Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New Books in May

Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month:

Human Rights and the Care of the Self by Alexandre Lefebvre (Duke University Press, 2018).

The History of Animals:  A Philosophy by Oxana Timofeeva (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness edited by Rocco J. Gennaro (2018).

Plato as Critical Theorist by Jonny Thakkar (Harvard University Press, 2018).

The Value and Limits of Academic Speech:  Philosophical, Political, and Legal Perspectives edited by Donald Alexander Downs & Chris W. Suprenant (Routledge, 2018).

Professor Stock replies to Professor Bettcher

Kathleen Stock (Sussex) has written a reply to the piece by Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State/Los Angeles) that we noted yesterday.  I find it hard to believe that anyone not already in an epistemic bubble could read both pieces, and come away finding Professor Bettcher more persuasive.  An excerpt from Professor Stock's reply below the fold:

Blast from the past: the sociology of English academia in the 1980s and 1990s, and Philosophy academia today

Back in 2016.

Yale-NUS's Malcolm Keating interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Petition against forcible transfer of Palestinians

Chaims Gans (Tel-Aviv) has called my attention to a petition prompted by a recent decision by the Israeli Supreme Court, which has given a green light to forcible transfer of Palestinian residents of the West Bank.  Here is the petition:  Download Legal petition - Forcible transfer is a war crime

The petition organizers seek senior academics as signatories:  if you are willing to sign, e-mail (right away) [email protected] with your name, title, and institutional affiliation.

Four philosophers elected to the American Philosophical Society

They are:  Philip Kitcher (Columbia), Avishai Margalit (emeritus, Hebrew U), Susan Neiman (Einstein Forum), and T.M. Scanlon (emeritus, Harvard).  Four philosophers is an unusually large number in a single year for APS.

All commencement speeches should be this good

Funny, wickedly direct, even insightful at places; this is comedian Tim Minchin's address to graduates at the University of Western Australia in 2013 (it's the first 11 minutes, the remainder is his getting an honorary degree):

 

 

The toxic on-line debate about trans women (UPDATED)

Here's a remarkable back and forth--remarkable for the hate, the lack of evidence, the irrationality of the exchange.  I'm sorry I found it, but having now waded into some of this literature and on-line debates, I realize that contributions like those by Professors Stock, Coleman, and Jensen are the exception, not the norm.  Another reason for more philosophers to get involved in discussing these issues.

UPDATE:  Remarkably, since yesterday, the first piece linked above has been removed as "hate speech" (!), although the response is no less hateful, but it remains.  Without any sense of irony, the censors declare that "silencing" women's voices is wrong.  That editorial decision is itself revealing about the state of the on-line discussion of these issues.  If anyone finds another copy of the original piece please send it along.  (Here's another piece by the same author, that so far seems to have survived the hand of the censors.)  (UPDATE:   the article came back up, then disappeared again, as did the ironic statement by the censors.  Here's a cached version.  Thanks to several readers who sent this along.)

ANOTHER:  Over at the "safe space" philosophy-related blog, there's now a (non-toxic) response to Professor Stock from philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State/Los Angeles), who is also author of the SEP essay on the general subject.  The response to Stock, alas, is not very substantive, substituting literature references (not all actually relevant, as I've looked at some of them) and tangential musings for extended, direct engagement (there is some substantive engagement, happily). 

"Redneck Revolt"

American gun culture meets radical politics. 

UPDATE:  A bit more about Redneck Revolt from philosopher James Klagge (Virginia Tech) in a review of a book about antifa.

U of Southern California President will resign

IHE has details.  The cover up for the sexually abusive gynecologist (i.e., not reporting him to state medical authorities) really was beyond belief--there's going to be a lot of legal settlements for the next President to sign off on, and rightly so.

Videos from the June 2017 memorial for Derek Parfit...

...are now available here.

Gender, Sex, Biology and Sports

This is a quite interesting and sensible commentary on the issue from legal scholar Dorianne Coleman (Duke); I'll post a somewhat lengthy excerpt, but do read the whole thing (and you can also look at a longer scholarly article by Professor Coleman on this topic):

Last week, track and field’s world governing body limited entry into women’s events to athletes who have testosterone levels that are capable of being produced solely by ovaries.

These rules apply across the board to athletes however they presented at birth. Advocates for intersex and transgender athletes have vigorously attacked the International Association of Athletics Federations’ new rules, but they are an extraordinary compromise for women’s sports, including for traditional feminist proponents of equal access to sports for girls and women, guaranteed in the civil rights legislation known as Title IX.

Understanding the rules and why they make sense is hard. They are based in biology people don’t know or don’t like to talk about and, let’s be honest, at least in some circles, they’re politically incorrect. They force us to talk about women’s bodies when it is increasingly taboo to do so, and they run counter to the movement that seeks to include transgender and intersex people in social institutions based on their gender identity rather than their biology.

These are important progressive developments, but their effects on valuable institutions like women’s sport are real and they need to be understood before positions harden on bad information. Pretending that the female body doesn’t exist or that we can’t define the boundaries between men’s and women’s bodies is a bad idea for many reasons. Replacing traditional sex classifications with classifications based on gender identity certainly has steep costs in contexts like competitive sport, where the likelihood of success is precisely about sex-specific biology.... 

Your neoliberal future...

...right here now in Britain.  I was not aware of the severity of these cuts--as one person in the linked article observes, Thatcher could only have "dreamed" of such cuts.

The Kuhn archives at MIT

Philosopher of science Brad Wray (Aarhus) comments.

L. Mollica did not like Professor Stock's essay...

...or my mentioning it.  (L. Mollica is identified at the site as a trans woman.)  The intellectual level of their response speaks for itself. 

(And don't worry, L. Mollica, calling someone a "bully," is not defamatory as I've explained before:   " in our era of cyber-cry-babies, the label 'bullying' is so widely abused (for reasons usefully elucidated here) that it increasingly looks like an opinion...not a shorthand for a factual statement about conduct." In this case, it's not even an opinion, but more like a non-cognitive term expressing something like, "Brian Leiter says things I don't like, and does it all the time, and he doesn't understand he's not supposed to say those things and I'm so mad about it" etc..)

Today in Trumpian depravity: immigrant children taken from their parents at the border

I guess the idea is to create a disincentive for illegal immigration.  But why just take the children?  Why not shoot at least one in front of the parents and other parents?  Swiftian satire will soon be unable to keep up with Trump.  In any case the border patrol officers involved in this should, as a matter of conscience, refuse to comply with these orders.  Full stop.  If you've got the stomach for it, here's a television account.

UC Riverside's Georgia Warnke interviewed...

...at 3AM.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Toad, "Stay," 1971

The Swiss "Bad Company" one might say, a hard rock outfit, that never got much recognition outside the homeland, which is a shame.  Here's a number from their debut album that gives a good feel for the band:

 

Deciding between graduate school in philosophy and law school

A recent philosophy graduate gave me permission to share his questions, which might be of interest to others:

I am currently deciding between graduate school in philosophy (I graduated in honors philosophy from [school name omitted] in 2015) and law school. In the long run I am considering whether to pursue philosophical or legal academia. I have benefitted greatly from your advice to prospective philosophy graduate students and prospective law school students with philosophical interests on Leiter Reports. Since I have a couple of questions that as far as I can see have not been directly discussed in a Leiter Report blog post I thought I would email them to you in case you have the time to answer them.

1. My primary area of philosophical interest is political philosophy. In the spirit of your post on the difference between the study of political philosophy in political science and philosophy departments, I am wondering about the difference between working in political philosophy in a law school or in a philosophy department. What would you say are the most significant differences that someone considering both options should take into account?

2. a. If one were to plan on obtaining a philosophy PhD and a JD separately in order to pursue legal academia, is there a significant difference academically in doing one of them first? For instance, would there be a significant impact on one's study of the subjects themselves? on job market chances?

b. If there is, is one course of study preferable? In other words, is it more beneficial to come to the study of law with significant training in relevant philosophical areas (political, moral, epistemology), or to come to the study of philosophy with philosophical questions arising from one’s study of law?

Here are my answers:

1.  At many good law schools (see this section of the PGR), there are serious opportunities to study political philosophy, but even at the best law schools, given that most of your studies will not be philosophy-related, you can't get adequate training to do professional work.  At best, you can acquire competence with themes, authors, and arguments, but you won't emerge as a political philosopher with a JD only.

2a.  I've known students who have done it in both directions, and had good success at it.  PhD programs seem, in recent years, to be keen to admit those with a good JD record, but those who come to the JD with a PhD in philosophy already have a set of intellectual and disciplinary skills that can help them thrive and do quite well in law school.

2b.  I don't think there's a one approach fits all answer to this question.  But I'm opening comments for thoughts from other readers.

 

 

Philip Roth on Trump

This is all certainly apt (it makes reference to his novel The Plot Against America, in which it is imagined that the pro-Nazi Charles Lindberg was elected President of the U.S.):

“It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam’ ”....

“I was born in 1933,” Roth continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English”....

“As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.”

Pyramid of the capitalist system

This is classic (attention most philosophers:  your'e in the second row from the top):

Blast from the past: Shorter APA Code of Conduct

Back in 2016.

Wake Forest's Christian Miller interviewed...

...at 3AM.

It is unconstitutional for Trump to block followers on Twitter

This was a predictable but also amusing decision.  Note that it probably means any public official with a twitter account can not block anyone.

Mexican philosophy workshop at UCSD

This looks interesting, sorry it's 2,000 miles away!

The tragedy of student suicide

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

This bracing and tragic NYT story about a student at Hamilton College should be read by all college teachers.   The awful situation in which those local know that a student is in distress but the parents do not results from student privacy laws that, quite mistakenly, treat teenagers (and those barely out of their teens) as adults (even, ironically, when parents are footing the bill for everything).  The privacy laws need to be changed so that parents or guardians can be kept apprised of health issues their children face.  Even more importantly, faculty need to be alert for students having problems and be proactive in referring them to support services available at the institution.  The tremendous improvements in treatments for what otherwise would have been disabling mental health conditions a generation ago means that more of our students today are in high risk categories.

UPDATE:  A faculty member at another university tells me they have been advised by legal counsel that "If we feel that you are in imminent danger to your self or others we are empowered to break confidentiality."  In addition, he points me to the FERPA rules which contain this exception:

Health or Safety Emergency

In some situations, a school may determine that it is necessary to disclose non-directory information to appropriate parties in order to address a disaster or other health or safety emergency. FERPA permits school officials to disclose, without consent, education records, or personally identifiable information from education records, to appropriate parties (see Q&A 9) in connection with an emergency, if knowledge of that information is necessary to protect the health or safety of the student or other individuals. See 34 CFR §§ 99.31(a)(10) and 99.36. This exception to FERPA’s general consent requirement is temporally limited to the period of the emergency and generally does not allow for a blanket release of personally identifiable information from the student’s education records.

Under this health or safety emergency provision, an educational agency or institution is responsible for making a determination whether to make a disclosure of personally identifiable information on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the totality of the circumstances pertaining to a threat to the health or safety of the student or others. If the school district or school determines that there is an articulable and significant threat to the health or safety of the student or other individuals and that a party needs personally identifiable information from education records to protect the health or safety of the student or other individuals, it may disclose that information to such appropriate party without consent. 34 CFR § 99.36. This is a flexible standard under which the Department defers to school administrators so that they may bring appropriate resources to bear on the situation, provided that there is a rational basis for the educational agency’s or institution’s decisions about the nature of the emergency and the appropriate parties to whom information should be disclosed. We note also that, within a reasonable period of time after a disclosure is made under this exception, an educational agency or institution must record in the student’s education records the articulable and significant threat that formed the basis for the disclosure and the parties to whom information was disclosed. 34 CFR § 99.32(a)(5).

I'm opening comments for those with more experience and/or information about the emergency exception and also about practices at other institutions.

Turmoil at U of Southern California: 200 faculty call on President to step down...

...in the wake of sexual abuse and other scandals.  (Do read the letter, it's quite strong.)  I saw only three philosophy faculty among the signatories:  Janet Levin, Edwin McCann and Gary Watson.  (More law faculty signed, including one with a courtesy appointment in philosophy.)  Philosophy, perhaps more than any other department at USC, has been a beneficiary of the fundraising by the current and prior USC leaders that has allowed it to become a top ten department through aggressive faculty recruitment. 

UPDATE:  I'm told that the letter stopped circulating after it got to 200 signatories, so many more philosophy (and other) faculty might well have signed had they had the opportunity.

'On hate speech and feminist silencing'

Another interesting piece on our recent theme; an excerpt:

Feminism, as a political movement aimed at the liberation of women, has long theorized gender not as an innate essence, but as a hierarchical system enforcing women’s subservience. Characterizing certain personality traits – compliance, nurturance, the desire to be pretty or objectified – as ‘natural’ to women, is, according to feminist analysis, a primary mechanism for maintaining gender hierarchy. As a result, many feminists have genuine questions about trans ideology’s assertion that ‘gender identity’ is both natural and universal. It comes perilously close to naturalizing the oppression of women.

This is not trivial, and it needs to be discussed. But it has been decreed that it cannot be discussed, because to discuss it is to ‘deny the right of trans people to exist.’ Trans ideology collapses the fact that trans people exist into the theory of why trans people exist, and judges anyone who questions the theory to be a transphobic bigot intent on denying the very existence of trans people. Indeed, even those trans women who persist in existing despite subscribing to the feminist critique of gender are denounced by many in their community as self-hating or treacherous. This is argument by non-argument, and it functions to close down discourse by rendering feminism’s long-held analysis of gender unsayable.

 

Conference in honor of Jerry Fodor at Rutgers...

...just last month.  Videos of the talks are here.

Confessions of an "arsehole"

This is funny; an excerpt:

A few months into a cushy postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, where the walls were a soothing yellow and poached salmon was a staple, it dawned on me that I could reasonably be considered an arsehole. This wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to me: after all, I am the kind of Brit who insists on the difference between a donkey, otherwise known as an ass, and a backside, otherwise known as an arse. But on this occasion my reflection was prompted not by looking in the mirror or by hearing a recording of my voice but by the experience of being a philosopher in a non-philosophical setting. Calling yourself a philosopher already makes you sound a bit of an arse, but the fact remains that I have spent most of my professional life studying, discussing, writing and teaching philosophy—and it is this, I submit, that has made me liable to appear a right royal arsehole....

One of the norms governing ordinary conversation is that to disagree too much is to be disagreeable. Just as socially competent individuals tend to encourage whoever’s speaking by nodding or giving other affirmative signals, so they also tend to agree with most of what is being said unless something really important is at stake. If a stranger says that the last few days have been brutal with all the rain, a well-adjusted conversationalist might gently suggest an alternative viewpoint (“It’ll make us appreciate the weekend even more!”) but they would be unlikely to dispute the proposition entirely (“Actually you’re wrong: there was a lot of gray sky but not that much rain. People often make that mistake.”)....

The trouble for philosophers is that they find disagreement to be one of life’s higher pleasures. Part of the fun of philosophy, for those who have acquired the taste, is the cut and thrust of argument: for the person proposing it’s the thrill of trying to articulate yourself in the knowledge that a step in the wrong direction could get you skewered; for the person responding it’s the thrill of trying to reverse engineer an argument until you find a chink in the armor. In principle there’s nothing personal about this, just as there’s nothing personal about trying to exploit a weakness in someone’s backhand. In practice things tend to be more complicated. To take an obvious example, philosophers will often test an argument to see if it implies something ridiculous or if it rests on premises that do. But it’s a short step from calling someone’s argument ridiculous to ridiculing them—and in most contexts even asking whether someone’s view might imply something ridiculous is already a violation of trust and mutual respect.

Kitcher on Errol Morris and Thomas Kuhn

Philip Kitcher (Columbia) has a very useful review of the filmmaker's new book, a useful complement to this earlier post.

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Kant on felony murder laws

Philosopher Zachary Hoskins (Nottingham) comments.

The disappearing anonymous and pseudonymous blogs

In recent months, the embarrassing "Stormfront for philosophers" blog ceased operations ("due to security concerns" it says at the URL for the site) and then the latest iteration of the metablog disappeared (I'm not sure when, but some time it appears in the last few weeks).  Both blogs were marked by the expression of controversial views, but both were also marked by anonymous abuse--some of it defamatory in many jurisdictions--of members of philosophy academia.  

So what happened?

Since I do not know who ran these sites, these speculations are based on circumstantial evidence.  In the case of the Stormfront for Philosophers blog, I have heard there were concerted efforts to figure out who the contributors were, which led to the closure of the site.  (The evidence I was sent suggests the contributors were not exactly "philosophers" as opposed to people who may have studied some philosophy at some point in their academic life.)  In the case of the latest iteration of a metablog, it appears the person responsible for the site was not careful in covering his tracks, and was outed by the digital record by a tech-savvy grad student, who then communicated this to his dissertation advisor, among several others (including me).   Prudently, he seems to have shut it down.  (I will not be disclosing the name of the alleged creator of the site.)

Professor Stock responds to objections to her views about transgender women

Since I first linked to Professor Stock's essays last week, the various more timid philosophy blogs have picked up her articles as well, in many cases allowing comments (including abuse of Professor Stock--in keeping with the usual rules at these famously hypocritical blogs, abuse is always welcome when directed at people with "incorrect" views).  Professor Stock has now compiled a set of useful responses to some of the objections and comments over the last week.  I commend it to readers interested in these issues, both for the substance of her responses and her emphasis on respect for the dignity and rights of transgender women, though not to the exclusion of the dignity and rights of women.

Annals of twitter hypocrisy: the case of "condescension from below"

This past Saturday morning, I woke up early and had some time to kill, and so when I checked twitter, instead of blocking the usual jerks and knuckleheads there, I actually engaged some of them.  Before I get into the delicious details of what ensued, a reminder about a long-standing meme here, the idea of "condescension from below."  I owe the brilliant phrase to Stephen Stich.  We were both attending a conference where a philosopher (who shall remain nameless, except to note that no one would consider him a major figure) delivered what he took to be a devastating critique of Quine.   But the paper was not simply critical--that would hardly make it notable, this being philosophy after all--it was remarkably condescending in tone and substance--hence Stich's quip to me, "Condescension from below":  this philosopher was feigning an air of superiority towards a philosopher he was plainly inferior to.

"Condescension from below" is a staple of twitter, and for the obvious reasons:  the lack of barriers, group polarization effects, and the limits of the medium are all conducive to it.   And now for Saturday morning's amusement:

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Budgie, "Guts," 1971

e haven't featured the great Welsh heavy metal trio (who never made it in the U.S.) in quite some time; here's the lead track from their debut album:

 And as a bonus, below the fold, they perform in the studio their best-known number, "Breadfan":

The paradox of non-binary gender

Thanks to the important discussion initiated by philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex), people have been sharing with me interesting essays on issues related to gender and sexuality.  Here's a particularly insightful piece from political philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper; since the argument is complex, I post a longish excerpt from parts of the essay, but I recommend the whole thing:

It used to be a basic, fundamental feminist idea that while sex referred to what is biological, and so perhaps in some sense ‘natural’, gender referred to what is socially constructed. On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.

Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity above femininity....

From birth, and the identification of sex-class membership that happens at that moment, most female people are raised to be passive, submissive, weak and nurturing, while most male people are raised to be active, dominant, strong and aggressive. This value system, and the process of socialising and inculcating individuals into it, is what a radical feminist means by the word ‘gender’. Understood like this, it’s not difficult to see what is objectionable and oppressive about gender, since it constrains the potential of both male and female people alike, and asserts the superiority of males over females. So, for the radical feminist, the aim is to abolish gender altogether: to stop putting people into pink and blue boxes, and to allow the development of individuals’ personalities and preferences without the coercive influence of this socially-enacted value system.

This view of the nature of gender sits uneasily with those who experience gender as in some sense internal and innate, rather than as entirely socially constructed and externally imposed. Such people not only dispute that gender is entirely constructed, but also reject the radical feminist analysis that it is inherently hierarchical with two positions. On this view, which for ease I will call the queer feminist view of gender, what makes the operation of gender oppressive is not that it is socially constructed and coercively imposed: rather, the problem is the prevalence of the belief that there are only two genders. 

Humans of both sexes would be liberated if we recognised that while gender is indeed an internal, innate, essential facet of our identities, there are more genders than just ‘woman’ or ‘man’ to choose from....

American University in Cairo's Catarina Belo interviewed...

...at 3AM.

"Neither cis nor TERF"

Another interesting essay by feminist theorist and journalism professor Robert Jensen (UT Austin).  Noting that "cisgender" means "people whose internal sense of gender identity matches their biological sex," Professor Jensen explains why he is not at all cisgender:

As a male human, [the culturally dominant] patriarchal conception of masculinity is not my “chosen” identity, nor do I believe it is my fate. As a short, skinny, effeminate child — when I show people my church confirmation picture taken at age 14, they often assume it is a photo of a much younger girl — I never felt very masculine. As an adult with feminist politics, I reject and struggle to overcome the masculinity norms in patriarchy.

You can get a sense of the need some have to indulge in mindless gendered stereotypes from this twitter thread regarding Professor Jensen's earlier essay we noted here.  It really should be disqualifying for getting a PhD in philosophy to assert that gender or sex (or race etc.) excludes one from offering reasons in support of a view (especially a perfectly cogent position like Professor Jensen's).

An unrelated oddity about the use of "cisgender":  given that 99.7% of the population does not suffer from gender dysphoria, why would one think one needs any special label to describe the statistically normal condition?  Add to that the fact that it implies something about men that is often false, for the reasons Professor Jensen identifies, and it seems positively perverse.  (The same is true for "cis" women, as one of Professor Stock's original essays correctly pointed out.)

From C.L.R. James to game theory and the social epistemology of science

Liam Kofi Bright, a new member of the philosophy faculty at LSE, charts his intellectual evolution.  (Link fixed now.)

XPhil replication project

Philosophre Florian Cova, a participant in the project, writes:

Here is an information that might be of interest to the readers of Leiter Reports. In 2016, several experimental philosophers (including me) have teamed for a wide-scale replication project involving the replication of 40 experimental philosophy studies. In the wake of the replication crisis in psychology, it indeed seemed necessary to assess the reliability of results in experimental philosophy. The results of the projects are now out and can be found:

*Here for a detail presentation: https://psyarxiv.com/sxdah

*Here for a summary: https://sites.google.com/site/thexphireplicabilityproject/outputs

Overall, the rate of successful replication was quite high.

Responses to Professor Stock's essays on transgender women and the philosophical issues

She shares them here.

Philosophy major under threat (as well as one tenure-track faculty member) at Hiram College

A reader writes:

My alma mater, Hiram College, announced two days ago a reorganization plan that includes the termination of a tenure-track faculty position in philosophy and the removal of the philosophy major. This leaves Hiram with one (!) tenured philosophy professor and only a minor in philosophy. The soon-to-be terminated tenure-track professor, Megan Altman, is a promising Heidegger and Kierkegaard scholar with publications to her name. In other words, she possesses a quality academic record consistent with her career trajectory at a teaching college (four years removed from the reception of her PhD). 

You can find recent accounts of the events at Hiram over the past year in Inside Higher Education. I will link these accounts below the main body of this email in case you or your readers take interest in the details. 

I am not opposed to many of the proposals in the reorganization plan. Small liberal-arts colleges face great challenges in the current economic climate of higher-education. Hiram has been on a downward trajectory for more than two decades because of chronic mismanagement by successive administrations. In addition to the administrative bloat of most universities, Hiram has suffered from sclerotic professional course offerings and a general failure to keep up with the better liberal arts colleges in the Midwest. It still offers a communication major, for instance, an outdated field of study which has long been replaced by concentrations in public relations, journalism, etc at most universities. These professional course concentrations, which are tied to the perceptions of the market-place and thus especially subject to change, should be frequently revised and redesignated.

The point I wish to make is the following: you simply cannot be a liberal arts college without the option to major in philosophy. You can be a quality community college, technical college, or possibly regional branch of a public university, but you sacrifice all plausible claims to being a liberal arts college once you go down this route and remove the philosophy major. This point must be forcibly made to the administrators and Board of Trustees at Hiram, who will meet in the coming weeks to vote on the plan. What Hiram may attain in short-term financial relief will come at a great price in terms of institutional legitimacy and academic respectability. 

 

Inside Higher Ed Feature of the "New" Liberal Arts (May 2nd)

Inside Higher Ed Feature on Anxiety at Hiram (May 9th)

Inside Higher Ed Feature on Interdisciplinary Redesign (May 15th)

'The silencing of the lesbians'

This from The Spectator, considered "conservative" in the UK (American readers can ask themselves whether any so-called "conservative" paper in this benighted country could write an article this balanced and sympathetic to the concerns of lesbians and also transgender people).  It includes remarks from philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex), among others.

Scary "rough" heroines

I confess I've never seen any of the fictional programs referenced, but the account seems plausible.   The really frightening women, however, from Margaret Thatcher to Ann Coulter, are in a different category!

Fear of addressing philosophical questions about gender and identity in connection with transgender women

A female PhD student with a longstanding interest in these issues writes:

I've been following this debate and controversy for years now.  I was very interested to read that some philosophers are now speaking about it publicly.  I am glad that people are discussing these issues publicly: it seems to me a tide might have begun turning. 

I just wanted to mention that many feminist women have, for a long time, been saying exactly the sorts of things that Stock, Jensen and Kaufman said / are saying, but have been vilified, threatened and marginalised for doing so.  It's been frightening to watch the way in which any possibility of discussion on issues that will directly affect women's lives has been completely foreclosed under pain of stiff social penalty.  And the speed at which this happened has been incredible.  What happened to Tuvel was typical, and she wasn't even taking an opposing view.  Many women have been discussing these issues in private, but most are too frightened to speak in public (and not unreasonably so). 

The only thing to do is to push ahead with serious philosophical discussion of this and other topics, and, at the same time, to call out the thought police and academic bullies, as we have done many times before and will continue to do.

Wage slavery watch: cow manure edition

When the chains are broken, the ex-slave has his revenge.

ADDENDUM:  This is a joke, but a joke with a point!

John Martin Fischer on "near death experiences"

This lecture was on the occasion of his appointment to the rank of University Professor at UC Riverside; the lecture itself begins around the five-minute mark, and it includes a lot of interesting examples of the phenomenon:

 

APA gets grant from Mellon Foundation to develop a code of publishing ethics, i.e., provide a post-hoc rationalization for the mistreatment of Prof. Tuvel

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY:  E-mail me if your comment still has not appeared at the APA site by this evening, and I will collect and post the comments here.  Remember the APA site requires a name and e-mail address.  (5/15/18 update at 3:20 pm CST:   comments have started to appear.)

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MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 9:  The APA blog now features a post about this project, which makes clear that this will be another unethical code, intent on violating the academic freedom of scholars and rationalizing the unethical treatment of Prof. Tuvel.  Readers should comment at the APA blog.  One reader, who wrote me about this, indicated that if this goes forward, they will stop paying APA dues.

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The APA press release is here.  The last "ethics code" the APA produced was a joke, which might make one wonder what will result here, especially when the Executive Director of the APA, who is not a philosopher, remarks that, "Recent publishing controversies, as well as a more general awareness of diversity issues in the field, have brought increased attention to publication ethics in philosophy."  The release goes on to state that,

Some of the issues that the initiative will address include evolving forms of scholarly misconduct, diversity in citation and engagement practice, varieties of plagiarism, and implicit bias in research, peer review, and editorial practices, as well as correcting the scholarly record when missteps occur. In order to address widespread disagreement about these issues, the grant will bring editors, scholars, and publishers together to develop a set of explicit and clear guidelines.

There have been some major breaches of publication ethics of late (recall  the Bruyahaha or the Jenkins-Soble fiascos), but it's very clear that what this is really about (given the repeated references to diversity, and, remarkably, "diversity in citation and engagement practice") is an attempt by the APA to put its imprimatur on the unethical and unprofessional behavior of the Associate Editors of Hypatia during the Tuvel affair.

"How can you be so confident, Brian, that that's the point of this exercise?" a skeptic might ask.  Fair question.  But please note that, putting aside Ms. Ferrer, three of the five academic members of this committee--Rebecca Kennison, Yannik Thiem, and Adriel Trott--were signatories to the open letter defaming Prof. Tuvel and calling on Hypatia to retract her article. That's right, the majority of this committee supported unethical and unprofessional conduct by Hypatia.  And now they will draft a code of publication ethics.

Now in the world of actual professionals, one might have thought having signed on to an unethical attack on another scholar and a call for a journal to behave unprofessionally would disqualify one from participating in crafting a code of publication ethics.   But not at the APA:  apparently at the APA, it's still an open question, as it is nowhere else in the world (apart from the incoming Board of Hypatia!), whether Hypatia should have withdrawn a peer-reviewed article because it offended some readers.

Enough is really enough.  Anyone who pays dues to the APA should stop until some house cleaning is done.  And those philosophers with actual ethical standards and professional judgment who are involved with the APA:  why are you permitting this to happen?

ADENDUM:  Strictly speaking, the Mellon Grant is to the PI at Fairfield University, but the participation and endorsement of the APA's Executive Director and the featuring of this project on the APA website makes clear where this is heading.

Houston's Cameron Buckner wins 2018 APA Article Prize

Announcement here.