Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Among the stuff ChatGPT makes up...

...are false accusations of sexual haraassment against innocent individuals!

New faculty group on academic freedom at Harvard established

Here.  We've had a similar group at Chicago for a couple of years.   Are there other such groups on other campuses?  Please post links in the comments.

(Thanks to Ned Hall for the pointer about the new Harvard group.)

College accreditation agencies now flexing their muscles for "diversity"

From CHE:

The six-year graduation rate for [California Lutheran University's ] Hispanic students, who make up 40 percent of its 2,800 undergraduates, is equal to that of white and Asian American students, at about 75 percent. That sets the university apart from most others: Nationally, about 54 percent of Hispanic students graduate within six years.

Despite that accomplishment, the university received from its accreditor in early 2021 a “notice of concern” finding that it wasn’t truly inclusive. Academic outcomes hadn’t similarly improved for Black students, for whom the six-year graduation rate is 69 percent, according to a report by the WASC Senior College and University Commission, formerly the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, one of the nation’s major institutional accreditors.....

The 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black [also a poor and economically marginalized--ed.] man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, was another catalyst for action by the Western commission. “What does the death of George Floyd have to do with what we do? Everything,” the agency said just days after Floyd’s death. Spurred by that event, the accreditor established an Equity and Inclusion Council to make those issues central to everything it does....

Harvard's entire faculty of arts & sciences not even worth three times more than the University of Chicago economics department

$125 million to name the economics department here, $300 million to name the entire graduate school of arts & sciences at Harvard.  The market speaks!

Nietzsche on nihilism

Philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy comments.  I agree with a lot of this, although I don't think it captures the causes of the risk of "suicidal nihilism" that Nietzsche discusses in the Third Essay of the Genealogy.

Blast from the past: Green on conservatives on campus

Back in 2017.

Reed on Rustin

This certainly makes a nice contrast with this.  Professor Reed writes:

Bayard Rustin’s commentary between 1965 and 1975 on race, class, and politics in the U.S. was sharply insightful and can be read profitably for cultivating a nuanced understanding of the crucial period between the victories won by the civil rights movement and institutional consolidation of the ethnic interest-group regime generally known as “black politics.”1 To the extent that naïve, inadequate, simplistic, or simply wrong narratives concerning that political moment figure significantly into current formulations of black political life, engaging with Rustin’s critiques can be a helpful corrective to mistaken or shallow assessments regarding the present as well as the past.

Good work if you can get it

Ibram Kendi, well-known "anti-racism" grifter, was paid $30,000 by Rutgers for a 30-minute meeting with some Rutgers students, and a one hour "moderated lecture" with a sympathetic Rutgers law professor at the Camden campus.  Plus, he demanded first-class airfare (from Boston to Philadelphia?).   The rich get richer, including in academe, and even when they have no content.  (I wonder whether Professor Reed, an actual black intellectual, has ever gotten a fee like this; I rather doubt it, since his views do not fit with the agenda of the ruling class.)

UPDATE:  A reader points out that, according to CHE, Jonathan Haidt, another dubious character (although not an enemy of academic freedom, unlike Kendi), was getting 30K per speech back in 2017! 

Howell from SMU to Rice

Robert Howell (philosophy of mind, metaphysics), who is currently a Distinguished Professor in and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has accepted appointment as Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, where he will also be Chair of the Department.

Professor Christian Emden, the current Chair of Philosophy at Rice, tells me that the university is investing in Philosophy, and that the department will be making several more appointments in the next few years.

Gooding-Williams from Columbia to Yale

Robert Gooding-Williams, currently professor of philosophy and African-American studies at Columbia University, will become Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, effective July 1, 2024.  Professor Gooding-Williams is especially well-known for his work in philosophy of race (including influential work on Du Bois) and on 19th-century European philosophy (esp. Nietzsche).  (As an aside:  Gooding-Williams, who was born in 1953, will be one of the oldest laterals in philosophy I can recall.  Could the era of age discrimination in philosophy be coming to an end?)

(Thanks to Verity Harte for the information.)

"Irrational exuberance" about AI

This seems right:

AI doesn’t have to be all that smart to cause a lot of harm. Take this week’s story about how Bing accused a lawyer of sexual harassment — based on a gross misreading of an op-ed that reported precisely the opposite. I am not afraid because GPT is too smart, I am afraid because GPT is too stupid, too dumb to comprehend an op-ed, and too dumb to keep its mouth shut. It’s not smart enough to filter out falsehood, but just smart enough to be dangerous, creating and spreading falsehoods it fails to verify. Worse, it’s popular enough to become a potential menace.

But a lot of other people are scared for a different reason: they imagine that GPT-5 will be wholly different from GPT-4, not some reliability-and-truth-challenged bull in a china shop, but a full-blown artificial general intelligence (AGI)....

AGI really could disrupt the world. But GPT-5 is not going to do any of that...

A strike seems imminent at Rutgers

MOVING TO FRONT FROM THIS MORNING:  THE STRIKE IS ON!

Rutgers philosophers Kati Balog and Barry Loewer write:

You have likely heard that the Rutgers unions have been negotiating with the Rutgers administration over working conditions and salary. The administration has been very resistant and to a degree duplicitous. The primary issue is working conditions for part time and non-tenure track faculty. Our unions are asking for pay parity, job security, and medical insurance for PTLs, among other things. Their current salaries are below a living wage when teaching 6 courses a year. If someone can obtain 6 courses a year that is not enough to live on in northern New Jersey so adjuncts try to obtain other work leading them to travel around the state and undermine their teaching. It is in Rutgers’s interest as a university to meet these demands. They have sufficient resources (according to the union, about $800M in unrestricted reserves), in any case, the football coach has a $4million salary and like many universities, the administration is bloated. We hope there is no strike, but if necessary, there will be one for the sake of Rutgers and higher education generally.

Here is a link to an article about the current strike, and some  background:

https://truthout.org/articles/one-of-uss-largest-public-universities-could-see-first-strike-in-its-257-years/

Here is a link to a letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway calling on him to refrain from court action against union activity, which can be signed:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qDit6KCecVM7qHQr0LeD-GbYpIesQ5zi/view

Please post any of this information that you think is pertinent and ask for support from your readers.

One can also donate to support the strikers.

 

The assault on New College of Florida

Philosopher Nicolas Delon at New College talks about how these developments are affecting the faculty; an excerpt:

We have seven or eight tenure-track candidates coming up for tenure this year. Everyone has a positive recommendation for tenure. The next step is supposed to be the Board of Trustees, which in April will approve or deny tenure. Traditionally, the Board of Trustees just rubber-stamps the tenure based on the recommendations that are made. Now, recently, President Corcoran has met with the president of our union to recommend that the candidates withdraw their files before it’s too late. My interpretation is that Corcoran suspects there’s probably a non-negligible proportion of the trustees who want to make an example out of those people and deny them tenure. The trustees as a whole, Corcoran and DeSantis want to turn our institution into something different. And in order to do that, they need to hire new faculty. The best way for them to hire new faculty is to get rid of the faculty who they can fire without breaching contract. So that means firing the tenure-track faculty.

They can’t fire tenured faculty like me without breach of contract, but our collective bargaining agreement is not eternal—it’s up for renegotiation in June 2024. And with DeSantis’s higher-education bill, which is basically trying to overhaul tenure, there’s a possibility that it will be very easy for the president to fire many of us even with tenure. He has said they have currently no plans to fire tenured faculty. But should we trust him?

Philosopher of science Craig Callender talks about pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and more...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

Jesus didn't rise from the dead, because no one rises from the dead

So why is a secular newspaper running an interview that treats this as a serious possibility? It's one thing for a Church newspaper to feature such an interview, but the New York Times?  Maybe they should now run an interview with a Hume scholar on Hume on miracles and the comparative worthlessness of "testimony" in this context.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

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

We haven't featured a new tune from the great Welsh heavy metal trio in quite some time (we reposted an earlier item last fall); here's the closing track from their debut album:

 

2023 Stanton Prize of the Society for Philosophy & Psychology...

...goes to philosopher Eric Mandelbaum (CUNY Graduate Cener & Baruch College).

Yao from Rice to UCLA

Vida Yao (ethics, moral psychology), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy (with tenure) at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Let me observe (as I first did many years ago) that no department (outside the "top five") in the country has a better eye for junior philosophical talent than Rice.  Former faculty include Keith DeRose (Yale), C. Kenneth Waters (Minnesota, then a Canada Research Chair at Calgary), Larry Temkin (Rutgers, emeritus), Sherrilyn Roush (Berkeley, then KCL, then UCLA), Christopher Hitchcock (Caltech, who turned down Berkeley), Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern), Eric Margolis (Wisconsin, then British Columbia), Helen Longino (Minnesota, then Stanford, where she is now Emerita), Nomy Arpaly (Brown, who turned down Michigan)--I'm sure I'm forgetting some.   It's a remarkable track record, and I strongly suspect many current faculty are in this same category (although some will be victims of rampant age discrimination).

The Trump indictment in NYC

A couple of perspectives:  skeptical and optimistic (with some caveats).  The latter is pretty convincing, since it is firmly grounded in the actual New York law in a way the former is not.

"How not to kill yourself"

Philosopher Clancy Martin discusses his own experiences.

(Thanks to Mike G. for the pointer.)

Three philosophers win 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships

They are:  Stephen Darwall (Yale), Jennifer Morton (Penn), and Susanna Siegel (Harvard).

Robots coming to restaurants

Just as Marx expected, robots are starting to replace human workers in restaurants:

“Every restaurant chain is looking toward as much automation as possible,” said Phil Zheng of Richtech Robotics, an Austin-based maker of robot servers. “People are going to see these everywhere in the next year or two.”

Li Zhai was having trouble finding staff for Noodle Topia, his Madison Heights, Michigan, restaurant, in the summer of 2021, so he bought a BellaBot from Pudu Robotics. The robot was so successful he added two more; now, one robot leads diners to their seats while another delivers bowls of steaming noodles to tables. Employees pile dirty dishes onto a third robot to shuttle back to the kitchen.

Now, Zhai only needs three people to do the same volume of business that five or six people used to handle. And they save him money. A robot costs around $15,000, he said, but a person costs $5,000 to $6,000 per month.

Social (pseudo) Science

From CHE:

In complex areas like the study of racial inequality, a fundamentalism has taken hold that discourages sound methodology and the use of reliable evidence about the roots of social problems.

We are not talking about mere differences in interpretation of results, which are common. We are talking about mistakes so clear that they should cause research to be seriously questioned or even disregarded. A great deal of research — we will focus on examinations of Asian American class mobility — rigs its statistical methods in order to arrive at ideologically preferred conclusions....

Consider The Myth of the Model Minority (Routledge, 2008), in which Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin assert that “when researchers have examined Japanese and other Asian American workers in comparison with white workers with similar jobs, educational credentials, and years of job experience, the Asian American workers are found to be paid less, on average, and are less likely to be promoted to managerial positions.” But Chou and Feagin’s claim lacks any serious empirical evidence. Instead of directly citing published research from peer-reviewed journals, Chou and Feagin instead based their conclusion on a book by Tim Wise, a self-proclaimed “prominent antiracist” journalist who has no graduate training or any professional experience with evaluating labor market or socioeconomic data.

"Long Covid" in kids and young adults in fact not related to Covid

This is striking, although the author's clear partisanship is somewhat concerning:

A new paper out now from the Norwegians on Long COVID in kids and young adolescents takes a sledgehammer to the media narrative of the condition.

TL:DR - Long covid has no link to prior COVID19, instead, initial symptom severity (of whatever virus you get), loneliness and poor physical activity are linked to the “post covid conditions.”

Dr. Prasad is a hematologist/oncologist, but I presume he knows how to read the study.  What gives me pause is not his summary but his additional commentary, especially this:

The reason people [i.e., the media] inaccurately covered long COVID is that they needed to have it— they needed it to be scary— to justify continued restrictions in young populations.

There is, of course, no evidence for this hypothesis about the motivations of journalists (journalists love sensationalism, to be sure, but there is no evidence they were motivated in this case by a desire to "justify continued restrictions in young populations").   The fact that he inserts this makes me skeptical he is reliable.  People who want to be sober and objective purveyors of truths about Covid shouldn't make fact-free allegations about motives of their opponents/targets. 

An amusing interview with philosopher Roy Sorensen (UT Austin)...

...an "atrophy spouse"!

"Values, Morality, and Social Reality"

A Festschrift for several Swedish philosophers at Lund is currently open access, with contributions by Krister Bykvist, Stephen Darwall, Kirk Ludwig, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, and Wlodek Rabinowicz, among others.

(Thanks to Dan Telech for the pointer.)

What if authors could respond to referee reports before the editors make a decision?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

An interesting proposal from philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell.

UPDATE:  Opening comments here, since Professor Chappell's post is a few years old.

War on tenure comes to Louisiana...

...with new legislation to require annual reviews of tenured faculty, proposed by a legislator openly committed to abolishing tenure.  One can't expect neanderthals like this to understand the value of academic freedom, so the best bet, I suspect, is to point out that tenure is a form of non-monetary compensation, and without it, salaries will have to increase.  These folks usually understand $$$!

"Glacier Express" in Switzerland?

Have any readers taken it?  Any advice or comments welcome, you can either email me or post comments here.  Was it difficult to get reservations for seats together?  If one doesn't do the whole route, what portions are most interesting?   What should one know before doing it?  We are likely to try it in summer.  Thanks in advance.

"Philosophising in..." lesser-studied languages

Jonathan Egid, a PhD student in philosophy and comparative literature at King's College London, writes:

I recently launched an interview series titled 'Philosophising in...' - https://www.philosophisingin.com/ -  that is devoted to exploring the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world, and promoting them as media of philosophy. I thought that you and the readers of your blog might find one of our most recent interviews, on 'Philosophising in Afaan Oromo,' interesting, as it contains an account of the history of teaching philosophy in socialist Ethiopia, and a short account of teaching Marx to peasants in the mountain towns of Oromia.

How do departments interpret "negative" responses to requests to do tenure reviews?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--SOME INTERESTING RESPONSES, MORE COMMENTS WELCOME!

A colleague elsewhere raised this issue in correspondence, and it seems like it might be useful to get some reader reactions.  Assume that respondents don't specify why they are declining.  At what point should a department draw a negative inference from the fact that respondents are declining requests to do tenure reviews?  When 25% of tenure referees decline?  40%?  More than 50%?

The concern might be possibly addressed if tenure referees who decline state their reasons for declining, including their opinion of the candidate's work.  When I decline, I always state the reason, and if it is because of time and existing commitments, I also indicate my view of the candidate's work if I have one.  I have also declined referee requests because I have a low opinion of the work, and don't want to spend time on it.  I have not had to say that often, fortunately.

But what do readers think about the original question?  And, relatedly, how do you decline requests to be a tenure referee?  Do you state your reasons and do you offer an opinion about the work? 

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives": a discussion with Adolph Reed and historian Barbara Fields

Here (it really starts around the 7-minute mark).   There are also some references to this utterly scathing essay by Reed on "black public intellectuals".   An excerpt from the latter below the fold.

If you live in Wisconsin, vote for Janet Protasiewicz tomorrow...

...for a spot on the state Supreme Court.  This is hugely important for Wisconsin and for the University.  Although Wisconsin is, in reality, a "purple" state (it has one Democratic Senator, one Republican senator, for example, while the Democratic Governor won re-election by a modest margin), the Repugs in the legislature have gerrymandered themselves into a permanent majority--unless the state Supreme Court strikes down their anti-democratic plan to remain in power.  The court itself is evenly divided, 3-3, so whoever fills this spot will play a decisive role on a variety of issues, including gerrymandering and abortion.  Protasiewicz will make a real difference.  The Repugs in the legislature have also been starving the university system, which began under union buster Scott Walker as Governor, another reason why anyone who cares about public education needs to vote for Judge Janet tomorrow!

An AI researcher on what worries him: people, not AI

Some interesting thoughts.   What he should have said is that what worries him are people with the incentives produced by capitalist markets!

Federal judge in Arkansas says Supreme Court's Dobbs decision means Arkansas can criminalize adultery, masturbation and more

Informative analysis of a recent court opinion by constitutional law scholar Michael Dorf.

UPDATE:  ‘Twas an April Fools joke, a bit too subtle (and plausible).  

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: The Nazz, "Open My Eyes," 1968

ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 6, 2018

It's hard to believe this groovy tune, very much of its moment, couldn't even crack the Billboard top 100 back in 1968.   That's a young Todd Rundgren on lead guitar; ironically, the flip side, "Hello It's Me" became a big hit for Rundgren in the early 1970s. 

 

FIRE on the Shaviro case at Wayne State

Following up on this, here is FIRE's informative statement on the case.  It explains the applicable legal standards methodically.