From 2017 until January 2023, I served in the role of Eastern Division Secretary-Treasurer (S-T). It’s not a particularly well-known role, though anyone who has attended an APA meeting will vaguely recognize the S-T’s name from various meeting-related emails. When I initially thought about taking on the role, for instance, I knew that Robin Smith was the Central Division’s S-T for just this reason, but I couldn’t have told you much more about the role than that.
What, then, is the role of the S-T? The simplest way to put it is that the S-T for a division is responsible for ensuring that the divisional activities run smoothly. This includes managing the division’s finances, facilitating divisional elections, ensuring that divisional bylaws are followed, making changes to how the division and its meeting operate based on changes of member needs, and coordinating with the other divisions and the APA office. But since the largest activity of a division is that division’s annual meeting, the most prominent part of the S-T role is to ensure that the meetings go well. I hope that during my tenure the Eastern meetings did go well, but it was certainly not smooth sailing. By my count, three of the six meetings I oversaw were in some way abnormal, so it was certainly an eventful six years.
2017: Baltimore
The 2017 Eastern Division meeting was in Baltimore and at that time I was shadowing my predecessor, Andy Cullison, to learn the ropes. By 2017, the job market activity at the Eastern had significantly declined from its peak in 2010. Nevertheless, there were still some first-round interviews, and the APA still offered “placement services,” which included selling interview space to departments and coordinating on-the-fly interviews. There were six departments in 2017 holding first-round interviews at the Eastern.
2018: Savannah
The 2018 meeting was scheduled to be in Savannah, Georgia. It was not a location that I had personally selected (that contract had been signed before I was S-T), but I was excited about the prospects of a more southerly Eastern, where we might expect warmer temperatures and certainly no blizzards à la Boston 2011. The Eastern was to be held at the Savannah Convention Center, which is located on Hutchinson Island, a small island in the middle of the Savannah River. There is a hotel, The Westin, on the island, but it doesn’t have sufficient space for all APA attendees. Given this, the Eastern also reserved a block of rooms at the Savannah Hyatt, across the river near downtown Savannah. To get from one side to the other there were charming little water taxis that could ferry people across the Savannah River. Why, you might wonder, am I going through these geographical details? Those who were at the meeting, or who already know the story, know that there is a good reason for this.
The Eastern was to begin on Wednesday, January 3. A number of philosophers had arrived the night before, and many more were in transit on January 3. By noon on that day, the temperature had dropped significantly, and there was freezing rain. Ice covered everything. The Convention Center staff let us know in the afternoon that the water taxis would not be able to run: the docks were too slippery to allow people on them. But, they assured us, we would still be fine. The Talmadge Bridge was right next to Hutchinson Island, and they could arrange for a shuttle service for participants across the river. The Talmadge Bridge, they said, had never shut down.
A few hours later we learned that the Talmadge Bridge was being shut down. The ice was too severe and the city of Savannah didn’t have salt or trucks to clear the roads. Unsurprisingly, flights were canceled and we were receiving a torrent of emails from philosophers informing us they would no longer be able to attend the meeting.
Even though the weather improved, it stayed cold, and so the water taxis never did end up running during the meeting. The Talmadge Bridge opened only on the final day. Many philosophers were not able to make it to Savannah at all, and for those of us who did make it, half were on one side of the river and half on the other. So, we had to completely rethink sessions.
As luck would have it, my predecessor, Andy Cullison, was on the downtown side of the river in the Hyatt. I was on Hutchinson Island, in the Westin. We worked together to find out who was on what side of the river, and then cobbled sessions together with ad hoc titles like “Modal Logic, Aristotle’s Ethics, and Aesthetics”—really just a collection of papers by three philosophers who happened to be on the same side of the river. Though in some ways this was not ideal, there was a certain magic to these sessions. Suddenly, out of necessity, philosophers with all sorts of different specializations were in the same room together, thinking about topics they might not otherwise have considered. And I found that the philosophers at that meeting were incredibly flexible and gracious about the situation (even when food supplies began running low on Hutchinson Island).
One final note about that 2018 meeting. In Savannah, we had nine schools sign up to do first-round interviews in person. Only six schools were able to make it. The next year, the Eastern stopped facilitating in-person interviews. Though things were heading this way on their own, the Savannah ice storm was the final blow for in-person first-round interviews for philosophy in the US.
2019: New York
I said that three of the six Eastern meetings I oversaw were abnormal. This was not one of them! It was just a normal conference, with great attendance, in a fun location. It was also when The Teaching Hub—a mini-conference within the Eastern Division meeting focused on philosophy pedagogy—really gained some momentum. The Teaching Hub first appeared as a pilot in 2017 and was significantly disrupted in 2018 due to the ice storm. The success the Eastern had with this Teaching Hub led to its expansion to the Central and the Pacific Divisions as well.
2020: Philadelphia
This was another normal meeting, though if it had been just a couple months later, it would not have been. I recall being in the hotel lobby in Philadelphia and seeing news reports about a respiratory illness in China. But at that time (early January), there wasn’t the sense that this was a matter of global concern. A few months later, COVID had disrupted everything.
2021: New York (planned), Virtual
The 2021 Eastern was to be in New York. Though this now strikes me as naïve, in the summer of 2020, I was still thinking there was a chance we’d be able to hold the meeting in person. I had recently moved to Norway for a year and was thinking about the logistics of booking plane tickets from Oslo to NYC.
Of course, we weren’t able to have the meeting in person, but we still had a very big program scheduled, since the submissions for the Eastern had all come in before February 15, 2020, and thus before many of us realized the scope of the pandemic. Rather than cancel the meeting outright, then, we decided to go virtual. And with that the 2021 Eastern was the first fully virtual APA (the Pacific meeting in April 2020 unfortunately had to be canceled outright).
I helped to run this virtual meeting from Norway, which meant biking to my office late at night (due to the time difference) and monitoring a menagerie of Zoom rooms, together with the wonderfully dedicated staff at the APA national office.
I think this meeting, at least for me, showed both the promise and limitations of virtual meetings. On the promise side of things, many of the virtual sessions I attended were fantastic. People enjoyed seeing other philosophers that they knew, the quality of discussion was generally high, and there is a kind of convenience that comes with being able to sleep in your own bed and eat at your home. But there are limitations. The collegiality of the 2021 Eastern was largely based on pre-existing friendships and relationships—friendships and relationships that for the most part were built up in-person. I certainly didn’t cultivate any new professional relationships at the meeting, and I think it was challenging for most people to do so.
This suggests that some combination of in-person and virtual events might be the best kind of model. The experience of putting on these virtual meetings during the pandemic had a significant impact on the APA implementing a trial of the 2+1 plan where, starting in 2025, two of the divisional meetings will be in-person while one will be virtual.
2022: Baltimore
The 2022 Eastern was supposed to be in Montreal, with the 2023 meeting scheduled for the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, D.C. However, in the summer of 2021, the Wardman Park went bankrupt as a result of the pandemic. And the border between Canada and the US was still heavily restricted, so we reached an agreement with the hotel in Montreal to push that meeting back to 2023. That left us needing a location for 2022.
We were fortunate to book a place for 2022 with a hotel in Baltimore. Because hotels were desperate for business, we were able to sign a very favorable contract that had a 0% attrition clause. What does that mean? The way most hotel contracts work is that in exchange for complimentary use of meeting rooms, the hotel asks us for a certain number of guest room nights. For the Eastern, this has typically been 1,000–1,500. If you fail to get enough meeting participants that use these room nights and so miss your target, you as the conference organizer have to pay the difference. An attrition clause allows you to only have to meet a certain percentage of this target. The attrition clause usually sets that percentage at 70–80%. A 0% attrition clause means the Eastern would not have to pay any financial penalties no matter how many (or few) people attended. This ended up being an important factor in our decision-making for this meeting.
We were optimistic in the summer of 2021 that the meeting in Baltimore would be a success. Vaccines were widely available and people were eager to get back to something a bit more normal. In mid-October, however, COVID numbers started to increase and so we decided to offer the option of a virtual meeting for anyone who was uncomfortable traveling to the in-person meeting. The in-person meeting was scheduled to go ahead as planned in early January in Baltimore and the virtual portion of the meeting was to be a week after that. This required some significant reshuffling of the program, but was feasible since we were still over two months before the meeting.
All was going smoothly until late December when the COVID numbers, fueled by the Omicron variant, really started to surge. At this time, I received a corresponding surge in emails from participants who no longer wanted to attend the in-person meeting. Though the deadline for requesting participation in the virtual portion of the meeting had passed, it became clear that it would be best to try to accommodate such requests or else the entire meeting was at risk of falling apart.
The requests for virtual participation increased over the Christmas holiday and we began to wonder whether we should cancel the in-person meeting altogether. In the end, we decided to go forward with the in-person meeting, but add additional virtual session dates. What informed this choice? Two main things. First, though many participants had told us they would not be traveling, others told us that they were planning to attend. We estimated that 30–50% of participants were still intending to come to the in-person meeting. Second, if we canceled the meeting outright, there could be severe financial penalties. But because of our 0% attrition clause, if we attempted to hold the in-person meeting, there would be very little financial penalty even if no one showed up. As things turned out, we had perhaps 30% of the regular attendees at the in-person meeting, with most of the others participating in the virtual meeting.
A third abnormal Eastern for me was in the books.
2023: Montreal
The 2023 Eastern in Montreal was my last one as S-T, and I was excited that it was also the first time in a long time that the Eastern Division would meet in Canada. The last time the Eastern was in Canada was in 1950 in Toronto. Interestingly, the president of the division at that time, Max Black, invited W.V.O. Quine to give a paper at the meeting. Quine did so, and the paper he presented was “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”
Though time will tell whether any papers presented in Montreal will have the same impact as Quine’s “Two Dogmas,” I do think that this meeting was largely a success. Montreal is an enjoyable city, and though we did get a bit of snow, the winter infrastructure in Montreal is considerably more robust than that in, say, Savannah, GA. Though the meeting was a bit smaller than pre-pandemic meetings, it was clear that those who attended were excited to be back together in person, and it was an excellent way to close out my time as secretary-treasurer.
Conclusion
I was lucky to work with wonderful people including fantastic divisional presidents, members of the Eastern executive committee, members of the Eastern program committee, and with others on the APA Board of Officers. For someone like me who works at a small liberal arts college, it was an invaluable opportunity to meet and work with philosophers from all over the country. I would like to especially sing the praises of the wonderful people who chaired the program committee for the years that I was S-T. Chairing the program committee is significant work in two senses: it is both time intensive, but also incredibly valuable to the profession. I had the pleasure of working with program chairs Susanne Sreedhar, Ted Sider, Patricia Blanchette, Susanna Siegel, Christina van Dyke, and Iakovos Vasiliou. Finally, the APA staff made the work a joy, including Erin Shepherd, Melissa Smallbrook, Mike Morris, Linda Nuoffer, Michelle Crabb, and Amy Ferrer.
Jeff Dunn
Jeff Dunn is an associate professor of philosophy at DePauw University and is the Phyllis W. Nicholas Director of the Prindle Institute for Ethics. From 2017 to 2023 he served as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Eastern Division of the APA. His research and teaching is primarily in epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and ethics.
