Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

American College Health Association recommends all colleges mandate vaccination for COVID before fall enrollment

This is obviously sensible, and will give ammunition to schools in benighted states who will no doubt face opposition from local politicians of a certain flavor.  Colleges already mandate vaccinations for many illnesses, the only thing new here is the disease.

(Thanks to Jeff Roland for the pointer.)

On the etymology of the "N-word"

This is fascinating and informative.

Philosopher Manon Garcia (Yale) discusses her new book on...

..."why women’s submission in a patriarchal system is understandable, rational, and pleasurable, though not in their best interests."

Linfield University is a disgrace

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--UPDATED

It is not "cause" for firing a tenured faculty member that he was "insubordinate" and harmed the university's reputation by making allegations of sexual misconduct.  I hope a lawyer can help vindicate his legal and contractual rights.

ADDENDUM:  Reactions to Lindfield's outrageous misconduct.

(Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick for the pointers.)

UPDATE:  There's an open letter protesting this firing, which I would urge faculty to sign.  (Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

Excess mortality due to COVID (directly or indirectly)

Useful representation of the data by sociologist Kieran Healy (Duke).

Dembroff v. Singer

The Twitter smear merchants have been working overtime since The New Yorker interview with Peter Singer, but this exchange is really something:

The anecdote sounds aprocryphal to me, inconsistent with everything I've heard about Peter Singer.  (This is a more likely explanation.)  I have no shortage of harsh criticisms of Peter Singer's work (for example), but what is wrong with people that they stoop to repeating alleged anecdotes to impugn his character?  (Even if it were true, what is the point of repeating it?)   It really is one of the sicker aspects of Twitter.

UPDATE:  A philosopher elsewhere writes:

The Dembroff story about Peter Singer strikes me as very likely to reflect a misinterpretation.  In my times visiting at Princeton, I've been in a lot of seminars with Peter, and I never saw him playing anything like the "I'm extremely famous" card. On the contrary, he was unfailingly self-effacing, wryly funny, constructive, and very good at philosophy; in short, a model citizen.  I'm sure lots of people who have been around the Values Center can confirm this. 

The actual contents of the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" reviewed...

...by Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's/Canada).  From his apt conclusion:

There are immoral and outrageous ideas that cause no controversy whatever, raise no twitter-storms: ideas that not only don’t put your job at risk, but that actually lead to promotions, chairs, salary increases, and fellowships in our academies. As we learned from Gramsci—and Mill—there is as much danger in these as there is in transitory, popular controversies. Perhaps we need a Journal of Hegemonically Uncontroversial Ideas.

On the Blake Bailey biography of Philip Roth

This is the best piece I've seen about this controversy, by Katha Pollitt at The Nation.

Death threats for denying free will?

Sadly, some philosophers have received them, but it provides the occasion for an informative article in The Guardian about free will, quoting many philosophers.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

More signs of the times, this time from San Diego State University

Social media is driving this nonsense, and in two ways:  social media facilitates mobbing based on selective reporting; and social media shows others that by seeking out occasions for faux offense, they too can occupy the limelight, get administrators, more often than not, to capitulate, etc.

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" evaluated in light of the replication crisis in social psychology

Interesting.  Thoughts from readers?

"Derrida made simple" and other Twitter delights

As I've noted before, I do post links to items on the blog on Twitter, so you can follow the blog there (if you participate in that godforsaken medium of the resentful and never-ending condescension from below!).  And I post a few other things that don't make it to the blog, like "Derrida made simple."

Peter Singer interviewed...

...in The New Yorker.  Some interesting bits, although I was sorry to see Professor Singer took the bait on this absurd question:

A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.

That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally [then goes on to name some of them from outside the Anglophone world].

The correct answer would have been:  "No, it's not on my radar, and it has nothing to do with equity.  My citing more Black writers would not contribute to equity; reparations for the descendants of the victims of slavery and de jure segregation would contribute to equity.   Scholarship is not about equity, it is about engaging evidence and arguments that are relevant and worth engaging.  If you have in mind some evidence and arguments relevant to my work that I have neglected, I would be interested in them, independent of the race or nationality of the authors.  But it is pernicious ideological obfuscation to act like keeping a tally of the race of authors you engage contributes anything to equity or human well-being."

UPDATE:   Something I posted on Facebook in response to a comment from a colleague elsewhere might also be relevant here: 

My position is that racial or demographic equity in citations is not a value in scholarship; truth and knowledge are the only values. If past racism has resulted in neglect of scholars who can contribute to truth and knowledge in a particular domain, then the demand should be to name those scholars so that they can be studied. But equity-qua--demographic-diversity per se is not a scholarly value. It has a stronger claim to be a value in pedagogy, policing, and other contexts of course.

Want to rise in the QS university rankings? Paying QS for "consulting" services may be a good bet!

We've noted the "Quirky Silliness" rankings before (and see also), but this new study is an eye-opener:

Results show that universities with frequent QS-related contracts experienced much greater upward mobility in both overall rankings and in faculty-student ratio scores over five years in the QS World Rankings. Positions of Russian universities that had frequent QS-related contracts increased on .75 standard deviations (approximately 140 positions) more than they would have increased without such contracts," the study says. "In a similar way, QS faculty-student ratio scores of Russian universities that had frequent QS-related contracts increased on 0.9 standard deviations more than they would have increased without frequent QS-related contracts. Taken together, these findings suggest that conflicts of interest may produce significant distortions in global university rankings."

Chirikov calls these changes "the first empirical evidence to date that rankers’ conflicts of interest may negatively impact outcomes in university rankings."

"Public philosophy" is not scholarship (and not simply because most of it is bad qua philosophy)

Lawyer/philosopher Tommy Crocker (South Carolina) calls to my attention a recent blog post by philosophers Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin (both Vanderbilt) arguing that public philosophy should not be part of the institutional criteria for promotions and salary increases.  They observe:

[O]nce a faculty member’s public-facing work is folded into the usual schemes of recognition and reward, its quality will become a focus of professional assessment. However, most public-facing scholarship is not subject to peer review, and thus its content often does not have the endorsement of the scholarly community to which the faculty member belongs. What this means is that, in crediting public scholarship, administrators will need to apply their own conception of the relevant metrics for evaluation. The danger is that, once it is introduced into the formal channels of professional advancement, one’s contributions to public philosophy will be assessed according to administrators’ ideals concerning the branding and public face of the university.

Professor Crocker added his own apt observation:

[T]he link I see with the “new ptolemaism” discussion is that it might seem to invite encouragement of social activism in lieu of traditional scholarship in ways that create possible pernicious incentives for administrators to encourage public facing advocacy along favored lines of say promoting diversity and inclusion, and for it to count as scholarship, and by implication to be able to evaluate as non-meritorious non-favored advocacy say of criticisms of university investments for their climate impact and the like. If a faculty member can get merit raises or scholarship credit for favored public facing advocacy that aligns with the administration’s favored views, then such writing will be more likely to be skewed accordingly.

Howard University plans to eliminate its Classics Department, the only one at an HBUC

Happily, there is an uproar in opposition.

(Thanks to Kathleen Ryan for the pointer.)

More on the "Journal of Controversial Ideas"

As we saw, there were some dismissive responses to the new journal from the usual suspects (see also), but now philosopher Robert Gressis (Cal State/Northridge) has given a considered defense of the value of such a journal.

What the experts still want to know about COVID and the virus that causes it

Alas, there's still a lot to learn, from how long immunity lasts, to how variants will affect vaccines, to why some suffer "long COVID" while others don't even develop symptoms.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

University of Toronto censured by Canadian Association of University Teachers...

...over outside political interference in hiring at the law school.   More details, including a lengthy account by law professor Denise Reaume (Toronto), are available here.

Three tenure-track philosophers win ACLS Fellowships

They are:  Renee Jorgensen Bolinger (currently Princeton Politics, moving to Michigan); Georgi Gardner (Tennessee), and Wendy Salkin (Stanford). [Link now fixed.]

(Thanks to Liz Jackson for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Bang, "Feels Nice," 1973

Another great number from the Philadelphia hard rock band that never made it to the big time (but made our "top five" finds for 2020):

 

America is doomed, part 411: even David Brooks is noticing!

From a recent NYT column of his:

Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

In Memoriam: Kai Nielsen (1926-2021)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM APRIL 7--UPDATED

Professor Nielsen wrote widely in social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphilosophy over the course of his long career, which included teaching positions at Amherst College and New York University in the United  States and, then, for many years at the University of Calgary in Canada, where he was emeritus.  You can learn more about his work here.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

(Thanks to Nick Sagos for the information.)

UPDATE:  The Calgary memorial notice is here.  (Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

ANOTHER:  A memorial by Professor Gasper at New Politics.

"Journal of Controversial Ideas"

The inaugural issue is here.  Not all contributors chose to use pseudonyms.  (Earlier coverage here and here.)

UPDATE:  Smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa (British Columbia) is already smearing the new journal and its contributors!  Perhaps this is exactly why the journal is needed?  (See this funny rejoinder too.)

Wittgenstein exhibit, online

Philosopher Franz-Peter Griesmaier (Wyoming) kindly called to my attention that,

...on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Wittgenstein's death, and the 100th anniversary of the publication of his Tractatus, the Austrian National Library has put together an on-line exhibition of some of his manuscripts, photos, letters, etc. The narration is currently only in German, but perhaps they'll add an English translation at some point. As evidenced by his earliest surviving letter, which he wrote at age eight, Wittgenstein's nickname as a child appears to have been Luki (pronounced Lookee).

University of California and California State University systems will require COVID vaccine as condition of enrollment...

...as well they should.  Every university in the country should follow suit, although I'm sure public universities in benighted states will face obstacles.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  And now the University of Maryland.  (Thanks to Peter Carruthers for the pointer.)  Feel free to add more in the comments.

Employment declined 11% in higher education in the US during the pandemic

CHE is profiling various people who lost their jobs due to pandemic-related cutbacks, including a member of the housekeeping staff at a hotel owed by Northwestern University:

Espinosa, 48, left Colombia 20 years ago, fleeing violence in her home country and seeking opportunity in a new one. Here she married an American, became a citizen, gave birth to a daughter, and eventually got divorced. She worked for a few years at manufacturing plants, then landed a job at the hotel in the early aughts through a cousin who already worked there. At the time, Aramark ran housekeeping in the hotel, and Espinosa was paid about $9 an hour, with 10-cent-an-hour raises every year. Her health insurance cost $500 a month.

Espinosa was active in organizing the union, in 2013, a cause supported by students and faculty members at Northwestern.

“The union came, everything was different,” she says. Before she was laid off, she was paid $14.75 an hour by the Compass Group, which took over Northwestern’s services contracts in 2018, and her benefits fees went down to $85 a month.

Eight philosophers elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

They are:  Cristina Bicchieri (Penn), Ruth Chang (Oxford), Angela Davis (UC Santa Cruz), John Etchemendy (Stanford), Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia), Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard/Columbia), Stewart Shapiro (Ohio State), and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley).

Arkansas Taliban...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 20--UPDATED

...trying, again, to inject creationism (not simply "Intelligent Design" creationism) into the science curriculum.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

UPDATE:   Fortunately, the bill was (narrowly) defeated in committee.  (Thanks to Glenn Branch for the pointer.)

BJHP Article Prize for 2020

Philosopher Alix Cohen (Edinburgh) asked me to share this announcement, which I'm happy to do:

The British Journal for the History of Philosophy has awarded the 2020 Rogers Prize—its annual prize for the best article it publishes—to Khaled El-Rouayheb (Harvard) for his paper ‘The liar paradox in fifteenth-century Shiraz: the exchange between Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī’ (volume 28, issue 2).

This Prize, awarded for the first time in 2012, was established in honour of Prof. John Rogers, the Founding Editor of the journal. It is worth £1000, and will be announced in the next issue of the journal.

Here’s the abstract of his article:

Two rival scholars from Shiraz in Persia, Dawānī (d. 1502) and Dashtakī (d. 1498) engaged in a bitter and extended dispute over a range of metaphysical and logical issues. One of these was the liar paradox. Their debate on this point marked the most extensive scrutiny of the paradox in Arabic until that time. Dashtakī’s solution was to deny that the statement ‘What I say is false’ is true or false, on the ground that there is one statement and one application of the falsity predicate. Given that – ex hypothesi – there is no other statement, there is no basis for a reiteration of the truth or falsity predicate and describing the statement itself as true or false. Dawānī’s solution was to deny that ‘What I say is false’ is a statement at all, and he argued that it is instead akin to a performative utterance such as ‘I hereby sell you this’.

The runner-up for the prize is Ursula Renz (Graz) for her paper ‘Cassirer’s enlightenment: on philosophy and the ‘Denkform’ of reason’ (volume 28, issue 3).

Shaun Nichols (Cornell) discusses the philosophy and psychology of morality...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

On the motives of academics and administrators in promoting faux "social justice" initiatives

Some interesting comments from the earlier thread, that might warrant separate discussion:

"Canadian philosopher" writes:

Professor Lowrey argues that there are three elements that together threaten to undermine the academy. The “new Ptolemaism” is one piece but is combined with: (2) the Foucault-inspired insistence that academics identify a hierarchically arranged binary and then work to invert it; and (3) the surprising alliance between two groups: (i) the professional managerial class currently running universities; and (ii) a large percentage of social science and humanities faculty, which both, for different reasons, see the traditional/current university as in need of reconstitution, if not outright dismantling. My experience, which includes multiple terms as chair of a department, suggests that all three phenomena exist to different but significant (and generally increasing) degrees, and may well add up to a non-trivial threat to universities as most people over the age of fifty understand them. A particular concern that professor Lowrey raises is how the public and its elected officials will view the value of supporting institutions of higher learning if they are remade in the way she fears.

Yoga is banned in Alabama public schools...

...because it might, after all, lead to Hinduism!

(Thanks to John Styles for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: Best Anglophone political philosophers since 1945?

Back in 2016, with a discussion of the poll results.

Peter Carruthers (Maryland) talks about "Human and Animal Minds"...

...with Richard Brown (CUNY) at Consciousness Live.

Alexa rankings of philosophy blogs, redux

We first noticed these a few months ago, so I took a more recent look to see if there were any changes for the philosophy blogs/sites (there were some in the overall rankings, but not many in the order):

Leiter Reports:                    340,106

Daily Nous:                          556,133

APA Online:                         918,916

Philosopher's Coccoon:      1,047,537

Digressions, Impressions:   1,404,354

PeaSoup (ethics blog)        2,469,935

The stunning verdict in the killing of George Floyd

When the jury announced they had a verdict just one day after closing arguments, it was clear Officer Chauvin was going to be convicted on at least some of the charges.  But I wouldn't have guessed that he would be convicted on all three charges, including the hardest one to prove, second-degree murder.  The second-degree murder  charge requires proving that Chauvin unintentionally caused Floyd's death while committing felony assault, the latter requiring "intentional infliction of substantial bodily harm."  The prosecutors must have done a very good job to secure a conviction on that charge as well.

Interestingly, during this whole trial, I've not heard of any evidence suggesting that Chauvin's criminal misconduct reflected racial animus.   Shoot me an e-mail if I missed something.

It's certainly a great relief that Chauvin was convicted, and actually encouraging that he was convicted on all three counts.  Let us hope it has a deterrent effect on other police officers.

The crisis of the New York City college prep schools

"Woke capitalism" isn't playing that well with the capitalists who pay 50k and up to send their kids to private high schools in NYC, schools which seem to have fallen through the Kendi-antiracist looking glass.  But the question is why?   The race fixation and posturing doesn't, of course, endanger capitalist relations of production, although I imagine it will endanger the privileges the parents are paying dearly for, as colleges rush to admit more racial minorities and fewer kids from "elitist" institutions.  (This Atlantic article captures the anti-private school Zeitgeist well).  Indeed, when the New York Times, the mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class in America, publishes an article like this about the invasion of the bastions of ruling class privilege by non-elite students, elite prep schools surely have good reasons to worry.  Their rush to hyper-wokeness is probably an attempt to rebrand the schools so that elite colleges can resume admitting their students in suitably large proportions.

Blast from the past: best Anglophone scholars of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy since WWII?

Back in 2016.

Philosopher Michael Strevens (NYU) talks about "The Knowledge Machine"...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.

Urban animals and "pervasive captivity"

Philosopher Nicolas Delon (New College of Florida) discusses.

America is doomed, part 328: One America News Network edition

This propaganda network, which makes Fox look responsible, has 1.5 million subscribers and is available  in some 35,000,000 households around the country. 

"The New Ptolemaism" in the humanities and social sciences

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 15--MORE DISCUSSION WELCOME

The author of this piece is a gender critical feminist, but I found more interesting its description of "the New Ptolemaism" than its particular application to debates about trans identity:

This is a push for scholarship to be insistently insular and to be much less interested in the study of the world than in the study of the study of the world. This kind of work, which is by now very common in the social sciences and humanities, performs the same neat trick every time. It turns out, in every such analysis, that the framing of inquiry turns out to be more significant than the object of inquiry. Inevitably, the most important research site thus becomes academia itself because academia is where the framing happens. Any real understanding of the world–and any disruption of it–must on this view begin within the academy. The academy becomes the center around which everything else revolves, and the most profound forms of intervention into systems of “power/knowledge,” to use Foucault’s famous phrase, are those that upend academic conventions.

Curious whether this rings true to any readers.  Please confine the discussion to this idea (and to whether Foucault is fairly implicated in it).

Blast from the past: How have other universities handled budget crises without destroying entire departments?

Back in 2010, when the precipitating cause was the global crisis of capitalism in 2008, rather than COVID.

A look at the 2020-21 job market, such as it was

Courtesy, as usual, of philosopher Marcus Arvan (Tampa); an excerpt:

[T]he actual number of junior TT jobs in philosophy advertised this year on PhilJobs appears by my tally to be 118, down from 224 last year. So, unfortunately, compared to last year, junior TT jobs this year appear to be roughly half of what they were last year....

In any case, here's a summary of what I found:

TOTAL (junior-level) TT jobs advertised in philosophy = 118

• Open AOS: 29 jobs (24.6% of all TT jobs advertised)

• 'Core areas' (mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, logic) = 7.5 jobs (6.4% of TT jobs)

• Value theory (ethics, social, political, law) = 51.6 jobs (37.8% of TT jobs) 

  • Ethics & Applied Ethics (biomedical, environmental, AI ethics, etc.): 38.25 (26.3%)  
  • Social, Political, Law, Econ: 12.13 jobs (10.3% of jobs)

• Science (including philosophy of technology & AI) = 13.8 jobs (11.7%)

  • Philosophy of Science: 4.2 jobs (3.6%)
  • Philosophy of Technology: 6.1 jobs (5.2%)
  • AI/machine learning: 1.25 jobs (1%)
  • History of life-sciences: 1 job (1%)

• History = 7.15 jobs (6.1%)

  • History (open): 2.75 jobs (2.3%)
  • 18th-19th Century: 1 job (1%)
  • Medieval: 1 job (1%)
  • Ancient: 2.4 jobs (2%)

• Social identity (race, gender, feminism) = 8 jobs (6.8%)

  • Feminism & gender: 3 jobs (2.5%)
  • Race & African-American philosophy: 5 jobs (4.2%)

• 'Non-western': 7.7 jobs (6.5%)

  • Non-western: 2.45 jobs (2.1%)

  • African philosophy: .5 (.5%)

  • Asian philosophy: .25 jobs (.2%)

  • Buddhist philosophy: .5 jobs (.5%)

  • Caribbean philosophy: .25 jobs (.2%)

  • Chinese philosophy: .25 jobs (.2%)

  • Indigenous philosophy: .25 jobs (.2%)

  • Islamic philosophy: 1 job (1%)

  • Latin American philosophy: 1 job (1%)

• Continental philosophy = 1.4 jobs (1.2%)
• Philosophy of Religion = 1.5 jobs (1.3%)
• Aesthetics = 0 jobs (1 job in Art History)

As in prior years, the "core" is no longer very core on the job market, unless it turns out all the "open" jobs are going to philosophers in the "core" (some are).  19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy continues to be outrageously neglected, despite it being one of the most fertile periods in the history of philosophy, hugely influential across all the humanities and social sciences.   See Professor Arvan's post for the details of how he calculates the preceding.   Comments from readers welcome.

In Memoriam: Ed Gettier (1927-2021)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 13:  UPDATED

Professor Gettier was responsible for what was no doubt the most famous paper in epistemology--and the most famous short paper in Anglophone philosophy--of the past sixty years, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"  David Lewis, as I recall, once said that no one had ever "proved" anything in philosophy, except Gettier (readers can correct me in the comments, or supply the reference to where Lewis said this). 

Gettier was of a generation when philosophers could make careers in the academy based on high regard from their colleagues without many publications (think Rogers Albritton [Harvard, then UCLA] or Thompson Clarke [Berkeley]).   He taught at Wayne State during its own "golden era" as a center for analytic philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, but spent most of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (which he helped establish as a leading center for analytic philosophy), where he was emeritus.   Philosopher Hilary Kornblith tells me a memorial is forthcoming, which I'll add when it appears.

UPDATE:   Memorials from colleagues at U Mass/Amherst are now available here; others can add their own remembrances there as well.  (Thanks to Hilary Kornblith for the pointer.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Captain Beyond, "Sufficiently Breathless," 1973

The title track of this California band's second album, this is my favorite tune of theirs:

 

These people are all out of their minds

Female white Yale professor serving on a nearby town council makes a "point of order" while a male Black councilmember is speaking; the latter refers to her as "councilwoman," she demands to be called "Dr."  He declines (rightly so, the title is irrelevant in a democratic body--he's the only sane person in the mix!), she calls him a sexist on her Facebook page.  Now there's a petition denouncing her as a "racist" and demanding her removal from the council.

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

AAUP study of faculty compensation and responses to COVID, 2020-21

Lots of interesting details, but here's the overview of how institutions responded to COVID:

• Nearly 60 percent implemented salary freezes or reductions.
• About 30 percent eliminated or reduced some form of fringe benefits.
• Over 5 percent did not reappoint or terminated contracts for at least some tenure-line faculty.
• Over 20 percent did not renew contracts or terminated contracts for at least some non-tenure-track faculty.
• Almost 10 percent implemented furloughs for at least some faculty.
• Over 50 percent took some other action for tenure-line faculty. The most common action described was some type of early retirement program.
• Almost 30 percent took some other action for non-tenure-line faculty.
• Almost 50 percent implemented tenure-clock modifications for at least some tenure-track faculty.

In at least one striking case of cutting fringe benefits, namely Johns Hopkins, it turned out there was no financial reason to do so!  Johns Hopkins has now restored, retroactively, retirement contributions.  Do readers know of any similar cases where a university has reversed course on COVID-related cuts?

 

 

Hope for America?

Mostly, I think America is doomed, but occasionally there is a glimmer of hope:

Only 47 percent of American adults said they were members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to recently released polling that was conducted by Gallup throughout last year. It marked the first time that a majority of Americans said they were not members of a church, mosque or synagogue since Gallup first started asking Americans about their religious membership in the 1930s....

What’s driving this shift? In part, it’s about people who still identify with a religious tradition opting not to be a member of a particular congregation. Only 60 percent of Americans who consider themselves religious are part of a congregation, compared to 70 percent a decade ago, according to Gallup. But the bigger factor, Gallup said, is the surge of religiously unaffiliated Americans — people who are agnostics, atheists or simply say they are not affiliated with a religious tradition. The rise of this group — sometimes referred to as “nones” because they answer “none” when asked about their faith (and, you know, it’s a play on words) — isn’t new....