UPDATED AS OF MAY 3, 11:45 AM CST.
A lot of philosophers have been speaking out about the appalling behavior of the Hypatia editors, and I've gotten permission to share a few responses already. If you would like to add your own, e-mail me.
Philosopher Debra Satz (Stanford) sums up what is at stake here quite crisply:
A note of appreciation for your post about the Hypatia debacle. I regret to see so many rush to intolerance when confronted with ideas that they disagree with. This kind of response to an argument, even if flawed, -- calling for a retraction, apologies from the associate editors, etc -- will only chill independent thought and limit the exchange of ideas. But these latter are precisely what we need now and also what I thought philosophy was about
Philosopher José Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M):
I am deeply concerned about what appears, on the evidence available, to be an egregious episode of collective persecution that breaches longstanding norms, not just of academic life but of civilized behavior. I have no comments on Dr. Tuvel’s article, but the correct response to an article with which one disagrees is surely to write a response pointing out perceived flaws in argumentation and evidence. The job of a journal's editorial board is to provide a forum where such disagreements can be voiced, explored, and hopefully resolved. It is not to serve as a weather-vane. Academic life does not, and cannot, proceed via petitions, public shaming, and unfounded accusations of unspecified harms. This sort of behavior does nothing but cast our profession into well-deserved disrepute and mockery.
Of course, petitions can be appropriate for protesting, e.g., unprofessional conduct by editors, but they have no place in adjudicating published and peer-reviewed scholarship.
Philosopher Matthew Kotzen (UNC-Chapel Hill):
Just wanted to thank you for your post about the outrageous behavior of the editors of Hypatia. This madness is anathema to everything we do as scholars, and I can't tell you how grateful I am to have your prominent voice denouncing it.
From a PhD student in philosophy:
As a PhD student in philosophy, I wanted to thank you for taking a stand on your blog against this ridiculous thought-policing going on at Hypatia. The sheer number of "scholars" who signed that Open Letter to Hypatia was staggering, and therefore depressing; their apology was even more disappointing. It seems absurd to me where we've arrived in academic philosophy, where critical thought, reflection, and engagement are subsumed in importance to "hurting people's feelings." I think those of us, like you, who point out this absurdity are doing a genuine public service, and I wanted to express my appreciation that at least some people in the profession have the courage to point out when the new emperors are not wearing any clothes.
Philosopher Mylan Engel (Northern Illinois) has written up a very useful analysis of the article, which he gave me permission to share; here's an excerpt:
I just finished reading Rebecca Tuvel’s excellent article “In Defense of Transracialism” in which she argues [yes, ARGUES] that the same sorts of considerations that rightly support transgenderism apply with equal force to transracialism. Her argument runs as follows:
1. Generally, when a person genuinely and sincerely self-identifies as a member of a socially constructed category, we should recognize and respect that person’s self-identification.
Given 1, it follows that:
2. People who sincerely self-identify as a particular gender should have their self-identified gender be recognized, accepted, and respected (regardless of their chromosomal structure or the external or internal genitalia). [As Tuvel puts it: “Thankfully, there is growing recognition that justice for trans individuals means respecting their self-identification by granting them membership in their felt sex category of belonging.”
Likewise, given 1, it also follows that:
3. People who sincerely self-identify as belonging to a particular race should have their self-identified race be recognized, accepted, and respected (regardless of their ancestry or color of origin).The point Tuvel is making is this:
Just as gender identity has RIGHTLY shifted from an emphasis on one’s sexed biology toward an emphasis on gendered self-recognition, racial identity should shift away from ancestral ties or color of origin toward an emphasis on racial self-identification.
Tuvel concludes: “If some individuals genuinely feel like or identify as a member of a race other than the one assigned to them at birth—so strongly to the point of seeking a transition to the other race—we should accept their decision to change races.”
There are only two legitimate ways to criticize a philosophical argument: (a) show that the argument is invalid, or (b) show that the argument’s premises are false.
The people who have criticized Tuvel’s article and called for its retraction in an open letter to Hypatia have not objected to her argument. They have objected to the fact that she “deadnamed” Caitlyn Jenner, while committing several other grave sins.
Prof. Engel goes on to consider the various objections, which are so obviously feeble as to belie entirely the claim that there are any actual "scholarly" objections to this paper. The bit about "deadnaming" Jenner is remarkably absurd: the whole world knows that Caitlyn Jenner used to be Bruce Jenner, since Bruce made a public spectacle of becoming Caitlyn. Prof. Engel concludes:
The reason that two anonymous blind reviewers recommended publication of Tuvel’s paper is because it is a tightly written, well argued philosophical defense of a novel thesis that merits serious philosophical consideration. These are the publication standards that every reputable philosophy journal should employ. Hypatia was right to publish the article and profoundly wrong to suggest that its publication was a mistake. Shame on the Associate Editors of Hypatia for their cowardly capitulation to the bullying of an outspoken few (most of whom show no evidence of even having read the article to which they so vehemently object).
UPDATE: Philosopher David Wallace (Southern California) has a long set of remarks; an excerpt:
[T]he “open letter” is not simply a criticism of that article: it is a demand that Hypatia retract the article (and take various other actions going forward).
Hypatia is published by Wiley and so falls under Wiley’s policy on retraction, which reads, in relevant part: “On occasion, it is necessary to retract articles. This may be due to major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article, or in cases of ethical issues, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, etc.” Wiley also subscribes to the Code of Publishing Ethics (COPE), which give further guidance on dealing with direct and social-media reports of problems with papers, including a requirement to contact the author and get a response from them, and an instruction to separate complaints that “contain specific and detailed evidence” from those which do not.
At least on the basis of what’s in the public domain, there seems to be no case at all for retraction:
1) The “open letter” can’t plausibly be taken as providing the “specific and detailed evidence” noted in the COPE guidelines: the four numbered complaints are in total only 164 words and follow an explicit disclaimer by the letter’s author that “it is not the aim of this letter to provide an exhaustive list of problems that this article exhibits”. The very fact that the letter is open and signed by hundreds of people supports the idea that it’s intended to communicate to Hypatia *that many people think there are problems with the article* not *what the specific problems are and that they are serious enough to warrant retraction*. (Number of signatories can communicate strength of community feeling; it can’t plausibly add weight to an academic argument.)
2) If (1) is set aside and the open letter is interpreted as a list of problems meriting retraction, it seems pretty clear that it falls wildly short of Wiley’s retraction policy. There is no suggestion that there are any ethical problems with Professor Tuvel *in the sense meant by Wiley’s policy* : she does not fabricate data nor plagiarise; she conducts no formal research with subjects and so cannot have failed to get research permission; she has not published the article elsewhere. (Her alleged failure to “seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions” would fall ridiculously short of counting as an ethical failing in this sense, even if the open letter provided specifics.)
So retraction would have to rely on “major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article”....I’m not sure that *anything* could count as “major scientific error” in a philosophy article (except when that paper borrows the formal methods of other disciplines....). In any case, as can be seen from this thread itself the errors in Professor Tuvel’s article, if any, are a matter of academic dispute between members of the community and so fall far short of this standard.
3) The open letter itself urges retraction not primarily on the grounds of academic failings but on wider moral grounds. (“More importantly, these failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia.”) But there is absolutely nothing in Wiley’s retraction policy (or COPE’s guidelines on such policies) permitting retraction on those kinds of grounds.
In addition to this, Hypatia’s own response is odd, to say the least:
4) I don’t know for certain whether Hypatia followed the COPE guidelines and contacted Professor Tuvel, and received a response from her, before their public comment. But I think it’s most unlikely: the “open letter” appears to have been in circulation for only 48 hours or so, and Professor Tuvel’s own comments don’t give any indication that she has been in correspondence with the journal since then....
7) Most strikingly, the letter (insofar as it does speak for Hypatia) seems to tread a most uneasy middle way. A journal that has carried out a standard arms-length review process and on that basis published a paper has well-established responses available to subsequent criticism: it can defend its decision on grounds of academic freedom and due process, or it can carry out a proper investigation of whether there are academic or ethical grounds for retraction or correction, and then make that retraction or correction if indeed there are such grounds. The Associate Editors’ Board, in condemning publication (and themselves) ahead of any formal retraction investigation, seem to be on procedurally thin ice, and leave Professor Tuvel in a very awkward position: her paper remains published; there is a declaration, by some part of the journal team but possibly not the journal itself, that it should not have been published; in the absence of a formal process she doesn’t seem to have any appropriate scholarly recourse. In her position, I think I’d be talking to a lawyer.
STILL MORE: Philosopher Jimmy Lenman (Sheffield):
I am deeply vexed and shaken by the sheer nastiness of l'affaire Tuvel. I seriously begin to question if I really belong in this profession. I entered it naively thinking it was a place where everything could be challenged, everything questioned, a glorious field of free inquiry where intellectual integrity counted for everything, ideological conformity for nothing. Increasingly it looks instead like a place for the enforcement of pious orthodoxies where self-righteous bullies queue up to trash the reputation of anyone foolish enough to question bien pensant received opinion, not just powerful, tenured folk like me, but vulnerable early career folk like Tuvel. I am utterly horrified and disgusted. God knows, at my age, I don't have a plan B for earning a living. But I seriously begin to think I need to give the matter some thought.
Philosopher John Gardner (Senior Research Fellow, All Souls, Oxford):
I am totally with you in condemning the outrageous behaviour of the Hypatia editorial board members and their friends.
Dr. Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, librarian of the Robbins Library of Philosophy at Harvard:
I write to thank you for bringing attention to the frankly scandalous mistreatment Rebecca Tuvel has received at the hands of both the authors of the “Open Letter to Hypatia” and by the editors of that journal. Incidents like this can provoke crises of confidence in one’s choice of profession, so it has been encouraging to read on your website the expressions of support for Tuvel and outrage over the public rush to defame her.
Of course the very public action taken by the authors of the open letter has already had its predictable effect—news of l’affaire Tuvel has been embraced by right-wing critics of the academy and held up as yet another example of, in their caricatured view of it, the academy’s intolerance, captivity by extremist activists, and growing irrelevance. This is, of course, a caricature but its ubiquity and durability in some circles is facilitated by responses such as these. I predict, however, that the same people who have accused Tuvel’s article of perpetrating discursive harms will deny that their actions bear any blame for assisting in the academy’s growing disrepute among some members of the public. You may already be aware of the fact that the Wikipedia entry for the journal Hypatia now includes a section on the Tuvel controversy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia:_A_Journal_of_Feminist_Philosophy). I am sure this is not the kind of publicity the journal’s editors desired.
Philosopher Graham Oddie (Colorado):
No fewer than 520 academics signed on to an inaccurate, possibly defamatory, open letter to the journal Hypatia, publicly denouncing Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rebecca Tuvel. This is an attempt to silence a researcher with whom they disagree, through collective social media shaming. Professor Tuvel was denounced for publishing a peer reviewed article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, offering some interesting arguments with which those signatories profoundly disagree. Instead of publishing a careful and reasoned rebuttal of Tuvel's argument, the signatories are instead demanding that Hypatia unpublish the article. A majority of the Associate Editors of Hypatia almost immediately took up their pitchforks, denouncing Tuvel on the Hypatia Facebook page. It hardly needs to be pointed out (though regrettably it does) that this is an extraordinary and deeply disturbing development. Many, though thankfully not most, of the signatories call themselves philosophers. This is the sort of behavior one might rather expect from the apparatchiks of an extremely repressive regime. It is just this kind of cruel, committed irrationalism that has caused the Humanities to fall disastrously into disrepute. And it played its part, like Comey and the Russians, in the election of a self-confessed barbarian who would love to defund the Humanities, silencing Tuvel along with her detractors, and all the rest of us. ("The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”)
Leading torts expert and feminist legal theorist Anita Bernstein (Brooklyn):
Agree 100%, defamation by the Hypatia editors. This response to a serious peer-reviewed thesis sounds like a parody of a mob. Madness indeed. If you raise funds, I'll donate.
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