future.
It is crucially important that we find new ways to engage young philosophers at the beginning of their careers so that they can find helpful philosophical community, now that the job market is more diffuse, and young colleagues no longer experience the divisional meetings as their primary point of entry into the profession through the job market. The changed landscape provides us with some new opportunities since the decline of job market activities leaves more time and energy at the meetings for deeper philosophical exchange, but we can only maintain these important venues for philosophical communication (along with others, like the Journal of the APA, the Blog, the Department Chairs Network, and more) if the APA itself is strong. And we can only be as strong as the members and volunteers you mentioned.
Another point I’d like to mention is that the APA is increasingly serving as a clearinghouse to spread ideas for addressing key problems that arise for our departments. The Department Chairs Network is only one example, and the newly launched Departmental Services Program serves as an organized venue for that work, bringing not only chairs but also DUS’s, DGS’s, placement officers, and others to discuss issues of common concern, to brainstorm solutions, and to spread good practices. Departments come in all shapes and sizes, and the APA aims to be of help across the whole diverse range, hearing from departments themselves what the key challenges are, and bringing collective attention to bear on solutions. The addition of the Teaching Hubs to the divisional meetings is another significant recent innovation to help philosophers advance the teaching side of our work, and to bring more philosophers (and more issues) into the conversation at the meetings.
It’s important to maintain the APA as a welcoming home for all philosophers to come together in these efforts to advance our enterprise. You’re entirely right to emphasize that recent years have led to greater demands for us to engage with pressing social problems. Of course, philosophers—just like other groups in the wider society—do not always agree about how such issues ought to be addressed, but one thing we can do as an organization is to use our convening power to promote debate over controversial questions that brings the tools of philosophy to bear. I have been heartened by recent initiatives like the Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest which encourage philosophers to develop a public voice. We should be doing our bit, with the special skills we have developed, to improve the thoughtfulness and the level of public discourse. I hope we can see more efforts to develop public philosophy going forward.
Even though there are a lot of challenges for us, it is an exciting time to be rejoining the board and helping to build the effectiveness of the APA. We are lucky to have innovative and dedicated staff leadership for the association in the person of Amy Ferrer, and she will help our members and volunteers do the steady work of improving the conditions for philosophers and philosophy over the coming years. I am excited to join with her and the board in that work.
Dominic McIver Lopes
Dominic McIver Lopes FRSC is University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia, where he works mainly in aesthetics. He is the author of books on images and their values, technologies in the arts, the theory of art, and aesthetic value. He has just completed a book entitled Aesthetic Injustice, and his next project is a historical study, Pluralism and Its Discontents.
R. Lanier Anderson
Lanier Anderson is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities at Stanford University. He is a historian of modern philosophy and has written extensively on Kant and Nietzsche, as well as select topics at the intersection of philosophy and literature. His current project is a book on Michel de Montaigne.
