The situation is plainly worse there, than in the U.S., with most of the mindless extremism here confined to the Twitter red guard.
UPDATE: A reader points out that Christa Peterson, one of the Twitter red guard, is waiting for me to die. Wow! This is pretty sick; I love polemics, but wishing others dead is beyond the pale, I would have thought.
ANOTHER: I had not looked at Ms. Peterson's Twitter account in several months, until it was flagged for me, per the last update. It appears to be as unhinged as before. For example, the fact that philosophy has "tolerated" discussions of Prof. Stock's and other gender critcial views is apparently "intolerable" to the Red Guard wannabees like Peterson. Obviously philosophers Les Green, Kathleen Stock, Sophie Allen, Mary Leng, Holly Lawford-Smith et al. should engage in self-criticism and fall silent. All joking aside, the adult gate-keepers in the profession need to attend to the gate.
MEANWHILE IN THE UK: A Facebook friend in the UK writes: "So Kathleen Stock gave her talk at York last week with three security guards in attendance, bags banned from the room and stored elsewhere, with the University bombarded with complaints via social media and e-mail. This is not normal, folks, and it is asymmetric – if you want to give a paper defending the 'New Orthodoxy' on sex and gender, this is not going to happen to you. Kathleen mentioned she is not getting many invitations to speak from UK departments so I guess the intimidation is working." This is what happens when the aspiring Red Guard go from being chattering Twitterati to actors in the real world. Every UK department that values academic freedom should invite Professor Stock to give a talk, either about her philosophical work in aesthetics or her public advocacy on issues related to the rights of women. (ADDENDUM: Apparently there was some miscommunication, as Prof. Stock has not been getting fewer invitations, despite the attempts to silence her. That is certainly good news.)
A FINAL UPDATE: I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that narcissists excel at self-pity, but we really do need a reality-check here. A college graduate in her mid-20s tweets to her 7,000 followers a wish for me to die, as well as months and months of insults and sneering mockery of me, Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith and many others in the profession (it's all a matter of public record), and then feigns being the victim when someone actually notices and criticizes her behavior. We've been through this DARVO routine before: see here and here.
ALAS, I'D HOPED TO BE DONE: But I need to put this here to avoid boring the regular readers of the blog by putting it up front. Mark Schroeder, a philosophy professor at USC and Ms. Peterson's supervisor, has now launched a fraudulent attack on me on Facebook because I called attention to his advisee's embarrassing pattern of bad on-line behavior towards members of the profession; in the course of this attack, he also included a misrepresentation of our earlier correspondence. He would not permit me to respond on FB, so I'll add something here for anyone who cares.
Prof. Schroeder first wrote to me after the first time I commented on Ms. Peterson's abusive nonsense. Here's what he wrote:
Dear Brian –
I hope that this note finds you well. I’m writing to express my disappointment in the judgment that you exhibited in publically attacking my PhD advisee, Christa Peterson, on your blog this weekend, as unfit to receive a degree in philosophy. I’m not interested in getting into a debate about the details, but from what I can tell, you’ve misrepresented what she said and used that to issue a very public personal attack which I take very personally.
As you may realize, I have one of the higher PhD advising loads in our profession – though I just turned 40, I’ve already directly supervised 14 PhDs, nine of whom are in tenure-track or equivalent positions, and have served on 52 dissertation committees, not counting the many other students I have mentored in other roles. My own students have been highly successful, publishing in nearly all of the best journals in the field. I can assure you that Christa Peterson is one of the smartest and most capable PhD students who I have ever worked with, and my prediction is that she will be both a leader in her field and a credit to the profession. She is also, I might add, one of the last people that I would choose to pick a fight with.
I would encourage you to try to understand where Christa is coming from, rather than trying to dismiss her or diagnose her. It will be well worth your time, even if you continue to disagree.
Best wishes,
Mark
For those who don't know Schroeder, he is quite full of himself; as an undergrad at Carleton, I am told he would tell other students about his perfect SAT scores for example. Little has changed in the interim, as the second paragraph reveals, and his interest in this matter is directly proportional to his own vanity. I replied to Schroeder as follows:
Dear Mark,
Thanks for your note.
I assume you agree with me that no philosopher or serious scholar should accept “that gender or sex (or race etc.) excludes one from offering reasons in support of a view” (I am here quoting my blog post). In that case, the only issue is about whether Ms. Peterson’s twitter thread, to which I linked, supports attributing that view to her. That is a matter of “details,” though I can be brief: after calling my former colleague Robert Jensen’s essay “dumb as shit,” she declared that “𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝒶𝓃'𝓉 𝒷𝑒 𝒶 𝒸𝒾𝓈 𝓂𝒶𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶 𝓇𝒶𝒹𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝒻𝑒𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒾𝓈𝓉” (her italics) and then expressed skepticism that any “cis [sic] men” should be discussing these issues.
Because she is a student, I did not use her name in the blog post, and I’m sure 99% of readers will never bother to figure it out. This is not about her, but about a problem that is starting to poison the profession, and which her twitter thread merely illustrates (which is why a reader sent it to me in the first place).
She is lucky to have the strong support of her teachers and I’m happy to take your word that she is extremely able. As one of her mentors, you should advise her to either close her twitter account or make it private. It reflects badly on her and will harm her job prospects, given her repeated insults, sneering, and derision aimed at other philosophers. I know the medium lends itself to that, which is one reason I discourage students from utilizing social media, especially twitter. As part of the professionalization of our JD students, we even explicitly caution them about this, and perhaps it’s time to do this more systematically for PhD students as well given how common google searching job candidates has become.
Yours,
Brian
I, of course, have nothing to do with the award of PhDs at USC; it is remarkable that Schroeder didn't recognize that my rhetoric was meant to express disbelief about the absurd view his advisee expressed. PhDs are obviously awarded to zealots like Peterson all the time.
Although I originally did not name her, it became increasingly clear that, like Nathan Oseroff, she was symptomatic of bad tendencies in the profession: intolerance for views she disapproves of, willingness to dish out reckless insults and abuse of members of the profession on social media for their thought crimes, etc.. (Mr. Oseroff, to his credit, eventually apologized for his outrageous treatment of Kathleen Stock.)
In his fraudulent Facebook attack, Prof. Schroeder would not permit me to note the voluminous insults and abuse Ms. Peterson has directed at many professional philosophers, including Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sophie Allen, and other feminists. Ms. Peterson's Twitter thread is public, anyone can review the history. I wonder whether Prof. Schroeder has thought about the consequences of drawing further attention to it?
In any case, Schroeder's attack is part of what is now a familiar pattern from Rebecca Tuvel to Kathleen Stock: anyone who runs afoul of "correct" opinion is to be demonized, ostracized, and vilified. I learned from the last fraudulent attack on me more than four years ago that it does no good to try to appease the zealots and dissemblers, so I won't make that mistake again. I hope Prof. Schroeder will rethink his escalation.
I'll let an untenured professor, who wrote me about Schroeder, have the final word: "I don't understand these people who think that a graduate student ID gets you license to be an asshole without consequences, like it's a discount at the movies. Everyone who isn't blinded by ideology can look at Christa Peterson's twitter account and see that she's unhinged." [I had originally edited this quote slightly, to soften it, but in retrospect that was a mistake--see the 2/1 update.]
2/1 UPDATE: Earlier this week, Ms. Peterson collected many of her threads targetting feminists and others she deemed to have the "wrong" views about transgender issues. She prefaces it by noting, "I'm sometimes a bit sharp!" That's a diplomatic way of putting it. I'm also "sometimes a bit sharp," and get criticized for it. That's how these things work when they happen in public. In any case, a reader would have to dig in to the context of some of her screen shots to realize how badly she is misrepresenting at times the feminist philosophers she is deriding or how she is whitewashing the misconduct of those she defends against Professors Stock, Lawford-Smith et al.
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