The annual meetings of the divisions of the APA are the largest generalist philosophy conferences serving our membership. To be truly generalist, they must be diverse. In 2018 and 2019 the executive committees of each of the three divisions expressed this in the APA Statement on Program Diversity, which reads, in part:
The APA divisions are committed to the goal that the divisional programs and the membership of their committees achieve broad diversity. This diversity includes (but is not limited to) race, color, religion, political conviction, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification, ethnicity, and age. Where representation on the divisional programs is concerned, we also include diversity of rank and institutional affiliation.
This kind of broad diversity both requires and entails a diversity of approaches and traditions in philosophy.
But when it comes to the program itself—the thing that appears on your app (or, if you’re old-school, the little white book you carry around at the meeting)—what gets a diversity of approaches, topics, traditions, and speakers on it?
It seems mysterious. How can someone whose interests or approaches are not reflected, or not reflected enough, on the program, change that?
There are four main mechanisms by which to promote a greater diversity of approaches, topics, traditions, and speakers: paper submissions, the program committee, invited and suggested sessions, and the APA committees.
I’m going to focus on paper submissions because, apart from the contributions of the APA committees (about which I will have more to say below), they drive everything.
Here’s how it works: we receive hundreds (anywhere between 400–700) of paper submissions and we need competent people on the program committee to referee them. Our program committee is about 30 people, so each person is refereeing 15–25 papers.
Obviously, our program committee members must stretch a bit more than they would in accepting referee requests from a journal. As a modernist specializing in 17th- and 18th-century British philosophy I would never referee a paper on Descartes for a journal, but I might well be the only modernist on the program committee, which means it would likely fall to me.
On the other hand, we can’t send all the papers in philosophy of mind to one person: there are going to be more than 25 of those! So, for some areas, we’re going to need more than one person on the program committee to be able to referee the submitted papers.
Finally, the number of papers we receive in areas of specialization is maddeningly unpredictable: some years we’re under a pile of epistemology; other years we’re buried in applied ethics.
You may be anticipating what I’m suggesting: if you want to influence what gets on the program, submit papers. Better yet, get all the people in your networks to submit papers. Better yet, if you have something more formal than a network—a listserv, a society—send out the information and reminders about how and when to submit papers. Deluge us with papers!
Because here’s what happens if you do: we now have to find a person to serve for three years on the program committee who can competently referee all those papers. It can’t be someone who will have to stretch to be able to read just a handful. After all, you have deluged us with papers! Now we have to find someone who is particularly dedicated in this area.
And what kind of difference does that make? Why does it matter whether the program committee itself is composed of philosophers from a more diverse range of approaches, topics, and traditions? Because the program committee creates the invited portion of the program.
There are four main parts to the divisional program: the refereed sessions (colloquia, symposia, and posters), the invited sessions, the APA committee sessions, and the special sessions (the Presidential Address, the Dewey Lecture, special memorial sessions).
Being on the program committee is pretty thankless, like most honors. You referee an enormous number of papers in the span of about one month or less. For any paper you accept, you now have to find a commentator and a chair. This is so much harder than it sounds.
(Yes, I have heard the suggestion that we do away with chairs, and it’s not as great a suggestion as you might think, but that’s for another blog post.)
And you do it for three years. In the Pacific Division, all this happens during the busiest months of the fall semester. Thank your program committee members when you see them, please.
But there is one thing we do to thank program committee members and it promotes program diversity at the same time: each program committee member is asked to create two (but no more than two) invited sessions—that is, book symposia (also known as Author Meets Critics), invited symposia, or invited papers.
Although program committee members are not required to stick to their areas of specialization when creating their invited sessions, we tell them that they’re on the committee in part to ensure that their areas are represented at the meeting. If we had no one in ancient philosophy on the program committee, for example, there might be few to no sessions in ancient on the program.
Now you’re beginning to see why I say that paper submissions drive everything. Because you have deluged us with papers in the area you’d like to see more represented, we’ve had to find a program committee member whose areas of specialization include your area. And because this is their area of specialization, they’re going to use one or both of their invited session slots to create a session in this area.
So now there are more papers in both the refereed and invited portions of the program in the area you’d like to see more represented because you and your networks have made it so.
I’ll quietly say that this works in the other direction too: you might have asked yourself, why are there so many sessions in area X on the program? This is why.
And insofar as the overwhelming presence of some areas discourages people from submitting papers in areas that are less represented on the program—or not represented at all—the bottom-up nature of the system can maintain the status quo or worse, entrench it.
This is why I’m suggesting that you make the volunteer, thankless work of the program committee that much harder by giving us more, and more diverse submissions.
There is a more straightforward way to suggest a session for the invited portion of the program. Program committee members are free but not obligated to use one or both of their invited session slots to take up suggested sessions. In the years that I’ve been with the Pacific Division, I’ve seen most but not all suggested sessions adopted.
But suggesting a session doesn’t make longstanding change. Changes in paper submissions change program committees, and changes in program committees change the invited portion of the program. Both result in more sessions in the refereed and invited portions of the program in areas you’d like to see more represented.
I said I’d say a bit about the APA committees. We rely a great deal on the APA committees to ensure greater program diversity, and another way you can make a long-term difference to the diversity of the program is to serve on one of these committees. Although there is no upper limit on the number of sessions an APA committee can create, we like to see two sessions from each committee per meeting.
There are currently 18 committees, many of which are vital to the diversity of the program, such as the APA Committee on Hispanics/Latinxs, the Committee on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, the Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession, the Committee on International Cooperation, the Committee on LGBTQ People in the Profession, the Committee on Native American and Indigenous Philosophers, the Committee on Public Philosophy, the Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers, the Committee on the Status of Disabled People in the Profession, and the Committee on the Status of Women.
Please serve. Nominate yourself. Nominate your colleagues. We tend to think of the APA as a thing, this other thing, but it’s us, volunteering.
I’ve been around for a while now, in philosophy and with the APA. I’ve seen the discipline change and I’ve seen the meetings change. I’ve seen the APA change. And I’m hoping for more change.
In making this process less mysterious, I hope I’ve given you an easy, powerful roadmap for changing the programs at the annual meetings: submit your papers and tell your colleagues to submit their papers. It can make a more profound difference than you might think.
Becko Copenhaver
Rebecca Copenhaver is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Pacific Division of the APA.
