The following comment was submitted anonymously to the thread about Liz Harman's move to a tenure-track post at Princeton:
Would it be totally unreasonable to take Ms. Harman as a case in point for liberal bias in academe?
If you take a look at one of her papers,
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1165/Potentiality.pdf
she argues that embryos have a lower moral status than cats. The conclusions are that contraception and early abortion are OK because embryos have no moral status.
Now without judging the merits of the arguments, is it plausible to think that a philosopher with the contrary argument, that embryos do have a moral status superior to cats, would get tenure at Princeton? Which is of course a private institution and is free to hire whoever they like. I just raise this as interesting and rather clear-cut instance of a possible liberal bias at work.
I was tempted just to delete it, since it was both off-topic and betrayed considerable ignorance about philosophy (not to mention "liberalism"!), but then it occurred to me that it might be useful to air this confusion publically, so that philosophers might take the opportunity to educate at least a small part of the public about our discipline. I am pressed for time today, so may not weigh in for a day or two. Comments are open; they may take awhile to appear, so please be patient and only post once. Non-anonymous comments will stand a much better chance of seeing the light of day.
