Noelle McAfee took her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1990s. I was one of the placement directors when she was first on the job market, and got a rather irate e-mail from her late in the process, since she felt I had not done enough to help her. She, in fact, got a tenure-track job at the University of Massachussetts, Lowell, and then, through the SPEP network, eventually landed a few years ago at Emory University, a SPEP bastion. Well before her move to Emory, McAfee joined the SPEP "Advocacy Committee," which had as its primary purpose counteracting the effect of the PGR that I edited, so her personal vendetta now turned into a professional one. In that role, McAfee spent years on social media posting lies and misinformation about the PGR and sometimes about me personally. After awhile, this grew tiresome, and past experience with SPEP miscreants (like John McCumber) had taught me that a firm response usually sufficed to pull them back from the defamatory brink, which it did with McAfee, at least under her own name. (Sally Haslanger and David Velleman, the two longtime PGR haters, who released my e-mails to McAfee on the web omitted all this history, of course--indeed, they never inquired about it since their aim was to harm me and the PGR, not inform.) But then it turned out that under the pseudonym "ChrisClaire," McAfee had not only written much of her own entry on Wikipedia, but had also taken to vandalizing the wikipedia page about me (the Wikipedia editors eventually put a stop to her mischief). A class act.
UPDATE: I came across the following remarkable exchange from a public Facebook page. It appears to have been a SPEPPie "circle jerk" (to use the technical term) complaining about me and the PGR, including the fact that I (correctly) called out Linda Alcoff's misconduct regarding the "Climate for Women" fiasco last year. Into the mix stepped SPEP member Catherine Kemp, a philosopher at Brooklyn College (and a former student of mine at Texas in the law school), who is married to Mitchell Aboulafia, whose efforts to address sexual harassment problems at Penn State led to his being ousted as Chair there. Professor Kemp wrote:
I believe that [Linda Alcoff's] refusal to back away from the climate-for-women section of the Pluralist Guide compromised her standing as an officer in a national organization of philosophers. The inclusion of Penn State (not to mention Oregon) and the presence of Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan as members of that faculty responsible for the *desirability* of the climate for women at Penn State was (and is) outrageous. Tuana and Sullivan have together done more to harm female graduate students and female junior faculty there than all the men on the faculty taken together, not least because Tuana and Sullivan protect (and protected) a serial harasser among the men. Linda was perfectly well aware of this situation before the Pluralist Guide was published, before she participated in getting SPEP to support it, and before BL laid a post on it....
When we overlook or pretend not to see that our own house is not in order on these important issues, our outreach is less credible, esp. when it is based in part on criticism that amounts to throwing stones in that glass house.
A strong statement, though I can not vouch for the accuracy of the allegations it contains. Professor Kemp tagged a few other SPEPPies in her post, including Noelle McAfee, who then weighed in as follows:
Noelle McAfee I was tagged to this post but I must say I am not willing to be any party to disparaging other feminist colleagues here. If that's going to go on, I'd just as soon not be tagged.
Solidarity is, apparently, more important than truth or justice, even justice for victims of sexual harassment.
NOELLE MCAFEE, aka, CHRIS CLAIRE UPDATE: Following McAfee's policy of not linking, I will comment briefly without linking to her non-response. McAfee doesn't deny any of my allegations (since they're all true, and as she notes the record of most of her lies and misinformation on the PGR is on her blog, except for the defamatory bits which she wisely removed), except one, namely, that "the Wikipedia editors eventually put a stop to her mischief.” In fact, after I e-mailed the Wikipedia help desk about the vandalism, she did stop vandalizing the entry, as a high level editor named Kevin Gorman assured me she would. Even better, McAfee now effectively admits to using the pseudonym "ChrisClaire" (not only to vandalize the entry about me, but to write most of the entry about herself): after I e-mailed her about her use of the pseudonym "ChrisClaire" to vandalize the wikipedia entry about me, McAfee writes that, "I contacted a high-level editor at Wikipedia [Gorman again] and asked for help." The "help" she got--besides being told to stop the vandalism and stop writing her own entry--was the information that Wikipedia actually will pay to defend editors who are sued for defamation--not an issue in this instance, but a remarkable policy nonetheless which readers should keep in mind the next time Wikipedia asks for donations.
4/2/16 UPDATE: Remarkably, "Lyin' Noelle" (to coin a name) is still pretending she's not ChrisClaire88, who is responsible for one third of all the 40 or so edits on her own entry on Wikipedia. (It's true her friend Kevin Gorman [recently ousted, it appears, from his senior editorial role at Wikipedia due to misconduct] wrote other parts of the entry, but I think Lyin' Noelle left out the part about the friendship.) Having no better retort, Lyin' Noelle now resorts to the defense you did it too! My entry on Wikipedia has been edited some 1000 times, over the last decade or so, by God knows who. There was so much malicious editing by miscreants like Noelle, that the entry has been "locked" for years (meaning, I think, that unless you have a registered account, as ChrisClaire88 does, your edits have to be pre-approved, or something like that). Lyin' Noelle, with her "ChrisClaire88" hat on, was one of those malicious editors, and I definitely reversed her edits, twice, when I learned of them--and I notified Wikipedia at the time that I had done so, and then they made her stop. (Once or twice years ago, I tried correcting straight up factual errors in my entry, to no avail, so gave up. So 4 edits out of 1,000, that's me!) When I discovered vandalism, I would occasionally write to Wikipedia about it, and the editors would generally fix things, and that's also why they eventually locked the entry. (Wikipedia is notorious for being the first place anyone with a grievance turns to exact revenge.) But Lyin' Noelle, ie., ChrisClaire88, knows all this.
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