The NY Observer has a very long coverage of the
MLA, which seems to be a lot like the APA Eastern, only worse. For those of
you who just returned from the APA and want to relive the experience, this
link’s for you. For the first time in half a decade I missed the APA Eastern to
spend my holidays in Amsterdam, a city that somewhat reverses the aphorism
about the MLA.

There’s an interesting comment about tenure halfway
through the article. This is from Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist.

It used to be
that you had to have one book … Now the expectation is for two or three.

Now I don’t know how much of an expert Prof Geertz
is on tenure, so this could be just one person’s opinion, but if it’s true it
means philosophy is moving even further from the other disciplines in terms of
what quantity of work it requires for tenure. Analytic philosophy has never
required its practitioners produce a book for tenure, a few good articles has
always been enough. But in recent years it seems the quantity of articles needed
is falling. Where other disciplines (allegedly) require two or three books, two
or three well received articles will do for us. There’s still some inexplicable
decisions to deny tenure made,
but the days of inappropriate denials of tenure based on having too few
publications may have ended well before the second millennium. I think that’s
altogether a good thing, though as an untenured person I would say that.