Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blogging Hiatus

The new term is in sight, deadlines are looming, and there will even be a bit of travel. Don't expect much, if anything, new between now and mid-August at the earliest. Some coming attractions for later in August, besides the usual faculty news and updates:

Germany in the 1930s and America Today
The Myth of Left-Wing Harvard
Freud Bashing under the Guise of "High Standards"
How to be a Left Nietzschean
Weber, Foucault and the "Iron Cage of Modernity"

Some of these postings are in response to reader queries; my thanks for your patience, and hopefully the responses, when they get here, will have been worth waiting for.

More thoughts on the Kerry speech and the Democratic convention

These from a young philosopher:

"I'm watching the DNC on television. It's a good show. Good production values. I just don't recognize the Democratic party anymore.

"American political culture has become an intellectual race to the bottom. This isn't populism. It's the only destructive form of intellectualism I know of. Everyone's second-guessing themselves hoping David Brooks won't snark at them.

"I'm tired of watching the Democrats fetishize Vietnam. Sure, it's a useful stick to beat George Bush without saying anything 'negative.' Kerry distinguished himself as a soldier, but he also distinguished himself as a antiwar activist. His Vietnam buddies earned their place on the stage, but so did his fellow antiwar activists."

Countries with Highest Per Capita "Highly Cited Researchers"

More data on highly cited researchers, courtesy of the Institute for Scientific Information. Remember: this data does not include the humanities, and is tilted towards research in the hard sciences and medicine. The data also favors scholarship published in English. With those caveats in mind, here are the nations with the ten highest per capita representation of "highly cited ISI researchers"; the number in parentheses is the number of people in the country for which there is one ISI highly cited researcher.

1. United States (93,880)
2. Switzerland (96,103)
3. United Kingdom (170,454)
4. Israel (186,486)
5. Sweden (200,000)
6. Canada (219,310)
7. Denmark (234,782)
8. Netherlands (250,769)
9. Australia (256,962)
10. New Zealand (273,333)

Some other countries (not rank ordered):

Austria: 1 per 800,000
Belgium: 1 per 433,333
France: 1 per 530,973
Germany: 1 per 430,208
Italy: 1 per 1,260,869
Japan: 1 per 669,633
Finland: 1 per 742,857
Norway: 1 per 657,142
Singapore: 1 per 875,000
Spain: 1 per 3,500,000

The Sensibilities of which Totalitarianism is Made

Herewith a third year law student at the University of Houston reacting to these pictures of the "free speech" cages and this posting of mine:

"Brian Leiter can't understand how a federal judge could uphold keeping loony protestors waving various protest paraphenalia and working themselves into a frenzy a safe distance from the Democratic convention."

UPDATE: More on the "free speech" cages here:

"There was absolutely no justification for the Democrats of the DNC and the Democratic mayor of Boston to adopt the shameful strategy of the Bush Presidency for dealing with protest--fencing it in behind razor wire.

"The protests planned for the DNC, mostly by A.N.S.W.E.R., have been and were going to be peaceful.

"The alleged threats of terror, emanating from the Bush Department of Homeland Security and the Bush Department of Justice were absurd--a warning that the media would be attacked! Warnings of attacks on public transit! Look out! It was all calculated to embarrass the Democrats and, incredibly, it worked.

"The fact that the Democrats fell for this kind of paranoia-inducing hokum shows how far into madness the American public has descended.

"But the price for such lack of principle and of such cowardice and idiocy is high. A new low has been set for a Democratic Convention violating the right of free speech when even a silent protest in the hall led to a demonstrator's being dragged out in handcuffs....

"[W]e will all pay for this next step down the road of repression of dissent.

"With Bush, Cheney and the Republicans, we've come to expect the jackbooted response to protest, the shunting of demonstrators off into fenced in detention facilities out of sight of the media, the arrest of those who refuse to be so muzzled. If Kerry and the Democrats now adopt the same approach to dissent, the only response will have to be massive civil disobedience."

Early Modern Philosophy texts...

...on-line, courtesy of the distinguished philosopher Jonathan Bennett. Very nice.

UPDATE: Philosopher Matt Davidson points out something I should have noted more clearly initially: "One thing you might want to note is that he has 'cleaned up' the English in Locke, Hume, and Berkeley to try to make the texts more readable by beginning undergraduates. I make no evaluative claims here as to the merits of this particular project (though few are better candidates to do this sort of thing than JB). But it might be worth pointing out in case a reader sees your link and thinks, 'These texts already are all over the web. Why do I need to see another website with them?' The answer is that Bennett is doing something very different with his attempts to make Modern texts 'accessible.'"

Philosopher Sawyer from Kansas to Nebraska

Sarah Sawyer (philosophy of language and mind, epistemology), currently an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, has accepted a tenured offer from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Anyone but Bush for President!

The Democratic convention is over, and John Kerry is now, officially, the only person who has any chance of beating George W. Bush, the worst President in the history of the United States, and the most reviled internationally in the last hundred years. What can we say about this convening of the major opposition party and the acceptance speech of its nominee?

Let us put aside the chauvinistic masturbation that travels under the heading "patriotism"; the cheesey "feel-good" pop psychology about America's "can do" spirit; the implicit, and sometimes explicit, condescension to all other nations and all other peoples of the world; the romanticization of the last great immoral and criminal war by the United States--one also based on lies--in Vietnam; and the pandering to the lie that only the godly are righteous, and the erasure of the 40 million or more in America who are not "people of faith". Let us put aside, in other words, the simple fact that the entire display was an offense to truth, reason, and decency. How could it be otherwise? After all, we are only human, all-too-human.

Put that all aside, and we have this: John Kerry gave a better speech than one might have expected: less dreary, more animated than this citizen, at least, had thought possible. He pressed all the right "buttons" of the "undecided" voters, individuals who must be so ignorant as to almost defy comprehension to those of us who inhabit the realm of facts and reasons.

If, with their performance these past several days, the Democrats can not defeat the current fascist theocrats and criminal war-mongers in Washington, then America is doomed, and every nation of the world ought to arm itself in self-defense accordingly.

As one simple but plainspoken American observed::

"Kerry is sometimes described as Bush-lite, which is not inaccurate, and in general the political spectrum is pretty narrow in the United States, and elections are mostly bought, as the population knows. But despite the limited differences both domestically and internationally, there are differences. And in this system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."

If you live in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, or Michigan--the states likely to decide the next election (assuming votes are counted)--please vote for John Kerry. Do it for my kids. Do it for yours. Do it for the Enlightenment. Do it for humanity.

UPDATE: "How They Could Steal the Election This Time." Read it.

In Memoriam

Francis Crick (1916-2004)

The memorial notice from the Salk Institute is here.

In Memoriam

Corwin Johnson (1917-2004)

Professor Johnson joined the UT Law faculty in 1947 (before air-conditioning, which, he said, made those April and May classes in jacket-and-tie a bit uncomfortable!), and although he officially retired in 1988, he continued to teach one or two courses every year since. A distinguished expert in the law of property and water law, he may have been best-known for the leading property treatise he wrote with John Cribbet of the University of Illinois. He was also an exceptionally warm and gentle man, who will be dearly missed.

I shall share one of my favorite stories Corwin told me several years ago. His first teaching job was at the University of Iowa, right after WWII. The town was swamped with returning vets, and housing was scarce. So for his first few months on the job, Corwin actually had to live in his office, and bathe in the restrooms before the crack of dawn, before the faculty and students arrived! Only once during that time did he encounter a colleague as he emerged with towel in hand from the restroom, at which point his "secret" became known.

And to think today's new faculty hires are worried about the size of their budget for research assistants! Things change...

UPDATE: Here is an obituary of Professor Johnson: Download file. My colleague Douglas Laycock notes:

"When I first arrived as a young professor, Corwin Johnson was many years my senior, but he was one of the very first to greet me, take me to lunch, and invite my wife and me to his house. He was a leading expert on Texas water law, and co-author of a leading property casebook. He was part of the first generation of faculty who came to the Law School from other parts of the country, with no prior connection to Texas -- the generation that made this a national law school instead of a very good regional law school. He was also part of the transition from racially segregated to racially integrated legal education at Texas, a change he enthusiastically supported. He served this law school well for nearly sixty years."

UPDATE: The Law School's memorial notice is here. It includes a lovely picture, which evokes the man's warmth and kind nature.

Just War Theory

Philosopher Mark Rigstad runs a useful site on "Just War Theory," with material of interest to both philosophers and lawyers.

The Religious Right/Secular Liberal Split: Is it an Illusion?

This article suggests as much. Here is the conclusion (but do read the whole thing if you want to comment):

"But as liberal practices like divorce, congregation-switching, rock music, sex toys, Medicare and therapy worm their way into the religious heartland, it becomes less easy to pick out distinctively liberal horrors from which to save the people. The gay bogeyman still half works. Evolution and atheism still work.

"It will be intriguing to watch the evolution issue over the next twenty-five years. Medicine is starting to revolve around genetics. Middle America wants its health quite as much as it wants its makeovers, sex, malls, and certainty of heaven. How can one accept gene-based medicine and reject evolution? So believe this: evolution will follow rock music and female orgasms deep into the hearts of the faithful. New reasons will have to be found to hate the liberal elite.

"Meanwhile, liberals will thrash around in their nightmare of religious takeover, for lack of actually knowing enough conservative religious people, who are all rather slowly becoming like the rest of us."

What do you think? I'd be interested to hear what readers make of this. No anonymous posts please.

Why the "Free [sic] Speech Zones" at the Democratic Convention are so Worrisome

Look again at the pictures. We're all used to seeing protesters kept behind those old police saw-horses with a line of cops in front. But political speech here is literally being caged in a demeaning, intimidating environment, designed to minimize its impact and discourage its presence.

Here's why I find this so alarming:

(1) There's no reason to think that the Democrats authorized these "security" arrangements. But the fact is they are being silent on them. The party that many of us are hoping will stand for the rule of law, civil liberties, and the rights of minorities, political and otherwise, is saying nothing about these grotesque arrangements. (Am I wrong? Has any reader seen prominent Democrats or party officials object to the treatment of political speech outside the convention?)

(2) The mere existence of these arrangements says something quite frightening about the mindset of law enforcement, and also of the judiciary, since the judiciary, in the end, approved this set up. That law enforcement professionals and judges OK these "free speech zones" means they are running scared, that they have only one concern: security at any cost. "Security at any cost" is the recipe for totalitarianism, the recipe that Hitler exploited in 1933.

If this is already the mindset of law enforcement and members of the judiciary, what happens if there is another terrorist incident? What happens when, after another incident, Congress actually suspends the right of habeas corpus as a "security" measure? With law enforcement running scared now, with law enforcement already having forgotten any countervailing values or rights, what will they do when there is no longer judicial oversight of their detentions, their intimidations, their investigations?

That is why the existence of these demeaning "free [sic] speech" cages at the convention of the Democratic Party is absolutely chilling.

Free Speech at the Democratic Convention

I think I won't vote for Kerry/Edwards after all; I think I'll leave the country (any Canadian universities hiring?). Take a look at the "free speech zones" at the Democratic convention. Now we can understand why the federal judge who heard the challenge to these cages--but nonetheless upheld them--remarked that ,

'I, at first, thought before taking the view [of the site] that the characterizations of the space as being like an internment camp were litigation hyperbole. I now believe that it's an understatement. One cannot conceive of what other elements you would put in place to make a space more of an affront to the idea of free expression...."

If every libertarian-minded blogger isn't on top of this story by morning--that means you, Eugene, and you, David, and you, Stuart--then they ought to just resign from the human race (or at least the libertarian party!).

Unbelievable. Except believe it: it's real.

(Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein for the pointer.)

"The Future for Philosophy" is now...

...here, or at least actual copies have now arrived in Austin. OUP has produced a very handsome volume, which is gratifying to see after so many years of intellectual labor. I understand that the book will be released for purchase in Europe in the next week, and in the U.S. shortly thereafter--by September at the latest, but probably during August.

"Doctors Without Borders" is...

...leaving Afghanistan, another country we "liberated," because the violence is so out of control--so National Public Radio reported this morning. This humanitarian organization serves and has served in many of the most dangerous and desperate places on earth, but is now forced to leave Afghanistan. (Here is DWB's statement on the departure.)

Meanwhile, in never-never land, a right-wing pundit tells us everything is dandy there, and is busy congratulating his masters for it. Puke.

UPDATE: More bad news from Afghanistan.

Why Marx Would Have Despised "Critical Legal Studies"

It has long amused me that many inside and outside law think of "Critical Legal Studies" as a Marxist movement. Plainly, within the parochial context of American life, any ideas on the "left" are viewed as Marxist, but in this case the association is particularly wrongheaded. Herewith what I wrote on the subject in my review essay of Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence in the summer 1997 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies:

CLS writers...locate the source of "indeterminacy" in law in one of two sources: either in general features of language itself (drawing here--not always accurately--on the semantic skepticism associated with Wittgenstein and Derrida ); or in the existence of "contradictory" moral and political principles that they claim underlie the substantive law, understood at a suitable level of abstraction. Duxbury himself recognizes this strand of CLS, which he aptly describes as claiming,

"...that liberal consciousness is somehow a false or corrupted consciousness, that there exists within liberal thought--liberal legal thought included--a tension so fundamental, so irresolvable, that it must ultimately implode and make way for radical social transformation." (455)

This strategy of argument signals the rather curious intellectual pedigree of CLS, a pedigree that Duxbury does not appear to recognize. [Ed.-Most CLS writers don't appear to recognize it either, though I'm sure Unger knows!] For what CLS has done in American legal thought is to revive a certain strategy of left-wing critique that dates back to the Left Young Hegelians of the 1830's in Germany. Seizing upon the Hegelian notion that ideas are the engine of historical change, the Left Hegelians sought to effect change by demonstrating that the prevailing conservative ideas were inherently contradictory and thus unstable. To resolve these contradictions, it would be necessary to change our ideas, and thus change the world.

This strand of Hegelianism was a dead issue by the 1850's--in part because of Schopenhauer's devastating anti-Hegelian polemics, in part because of Marx's criticisms (about which more below), and in part because of the more general "materialistic" and "positivistic" turn in German intellectual life associated with Feuerbach and the so-called "German Materialists." It was not revived until 1922 when Georg Lukács re-introduced Left Hegelian themes into the Marxist tradition of social critique in History and Class Consciousness, especially in the central chapter on "The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought." CLS, however, acquires the style of argument less from Lukács--though he is a favorite figure in the footnotes of CLS articles--than from Harvard Law School professor and CLS "founding father" Roberto Unger, whose 1975 book Knowledge and Politics is quite obviously a replay of the central arguments and themes of History and Class Consciousness.

What is slightly ironic in this intellectual genealogy--one that most CLS writers seem only vaguely aware of--is that CLS should have revived precisely the tradition in left-wing thought that Marx had so viciously lampooned 150 years earlier! Indeed, with certain obvious emendations, we find Marx and Engels articulating (in The German Ideology ) a critique one often hears, with some cause, of CLS:

"Since [the Crits] consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness...as the real chains of men...it is evident that [the Crits] have to fight only against these illusions of the consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, [the Crits] logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation....They forget, however, that to these phrases [constituting the old interpretation] they are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world."

Showing the right-wing professors that their ideas are incoherent and demanding that they change their ideas is politically irrelevant for Marx: it is, of course, "contradictions" in the material circumstances of life that are the real engine of historical change. What CLS has done is to revive precisely this discredited strand of critical theory--the critique of ideas or "consciousness"--in the legal domain. It is not obvious that these critiques are any more plausible or relevant now than they were in 1840.

UT Law & Philosophy Program information for 2004-05...

...is now on-line here.

Metaethics Workshop at Wisconsin

I mentioned this months ago, but now the October metaethics workshop at Wisconsin has a full program here. An exceptional line-up, between the keynote speakers (Peter Railton and Michael Smith, two of the best philosophers in the world) and the conference presenters. I very much wish I could be there.

Andrew Sullivan, again

I now realize that I've been too nice about Andrew "I'm a despicable neanderthal, except when my own interests are at stake" Sullivan. Here is what he said comparing filmmaker Michael Moore and Fox TV pundit Bill O'Reilly: "O'Reilly, at least, has some grip on the truth and on morality."

For my non-US readers who may not be familiar with Mr. O'Reilly, think Goebbels without the anti-semitism.

I occasionally hear from readers who like to think of Mr. Sullivan as a "thoughtful" conservative. What say you wise folks now?

In Memoriam

John Passmore (1914-2004)

A memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Matthew Mullins for the pointer.)

Top Research Universities by Number of "Highly Cited Researchers"

The Institute for Scientific Information compiles detailed data on citations to faculty research in the natural and social sciences, including medicine and law, but not in any of the humanistic fields. Citation counts are always problematic proxies for quality, but across whole universities their limitations presumably even out (presumably, e.g., each major university has its share of highly cited productive drudges, and the like). The primary limitation of this data is that it does not include humanistic fields, so universities with strong research profiles in the humanities will underperform in this study. The data also gives a slight preference to larger schools, though it is doubtful that there are any large major research universities that consist of, e.g., two dozen highly cited researchers superimposed on thousands of non-researching mediocrities.

In addition, because medicine turns out to be a high-citation field, any university with a good medical school will often have a quarter to half its highly cited researchers located there. I've marked below with an * schools that do not have a medical school, noting how many researchers would be added to their count if the nearest medical school in that university system were included.

1. Harvard University (131)
2. Stanford University (119)
3. *University of California, Berkeley (72) (46 more at UC San Francisco, the medical school campus, for a total of 118, so basically tied with Stanford)
4. *Massachussetts Institute of Technology (69)
5. *Princeton University (56)
6. *California Institute of Technology (55)
6. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (55)
8. Yale University (54)
9. University of California, San Diego (53)
10. University of Pennsylvania (49)
11. University of California, Los Angeles (48)
12. *Cornell University (43) (2 more at the medical school in NYC, for a total of 45, so no change in overall rank)
12. University of Washington, Seattle (43)
14. University of Chicago (40)
14. University of Wisconsin, Madison (40)
16. Columbia University (37)
17. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (36)
18. *University of Texas, Austin (34) (15 more at UT Southwestern in Dallas, the medical school campus, for a total of 49, so basically tied with Penn and UCLA)
19. Pennsylvania State University (33)
20. University of California, Davis (31)
21. Duke University (30)
21. Northwestern University (30)
23. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (28)
24. *University of California, Santa Barbara (27)
25. University of Colorado, Boulder (26)
26. New York University (25)
26. University of Maryland, College Park (25)
28. Johns Hopkins University (24)
28. University of Pittsburgh (24)
30. University of Southern California (23)
30. Washington University, St. Louis (23)

Yale, with both a Medical and Law School in the mix, still trails Princeton, which has neither! (The same is true for Penn, Duke, Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, Michigan, and Chicago, among others.) On the other hand, Yale's strengths in the humanities (especially history and literature) go unrecognized in this study. Other schools whose rank would improve if strength in the humanities were credited would include Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, and--maybe--Penn, UCLA, Duke, NYU, and Johns Hopkins (though Hopkins seems to be in a general state of decline, in the humanities and elsewhere--same may be true of Chicago, though not as dramatic).

It is striking, of course, how badly most of this list correlates with "popular" perceptions of university quality outside roughly the top five; but popular perceptions, of course, are little-informed by research output, and, in particular, by research output in the sciences. If anything, perception of university quality seems to track (imagine this!) quality of the English Department!

Some results for other well-known schools (not rank-ordered, since it's possible we missed some):

Boston University (14)
Brown University (12)
*Carnegie-Mellon University (14)
Emory University (11)
Georgetown University (1)
Michigan State University (20)
Ohio State University (22)
*Purdue University (13)
*Rice University (9)
Rockefeller University (13)
*Rutgers University, New Brunswick (18)
*Texas A&M University (15)
University of Arizona (13)
*University of California, Irvine (15)
*University of California, Riverside (13)
University of Iowa (13)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (19)
*University of Notre Dame (2)
University of Virginia (14)
Vanderbilt University (18)

And herewith Canadian universities (since I know less about which ones have medical schools, and which don't, I've omitted the * here):

1. University of Toronto (20)
2. University of British Columbia (17)
3. McGill University (13)
4. McMaster University (7)
4. University of Waterloo (7)

The numbers get small rather quickly here, so the differences are less meaningful. A random sample of some other Canadian universities (don't think we've missed any close to McMaster and Waterloo):

Queen's University (6)
University of Manitoba (5)
University of Saskatchewan (5)
Dalhousie University (4)
University of Alberta (4)
University of Guelph (3)
Simon Fraser University (2)
University of Calgary (2)
University of Victoria (2)
University of Western Ontario (1)

A clear indication of the skew towards the natural sciences in this data is that York University, Toronto--a major research center in the humanities and social sciences in Canada (but with a weaker presence in the hard sciences, and no medical school)--has no "highly cited researchers" according to the ISI measures! Other Canadian schools shortchanged by this tilt would include Alberta and Victoria.

[UPDATE, JULY 29: Stan Jones (Dalhousie) informs me that the only schools noted above without medical schools are Waterloo, Guelph, Simon Fraser, and Victoria. Waterloo, however, has a "very large mathematics and computing faculty" and Guelph a "very large agricultural and environmental faculty." Simon Fraser and Victoria, he also notes, are not "particularly well-known for science and/or engineering."]

Meanwhile, here's how the universities in Britain and Ireland rate:

1. Cambridge University (40)
2. Oxford University (37)
3. Imperial College London (25)
4. University College London (20)
5. University of Bristol (14)
6. University of Edinburgh (10)
7. University of Manchester (9)
8. University of Birmingham (8)
9. University of Nottingham (7)
9. University of Sheffield (7)

Others on the cusp of the "top ten": Sussex (6), King's College, London (6), Glasgow (5), Leicester (6). LSE, for reasons similar to York/Toronto (see above), had only 3 "highly cited" researchers. So, too, Birkbeck College, University of London had only 1. Schools shortchanged because of the natural sciences tilt of this data would also include York, Warwick, and St. Andrews.

Journalism in the UK and the US

Here's an astute post by Pharyngula on the difference between here and there, with some fine examples of what pathetic cowards most of our journalists are by comparison to their British counterparts.

More Suppression and Intimidation of Political Speech

A propos the recent posting on the attack on political speech under the guise of "security," these stories come via the National Lawyers Guild, from different parts of the nation:

7/23/04
The NYC Chapter notified the National Office today of multiple FBI questioning of activists in relation to the DNC. Agents questioned twenty activists in Lawrence, Kansas and people in Kansas City, Missouri were also questioned.
The FBI is asking questions such as :

"Do you know of any violence at the DNC?
"If you found anything out would you tell us?"
"Do you know of anyone planning on being involved in violence at the DNC?"

Many of the activists indicated that they prefer to answer only with counsel
present and the FBI instructed them to get one and come back. Agents located
the cell phone of one person and called him four times in one half-hour period. FBI agents called the parents of another activist.

> 'Warnings precede party conventions
> FBI, police visits to young people rile ACLU official'
>
> By Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
> July 24, 2004
>
> Law enforcement officers visited several Denver young people Thursday to warn them against committing violence at the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
>
> "This is part of an ongoing FBI investigation with the Joint Terrorism Task Force," Colorado FBI spokeswoman Monique Kelson said Friday. "That's all that we can comment right now."

> The Joint Terrorism Task Force includes officers from local law enforcement agencies.
>
> Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Colorado, said young people living at two locations in Denver reported the visits to the ACLU and that similar visits have occurred elsewhere in the United States in recent days.
>
> He said officers told the Denver young people that they were visiting "protesters and anarchists."
>
> "It's an abuse of power, designed to intimidate these kids from exercising their constitutional right to protest government policies and associate with others
> who want to protest government policies," Silverstein said.
>
> Denver police public information officers referred inquiries to the FBI on Friday night.
>
> Sarah Bardwell, 21, said six officers arrived about 4:30 p.m. Thursday at the Denver home she shares with four other young people. Two houseguests also were there, she said.
>
> The six officers identified themselves as four FBI agents and two Denver police officers, but declined to give their names after the young people declined to give theirs, Bardwell said.
>
> One officer said he took the young people's refusal to give their names as "noncooperation" and said he would have to use "more intrusive efforts to get his job done," Bardwell said.
>
> "We had really no idea what was going on," she said.
>
> "They told us in a joking way that they were doing community outreach and getting to know the neighbors," she said.
>
> Then the officers said they were "doing some preventative measures and investigating," she said.
>
> She said the officers asked three questions: Are you planning to be involved in any criminal acts at the national conventions? Do you know anybody who is? Are you aware that if you assist or know anybody planning any criminal acts and do not report them, it's a crime?
>
> "We declined to answer," Bardwell said.
>
> She said she refused to answer on principle, not because she's hiding anything. She said she doesn't plan to attend either party's national convention.
>
> "I would normally be completely open," Bardwell said.
>
> Silverstein said law enforcement officers made a similar visit to another Denver home, occupied by four or five young people.
>
> Bardwell said she and her housemates believe they were visited because they have participated in protests in the past - including one the day before against the recent shooting death of a 63-year-old disabled man by a Denver police officer who was looking for someone else and mistook a soda can the man was holding for a gun.
>
> Other causes in which she has been active include protests against Columbus Day as a celebration of oppression of native people, work with an organization
> that collects food donated by grocery stores for homeless people and anti-war protests, Bardwell said.
>
> She is an intern with the American Friends Service Committee, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1940s for its work against violence. AFSC also
> advocates for prisoners' rights.
>
> "I think it was an intimidation tactic and it was designed to threaten people who are analyzing our current government and its policies and the system in
> the United States - an intimidation tactic that is used to crush any form of resistance or dissent or public expression of disapproval," Bardwell said.
>
> She said the visit from law enforcement officers motivated her to learn more about her rights and to be "even more active in my community."
>

Right now, there is no reason to believe votes will be fairly counted in the fall election

Details here. Bush is President now because Blacks were illegally disenfranchised in Florida. Next time, the vote theft may be even more brazen...and we won't even know.

It's good to forget...

...especially if you're a neocon war-monger (or a believer in "humanitarian" wars), as Red Constantino reminds us (footnotes omitted):

"We are not supposed to remember that the American Chamber of Commerce described the imposition of martial rule in the Philippines in 1972 as a 'heaven-sent relief' and we are expected to forget that, after martial law was declared, the same august Chamber wished Marcos 'every success in your endeavor to restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth and the well-being of the Filipino people.'

"We are not supposed to remember that, two years before Marcos inflicted martial law on Filipinos, US investments in the Philippines stood at $16.3 million; and that by 1981, the year of the Bush toast to the Filipino tyrant, US investments stood at $920 million.

"We are expected to forget the 1965 -1966 Indonesian bloodbath - the slaughter of a million Indonesians perpetrated by a vile gang of Indonesian generals backed by America. A culling that overthrew a government that the US government disliked. A slaughter that midwifed the three-decade dictatorship of the Indonesian despot Suharto.

"We are not supposed to remember that during the carnage, the US government had supplied Suharto and his generals lists containing the names of those America wanted slaughtered....

"'The US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the [Indonesian] army is doing,' said the American Ambassador in Jakarta, Marshall Green, of the killings. But we are not supposed to remember these things.

"We are expected to forget about the Iraqi coup of 1963. A coup that took place four years after a massive public demonstration attended by half a million Iraqis had demanded working class leadership in Iraq. A coup that took place two years after the government of Abdul Karim-Qasim attempted to implement socio-economic reforms that included increasing taxes on the rich, the introduction of inheritance taxes, rent controls, price controls, the regulation of working hours and the provision of compulsory systems of social insurance.

"We are not supposed to remember the 1963 coup. A US-engineered coup that eventually catapulted a certain Saddam Hussein to the highest echelons of leadership in Iraq. We are not supposed to remember that the Ba'ath Party came to power, in the words of a Ba'athist president, 'using an American locomotive....'

"We are expected to forget all these things lest we ask some interesting questions. Without America's support, would the Marcos regime have lasted as long as it did? Without America's instigation, would Suharto have been able to slaughter so many and rule Indonesia for so long and with such barbarity? Without the American locomotive of 1963, where would Iraq be today?"

Soldiers React to Farenheit 9/11

These right-wing conmen are busy pushing a story about "soldier Joe Roche" reporting the pained reaction of soldiers to Michael Moore's movie. (Like the Black conservatives, soldier Joe appears to be bought and paid for, and by the same folks even! His story is being pushed by the "National Center for Public Policy Research," precisely one of the groups that has Black conservatives on its payroll, and the group that was "formed in the 1980s to support Reagan's military interventions in Central America.") The story has gained prominence since Andrew "I'm a despicable neanderthal, except when my own interests are at stake" Sullivan gave it prominent billing.

But if you cut through the right-wing overlay, and "soldier Joe's" laughable commentary ("Moore has abused the First Amendment and is hurting us worse than the enemy has"), it's clear that the soliders who have seen the movie got exactly the right message, the kind of message that real people connected to the military, like Military Families Speak Out, have been promoting for more than a year. I would imagine it is gratifying to Moore to learn that,

*"Specialist Janecek...is devastated. 'I feel shitty, ashamed, like this was all a lie.' It was all a lie, but you should not be ashamed, you should be angry. Talk to Specialist Everett:

*"Specialist Everett [said] after seeing the film: 'You'll be mad as shit for ever having come here.'" You should be. Make sure to vote.

*"Mostly the comments are absolute shock at the close connections Moore makes between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. 'Bush looks really really REALLY corrupt in this film. I just don't know what to think anymore,' is a common comment to hear." Excellent: Bush is really, really, really corrupt, and for reasons Moore didn't even touch on!

Obviously, the country could benefit from more "abuses" of the First Amendment like this. Maybe if we had had a few sooner the war-mongering criminals in Washington would have been stopped dead in their tracks?

The Democratic Convention

It is some indication, I suppose, of the desperate political situation in America that a staunch opponent of Republocrats and Demublicans like myself actually watched significant portions of the convention last night. Why? Because I am desperately worried about what will happen if we do not defeat the current criminal war-mongers and theocrats in Washington, DC. And so I watched hoping for some reassurance that the Democrats won't screw it all up for me and my children, not to mention world history. From the first night, I have only two observations:

(1) Hilary Clinton is a dreadful speaker; she needs to be retired from public life ASAP, for the sake of humane values. She comes across as exactly the irrelevant, stiff rich girl, trying to affect human emotion, that she is--the female counterpart to John Kerry, who at least has the redeeming virtue, for political purposes, of having gone to war in Vietnam and been shot at.

(2) Bill Clinton--who, let us remember, had a domestic economic policy far to the right of Richard Nixon's--is such a good rhetorician that it embarrasses the entire field, except of course John Edwards. I never voted for Clinton, but I would vote for him this year, since for all his reactionary domestic policies, he was not a fascist theocrat, and his values at least stand in some relation to the values of the Enlightenment. One could have some confidence in Clinton as a candidate against the beady-eyed, tongue-tied Bush. Like Edwards, Clinton would wipe the floor with Bush in a public debate. Alas...

UPDATE: There is a decent, short account of why the Clinton speech was effective here: "He performed a brilliant rhetorical trick: he deployed the usual canards used against him to buttress Kerry. Rather than attack the wealthy as recipients of tax cuts, he attacked himself as a now-wealthy man. And then the coup de grace: he put himself and Bush in the same camp as draft-dodgers, in stark comparison to the patriotic Kerry!...[I]t was mighty effective. And the way in which he described the cost of the tax cut in terms of squandered attempts to improve homeland defense was another smart move. Use the Republican tax cut issue against the Republican security issue. Wedge against them for once. If the constitution didn't prevent it, the man would still be president. After last night's speech, you can see why."

UPDATE: I actually missed former President Jimmy Carter's speech last night, but the text is here, and it's not bad, pleasingly direct in many ways, given the usual dishonest pleasantries that ordinarily prevail on such occasions.

Conference on Religion & the Media in Austin

Conference details here; note that veteran, and usually no-nonsense, journalist Helen Thomas is the keynote speaker.

New Center for Law, Business & Economics...

...at UT, under the direction of my colleagues Bernie Black and Ronald Mann. Information here. Good stuff.

So much for terrorist dry runs

Well, since I made the mistake of linking to this odd item about new terrorist ploys in the sky, it is time to note that its author turns out to be a busybody bigot, and her story amounted to nought.

The fact that she quoted Ann Coulter should have tipped me off to the fact that I was dealing with a bozo!

Black Conservatives: Bought and Paid For

Details here:

"'Black Conservative to Rebut NAACP Leader's Remarks in C-SPAN Interview,' read the press release from Project 21, an organization of conservative African-Americans.

"I had read in Reuters that Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, had called groups like Project 21 'make-believe black organizations,' and a 'collection of black hustlers' who have adopted a conservative agenda in return for 'a few bucks a head.'

"So I tuned into C-SPAN with interest to hear what a leading voice in the black conservative movement had to say. But then a funny thing happened: the African-American spokesperson for Project 21 caught a flat on the way to the studio, and the group's director had to fill in. And he was white....

"It was a remarkable moment. A flat tire had led to a nationally televised peek into what lies behind a murky network of interconnected black conservative organizations that seek ostensibly to bring more African-Americans into the conservative movement. But they're not just reaching out to the community. They also speak out publicly for conservative positions that might evoke charges of racism if advocated by whites. And while that's not to say that there aren't some blacks who embrace conservative values, the groups that claim to represent them are heavily financed by business interests and often run by white Republicans....

"Project 21 is a subsidiary of the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), which, according to the liberal watchdog Mediatransparency.org, was formed in the 1980s to support Reagan's military interventions in Central America. NCPPR's leadership – president, vice president, executive director – are all white. Amy Ridenour, former Deputy Director of the College Republican National Committee and the organization's president, also sits on the board of Black America's PAC, an organization that claims to be nonpartisan but whose IRS filings state that its mission is to elect Republicans....

"In the 1990s, NCPPR got into the business of denying that climate change warnings were based on sound science. If the connection between black conservative outreach work and environmental skepticism doesn't seem clear, that's because it's not. But it's logical considering that ExxonMobil donated $30,000 to NCPPR for 'educational activities' and $15,000 for general support in 2002, and last year they hiked their operating support to $25,000 and kicked in another $30,000 for NCPPR's 'EnviroTruth' website, according to company financial records.

The End of One Kind of Free Speech in America?

Amidst all the jabbering about American being a "free" society, there has been insufficient attention to the increasingly serious restrictions being imposed on what, on any account, is "core" First Amendment speech, namely, political protest speech. The increasingly totalitarian approach was on display in Miami last fall, and will be in full view (or not!) at the upcoming political conventions. Some useful details here:

"Demonstrators who want to be within sight and sound of the delegates entering and leaving the Democratic National Convention at the Fleet Center in Boston this coming week will be forced to protest in a special 'demonstration zone' adjacent to the terminal where buses carrying the delegates will arrive. The zone is large enough only for 1000 persons to safely congregate and is bounded by two chain link fences separated by concrete highway barriers. The outermost fence is covered with black mesh that is designed to repel liquids. Much of the area is under an abandoned elevated train line. The zone is covered by another black net which is topped by razor wire. There will be no sanitary facilities in the zone and tables and chairs will not be permitted. There is no way for the demonstrators to pass written materials to the convention delegates.

"The federal judge who heard a challenge to the demonstration zone by protest groups on July 22d stated in open court, 'I, at first, thought before taking the view [of the site] that the characterizations of the space as being like an internment camp were litigation hyperbole. I now believe that it's an understatement. One cannot conceive of what other elements you would put in place to make a space more of an affront to the idea of free expression ...' Despite that, the judge denied the groups' challenge to the conditions and ruled that they were justified by concerns about the safety of the convention delegates. The hearing on the case and the judge's ruling contain important lessons about what has happened to freedom of speech during the War on Terror.

"Following the lead of Attorney General Ashcroft, law enforcement officials in the United States have taken two steps that have been devastating to the exercise of free speech rights. First, principles and tactics that arguably, but only arguably, may sometimes be appropriate with respect to the conduct of war or the prevention of terrorism are now routinely employed with respect to ordinary law enforcement. Second, the focus has shifted from the punishment of people who have committed crimes to a strategy that pretends to be able to prevent crime. Taken together these steps have the consequence that not only those who have committed crimes are subject to control by law enforcement. Those who fall into general categories of people who are suspected of having the potential to commit criminal acts may also be monitored, physically controlled and in certain cases, detained, by law enforcement....

"The justification for the demonstration zone...is that...assaults [on convention delegates] must be prevented before they happen. There is no evidence that they may happen beyond what the judge characterized as the 'generic experience of the past several years at such events.' Everyone who plans to protest is assumed to be someone who may throw rocks and urine at delegates, or who would break up tables and chairs to obtain weapons to attack delegates or police.

"On three occasions during the hearing, and once again while announcing his decision, the Judge referred to the plaintiffs who brought the case to complain about the demonstration area as the 'defendants.' It does not take a psychoanalyst to know that this slip of the tongue has meaning. The fact is that with no evidence whatsoever those who would protest close to the site of the Convention have already been convicted of being up to no good....

"The shift in First Amendment law can be appreciated by comparing the judge's ruling on the DNC demonstration zone with the Supreme Court's decision in 1969 in the Tinker case where it upheld the right of children to wear black arm bands to school to protest the Vietnam War. The school officials had argued that the arm bands would lead to disruption of the educational process. The Supreme Court rejected the argument, holding that 'undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression.' In Boston, as in the Tinker case, the authorities have no evidence beyond an 'undifferentiated fear' of trouble.

"In other cases the Supreme Court has recognized that the First Amendment requires 'breathing room.' Where the government is forced to interfere with free expression in order to further other legitimate state interests, the interference should be as limited as possible in order to avoid 'chilling' the willingness of people to engage in free speech. The demonstration zone in Boston, on the other hand, is a walk in freezer for free speech. Experienced protestors will avoid the humiliation of being subjected to the conditions in this zone, and less experienced citizens who might wish to convey some message to convention delegates will be too terrified by the netting and razor wire to go anywhere near the site. I shudder to think what message is conveyed to children like my daughter about the possibilities for free expression in this country."

And the Real Iraq...

...via a U.S. source, but not, needless to say, the U.S. mass media:

"Inside the heavily protected Green Zone [last year], the US enclave in the heart of Baghdad, Bremer and the uniformed American military were cut off from what was happening on the ground. US generals claimed at briefings that the number of hostile incidents was falling. I began to wonder why, if there were only sixteen or so attacks on American soldiers a day, I seemed regularly to witness a quarter of these whenever I drove out of Baghdad. American soldiers in the field told me that they no longer reported guerrilla attacks unless there had been US casualties. It was a bureaucratic hassle to make out the reports and their commanders were keen to hear that resistance was petering out.

"By November it was impossible to conceal the bad news any longer. I was in the dusty truck-stop city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, when we heard that a giant Chinook helicopter had been shot down. We drove across an old iron bridge over the Euphrates to look at the wreckage. On the way we saw a burned out vehicle that had been hit by a rocket; the American contractors inside had been killed. On the far side of the river, farmers were handing round twisted pieces of metal from the helicopter’s fuselage: 16 soldiers had died. Shortly after that incident, the White House began making its plans to dilute full imperial control by installing the interim government....

"Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority weren’t able to see that their political strength was diminishing by the month. In April the US took two disastrous decisions which led to simultaneous confrontations with both Sunni and Shiite communities. Four American private security contractors had been killed, their bodies burned and hung up from the bridge at Falluja; US marines quickly besieged the city. Six hundred people were killed. With ludicrously bad timing, Bremer had also decided to pursue Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose father had been martyred by Saddam Hussein in 1999. Both ventures failed. The marines dared not storm Falluja for fear of a general Sunni uprising. Sadr had retreated to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf but the US army could not send its tanks into Shiite shrines. In both Falluja and Najaf American soldiers were forced to withdraw.

"Power was already seeping away from the US before it was nominally handed over to Allawi. A year after Bush famously declared major combat in Iraq over, insurgents have their own capital in Falluja, thirty miles from Baghdad. In April, I was caught in an ambush of US petrol tankers at Abu Ghraib. The US military, unprepared to recognise that they had lost control of the road, were still sending convoys down it. By early June the road to the airport, the main US base near Baghdad, was no longer safe. Four security men who had been staying two floors above me in the Hamra Hotel were killed as they drove to the airport by men armed with machine-guns and grenade launchers....

"Suicide bombers, car bombs and rocket attacks have paralysed Baghdad; the US army are building increasingly elaborate fortifications to defend their bases. At the entrance to the 14 July Bridge over the Tigris, which leads into the Green Zone, the road is blocked by sandbags and razor wire. A notice hanging from the wire reads: ‘Do not enter or you will be shot.’ US soldiers in Baghdad are trigger happy and they like Iraqis to know it....

"Neither the suicide bombers nor the US army care very much how many ordinary Iraqis get killed. The entrances to the Green Zone provide no protection for Iraqis queuing for jobs or to have their documents checked. They are frequently caught in bomb blasts; there are many casualties. On 17 May a suicide bomber assassinated Izzedin Salim, the head of the Iraqi Governing Council: his fleet of cars was waiting to enter the Green Zone. An Iraqi minister told me that Salim might have been safe if US soldiers at the gate had not delayed the convoy by declaring that some of the documents were not complete. There is an Iraqi conspiracy theory which sees foreign suicide bombers and the US acting in unison to prevent Iraq regaining its independence....

"Iraqis are desperate for the return of some sort of security. Among the better off there is a pervasive fear of kidnapping. Over the last year this has become a local industry, now so common that new words have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang: a kidnap victim is al-tali, or the sheep; the person who identifies the potential target is al-alaas....

"Last year a rumour went round the city that Kuwaitis were seizing Iraqi girls and taking them back to Kuwait. This year the kidnapping is real. A businessman friend living in Jordan has just paid $60,000 to have his brother-in-law returned. Doctors are a favourite target. Operations are postponed in hospitals because specialist surgeons have fled the country....

"It’s not only the well-off who feel threatened. Gangs of thieves hop on and off buses in Rashid Street in the city centre and rob passengers at gun and knife-point. Ali Abdul Jabber, a driver at the al-Nasser bus station, has been robbed three times. ‘On the last occasion,’ he said, ‘the thieves jumped on board because the doors have to be open in this hot weather. Two of them stood guard at the back while two others walked down the bus looking in people’s handbags and stealing money and jewellery.’ Jabber didn’t dare glance back: he thought that if the thieves suspected he could identify them they would kill him. After the robbery nobody went to the police. ‘The passengers didn’t even discuss it among themselves because this sort of thing is so much part of daily life in Baghdad.’ Most of them thought that he was in league with the gang.

"After the disasters of the past year the Americans know they cannot, even in the short term, occupy Iraq without the support of local allies. The problem for the US is that most Iraqis would like Allawi and the interim government to get rid of the suicide bombers and kidnappers -- and of the US occupation as well. But the US shows no sign of abandoning its plans to keep Iraq as a client state. It would have a weak army, devoted entirely to counter-insurgency. It would have no tanks, aircraft, missiles or artillery. The Iraq of the future would resemble a Latin American state of the 1960s with an army and security forces controlled largely by Washington. This was the message brought by Paul Wolfowitz in June when he turned up in Baghdad -- accompanied by Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence -- just before the supposed handover of power. The US will allow Iraq to rearm, but only against its own people....

"The struggle for Iraq is only beginning. The Shia want elections and real power. The Sunni want the US out and will not accept being marginalised. The Kurds want a greater measure of autonomy, very close to independence, than the Iraqi Arabs will give. The Islamic resistance think the US is vulnerable in Iraq as the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan. The nationalist guerrillas will not stop killing American troops. Above all the US is still not convinced that it has lost its great gamble to keep control of Iraq, a country it made the test-case of its power as the world’s single imperial overlord."

The Real Saudi Arabia

As usual, to find some grown-up perspective in the mass media one must go North of the border:

"Saudi Arabia is a feudal monarchy owned and run by 6,000-7,000 royal princes. The de facto ruler is Crown Prince Abdullah; the ailing king, Fahad, is a figurehead.

"Saudi Arabia has been a U.S. oil protectorate since the late 1940s under the following arrangement: The royal family supplies cheap oil to the U.S. and its allies Europe and Japan. The billions earned by the Saudis are recycled into U.S. and western financial institutions and commercial projects, or spent on huge amounts of advanced weapons ($9 billion in recent years) the Saudis cannot operate. Saudi arms purchases are used to support friendly American and European politicians in politically sensitive states or regions.

"In return, the U.S. supplies the royal family with protection against its own increasingly restive people and covetous neighbours, like Iraq. The small Saudi Army is denied ammunition to prevent it staging the kind of coup that overthrew Iraq's British-run puppet monarch in 1958. A parallel 'White Army,' composed of loyal Bedouin tribesmen led by U.S. 'advisers,' watches the army....

"[F]ar from being an enemy of the U.S., Saudi Arabia is almost an overseas American state. One-third of the population of 24 million is foreign. Saudi defences, internal security, finance and the oil industry are still run by some 70,000 U.S. and British expatriates. Some eight million Asian workers do the middle management and donkey work.

"The royal family is intimately linked to Washington's political and money power elite through a network of business and personal connections. The Bush family, and its entourage of Republican military-industrial complex deal makers, has been joined at the hip for two decades with Saudi power princes and their financial frontmen.

"As this column has long maintained, Saudi Arabia did not finance or abet Osama bin Laden -- it tried repeatedly to kill him. Bin Laden's modest funds came from donations by individual Saudis, wealthy and poor alike, who supported his jihad against western domination.

"The violence now erupting across the kingdom is partly the work of small al-Qaida cells. Bin Laden's charges that the royal family debases Islam, squanders the nation's oil billions on useless arms, luxury prostitutes, and the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, resonate across all of Arabia.

"Anti-royalist jihadi groups, many veterans of the 1980s Afghan war, have joined in the revolt with young Saudis fed up by their nation's medieval society, corrupt regime, brutal repression, and subservience to Washington. Half of Saudis are under 16. The kingdom is undergoing the same kind of generational revolt that brought down the Soviet Empire.

"These anti-feudal rebels cannot simply be dismissed as 'terrorists.' Many want genuine democracy and modernity; others, a truly Islamic state, or, simply, change. The ground is shaking in Saudi Arabia."

Changes in British Academia over the last 40 Years

Chris Bertram (Philosophy, Bristol) calls my attention to this interesting retrospective look at changes in British academia over the past 40 years, by an English professor at University College London.

The four positive changes noted by the author, in brief:

1-"The long awaited breakthrough of women into higher echelons of the academic profession....

2-"A series of technology breakthroughs....Cheap mass transit is one such breakthrough. My first visit to American research libraries in 1965 cost me...£80 - around a 15th of my annual salary. Today, the cost - with a hugely wider choice of convenient travel - is about 100th of a starting lecturer's salary. Xerox, the computer, the internet, email have all streamlined academic life - which, typically, is processing an interchange of words"

3-"The hugely enlarged available corpus of canonical texts in cheap, paperback format....

4-"The more generous provision of leave. The sabbatical, true to its name, used to be one term every seven years. Now, for most serving academics, it's at least one term in seven [terms, i.e., 3 1/2 years], and probably better" (emphasis added).

All four of these apply in the case of the U.S. too, it seems to me, except the point about sabbaticals, which is largely true at research-oriented institutions, but not otherwise. (The same may hold in the UK; the author, after all, spent his career in research-oriented universities in England and Scotland.)

The five negative developments in UK academic life since 1964, in brief:

1-"Salary tops the list. When I began as an assistant lecturer at Edinburgh in 1964, at a salary of £1,000 per annum, I could get a mortgage for a spacious new town (ie Georgian) flat for a purchase price of £2,000. It was, looking back, the finest property I ever owned. The flat would now go for £300,000. Is a junior lecturer's salary, in 2004, £150,000?

2-"Loss of autonomy - at all levels....The fact is, all the important decisions and initiatives now come from outside a department's once impregnable walls: the AHRB, the British Academy, Hefce, the QAA, the dean's office, the Internal Quality Audit Office. Departments have become servo-mechanisms of the institutional will, incapable of independent (let alone rebellious or revolutionary) action."

3-"The installation of the PhD as the sine qua non for academic appointment. I got my first appointment six months after my BA. Now I would have to put in at least five to seven years getting a doctorate before qualifying for a first job. In one sense raising the entry hurdle to post-doc elevation is good - in that the entrant will know more, and have more research skills. But, starting work at 30-something, there will be a loss of the apprentice's elasticity, a hardening of the intellectual arteries."

4-"Field specialisation. This is linked to the above. Increasingly, since they come in as 'specialists' (with a thesis / first book behind them), starting lecturers are unwilling to teach outside 'their' area. The 'Jack of All Trades' cross-subject proficiency (the willingness to teach anything from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, via Thomas Wolfe and Wulfstan) is a thing of the past. Sad.

5-"Staff student ratio - badly eroded in 2004. When I started at UCL, the SSR was 1:9. Now it's double that....Erosion of SSR has also encouraged reliance on the 'freeway flier', or 'adjunct teacher' working on short contract, without benefits, and usually well below even the underpay levels of his / her tenured colleagues."

1 and 2 are probably most responsible (together with mandatory retirement) for the philosophical brain drain from the UK to the US: 2 is simply not the case in the US, and 1 is not the case at the level of the top academic talent (a Chairholder at Oxford will earn the equivalent of US $90,000, in a town where a typical house suitable for a family costs 8-10 times that, while the same individual can earn at least 50% more, sometimes 100% more, in the U.S.). (I haven't the figures to know how average or lower-end academic salaries of 1964 compare to today, but my sense is that there has been nothing like the erosion seen in the UK.)

Finally, the author notes five "mixed" developments since 1964, two of which I'll mention here:

1-"The RAE [Research Assessment Exercise]. No question that the research assessment exercise has raised the British academic game. But it has also standardised the product across the whole system, flattening out institutional and idiosyncratic research styles. It has raised the level of professional nervousness. It also inhibits the appointment of colleagues at the very beginning of their careers when - as yet - they have 'nothing to put forward for the next RAE'. This means that many would-be lecturers, at the beginning of their careers have to take a series of short-contract positions, wherever they happen to turn up, with the attendant life-disruption. Most malignantly, in my view, the RAE militates against colleagues who are merely (merely!) 'learned' but 'unproductive'. Not all learning needs to be excreted on paper to be useful to the academic community

2-"The end of mandatory retirement (in 2006, as I understand). Good, insofar as many academics (who am I thinking of?) still have shot in their locker at 65....The downside is that a senior colleague sitting on his/her job, until death or dishonour removes him/her, is stopping junior colleagues from getting their feet on the first rung."

The U.S., of course, has had experience with 2 since 1993, when the mandatory retirement age of 70 for college professors expired. This has, indeed, resulted in some highly productive teachers and scholars continuing their work well in to their 70s--a benefit for their departments and their students--and it has also resulted in a lot of folks who were de facto retired, or who ought to be de jure retired, "hanging on," like the proverbial albatross. Does anyone know of a systematic study of the impact of the end of mandatory retirement in terms of junior hiring?

The author notes the standard complaints about the RAE, though it is worth mentioning the other side of the coin: for while the RAE, with its periodic review of actual publications in each department, may have made it harder for a department to hire those who are "merely learned," it has also made it harder for a department to simply hire the latest "bright young fellow" who worked with the department chair's advisor at Oxford. In other words, by all accounts I've heard, the RAE has unsettled old-boy network hiring, and given graduates outside Oxbridge and London a much better shot at attractive university posts.

The rampant grade inflation in the RAE is, alas, undermining some of its value as a meritocratic device--in the last RAE some 20 philosophy departments scored a "5," for example, from genuinely strong departments like UCL to places like Middlesex which, in a candid evaluation by experts, wouldn't score in the top 25 in the UK. The result is that prospective students--one set of particular consumers of this information--no longer get real information from the RAE results.

I'm always amused, too, when I hear critics of the PGR praise the RAE results as superior. First, of course, the RAE results are entirely backwards-looking: a department gets credit for work done the prior five years, including by faculty who are on their way out! Second, there is no knowledgeable person alive who thinks that the RAE results, especially with their rampant grade inflation, are as reliable as the PGR results for UK departments (go ahead, compare!). As Jonathan Wolff (UCL Philosophy) has remarked here

"The myth of the RAE is that a small group of people can conduct a speed-reading peer review of the entire range of philosophical output of the UK. From my discussions with RAE panelists over the years my feeling is that they often have had to read submissions that they are not in a good position to judge (for example, that no journal would ask them to review). Furthermore the speed with which the panelists have to read the vast volumes of submissions leaves them too dazed to make philosophical judgements except in the narrow specialist areas in which the panelists are genuinely up with the current literature."

This, of course, may explain many of the highly peculiar results.

The "Liberation" of Iraq

Here's a fine photo montage, that comes with music and priceless quotes.

Bush Big Winner...

...at annual World Stupidity Awards. Details here:

"The November elections may still be ahead of him but U.S. President George W. Bush came out a big winner Friday - at the World Stupidity Awards.

"Bush was a dominating presence at the second edition of the awards presented at the Just for Laughs comedy festival. Host Lewis Black, whose biting satire is a highlight of TV's The Daily Show, took pride in the recognition the United States received at the awards, saying: 'we are the gold standard....'

"Bush took the Stupidest Man of the Year Award and for the second time in the history of the two-year-old awards won the Stupidity Award for Reckless Endangerment of the Planet....

"Bush didn't take the category alone, however, and tied with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"The controversial Texan president shared in two other awards as the United States was noted for having the Stupidest Government of the Year.

"'What was interesting about that is that the decision was made overwhelmingly by Americans who voted,' said Albert Nerenberg, of the Main Organization Revealing Obvious Numbskulls which runs the awards....

"Stupidest Statement of the Year was Bush's pronouncement that 'combat operations have ended in Iraq,' where fighting still rages more than a year after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

"Bush beat out pop princess Britney Spears, nominated for saying, 'I do,' at her brief Las Vegas wedding, and singer Jessica Simpson, who wondered aloud on TV: 'Why does Chicken By the Sea taste like tuna? Is it chicken or tuna?'"

More on the Impending Military Draft

Reader Thomas Gilpin calls my attention to this item from the International Herald Tribune:

"The United States now is in its second year of fighting two wars, neither of them victorious, both promising to go on for years to come. The reservists and National Guard members who originally contracted for duty one weekend a month, and two weeks in summer, find themselves locked into active duty that in many cases is already in its second year. Regular soldiers have had their terms of service extended.

"The marriages these people left behind, their businesses or professional practices, are under enormous strain or have collapsed. Yet army planners are relying on the National Guard alone to supply 43 percent of the American troops needed in Iraq next year.

"Once again there is a widening sense of exploitation and broken moral contracts for a war of still-obscure motivations, interests, and purposes. Resentments and cracks in solidarity and discipline reappear....

"Vietnam was a war where those who were selected had to go. Iraq is an affair that now depends on people who originally volunteered but now are being forced to serve multiple 12-month duty tours, in what amounts to their de facto conscription.

"As a result, army re-enlistments are dropping; new enlistments in fiscal year 2005 (beginning in October) are expected to fall 10 percent short of the total needed. If the United States means to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq for the next five years, there will be no alternative to reinstating conscription after the presidential inauguration in January."

More on Preference-Satisfaction and Well-Being

J.D. Trout, a philosopher of science and epistemologist at Loyola University at Chicago, writes:

"I agree that well-being cannot be preference satisfaction, but I can just hear economists dismissing your examples as mere 'information problems.' In other words, if fully informed, the agent would have known that salmonalla is bad, and that dives are at high risk for hosting salmonella. So your examples are just 'information problems.'

"Orthodox economists may pretend that actors are rational, but they have no serious, subsidiary model to explain the frequent deviations from the ideal. Physics has such models for precisely such occasions (e.g., how to explain departures from the normal consequences of Boyle’s when a gas is under extreme pressures or at high temperatures).

"Sheena Iyengar, at Columbia University’s Business School has done fascinating work on the psychology of consumer choice. Economists typically suppose that having more choices is always better, because it increases the chances of securing utilities. The problem is, there are many cases in which having more choices reduces those chances. Iyengar has shown that people who had fewer rather than more choices when making a purchase were (1) more likely to actually make a purchase, and (2) more likely to be satisfied with the purchase once made.

"Following work in prospect theory, Eric Johnson’s research showed that when faced with actual choices about insurance coverage, people are tyrannized by default options. This hypothesis could be tested because, every now and then serendipity produces a natural experiment. This natural experiment dramatized the human tendency toward cognitive laziness, the inertia produced by the status quo. In the early 1990s, insurance providers gave drivers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey a choice between two coverage options regarding the right to sue. Drivers in both states were given the choice of a reduced right to sue in exchange for lower insurance rates. But the default option was different for each state. In Pennsylvania, the default option was the full right to sue. That is, if they did nothing, they had the full right to sue. New Jersey drivers had to take action, by selecting the alternate option, in order to acquire this right at an additional cost.

"Now, the two states are demographically similar, so we should expect that the two states have the same percentages selecting the same options. But not so. In fact, the results are startling. Motorists’ choices followed the default options in each state. In NJ, where you have to take action for full rights to sue, 20% of the drivers acquired the full right to sue. In PA, where the full right to sue was the default option, 75% of the drivers retained the full right to sue. If New Jerseyans and Pennsylvanians are demographically similar, then either Pennsylvanians paid 200 million more than they needed to or New Jerseyans paid 200 million less than they should have. And this embarrassment is not the result of a choice, but of a norm dictating that a box be checked or not. (The same problem with default options probably explains why the U.S. has a much lower organ donation rate than Europe.)

"Now, an economist might say that this is just another 'information problem,' and that people should make their decisions based upon careful study of all of the available information. But this is not only ineffective normative advice, it is not even good advice to implement since this stance on all relevant issues would crowd out the activities most crucial to happiness, and likely well-being too. If you had to ferret out the health code violations of all of the Mexican restaurants you might eat at, check the information for insurance coverage, identify the ingredients of cans of beans at the grocery, and so on, you wouldn’t be able to drink with friends, spend leisure with your spouse, read to your children at bedtime, etc. Never mind that making the necessary calculations (even if it were advisable) is, for practical purposes, an intractable problem.

"This suggests another reason that well-being isn’t preference satisfaction: Preferences are often complex and ill-formed, and so they are not especially transparent to the agent. We are pretty bad at predicting which courses of actions will satisfy us. Work on affective forecasting by people like Gilbert and by Kahneman displays people chasing instruments to satisfy a preference that, in the end only frustrates them, and alienates them from the activities that makes for satisfied, even happy, people."

"Researchers like Ed Diener, Martin Seligman, and Daniel Kahneman actually study the natural conditions of well-being in a scientifically rigorous way, and not surprisingly it doesn’t look like preference satisfaction (on any of the familiar construals of that notion) is the route to it. In fact, Kahneman and his colleagues have an article in press at American Economic Review on this topic and related ones.

"It should be noted that, with a few exceptions, this voluminous literature on the nature and requirements of happiness and well-being has been largely ignored by philosophers. Does this mean that economists are in good or bad company?

"On the other hand, many of the problems in economic decision-making (such as intergenerational discounting to mention just one) are already widely discussed by a mixture of psychologists, economists, and legal scholars like Kahneman, Thaler, Sunstein, Hastie, Loewenstein, Dasgupta, Hanson and Kysar, Rachlinski, and so on. This work is readily accessible to economists and, if naturalistic work in moral psychology takes root, perhaps it will have an audience in philosophy as well."

Philosophy for Soldiers

Matt Davidson (Philosophy, Cal State-San Bernadino) tells me he's gotten appreciative feedback after donating philosophy books via this site.

More Political Laughs

This time at the expense of Bush and Kerry. Slightly amusing.

More Philosophy Grad Student Blogs

Neil Sinhababu--who studied philosophy at Harvard, is now a grad student at Texas, and is co-editor (with me) of the forthcoming Nietzsche and Morality for OUP--has a new blog here. Neil, who just finished his third year in the PhD program, recently won a highly competitive University Continuing Fellowship for next academic year. Neil: work on your dissertation, don't blog too much!

The 3 Most Important Developments in Epistemology...

...during the last 25 years are being discussed here. Since it appears just about every major epistemologist in the English-speaking world is now a contributor to this site, the answers should be interesting and (need I add?) reliable.

Why Well-Being Could Not be Preference-Satisfaction

(Warning: I'm going to pick on economics again, but let me preface this by saying that economists are my favorite people in law schools after philosophers--indeed, some of them are even as smart!)

The most peculiar feature of economics--apart from its scientific pretense--is its view that human well-being can be equated with preference-satisfaction. I understand, methodologically, what drives economics to such a silly view: if well-being is equivalent to preference-satisfaction, and the value of a particular preference-satisfaction is measurable by willingness to pay for its satisfaction, then we have a concrete way to measure well-being, i.e., by what price people are willing to pay for the satisfaction of their preferences.

This is tidy, and makes for well-defined research questions, but as an intellectual matter it is so silly as to be breathtaking. And the silliness begins with the idea that preference-satisfaction tracks well-being. (We won't even touch the familiar worry--familiar even to economists--that willingness to pay is a problematic proxy.)

Why can't well-being be equivalent to preference-satisfaction? Simple answer: there are lots of preferences whose satisfaction makes people worse off, and this happens all the time. Why? Because people are dumb or irrational or lacking in information or addicted, and so on.

Case 1: Anyone in the grips of addiction will have preferences whose satisfaction (another shot of heroin, another whisky, another hand of blackjack, etc.) will make them worse off.

Case 2: Anyone lacking relevant information will have preferences whose satisfaction will make them worse off. Examples:

(a) John wants to be a professional philosopher, so he satisfies his preferences to go to grad school in philosophy and pursue such a career, only to discover too late that he isn't smart or creative enough to pull it off--all this time and effort has been wasted, and he is much worse off (if he had gone, instead, to grad school in economics, where being able to make a rational argument is not necessary, he would have been much better off);

(b) Richard really wants Mexican food, and so goes to a neighborhood dive, to satisfy his preference; he does not know that sanitary conditions at the dive are so poor, that the salsa is full of salmonella, and he dies of food poisoning two days later;

(c) Mona really wants to be a ballerina, but no one has the nerve to tell her that being six feet tall and built like an Amazon is an insurmountable obstacle; as a result, she spends years and years acting on her ballerina preference, only to meet with professional and personal defeat and humiliation;

(d) Jim and Susie, tourists from Idaho, really want to get a feel for New York City, so they decide to take an evening walking tour of non-touristy parts of Brooklyn, which also, unbeknowst to them, are non-touristy because they are dangerous and crime-ridden; when their bodies are pulled from the East River, it is clear that their preference-satisfaction has made them worse off.

These are stylized examples, to be sure, but a moment's reflection ought to call to mind examples from your own life where preference-satisfactions made you worse off. (And notice that we haven't even mentioned the old Frankfurt-School worry about the manufacture of preferences that the market can then satisfy, and what the connection is between those preferences and well-being!)

Since there is no reason to think preference-satisfaction reliably tracks well-being, there is no reason to predicate an analysis of social or legal policies on preference-satisfaction. (This is one of several reasons why Kaplow and Shavell's book Fairness versus Welfare will go down in history as the most ridiculous book by smart people ever written...but more on that another day.)

Advice for New Job Seekers on the Law Teaching Market

A prospective candidate for law teaching jobs this coming year writes to ask whether I would post advice on the law teaching job market for those new to it. In fact, I have a lengthy document on this subject at my homepage here. It is aimed at Texas students, but much of the information is of general applicability and interest. There is discussion of the mechanics of the job market, interviews, factors to consider and investigate in looking at schools, and the like. I gather, from correspondence, that many law students at other schools utilize this site, which confirms my impression that it will be of value to those not from UT. But any UT alums thinking about law teaching ought to get in touch with me ASAP! At this point, it is probably too late to begin preparations for this year's teaching market, but it is not too early to begin planning for next year. (Note: this latter point is UT-specific--unlike, as far as I can tell, every other top school in the country, we actually prepare detailed information on our candidates, including collecting references in advance, which we then share with hiring schools nationally. This takes time! Most top law schools just leave their grads at sea on the teaching market, unfortunately.)

Here's my basic advice in a nutshell:

(1) Of the 1,000-or-so resumes submitted to the AALS each year, at least 500, probably 700, are non-starters: the candidates are wasting their time.

(2) To not be wasting your time, you should have (a) a very strong academic record from strong academic institutions; (b) at least one post-law school publication; and (c) at least two recommenders who are established legal academics. Your recommenders ought to have agreed, in advance, to recommend you!

That's a slight over-simplification; for the details, see the site above.

The Bush War on Science, a Continuing Saga

More gruesome details here:

"Consider the administration's handling of scientific advisory committees. In April, the president's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, issued a rebuttal to the February UCS [Union of Concerned Scientists] report, saying 'the accusation of a litmus test that must be met before someone can serve on an advisory panel is preposterous.' However, the new UCS report casts significant doubt on this assertion.

"For instance, Sharon Smith, chair of the University of Miami's marine biology department, informed UCS that she was summarily rejected for a position on the U.S. Arctic Research Commission 'after she gave a less-than-enthusiastic answer in response to a question from the White House personnel office about whether she supported President Bush.'

"Likewise, two recently appointed members of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research – Richard Myers of Stanford University and George Weinstock of Baylor College of Medicine – report that White House representatives asked inappropriate questions about their political views. Myers was initially denied a spot on the committee, apparently because he refused to discuss his opinion of President Bush, but was ultimately approved after a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health (where the committee is housed) intervened on his behalf. Weinstock told UCS that his answers regarding President Bush must have been 'innocuous enough to be palatable,' adding, 'There is no doubt in my mind that these questions represented a political litmus test.'

"Perhaps most dramatic, Gerald T. Keusch, who oversaw advisory committee appointments at a branch of NIH, recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the Bush administration approved only seven of his 26 advisory-board nominations over three years. In one case, Bush officials explained to Keusch that they had rejected Torsten Wiesel, a Nobel laureate in medicine, 'because he had signed too many full-page letters in the New York Times critical of President Bush.'

"The administration has also shown no reluctance to shape scientific findings in service to its political agenda. In one case, Deputy Interior Secretary J. Stephen Griles, a former lobbyist for the mining industry, directed agency scientists and staff to drop any consideration of alternatives that could minimize environmental damage from mountaintop mining, which the administration was seeking to boost. 'We were flabbergasted and outraged,' one high-ranking staff scientist at the Fish and Wildlife Service told UCS."

Lysenko, anyone?

Political Humor

Follow the money. Then click on the name.

Update on Plans for the New Philosophical Gourmet Report

'Tis the time of year when students and faculty start to inquire about plans for the new PGR...so here's the scoop:

(1) Board members are stil nominating evaluators--I expect some 500 philosophers from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe will get invitations this year to participate in the on-line surveys.

(2) We expect to conduct the surveys during September--this means faculty changes that occur by September 1 can still be reflected in the new surveys.

(3) For the first time, evaluators will be able to offer not only overall evaluations of faculties, but also to score departments in their own areas of specialization; the Advisory Board overwhelmingly approved this proposal. (We will not publish the mean score for the specialty evaluations, since these too often involve assessments of single individuals on a faculty; we will publish either the median score, or the rounded mean, for the top three groupings, corresponding roughly to the existing Excellent, Strong, Also Notable.)

(4) The new PGR itself, for 2004-06, will be published not later than mid-November, and hopefully by the end of October. Having just concluded a new contract with Blackwell through 2010 for the Report, it will continue to be available at the Blackwell-maintained site: www.philosophicalgourmet.com.

British Ex-Patriate Philosophers Likely to Remain So

Oxford philosopher Ralph Wedgwood--a Brit who took his PhD at Cornell and taught at MIT before returning "home"--writes:

"I was very interested by your post on 'When will Britain Try to Recruit Its Leading Philosophers Home?'

"Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine the mandarins of the British 'Department for Education and Skills' (as it is now called), let alone their political masters, getting very worked up about what you rightly call the 'brain drain of philosophical talent' from the UK. Gradgrind's ruthlessly utilitarian conception of the value of education seems pretty firmly entrenched there.

"That said, there are probably better opportunities for externally-funded research leave in the UK than in the US at the moment. The most notable sources of such external funds for research leave in the UK are the government-funded AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) and British Academy, and private organizations like the Leverhulme Trust:

"The AHRB runs a large scheme under which one additional term of leave is provided immediately following ordinary sabbatical leave.

"The British Academy funds a small number of Senior Fellowships (one year) and Readerships (two years) in the humanities.

"The Leverhulme Trust funds a small number of Research Fellowships each year, for a tenure of 2-3 years, in the humanities and social sciences.

"Ironically, though, these bodies don't seem at all interested in using their resources to recruit the leading British philosophers back to the UK. I was rather surprised to find out that to be eligible for one of these Leverhulme Research Fellowships, one *must* have held a UK University post for the previous five years. So the only effect of these Fellowships on the brain drain is that the eminent scholar will leave the UK a bit later, at the end of his or her Research Fellowship, than they would otherwise have done (this is exactly what Peacocke did).

"If your question, 'When will Britain Try to Recruit Its Leading Philosophers Home?', is about when there will be a concerted effort, co-ordinated across all the top UK universities, whether by the government or in some other way, to recruit back some of the UK's best philosophical exports, then I fear that the answer is, 'Not for a very long time -- if ever.'"

Sudan

Reader Rob Sica calls my attention to these fairly concrete suggestions for trying to alleviate some of the current horrors in the Sudan. They come via Nicholas Kristof, one of the leading "no ideas and the ability to express them" columnists at the New York Times, but here at least he is modestly constructive.