The Career Ladder

 My brother sent me a link to an article in The Denver Post to the effect that the University of Denver is shutting down two departments, of Religious Studies and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I thought this curious in part because DU had closed the entire College of Engineering about 1975, then revived it.

(In this part of Colorado, the 'U' goes last in the abbreviation, wherever it appears in the name. The University of Denver is DU, the University of Colorado is CU, and references to UD or UC will not be understood by locals.)

The article also said that the faculty had voted to close three other departments: of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, of Philosophy, and of Socio-Legal Studies. This sounded like The Raft of the Medusa, though of course I don't know what the deliberations might have been. I know nothing of the first and third offered sacrifices, but I had a look at the Department of Philosophy's web page.

The ranks stood out. In the usual academic understanding, an assistant professor hopes for tenure, an associate professor or professor has tenure. Here the only associate professors were emeritus. There were four professors (and one professor emeritus). The other two members were visiting assistant teaching professors.  As I read this, the components of this title mean

• visiting: don't sign a long lease
• assistant: not tenured
• teaching: heavier teaching schedule (likely running to the intro courses)
• professor: a courtesy

It seems to me that such a billet is more or less that of an adjunct, but paid by the year (or term) rather than the class.

When I was in college, even I could see weaknesses in the model that had carried American academia from 1946 through 1976, that is to say had worked well enough in a period of long expansion. By then such boomers as wanted degrees largely had them, and enrollment was no longer increasing. The young and promising faculty were too often on "soft money", with no better prospect than that of a visiting assistant teaching professor. Yet if you didn't look too closely, the enterprise seemed to be sailing along. No more, and not I suppose for many years.

Popular Down the Hall

In 1992, a number of academic philosophers signed a letter to The Times of London, suggesting that the electors at Cambridge University vote against granting an honorary degree to  Jacques Derrida. One of the matters alleged to the discredit of his writings was that 

Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.

I remembered this because the introductory notes to the excerpts of Hans Vaihinger's work in The Neo-Kantian Reader say among other things that

Although he has been nearly forgotten by philosophers, there has been a continued interest in his thought in literary studies and psychology.

It is possible that Sebastian Luft, editor of The Neo-Kantian Reader thinks the forgetting not unjust, for Vaihinger gets a dozen pages, including textual notes. By comparison, Wilhelm Windelband gets 54 pages and  Ernst Cassirer gets 44 pages, not counting his "Davos Dispute" with Heidegger. And Vaihinger gets few and passing mentions in Frederick Beiser's After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840-1900. On the other hand, the cultural historian Egon Friedell wrote of Vaihinger with respect in Der Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit.

 

Warp Speed

The New York Times says that some young playwright's career is moving at warp speed. I was never particularly a Trekkie, but couldn't avoid knowing that in Star Trek warp speeds are beyond the speed of light. (And therefore beyond possibility, but never mind that.)

Given that I don't think much about Star Trek, "warp" first recalled accounts of ships that were warped here and there, either towed, or moved by the crew hauling on a rope secured to some fixed object. I find in Henry Adams's history of Madison's second administration

June 6, at leisure, Perry superintended the removal of the five small craft from the navy-yard at Black Rock; several hundred soldiers, seamen, and oxen warped them up stream into the Lake

(chapter "Proctor and Perry 1813") and

A little after dusk, Reid, seeing the suspicious movements of the enemy, began to warp is vessel close under the guns of the castle.

(chapter "Sloops-of-War, 1814")

 The vessels so warped must have moved slowly, and certainly moved at the cost of considerable effort. That does sound much more like the usual progress of a writer, whether for the stage or otherwise, than the Star Trek warp speed does.