The joys of travel

Having waffled on earlier about some of the slightly less good aspects of work travel, I though I'd better redress the balance a little.

Today, I (mostly) had a day off. So, with time on my hands, I did what I like to do most in a city I don't know: I walked around it. This is my default anywhere new. Walk. So far as I can tell, there's no better way to get a feel for a city than to walk its pavements (in KL, that also seems to mean roadsides, roads, crumbled tarmac falling into the road, etc.).

Hot and humid it may be, but I still covered around 15 miles on foot. The botanical gardens were lovely; large, green and mostly deserted. Even so, it's hard to lose the impression of being in a large, sky-scraper dominated city.

Next up was a wander around, which saw me take in the Eco Forrest, rope bridges and all. From there, I swung down into a seemingly ethnically Indian section of the city. This was possibly my favourite section of the wander. Having not (yet) visited India, this to me was the part of the city that felt most 'other'. I loved it for that. The street food was great and the people all very friendly.

Re-fuelled, I walked on to the Petronas towers and all that comes with it. It's a corporate and shopping driven section of the city, with big name brands in the shops and very expensive cars on the roads. It's nice enough, but not my favourite part of town to wander through. The towers are quite striking, though.

A decent walk. I don't think KL is my favourite city in the world. This is my second visit and, though I quite like it, for me places like London, Sydney and Singapore are still a little way ahead in my personal ranking.

However, I did see this place on my travels--that nearly swung it....

Travel woes: a first world problem

I'm currently visiting the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. I'm staying in Kuala Lumpur. I'm here all week. The week after I'm in Lund for a couple of days on a research trip. A couple of weeks later I'm visiting L'Aquila in Italy, and in June I'm off to Seoul. Busy and very exciting times.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I'm enormously fortunate to have a wonderful job that allows me to travel the world. No argument. But here's something that I don't see discussed often enough for my liking. When I travel, there are two knock-on effects. The first of these is that all domestic responsibility falls to my wife (the long-suffering @katetallant--for those of you twitter-minded). We have a daughter and a fair few commitments at home. So, that's not easy. If not for Katherine being prepared to look after our home and daughter, I wouldn't be able to do this. Second, I don't get to see my wife and daughter for extended periods of each year. That's not so nice--at nearly 8, I find myself especially missing the kid. At a rough count-up, I'm away from them for around 3 weeks each year, and that seems to be rising. It also seems to cluster: nothing for months, then a whole run of commitments.

Now, of course, I travel as much (and only as much) as I'm prepared to. I could say 'no' to more travel than I do. And this is hectic period having not travelled since the early Autumn. But it's a balancing act. To do my job well, there's some non-zero pressure to travel. To network. To do the things that travel permits. And sometimes I can take the family with me! So, I'm not blind to the upsides and alternatives.

But it strikes me as odd that we don't talk about the emotional cost more than we do. We academics face many of the same pressures. But almost never do I hear anyone talk about the 'yes, it's lovely, but it's hard on me and the family'. That's.... well, I think that the cost should be acknowledged more than it is. I certainly hear friends and family who work outside academia have that conversation. (Maybe I just have massively atypical friends in academia/outside academia.)

If nothing else, I would prefer balance. Yes, by all means, we should celebrate how fortunate many of us are to be able to do what we do. And whilst I don't thinking complaining about the down-sides is the right way to think about it or to go about it, acknowledging those downsides is important. It's tough being away from the ones you love, and this job, if it doesn't actually require it, certainly puts a degree of pressure on us to travel.

(For what it's worth, I think that the only place I've seen anything like this discussed is in fora where single-parent academics discuss or seek support for better provision as well as the professional costs of not being able to travel so much. Their situation is clearly much tougher than mine. I have it relatively easy. But a cost is a cost and we should be prepared to talk about them.)

While I'm here, I should also note that things are much easier for me (now) than they are for early career colleagues who may face all of the above, but who will need the opportunities travel affords more than I do, but who may also face financial barriers, or network barriers (it's who you know, after all....) to being able to do so. I do not mean to make light of their situation by not discussing it in particular. My focus here is simply on the emotional/domestic challenge that we can face in trying to do this job.

Using myself as an example

Earlier on today, and in the context of discussing the recent strike action, Jo Wolf tweeted something that caught my eye and made me think. To quote the relevant-to-this-post bit: "What mattered to me as a student was whether teachers were clear, insightful, enthusiastic and engaged. Even if we had keep coats on because rooms so cold." What’s under discussion here is the extent to which University management may have tried to spend their way to better NSS scores. The Article Jo is commenting on is this one.

Jo’s remark brought me up short, because my immediate response was to think about students generally. If you didn’t already know, I should say that Jo’s a Professor of Philosophy. To the extent that he enjoyed his degree, and pursued a further degree , and made his career out of the subject, and now in fact teaches and researches it, I think it’s fair to say that Jo would be the exception, rather than the rule! (If he’s not, the that was one hell of an UG student cohort.)

As I say, what brought me up short was the fact that, at least dialectically, Jo appealed here to his own experience of being a student to seemingly draw a general conclusion. “He’s clearly atypical!”, I thought.

Problematically, so I am (though less exceptional than Jo!—more’s the pity…), but I also use my experiences of being student to work out what I think ought to happen.

I think I should stop. I think that most (all?) of us should. A few salient points. When I was an UG student (1998-2001), we didn’t really use the internet. Not much, anyway. There weren’t powerpoint slides. There frequently weren’t handouts. I had to use hard-copies of anything I wanted to read. None of these things are true for most of our UG students.

More, School has changed. I lack the data to assess ‘for the better’ or ‘for the worse, but given the pervasiveness of the internet and social media, it’s clearly different. So, the students coming in have different skills and different expectations to the ones I had.

As soon as I stop and think about it, it’s clear that I need to be more cautious than I have been in thinking through those differences and where those differences might be telling. I really need to stop appealing to my own experiences of being a student.

A much better contrast would be my experiences of being an academic. And am I so different from my students? In some ways, no. Like many of them, I prefer to use electronic resources, rather than go to the library. Like at least some of them, I’ll leave work closer to a deadline than I should. Like at least some of them, I’m sometimes prone to irritation if I have to read through pages and pages of guidance before I can do something (For essay writing guides & module sign-up, see REF or TEF policy; I can recognise the import and value of such things, whilst still wishing they were otherwise).

In closing I should be clear that I’m not meaning to have a pop at Jo here. His tweet had a particular context that means that I don’t think we can be at all confident in reading in to it that he would disagree with me on any of this. The framing is simply autobiographical; his tweet was what made me reflect on my own practices, which I then found wanting.

Striking times

I tend to avoid politics and the like on here; echo chamber and all that, but also because there are people who are far better at it than I am, and who are far better informed. I read, and think about, what others have to say (and learn a great deal from it), but mostly do not think that I have anything useful to add. But this, about the strikes, seems to me that it is worth saying. YMMV,

I am not (here) interested in discussing the vices of the various different potential agreements and I am not interested (here) in discussing the approaches taken to negotiation, or the transparency provided by any particular group. Nor am I (here) interested in discussing what a fair pension looks like. See above: I am less able than others to work my way through it, and I am less well informed. I have nothing to add. I commend Mike Otsuka's work to you, as what seems to me very insightful discussion and data.

What I have seen on social media, and elsewhere, is people being deeply unkind and spiteful to, and about, senior managers at their respective institutions. And that makes me sad and angry.

What sits at the bottom of all of this is that I think people should be civil to one another--at absolute bottom; kind, would be my strong preference. Numbers of people are falling well below that standard. This makes me sad and I do not think that they should do it.

I should also note that some very angry people are absolute models of how I would hope we behave towards one another. #notallangrypeople is absolutely true. But there are some. Too many, indeed, for my liking.

"But Jonathan, you need to understand how F (for some value of F) VCs and similar have been, and how high passions are running." I do need to understand that. This is true. And I have listened and I have read and I have learned a great deal.

But what I don't see is that being angry, or VCs and similar 'being F', justifies being unkind or spiteful to them. It explains it, I agree, but it does not justify it.

So, consider this a plea for kindness. I'm sure I fail (and will continue to fail) to meet this standard myself (I must, I make mistakes). This does not stop me from desiring it as a standard, and I would hope to be called out when I fail to do so.

As I noted in my last post, Jonathan Lowe, my late PhD supervisor, behaved in a way that I would seek to emulate:

"Everything that was said was weighed, carefully, and with respect. You could be a Professor of Philosophy from VERY IMPORTANT UNIVERSITY, or someone outside academia who'd written in with a question; in my experience, it didn't matter. Jonathan would kindly and patiently work through what it was that interested you and try to help you see how the idea could be developed."

That thought guides me here, just as much as it does in my research and teaching.

(I should also acknowledge a debt to Carrie Jenkins here. A while back, Carrie posted something about the idea of kindness of academia that impacted on my thinking. I can't now find her post.)

Professor'd? Professored? Pro...

As I noted on Twitter, this week I received the rather lovely news that I'm to be promoted to Professor this summer. I am delighted!

People have also been extremely kind about it. This has been very wonderful, and I've had to push down the desire to shout 'there must be some mistake' and simply enjoy all of the very nice things people have said.

In among all of those positives, and moments of kindness, there has been one thought that has been ono my mind quite a bit--I hope I can be indulged in talking about it here. I think that the person who had most impact on me as an aspiring academic was Jonathan Lowe. Jonathan sadly passed a few years ago. You can read an interview with him here (http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/metaphysical-foundations-for-science/ ) and an obituary here ( https://www.dur.ac.uk/philosophy/ejlowepages/ ). It was with sadness that I was not able to attend the memorial service in Durham when it was held. I was examining a PhD the same day--probably the only thing I didn't feel I could cancel to be there.

I've been conscious this week of feeling his absence rather keenly.

To me, Jonathan was a model of what I had always thought an academic should be. He was incredibly clever and well read, and a wonderful teacher. But, more than that, through working with him I also came to recognise that he was exactly the kind of academic that I would most like to be. Setting aside his research (it is clear enough that Jonathan was a far better researcher than I will ever be), what stays with me is his enduring kindness, patience, love for his subject, and respect to everyone around him. No question was trivial; no request was insignificant. Everything that was said was weighed, carefully, and with respect. You could be a Professor of Philosophy from VERY IMPORTANT UNIVERSITY, or someone outside academia who'd written in with a question; in my experience, it didn't matter. Jonathan would kindly and patiently work through what it was that interested you and try to help you see how the idea could be developed.

So,  I've been somewhat prone to navel-gazing this week, and wondering 'what sort of Professor would I like to be?' Maybe that's pretentious of me. I don't know. But I do have an answer.  I'd like to be as much like Jonathan as I can be. If I'm half the Professor he was, I'll consider it a job very well done.

On the radio....

Ah, so a little while back I posted about wishing philosophers did more to get their work 'out there'. In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I've worked with the University on promoting some of my work about trust. The first notable output from this was a press release. You can read it here.

I felt ok about that. After all, it's in a medium I'm familiar with. But then....

I realise that in reality it's no big deal, but after that I had the opportunity to go and speak about the work on BBC radio Nottingham. The interview itself was fun--I hope listeners enjoyed it!

But two things really struck me. First--and it was a useful reminder--was just how insignificant me and my work are to folks as they go about their everyday lives. We (/I?) aren't a staple. Where what scientists say is probably held up as quite important, or at least interesting, it's a bit less clear that we can say the same about philosophy. Now that's not the fault of the people who don't do the philosophy! We've just done such a bad job as a discipline at getting ourselves into their lives, that we've allowed ourselves to be thought of as less relevant than we really are.

Second, and this was a bit less fun, was the reminder of the challenges that we can all face when in a novel environment. I've never gone on live radio before, and it's safe to say that I'd have benefited from training and practice. So in the hopes that this wasn't my first and last chance to do something like that, I think I need to locate some media training and work out a bit more of a plan. But in any case, a nice reminder. We often put students in novel positions (1st years away from home for the first time; personal tutees being expected to form a professional relationship with a tutor for the first time). It's always good to be reminded of just how daunting that can be.

[Updated: for a month or so, you can listen to me warble on, here [1:25:20 onwards].]

Temporal error theory

Very pleased--nay, delighted!--that my 'An Error in Temporal Error Theory' is now forthcoming at the Journal of the American Philosophical Association (JAPA). The target of the paper is the idea of timelessness. There are some famous cases in the philosophical literature of philosophers looking to deny the reality of time and some more recent cases of physicists doing the same. One of the questions that hasn't really been asked, though, is what it would mean to deny the reality of time. Crudely, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for reality to be timeless? There hasn't been much written on this, apart from one interesting paper by Kristie Miller and Sam Baron--'What is Temporal Error Theory?'

Much as I like Kristie and Sam's paper, I think that they err in spelling out the details. So, this paper looks to provide what I think is the correct account of what it would take for reality to be timeless. In a nutshell I claim it comes to this: temporal discourse--the sum of all present tensed sentences--is truth-apt, but false. There's a bit more nuance than that in the end, but that's a decent enough starting point. You can read a draft, here.

I'm hoping to do a bit more work on timelessness, building on this paper, as well as my 'Causation in a timeless world?'. The current plan is to work with Sam and Kristie and see where we get to collaboratively, rather than writing papers back and forth to each other. We'll see how that goes.

I should also note that I had a brilliant experience with JAPA. The referees were great (smart, timely and helpful) and the whole process was really well managed. Along with Ergo and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, one of my favourite journals to deal with.