Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

After a two-year hiatus...

...my homepage is updated, for anyone who's interested--that includes talks (many of which were obviously derailed by the pandemic), video and audio interviews, former students, etc.

AFA sends second letter to MIT after MIT Provost tries to rationalize cancellation of Professor Abbot's lecture because of his "incorrect" views about diversity

The new AFA letter is here, and the MIT Provost's letter is here.  The Provost really doesn't get it.  (Earlier coverage.)

Cambridge University Press merged with "Cambridge Assessment" (which produces exams)

Official announcement here, although philosopher Richard Eldridge (Swarthmore/Tennessee), who called this to my attention, has heard a report of dozens of layoffs, including the production manager of the journals division.  If readers have more information, comments are open.

More on the SSHRC's "diversity" initiative

Philosopher Jason Bell (New Brunswick) writes:

I appreciate your note about SSHRC.

I am a philosopher on SSHRC review committees.

I am worried that this new scoring component will discriminate against philosophers who examine non-diverse essences (questions in pure logic; the greater is greater than the lesser for all people, etc). It will favor social sciences in which particular communities are examined. Diverse questions are certainly important, but it is also important to figure out what we share in common.

SSHRC has done valuable work in promoting philosophical research. This new requirement will make this more difficult, in my opinion.

Readers concerned about this might write to some of the key scholars on the SSHRC executive committee --perhaps the chair, the president, and one philosophy professor.  Names and addresses below the fold:

PGR surveys update

PGR surveys went out only about ten days ago, and Professor Pynes tells me there are already more than 150 philosophers who have completed or are in process of completing the survey.  Professor Pynes also tells me, however, that, "University systems have become far more aggressive in blocking external emails," especially those with embedded links.  Professor Pynes asks that "folks who have participated in the past, who haven't gotten an invitation, but want to participate [should] contact me directly at CA-Pynes@wiu.edu.  I can send a link back via my .edu email and it should make it through."   People who participated in 2017 or 2014 would all have received invitations this time around.  Do check your spam filters too!

Books with advice about the dissertation stage of a humanities PhD?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 14--MANY INTERESTING SUGGESTIONS IN THE COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

Adam Patterson, a PhD student in philosophy at Syracuse University, writes:

I was wondering if you wouldn't mind putting the following question to your readers: what are some good books that are about (and meant to help with) the dissertation phases of a humanities Ph.D.? I'm looking for recommendations, which might be useful to others in a similar position as me.

I'm in the dark about his; comments are open for suggestions.  Please do try to say something about the book (or article) you're recommending.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Comus, "Song to Comus," 1971

Eclectic British folk/psychedelic/progressive band, they have enjoyed a cult following for many years.  This song comes from their debut album:

 

2nd assassination of an MP in Britain in five years!

That's pretty ghastly, and a very bad sign.  If guns were more readily available, one suspects there would have been even more incidents.  The UK, like the US, is in trouble.

The "cloak and dagger" campaign against Professor Kathleen Stock

The Times of London reports; an excerpt:

Rio Jacques, 23, a second-year history student at the university...is the first activist from the campaign to speak openly, added: “It’s very much cloak and dagger, but that’s not the way we want it to be. The masks — it’s not meant to be threatening. It’s just for the protection of the people that want to be vocal.

“No one wants to lose their place at university, but at the same time we don’t want to sacrifice our right to defend ourselves with our words.”

Jacques, who is transgender, is one of the leaders of Reclaim Sussex and is involved with Anti Terf Sussex, the two most prominent groups spearheading the campaign....

The group’s suggested reading includes an essay by Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. For the past two years years, Peterson has led a Twitter campaign against Stock, culminating in the essay published earlier this year.

In praise of anger

A discussion of the new book by philosopher Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) at The New Yorker.

(Thanks to John Martin Fischer for the pointer.)

SSHRC (the major research funding source in Canada) now requiring "diversity" in "research questions, methods, theoretical frameworks, literature reviews, analyses, and the interpretation and dissemination of findings"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 13--INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS

A philosopher in Canada called to my attention this development, which would seem to have a significant impact on academic freedom.   As this philosopher wrote:

I'm not opposed to thoughtful projects on topics related to diversity in various ways, but I worry that a requirement like this for *all* proposals is going to drastically reduce (if not eliminate) the funds given to great projects that just happen to have nothing to do with diversity.

Lots of my colleagues in Canada are terrified to say anything publicly about this that even resembles mild criticism (myself included). I'm hoping you might draw some attention to this issue on your blog.

One of the strange things about this initiative is that Canadian law is not beholden to "diversity" the way American law is since Bakke.  Why not just specify that a certain amount of SSHRC funding will go to certain minority groups, and leave it at that?  Does anyone know what's behind this?  Given the climate of fear that apparently obtains, anonymous posts are fine, but please include a real email address, that will not appear.

AI Chatbot, part 2

Inspired by Dr. Myers, philosopher David Lobina (Barcelona) also had a "chat" with the AI chatbot.  As Dr. Lobina wrote to me:  "[I]t seems the chatbot likes to make up papers, people, and meetings."  The conversation is below the fold.

More on the academic freedom crisis at Yale

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley comments on the events we have recently noted.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Mike Huemer (Colorado) edition

Here.  An amusing interview, as one would expect.  He thinks there's not enough substantive philosophy on blogs like this one, but I guess the evidence suggests that trying to do actual philosophy on blogs doesn't always go well!

The attack on tenure in Georgia

The vote to "change" the tenure rules yesterday by the Georgia System's Board of Regents is of enormous significance, both for tenure and for academic freedom--for now at state universities (since other states will follow suit if Georgia's change survives legal challenges), but I suspect this will creep into the private universities as well, since it would be a cost-cutter's dream come true:  to be able to fire tenured faculty without due process or having to show actual "cause."   This article explains the new Georgia rules:

The changes will replace a tenure system that allows professors to be fired only for a specific cause following a thorough peer review process with a new system that permits professors to be dismissed if they fail to take corrective steps following two consecutive subpar reviews....

A key change in the new policy adds student success as a category to be evaluated along with teaching and research.

The new "student success" metric seems to be designed to make faculty work more mentoring and advising students, but I'm not sure.  (Comments are open for readers with more information about that.)  The crucial change, however, is eliminating the "for cause" criterion of dismissal and its associated procedural safeguards, most importantly, faculty peer review.

ADDENDUM:  You can see the changed language at pp. 38 ff. of this document.

Board of Regents of Georgia public universities will vote to abolish tenure today

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--UPDATED

If this move survives legal challenges, it will undoubtedly spread.  And in "red" states, there will be a real risk in the years ahead of a purge of faculty for political reasons.  Perhaps at the last minute, the Board will surprise everyone, but I'm not optimistic.

UPDATE:   The Board has approved the "changes."

The ideas of Wang Huning, one of the most influential people in the CCP

I'd never heard of this scholar turned powerful political advisor before a Chinese scholar elsewhere called this piece to my attention.

ADDENDUM:  A philosopher elsewhere points out to me that reactionary Catholics in the U.S. are very fond of this guy's ideas!

Talking about the Chinese Room argument with a chatbot

Philosopher Blake Myers works "on issues at the intersection of philosophy, artificial intelligence, and data science."   He continues:

Most recently, I have been working with deep learning AI chatbots to assess their abilities with respect to self reports. One of these chatbots is GPT-3, which is arguably the best chatbot in existence right now, and one that has attracted the attention of some philosophers. Below I have copied and pasted a recent dialog session that I had with GPT-3 that I found interesting, and I thought your readers might enjoy reading it, as well.

There's more at Dr. Myers's homepage.   The dialog is below the fold:

A triumph for the fascists: OUP India decides not to print book about Modi's attack on democracy

Amazing.  It's just further confirmation of the damage Modi has done in India.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

The power of the "woke" and the impotence of the left in America

There is much to agree with in this essay by Freddie DeBoer; some excerpts:

The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath....

Open letter from UK philosophers in support of academic freedom for Prof. Kathleen Stock and at the University of Sussex

Here.  Additional UK-based philosophers (faculty and graduate students) are invited to sign.  A distinguished group of signatories already, including Crispin Wright, Timothy Williamson, David Papineau, Helen Beebee, Samir Okasha, James Ladyman, Quassim Cassam, Mary Margaret McCabe, Emma Borg, Mike Martin, Christopher Janaway, and many others.

(Thanks to Mary Leng for the pointer.)

"Harry Frankfurt and the Senate Parlimentarian"

Philosopher Ben Burgis comments in Jacobin.

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.

It's fair to say compensation for university Presidents is out of control

The current Michigan President is getting some package, considering how badly he mismanaged COVID, among other things.   No doubt this is because Boards of Trustees (or Regents) are made up of the leading lights of corporate America, who are used to wealth capture by those at the top.

Happy Columbus Day...

...from Howard Zinn.  Or as Nietzsche says:  "the start of everything great on earth [is] thoroughly and for a long time soaked in blood" (GM II:6).

The case of Profesor Sheng, the composer, at Michigan

A balanced assessment of the latest student overreaction (although at least he doesn't require police protection!).

Google is hiring philosophers...

...to work on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence.  Since Google is, like very capitalist enterprise, fundamentally about profit maximization, we'll see how much ethics they can abide!  But the job might interest some readers out there.

ADDENDUM:  As philosopher Sebastian Lutz (Uppsala) reminds me, Google has had a vexed history with its ethicists.

Richard Marshall interviews Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Professor Zuckert has done important work on Kant, especially his aesthetics, and, more recently on Herder.

Albania, before and after Stalinism

Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) talks about her autobiographical book at The Guardian.

"The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America"

A draft of this paper is now available, which will be presented at Georgetown next month.  It picks up on some ideas first mentioned in an earlier blog post and presentation in Turin, which generated a lot of interest:  finally there is a shareable paper. Here is the abstract:

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Tucky Buzzard, "She's Meat," 1971

Last featured in 2020, this British band, produced by Bill Wyman, produced several albums in the early 1970s; this song also comes from the best, second album:

 

Another ominous sign at the University of Hong Kong

The university is removing a statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In Memoriam: Salvatore Veca (1943-2021)

Professor Veca was an important and influential figure in political philosophy in Italy, where he taught at several universities, and held professorships at the Universities of Florence and (from 1990) Pavia.  There is a brief obituary in English here and there is much more about his career and work at the Italian Wikipedia page.

The wicked never rest, University of Sussex edition

Here we go again:  this time an anonymous alleged group of students at the University of Sussex (who knows?  they're anonymous) is not content simply to argue against philosopher Kathleen Stock, to protest the LGB Alliance with which she is involved, to protest in support of trans students--instead, like all fascist wannabes, they want her fired from her job.  The University, so far, has stood firm.  But what disgraceful behavior, complete with the false claims about "harm" and "safety" that we're all familiar with when "childish authoritarian idiots" (as philosopher Alex Byrne [MIT] aptly called them) go on one of their rampages.   Hopefully, the University will continue to stand firm. 

Virtual memorial for Charles Mills this Sunday

Details, as well as much information about his life and work, here.

Annals of unreliable data: "student ratings" of philosophy PhD programs

This data was recently pointed out to me.  Apparently, the response rate to the surveys sent out was only 10%, which is remarkably low.   Many years ago, the PGR tried to survey student opinion, and here's what happened:  for most programs, only a few people responded, and they were almost all really angry about their program; for other programs, the department rallied their happy students to respond en masse and praise the program.  In other words, it quickly became clear the data was unrepresentative and worthless.  This looks to be the same.  (Of course, as I've emphasized for literally a quarter-century now, admitted PhD students must talk to current students to figure out what the situation really is at a program, and regardless of how good or bad the "student ratings" are.)

More useful is this data on job placement from the same source.  It covers the period 2012-2016, so is a bit dated.  Since job placement changes with changes in faculty quality (as we've seen in years past with, e.g., Rutgers, NYU and, more recently, Southern California), this is certainly a case where past performance does not guarantee future returns!  (The students securing jobs in this study would have been choosing graduate programs circa 2005-2010.)  (For concerns about this jobs data, see an earlier discussion.)

"Uprising" on Amazon Prime

I'll take the liberty  of sharing another recommendation of an eye-opening documentary (at least for an American, maybe Brits knew all this) that may interest some readers, this one on Amazon Prime from director Steve McQueen.  "Uprising" recounts the horrific fire at a "house party" that killed thirteen Black teenagers in South London in a neighborhood of West Indians ("the New Cross fire"), setting the event in historical context and exploring its aftermath.  The context was the rise of the basically fascist and openly racist National Front party in Britain, which called not just for an end to immigration but for "repatriation" of all "colored" people!  (Seriously:  watch the film, this is 1979!) Thatcher pandered to National Front voters while soft-peddling their racism, as the film shows.   Was the New Cross Fire a racially motivated attack on a "house party"?   The film's treatment of this question is nuanced.  But the disgusting level of public racism, by ordinary people and police (including the police official who explained that it was a matter of "opinion" whether use of the N-word by police was derogatory), is breathtaking.

Brazen attack on tenure protections in Georgia

They are discussed here; briefly:

The proposal would empower administrators unilaterally to dismiss faculty after a poor post-tenure review without normal procedural protections or peer review. As the AAUP notes, this is an "extraordinary" exception to traditional tenure protections and would shift substantial power over the continued employment of a professor from the faculty to the university administration.

Moreover, it creates an entirely new option for firing tenured faculty. Although the current procedures for removing faculty "for cause" would stay in place, they would be supplemented by another option of removing professors "other than for cause" in pursuance of future policies that the board might adopt and with none of the procedural protections that exist in cases of dismissal for cause. As the AAUP notes:

"The doorway opened by the new language is a wide one: if any institution of higher education can dismiss any faculty members without affordance of due process for unspecified reasons—as long as those reasons are not among the listed grounds for dismissal—then the system of tenure and the academic freedom it is designated to protect are severely compromised, as are the appointment security and academic freedom of non-tenured faculty members."

There will surely be legal challenges to this proposal for a massive breach of contract with existing tenured faculty, but if Georgia succeeds, rest assured other "red" states will follow suit, and I wouldn't be surprised if some "blue" states did so as well.

Portable air filters work against the coronavirus

Interesting and good to hear!

Blast from the past: Regulating speech on campus

Some comments on the law, back in 2015.

Yale's President is extremely confused about the role of academic freedom and his job

A propos the academic freedom violation at Yale noted last week, the Yale Daily News now reports the following:

[Yale President Salovey] further explained that the University has to balance its obligations both to its faculty and to its donors.

“There’s probably two principles that are really important to honor,” Salovey said. “The first is [that] academic freedom to teach and do scholarship in an unfettered way … is sacrosanct at the University.”

The second principle, he added, is that the University “[has] an obligation to our donors to meet the agreements to honor the agreements we make with them.”

More Charles Mills

MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPT. 29)--A LIVELY DISCUSSION CONTINUES IN THE COMMENTS

Via Jason Stanley, I came upon this very funny video clip of Mills talking about "The Whiteness of John Rawls."  The NYT has also published its obituary, which contains this useful summation of his critique of liberalism in The Racial Contract:

In it he argued that white supremacy, far from being a bug in the Western political tradition, was one of its features, and that racism represented a political system every bit as coherent and intentional as liberal democracy.

“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today,” he wrote in the book’s first sentence.

He posited that one of liberalism’s core tenets, the “social contract,” a theoretical agreement in which individuals ceded some rights in exchange for protection by the government, was designed explicitly to exclude people of color. (He readily noted the debt he owed to feminist political theory, especially the philosopher Carole Pateman and her 1988 book “The Sexual Contract.”)

“What Mills does is to deconstruct the domain of white political theory by showing that Black people and people of color were never meant to be included,” George Yancy, a philosopher at Emory University in Atlanta, said in an interview....

I am far from being a Rawlsian liberal, but my impression is that Rawlsian liberals have found this critique wholly unpersuasive, as involving misunderstandings of the theory.  But what say the experts?   I will prefer signed comments, but you must at least include a valid email address, which will not appear.

More from Professor Abbot about his literal cancellation at MIT

Here (earlier coverage).  The rejoinder to Professor Abbot's call for treating individuals as individuals based on their merits is always that this isn't "really" what's going on, and in some respects, I think that is right:  this is why departments tend to replicate themselves, ideologically and often in demographic respects too.  But insofar as the latter is a problem (it is), it's hard to see how doing more of the same, but in new directions, is the optimal solution, even if it is sometimes the second-best approach.

AFA's letter to MIT regarding the literal cancellation of Professor Abbot's lecture

Here; an excerpt:

I write on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance to express our firm view that this disinvitation represents an egregious violation of the principles of academic freedom and an abnegation of MIT’s own stated commitment to freedom of thought.

 Exactly right.

"Social media as the 'false representative class'"

Another amusing essay by philosopher Justin Smith (Paris VII); an excerpt:

It is of course fitting for politicians to say something when, e.g., the president of the US has a military opponent assassinated by drone strike. By contrast it is troubling when ordinary private citizens are expected to withhold whatever they might have planned to tweet about their recent Netflix experiences because something big just happened in Afghanistan, and some nebulous pressure obliges them to speak only of this, or, if they are aware of their own ignorance, to simply remain silent. But what is the nature of this pressure? It cannot be noblesse-oblige, because they are not nobles; it cannot be the dignity of the office, because they hold no office.

Philosopher Kristin Andrews (York U/Toronto) talks about animal minds and animal ethics...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

An empirical study of philosophers' views about "moral expertise"

Here; not much that is surprising, although I found this amusing:

Notably, philosophers in the field of moral philosophy, and those who are publicly involved in advisory activities, tend to evaluate philosophers’ moral judgment capacity as stronger, while analytic philosophers tend to reject this view.

Far be it from me to pretend to "moral expertise," but this finding does suggest that moral philosophers are prone to rather self-serving assessments!

(Thanks to Michael Magoulias for the pointer.)

On Macroeconomics, in the NYT

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 1--INTERESTING DISCUSSION, MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

From an article today:

In effect, many of the key ideas underlying economic policy during the Great Moderation — the period of relatively steady growth and low inflation from the mid-1980s to 2007 that also seems to be a high-water mark for economists’ overconfidence — increasingly look to be at best incomplete, and at worst wrong.

It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it.

MIT cancels distinguished lecture by geoscientist who expressed 'incorrect' views about diversity

Dorian Abbot, here at the University of Chicago, had been invited by MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences to give their distinguished "Carlson Lecture."   Professor Abbot, as some readers may recall, encountered a mob here at Chicago awhile back when he expressed skepticism about "diversity" initiatives here.  The Chicago Administration, correctly, rebuffed the disgraceful calls to sanction him for expressing his lawful views.  More recently, he co-authored an essay on this subject in Newsweek, which then sparked another Twitter mob calling for the cancellation of his lecture.  (This mob was particularly enraged by the ill-considered Nazi analogy in the essay, which the mob also misinterpreted.)   Alas, the Chair of the Department succumbed to the mob pressure. 

Jeffers on the later DuBois

Philosopher Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie) talks about some of DuBois's later works, many of which are less-known than his famous The Souls of Black Folk from 1903.  (Professor Jeffers, happily, is writing the volume on DuBois in my Routledge Philosophers series.)

Blast from the past: Robert Paul Wolff's memoirs

Here's a post from 2010 with a link to several chapters.   Many readers at the time greatly enjoyed Wolff's evocative and well-written memoirs of personal and acadedmic life, and his portraits of different philosophers; a new generation of readers deserves to know of them!