Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

More Thoughts on Graduate Students and Unionization

Matthew Smith (Philosophy, Yale) writes:

"The blow to grad student unionization is disturbing in more ways than just the obvious way in which it deprives employees from the right to collectively bargain and the benefits gained from such bargaining. I don't know what it's like at Texas, but at UNC, where I just got my PhD, an increasing amount of face-to-face teaching is being performed by graduate students. [Leiter: the same is true here.] This trend is recapitulated throughout higher education from the most prestigious private universities to more workaday public universities (see the Yale GESO report "Casual Nation." While this is not prima facie worrisome, it signals a tremendous shift in the way in which higher education is conducted in the US. Such a shift certainly warrants explicit recognition and evaluation, even if the change turns out to be a good thing. The NLRB ruling obscures this shift by suggesting that graduate students' primary role in the university is the role of student. As a consequence, the very important public discussion we ought to be having about the future shape of American higher education faces yet another barrier.

"I say none of this to de-emphasize the significance of union benefits. I worked as a union organizer before and while getting my PhD at UNC-CH and have seen first hand both the tangible and the intangible improvements in people's lives that union activity and union victories have brought. I only write to note that, beyond the immediate loss of these beneifts, there is a broader, systemic (where 'systemic' is not code for 'more important') negative effect that this NLRB ruling will have."

Yglesias is Annoyed at Academic Bloggers It Appears

Did anyone else notice that nice, moderate Democrat Matthew Yglesias (who majored in philosophy at Harvard, before becoming a "pundit") has removed all the academic blogs from his blogroll ever since he got beat up by Larry Solum (San Diego, Law) and Chris Bertram (Bristol, Philosophy) for a rather weak posting on Rawls? It is true I've never seen Solum be so harsh as he was in this case, but, hey, Matt, don't take it out on me and Weatherson!

When will Britain Try to Recruit Its Leading Philosophers Home?

Australia now offers Australian Federation Fellowships to lure its leading philosophical ex-patriates back home: five-year research appointments, high salaries, and equally large research budgets. So far, Australia has reclaimed Huw Price from the University of Edinburgh, David Chalmers from the University of Arizona, Paul Griffiths from the Universities of Pittsburgh and Exeter, and Philip Pettit from Princeton University.

Canada, meanwhile, has created the Canada Research Chairs; the senior ones (there are chairs for younger scholars as well) involve 7-year appointments, with one term free of teaching each year, and at a salary of 200,000 Canadian dollars (so about 160K US). In terms of salary, they are comparable to the Australian Fellowships, and while they involve more teaching, they also involve considerable research leave, and are renewable. (I'm not sure whether the Australian Federation Fellowships are renewable: I assume some knowledgeable reader will inform me before long.) In philosophy, the senior Chairs have gone to four English-speaking philosophers: Nicholas Griffin (McMaster University), Will Kymlicka (Queen's University), Adam Morton (University of Alberta), and Jeff Pelletier (Simon Fraser University). Unlike in Australia, most of the Chairs have not gone to recruit ex-patriates--only Morton, I believe, was recruited from abroad (from the University of Oklahoma at Norman).

No country, though, has suffered a brain drain of philosophical talent like the United Kingdom. Lost to the United States from Britain over the past two decades have been Julia Annas (Arizona), John Campbell (Berkeley), Jonathan Dancy (Texas, half-time), Susan Haack (Miami), Richard Holton & Rae Langton (MIT), Paul Horwich (CUNY), John McDowell (Pittsburgh), Colin McGinn (Rutgers), Christopher Peacocke (Columbia), Mark Sainsbury (Texas), and Galen Strawson (CUNY, half-time), among others.

Other native Brits who have spent longer in the U.S. include Kit Fine (NYU), Philip Kitcher (Columbia), and Michael Tye (Texas), among many others.

It would seem that a program in Britain similar to the Australian Federation Fellowships or the Canada Research Chairs would have many worthy candidates to recruit home from abroad. Of course, there is no sign, yet, that any such program is in the works for the U.K.--which is fortunate for the many U.S. departments, including my own, which have benefitted from being able to recruit first-rate British philosophers! And while Britain has had some success recruiting home some of its leading philosophical lights (Michael Frede went from Princeton to Oxford, and Raymond Geuss from Columbia to Cambridge, each about a dozen years ago; more recently, Sarah Broadie went from Princeton to St. Andrews, Simon Blackburn went from North Carolina to Cambridge, and Andy Clark went from Indiana to Edinburgh), it is clear that the balance sheet still favors the U.S. quite strongly. British Research Chairs or Fellowships, modelled on the Australian or Canadian ones, would almost certainly reverse the flow of academic talent, especially if it is coupled with abolition of the mandatory retirement age, which seems inevitable given European Union human rights standards, which bar age discrimination.

Ralph Nader Really Ought to be Embarrassed by This

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: This story confirms the first. Mr. Burgis, in turn, now reports that he has since gotten confirmation from Nader folks in Michigan that this AP story is correct. The final two paragraphs of Mr. Burgis's message, below, remain of interest, however.

UPDATE: Ben Burgis, Green Party member from Michigan, informs me that the story posted below earlier today is inaccurate; he writes:

"The link, from the Nader/Camejo web-site, establishes that at the July 15th deadline for turning in all the signatures, the Nader campaign turned in a grand total of 5,000 signatures, 1/6th of the 30,000 necessary to get on the ballot, and that Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, a Republican, has refused to put Nader on the ballot on the basis of the Reform nomination on the excuse that a minority splinter group that is now using the name Reform Party of Michigan disputes the nomination and that she refuses to 'get involved with an internal matter' of the Reform Party, which strikes me as a pretty flimsy excuse for keeping off the ballot a candidate who is predicted to get at least 2% or so of the vote in Michigan and as much as 6% of the vote nation-wide.

"None of that means that some Republicans weren't encouraging Michigan residents to sign Nader petitions out of their own calculations of self-interest--that seems well-established enough and covered in many different media sources--but it does mean that (a) the claim that the Republicans gathered 40,000 signatures for Nader is simply wrong, and (b) at least some highly positioned Michigan Republicans actually want to keep Nader off the ballot.

"Personally (I'm obviously biased given my party affiliation, etc.) I think that any alleged help some Republicans may or may not have given Nader to get on the ballot is far less of a scandal than the openly anti-democratic efforts of Democrats around the country to keep the preferred candidate of millions of voters *off* the ballot, using techniques frighteningly reminiscent of those used by Republicans in Florida in 2000--scrutinizing the signature of every one on each petition for criminal background, unreported changes of address, etc., etc., any technicality that could be used as an excuse for disqualifying signatures.

"This is particularly ridiculous given the case of Illinois, where long-standing state law as it has always existed would keep Bush off the ballot, since the Republican National Convention will be long after the state deadline. Thus, just by enforcing existing law as it has stood for years with bipartisan approval, the Democratic majority in the Illinois state legislature could keep Bush off the ballot. But--got to love that duopoly!--the Democrats controlling the state legislature are changing the deadline to accommodate the RNC. All of this at the same time that they are trying to deprive millions of voters of their democratic right to vote for Ralph Nader. Any legal technicality in the book is fair game to get Nader off the ballot, but enforcing the clear-as-day provisions of state law that the Republicans knew about (but assumed would be changed to accommodate them) would be an unfair abuse of power."

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Details here:

"The Michigan Republican Party submitted more than 40,000 signatures last week in a bid to get independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader on the state's November ballot.

"Of course, this is not really about helping Nader. It is all about helping President Bush and hurting Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry's campaign in a closely contested state.

"The Michigan GOP denies that, of course. Matt Davis, a spokesman for the group, said it was merely concerned about third-party candidates being left off the ballot. He could not name, however, another third-party or independent candidate his party has helped."

The Republicans should be embarrassed too, but I think they're beyond that.

In Memoriam

John Watling (1923-2004)

A memorial for the longtime member of the Philosophy Department at University College London is here.

Law prof Ruger from Wash U to Penn

Theodore Ruger (legislation, health law, constitutional law) at Washington University, St. Louis will join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, starting this fall as a tenure-track assistant professor.

Philosophy Blogs Make Newsweek

Josh Glasgow from Peasoup kindly called my attention to the fact that the July 26th Newsweek features a short item on philosophy blogs. (Inexplicably, the article omits Weatherson's site, the pioneer in the arena where one really could discuss, as the article suggests, "epistemology"!)

A propos my recent item on "'Arrogance' and Knowledge," note how the Newsweek article concludes, after urging readers to visit several of these blogs:

"You don't need a Ph.D. to participate, but don't fake it: draw on real-life experience to show ivy-tower academics the light."

Philosopher Alan Hajek from Cal Tech to the ANU

Alan Hajek (philosophy of science, decision theory, epistemology) at California Institute of Technology has accepted a senior offer from the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. The ANU, which suffered two major losses in recent years (Michael Smith is going to Princeton, and Philip Pettit also went to Princeton, though he is now taking up an Australian Federation Fellowship at Sydney), now concludes a good year, adding Hajek, as well as David Chalmers, another recipient, like Pettit, of an Australian Federation Fellowship.

More Analysis of Hiring by the "top 18" Law Schools

A propos this earlier posting of mine on changes in law faculty composition between 2000-01 and 2004-05, Larry Solum (Law, San Diego) has produced some interesting additional analysis of these hires here. Some highlights:

"More than 75% of all American JD students hired by the 18 elite schools during the five-year period were produced by five law schools, Yale (30%), Harvard (23%), Stanford (11%), Chicago (8%), and Columbia (5%)."

"Almost 2/3rds of those hired by the eighteen schools in the five year period were trained exclusively in law. To look at the same glass half-full, fully one-third of those hired did have an advanced doctoral degree from a discipline other than law." [Bear in mind that the sample here included many senior candidates, many of whom do interdisciplinary work, though they do not have a PhD: examples would include my colleagues Bernie Black and Larry Sager.]

"Of the 79 individuals with doctoral degrees hired during the five year period, 59 were hired by nine schools (Penn, USC, Northwestern, Stanford, Michigan, Columbia, Yale, Texas, and Virginia), while the remaining nine schools hired only 20. 89% of Penn's hires had non-JD doctorates, while only 13% of Georgetown's hires had such degrees."

Give or Take 395,000

Story here:

"Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

"The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

"In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

"On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

"The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

"Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead."

5,000 dead is pretty awful too, but the gross exaggeration is relevant in a different way. We now hear from various chicken hawks and right-wing pundits (I realize the categories may be redundant) that, whatever the casualties of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, as many would have died anyway if Saddam remained in power. Put aside the ghoulish nature of these post-hoc rationalizations, it turns out there there is no reason to think anything like this is remotely true. Tens of thousands have been killed since the invasion in March of 2003, and tens of thousands have been maimed and injured, their lives shattered, in many cases, beyond repair. There is no evidence that anyone has produced that Saddam was killing and maiming people at anything close to this rate. His worst killing sprees appear to have coincided with when he enjoyed staunch U.S. and British support--for example, when he used poison gas on the Kurds in the late 1980s. Where is the evidence that if Saddam had been in power from March 2003 to the present, forty or fifty (or is it sixty or seventy? the Pentagon, as we know, doesn't count Iraqis) thousand people would have been killed and maimed? There is none. Chicken hawks ought at least to hold their blood-drenched hands up to the light of day.

UPDATE: Benjamin Hellie (Philosophy, Cornell) calls my attention to the fact that there is debate about whether Saddam is actually responsible for using poison gas on the Kurds: details here.

A Big Blow for Grad Students at Private Universities

This article reports that,

"The fast-growing movement to unionize graduate students at the nation's private universities suffered a crushing setback yesterday when the National Labor Relations Board reversed itself and ruled that students who worked as research and teaching assistants did not have the right to unionize.

"In a case involving Brown University, the labor board ruled 3 to 2 that graduate teaching and research assistants were essentially students, not workers, and thus should not have the right to unionize to negotiate over wages, benefits and other conditions of employment.

"The Republican-controlled board reversed a four-year-old decision involving New York University, a private institution, in which the board, then controlled by Democrats, concluded that graduate teaching and research assistants should be able to unionize because their increased responsibilities had essentially turned them into workers."

This is very bad news for graduate students at private universities--though it shall at least save us the disgraceful spectacle of senior professors offering tortured explanations, based on no evidence, of why unions would destroy graduate education.

At Michigan, the TAs were unionized when I went there. It had no negative impact on student/faculty relations, mentoring, or anything of educational significance. It did mean that we were paid much better than the grad students at, for example, Yale, and we had better benefits and more reasonable teaching loads.

It is true that competition for students at the better programs creates some pressure towards better working conditions for teaching assistants, but, like all market pressures, it is unpredictable and uneven. And at least some arrogant private schools that can trade on the prestige of their "name" regardless of the quality of the program can be expected to shortchange their graduate students.

One potential countervailing force, not available when I went to graduate school, is the Internet, which makes it very easy to get information about working conditions for teaching assistants. The burden will now fall to students to educate themselves about comparative working conditions, and to make decisions based on that information. Only when the faculty start losing the students they want to the schools with unionized teaching assistants and better working conditions will the serial exploiters of graduate-student labor reform.

Of course, the preferred outcome would be if the NLRB faced up to the reality of the situation, and permitted graduate students at private universities to unionize. Depending on how things go in November, maybe that will happen a year from now.

Berkeley Law Prof John Yoo and the "Torture" Memo

Until now, I've refrained from comment on the very public controversy concerning the pretty scandalous "legal" memos written by Bush Administration lawyers cooking up any-and-all-rationales for violating international law and torturing "bad guys." I haven't much of substance to add to what others have written on this subject. The lawyers who wrote this stuff deserve to be embarrassed, and they have been, at least momentarily. At the center of this firestorm has been John Yoo, a law professor at Berkeley ("Boalt Hall School of Law"), who, it turns out, is largely responsible for most of the egregious legal memoranda. (I note in passing that Professor Yoo clerked for the extreme--but not, mind you, lunatic--Justice Thomas.)

Berkeley law students called for Yoo to either repudiate his work or resign from the faculty. ("Juan Non-Volokh"--the "non" presumably designates the fact that he has neither intellectual nor legal competence--at the Volokh Conspiracy has written on this subject at length, for those who traverse blogs.) I give them credit for not calling for Yoo to be fired, since doing so would be both illegal and unconstitutional. Contrary to the Boalt students, academic freedom does indeed protect Professor Yoo's right to be both morally wrong and wrong on the legal merits; if it did not, it wouldn't mean much.

My guess, in any case, is that Professor Yoo would love to resign from the Boalt faculty, once he has another job. Boalt is a quite pathological place, even without the student body up-in-arms about your legal work! But at this point, it is doubtful he will be appointable at a comparable school.

In any case, what prompted me to comment was the judicious analysis of the denoument of this whole affair by Jack Balkin (Law, Yale) at his blog. I commend it to your attention.

Professor Yoo is no doubt an exceptionally bright young man--the proverbial 3-digit IQ. But, if I may borrow a phrase dear to our alleged President, he has, unfortunately, aligned himself with "evil," and has used his lawyerly intelligence to provide lawyerly rationales for injustice and inhumanity. He is not the first, nor will he be the last, lawyer to do so. More often than not, lawyers must do this in contexts in which the fundamental values of the post-Enlightenment world are not at stake. Professor Yoo's context, alas, was different.

One should not call on Professor Yoo to repudiate his memos or resign; he ought to repudiate them, to be sure, since every expert I've talked to confirms they are pretty bad pieces of work. But that is a matter for his intellectual and moral conscience. Calls for resignation are irrelevant. There are plenty of folks who ought to resign from the Berkeley law faculty--among many others--if intellectual or pedagogical incompetence were the issue. The only thing at issue here (at least to my knowledge) is Professor Yoo's failures of judgment, not his competence. For those, he has answered, and will be answering, to the tribunal of professional and public opinion.

Stalinist Creep-Up Again?

More Stalinist creep-up; details here:

"As I began writing this piece I looked on the Internet at the Washington Post of July 5 and glanced at the lead-in to a report. It was 'The elderly physician who exposed the government's coverup of the SARS epidemic has been detained since June 1 and faces interrogation by the government.' OK, so it was a quick look; but my immediate thought was 'What on earth has that psychotic savage Ashcroft done now?' which is a pretty grim reaction to a newspaper headline that, given a momentarily longer examination, was obviously about Beijing's persecution of yet another innocent citizen.

"When a foreigner can look at such words in a Washington newspaper and think, even fleetingly, for the tiniest moment, that they could possibly apply to the democracy that is the United States rather than the totalitarian state that is China, it is obvious there is something badly wrong with the way the Bush administration is conducting the affairs of the nation. Only four years ago, not one reader on earth would have imagined for an instant that such a sentence could possibly, in the furthest flights of fancy, apply to the United States of America.

"No longer....[N]ow the world's democracies look at America and regard with horror the establishment's ferocious protection of a president who not only tells lies but wages war on his own people by denying them freedoms supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution....

"In America there has been an explosion of unbelievably Alice-in-Wonderland, government-initiated, capricious prosecutions, relentlessly pursued by dedicated morons in the teeth of all evidence that their grounds for federal charges were deficient, imperfect and derisory. The victims, such as Professor Steven Kurtz of Buffalo, Captain James Yee of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and the lawyer Mr Brandon Mayfield (to name the high-profile cases), have gone through hell. Their lives have been destroyed by the Government of the United States. Rejoice, ye tyrants everywhere, because the Bush administration is providing you with precedent, aid and comfort in repression of your citizens.

Free Speech is a Great Idea...

...in theory. Details here:

"A Texas couple wearing anti-Bush t-shirts was handcuffed and removed from a Fourth of July Bush-Cheney campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia.

"The Bush speech, given after the two, Nicole and Jeff Rank, were arrested, included a proclamation that 'on this Fourth of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds, the freedom for people to worship as they so choose.' The president added, 'Free thought, free expression, that’s what we believe.'

"According to radio news program Democracy Now!, police approached the Ranks and asked them to move from the rally area to a protest zone, an order they refused as both had tickets to the event. The two were then handcuffed and charged with trespassing."

Philosopher Hawthorne Staying at Rutgers

John Hawthorne (epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, early modern) will be staying at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, despite the bid by Princeton.

This must mark a really dramatic change in fortunes: who in 1980 would have guessed the day would come when the State University of New Jersey would retain philosophy faculty against Princeton, and would, in fact, dominate Princeton (and most other departments in the U.S., with the exception of NYU) in some of the central areas of the discipline?

This is perhaps the clearest indication of the extent to which the academic world of the 1960s--the one dominated by the Ivy League, Berkeley, Michigan, Chicago, Stanford, and perhaps one or two others--is no more.

"Academic Freedom Bill of Rights"

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 27, 2003. I'm reposting it now in light of the extraordinary spectacle of literally dozens and dozens of blog linking approvingly to Arnold Kling's non-argument on behalf of some conservative conclusions. And conservatives are underrepresented in the academy because?

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I'm reposting this, in light of the latest salvo by the right claiming a "bias" against conservatives in the academy. As usual, the possibility that conservatives are underrepresented because of intellectual or scholarly deficiencies isn't broached (how could that topic be broached by a journalist, after all?) (Surely it is relevant to an assessment of why Straussians who work on Plato have difficulty getting hired (except in departments already infested) is that they are viewed by all other Plato scholars as sloppy and philosophically inept scholars.)

Conservatives are usually keen to deny that the absence of, say, Blacks in academia doesn't signal bias; why are they so ready to infer bias from the absence of conservatives?

Only 7% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences believe in God, compared to 90% of the U.S. population. What should we infer?

Readers may also find the discussion here of interest.

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The fury of the ex-smoker towards smokers is matched only by the fury of the ex-New Leftist towards anyone to the left of Tom DeLay, which brings us to David Horowitz, and his newest initiative, which ought to scare every scholar in the United States to death. He calls it an "Academic Freedom Bill of Rights," and its text seems almost benign and uncontroversial:

"All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs."

Who could quarrel with the proposition that "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs"?

The idea that a "plurality of methodologies and perspectives" be mandated is a bit more worrisome: should someone take the UCLA Philosophy Department to court for not having hired a postmodernist philosopher? At the University of Texas School of Law, we've also passed on a lot of postmodernists and Critical Race Theorists lately. Should we be liable as a result?

Of course, the pathological Horowitz has no interest in these issues. If you want an idea of what "academic freedom" means to him, you need only read a bit of what he has written, for example, this gem on the very same web page where the Academic Freedom Bill of Rights appears, in which he denounces "sociological flat-earthists -- Marxists, socialists, post-modernists and other intellectual radicals -- whose ideas of how societies work have been discredited by historical events" but who "can still dominate their academic fields."

I guess academic freedom doesn't encompass them.

McCarthyism was never so clever. Horowitz says:
"We call on state legislatures in particular to begin these inquiries at the institutions they are responsible for and to enact practical remedies as soon as possible."

Pratical remedies? Over in libertarian fantasy-land, Eugene Volokh expresses relief that Horowitz isn't suggesting quotas for conservatives. But what in the world does Eugene think litigation over violations of the so-called "Academic Freedom Bill of Rights" would look like? If people have legal rights, they have remedies, and those remedies are going to be crafted by courts or legislatures. In either scenario, you might as well kiss universities good-bye.

The next critical race theorist denied tenure at a law school will have her day in court, as will the next Straussian booted from a classics department (I'm assuming, counterfactually of course, that one would ever be hired). And perhaps to avoid endless litigation, the legislature will simply proclaim the appropriate balance of libertarians, social conservatives, Marxists, social democrats, liberals, centrist Democrats, and Republicans for each department at the university.

The Colorado branch of Horowitz's front group, "Students for Academic Freedom [sic]," has issued the following declaration:

"These vastly lopsided figures (94% Democratic faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 98% at the University of Denver) provide objective standards of bias, since party affiliation is a choice of the individuals themselves. Even accounting for the fact that more liberals go into academia than do conservatives, can anyone truly claim with a straight face that liberals are so overwhelmingly more competent as teachers and scholars that they deserve to win such an astoundingly high percentage of professorships? This outcome is incomprehensible based on merit alone."

What percent of University of Colorado at Boulder faculty are white, one wonders? 90%, 95%? And since there is no reason to think Blacks are less interested in academic careers than whites (as opposed to conservatives, who would rather make money on Wall Street, or so the argument goes), and since no one could "claim with a straight face that" whites are "overwhelmingly more competent as teachers and scholars," this outcome "is incomprehensible on merit alone." Ergo, it must be bias, ergo, bring in the courts.

In the race and gender discrimination contexts, of course, the courts have largely rejected these kinds of arguments--and certainly right-wingers like David Horowitz reject them out of hand. Too bad they've not noticed the parallel in this context.

And, of course, the argument begs the real question. There are no alchemists in the best chemistry departments; no creation scientists or intelligent design proponents in the best biology departments; no geocentric theorists of the solar system in the best astronomy departments; no supply-side economists in the best economics departments (according to Paul Krugman); no postmodernists or Straussians in the best philosophy departments; and so on.

Do all these underrepresented intellectual perspectives have a claim under the Academic Freedom Bill of Rights? Couldn't it be that fundamental intellectual deficiencies of these views have something to do with their underrepresentation in the academy?

After all, take your favorite "objective" measure of intellectual ability--IQ, standardized test scores, etc.--and there' s no disputing that the level of intellectual ability is much, much higher in the academy than in the population at large. Why don't great believers in "merit" like Horowitz draw the obvious inference from this fact when conjoined with the absence of their preferred political ideology? (Well, the answer to that one is obvious.)

Alas, I'm sure it's not quite that simple. And conservative views aren't quite as underrepresented. Take libertarians in the legal academy: they are well-represented at most of the top law schools (Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Virginia, Texas, UCLA, Northwestern, etc.). (Indeed, they may be better-represented than Critical Race Theorists--most top schools have only one, if that.) That is as it should be since the libertarians, from Richard Posner to Alan Schwartz to Eugene Volokh, are intellectually and argumentatively engaged with the major scholarly issues in law. But if you start looking for conservatives in the Bush/DeLay model, you'll find hardly any. Is this attributable to bias or to the fact that as educational attainment and intellectual sophistication rises, it is harder to sign on to this world view?

That is the question, isn't it?

Philosopher of Biology Griffiths to Queensland

Paul Griffiths (philosophy of biology, philosophy of the emotions) has accepted the Australian Federation Fellowship, and will start at the University of Queensland this fall. No word yet on whether Griffiths--who had earlier accepted an offer from Exeter (he is currently at Pittsburgh HPS)--will have some kind of part-time arrangement with Exeter. (The Australian academic calendar runs quite differently, for obvious reasons, from the US and UK ones, making these part-time arrangements very feasible.)

In addition, the Australian National University's homepage is advertising David Chalmers as having accepted the Federation Fellowship there, to start in August. No word there, either, on whether Chalmers will continue part-time at Arizona or elsewhere in the U.S.

In addition to the highly competitive salary, the Federation Fellowships, it's worth noting, are also five-year research appointments (no formal teaching duties) and include at least as much money as the salary to support research-related activities. It's a surprise that any Australian philosopher is abroad these days!

Historian Juan Cole Wipes the Floor with the Alleged President...Again

This time on the Bush lie (what else to call it?) that we are safer because of his lunatic military exploits. From his conclusion:

"So, no, Americans are not safer, Mr. Bush. They face the threat of substantial narco-terrorism from Afghanistan. Iraq is a security nightmare that could well blow back on the American homeland. Pakistan remains a military dictatorship with a host of militant jihadi movements that had been fomented by the hardline Pakistani military intelligence. Saudi Arabia is witnessing increased al-Qaeda activity and attacks on Westerners. And the Israeli-Palestine dispute is being left to fester and poison the world.

"These are not achievements to be proud of. This is a string of disasters. We are not safer. We face incredible danger because of the way the Bush administration has grossly mishandled the Middle East."

And on top of that, we now have rather chilling anecdotes about terrorists doing dry runs for new attacks on the airlines.

E-mail Problems

I've recently lost two e-mails--one from Jason Walta, one from a scholar in China writing about the Royal Society of Canada--due to filter malfunctions. (I saw the messages from an off-campus site, without filters, but they then disappeared from my office machine.) I'd be grateful, if these readers see this, if they'd resend their e-mails. Thanks, and sorry for the trouble.

Who Goes to See "Farenheit 9-11" and "The Passion of the Christ"?

Details here via the excellent Rasmussen Reports:

"Fahrenheit 9-11, Michael Moore's entry into the election debate, has an audience that is 47% liberal, 26% moderate, and 25% conservative. The audience for Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ is 51% conservative, 27% moderate, and 21% liberal.

"Other demographic differences abound:

"Women make up 42% of the audience for Fahrenheit 9-11 and 53% for Passion.

"The President's Job Approval among Fahrenheit viewers is 26%. Among Passion fans, it's 58%.

"The partisan make-up for Moore's movie is 47% Democrat, 19% Republican, and 34% unaffiliated. For Gibson's, the audience is 41% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 23% unaffiliated.

"Fahrenheit fans will vote for Democrats in Congress by a 66% to 20% margin. The Passion crowd will vote for Republicans by a 48% to 39% margin.

"There is a bit of common ground between the movies. Fans of both named Rock'n'Roll as their favorite music. However, Classical music was the second choice of the Fahrenheit 9-11 audience while country music ranked second among the Passion audience."

Two things that strike me about this data:

(1) In less than two generations, a marginal and insubstantial musical form has become the shared basis for musical sensibility in the public culture.

(2) One out of three viewers of the Moore movie are political "independents," and one out of four actually have a favorable view of the alleged President. Both those figures have to make Republicans sweat.

Cornell Makes Bid for Epistemologist DeRose at Yale

Cornell has made a senior offer to Keith DeRose (epistemology, philosophy of language, early modern, philosophy of religion) at Yale University; a decision is expected by early fall, perhaps in time for the new PGR surveys. DeRose has rebuffed offers from Rutgers and, more recently, Arizona. Look for Cornell to recoup its "top ten" position if it succeeds in recruiting DeRose and retaining Graff and Fara in the face of the Princeton offers.

A Newish Blog on the History & Philosophy of Biology is...

...here. I just stumbled on it by chance. Contributors appear to be primarily (maybe exclusively?) faculty and students at Florida State University (including, e.g., Michael Ruse).

Philosopher/Blogger on the Move

David Shoemaker (moral and political philosophy), of Pea Soup fame, will move from a tenure-track position at California State University at Northridge to a tenure-track post at Bowling Green State University.

"Self-Appointed Experts"

Ilkka Kokkarinen writes, a propos "'Arrogance' and Knowledge," to call my attention to this terrific little item on "Self-Appointed Experts" by Professor Steve Dutch, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He imagines a critic who objects,

"I'm sick and tired of self-appointed so-called experts and their know-it-all, arrogant attitude. Why don't you people stay out of things you know nothing about? To hear you tell it, you know everything and the rest of us are stupid."

Profesor Dutch replies:

"I've seen this script before. At this point I'm supposed to get all humble and apologetic and say 'There, there. We didn't mean to make you feel bad. You're really a good person and a valuable human being and your opinions do count.'

"I'm tired of playing that game.

"We're not 'self-appointed' or 'so-called' experts. We are real experts. We're not 'authority figures.' We are real authorities.

"It's not arrogance to say what you know professionally. It is arrogance to reject expert opinion without having expertise of your own.

"If hearing the experts say you're wrong makes you feel bad or stupid, that is your problem, not ours. See a therapist and work on your self-esteem. If you think this is rough on the ego, try getting a paper or grant proposal you've worked on for months rejected, something real experts face all the time. We don't know everything, but we do know more on our subjects of expertise than other people, especially people with no training at all.

"Unless you have real evidence to back up your opinions, they don't count. If you hear something that conflicts with what you think you know, and you don't bother to check it out, you shouldn't feel stupid. You are stupid. If you want to take on the experts but won't spend the time, effort and money to become an expert yourself, you're not just stupid. You're lazy, too.

"If you think I'm disrespecting you, you're right. I have no respect for people who are uninformed, get angry when someone contradicts them, but are too lazy to get informed and too cowardly to face failure, criticism, and the possibility they might have to change their minds. You're not a good person. Nobody who is lazy and cowardly can be called 'good.'

"Where did you get the idea you're so valuable? There are six billion of us. You're not all that unique. How exactly did you get the notion that you stand so high in the cosmic scheme of things that you have the right to make real experts treat you as an equal without bothering to acquire any knowledge yourself?"

(For those who read Finnish, Professor Kokkarinen's blog is here.)

Major Coup for Philosophy at Southampton: Janaway from Birkbeck takes Chair

Christopher Janaway, the distinguished Schopenhauer scholar at Birkbeck College, University of London--who is also well-known for work on Nietzsche and on aesthetics, ancient and modern--has accepted a Chair at the University of Southampton, to start in January 2005. On this occasion, I will simply quote myself, from the letter I was asked to write by Southampton earlier this year when they were considering the appointment: "[Professor Janaway] would instantly raise the international standing of the Philosophy Department at Southampton, establishing it as the leading center in the United Kingdom for the study of such major 19th-century figures as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and one of the two or three such leading centers in the world." At Southampton, Professor Janaway joins, among others, Aaron Ridley in the Philosophy Department and David Owen in Politics. The University of London will continue to have good resources for those interested in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Ken Gemes at Birkbeck, and Sebastian Gardner at UCL), as will Cambridge (Raymond Geuss) and Oxford (Stephen Mulhall and, if he stays, Michael Rosen); outside the U.K., of course, the place to be for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is...

Bush's War on Science

A propos "'Arrogance' and Knowledge," I learn via Panda's Thumb of this apt column by Dr. Dean:

"The Bush administration has declared war on science. In the Orwellian world of 21st century America, two plus two no longer equals four where public policy is concerned, and science is no exception. When a right-wing theory is contradicted by an inconvenient scientific fact, the science is not refuted; it is simply discarded or ignored.

"Egregious examples abound. Over-the-counter morning-after contraceptive sales are banned, despite the recommendation for approval by an independent panel of the Food and Drug Administration review board. The health risks of mercury were discounted by a White House staffer who simply crossed out the word 'confirmed' from a phrase describing mercury as a "confirmed public health risk." A National Cancer Institute fact sheet was doctored to suggest that abortion increases breast-cancer risk, even though the American Cancer Society concluded that the best study discounts that. Reports on the status of minority health and the importance of breast feeding are similarly watered down to appease right-wing ideologies....

"Presidential scientific commissions have long enjoyed relative immunity from politics. Presidents of both parties have depended on impartial, rational advice from such groups for decades. Yet under the Bush administration, there has been a concerted effort, led by Karl Rove and other political ideologues based in the White House, to stack these commissions with Republican loyalists, especially those who espouse fundamentalist views on scientific issues....

"[For exampe,], the nomination of public-health experts to a CDC lead paint advisory panel were rejected by Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, and replaced with researchers with financial ties to the lead industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists, with 20 Nobel laureates and several former scientific advisers to Republican presidents, has issued its scathing Report on Scientific Integrity condemning these practices....

"Will it be long before a prominent panel of fundamentalist theologians, conservative columnists and a few token scientists take up the question of whether the theory of evolution should be banned from the nation's classrooms? Stay tuned. In George Bush's America, ignorance is strength."

This, in a nutshell, is why anyone with any allegiance at all to the Enlightenment ought to be ashamed to cast a vote for this President.

"Arrogance" and Knowledge

Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative religious organization, delivers what could be the signature line for our backwards times in America:

"There's an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American."

In fact, of course, scientists do know quite a bit better than the "average American" about the matters for which their scientific expertise equips them. Those with knowledge, surprisingly, know more than those who are ignorant. Is that arrogance?

As Chris Mooney remarked, "science is not a democracy," and in a democratic culture, that inevitably becomes a cause of resentment, as Ms. Lafferty's comment attests. This resentment of competence was first made vivid to me when I appeared on CNN more than a year ago to discuss the textbook selection process in Texas. When I dismissed the argument that the textbook selection process should be "democratic" (which it isn't, though it pretends to be) on the grounds that competent educators should vet textbooks, not political and religious groups, the CNN host, Anderson Cooper, cut me rather short: that reply clearly made him uncomfortable, and he changed the topic to how the selection process wasn't really democratic anyway.

Resentment of competence was also a motif suggested by my exchange with Professor Eastman--one of the ignorant law professors shilling for teaching creationist lies to schoolchildren--who used that favorite rhetorical device of the anti-Darwin crowd by referring to its "tyrannical orthodoxy." Unfortunately, as I noted on that occasion, "views that are correct ought to be orthodox, and they ought to exercise the tyranny appropriate to truth, namely, a tyranny over falsehood and dishonesty."

But when truth and knowledge clash with deep-seated prejudices--especially those reinforced from the pulpit and in the public culture--resentment towards the "arrogance" of those with knowledge and competence grows.

Unfortunately, I don't see much room for compromise in this domain. Knowledge and competence can not become meek and abashed merely to avoid offending the vanity of the undereducated, the parochial, and the unworldly. The Enlightenment dream was to extend the blessings of reason and knowledge as widely as possible. In the United States, that Enlightenment project has been stymied: at the highest echelons of the culture, the material and institutional support for the pursuit of knowledge and competence is unparalleled, yet the fruits of these labors are often either regarded with suspicion and resentment in the public culture at large--or simply go unrecognized and unnoted altogether.

Could there be a greater failure of the Enlightenment project than that a huge majority of U.S. citizens actually believe there is an intellectual competition between Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and "intelligent design" creationism? Or that the President of the country publically affirms their skepticism, without being held up for ridicule in the media and the public culture?

These are, for various reasons, scary times in America, but the increasingly brazen haughtiness of the purveyors of ignorance and lies--who cloak their backwardness in the judgmental rhetorc of "arrogance" and a none-too-subtle appeal to the "ordinary" person's sense of democratic equality--may be the most worrisome development of all. That the empire of ignorance spreads its domain portends calamities from which it could take centuries to heal.

Against Religion in Politics

Some excerpts from the longer essay by Susan Jacoby:

"Like most Americans, I responded to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with an immediate wave of anger and grief so powerful that it left no room for alienation.

"Walking around my wounded New York, as the smoke from the ruins of the World Trade Center wafted the smell of death throughout the city, I drew consolation from the knowledge that others were feeling what I was feeling - sorrow, pain and rage, coupled with the futile but irrepressible longing to turn back the clock to the hour before bodies rained from a crystalline sky.

"That soothing sense of unity was severed for me just three days later, when the president presided over an ecumenical prayer service in Washington's National Cathedral. Delivering an address indistinguishable from a sermon, replacing the language of civic virtue with the language of faith, the nation's chief executive might as well have been the Reverend Bush. Quoting a man who supposedly said at St. Patrick's Cathedral, 'I pray to God to give us a sign that he's still here,' the president went on to assure the public not only that God was still here but that he was personally looking out for America.

"'God's signs,' Bush declared, 'are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own ... Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, can separate us from God's love. May he bless the souls of the departed, may he comfort our own, and may he always guide our country.'

"This adaptation of the famous passage from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans left out the evangelist's identification of Jesus Christ as God - an omission presumably made in deference to the Jewish and Muslim representatives sharing the pulpit with the president.

"Bush would surely have been criticized, and rightly so, had he failed to invite representatives of non-Christian faiths to the ecumenical ceremony in memory of the victims of terrorism. But he felt perfectly free to ignore Americans who adhere to no religious faith, whose outlook is predominantly secular and who interpret history and tragedy as the work of man rather than God. There was no speaker who represented my views, no one to reject the notion of divine purpose at work in the slaughter of thousands and to proclaim the truth that grief, patriotism and outrage at injustice run just as deep in the secular as in the religious portion of the body politic.

"According to a religious identification survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, more than 14 percent of Americans - a much larger minority than any non-Christian group - describe their outlook as 'entirely or predominantly secular.' There are more secular humanists than there are observant Jews or Muslims - but one would never know it from the makeup of supposedly ecumenical civic rituals that are ecumenical only for those who believe, to paraphrase Bush, that God is at the helm of our country.

"Bush's very presence in the pulpit represented a significant departure from the behavior of other presidents in times of crisis. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not try to assuage the shock of Pearl Harbor by using an altar as the backdrop for his declaration of war and Abraham Lincoln, who steadfastly refused to join any church even though his political advisers urged him to do so, delivered the Gettysburg Address not from a sanctuary but on the battlefield where so many soldiers had given 'the last full measure of devotion.'...

"Bush has spoken proudly, on many occasions, of America's religious liberties as one of the factors distinguishing the U.S. from radical Islamist states - but he does not respect those liberties, which flow from the separation of church and state, at home. Only last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee once again took up the nomination of one James Leon Holmes for a federal district judgeship. This is a man who, in a 2002 address to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, proclaimed that 'the final reunion of church and state will take place at the end of time, when Christ will claim definitive political power of all creation, inaugurating an entirely new society based on the supernatural.'

"What a great and welcome contribution it would be for John Kerry to step forward and proclaim a love of country based not on dreams of a supernatural Christian government but, as the Constitution's preamble asserts, on the authority of 'We the People.'

"The framers knew what they were doing when they declined to write, 'We the People under God.' It is simply disgraceful that modern politicians run away from the noble secular heritage that they should embrace."

Disgraceful it is.

Love as a "moral" emotion?

It's not often that the journal Ethics (edited by my esteemed colleague John Deigh) publishes funny articles, but the rejoinder by Elijah Millgram to David Velleman's 1999 article "Love as a Moral Emotion" (requires JSTOR) certainly qualifies (perhaps as wickedly funny). If your institution subscribes, you can access Professor Millgram's article here. An excerpt:

"The Kantian element [in Velleman's account of love] is that you are supposed to love that person as a rational being or, more precisely, an 'idealized, rational will' (p. 344); what you are supposed to love in them is 'the capacity to be actuated by reasons,' the 'capacity to care about things in that reflective way which is distinctive of self-conscious creatures like us' (p. 365)....

"Velleman confirms the point I want to make here by calling your rational self your 'true self' (p. 365). It is not a new observation that when someone tells you that x is your 'true interest,' or that x is what we 'truly want,' or that x is someone's 'true home,' we can be pretty sure that x is not actually in your interest, that we don't actually want x, and that x is not actually his home. This use of 'true' might as well be a negation operator, and when Velleman tells us that our rational selves are our true selves, he is (inadvertently) acknowledging that they're not actually our selves at all....

"In a surprising book-length essay, Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) argues that what he calls 'crystallization' is a central feature of romantic love. One never, he thinks, loves a person as that person is. Instead, one loves an idealized fantasy of perfection that obscures the person from view, in something like the way that salt crystals growing on twigs in the Salzburg salt mines obscure the twigs from view. Velleman has produced an account that...ends up as Kantian crystallization, that is, treating empirical persons as the occasions for fantasies of Kantian practical rationality...."

Tired of Kantian fantasies about love? On a different note, here's what the scientists are saying.

A Real Human Being (i.e., not a conservative pundit or chicken hawk) responds to the Senate Report on Iraq "Intelligence"

Here is Amy Bright "an angry mom":

"I am so angry right now I thought I'd unload on you, since I know someone there has to be feeling the same thing. When that Senate 'intelligence' report came out yesterday, 7/9/04, saying that the war in Iraq was based on a big mistake and that if congressmen knew then what they know now, they would never have voted for use of force, it made me cry. How can we sit by and let this happen without a lot of OUTRAGE being voiced? Families of soldiers who have died and been injured must SHOUT their OUTRAGE NOW.

"Most of the world knew that there was not sufficient foundation for the US invasion of Iraq, yet all but a very few of our Congressman believed the b

More on Groseclose & Milyo and "liberal bias" in the media

Here's another wipe-out of these two "liberal bias" experts by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg.

The Coming Military Draft, Part 72

Details here:

"Army re-enlistments have dropped suddenly and dramatically at Fort Carson and several other posts where combat units have recently returned from Iraq.

"The surprising decline within the past 2 1/2 months has jolted recruiters and military analysts and provoked questions about the war's effect on the Army's recruiting ability.

"Since Fort Carson units began coming home in April, post recruiters have met only 57 percent of their quota for re-enlisting first-term soldiers for a second hitch, according to an Army report.

"More disturbing, recruiters say, is they're re-enlisting only 46 percent of the quota for 'mid-career' noncommissioned officers. These are the young sergeants with four to 10 years of experience who are the backbone of the Army - its skilled soldiers, mentors and future senior NCOs."

Will the US Have an Election in November?

Maybe not, according to this article :

"A senior House Democratic lawmaker was skeptical on Sunday of a Bush administration idea to obtain the authority to delay the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda.

"U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday."

More commentary here.

(Thanks to Bill Edmundson [Law & Phil, Georgia State] for the pointers.)

UPDATE: I'm glad to see one important, conservative site has come out against this crazy proposal.

Swedish Anyone?

So what does this say?

Demokraterna håller konvent 26-29 juli. Det kommer bloggas.

Jo, förresten, när jag ändå är inne på amerikansk politik: via Erik hittar jag en blogg skriven av filosofen Brian Leiter. Mitt i allt prat om vilka Platonexperter som flyttat till vilka universitet och vilka institutioner som rekryterat Kantspecialister och metafysiker, dyker det upp angrepp på republikanerna. Republican National Committee är "enemies of humanity", "goons", den nuvarande administrationen är "the current criminals in Washington". Pang på, bara.

Your Tax Dollars at Work...

...stamping out the terrorist threat via the mindless harassment of harmless individuals.

John Edwards: "Lackey of Big Children"

From the always funny Fafblog, the case against Edwards:

"He is a trial lawyer! As a trial lawyer Edwards repeatedly stole money from poor corporations to give to greedy children crippled by their products! Do we really need a vice president who is a lackey of Big Children?"

Was Yale Law School the "Greatest Law School of the 20th Century"?

According to its new Dean, Harold Koh, it was. Discuss. No anonymous posts.

The Weirdest Post by an Intelligent Person in the History of the Blogosphere...

...is here, courtesy of my former colleague Tom Smith, a distinguished corporate law scholar at San Diego. First, he quotes neocon columnist Krauthammer observing that,

"This is the first time in history that the knowledge of how to make society-destroying weapons has been democratized. Today small radical groups allied with small radical states can do the kind of damage to the world that in the past only a great, strategically located and industrialized power such as Germany or Japan could do."

Put aside the fact that the rest of the piece is another unhinged polemic against Hans Blix, Krauthammer's point in this one paragraph is straightforward, and the question is what are we doing to prevent these horrific weapons from being used by "small radical groups" here or elsewhere.

Let's not exaggerate what's at issue here, though: it's not like you can go on E-Bay and get your suitcase nuclear bomb (let alone 12 of them, as Krauthammer fantasizes); in fact, lots of countries that would like to have nuclear bombs can't manage to get them together. But, in principle , it can be done, and so steps should be taken to prevent it. They might include: (1) increased scrutiny of ports and borders, (2) increased control and safeguarding of existing nuclear stockpiles and materials, and (3) ending or severely reducing the production of fissible materials.

None of these points, however, are in evidence in Tom Smith's reaction to the Krauthammer piece. He writes (I quote all of it, verbatim):

"It is puzzling that people credulous enough to believe or at least entertain the idea that Bush lied about WMDs in order to, what, make profits for oil companies or get advance bases for American empire, or whatever, find utterly unbelievable the idea that terrorists could get or have gotten their hands on WMDs either from Iraq or another terrorist sponsor state. Or, for that matter, in the deep black market. I think some on the left really want an American city to go up in flames, and to see the resulting fury of the American people, which could very well include martial law, mass deportations, and the like, because it would confirm their paranoid fantasies about American society. These people will disappear as fast as the pro-fascists did after Pearl Harbor if this happens, but by then the damage will have been done.

"The idiots on the left have no idea what they are playing at. There is no Soviet Union to restrain the US anymore. In WWII, the US firebombed cities in Japan and Europe, nuked two cities in Japan, and mobilized itself to a degree unprecedented in world history. Now, the US is far more powerful than it was then, and in many ways far more democratic and responsive to popular whim. A catastrophic attack on US soil would create the will and the means to wreak havoc on our enemies and near-enemies on a scale never seen before. It might give US leftists some weird feeling of justification to see us wipe North Korea and Iran off the map (suppose the nuke that destroys Houston was manufactured in North Korea and passed through Iran -- we can find out these things), but there are a lot of Koreans and Iranians who deserve better. But those arguments will fall on deaf ears in the aftermath of a big enough attack."

What?

If anyone has any idea what Tom is talking about, please let me and him know.

I hereby call on Tom to immediately return to mocking the Yale Law School and the Supreme Court!

UPDATE: Tom Smith speaks.

Philosopher Demopoulos from Western Ontario to UC Irvine

William Demopoulos (philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of science and physics, history of analytic philosophy) at the University of Western Ontario has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, to start in January 2005. This will solidify Irvine's status as one of the handful of leading centers in these areas in North America.

What if there is another catastrophic terrorist attack in the US?

What will be the political consequences? The political consequences of the first attack were pretty bad: (1) detentions, many secret, of thousands of people, most wrongfully detained, (2) claims of executive power (e.g., to detain U.S. citizens without access to the courts) that would have been unthinkable in the year 2000, (3) significant expansion of secret police powers, (4) two wars--one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq--which costs tens of thousands of lives, and neither of which, according to all objective intelligence reports, decreased the likelihood of further incidents, and (5) a reactionary domestic social and economic policy agenda that would have likely stalled without the smokescreen of fear and war.

What, then, if it happens again, on a 9/11 scale, or even a Madrid 3/11 scale?

We are told by Tom Ridge, the increasingly ridiculous Director of the Department of Homeland Hysteria, to expect more attacks before the elections. There are earlier reports that Al Quaeda has endorsed President Bush's reelection bid--don't expect the Republican National Committee to mention that--which means that, if there are actually attacks forthcoming, they are premised on the thought that greater fear on the part of the populace will swing them towards the incumbent. But would it? What if the attack is presented or perceived as retalitation for Iraq?

My guess is Al Quaeda is correct: another horrific incident will lead enough of the populace to prefer the current Leviathan over any challenger.

These are very scary times, indeed.

Jimmy Breslin Whoops the Fascists

New Yorkers, and ex-New Yorkers, will appreciate this column by long-time NYC journalist Jimmy Breslin on Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to make sure the Republicans don't know how New York City really feels about them when they arrive in August for the Republican Convention. (It comes complete with embarrassing NYC chauvinism!) An excerpt:

"[T]he Parks Department, as cheap fronts for Mayor Bloomberg, won't give any permits to the group running a demonstration against the Republican war during their convention at Madison Square Garden in August.

"They say that a large crowd would mash all the grass and maim the park.

"By a large number, 10-1, anything you want, and more, people of New York, the only city in the world worth living in and working in, don't want our young people getting killed in Iraq.

"As this is being typed, I wait for the press releases from the Defense Department telling the names, ages and hometowns of the seven Marines who were killed on Tuesday.

Help Sought from Readers Knowledgeable about London Schools

In fall 2005, I expect to be spending the term at University College London, and will need a school for my oldest boy, who will be turning 9 at that time and will have completed 3rd grade in the U.S. A private (i.e., non-state supported) school would be fine; academically rigorous (of course!); and a school with a contingent of foreign students might be nice, so that he's not the only "new" kid who isn't English in the class. We are likely, for a variety of reasons, to be fairly centrally located (perhaps Kensington), so something more-or-less central would be an extra plus.

If you have any advice, I'd be grateful: bleiter at mail-dot-law-dot-utexas-dot-edu.

Many thanks.

The State of Nietzsche Studies

I recall once reading a paper in which the author adduced as evidence of the vibrant state of Nietzsche studies the fact that there are now three specialist journals for Nietzsche articles--Nietzsche-Studien, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and New Nietzsche Studies--not to mention three English-speaking professional organizations: the North American Nietzsche Society (NANS), the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain (FNS), and the Nietzsche Society, another American-based Nietzsche group, aligned with the Society for Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy.

My reaction to this evidence, by contrast, was the opposite: the reason there is a proliferation of specialty Nietzsche forums is because the field is populated with mediocrities and incompetents, who can't perform in ordinary scholarly and philosophical contexts. Because the majority of those who write on Nietzsche don't do work that is publishable in legitimate journals that feature important work on Nietzsche--European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of the History of Ideas (not to mention Philosophical Review and Ethics!)--it is necessary to create "specialty" journals that have almost no scholarly or philosophical standards in which the vast amount of rubbish on Nietzsche can find a place. The field of Kant studies, a robust scholarly field, provides a striking point of contrast: most of the leading Kant scholars publish in the journals just mentioned, and the up-and-coming young scholars try to do the same. One does not find in Kant studies a proliferation of "specialized" Kant journals that publish nothing but (third-rate) work on Kant. There is, to be sure, one specialty journal, Kant-Studien, about which I know little, though I hope it is better than Nietzsche-Studien, which apart from publishing occasional, useful philological and intellectual history pieces, rarely features anything philosophically substantial. (One philosopher who submitted to them tells me his piece was rebuffed because it featured that "Anglo-Saxon" tendency to focus on "coherence" and "arguments." Imagine that!)

Harsh talk, I know, but readers of this blog are used to it. I am particularly incensed by what's become of the North American Nietzsche Society (NANS) under the direction of Richard Schacht of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schacht's 1983 book on Nietzsche (Routledge) did much to raise the level of Nietzsche studies in English-speaking philosophy--kudos and gratitude to Professor Schacht for that important contribution--but as the de facto dictator of NANS, he has, for mysterious reasons, pandered to mediocrities, putting them on committees, including their papers in NANS programs, and so on. Since I know that Schacht's view of this work is not much different from my own, I have found his posture peculiar: instead of using NANS to advance philosophically substantial Nietzsche studies, he has, in the service of "inclusiveness," legitimized weak work and promoted the careers of scholars who do not do work up to the high standards he has set.

What's worse is that the effort has been pointless. During the 1990s, New Nietzsche Studies was launched by "the Nietzsche Society," the other group for American Nietzsche "scholars" [sic] affiliated with SPEP, the primary organization for those interested in European philosophy who aren't very good at philosophy. (Anyone with doubts on this score should take a look at, e.g., Babette Babich's Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, a book apparently written on the premise that it is not necessary to have any knowledge of philosophy of science to nonetheless explain Nietzsche's. Babich is a key figure in the Nietzsche Society and its journal New Nietzsche Studies; she was also the target of Samuel Wheeler's recent, amusing remarks in a NDPR book review: "Babette Babich’s [essay] consists largely of assertions about analytic philosophy and citations of other people’s assertions. A reader somewhat familiar with both traditions will be puzzled as to why some of these assertions are taken to be true.")

Don't misunderstand the point of this little polemic: obviously a professional organization must represent both the very best and the solid laborers in the field. The problem with NANS is that it has also chosen to "include"--indeed, gone out of its way to include--"scholars" who, if they worked on Kant or Descartes or Plato, wouldn't be able to get on a professional program at a scholarly meeting.

The straw that broke this camel's back, however, was the latest announcement from "on high" that Jim Conant of the University of Chicago is to be the new head of the Program Committee. (It appears that Professor Schacht makes these decisions unilaterally.) Conant replaced Alan Schrift, who at least had written a lot on Nietzsche. Conant, by contrast, has published only one substantial paper on Nietzsche since beginning his teaching career 15 years ago--in a book edited by none other than Dick Schacht! The paper, a reading of Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator, was part of Conant's doctoral thesis, so it's one he's been working on for more than 15 years. Yet this one paper is, itself, a problematic piece of work. As I wrote in my review of the Schacht collection in Mind:

Changes in U.S. Law Faculty Composition 2000-2005

UPDATED July 8, 2004, with new information; thanks to all for feedback. Various revisions below. I'm sure reasonable and similarly informed readers would likely differ by +1 or -1 on the final scores, below.

============

The market for the "top" legal scholars is intense, and there is much coming and going. We looked at the top 18 law schools, in terms of faculty quality, to see how they fared between the 2000-01 academic year and the 2004-05 academic year to see who came out ahead and who lost ground. Quality is more important than quantity: did schools, e.g., lose their very best people; did schools add faculty who are at the very top of their roster in terms of quality, or did they merely add "filler"? The judgments are necessarily subjective, but well-informed. The detailed information appears below for those who want to assess the changes for themselves.

In summary form, the schools most improved among the top 18 over the last five years are:

Columbia University
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Texas, Austin
Vanderbilt University
Yale University

The schools who lost the most ground are:

Cornell University
Northwestern University
University of Chicago
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Schools that gained some ground during this five-year period are: Duke University; Harvard University; University of Pennsylvania.

Schools that lost some ground during this five-year period are: University of California, Berkeley.

Schools that "broke even" (as it were) in terms of gains and losses are: Georgetown University; New York University; Stanford University; University of Southern California; University of Virginia.

The details appear below:

International lawyer Goldsmith from UVA to Harvard

Jack L. Goldsmith III (international law, foreign affairs law), who recently moved from the University of Chicago Law School back to the University of Virginia School of Law, has now accepted an offer from Harvard Law School. Harvard's international and comparative offerings took a hit when two major faculty departed in the last few years: Anne-Marie Slaughter became Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and Joseph Weiler went to NYU. In light of this important development, I'll be reposting and revising the earlier item on changes in law faculty composition.

In Memoriam

Peter Birks (1941-2004)

Professor Birks was the Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University and a Fellow of All Souls College. He was by common estimation one of the two or three most distinguished legal scholars in Britain. We were fortunate to have him as a Visiting Professor at Texas several years ago. Despite his unfortunate, but very English, view that "legal realism is immoral," one could have nothing but admiration for his erudition, his clarity of mind, and his analytical acuity. A great loss to legal scholarship throughout the English-speaking world.

Links to memorials will be posted when they are available.

UPDATE: A brief notice, with more to follow, is at the Oxford Law site.

What is legal realism?

ORIGINALLY POSTED NOVEMBER 13, 2003

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UPDATE: I'm moving this post (from 9/17/03) to the top, given the latest brouhaha about the judicial confirmation process. The Democrats have approved 168 of Bush's 172 nominees; that's to their lasting shame. An honest, i.e. legal realist, appreciation of what appellate courts actually do, suggests that they ought to be using the filibuster a lot more.

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So I am asked by a reader of the preceding post. I don't find blogs work too well as scholarly fora, so I refer interested readers to my essay in the forthcoming Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law on "American Legal Realism" for a scholarly answer. (There is a "Scandinavian" branch of "legal realism" which is a very remote cousin of the American branch--indeed, the label "legal realism" is probably more misleading, than illuminating, when applied to both--for reasons I'll explain when I finally finish the essay on both kinds for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

A non-scholarly, and more superficial, gloss on "legal realism" will have to suffice for purposes here. Those who are realists about law, and more particularly, courts, think that the kinds of "legal reasons"--appeals to doctrine, precedent, statutory text, and the reasoning by analogy, by which courts bring the doctrine etc. in to contact with the facts of a case--that judges offer in their opinions largely obscure the actual grounds of decision. Legal reasons don't really explain the decisions; legal reasons are often indeterminate, and equally good legal arguments can be given for very different outcomes. What really explains the decision is the judge's commitment to non-legal norms (moral, political, economic).

My colleague Lucas A. (Scot) Powe, Jr. has a pithy way of expressing the idea. He likes to say: "Anyone teaching constitutional law who discusses only the doctrine is guilty of educational malpractice." (For a detailed case in support of this view, see his book on The Warren Court and American Politics [Harvard University Press, 2000].) Why malpractice? Because such a teacher will not equip his or her students to advise clients intelligently about constitutional law issues, since what courts do with these issues, on the realist view, has far more to do with extra-legal political and related considerations than with doctrine.

Suitably qualified (for the full scale of the qualifications, see my Blackwell essay), I find it hard to fathom that anyone disputes the truth of legal realism (lawyers don't, it's strictly some academics). It should hardly be surprising that legal realism is the correct descriptive account of appellate decision-making, if only for the simple reason that the cases selected for appellate review are disproportionately the ones where the legal reasons are indeterminate, and so the necessity for political and moral judgment is inescapable. (Yes, yes, I realize that Dworkin and his 3 [or is it 4?] followers have a theory according to which these judgments are themselves legal, but the theory is so bad, I'm discounting it here, sans argument.)

It's hard not to feel that our public culture, and our public discourse about law, would be a lot healthier if the truth of legal realism were more widely acknowledged. Consider the battle over federal court nominations: if we're realists, then we can say plainly that these are battles over life-time appointments of government agents who will be called on to make moral and political judgments, by which the force of the state will be brought to bear against the parties so judged. Ergo, it is perfectly reasonable, indeed, appropriate, for Senators to oppose nominations on moral and political grounds. The surprising thing, then, about the defeat of the Estrada nomination is not that he was defeated, but that so many others were given a free pass. These aren't battles over appointing the best "legal technicians"; these are battles over the appointment of mini-legislators. If the President doesn't nominate reasonably bipartisan legislators to the federal appeals courts, a Senate with a differing political cast of mind shouldn't approve any of them. Isn't it that simple? Well, it is if you're a legal realist.

UPDATE: Stuart Buck has "responded" in a fashion to this posting, but without it appears reading the linked essay and so without noting any of the "suitable qualifications." In particular, it is not the thesis of legal realism that "personal ideology" (as Mr. Buck puts it) determines the decision; it is the thesis that non-legal norms determine the decisions. This is obviously compatible with lots of unanimous decisions.
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Related posts on legal realism are here and here.

Catholic Jurisprudent Brennan from ASU to Villanova

Patrick Brennan, a legal philosopher at Arizona State University well-known for his application of the Catholic philosophical tradition (principally Maritain and Lonergan) to legal theory, has accepted a Chair in the law school at Villanova University.

The Distribution of Philosophical Talent

I spend a lot of time noting the comings and goings of philosophers at programs that grant graduate degrees; this information is useful to prospective students, and thus of value to those who advise prospective graduate students as well.

But it also gives, admittedly, a misleading impression about the distribution of philosophical talent.

Here's a simple fact: the job market for philosophers is so competitive, and so many very able people enter the field, that these days you could staff a damn good PhD program with philosophers employed at non-research universities.

This isn't to say that those at the very good PhD programs aren't, by and large, very good philosophers. It's to say that they are also, more often than not, very well-connected, well-pedigreed philosophers. Talent and ability is a threshold requirement for being hired at the best departments; but that is all it is.

Look at Mark Heller, by all accounts a very talented metaphysician, who was recently hired away from Southern Methodist University to Syracuse University, from which he earned his Ph.D. Might he have been at a PhD program for the last twenty years if his Ph.D. had been from Princeton instead of Syracuse (itself a rather good program, but not Princeton)? Perhaps.

Some of the distribution of philosophical talent has to do with field. Take Nietzsche studies, and Continental philosophy, generally: this is a non-preferred field at many of the top programs, i.e., it is the kind of field (like medieval philosophy, or early modern, or mathematical logic, or medieval philosophy, or Kant studies) in which very good departments will often hire only one person, if that.

That would explain why, uncontroversially, the single most important senior scholar in English-speaking Nietzsche studies, Maudemarie Clark, teaches at Colgate University, a fine liberal arts college in upstate New York. If she worked on Plato or Kant, and her work were of comparable importance, she'd be at a research university, indeed probably a top department.

The over-supply of philosophical talent relative to the number of positions at research universities also explains why we see research universities periodically snatching up faculty from places like Davidson and Reed (not to mention SMU), though it still doesn't happen as often as it justifiably could.

More than a century ago, Max Weber observed that he knew of no career in which "luck" played a bigger role than the academic one. That, I fear, is still true, though the PGR has helped reduce the "chance" element a bit. But a focus on graduate faculties also gives, as noted, a somewhat distorted picture of the distribution of philosophical talent.

New Fellows of the British Academy

The full list of the newly elected Fellows is here.

Philosophers elected are R.A. Duff (Stirling), Peter Simons (Leeds), and, as a Corresponding Fellow, Sidney Shoemaker, now emeritus at Cornell. In addition, two scholars well-known to philosophers were also elected: Nicholas Jardine, in the History and Philosophy of Science program at Cambridge, and, as a Corresponding Fellow, Bob Goodin at the Australian National University.

Interesting here is the fact that neither of the two philosophers elected from Britain is at Oxbridge or any of the London colleges: quite unusual, but just.