This will be of no interest to regular readers. This just records in one place certain facts about events in 2014, that I've written about previously.
1. In February 2014, I discovered that Noelle McAfee, who had long nursed a personal and professional grudge against me, was vandalizing the Wikipedia entry about me under a pseudonym. This came on the heels of years of falsehoods and smears posted by her on social media, so I sent her several strongly worded e-mails about the latest misconduct, threatening her with legal recourse if she didn't finally stop defaming me. (Wikipedia editors intervened and stopped her mischief there.)
2. On July 1, 2014 I posted a sharp critique of some utterly misleading rankings of job placement produced by Prof. Carolyn Jennings, a tenure-stream faculty member at UC Merced. Jennings quickly started revising her misleading data presentation after I called her out. (You can get a sense of how misleading her initial rankings were in the first update here; see also this.)
3. On July 2, 2014 other blogs began attacking me for criticizing Jennings. One blogger who joined the criticism, pointied me to the response by Prof. Carrie Jenkins of British Columbia; this blogger characterized Carrie Jenkins' attack, obviously correctly, as “reacting to...Brian Leiter’s...attack on Jennings’s analysis.” (One of Jenkins's friends later confirmed what was obvious to everyone at the time, namely, that Jenkins was targeting me with her remarks.) Jenkins deemed my (accurate) blog post "unprofessional and unethical," and declared that, in consequence, she was no longer going to treat me as a "normal or representative member[] of" the profession. I had had some unpleasant exchanges with Jenkins on social media previously, but this latest sanctimonious display was the final straw: I sent Jenkins a derisive e-mail, wondering what exactly she was going to do to me. (Some naïfs thought my mocking e-mail was a legal threat--here's what actual legal threats look like).
4. Throughout 2014, I had been at repeated loggerheads with feminist philosopher and activist Sally Haslanger over a variety of issues. After I hosted a discussion of the Colorado Site Visit report in February (after the Feminist Philosophers blog shut one down), Haslanger went sleuthing after the identity of one "Jane Brownstein," whose comments were highly critical of the report (it turned out to be a pseudonym, but I was struck by how much Haslanger wanted to know who was saying these verboten things). In March, I wrote at length about the "cyber-mob" mentality sweeping the philosophy profession and the hysteria over the Ludlow case. (The Kipnis book has now vindicated many of those concerns.) In August, I took issue with Haslanger's comments about the new Journal of the American Philosophical Association. Also in August, I criticized comments by Haslanger's friend Hilde Lindemann, who had been involved in the Colorado Site Visit fiasco. Throughout 2014, I was an increasingly lonely (but very loud) voice raising concerns about fair process in cases involving alleged sexual misconduct at universities. As a famous feminist philosopher told me subsequently, Haslanger is, "Smug, self-righteous, moralistic without any self-critical capacity morally." I was about to find out how true that diagnosis was.
5. In September 2014, about a week before the 2014 PGR surveys were to begin (I had announced that on the blog), Sally Haslanger, and another longtime hater of the philosophy rankings, David Velleman, released portions of my July e-mail to Jenkins and my February e-mails to McAfee. Haslanger and Velleman never asked about any of the context, Velleman having decided that it's impermissible to send irate e-mails in private, and Haslanger having her own motives (see #4).
6. Haslanger coordinated the release of the e-mails with a petition to "boycott" the PGR organized by Carrie Jenkins and her colleague Alan Richardson at British Columbia (another longtime hater of the PGR going back to 2002), based on the false claim that my derisive e-mail to Jenkins responding to her threat had caused serious harm to her "health" and her ability to contribute to the profession. Among the evidence that it was false: (1) Jenkins gave multiple professional talks in the months following the allegedly 'traumatizing" e-mail; (2) when my lawyer challenged Jenkins about the defamatory falsehoods, her lawyer did not defend them as "substantially true" but only as lawful expression (i.e., even if not true), a telling admission since, as her own lawyer has written, "'[A] failed plea of truth may aggravate the plaintiff's damages or underpin an award of exemplary damages"; (3) half of Jenkins's roughly 20 colleagues declined to sign the petition (three-quarters did sign initially due to bullying by Jenkins and Richardson, but once the two bullies were forced to back off, five removed their names). There's a more detailed account, including some speculation as to why Jenkins failed to elicit more support from her colleagues ("the drama queen" as one called her), of those events here.
7. There were roughly 550 evaluators nominated for the 2014 philosophy rankings; of these about 55 signed the "boycott" statement (90% of the 600 signatories [many not even regular faculty] were boycotting an event to which they were not even invited--most were solicited by Richard Heck, who last tried to torpedo the philosophy rankings in 2001 with another petition; Heck misrepresented the exchange with Jenkins [see #3] in order to inflame opposition to me). Having already invested three years in preparing for the 2014 PGR, I was not about to have it derailed by this nonsense. I declined to step down as editor; I asked Berit Brogaard to join me as co-editor of the 2014 PGR; and made a public commitment to appoint another co-editor to work with Brogaard thereafter and to continue to support their efforts on my blog. (My commitment, being elicited by coercion, has no legal force, obviously, but since I had no intention anyway of producing another PGR, and did not want my existing work on the 2014 edition to go to waste, it was a win-win solution.)
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