Open the Gates For the Humanities and Social Science to Thrive

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Excellent Eid, Krazy Kwanzaa, and Kickin’ New Year to everyone reading this. Before I get into the meat of today’s newsletter (which you can skip to if you feel like it, a couple of paragraphs down), I want to reflect on how the year has gone. 

It’s been a transitional year for me, certainly. After finally being downsized from what will likely be my last position in higher education, I’ve become a credible hire for most professionals in the learning and development world, thanks to my current contract. Ironically, I can’t discuss directly a lot of what I’m developing there or the ideas I’m bringing to it because I’m contracted to a pretty impressive government department. My main hope is that this credit in my work history and the good relationships I’m building there will be impressive enough that I can crack through to a permanent position with a good company early next year for my main income-earning job. More will come about those developments in the new year. 

Aside from my professional developments, today I want to share some ideas about my writing and creative work. It’s about why I still develop projects and pursue publications in what I’m currently calling “philosophical non-fiction.” Figuring out how to sell philosophical writing to a wider audience than professional academics. It has to do with giving the philosophical tradition that I fell in love with as a youth more paths to persist through a potentially dark time. 

A lot of people I’ve known over the years who had trouble finding work in the higher education sector after finishing their doctorates left the field bitter. And they left it entirely. But what drew me to study those traditions and build those research and analysis skills in the humanities was the substance of the traditions. I worry that this moment in history is a point of high risk that many traditions of writing and thought in the humanities will disappear and a lot of value will be lost to us. 

Why? Because the tradition of writing and reading philosophical works has become centred entirely in the universities and higher education sector, and that sector is facing serious destruction from budget cuts and corruption. Government support falls, tuition rises as a result, and students have to make such a huge cash investment in their educations that they think only of direct applications to their careers. The wider purpose of cultivating the spirit and engaging with ideas to become a more intellectually formidable person disappear because no one gets a job for being an intellect. 

As for corruption, humanities and social science researchers and teachers are under sustained attack from religious extremist authoritarian political movements and governments. The character of resistance from the high integrity of university and college leadership looks rather like bending over and asking politely for another. Just as Nikole Hannah-Jones or Mel Curth learned the hard way. 

I’m still figuring out how to build a network that can continue these traditions without their collapsing into strange communities around the fascism-curious or self-help books. It’s the one plan in my life right now that I can see, if it’s successful, stretching beyond the end of my life. But for now, I want to share a story. 

I still contribute to a few sources of publicly-accessible research in the humanities and social sciences as the opportunities arise. It’s how, over the last decade or so, my published research has moved more into the field of theory of science and the social or political aspects of knowledge. A lot of my publications over that period have been with through the journal Social Epistemology and their open-access site, the Review and Reply Collective. I’ve had a professional relationship with their editor-in-chief, Virginia Tech’s James Collier, and many regular contributors there, since 2011. For just under two years over 2017-8, I was their digital editor, but left for reasons I described in an earlier post. 

In late November, I got an email from the journal Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, asking if I’d like to do some peer review for a submission that was in my research wheelhouse. It was very much in my wheelhouse, for reasons I’ll explain later in the post. Not only that, but it was very good, which I’ll also explain later in the post. So I recommended publication, and left some very detailed comments and suggestions for the author’s future work in the feedback form, managed by the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. 

Or at least I would have, if I were able to make an account. 

You see, you could only leave a peer review if you made an account. Fine enough, but you could only make an account if you had an email address from their long list of post-secondary education institutions. But I’m no longer employed with a higher education institution, and I don’t even think my former employer, a Canadian private college company, would have been on that list at all. Private college faculty, as far as the institution works in Canada, typically are not expected to do any research, or even have any research acumen or skills. Most often, Canadian private college faculty jobs aren’t even classified as permanent, and are fully contingent, reappointed course module by course module or semester by semester. 

Without an email address from a recognized higher education research institution, I couldn’t complete my account creation. Without an account, I had no way to submit my peer review. 

I contacted the journal’s editor, so I’ll likely be able to sort this out. But the fact that I can’t create my own account to qualify as a peer review contributor in the Elsevier system prevents me from being recognized as a legitimate member of the community of researchers in this field. 

Since my earliest time working in research institutions, I saw how strict gatekeeping was around unaffiliated researchers. At one of the first conferences I attended for the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, I remember seeing a man only a few years older than me whose nametag read “Independent Scholar.” He was the loneliest person at the entire Philosophy Association gathering. I was one of a small handful of people who attended his presentation session, and no one spoke to him at any of the lunches. Neither student, part-time teacher, nor professor at any rank, the community barely perceived him. 

It was the second year of my doctoral program, and I had given a talk and two commentaries in the Philosophy Association, and taken part at a panel in the Sociology Association. The latter would be a published, peer reviewed article by the end of that year, and one of the other presentations from that work won an award from the Common Ground Conferences organization, which got me invited to give one of the central talks at that Fall’s conference in Switzerland. I resolved that my research acumen would land me a teaching or post-doc position on graduation, or at least within the year. 

Three years after finishing my doctorate, I was an unaffiliated researcher at the Congress meetings in Calgary. To avoid being blanked and avoided by most of the participants, I put the Reply Collective down as my affiliation. It didn’t work. My own friends were perfectly friendly. But a couple of people laughed at me, and a former professor at McMaster looked straight in my face and walked past me without saying hello because she knew I had no higher education job. I was there leading a solo panel about my book, but only five or six people were there. Three of them because they were friends. For most people working in the higher education system, people not working in that system did not deserve to be part of their community. 

Yet that community is shrinking. More than 10,000 faculty positions are set to disappear from the college system in Ontario alone. Universities across North America are shutting down programs in their humanities and social science departments entirely. Some whole departments are disappearing. A public university was nearly shut down completely, then radically restructured. In these kinds of circumstances, it seems understandable that well-qualified people, as sharp as any tenured professor, simply may not find work. When one of the major pressures on research journal publishing is the increasing difficulty of finding peer reviewers in a timely manner, restricting this pool only to those in a shrinking higher education employment base is horribly counter-productive. 

If research professionals across the field want their disciplines to survive through this time of cratering support from the governments we could once rely on, we need to open the gates to those who weren’t as lucky. But to do that, we need to overcome a professional culture that sees those who landed permanent, secure positions in research universities as lucky. Not more deserving, smarter, or generally better than those who didn’t. Only luckier.

There, but for the smallest or errors or missed opportunities, could have gone you.