Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

How not to be popular with your colleagues in English

Write things like this:

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

I think this turn from teaching and scholarship to political activism is much worse in some fields, like English, than in many others, but, alas, the worst offenders may have poisoned the public understanding of the universities.  "Disciplines" (it's not clear they are scholarly disciplines) that fit Professor Clune's characterization do not belong in the Humboldtian university.  See, e.g.  (And recall some of the nincompoops quoted here, all communications and English faculty.)

University of Sydney's bizarre new "free [sic] speech" policy

Reader Will Moisis writes:

You may be interested in the University of Sydney’s extraordinary hamfisted attempt at limiting free speech on their campus.

They received 51 submissions, and the report recommends:

“Mr Hodgkinson acknowledges that academic freedom and freedom of speech are fundamental to the University and that these rights are limited by the law. While freedom of speech does not permit the use of hate speech or vilification, the report notes that difficulties arise when different parties have divergent views on the legitimate use of words or phrases because the intended meaning of the speaker has not been made clear.  

The report proposes that the University implement a new civility rule that requires any speaker using University facilities to make the meaning of contested words and phrases clear to the audience.”

How would they go about this? 

Looking back at the uneven record of elite colleges regarding speech

A useful overview by Len Gutkin at CHE, charting some of the more notorious incidents I often associate here with "the New Infantilism."  Many of the events noted were discussed here in the past, from the Yale Halloween fiasco (which begins Gutkin's narrative), to the Princeton craziness in the wake of George Floyd's murder.   What remains to be seen is whether university leadership, in the wake of the "anti-semitisim" hearings, will commit to a consistent and principled approach to free expression, or whether they will cave to the authoritarians in Congerss who want to see pro-Palestinian speech on campus suppressed and punished.

 

The Kafkaesque world of the Pomona College English Department

Here.  Pomona is one of the most elite liberal arts colleges in the U.S. 

(Thanks to Michael Clune for the pointer.)

Speaking of the Wokerati...

...even broken clocks are right twice a day:

It’s become increasingly evident to me that American adolescence and young adulthood — especially for those who wind up at elite schools — now happen within a specific kind of ideological atmosphere.

It centers on a hard-edged ideological framework that has been spreading in high school and college, on social media, in diversity training seminars and in popular culture. The framework doesn’t have a good name yet. It draws on the thinking of intellectuals ranging from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the critical race theorist Derrick Bell. (For a good intellectual history, I recommend Yascha Mounk’s recent book, “The Identity Trap.”)

The common ideas associated with this ideology are by now pretty familiar:

• We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.

• Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.  [BL:  this of course is true in all human societies to date, which have been class-based societies; what is distinctive of the Wokerati, is that they focus mostly on epiphenomena]

• Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.

• The goal of rising above bigotry is naïve. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.

• Seemingly neutral tenets of society — like free speech, academic freedom, academic integrity and the meritocracy — are tools the powerful use to preserve their power.

There are many teachers and administrators who believe that they best serve society not by being open and curious and searching for the truth but by propagating this ideological framework.

Aly Corey, "Associate Director for Inclusive Learning" in the DEI office at Williams College, has apparently resigned from my fan club

Admittedly Dr. Corey must have led an exemplary life if having an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in music is the most embarrassing thing they have ever done.  Good to know "diversity" at Williams is in the hands of such a mature, balanced individual!

 

Censorship of philosophy at Oxford University Press

Alex Byrne recounts the disgraceful tale.  Note that Professor Byrne, a philosopher at MIT, has previously published a philosophical monograph with OUP, and has contributed many essays to OUP volumes, as one would expect given the quality of his work over many years and his prominence in the profession.  There is only one explanation for what he recounts in this new essay, and it is telling about the rot of ideological corruption in academic philosophy these days.  An excerpt, regarding just one of the incidents:

I received an invitation to contribute a chapter on pronouns for the Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. The format, I was told, is “very flexible,” and that “it would be wonderful” if I could find time to write the chapter. As it happened, I had been thinking about pronouns for my book, and taking some time out to research the topic more thoroughly seemed like a good idea, so I accepted.

There are more than 1,000 Oxford Handbooks (published by OUP)....An invited handbook chapter on one’s CV is not as valuable as a peer-reviewed paper in a journal, but academics accept these invitations because publication is practically guaranteed. The bar for an acceptable chapter is not particularly high, and the reviewing process is usually cursory.

The handbook had two editors, Ernie Lepore, a respected senior philosopher, and Luvell Anderson, a philosopher about whom I knew little. (It’s worth mentioning that Lepore’s friends would hardly describe him as “woke.”) I wrote to Lepore, “Just to be clear on the assignment. This is an entry about issues like: whether (or why) we should call Demi Lovato ‘they’, or Elliot Page ‘he’; whether we should call everyone ‘they,’ etc.? … Obviously I’ll try to keep it respectful but I should warn you in advance that any balanced and frank discussion of this topic is bound to annoy some people. (I won’t be offended if you want to reconsider.)” Lepore replied, “All systems go. Thank you for agreeing to this.”

One reason why it is hard to take the American Philosophical Association seriously...

...is that it still has on the books a "Code of Conduct" that violates the First Amendment rights of faculty at public universities and the academic freedom rights of all faculty.   Perhaps current leadership will rectify this professional embarrassment, and repeal this Code and enact a normal one, like most other professional organizations.

"Woke" explained

A very perceptive essay by Freddie deBoer, a man of the actual left:

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

The Stanford Law School "heckler's veto" incident involving a conservative judge

For those interested, there is more at my law school blog.

Katha Pollitt on the "kinder, gentler" Roald Dahl fiasco (with a guest appearance by the Orwellian "Inclusivity Ambassadors"!)

Apt and cutting, as usual; an excerpt:

You may have read that Roald Dahl’s classic tales have been altered to be, well, nicer. Because as we all know, niceness is what Roald Dahl is all about. Forget the misanthropy, physical disgust, and delight in transgression and violence and extravagance that give his stories bite and edge. Forget, too, the dependence of wit and vividness on specific, concrete words, on their sounds and evocative associations. What matters is that no one in the whole world be offended and that no opportunity be missed for moral improvement.

On the neoliberal identity politics of the fake "left" in America

This essay makes a number of good points (although readers will notice echoes of Adolph Reed, the essay overall lacks his more sophisticated theoretical framework); an excerpt:

[Ne]oliberal identity is u]sing one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.” What’s implied is that one’s identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently—for better or worse— dismissed....

Professor Hay is apparently unrepentant for her misconduct

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 14, 2022--IT'S NOW BEEN MORE THAN A MONTH, AND THE FALSE TWEET IS STILL THERE, AND NO APOLOGY HAS BEEN ISSUED

So ten days have passed since philosopher Carol Hay decided to humiliate Professor Byrne on Twitter based on a misrepresentation, and although she has resumed tweeting, the original tweet remains, without any acknowledgment that it is false and without any apology, which is all the more remarkable given that she learned of her misinterpretation at the Q&A on November 4.   The only conclusion I can draw is that Professor Hay views her behavior as professionally appropriate.  Conference organizers take note.   

Meanwhile, other dishonest philosophers have also been coming to her defense on Twitter, despite first-hand reports from people who were actually at the talk confirming what we all now know about its actual content.

The threat to academic freedom in teaching and research from the "woke" thought police, an ongoing saga

A biologist at Williams College recounts her experience:

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that “we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges.” Students gave this a standing ovation.  Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed....

Let’s start with teaching. I need to emphasize that this is not hypothetical. The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary. 

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes. 

Conference organizers may want to think twice before inviting Professor Carol Hay (U Mass/Lowell) to their event

This bizarre case of unprofessional behavior occurred while I was in Rome, and so I only just caught up on this nonsense in the last day.

On November 4, philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT) presented a paper at the PPE conference in New Orleans; here is the abstract:

Patriarchy and the Original Position
If politics is the art of the possible, political philosophy is the science of the possible. What kinds
of societies could there be, not just for Homo economicus, but for Homo sapiens, a recent product of
a long lineage of primate ancestors? One obvious—in political philosophy, often ignored—
feature of sapiens is sex. Unlike economicus, humans come in two distinct sexed forms, female and
male. And one striking apparently universal feature of past human societies (including at least
many contemporary societies), is patriarchy: the dominance of males in political and social
decision-making. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari says, it is plausible that some ‘universal
biological reason’ accounts for patriarchy. If that is right, then patriarchy may seem inevitable,
or at least hard to avoid. The first part of the paper outlines some evidence for Harari’s
‘universal biological reason’. The second part brings the first part to bear on Rawls’s use of the
original position, and the subsequent feminist adoption of it by Susan Okin. I will argue that
ignorance of one’s sex in the original position fails to deal with the problem of patriarchy, and
that the Rawlsian approach should be abandoned.

During Professor Byrne's talk, philosopher Carol Hay tweeted out the following:

Even if that were what Professor Byrne had argued--it was not, as Professor Hay has known for several days now without removing or qualifying her tweet--it is not appropriate to take to social media to humiliate a speaker behind his back during an academic conference.  But this is made worse by the fact that Professor Hay completely misrepresented Byrne's argument, as several pointed out on Twitter and as I've now had confirmed by various attendees at the session who heard the entire paper.   To do a Twitter "gotcha" at a conference is childish and stupid enough, but to do it and be wrong is beyond belief.

NYU fires organic chemistry teacher for being too demanding, after student protest petition

I wish there were another gloss on this, but that seems to be the only one that is plausible.  It's not that the guy is emeritus at Princeton (until recent years, Princeton was not very strong in chemistry), or that he authored a widely used textbook.  It's that the guy taught organic chemistry for 15 years at NYU (after retiring from Princeton), without a problem, until....well, here's what the aritcle says:

After retiring from Princeton in 2007, he taught organic chemistry at N.Y.U. on a series of yearly contracts. About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.

“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.

The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.

A lot of students have been suffering because of the pandemic, no one doubts that.  And the Internet certainly started making people stupider and lowering their attention spans in the early 2000s.  But firing a professor who has been teaching for 15 years because of al this stinks to high heavens, and means the "inmates" (sorry, the "clients") run the "asylum" (sorry, the "business").

"A university is not a kindergarten."

Biologist Jerry Coyne (Chicago) comments on a famous remark of the former UChicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was a strong defender of academic freedom.

Society for Personality and Social Psychology ceases to be a scholarly society

This is shocking:

[M]y main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth. I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining “whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.

These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll just add one additional concern: Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly.

The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism. I read Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, so I knew that I could no longer stay silent. 

University of Toronto, Scarborough campus curriculum review suggests confusion about what a university is

The summary (and the full document) are here; an excerpt:

The review was launched in the Fall of 2020 with the goal of ensuring that programs and pedagogical approaches at UTSC reflect the diversity of our students and the histories, epistemologies, and pedagogies that have been devalued and violently erased by settler colonialism and systemic injustices. The review’s focus is on Indigenous knowledges and knowledge systems, Black knowledges, racialized perspectives, and international and intercultural perspectives. In addition to these named areas, the review has prioritized an intersectional approach, recognizing that individuals hold multiple identities that shape experiences of oppression, including gender, sexuality, and disability.

President of American Historical Association criticizes "presentism" in history scholarship and its usurpation by politics...

...singling out, inter alia, the 1619 Project, the misuse of history by conservative Supreme Court justices, ignoring the role of Africans in the slave trade, and a few other items.  He has now issued an absurd and abject apology:

My...Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.

When you can't tell what's a parody and what isn't

This exchange has been circulating on social media.  My first reaction was that this had to be a parody of mindless identity politics, but in fact the participants actually believe their nonsense.   God help the universities if too many people like this gain a foothold.

(No doubt there are instances of "indigenous knowledge" that are actual cases of knowledge. But do they really add up to a Wissenschaft?  Maybe some do, but repetitive assertion of the point doesn't inspire confidence.   It's downhill from there in this Twitter exchange....)

More signs of the times: actual left policy analyst leaves Center for American Progress for AEI...

...because the Center for American Progress is suffering from neoliberal wokeness (much like the academy in this regard, and recall this and also this):

“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class"....

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.

“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says....

 

"Identity politics" neoliberalism meets millenial narcissism

Many readers will have heard the story of the ex-Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez (age 39), who called out a colleague for retweeting a stupid sexist "joke" (it wasn't even funny)--the colleague Dave Weigel was then suspended for a month without pay even though he immediately deleted the tweet and apologized!--and then went on a Twitter jihad about her colleagues who didn't support her adequately and, of course, her feelings.  Glenn Greenwald, himself a world-class narcissist (who at least sometimes can focus on the issues), did peg this whole display correctly:

A pernicious form of "cancel culture" exists...

...and thankfully the longtime feminist critic at The Nation has taken the trouble to document it, given the ostriches on the putative left who pretend it doesn't:

Gillian Philip, one of a group of writers producing popular children’s books under the pseudonym Erin Hunter, put #Istandwithjkrowling in her Twitter bio, for which she was subjected to a storm of online abuse and fired by her publisher. Whatever you may think of Rowling, Philip isn’t her. Without the security that comes with unparalleled wealth and celebrity, she’s just a person with an opinion—right or wrong, that’s what cost her her job. She now works as a truck driver.

"Mob review" rather than "peer review"?

Last week the Twitter mob panned a book they hadn't read, and now we have this:

The blurb for the book “Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology” says that it “engages with the overlap of Black experience, hip-hop music, ethics and feminism to focus on a subsection known as ‘trap feminism.’”

But the book, written by Jennifer M. Buck, a white academic at a Christian university, was criticized by some authors and theologians as academically flawed, with deeply problematic passages, including repeated references to the ghetto. The project was also widely condemned on social media as poorly executed and as an example of cultural appropriation.

In response to the criticism, the book’s publisher, Wipf and Stock Publishers, decided on Wednesday that it would pull the title from circulation.

The incident touched on a larger debate in the world of publishing over when, how, and even whether, it is appropriate for authors to write about subjects outside their own culture....

There is actually a whole academic discipline in which authors write "about subjects outside their own culture":  it's called anthropology.

(Thanks to John Doris for the pointer.)

"The End of Progressive Intellectual Life"

His narrative is somewhat selective, and self-serving, but there are clear elements of truth in this essay by Michael Lind.  An excerpt:

[I]n the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall....

OUP publishing a book="organized violence"

Thus spake this English professor in Canada, who apparently doesn't know what words mean:

If only Hitler had realized that a book could constitute "organized violence," he could have just published his way to the Third Reich.   Naturally, the University of California professor who flagged this for me said,

I hate to have to add that, if you say anything about this on your blog, I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention my name. My husband is still working at [our UC campus], which, as you know, is a hotbed of Diversity etc. I am looking forward to his retiring so I can speak my mind about the [insert expletives here] mess we’re in with regard to gender and biological sex.

The academy, or at least some campuses, are in a "mess" if faculty don't feel they can object in public to stark-raving idiocy like the tweet, above.

UPDATE:  An alert reader points out to me this extraordinary response on Twitter:

Philosophy thought police, redux

Philosopher Raja Halwani (School of the Art Institute, Chicago) discusses the reaction he got from some of the usual suspects (plus some new would-be censors, like Alex Bryant [British Columbia]) when he decided to include an essay by philosopher Kathleen Stock in his well-known Philosophy of Sex anthology.  Professor Halwani provides an admirably patient dissection of the objections.

Here we go again: St. Olaf students protest Peter Singer's virtual talk at their college

At least they only want the talk "boycotted" rather than cancelled, although they also want a commitment that the college will not invite speakers with incorrect views again.  (The misuse of the category "hate speech" is particularly remarkable:  nothing they quote from Singer would qualify as "hate speech" in any democracy with actual "hate speech" laws.)

(Thanks to Justin Garson for the pointer.)

"Identitarian psycho-babble" had its origins in Herbert Marcuse's third wife!

This is a truly weird story.

More "Social Justice [sic]" kittens for 2021

Here.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Coastal Carolina University behaving badly

I almost find it hard to believe this account could be accurate (the behavior of both the students and the administration is beyond idiotic), but if it is, Coastal Carolina University is going to being forking over $$$ for the wronged professor's legal fees.

(Thanks to Edward Cantu for the pointer).

Cancel culture, redux

It's certainly pathetic when right-wingers only give attention to free expression issues when it's their ox being gored, but it's even more pathetic when those nominally on the left pretend that there aren't serious problems with free expression in the academy and the broader culture emerging from the neoliberal identity-politics movement.   This article is a good antidote to the latter group of dissemblers; an excerpt:

Critics of the idea of “cancel culture” have a point when they argue that pushback against speech and expression we find morally offensive is a vital part of free speech. While disinvitations should be avoided on principle, there is nothing wrong with forcefully arguing that a college campus should not extend a speaking invitation to a far-right hate peddler like Ann Coulter or a progressive [sic] white-guilt grifter like Robin DiAngelo. Likewise, while taking down published articles should be a no-no except in case of egregious factual errors, plagiarism, or other misconduct, it’s not illiberal to argue that respected media outlets should not platform certain odious views, whether they’re unabashedly racist anti-immigration tirades or arguments that sexual liberation should extend to pedophiles. But it also seems clear that in a liberal society, the range of truly “cancelable” viewpoints should remain as narrow as possible, and the lines should be very carefully drawn.

The power of the "woke" and the impotence of the left in America

There is much to agree with in this essay by Freddie DeBoer; some excerpts:

The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath....

Peter Singer invited to give a Zoom talk about "Pandemic Ethics" by the Philosophy Department at Rhodes College...

...and now there is an uproar because Singer holds incorrect views, for example, about euthanasia, infanticide and the disabled.  An uproar is fine, what isn't fine are the demands that his event (slated for tomorrow) be cancelled, which have come from, among others, the History faculty and the Anthropology/Sociology/African Studies Program at Rhodes.  For example, the historians sent out the following campus-wide email:

As historians, we the undersigned condemn Prof. Peter Singers’ abhorrent views that some humans have less value than others. We object to inviting him to Rhodes College to speak as part of a “Pandemics Ethics” panel. Positioning him as an expert on ethics only legitimizes his reprehensible beliefs that deny the very humanity of people with disabilities. Hypothetical philosophies on morality cause real violence. We historians are all too familiar with ideas that justify labeling marginalized, vulnerable, and minority populations as “life unworthy of life,” and the murderous consequences for those deemed “unfit” to live. Adhering to the College’s own IDEAS Framework that seeks to foster “a sense of belonging” and embrace “the full range of psychological, physical, and social difference,” we historians assert that Prof. Peter Singers’ blatant inhumanity has no place in serious academic exchange here at Rhodes.  

The first sentence is fine:  the historians can decide that Singer's views are abhorrent and can condemn them.  But the rest of the email is a call to violate the academic freedom rights of their colleagues in the philosophy department, who have a right to invite someone they judge (quite reasonably) to be an expert in applied ethics to give a talk.  (Academic freedom includes the freedom of members of a discipline to decide which speakers are appropriate speakers in their departments, just as it includes freedom to design the curriculum, set requirements, and so on.)

The philistinism of the philosophers

From an essay by philosopher Justin Smith (Paris VII):

The political philosopher Jake McNulty reminded me recently of a wonderful observation of Adorno’s: that it was not the artists with firm political convictions expressed through their art, such as Bertolt Brecht, who ended up truly revolutionizing their historical moment, but those such as Samuel Beckett, whose work is infinitely ambiguous, non-committal, and open to endless interpretation. The one gave us Tin Pan Alley retrofitted with revolutionary slogans, the other gave us his own sort of revolution. One fears that the closest thing we have to intellectuals today are so disengaged from even the ideal of an avant-garde that they know only how to scan a work for its manifest content, and thus today’s descendants of Brecht are deemed good because they are “on message”, while today’s descendants of Beckett, if there were any, would be deemed irresponsible for failing to state explicitly enough their commitment to antiracism.

Peter Boghossian's resignation from Portland State University

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 9--UPDATED WITH SOME MORE INFORMATION

Various readers sent me this letter from Professor Boghossian describing his alleged reasons for resigning.  If, in fact, he was treated in the ways described, that is pretty outrageous, but it would be good to have independent confirmation from another source.  (He has been an assistant professor since 2014, which is a rather long time at that rank, so it would be good to know what the story is with that as well.)  Some of the "illiberal" campus environment is obviously real at many places, although rarely to the extent he describes.   On the other hand, a professor at Portland State revealed in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education that she literally has no idea what academic freedom is, so maybe things really are that bad there?

UPDATE (9/14/21):  A faculty member at Portland State writes with some useful context and perspective:

Peter was not a tenure-line faculty at PSU. PSU has an unusual status for non- t-t faculty that they can apply for the same titles as tenure-line faculty. I believe it was 2014 that he got that title (after having been an Instructor for I believe six years before that), but because he is not on the tenure track, he could have kept it indefinitely. In fact, he did decide to apply for promotion to "Associate Professor" last year, but was denied.

On "cancel culture" and online mobs

A balanced assessment, related to a point we have made before:  the "sanctions" are often wildly disproportionate to the offenses.  An excerpt:

[T]he modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime....

The actual left in America has always supported robust civil liberties...

...unlike the New Infantilist left in the universities, on social media today, and even in some of the leftist media.  This piece is a useful reminder; an excerpt:

The founders of Dissent were fiercely anticommunist, yet you’ll find them repeatedly, heatedly, defending the free speech rights of Stalinists.

I’ll cite just one example. In an article about the state of liberalism in 1955, Irving Howe criticized Americans for Democratic Action for passing a resolution that supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals.” Why would Howe have objected to this? He objected because the ADA had changed the wording of a previous draft, which supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals, including communist ideas.” They’d taken out “including communist ideas.” In other words, he was attacking them for the failure to explicitly affirm the free speech rights of communists.

The early editors of Dissent, defending the free expression rights of a political group they loathed and feared, were in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg, who said, “Freedom is always and exclusively the freedom of the one who thinks differently . . . all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political life depends on it"....

Contemporary skepticism about the idea of free expression seems to rest on two pillars.

 

The inflation of trauma

A former student, Mark Engleson, who is autistic, writes:

I recently got embroiled in a bit of go-round on Twitter (do not recommend). The background: the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts uses shock collars on autistic children to make them more compliant. The FDA tried to ban this use of the device, and a federal court threw it out.

On Twitter, someone posted a poll asking fellow autistics how traumatized they were by the knowledge that this is happening. I objected that this is a misunderstanding of trauma: the trauma here is clearly the children being shocked, not other people hearing about it. 

The problem with this language and this line of thought is that some went so far as to say that the problem with this whole situation is how it makes other autistics feel. Now, this situation disturbs me, but that's not why it's wrong: it's wrong because they're using shock collars on children. My feelings have nothing to do with it; if no one knew this was going on, it would still be horrific.

Changes in the Zeitgeist

Not sure if "everyone" knew these, but philosopher Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) is definitely on to something interesting about the evolution (or devolution) of cultural norms (in part due to the Internet).  As I'm also a New Yorker, I can confirm that a lot of these would have been widely shared norms and expectations of the 1970s and 80s (some do seem to me to capture more the kind of ideological compromises stressed middle class existence requires).  Some norms do change, for the better, but certainly not all.  Here's a few notable ones that particularly resonated with me:

[4] Confronting strangers with a raftload of stipulations as to how they must engage with you assumes that they care to engage with you in the first place, which may be untrue. And if they do, they probably will cease wanting to, unless you bring something so extraordinary to the table that it justifies all the trouble....

[15] Offense, insult, and hurt feelings are not particularly important, other than to oneself and to one’s intimates. This does not mean that you should go out of your way to offend others but rather that if you are offended, you shouldn’t be surprised if those outside your friends-and-family circle aren’t inclined to make a federal case out of it.

[16] You don’t accost random strangers on the street and unload your personal meshugas on them, because it’s not their business and they don’t give a damn. Nothing about these reasons fails to apply when you replace ‘street’ with ‘internet’.

[17] Scores of millions of people, most of whom neither know nor live near one another cannot constitute a “community"....

[22] The most virtuous people are the quietest about it. The least are the loudest.

[23] Terrible people have produced and continue to produce great works of art and popular culture, the value of which persists, regardless of the character or conduct of their creators.

Cancel culture watch, Human Rights Watch edition

A lawyer, discussing legal regulation of hate speech, did nothing wrong by mentioning the N-word, not using it.  Yet she's still been fired by a group that is supposed to protect human rights, which presumably includes rights of expression.  She didn't engage in hate speech, she was talking about hate speech.  In the current insane environment, even I'm not going to mention the actual N-word (I would of course never use it).

ADDENDUM:   A statement from the fired lawyer's attorney (sadly, having lost her job, she's now apologizing, despite having done nothing wrong):

Ms. PoKempner has dedicated her entire career to the protection of human rights. She used the n-word while teaching a class, solely for pedagogical purposes. She was providing a verbatim retelling of an incident involving the deposition of a KKK witness—by the Southern Poverty Law Center—that she had witnessed as a young legal intern. In that story, a lawyer used the word in questioning a KKK witness, to provoke a like response from the witness and get it on the record, which was important to winning the case. Her pedagogical purpose was to inspire a discussion of whether it is ever appropriate to use such language for the purpose of eliciting hate speech, even for the goal of exposing and combating racism. Following the telling, she told the students that when she heard this over 30 years ago that it shocked her. Unfortunately, she did not consider the shock her students would feel and how this stifled the very discussion she sought to generate. She deeply regrets the impact of her words on students and apologized to them repeatedly in class for her insensitivity, and continues to regret her language.”

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.)

The saga of the NY Times reporter fired for mentioning someone's use of the N-word

An interesting saga, symptom of our times, but this is really the best part and it is very true:

I’m publishing my thoughts here on Medium because I know journalists.

We make America what it is — without a free press, democracy dies. But we’re still jackals. We can befriend you for years, and then bite off your arm just as you’re offering us a treat. We can’t help it. It’s the nature of the job.

At the highest levels, like Watergate, it’s about digging for the truth, no matter what corrupt government official it hurts. At the basest level, when even the crummiest scandal erupts, you have to repeat the accusation, even if you know it’s untrue or half-true, in order to explain the truth — no matter how much you may personally like the source you’re hurting....

Since January 28, I’ve been a jackal circled by jackals. Since not every journalist gets quotes right, on the rare occasions in my life that I’ve answered journalists’ questions, I’ve tried to do so in writing. That way, either they get it right or I can prove I was misquoted....

How the powerful use "identity" as a shield from criticism

Greenwald--who has become a mostly unreadable narcissist--is actually pretty funny and apt on this topic; He uses, as his initial example, a hack NYT journalist, Taylor Lorenz:

[One] reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people....

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

Some further thoughts on Twitter

The first round of observations was so popular (especially on Twitter!), I thought I'd add a few more based on things I've learned and observed the last couple of months.

1.  I came across this interesting chart via Justin Weinberg's blog, which shows that the vast majority of U.S. adults do not use Twitter at all (thank God!), and that usage varies, unsurprisingly, by generation.  38% of those 18-29 use Twitter (the highest percentage), while only 7% of those over 65 use it.  I'm in the distinct minority in my age range (only 17% of those 50-64 use it), and I mostly use it to provide links to the blog for the benefit the readers who now follow the blog by Twitter. 

2.  This data is consistent with an e-mail shared on Twitter awhile back by the journalist Jesse Singal: 

"[T]he vast majority of both psychologically healthy and accomplished philosophers stay off twitter like their life depends on it. The vast majority of people I know in academic philosophy either ignore, mock, or disdain philosophy twitter." - professional philosopher in email

Although many Twitterati reacted with rage and denial to Mr. Singal's tweet, the claim about "the vast majority" is consistent with the data about usage by age alone.  (Are the non-users psychologically healthier and more accomplished?  Probably, but the preceding data are neutral on that.)   I strongly suspect that relatively few non-Twitter users "mock or disdain philosophy twitter" (although that would be a warranted response were they to look), and that most simply ignore it. 

The inflation of "bullying," a continuing saga

I've mentioned a number of times before the sociologist Randal Collins's excellent diagnosis of the inflation-of-bullying phenomenon, a key part of the New Infantilism that has gripped parts of academia and the culture at large. Like other cases of "concept inflation," the aim is a kind of Stevensonian "persuasive definition" in which the "inflaters" piggyback on the negative emotive valence of the original concept, but change the concept's referent as a way of weaponizing it for different purposes--in this case, for purposes of speech suppression (or making the speech too costly for the speaker by associating it with the negative valence of the original concept).

"Wokism" and the theory of ideology

Yes.

Biologist Jerry Coyne encounters the New Infantilism

It's a central tenet of the New Infantilism that if a student says something in public, only other students can comment critically.   If a professor criticizes a student's public words or deeds, that is "bullying."  The well-known evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes his encounter with the New Infantilism.

Cancel culture redux: think tank fires VP for funny tweet that offended Repugs

Story here.  I thought that was a pretty good joke, actually, and Mr. Wilkinson should not have apologized.  But for God's sake, everyone on Twitter posts jokes that fail or tweets something off the cuff they later regret.  Shame on the Niskanen Center.

(Longtime readers may recall Mr. Wilkinson from when he was more of a "free market" utopian:  see, e.g., here or here.)

UPDATE:  This is amusing.  Hypocrisy, thy name is Jerry Taylor!

ANOTHER:  Philosopher Jerry Dworkin (UC Davis) writes:  "I also was involved years ago with a critical correspondence with him [Wilkinson] about libertarian issues.  I was pleasantly surprised by his definite shift to more reasonable views at Nikansen. This latest firing is abysmal. That Taylor tweet is hilarious in light of his actions."