A graduate student at the University of Oregon wrote to me (and two faculty members there subsequently confirmed) that:
1. Although Oregon is "Strongly Recommended" in the so-called "Pluralist [sic] Guide" for its "Climate for Women";
2. There is a faculty member suspected of being a serial sexual harasser, and it was graduate students who had to raise a stink about it, due to departmental and administrative lethargy on the matter; and
3. A feminist philosopher on the faculty urged quiet about this incident lest it cost the department an award for being "women-friendly."
Bonnie Mann, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, now enters the fray to confirm all the particulars (including that she encouraged silence), though for reasons perhaps known only to her, she thought this was a rejoinder, and showed, for example, that I had "defamed" Linda Alcoff. (That accusation is itself defamatory, but we won't get hung up on legal details here!) Jamie Dreier (Brown) summed up (in comments at the FP blog) Professor Mann's curious "reply" as follows:
You think your department belongs on the list of philosophy departments that are Strongly Recommended for women, even if there is a man on your faculty who regularly harasses women students and has sexually assaulted a woman student during office hours, because you cannot imagine that this doesn’t happen in all philosophy departments.
That's basically her argument, with one addition: they also teach lots of feminist philosophy at Oregon, so that's why it's also a women-friendly department, sexual harassment notwithstanding. And then there's her underlying epistemic principle (here I quote Professor Mann): "The point is that feminists are competent to make these judgments [about which departments are women-friendly], and to make recommendations to students based on them, no matter how uncomfortable this claiming of epistemological authority is for those who are used to having it all to themselves."
I've already heard from some feminist philosophers disturbed by this display, and I am inclined to agree that public statements like this disserve both feminist philosophy and the situation for women in the profession. And perhaps we can remember that the primary objecton to the "Climate for Women" section of the so-called "Pluralist [sic] Guide" is that it disserves female students (recall Professor Kukla's comments and the discussion that ensued).
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