Moving ahead

I don’t have a problem with your membership policy (I plan to apply after my defense in January, but I’ve got no problem waiting) but it doesn’t seem self evidently correct, either. Perhaps if you could explain the initial thought process behind excluding ABDs or PhDs who are seeking but don’t currently have full time academic employment, it might help others think about the wisdom of the current policy.

I’ll suggest at least one reason why PhDs without full time employment (but who seek it) might be considered for membership. These people are likely to have less access than the rest of us to traditional forms of collegial discussion in political philosophy; a lack of professional colleagues, since they likely lack funding to attend professional conferences and don’t have easy access to colleagues down the hall. Just food for thought.

1. Policy and an editorial committee: may be helpful, but ultimately may be more problematic than its worth. Why not just have an editorial board that you look to for advise, but retain the authority for yourself? Doing so, of course, leaves you able to just have the committee vote and to abide by their decision if you so wish.

2. I agree with David that allowing those who are not currently employed but who are seeking employment as academics is a good idea. They should be at least ABD, though. We should seek some indication that they are ABD or are seeking an academic position though.

3. Comments: I like as is.

4. Other projects: you’ve given good suggestions, but I’m not sure how much use they’ll get. Reading groups on-line strike me as less fun than in person (unfortunately, I guess).

What we really want, I think, is to encourage more posts of substance. Changing membership policy as per #2 may help with that.

Hi David. I’m very glad you will be finishing up soon.
I think I would prefer to have people with PhDs who are still genuinely working on political philosophy and seeking employment within the field, especially given the way the job market can be a harsh and unforgiving environment. Certainly the reason you cite is a key purpose of the blog as a whole.

Re: ABDs, one concern I have is that it may not be a good idea to have people still working on their dissertation post stuff that their committee has not worked through with them properly. “All But Done” often means “Just Getting Started” and I wouldn’t people to publicly bind themselves to preliminary theses and arguments at such an early stage of their career. Maybe this is overly paternalistic.

For my money, that would be a tad too much on the overly-paternalistic side. Heaven forbid I’m committed to all the theses I float in discussion! And one good source of information that a thesis isn’t one one should be deeply committed to is how it fares in an informal airing!

An anonymous grad student writes to say that:

“What would be good is to have daily, timely, reasonably terse posts so this blog will stay interesting. In the short time the blog has been running there have been exceedingly few blog posts and far more conference announcements” and that “people will stop coming if you don’t increase the number of substantive posts.”

I agree that substantive posts are the main attraction of the site — conference announcements being more like the classifieds section — but that just repeats the question of how best to increase the number of substantive posts.

I personally favour having a very large number of people with no expectations for regular posting from any one person. Perhaps allowing ABDs is the way to go. But I’d also like many more regular faculty to join (and I’m tired of emailing people to invite them).

With 67 contributors already, I suspect that a more open membership policy could lead to a ‘watering down’ of posts, and as a result, the usefulness of the blog will be hampered. Though I am a grad student, I support the restriction of membership to those with Ph.D’s and those working in or seeking employment in political philosophy, as it will keep the blog on track.

With that said, I would like to see more substantive content; I study at a university that does not have a strong focus in political philosophy, and I look forward to more opportunities to engage current work in the area.

The comment policy is, to my mind, a good one. Many blogs that have a pretty high level of content as to their contributors have terrible comments sections, partly because of regular trolls who contribute nothing and partly because of a need to spend a long time repeating basic assumptions of a field. So far I’ve found the comments on this blog very interesting and useful but strongly suspect that if they were more open that this would not be so.

I do hope that semi-regular posting beyond announcements will continue (though the announcements are also useful.)

Hi Simon,

I’m also happy with the comments policy as it stands. I’ve been following the discussion over at Crooked Timber, and I agree with what you’ve said.

On the issue of other projects - I think online reading groups can work quite well (Pea Soup had a very productive one on Parfit’s Climbing the Mountain). I was thinking of organizing a reading group around David Estlund’s new book, Democratic Authority, which is due out in a week or two I think. If it seems like there’s sufficient interest, I’ll get that started sometime in the next month or two.

I’d be up for reading Estlund. That’s a great idea.

Re: policy, so far I’ve modified the membership policy to include underemployed PhDs. I’m sympathetic to bringing some very late ABDs on board, so I’m open to those who have at least submitted but not yet finally defended their dissertations. I’ll leave the comments policy as is for the moment, unless someone in future can think of a better policy.

I support the idea of study groups. And Jonathan’s proposal of reading Estlund’s new book is terrific.

I agree, and Estlund reading group would be just the thing.

I’d simply like to add to the chorus surrounding Estlund’s book, as well as thank Jonathan for an excellent idea.

The first chapter of Democratic Authority is available from Princeton University Press here.

Looking further ahead, Tom Christiano’s The Constitution of Equality is due out in May 2008.

Not a bad time to be working in democratic theory …