One of the things grad students should look for in selecting a program is how often the faculty are around. Many departments like to list faculty who are around for anywhere between 6 months and 6 hours a year on their faculty list to try and boost their rankings. But obviously that’s not as valuable as a full-time faculty member.

Now it’s sometimes hard to get a good read on how often people really are around. If you just ask people, you often get quite incredible stories. For instance, people at both Rutgers and Brown will say that Ernie Sosa puts in as much work as the average full-time faculty member at each university each spring. Actually, this one turns out to be true, but as a general rule you should still be careful.

One unscientific solution is to pick a random date, say this week, and ask how many people are around that week, as opposed to doing their ‘other job’, on a visiting assignment, off giving papers elsewhere, caught up in administrative duties, or otherwise occupied. So as a little research service, here’s the list of philosophy faculty ‘on duty’ at RSSS this week.

bq. “Andy Egan”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/

So the average faculty quality is off-the-charts, but there’s slightly less depth than you’ll find in the visiting bullpen at the end of a 4-game trip to Fenway.

p=. !http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/mardigras.jpg!

p=. Sarah McGrath and Liz Harman with the RSSS philosophy program

Having said that, I’m pretty excited about the dissertation proposals on philosophy of koosh that have been approved this week.

One is on the rival evolutionary vs sociological explanations for the spread of koosh. You’d think an evoluationary explanation would be hard to square with the recent data on the spread of the game, but you’d be amazed at the contortions a dedicated evolutionist can go to in order to back up their theories.

Another is on internalist vs externalist standards of normative assessment for koosh players. In the old days players were judged mainly on tools – bat speed, hand-eye coordination, ability to anticipate major property or bodily damage, etc. But the externalist revolution has meant that many players are now judged solely on their reliability. Some have been arguing for an ecumenical solution, but this upsets “other philosophers”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/002779.html. This dissertation promises a conceptual revolution, and if the funding proposals for the necessary experiments are passed, I think it could be the best philosophy of sport dissertation since my own epic piece on whether cornerbacks who transfer to rugby are best off playing on the wing or in the centres.

Reporting by “Ben Jeffares”:http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~jeffares/, and photography by some guy Andy met in New Orleans was used in this story.