Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Three observations about the college admissions scandal

CHE has a useful summary report of who has been indicted so far and what they did.  Two observations:

1.  The students who were admitted through this scheme will have to be expelled.   Fraud in an application, even if the students were unaware of it, is always grounds for expulsion.

2.  This is the third major criminal scandal to rock the University of Southern California (USC had multiple corrupt coaches taking bribes), after the sex abuser gynecologist in student health services and the dope-using medical school Dean.  In the last two cases, it turns out the Administration had warning signs but did not act in a timely way; it remains to be seen what the early warning signs were here that were ignored, if there were any.   A generation ago, USC was derisively known as the "University of Spoiled Children."  By trying to beef up academics, and shrewdly playing the U.S. News college rankings, USC has tried to shed that image in the new century, although this scandal is certainly a set back.  (Although USC has made a good number of strong faculty appointments in the last decade, the only program to be wholly transformed into a top ten unit has been philosophy.)

3.  Of course, the traditional "corruption" of college admissions--the lowering of academic standards for athletes, alumni children, and "diversity" candidates--remains untouched by any of this.

P.F. Strawson at 100

A nice overview of his career and work from philosopher Anil Gomes (Oxford).

On intellectual vices

Quassin Cassam (Warwick) comments.

Twitter

For those who use that deplorable medium, I am on it, and try to always post links to new posts there, so it's one way of following the blog, beyond the RSS feed.  I occasionally post other things on Twitter, although not a lot; I do a bit more retweeting of other interesting or amusing stuff I come across.

Federal indictments in scheme to secure admission to selective colleges and universities

Wow!   I wonder how many schools and individuals will be implicated.

UPDATE:  This tweet from philosopher Fritz Warfield (Notre Dame) cuts to the chase.

The latest in illiberal undergraduates who understand neither college nor academic freedom

Sarah Lawrence students demand, among other things, that a professor's tenure be subject to "review" because of his (lawful) views, and that faculty be appointed based on their race.   Some of their other "demands," while unrealistic, are less venal, and would no doubt be met with more sympathy if not framed as "demands" but, say, aspirations that would help improve the student experience.

A combined PhD program for philosophy and psychology

Is this a first?  It certainly makes sense at Yale, which has philosophically-minded psychologists like Paul Bloom and psychologically-minded philosophers like Joshua Knobe and Laurie Paul.

Harvard's Mathias Risse interviewed...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 9--UPDATED

...at 3AM.  Alas, they didn't talk about his Nietzsche work, which is also noteworthy!

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE:  Now the interview has been expanded to include some discussion of Risse's Nietzsche work!

Karl Marx makes it to Business Insider

Not bad, although it doesn't get the labor theory of value quite right.

Matt Heffner for D90 Board of Education (River Forest)

He's definitely the person you want on your BOE.  If you're in River Forest or vicinity, please share!

"If trans women are women, what is a woman?"

Interesting essay from last fall by philosopher Sophie Allen (Keele) that only recently came to my attention.

Humanities, including philosophy, in community colleges

Robert Townsend, Director of the Washington Office of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, kindly wrote to share news of a new study from the AAAS:

[W]e have just released a new report on the humanities in community colleges (at http://bit.ly/HESCC2019), with a number of interesting findings about philosophy study in the sector, including:

• Between 255- and 275-thousand community college students took a philosophy course in the fall of 2015.
• Approximately 5,000 faculty taught courses in philosophy.
• Approximately 90% of community colleges offered a course in philosophy.
• Students taking philosophy courses comprised about 4% of total enrollments for credit at community colleges.
• Among students enrolled in philosophy courses at community colleges, 4%–7% were dually enrolled high school students.

You can find this summary with related data tables at https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatorDoc.aspx?i=31303.

In defense of Harvard's Ronald Sullivan

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--DEFINITELY WORTH READING!

Sullivan is a clinical law professor at Harvard and a very accomplished criminal defense attorney, who, among his many cases, recently joined the defense team for Harvey Weinstein; he is also the faculty member in charge of one of Harvard's undergraduate dorms.   Benighted Harvard students have launched a smear campaign against him, claiming this work disqualifies him from discharging his duties.  Their arguments are as irrational as one has come to expect in such cases, but we are all indebted to Randall Kennedy, also a Harvard law professor, for dissecting them with precision.  Of more general interest is this observation about the student attack on Prof. Sullivan:

These events are emblematic of a crisis besetting all strata of higher education, as activists of various stripes perceive cannily the temptation of administrators to mollify zealots in return for quiet — regardless of the merits of competing arguments or the importance of the values in question....

Those calling for Sullivan’s resignation or dismissal as a faculty dean solely because he is serving as Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer in a rape prosecution are displaying an array of disturbingly widespread tendencies. One is impatience with drawing essential distinctions such as that between a lawyer and his client. Another is a willingness to minimize or dispense with important safeguards like fair trials. Yet another is a tendency to resort to demonization.

That “progressive” activists could denounce so bitterly a person who has demonstrated so clearly a commitment to inclusive, humane, liberal values and practices is indicative of a concerted illiberalism that is menacing university life.

All this is, of course, familiar from events covered extensively on this blog:  from the mobbing of Rebecca Tuvel, to the campaign by faculty and students on both sides of the Atlantic to shut down critical discussion of the gender ID law in the UK, to the attack on academic freedom at Marquette under the guise of protecting the "vulnerable."

Everyone who cares about academic life needs to speak up about these issues and the bad behavior of the illiberal perpetrators, including when the perpetrators are students (just as Prof. Kennedy has done correctly in this instance, since it is almost entirely students running the smear campaign against Prof. Sullivan).

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: The Good Rats, "Coo Coo Coo Blues," 1978

We haven't featured this Long Island, NY band in quite some time, but here's another favorite of mine, from their fourth album:

 

Would someone really buy a self-driving car that would *not* swerve to avoid hitting a human...

...while hitting a cat or dog? 

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Placement in PhD-granting programs

Given the time of year, this is worth linking to again.  Also this (note esp. the junior numbers).

A timeline of women in philosophy...

...from  OUP.  It contains several pieces of information that were new to me.

Blast from the past: the humanities in an increasingly "commercialized" culture and university

Almost a decade ago, and still relevant needless to say.

A brief comment

I do wish Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), who has run his own "safe space" philosophy blog for five years now, could have marked the occasion without launching yet another tiresome attack on me full of falsehoods and half-truths.  (He used to do this a lot, then seemed to grow out of it.)  I mostly enjoy his blog, despite his consistently awful judgment on professional matters and contempt for academic freedom.  But I do wish he could let his obsession with me go.

Since there is no point, as Shaw said, in "wrestling with a pig," I'll just make a general comment:

Since last May, I have been defending the freedom of speech and inquiry of feminist philosophers and activists (especially philosopher Kathleen Stock of the University of Sussex) concerned about the ramifications of current notions of “gender identity” for the rights of women in female-only spaces and for lesbians.  (You can see almost all the posts here.)  As a result, I have also  become a target of harassment and abuse from those, even within philosophy, wanting to vilify those with the “incorrect” views, though nothing as bad as Stock and others have experienced (of course, I've been accused of "transphobia," but that's the least it).  I have criticized universities, faculty (and here and here etc.) and students for their bad behavior towards Stock and others that affect honest and open discussion of these issues.  I do not always agree with Professor Stock, but she is a model of courageous and principled advocacy on an important issue, and in the face of a sometimes organized campaign of vilification, harassment, and threats.

UPDATE:  A funny twitter thread on Weinberg's usual hypocrisy.

ANOTHER:  Weinberg decided to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his blog not only by attacking me but, in keeping with his faux commitment to civility, opening up his forum for unmoderated insults, lies, and abuse of me.  (My thanks to several folks who sent nice messages today after Justin's slimy stunt.)  

New Director of the Marc Sanders Foundation...

...which offers prizes for work in analytic philosophy.  The new Executive Director will be Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (North Carolina), who takes over from Mark Johnston (Princeton).

Another philosophy outreach program to high schools...

...this time at SUNY Geneseo.

(Thanks to David Levy for the pointer.)

Trump and the Mafia, redux

It's not just a Mafia mentality, it's a Mafia organization!

(Thanks to Steve Sverdlik for the pointer.)

The next catastrophe we will face, sooner or later, from the monster-child

If impeached, or if he loses the 2020 election, he is unlikely to go peacefully.

Nearly $47 billion given to U.S. universities last year

These are "charitable" donations, since all these universities are non-profits.   Bear that in mind when you hear figures about "charitable" giving by the rich.  In some cases, of course, the "charitable" folks are buying admission for their offspring.

ADDENDUM:  Note that some schools on the list are in the midst of capital campaigns, while others are not--that explains some of the big differences in totals.

Financial crisis at University of Surrey in the UK: the first university victim of Brexit?

The University (which happens to have a strong jurisprudence group in the law school) has offered incentives to all faculty to take "voluntary redundancy" [as the Brits call getting people to resign], specifically citing problems caused by Brexit.  They haven't ruled out "compulsory redundancies," i.e, firing people.  Crazy!

UPDATE:  A law professor in the UK writes with a useful clarification:

Re: the (appalling) University of Surrey story; redundancy doesn't equal sacking. The thing about redundancy is that it eliminates the post, it doesn't just get rid of the person. Compulsory or voluntary, it always involves a payoff, which I guess is compensation for frustrating your expectation of continuing to have a job. Voluntary redundancy, for anyone approaching retirement age, can be a pretty good deal - as long as you weren't planning on any further achievements in your career, of course.

There is basically no such thing as at-will termination in Britain, in any job - as long as you've been in post more than a year (I think it is), and as long as your employer is reasonably law-abiding. On the other hand, academic disciplinary procedures increasingly include 'competence' criteria, which can be invoked on some pretty questionable grounds. British academics these days probably have less job security than some comparable professions.

On playing games

Philosopher Tom Hurka (Toronto) comments, drawing on a very clever book by Bernard Suits that he first called to my attention years ago.

An open letter about Patricia Lemer, putative autism expert

Mr. Engelson, a former student, gave me permission to share this open letter he has been circulating on social media:

To Whom It May Concern

As a high-functioning man on the autism spectrum, I write to protest the event at Politics & Prose with Patrcia Lemer. Her writing is predatory and presents a danger to society. By suggesting that her books contain solutions to "prevent" or "heal" autism, Ms. Lemer is peddling blatant falsehoods. Medical science does not know what causes autism, and thus cannot prevent it.

No one with autism has ever been healed of it. If there were a way to a rid myself of it, I would absolutely bulldoze everyone in my path to get to it. The fact is, though, that autism is a permanent, lifelong condition. One can learn to live as best one can one with it, but one cannot go from being autistic autistic to neurotypical. What we know suggests that would require "rewiring" the brain.

Desperate parents, willing to try anything to help their children, will buy into this junk science. They will sink money into attempts cure their children that cannot be successful. That money is better spent helping their children learn to adapt, to whatever extent they are able.

Ms. Lemer pushes the issue of vaccinations as causing autism. This has been proven untrue, and it is harmful; it encourages parents to avoid vaccinating their children against deadly diseases, and it diminishes herd immunity. I take this personally, as an "antivaxer" called me a "casualty" of vaccinations. Ironically, I am the third generation in my male line of descent on the spectrum, so genetics, not environmental factors, are clearly the operative factor here. I am also hardly a casualty: I worked full-time as a government contractor, making more than $75k; I have a side gig as music press, often reviewing three shows a week on comped press passes. I have an amazing life.

I recognize that my registration of protest will not affect this event, but it was important to me that you hear the thoughts of someone from within the autistic community. I often feel that, to cite the name of an organization, it may be that Autism Speaks, but maybe, when it comes to matters of autism, people should try talking to someone with autism.

Sincerely,
Mark Engleson

In Memoriam: Tony Honoré (1921-2019)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 26--UPDATED

Professor Honoré was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University from 1971 to 1988, but lived and taught in Oxford for some seventy years, and was still co-teaching with John Gardner until just last year.  Among philosophers he is, of course, best-known for his classic work on Causation in the Law, co-authored with H.L.A. Hart, but his interests ranged very widely.  His passing is, as John Gardner wrote to me this morning, "the end of an era."

I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  A memorial notice from the Oxford Law faculty, written by Professor Gardner.  And here is a memorial from his boarding school in South Africa.

More female faculty=more female PhDs from that philosophy department

That is what one would expect, and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) confirms it with data.

Blast from the past: The inflation of bullying

As true today as then.

10 (alleged) odd obsessions of famous philosophers

I have my doubts about the factual basis for these, but maybe there's something to each of them.  In the case of Nietzsche, he did try different diets, but the fruit consumption was short-lived, not a standing obsession.

Free speech, good and bad

Sean Illing, the philosophically-minded journalist at Vox, kindly interviewed me about this article.  One thing we didn't get to talk about is my view that the academy is, when functioning properly, one of the only places where the Millian background conditions for free speech to be truth-maximizing actually obtains.  (Mr. Illing does a lot of interesting interviews, you can check them all out here.)

Literature and culture in America in the 1940s: no room for identity politics

An interesting review of what sounds like a fascinating book by George Hutchinson (Cornell); an excerpt:

The book brings into focus intellectual and emotional realities of the decade during and after World War II that current historical memory largely occludes behind heroicizing or condescending stereotypes. On the one hand, popular media serve up nostalgia for a “Greatest Generation.” On the other hand, academic dogma rebukes the decade’s aspirations for “universality,” for an inclusive sense of what it means to be human, portraying those hopes as imperialist cudgels designed to impose Western values on a postcolonial world....

Hutchinson’s central theme is that literature mattered in the 1940s because it focused on experiences that happened to everyone and because it made sense of them, not by abstracting or generalizing, but by recognizing that those common experiences came to everyone in a unique way:

    "When Richard Wright narrates episodes of his youth in Black Boy (1945), he doesn’t mean     to say that the fear, shame, and hatred that haunted his childhood can only be true for     him, nor are they only relevant to other African Americans. He writes as an embodied     human being to other human beings—who also are afraid, shamed, and hateful for their     own reasons—with a faith in the possibility that they will listen and come to a 'human' (his     term) understanding of his experience and also of themselves, whoever and wherever they     are—and that they will be changed by that understanding as he was."

Ann Petry, whose first novel, The Street (1946), about a black woman in Harlem, sold a million copies, wrote her second novel, Country Place (1947), about a white family who experienced what Petry’s African-American family had experienced.  Another black author, Willard Motley, wrote his first novel, Knock on Any Door (1947), about an Italian working-class family. Humphrey Bogart starred in the film made from it. “Black critics as of 1950 considered these novels…among the most important literary achievements since 1935...."

"What we owe to rabbits"

Anglophone moral philosophy again at the cutting edge of what matters.  Someone wrote about this, as I recall.  But you don't have to be sympathetic to Marx to wonder whether how we treat rabbits is really an important moral issue of our time, or to wonder why highly renumerated professors at institutions whose purposes include reproduction of the ruling class spend their time writing about this.

Update on the Athens Review of Books

The letter, noted earlier, has now appeared in The New York Review of Books, and is apparently being noted in Greek media. (The letter, with the full list of signatories, is here.)  One of the editors writes:  "Our request at the re-trial of 21st February to lift the freezing orders of our accounts was denied."

Michael Jackson and Martin Heidegger

Les Green (Oxford) comments.  In addition to making some good substantive points and some wickedly funny jokes (at the expense of the Catholic Church and English academic bureaucrats), this is also a really good piece of writing.  Read it!

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Lucifer Was, "The Meaning of Life," 1971

Norwegian proto-heavy metal band, with progressive rock influences as well, they were active in the early 1970s; this song is representative:

 

Today in Twitter crazy: Sandra Lapointe

Lapointe, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, showed up on my Twitter feed (without being tagged or provoked) to denounce the PGR back in 2018.  This outburst was puzzling, not only because I had had no contact with  her, but also because a number of McMaster faculty regularly participate in the PGR surveys, and McMaster has often advertised its strong showing in several specialties.   I asked a former student and friend of mine on the faculty there why she was so upset about this that she would attack me on Twitter out of the blue.  Lapointe subsequently tweeted out this transmorgification of what happened:

Once I said something Leiter didn't like on Twitter and he called on my Chair to point it out to them.  I don't know what were his intentions; hardly decent.

More accurate would have been:  "Once I attacked Leiter on his Twitter thread out of the blue, and he asked his old friend and former student, a colleague of mine (who happened to be the chair at the time, but Leiter had no reason to know that), why I was so upset about this."  Her lies were pointed out to her, even by her colleague who had actually corresponded with me, but to no avail.   Lots of people retweeted Lapointe's lies.  This is a standing problem with social media:  fabrications by pathetic people get repeated as though they are factual.

ADDENDUM:  Other examples of "fabrications by pathetic people" (see esp. Powell, Weiner).

Vermont's Terence Cuneo interviewed...

...at 3AM.

No-platforming for expressing "incorrect" views about gender and sex now comes to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

An account from the victim here.

Most important contributors to metaethics 1945-2000?

An undergraduate writes:

Hello! I'm an undergraduate at [SLAC name omitted] and a long-time reader of your blog. I'm wondering whether you could possibly do a poll on the most important Anglo-American metaethicists after 1945. Your other polls on subjects like this have helped me navigate me various philosophical sub-fields, and I'd be delighted to see who the readership of your blog thinks are the most important figures working in metaethics. 

As I explained to this student, in recent polls various  malicious jerks without actual lives have gone to a great deal of trouble to screw up the results with strategic or just irrational voting, so polling is currently on hold.   However, I did indicate I'd open this for comments from readers; signed comments only (full name, valid e-mail address).

I think it's fairly easy to name the major figures, say, 1945-2000:  Charles Stevenson, R.M. Hare, J.L. Mackie, Gilbert Harman, Richard Boyd, Allan Gibbard, Simon Blackburn, Peter Railton, John McDowell; maybe also David Wiggins, Nicholas Sturgeon, David Brink, among others.   Since 2000, others would be added (e.g., Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, Sharon Street, David Enoch), but let's focus on 1945-2000 in the comments:  you can either add to the list, above, or express a view about the relative importance/influence of the philosophers mentioned above.

UPDATE:  Two signifciant omissions brought to my attention:  Michael Smith's The Moral Problem (1995) and Christine Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity (1996).  Just ot be clear, by metaethics, I mean contributions to questions about the metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of value and value judgments.

University of California System cancels Elsevier subscriptions

Wow!  If one or two other major systems follow suit, Elsevier will be in trouble.  And anyone thinking of publishing in an Elsevier journal better think twice.

Bayard Rustin in the NYT

This isn't bad, although it should have been titled "civil and labor rights" hero and should have mentioned A. Philip Randolph, one of the other great Americans of the 20th-century.  There can be no doubt what Rustin would have thought of diversity blather!