Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Classics professor at UT Austin defamed last December as a "pedophile" by deranged students...

...has now, thankfully, sued them (complaint here:   Download BLAKEMORECOMPLAINT(Final)).   (Earlier coverage (and also), and see also this for more details, including about material since deleted from the Twitter account of the deranged students.)  Professor Hubbard's lawyer issued this statement, which sums up what is documented in the various new sources and also reveals UT Austin's failure to act honorably in defense of academic freedom:

In December of 2019 Professor Hubbard’s home was violently attacked by a mob of masked University students.   They vandalized his home, distributed leaflets to neighbors falsely accusing him of pedophilia, and chanted threats of violence against him.  Dr. Hubbard does not have this sexual orientation, and has never been convicted or even accused of such conduct before now.  He was forced to flee his home under police protection and move out permanently.  Dr. Hubbard’s treatment is a matter of public record and known to UT.  Dr. Hubbard is unaware of any serious effort by the University to identify or sanction the students involved in the mob attack and vandalism on his house, or the blatant libel and slander he has suffered through a systematic and coordinated effort by UT students both on campus and off.   He reluctantly takes this step to defend himself because UT Austin leadership has not taken sufficient action. He will hold responsible anyone who alleges he has encouraged pedophilia, engaged in pedophilia, or has any interest in doing so.  Until these recent attacks on him he had worked for 33 years at UT without a single allegation of sexual impropriety.  The climate at UT Austin that allows students to freely lodge harmful, false allegations needs to stop and adult students must be held accountable for their actions. Dr. Hubbard has pledged that any award he wins will go directly to charities that work on behalf of gay, lesbian, and trans people, who have been tarred by false charges of pedophilia since the 'Save Our Children' crusade of Anita Bryant in the 1970s.

Southwest Baptist University in Missouri eliminates its philosophy program...

...and the job of its one tenured philosophy professor, who appears to be the real target.  Not a good look for SBU at all.

(Thanks to Rev. Beau Underwood for the pointer.)

The First Amendment is apparently hard to understand

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 5--UPDATED WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM PROFESSOR JUN

IHE had a brief item this morning about controversy over statements by philosopher Nathan Jun, who teaches at Midwestern State University.  (MSU is a public liberal arts college, in a smallish city in North Texas (about 100,000 people), on the border with Oklahoma.)   Jun did a riff on the remark attributed to Diderot that "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest," substituting police, capitalists and politicians for priests and kings.  This is clearly lawful expression, but it was bound not to play well in that part of America (probably it wouldn't play well outside of Hyde Park or Greenwich Village). 

The University initially pointed out that the First Amendment exists and protects Professor Jun from sanction by the university for his speech.  So far, so good.  But now the University President has taken to Facebook to assure her constituencies that they're looking into lawful options for punishing Professor Jun's speech.  Not so good.  I'm struck by the commenters on her Facebook post:  some think that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment (it is, but Jun's statement doesn't meet any statutory definition of hate speech I've seen in those jurisdictions where it is not protected--though one could imagine that politicians would be thrilled to be a protected class for hate speech!); others think his statement constitutes unlawful threats or incitement to violence (it is neither, and it's not close).  (It's true Diderot's remarks preceded the French Revolution, but no one thinks they incited anyone to the violence that ensued!)

Another academic freedom case, at the University of New Hampshire

IHE, in a very strangely written article (more on that in a moment), reports that the University of New Hampshire has put an assistant professor of chemistry on administrative leave and is investigating him because he posted pseudonymously (posing as a minority STEM professor) on Twitter in order to critique "woke" blather.   I can't see how a public university can have any grounds for investigating or disciplining him, unless he engaged in some criminal misconduct under the pseudonym (and the article contains no suggestion of that).   This is plainly extramural speech protected by academic freedom.   And this is not like the case of the George Washington professor (Jessica Krug) who passed herself off in real life as a racial minority, which raises questions about fraudulent misrepresentations that affected her hiring.

The author of the article, Colleen Flaherty, perhaps realizes that the University has no case here, and that may account for some of the strange claims.  Ms. Flaherty writes:

Three other white academics have been outed this year as posing as people of color, two in person and one only online. All three people -- historian Jessica Krug, graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad and #MeTooSTEM founder BethAnn McLaughlin -- caused harm, especially to members of the communities they were imitating, but they also, to varying degrees, used their fake identities to advocate for those communities. 

Notice that the article reports as fact that the imposters "caused harm, especially to members of the communities they were imitating."   Really? What is the evidence? That people were upset?  But being upset or offended is not being harmed.  Recall the apt remarks of the late John Gardner (Oxford): 

That something offends you, or more generally makes you feel bad, does not show that it does you any harm. We all feel bad about something most days and come out of it unscathed, just as we come out of most physical pain unscathed. Of course there may be harms that are consequences of offence and pain. Torture harms people by the use of pain. Upset may turn to depression and may then be disabling.

No evidence of any harm has been adduced, but Ms. Flaherty writes as though it were an established fact that there was harm.   That is shoddy journalism. 

On "cancel culture" again, and a philosophy anecdote

Linguist John McWhorter (Columbia) takes another stab at the topic (earlier attempt here):

Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.

Skeptics have labeled this undertaking “cancel culture,” which of late has occasioned a pushback from its representatives. The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind....An indication of how deeply this frame of mind has penetrated many of our movers and shakers is that they tend to see this punishment clause as self-evidently just, as opposed to the novel, censorious addendum that it is.

Professor McWhorter goes on to review various examples of cancelings, successful and attempted.   One of his anecdotes concerns former philosophy PhD students:

I have heard from not one but two philosophy doctorates who left academia. One explained that he was driven out by the “accelerating creep of what felt to me a pretty stifling orthodoxy. The hiring market was dominated by a concern for diversity statements, the ability to teach fairly ideologically-slanted courses on philosophy and critical race theory or philosophy and gender, etc.; and more generally it felt progressively less like a profession where I could opt out of those trends while still being a competitive job applicant.”

There has certainly been a striking increase in job ads for philosophy of race and gender, but otherwise this may be a slight exaggeration about the state of the profession.  (After all, despite my "unwoke" condition, this is still the most heavily trafficked philosophy blog in the world--admittedly, a minority of the benighted "woke" read to get aggravated!). 

The biggest threat to free speech on campus and academic freedom...

...consistently comes from the pro-Israel interest groups.  They are running scared because they realize that far too many of Israel's actions can not withstand public scrutiny.

Toronto Law scandal involving political interference with academic hiring continues

Amnesty and the National Council of Canadian Muslims have joined the call for an investigation of the allegations of outside meddling in appointments, and some are now naming the judge allegedly involved, David Spiro of the Tax Court and an alumnus of the law school.

Job search at U of Toronto law school scuttled after politically motivated interference by a sitting judge

Those are the allegations, and, if true, would represent a serious breach not only of judicial ethics but of academic freedom at the University of Toronto.  Job searches should be conducted and positions filled based on academic considerations, not the political concerns of members of the public, even if they are alumni and donors.

English Department at University of Chicago embarrasses itself

IHE has a story, and UChicago biologist Jerry Coyne also comments.   Departments do have the right to choose what fields to emphasize in graduate admissions, but to limit admissions to a single subfield (is it even a subfield in English?) to make a political statement is irresponsible and is another data point for those skeptical that English is still a Wissenschaft.  Enzo Rossi's quip on Twitter was also good:  "How self-absorbed and self-important do you have to be to think this is going to make any difference to anything other than the careers of a couple of Ivy League scholars?"  

How to evaluate history's heroes

Sensible comments from philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg), and timely again given the Hume fiasco at Edinburgh.   From the concluding paragraphs of the essay:

Newton wrote to Robert Hooke that if he saw further than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. That was a medieval metaphor that went back to before the 12th century, when John of Salisbury wrote in his Metalogicon, “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

Medieval humility has been inverted in the modern era with the hubris that we are moral giants on the shoulders of the dwarfs of the past, wicked dwarfs who deserve our eternal scorn. As we tear down more monuments to former heroes and erase their names from our buildings, we ought to think about their blameworthiness by the standards and expectations of their own era. Those supposed moral dwarfs we now decry may have been giants of their time. And you don’t have to be a scientist to know that even the largest persons look small when seen from a distance.

There's a serious problem at USC's Business School...

...and it has nothing to do with the professor who was vilified for using a Chinese word that sounds like an English derogatory epithet.  In a normal academic environment, the Dean of the Business School would now be relieved of his duties for violating the academic freedom of one of his instructors and for poor judgment, and the students who leveled the frivolous complaint would be identified and disciplined.   None of this will happen, but at least the Dean has been humiliated internationally for his stupidity.

I think it's time to recognize that Nietzsche had correctly diagnosed what we are witnessing in these displays, in his discussion of the "tarantulas" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

"That the world be filled with the storms of our revenge, that is what we call justice"--thus they [the tarantulas] speak to each other.

"We will wreak vengeance and abuse on all those whose equals we are not"--thus do the Tarantula-hearts vow.

"And 'will to equality'--that should henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that have power, we want to raise our clamor!"

You preachers of equality, the tyrannical madness of impotence cries out from you for "equality":  your secret desire to be tyrants is wrapped up in virtuous words!

Evangelical university, Taylor U in Indiana, fires tenured philosophy professor...

...for what is clearly lawful, extramural speech that could not be sanctioned at any school with normal tenure and academic freedom standards. (A bit more detail here.)  But Taylor's rules provide that a tenured faculty member can be terminated for "[f]ailure to meet professional, moral, philosophical and/or spiritual standards for faculty.”  These standards are set out in something called the "Life Together Convenant," which clearly gives administrators great leeway to sanction faculty for what would be contractually protected expression anywhere else.  The bottom line is that no university with academic freedom or real tenure regulates faculty this way, and the result is the fiasco before us.  It's all the more startling because there was not even a semblance of due process before termination.

(Thanks to Bryan Zuraw for the pointers.)

 

Adolph Reed couldn't speak at a meeting of the DSA

I'd heard rumors about this, and now the NYT has an account.  It's description of Reed's views is not particularly nuanced (it's understandably hard for the official mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class to present Marxist views, although Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from Princeton [quoted in the article] doesn't have that excuse), but it has some good quotes from Professor Reed:

None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a “tempest in a demitasse.” Some on the left, he said, have a “militant objection to thinking analytically”....

He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.

“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”

Professor Reed and his compatriots believe the left too often ensnares itself in battles over racial symbols, from statues to language, rather than keeping its eye on fundamental economic change.

Chomsky on the Harper's letter about free speech and "cancel culture"...

...which he of course signed, but which has been controversial with the wokerati.  From the interview:

The letter is anodyne. It's a simple statement that it's worth being careful to preserve freedom of speech. The main attack on freedom of speech was not discussed there. It's the mainstream establishment, which for years has been engaged in massive cancel culture.

But now segments of the left are picking up part of the same pathology. It's harmful; they shouldn't be doing it; it's wrong in principle. It's suicidal. It's a gift to the far right. So here's a quiet statement saying, "Look, we should be careful about these things and not undertake this." Should've been the end. Then comes the reaction, which is extremely interesting. It proves that the problem was much deeper than was assumed. The reaction is pretty hysterical, mostly totally irrational. Sensible people, personal friends of mine, are writing articles attacking the statement because of the people who signed it. Just think what that means for a second. I'm sure you, like any other person who's well-known, are deluged with requests to sign statements on human rights issues, civil liberties issues, and so on.

Do you take account of who the signers are going to be? You can't. You can't know who the signers are going to be. If this position of the critics were adopted, there would never be a statement. Nobody in his right mind would sign a statement if the content of the statement is going to be judged by who might sign it tomorrow.

This criticism is much to the pleasure of the right wing, which hates these statements. So it's another massive service to the right wing. Just as breaking up a meeting of somebody you don't like is a service to the right wing. You want to play their game? Do it straight. Don't pretend you're on the left.

The interview covers other topics, and is mixed.  He's right that activists, and Sanders in particular, pushed Biden to the left.   It's silly, though, to compare the supposed popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement with that of Martin Luther King, since the former stands for almost nothing (and nothing threatening to anyone except maybe some police and all actual racists), while the latter stood for a substantive program of social, legal and economic reform that was a threat to the status quo, and not just in the apartheid South.

Randall Kennedy takes apart the ludicrous hyperbole in the anti-racist declaration by some Princeton faculty

Kennedy's piece is here, and we noted the Princeton open letter here.   It's good to have a sober reality check on this nonsense; an excerpt:

The claim of racial exclusion is implausible. For years now, throughout the university, there has existed a self-conscious impulse to promote people of color to positions of leadership. Either today or in the very recent past, Black professors have been chairs of the departments of history, anthropology, English, religion, African American studies, and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Black professors have also served as the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs and as the director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Scores of scholars of color have been Humanities Council fellows. The general counsel of the university is Latinx. The dean of admissions is African American. The recently retired vice chair of the university board of trustees, Brent Henry, a Black lawyer keenly attuned to matters of racial equity, has been for at least the past decade one of the three or four most important figures in the governance of the university.

Current trustees include Terri Sewell, an African American member of the U.S. House of Representatives; Henri Ford, the Haitian American dean of the University of Miami School of Medicine; and Melanie Lawson, a seasoned African-American television journalist. These people, all Princeton alumni, are alert and capable and in demand. They are by no means needy. They could associate themselves with any number of prestigious enterprises. They would surely decline to contribute to or be involved with the sort of institution that the ultimatum depicts. This power and privilege is possessed also by many of the authors and signatories of the ultimatum, which accounts in part for the whiff of bad faith that suffuses the whole affair.

The ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019-20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”

More on the U of Southern Maine's "Anti-Racism" Pledge

Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) has some pretty funny observations here; an excerpt:

This kind of thing generally cheapens the idea of anti-racism. Universities are rather sad and pathetic places, in general. They're the kinds of places where, when people claim to get worried about racism, rather than using their ample resources to combat serious problems of racism out there in the world, they instead just hire a bunch of diversity officers who then create milquetoast programming for their student bodies, who already tend to be relatively non-racist and anti-racist. It's like getting worried about starvation, so you then distribute extra snacks to your generally well-fed student body rather than trying to feed actual starving people in refugee camps. You have to wonder whether the point is not to combat racism, but instead to be seen as anti-racist.

One does wonder that, doesn't one?

What is "cancel culture"?

This is a pretty apt characterization of some of the markers of "cancelling", including, e.g.:

1) Punitiveness:   Are people denouncing you to your employer or your social connections? Are you being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities? Does what is being said to or about you have the goal—or foreseeable effect—of jeopardizing your livelihood?

2) Deplatforming:   Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches or attending meetings? Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?

3) Organization:   Does criticism appear to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?

President of the University of Southern Maine understands neither academic freedom nor the First Amendment

You can't call on members of the community to sign an "anti-racism pledge," just like you can't call on them to sign a loyalty oath to American capitalism.   Of course, this isn't quite as bad as mandating as a condition of employment a profession of loyalty to the ideology of anti-racism (whatever that is:  "I won't join the Klan," "I won't use racial epithets"?, "I won't disagree with Black Lives Matter?"), but it comes to the same thing:  after all, the President has issued a public call for signatures, his staff has duly signed, so who would want to risk being branded a "racist" for failing to be counted?   But there are plenty of non-racist reasons not to sign:  e.g., doubts about what will count as "the conditions and structures" that allegedly support bigotry, doubts about who one is being asked to "stand in solidarity" with and doubts about their conceptions of "justice."   No one, least of all this blowhard President (who sounds more like the former politician he is), knows what it means to be an "antiracist...in all aspects of your life."   That the President goes on to quote the totalitarian wannabe Ibram Kendi certainly does not inspire confidence.

Someone in the general counsel office at Auburn University needs to explain the First Amendment to the admin

A brief comment on Twitter about the latest university that doesn't get it.

Nematodes are no joking matter!

This story is bizarre, even by the standards of the Twitter Red Guard!

(Thanks to David Velleman for the pointer.)

Academic freedom is dead in Hong Kong

This is horrible, and a very ominous sign for what the future holds.

(Thanks to Chris Fraser for the pointer.)

Board of Illinois Wesleyan spares Philosophy--this time

(Earlier coverage.)   Other programs were not so fortunate:   Anthropology, Greek & Roman Studies, Religious Studies, French & Italian are all being closed.   As a philosopher at IWU wrote: "Although the Philosophy Department survived—-this time—this is *not* a day for celebration. Academic freedom and tenure have been undermined at our institution, and we will continue to fight for our colleagues." 

Academic freedom and independence of Israeli universities under threat from new Minister of Higher Education

Legal theorist Alon Harel (Hebrew U) asked me to share immediately this statement from the President of Tel-Aviv University:   Download Message of the president - Significant risk to the independence of the higher education system in Israel -7.2020 (003)

Lawyer Wendy Kaminer on the unhinged responses to the Harper's letter about "cancel culture"

I was amazed to learn that the letter (referenced in passing earlier today) was actually controversial, albeit among the usual herd animals, who never met an independent thought they could abide.   The lawyer Wendy Kaminer, who signed the letter, has a suitably stinging rebuke:

‘I rest my case’, I’m tempted to say, reviewing the unhinged responses of cancel-culture fans intent on cancelling the judicious defence of free speech in our ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, published by Harper’s this week. I signed emphatically, which makes me one of ‘the worst people in the world of public intellectualism’, according to In These Times. What’s so bad about defending ‘the free exchange of information and ideas’ and critiquing ‘intolerance for opposing views’ and ‘a vogue for public shaming and ostracism’? In doing so we were not really defending the right to debate and criticise, according to In These Times: we were trying to squelch debate and censor our own critics, exhibiting a ‘bizarre aversion to being argued against … [that] now borders on the pathological’.

This is what citizens of cancel culture have apparently learned from Donald Trump: confound your critics by accusing them of precisely the sins you’re busy committing. Social-justice warriors have long demanded protection from the ‘trauma’ of hearing speech they deem offensive, calling for suppression of the speech and shunning of the speaker. So, employing Trumpian tactics, they accuse free-speech advocates of the censoriousness and psychic fragility that’s the raison d’être of their movement.

"Anywhere out of this world," said Baudelaire.

And with that I'm going back on hiatus to work on the book on Marx, as well as the drearier tasks presented by post-mortem bureaucracy in the modern world.

Several dozen Princeton faculty call for massive and systematic violation of their colleagues' contractual right to academic freedom...

...for the holy cause of "anti-racism."   ("Anti-racism" doesn't, in fact, mean opposition to racism any longer, for those who have not been paying attention.  And what is the connection between an abusive cop killing George Floyd in Minneapolis and alleged racism at Princeton?  There isn't any, of course.)  Some portions of the letter are harmless and predictable--the standard opportunism of the moment to claim resources and positions--but this proposal is chilling:

11. Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

This is simply a call to violate the contractual academic freedom rights of faculty at Princeton.  Have any signatories, one wonders, even thought about academic freedom and its purpose?  Do they realize that the only review of "research and publications" by scholars that is consistent with academic freedom is one based on applicable disciplinary standards?  Vetting the moral or political bona fides of scholarship is what universities without academic freedom do.

Statement by Alex Byrne (MIT) regarding the debate with Professor Dembroff

It is here (background here).  I would especially call readers' attention to his point #4, which sheds further light on Professor Dembroff's ongoing attempts to distract and deflect.

 

Still more on Phil Studies and the Dembroff-Byrne debate

Just a recap from last week:  

1.  Philosophical Studies (hereafter "PS") published a paper by philosopher Robin Dembroff (Yale) critiquing an earlier paper in PS by philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT).

2.  The Dembroff paper contained, as the former EIC Stewart Cohen put it, "unprofessional personal attacks" on Byrne (e.g., claiming that Byrne's paper was really "an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons” and wondering "about the motives of someone who would so confidently insert themself into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed.”  (Clarificatory note:  Professor Dembroff insists on referring to everyone by the third-person plural pronoun even if the indivdiuals in question would prefer "he" or "she," hence the use of "themself" to refer to Byrne)

3.  Springer policy forbids "descriptions of [an individual's] behavior or actions that could potentially be seen as personal attacks or allegations about that person."   Cohen, as EIC, was also committed to that policy.

4.  Given that the Dembroff paper was pretty clearly in violation of that policy, Cohen, as EIC, proposed two remedies:  (a)  PS would "make a public announcement owning up to the mistake" and reminding "prospective authors" that "personal attacks" are not permissible and that referees have a responsibility to alert the editor to such attacks; and (b) giving the target of the personal attack, Byrne, a right of reply.

5.  One other senior editor and Springer rejected these remedies, and Professor Cohen resigned as EIC and asked me to share his statement in public.

Laurie Paul calls to my attention that her colleague Professor Dembroff has now made a public response on Facebook.  It begins, oddly, with three statements of "principle" (as it were) that are not at issue in this case:

Regarding recent decisions at Philosophical Studies:

(1) All papers submitted to a philosophical journal should be subject to a transparent and professional editorial process. No paper should receive special treatment (be it harsh or favorable) because of an editor’s relationship to an author, or the editor’s personal views about the philosophical thesis defended.

(2) Academic freedom is a foundational value of philosophical scholarship. It should be restricted only with great caution. Calls to censor an academic paper that has been accepted after a transparent and professional editorial process, especially one that has gone through the double-blind peer review process, violate this foundational value.

(3) Typically, neither statements about matters of public interest nor true statements are defamatory.

Regarding (2):  there is no violation of academic freedom because a journal has editorial standards that bar personal attacks, as PS does; Cohen's proposed remedies (see my #4, above) did not include a "call[] to censor" the paper.  Perhaps Dembroff meant a call to"censure" the paper, which would be involved in a public statement acknowledging the failure to enforce journal policies.  But since the "censure" pertained to the violation of editorial standards, it would not implicate academic freedom, for the reasons already noted.  (It's a separate question whether post-publication censure is appropriate:  the issue arose during the Synthese debacle a number of years ago, and I'm inclined to think it's a bad idea, but it does  not violate academic freedom.  In the Synthese case, the editors, bizarrely, censured all the papers in the special issue, without naming the offending one.) 

Informative U Arizona article about Prof. Cohen's resigntion as EIC of Phil Studies

All student newspaper articles should be as professionally done as this one.

Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) calls out some bad actors in academic philosophy

Here (and scroll down).

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade under political attack from the Serbian government

If you want to sign this letter (as I have and as I encourage readers to do) please contact Dr. Zona Zarić from Les Archives Husserl, Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, who is organizing the letter:   zona.zaric@ens.fr.  Among the signatories already are Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Raymond Geuss, Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, and many others.

The letter is below the fold:

University of Queensland embarrasses itself on the international stage

Persecuting a philosophy undergraduate for supporting the Hong Kong protests and criticizing the Chinese Communist Party and its ties to the university isn't really a good look.  (This account is not behind a paywall.) Australia is so dependent on the Chinese market, and Australian universities are so dependent on Chinese students, that there is an increasing tendency to suppress speech offensive to the Chinese.

(Thanks to Jack James for the pointer to this story.)

UPDATE:  There is a petition in support of the undergraduate, Drew Pavlou, here.

New Infantilism at Oxford

This is more pathetic than alarming:

A motion which mandates the Oxford University Student Union (SU) to condemn the use of “hateful material” in mandatory teaching was passed in Student Council this Thursday....

Named the ‘Academic Hate Speech Motion’, the motion sets to establish a new policy on hate speech within the University to include ‘incitement of hatred on the grounds of gender identity, disability, and socio economic status, including to trans, non-binary, disabled, working-class, and women*’.

Current University policy on academic free speech protects most academic speech as long as it is within the law. The motion notes that hate speech which is ableist, misogynistic, classist or transphobic is not criminalised but believes that the University should amend the relevant policy to ‘ensure that trans and non-binary people, women, and disabled people receive equivalent protection from hateful speech within University contexts as groups which are protected by the criminal law’.

A committee member of the Student Union’s Disabilities Campaign, who seconded the motion, told The Oxford Student “....The University’s current policy towards such issues falls short of protecting many students who are particularly vulnerable to hate speech due to the shortfall in legal protection – the examples given in the motion are particularly concerning for student wellbeing...."

The motion also mandates the SU to lobby for trigger warnings on readings lists and for lectures, tutorials, and examinations with content deemed prejudicial against the aforementioned groups to be non-compulsory for students....

Under the new policy set by the motion, courses that contain ‘prejudicial content’, such as the FHS Medical Law and Ethics course- which was noted as the sole example in the motion- should revise their course content and reading lists. The motion states that articles on the Medical Law and Ethics reading list are ‘ableist content’. An article entitled “Why We Should Pick the Best Children” [by the philosopher Julian Savalescu] advocates for a moral duty not to have disabled children whilst another advocates for the ‘murder of disabled children after they have been born’, the motion noted.

This came to my attention on FB from a colleague at Oxford (not Professor Savalescu) who teaches in the "Medical Law and Ethics" course who was contemplating legal action given the defamation of the professional competence of the teachers of this course.  Perhaps a libel judgment would wake these New Infantilists up?

ADDENDUM:  Several readers point out that philosophy's leading champion of New Infantilism, Justin Weinberg, has a typically convoluted rationalization for this display (as usual, it's mostly unreadable, but for those with morbid curiosity, I include the link).  You would think a philosopher at a public university in a reactionary state would be motivated at least by prudence, if nothing else, in actually defending academic freedom for a change.

Why Berkeley's mandatory diversity statements are unlawful

My CHE essay is no longer behind the paywall.

The AAUP and financial exigency, redux

A member of the committee that drafted the new standards responds to the CHE article we noted earlier this year.   I still fear this change to the definition of financial exigency was naive, given the  AAUP's very limited enforcement powers.   Setting the bar higher would have been safer I suspect.

(Thanks to Joerg Tiede  for the pointer.)

Australian "fair work commission" judge says you can't fire a faculty member for not publishing in enough "A*" journals

A remarkable judicial push-back against the quantification culture that has taken over public university systems in Australia, the UK and elsewhere, in which academic pursuits are hostage to the stupidity of bureaucrats.  See sections 104-109 of the opinion, in particular.

"The Legal Problem with Diversity Statements," Berkeley's in particular

I believe this is an open access version of my essay at CHE. 

UPDATE:  Alas, this appears to be paywalled, I'll repost when there's a public version.

Did the AAUP make it easier for institutions to fire tenured faculty?

This CHE article suggests as much:

Experts on [the AAUP's] standards-setting Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure revised the definition of financial exigency in 2013.

Under the previous definition, a university’s financial condition had to be so dire that it "threatens the survival of the institution as a whole."

"We decided, frankly, that that was too stringent," says Henry F. Reichman, chair of Committee A.

The newer and broader definition staked out in 2013 allowed that "an institution need not be on the brink of complete collapse" in order to declare exigency. But it did need to prove that its financial troubles were legitimate and serious. Exigency, the report says, "is not a plausible complaint from a campus that has shifted resources from its primary missions of teaching and research toward employing increasing numbers of administrators or toward unnecessary capital expenditures."

UC Santa Cruz also using "diversity statements" to weed out faculty job candidates

My colleague biologist Jerry Coyne has the details.  See also this.

Harvard geneticist David Reich on the need for candid discussion of the genetic bases of disease, behavior, and cognition

After the failed petition to retract a peer-reviewed article by Nathan Cofnas, a graduate student at Oxford (who replies to some critics here), several readers pointed out that the same (or at least related) subject had been aired in the pages of the NYT by David Reich, a genetics professor at Harvard, back in 2018.   I invite signed comments from informed readers about the Reich essay.  (This old essay by philosopher Ned Block is also useful background here. I don't see that Reich is making the mistakes Block identifies, but I am happy to be corrected.)

UPDATE:  See also this follow-up piece by Reich, also in the NYT.  (Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Were you rejected in one of the University of California job searches utilizing the unlawful "diversity statements"? (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 23--UPDATED

Pro bono legal representation may be available--read on.

As we've noted on several occasions, schools in the UC System have begun requiring applicants for faculty positions to submit a diversity statement. In most searches, these statements have been evaluated holistically as part of an overall application. However, several UC schools have participated in Advancing Faculty Diversity Pilot Programs where contribution to diversity statements have been evaluated as a threshold requirement. In other words, for these searches, if you didn’t get a passing score on your diversity statement, you were not considered further.

This methodology has had an enormous impact. As we discussed last month, for a 2018-2019 search in the Life Sciences, UC Berkeley rejected 76% of the applicants without even considering their research, teaching skills, or academic merits (out of 893 qualified applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate). This methodology has also resulted in extreme racial and gender disparities. In 2018-2019 UC Davis ran eight open discipline searches using this methodology. With all the other searches conducted at UC Davis in 2018-2019, under 10% of the applicant pool were minorities, just above 5% of the finalists, and 2.3% of hires. But in the pilot searches nearly a third of the applicants were minorities, over 80% of the finalists, and a full 100% of those hired were minorities. The results for female hires was similarly sharp, with 87.5% of those hired through the pilot program being women compared to 45.5% campus wide.

This is a list of all of the searches that have utilized or plan to utilize this methodology.

UC Berkeley

• Engineering 2017-2018
• Life Sciences 2018-2019

UC Davis

• Eight open discipline hires (one in each college/school) 2018-2019
• School of Medicine 2019-2020 or 2020-2021
• The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences 2019-2020 or 2020-2021
• The College of Engineering 2019-2020 or 2020-2021

UC Riverside

• Mathematics 2018-2019
• Physical Sciences 2019-2020 or 2020-2021

UC San Francisco

• Biomedical Sciences 2017-2018

UC Santa Cruz

• Arts 2019-2020 or 2020-2021
• Engineering 2019-2020 or 2020-2021
• Global and Community Health Program in the divisions of Physical and Biological Sciences and Social Sciences 2019-2020 or 2020-2021

If you applied to and were rejected to one of these searches, or are planning to apply to one of the upcoming searches, you can help to challenge UC’s unlawful policies. Daniel Ortner from the Pacific Legal Foundation is looking for individuals who were impacted by these searches to potentially offer free pro bono representation. You can reach him at dortner@pacificlegal.org.

UPDATE:   A physics professor at UC San Diego reports that they too have been using these "diversity" statements:

Peer-reviewed journal publishes a peer-reviewed paper some people don't like...

...so it's time for a petition, which, after 24 hours and despite being linked from the Daily Snooze this morning, has only some two dozen signatories.  (UPDATE:  after 48 hours, 48 signatories!)  It was launched by famed Twitter tough guy Mark Alfano (Macquarie), seen here threatening the paper's author, graduate student Nathan Cofnas (Oxford) (says Mafia Mark to Mr. Cofnas:   "You're about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me").   Good to get confirmation that not only is there no norm against criticizing graduate students for their public acts and statements (which no one, other than graduate students on Twitter, believed of course), but there apparently isn't even a norm against launching a petition against the "vulnerable" and threatening them Mafia-style!

The petition is being ignored because it is so obviously foolish.  I'll give the last word on that to philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh), quite possibly the only adult who comments reguarly at the Daily Snooze:

Here we go again.

In the first place, the petition’s description of the paper doesn’t look factually accurate. It claims that the paper (i) “argues that the best explanation of differences in IQ scores between racial and ethnic groups is genetics”, and (ii) “completely neglects the role played by environmental injustice, housing segregation, and related forms of discrimination in producing these differences.”

As for (i), the paper’s discussion of the science argues only that it is a scientifically serious possibility that racial IQ differences have a genetic component, not that it’s cut-and-dried that it does (far less that the difference is 100% due to genetics). The section of the paper summarizing the science ends “As of now, there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component.” Furthermore, that conclusion (which occurs 6 pages into a 24-page paper, at the end of a 3-page discussion of the science) is all that the author needs, because the main question the paper asks is whether we should actively prevent research on the question, and to make that an interesting question we only need to know that a genetic component isn’t scientifically unserious, not that it’s scientifically proven. (And, I should add, the author’s all-things-considered defense of allowing research on the topic is fairly nuanced, and gives a pretty sympathetic hearing to the arguments against.)

"Diversity blather" originated in corporate America, and its leading proponents are members of the managerial class in academia

Prior to Bakke and the constitutionalization of "diversity" blather in the late 1970s, people knew what affirmative action was actually about:   a kind of reparations for the world-historic injustices suffered by African-Americans, for example.   "Diversity" was cooked up in corporate HR departments in the 1970s, and then declared the sole permissible rationale for affirmative action in college admissions by Justice Powell of the Supreme Court.   These facts probably do have something to do with the kind of grading rubric for the illegal "diversity statements" that Berkeley has proposed.   A graduate student elsewhere, seeing the connection, writes:

Leaving aside the many legitimate worries that required diversity statements raise: I have been active in the graduate employee union during my time in my PhD program. Many schools emphasize that diversity statements should mention volunteer work done in the name of diversity. And my own union has done remarkable work in this area. Just a couple brief examples: we have fought administrative efforts to lower or eliminate tuition waivers, which have a disproportionate effect on underrepresented groups being able to attend grad school; we have made progress in child care provisions and nursing provisions, both of which disproportionately help women, who are chronically underrepresented in many programs; and, by gaining wage increases, we have disproportionately benefited international students who, as they are on student visas, cannot work jobs over the summers. And yet, I know that many of those administrators who impose the diversity statement requirement would be unhappy to read that I was active in the union. Increased wages, strong bargaining units, solidarity between various interest groups within the academic community: these are not the sorts of action admins are interested in, as they (correctly) view them as a threat to their excessive power. Hence, I haven't been mentioning my significant amount of activism, because I know it's not the sort of activism that is really desired. This should give progressive advocates of diversity statements pause. After all, diversity statements generally read like the sorts of things corporate lackeys at Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Bank of America could get behind. And this should give the lie to the idea that these diversity statements are anything other than ideological cover for the professional-managerial class.

While "diversity statements" are being used system-wide in the University of California...

...we don't, at this stage, know whether all campuses are using them perniciously and illegally, as Berkeley and perhaps also Davis, and Santa Cruz are, in some significant number of their searches.  The potential for this misuse is there at all the campuses, of course, and it remains to be seen how things develop elsewhere.

Remember what's at issue here.  Berkeley has made the criteria for evaluating diversity statements public.   A job candidate will get a low score if he “defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn't discuss gender or ethnicity/race” or if he “discount[s] the importance of diversity.”   As I noted in a prior CHE column, “diversity” was not the original (or even most plausible) rationale for affirmative action for African-Americans.  “Diversity” only took over our discourse when the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke case endorsed “diversity” over the more plausible justifications such as compensating the victims of race-based injustice by facilitating the social mobility of their descendants, and providing salient role models for racial minorities.  Almost all advocates of affirmative action prior to the Bakke case would have discounted “the importance of diversity” except perhaps with regard to “different areas of study"; those folks wouldn't make the cut at Berkeley these days!

ADDENDUM:   Even at Berkeley, not all department searches are--yet anyway--using the "diversity statement" for a first cut.  The same may also be true at Davis and Santa Cruz.

India fascism watch: masked thugs attack university students and faculty

Remarkable.

Have you been rejected in a search requiring a mandatory "diversity statement"?

I've received permission from the lawyer (alluded to here) to share his information, which he also posted at Professor Coyne's blog.  Here it is:

If anyone was rejected for a position in such a search or any other search requiring a mandatory diversity statement, please reach out to me. I am an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that offers pro bono representation and am looking to challenge the University of California Policy.

Daniel Ortner
Pacific Legal Foundation
dortner@pacificlegal.org

UPDATE:   PLF is a libertarian legal organization; they are on the wrong side of some issues, and the right side of others, as in this case.   But here is the remarkably dishonest gloss of philosopher Chris Bertram (Bristol) on Twitter on the preceding:

I wonder whether Professor Bertram also supports the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths?  And surely this political philosopher might agree that not just any means are acceptable for promoting worthy ends?   Presumably the University of California could not forbid hiring white people, even though that would be a "diversity-promoting hiring practice."

There's a context to this pathetic display, that I’ll post below the fold for anyone who is interested.

Berkeley "Diversity Statements" in action in a life sciences search

Biologist Jerry Coyne (Chicago) has the gory details.  This is a lawsuit for unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination (and maybe also race discrimination) waiting to happen.  From Professor Coyne's post:

893 applications were...vetted for diversity statements alone, rating the statements in three areas: knowledge about diversity, track record in advancing diversity, and plans for advancing diversity if hired. The published Berkeley diversity-evaluation rubric was used, rating candidates on a 1-5 scale for each of the three areas, so that the minimum score was 3 and the maximum 15.

Statements were evaluated blind to the candidate’s names, getting rid of some clues to sex and race. But these data would have been clear, I suspect, from the diversity statements alone (at least for minorities), so I highly doubt that candidates were evaluated “blind” in this respect. No cutoff in scores was described in the description of this search, though there one was in the second search (see below).

Buffalo philosopher Newton Garver and "loyalty oaths"

I've been doing some research on the constitutional fate of the "loyalty oaths" in the various states (prompted by this), and discovered that longtime University at Buffalo philosophy faculty member Newton Garver was one of those who challenged, successfully, the constitutionality of New York's "loyalty oath" in a decision that paved the way for the California Supreme Court to find California's version also unconstitutional later the same year (1967).

Mathematician Abigail Thompson (UC Davis) on the "diversity" loyalty oaths

Here.  I'm optimistic there will be a legal challenge to these diversity statements as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, the precise grounds on which the original loyalty oaths from the 1950s were finally struck down:   the state can not demand allegiance to a sectarian political creed as a condition of employment.

UPDATE:   The journal where Professor Thompson's original essay appeared has now published many letters (including some group letters) about her article.  Many, happily, support her.

Identity politics and power

This essay is plainly on to something; an excerpt:

What if the people who speak in the language of identity politics were to recognize that their framework was the culturally dominant one? The one that helped you get into an elite college or win a coveted internship? If you spoke that language, you were working with dollars in a world of people who earned only rupees, or some other less valuable currency.

I’m not commenting on the accuracy or worth of wokeness. I’m commenting more on its increasing dominance in...the world bounded by players like Harvard and The New York Times.

Would the way wokeness navigated the world have to change if the self-understanding was that it was powerful rather than marginalized? What would it do to, say, the way the word “oppressed” was used? Or to how we understand call-out culture? What if the people doing the calling out and the canceling are viewed as the dominant ones beating up on the weak ones? What if the woke of the world were viewed as the bullies on the playground, filling the other kids with fear, beating someone up every couple of days with a call-out or a cancel in case anyone needed a reminder of their brute strength?

Isn’t it all about power?

There are many domains where this infantile pathology called "wokeness" still has no power, fortunately, but that may be changing.

Vigilante justice comes to NYU...

...as a reader points out to me.  Professor Ronell was at least found to have violated sexual harassment rules on her campus, unlike Professor Hubbard, but her case was adjudicated and she was sanctioned.  Unless universities respond quickly and harshly to these student mobs (in this case, a small one), this is going to spread and eventually lead to violence and criminal misconduct.