Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

What the mindless "diversity blather" misses about serious pedagogy

I've received many appreciate messages about my response to the confused CHE piece on diversity and academic freedom.  This part of one message is worth sharing, since it captures, I suspect, what many find so offensive about the requirement of "diversity statements":

My entire career, my student body has been extraordinarily diverse.  In fact, I would estimate that north of 80% of my students have been Hispanic and/or black.  I am a middle-aged, white male.  While the ideologues might find it shocking, reviews from my students consistently tell of my genuine care for them, my accessibility, the respect that I show them, the sometimes life-changing experience that they had in their time with me.  Need I catalog in a "diversity statement" my commitment to those students or to those I might teach elsewhere?  What I do has nothing to do with such a concept.  It stems entirely from the fact that they are my students, from the fact that I am invested in their goals, their dreams, their success, regardless of their age, sex, race, sexual activities, politics, or ideologies.

More on the brazen attack on tenure and academic freedom in Florida...

...from the United Faculty of Florida.

When the yahoos take over the community college

This is a warning about what may start to happen elsewhere.

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

A more substantial response to "Diversity Sometimes Trumps Academic Freedom"...

UPDATE:  The published letter is here.

...which I noted yesterday.  Here's the letter to the editor I sent to CHE:

To the Editor

Rutgers law professor Stacy Hawkins writes that, “The First Amendment, and the principle of academic freedom which emanates from it, is not exempt from the rule that no right is absolute.”   The First Amendment protection for academic freedom, however, only applies to faculty at public universities; faculty at private universities typically enjoy a contractual commitment from their university to protect academic freedom pursuant to the AAUP definition.  Employers can not violate contractual rights because they want to pursue other objectives incompatible with them:  it is thus false that “academic freedom may sometimes…need to cede to the responsibility academic administrators have to effective the institutional commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”  Academic administrators who take that approach are breaching a contract with their employees.  (Many public university faculty, it should be noted, also enjoy contractual protection for academic freedom.) 

Even in cases where the First Amendment does apply, there are, as Professor Hawkins presumably knows, hardly any exceptions to its protection when it comes to punishing speech based on its content (e.g., because it offends against diversity values).  There is certainly no “diversity” exception to the First Amendment, just as there is no “hate speech” exception.   So the whole “balancing interests” framing of this essay is completely beside the point.

When does DEI ("diversity, equity, inclusion" for the un-indoctrinated) trump academic freedom?

I'll have more to say about this pathetically bad (and factually inaccurate) CHE essay tomorrow, but my colleague Jerry Coyne covers it at his blog (including with some observations I made on a local listserve about the legal incomeptence of the essay).

The political economy of the academy and the decline of the humanities

This New Yorker essay on the decline of the humanities is getting lots of comment on social media; an excerpt:

According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before....

What happened to the Twitter maniacs from a couple of years ago?

The good news is that many of them have left academia (e.g., this one, this one, and this one), some self-destructing in a way consistent with their online antics, others just failing to find academic positions.   Alas, some of the juvenile jackasses remain in the academy, at least for now.  Let me add that the only ones who ought to have their online stupidity held against them are those who are openly hostile to academic freedom.  There are enough threats to the latter without multiplying them from within the academy.

MARCH 18 UPDATE:  A reader just flagged for me that the aforementioned juvenile jackass, Dallas Jokic, offered this response (on Twitter of course) to the original post:   "It is very strange indeed that a prominent philosopher is gloating about his graduate student critics having left academia following his bullying of them. Stranger still that he seems to view this as a victory for 'academic freedom.'" There really is no bottom to dumb with these pathetic people: none of the three who have left academia were critics of me, let alone "bullied" by me or anyone else, and all three made clear their hostility towards core academic freedom values, which is why their departure is good news for the academy.

Florida Philosophical Association statement on the attack on the universities by Viktor DeSantis

Here, it's a good statement. An excerpt:

The professoriate stands accused, by politicians, of “indoctrinating” students. Like Socrates (famously, and falsely, accused of “corrupting the youth” and “impiety”), we teach our students to think critically about common wisdom, to question authority, and to welcome fresh perspectives and ideas–even when doing so results in discomfort. We urge you to reject political edicts that prohibit the teaching of ideas on which we might disagree, that replace critical academic inquiry with pre-packaged state-approved lessons, and that demand fearful obedience rather than the courage to have difficult conversations about truth and justice.

This is clearly true of every philosophy department in the Florida public university system I know about (including New College, FSU, and UF), but is it true of other humanities departments?  I really don't know.  I doubt such fine distinctions keep Ron Orban up at nights, of course.

Temple Philosophy faculty statement of support for striking graduate students

The University has been playing pretty vicious hardball with the striking students (e.g., pulling their health insurance, demanding they now pay tuition), but the strike continues, no doubt because the average annual salary of graduate student TAs is about $19,500, which is astonishingly low.  The statement of support from the Temple philosophers is below the fold:

Viktor DeSantis comes for all the public universities in Florida, for real now!

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 24--UPDATED

Here's the proposed legislation; the new bits are underlined.  Not all of it is outrageous, but most of it is:  e.g., The Board of Trustees is responsible for faculty appointments, and need not consult the existing faculty.  It's fair to say Humboldt did not inspire this vision of the university, as mostly an appendage to industry and the Republican Party.  A lot of these provisions will be challenged, and some will almost certainly be enjoined as unconstitutional (e.g., attempts to regulate the content of course offerings to prevent verboten views from being aired).

UPDATE:  FIRE's analysis of all the unconstitutional provisions is apt.  (Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

The evolution of the CV

This is interesting.

"Chat GPT is a blurry JPEG of the web"

This is amusing and probably apt:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

(Thanks to Blake Myers for the pointer.)

 

A Black professor "trapped in anti-racist hell"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT

This is a pretty wild story:  it's like Lord of the Flies meets Ibram Kendi.

Do "diversity" statements violate academic freedom?

FIRE organized a debate between myself and Prof Brian Soucek (UC Davis) on this topic.  Here is a recording, for those interested:

I found it constructive and illuminating; it made clear that a key point of difference is about whether "diversity" is an extramural or intramural purpose of higher education.  I think it is clearly the former:  the essential purpose of universities is the production and dissemination of knowledge (i.e., research and teaching).  Universities have over time been enlisted (or enlisted themselves) in various social causes, from anti-communism to the "war effort," to diversity.  These are extramural; we can debate the wisdom of universities committing themselves to these social policies, but their having done so does not give them a right to corral faculty time and effort for the same purpose.

Scholars of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy rally to the side of Viktor DeSantis in Florida

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 1--USEFUL LINKS IN COMMENTS, AND MORE INFORMATION WELCOME

Not really, but there may be a silver lining for them in the latest rain cloud:

DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization"....

Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”

The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”

“We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”

DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.

One philosopher is not worried about ChatGBT

Philosopher Larry Shapiro (Wisconsin) writes in the Washington Post:

Here’s what I plan to do about chatbots in my classes: pretty much nothing. Let me say first that as much as I value the substance of what I teach, realistically my students will not spend more than a semester thinking about it. It’s unlikely that Goldman Sachs or Leakey’s Plumbing or wherever my students end up will expect their employees to have a solid background in philosophy of mind. Far more likely is that the employees will be required to write a letter or an analysis or a white paper, and to do this they will need to know how to write effectively in the first place. This is the skill that I most hope to cultivate in my students, and I spend a lot of time reading their essays and providing them with comments that really do lead to improvements on subsequent assignments. In-class exams — the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments — are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts....

But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot).

Professor Shapiro makes an important point.  It's of course galling to grade "fake papers" produced by AI, but most of our students still need our feedback on their writing.  I imagine lots of readers would benefit from hearing how other faculty are thinking about this. 

Inviting waitlisted prospective graduate students to visit?

A philosopher elsewhere writes:

Does it ever make sense for a department to invite waitlisted prospective graduate students to visit?

I am aware of a department that invites all accepted and waitlisted students to visit, offering to pay for the accepted students' travel but not for the waitlisted students'. On the one hand, this gives the waitlisted students an opportunity to make a more informed decision, which can benefit both the student and the department. On the other hand, it risks a host of logistical complications and social tensions during the visits (both because waitlisted students might feel awkward being around accepted students and vice versa, and because the waitlisted students may feel the need to perform—or worse, compete—in hopes of improving their standing), and it may even make waitlisted students feel that their best chance at admission is to visit, even if doing so is financially perilous.

I know of other disciplines that invite waitlisted students, but they pay for them to visit.   Inviting waitlisted students to admission events without paying for them is perverse and exploitative in the way my correspondent worries.  Comments are open:  please use a real email (which will not appear), and in your comment indicate your position in the academy (e.g., philosophy professor, graduate student, professor in phyics, etc.).

Why British university faculty are striking

A pretty grim state of affairs.  What the author does not note is that the so-called "marketisation" of higher education in the UK was actually the worst of both worlds:  universities continue to be under the control of state bureaucrats, and can't charge "market" prices," only state-set prices.  The state can then justify spending less on universities, while still meddling in every aspect of university life.

Comments are open for reactions to this piece, especially from UK faculty.

(Thanks to Paolo Sandro on twitter for calling this to my attention.)

And the prize for proposed legislation that would most clearly abolish tenure and academic freedom with it...

...goes to North Dakota.  Yikes!

Where professors come from

An article in Nature a few months ago documented where professors across all fields got their PhDs; the study found:

Overall, 80% of all domestically trained faculty in our data were trained at just 20.4% of universities. Moreover, the five most common doctoral training universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford—account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty (13.8%; Fig. 2a and Extended Data Table 3). Even when disaggregated into domains of study, 80% of faculty were trained at only 19–28% of universities (Fig. 2b).

A couple of observations.  The fields studied were the humanities, social sciences, applied sciences, natural sciences, mathematics & computing, medicine & health, engineering, and education.  While the "big five" producers (above) are all excellent research universities they are also distinguished by being comprehensive in a way that, e.g., Princeton or MIT are not (the latter, for example, do not offer PhDs in education, or medicine; and MIT does not offer PhDs in all the social sciences and humanities).   

Mandatory "diversity" training doesn't seem to work

We've touched on this before, here's the latest debunking of the DEI industrial-complex:

“We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.” (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity trainings....

Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them....

In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatADory or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate biases.

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like objectivity and worship of the written word as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

ADDENDUM:   Professors Dobbin and Kalev discuss their diversity research here.   Amusingly, they note that most management practices are not evidence-based.

(Thanks to Roger Albin for the pointer.)

Harvard Kennedy School Dean reverses decision, and extends offer to Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch

Professor Risse tells me that Mr. Roth has accepted the Senior Fellowship.  (Earlier coverage.)  The Dean, in his letter to the faculty, wrote:

In the case of Mr. Roth, I now believe that I made an error in my decision not to appoint him as a Fellow at our Carr Center for Human Rights. I am sorry that the decision inadvertently cast doubt on the mission of the School and our commitment to open debate in ways I had not intended and do not believe to be true. The broader faculty input I have now sought and received has persuaded me that my decision was not the best one for the School. I have spoken now with a colleague at the Carr Center, and we will extend an offer to Mr. Roth to serve as a Fellow. I hope that our community will be able to benefit from his deep experience in a wide range of human rights issues. 

Will AI change teaching?

Curious piece in the NYT about growing worries about students using AI to produce written work:

While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily “the best paper in the class.” It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments.

A red flag instantly went up.

Mr. Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers information, explains concepts and generates ideas in simple sentences — and, in this case, had written the paper.

Alarmed by his discovery, Mr. Aumann decided to transform essay writing for his courses this semester. He plans to require students to write first drafts in the classroom, using browsers that monitor and restrict computer activity. In later drafts, students have to explain each revision. Mr. Aumann, who may forgo essays in subsequent semesters, also plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.

Across the country, university professors like Mr. Aumann, department chairs and administrators are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to ChatGPT, prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching and learning. Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones....

In higher education, colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban the A.I. tool because administrators doubt the move would be effective and they don’t want to infringe on academic freedom.

Just as an aside:  while banning AI may not be effective, it would not violate "academic freedom."  There is no "academic freedom" right of students to cheat.  So putting that confusion aside, I am curious what readers make of this.  Given some of the nonsense AI generates, I confess I'm surprised by this.

The DEI industry and its role in the university's appeal to "consumers" (formerly known as students)

A lot of sensible remarks in this CHE essay about the Hamline fiasco:

The DEI profession began as workplace diversity trainings aimed at protecting corporations from costly discrimination lawsuits, and it plays a similar role today. As such, it is woefully inadequate for addressing with nuance the racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and other real challenges students may face on college campuses and elsewhere. DEI offices tend to reduce complex issues to manageable problems with ready-made responses. The idea that intention (messy, subjective) matters less than impact (objective, measurable), for example, found enthusiastic embrace in the world of corporate HR and DEI, already obsessed with quantifiable metrics like “impact factor.”

Rather than improving overall campus climate, institutions like DEI offices wind up cultivating student fragility — something they need to do in order to justify their continued existence and funding. The more easily students are offended, the more the university needs a robustly funded DEI program to manage them. This vicious cycle plays out on college campuses across the country. Indeed, the Muslim students at Hamline resemble their non-Muslim peers at universities elsewhere. They assert themselves as consumers and ask to speak to the manager when unhappy with the service they’ve received.

Hundreds of Harvard "affiliates" call for Kennedy School Dean to resign in the wake of the Ken Roth fiasco

So reports the Harvard Crimson; I'm not sure what an "affiliate" is, I guess it means someone connected to Harvard (faculty, students, staff, visiting scholars etc.).  For background, see the statement from Professor Risse, Director of the Carr Center.

Muslim Public Affairs Council issues strong statement in support of wrongfully fired Hamline professor

Here, a propos this.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

Statement by Director of Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard on the failure to hire Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch

A propos this, philosopher Mathias Risse, who is Director of the Carr Center, kindly shared the statement he has circulated locally:

Subject: Carr Center // Ken Roth

Dear friends of the Carr Center at HKS and from around Harvard -- 

                A Happy New Year to you! You might have seen the article in the Nation that was published a few days ago and reports on the denial of a Carr Center fellowship to Ken Roth (owing to allegedly biased reporting on Israel by Human Rights Watch, the organization he led for almost 30 years). As of now, this article pretty much dominates the Harvard-related news at the national and international level: it has been taken up by multiple other outlets and unsurprisingly has also resonated quite a bit on social media, and we can expect more to come. Quite a number of people from around the university and beyond have written to share their thoughts on this, also making clear that this is a matter of common concern. I myself did not speak to the reporter (Michael Manning) about this particular decision though I had some exchanges with him about related matters; the dean’s office wanted this to be handled by its communications office. It is, however, important that everyone connected to the Carr Center knows what happened here, and where I, as the director of the center, stand on this.  

In summer 2022, we tried to recruit Ken Roth as a fellow because he is one of the most distinguished human rights leaders of our time and one of the most visible faces of the human rights movement. He had not approached us; we took the initiative, after a few conversations came to an understanding with him on what such a fellowship would involve, and then submitted this proposal to the dean’s office for approval (not expecting any difficulties). I continue to stand by this initiative, without any hesitation and qualification. Roth has courageously and over several decades stood up for human rights everywhere in the world. He has built Human Rights Watch into a trusted organization of formidable size. Their reporting sets standards in the field, and political scientists who study these matters (such as our very own Kathryn Sikkink) confirm the fairmindedness of their reporting. Ken is articulate and really quite brilliant, and never shies away from debate. He would have been accessible to the HKS community to discuss all controversial issues, including their assessment of the human rights situation in Israel.

Former director of Human Rights Watch denied Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School for having "incorrect" views about Israel

The Nation reports.  If there is one arena in which attacks occur systematically on academic freedom and free speech in the U.S., it is for those--from Finkelstein to Salaita--who do not tow the party line on Israel.  What a disgrace.

"Diversity" and "tolerance" turned on their head

Apt remarks by The Guardian's Kenan Malik regarding the academic freedom fiasco at Hamline University:

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Hamline’s action is the use of the language of diversity to eviscerate the very meaning of diversity. This is an issue not confined to Hamline. Too many people today demand that we respect the diversity of society, but fail to see the diversity of minority communities in those societies. As a result, progressive voices often get dismissed as not being authentic, while the most conservative figures become celebrated as the true embodiment of their communities.

Here, liberal “anti-racism” meets rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry. For bigots, all Muslims are reactionary and their values incompatible with those of liberal societies. For too many liberals, opposing bigotry means accepting reactionary ideas as authentically Muslim; that to be Muslim is to find the Danish cartoons offensive and the depiction of Muhammed “harmful”. Both bigots and liberals erase the richness and variety of Muslim communities.

The Hamline controversy shows how the concepts of diversity and tolerance have become turned on their head. Diversity used to mean the creation of a space for dissent and disagreement and tolerance the willingness to live with things that one might find offensive or distasteful. Now, diversity too often describes a space in which dissent and disagreement have to be expunged in the name of “respect” and tolerance requires one to refrain from saying or doing things that might be deemed offensive. It is time we re-grasped both diversity and tolerance in their original sense.

AFA statement opposing legislation banning discussion/teaching of "divisive concepts"

This effort, by right-wing legislatures and Governors (like Florida's Viktor DeSantis), has been the biggest threat to academic freedom and First Amendment rights on campus in recent memory.

The new front in Viktor DeSantis's war on higher education in Florida

Longtime reader Larry Franz calls my attention to this alarming (but not surprising) development:

Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process Friday of transforming Sarasota's New College of Florida into a more conservative institution, appointing six new board members, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo [see], a dean at conservative Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank.

"It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida's classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south," Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said in a statement....

Rufo said in a series of Twitter posts Friday that public universities have "been corrupted by woke nihilism" and he is "ready to transform higher education from within." He said he plans to recruit new faculty to New College to "create an institution where academics can thrive, without self-censorship."

“My ambition is to help the new board majority transform New College into a classical liberal arts institution. We are recapturing higher education.” Rufo said.

New College is already a classic liberal arts institution ("classical" here is just code for "conservative" and nothing else).  The only "hopeful" sign here is that Mr. Rufo (who has zero qualifications, of course, to sit on a college board) speaks of recruiting new faculty, rather than violating the contractual or academic freedom rights of existing faculty.

Any readers who have more details about what is afoot may shared them in the comments.  

Hamline University's disgracefully stupid violation of academic freedom

This is really breathtaking in its stupidity:

On October 6, during a class on Islamic art that was part of a global survey course in art history, a professor at Hamline University offered students an optional exercise: Analyze and discuss a 14th-century Islamic painting that depicts the Archangel Gabriel delivering to the Prophet Muhammad his first Quranic revelation.

Before showing a slide of the painting, the instructor issued a content warning and spent over two minutes providing context about the controversies surrounding depictions of Muhammad. “I am showing you this image for a reason,” the professor explained. “There is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.”

A senior in the class, who is also president of the Muslim Student Association at Hamline, later complained that pictorial depictions of Muhammad offended her Muslim sensibilities....

[T]he complaint set in motion the DEI bureaucracy on campus, and on November 7, David Everett, associate vice president for inclusive excellence, called the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.” Just days later, on November 11, Everett told the student newspaper in an interview that because of the incident, “it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community"....

The University of California strike ended just before Xmas

Here's a recap of what transpired.

Philosophy is a low-citation field

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel looks at citation patterns across various disciplines, which confirms what casual observation would suggest:   philosophy is not a high-citation field.   As Professor Schwitzgebel notes:

Philosophy ranks 126th of the 131 subfields [by one measure of citations].  The 25th-most-cited researcher in philosophy, Alva Noe, has 3,600 citations in the Scopus database.  In the top field, developmental biology, the 25th-most-cited researcher has 142,418 citations -- a ratio of almost 40:1.  Even the 100th-most-cited researcher in developmental biology has more than five times as many citations as the single most cited philosopher in the database.

Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise

A propos this, a telling observation from a longtime reader:

Remember how our generation was the “What are you going to do with that?” era, if anyone ventured to say that their major was in the humanities? Hardly anyone is now tempted by the humanities since the message that economic life in America is fundamentally precarious has been one of the few messages about reality that has been successfully imparted to young people.

Economic life in America is, in fact, precarious, so the students have gotten the correct message.  Add to that the huge cost of higher education, and it shouldn't be surprising that 1 in 4 undergraduates at the University of Chicago major in economics!  I suspect the numbers are even more skewed away from the humanities at other schools.  

UPDATE:  Some amusing observations from another longtime reader, S. Wallerstein:

The point of education according to Democrats in America

On Twitter, the Secretary of Education in the Biden Administration wrote this:

Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.

Remember that this is a Democrat speaking, thus confirming, once again, that the Democrats are simply the party of the prudent (rather than insane) wing of the ruling class in America.   Humboldt where are you when we need you?  Not in the Biden Administration obviously!

Harvard's new President

"Diversity" is the theme of most of the coverage, since President Gay is black.  She is also a child of immigrants from Haiti (recall); her father was an engineer; she graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, the elite prep school, and Stanford University, earning her Ph.D. at Harvard.  What really struck me, and would concern me were I a faculty member at Harvard, was this:

“The idea of the ivory tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia,” she said. “We don’t exist outside of society, but as part of it, and that means that Harvard has a duty to lean in and engage and be in service to the world.”

Harvard certainly has played a major role in sustaining class hierarchy in America, although that is perhaps not what she means.  But universities have no "dut[ies] to lean in and engage and be in service to the world":  they have duties to produce knowledge and share it with students.  That is their only service, their raison d'etre.   I conclude with an anecdote I've shared before: 

The economic background of faculty

A propos last week's post, Nature also ran an article on the socioeconomic background of current faculty, which found that,

faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.

That certainly helps explain the triumph of "race" and "gender" as topics in recent philosophy, including at elite departments, while Marxism and the Marxist tradition languishes in obscurity at most of those same places.  But it also explains the so-called "racial disparity," which, like so much else, is really a class disparity.

(Thanks to Boris Dagaev for the pointer.)

The "diversity" mafia is insatiable

Three "diverse" scholars explain in Nature that at the current rate at which universities hire "diverse" candidates, "racial parity" (with the population at large) will not be achieved, therefore universities need to hire 3.5 times as many "diverse" candidates.  This would, of course, require a massive increase in discrimination against non-diverse candidates (beyond what already occurs, which as everyone knows is substantial), but that does not figure in the relevant conception of "equity."   No explanation is given for why "racial parity" is the desideratum,* and of course there is no discussion of the class dynamics that are central to any serious explanation for the existing racial disparity in higher education.   "Racial parity" is already an illegal criterion in hiring, and "diversity" will be unlawful within the year.  What will the insatiable proponents of "diversity" do then?  This is going to get ugly, I fear.

*One line of text asserts that, "Decades of work across policy and the social sciences have established the normative importance and empirical benefits of demographic parity in higher education."  The footnote has a couple of citations.  Authors who make claims like this are clearly counting on the fact that most readers do not actually examine the literature, which establishes nothing of the kind, and which certainly does not make the case for "racial parity."

"Diversity" madness comes to academic psychology

This is a bizarre story, with this anecdote, in particular, being telling about Professor Roberts, the psychologist from Stanford:

In his paper responding to Hommel and Roberts, [Lee] Jussim employs an analogy, drawn from a quote in Fiddler on the Roof, about a horse and a mule. He writes that mixing science and ideology is like selling someone a mule when what you promised was a horse. Because Roberts’s paper is both scientific and ideological, according to Jussim, it is a rhetorical hybrid — i.e., a mule.

Roberts, who identifies as Black and multiracial, writes in his paper that comparing people of color to mules is a “well-documented racist trope,” though he gives Jussim the “benefit of the doubt” and doesn’t directly assert that Jussim is advancing that view. I spoke with Jussim, who told me he was unaware of that history, and he points out that his paper begins by quoting the well-known musical. “It’s absurd because obviously the origin is Fiddler on the Roof,” Jussim says. “It refers to an idea. It doesn’t refer to people.”

Jussim is obviously correct, and Roberts should apologize to him.

 

 

According to a 2007 study, 41% of Black first-year students at Ivy League universities are immigrants or children of immigrants...

...rather than descendants of slaves.   I would guess the figure is higher now.  This is a clear indication of the extent to which the remedial purposes of affirmative action have been undermined in the era of "diversity," an era that is itself about to end.

"Open letter" by faculty in the College of Science and Mathematics at U Mass/Boston opposing a new mission statement...

...that eviscerates the actual purpose of the university as a place where knowledge is generated and disseminated.  (Earlier coverage here, here, and here.)

Jobs at selective liberal arts colleges and the expected decline in college enrollments in the coming years

At Philosopher's Cocoon, there is an interesting discussion of expected changes in enrollment patterns and whether that is in any way connected to a perception of fewer jobs at SLACs this fall.  Comments are open there.

The "sociology" of literary studies

Reader Scott Newstok called my attention to this very interesting LRB review essay of John Guillory's latest attempt to look at the history and organization of literary studies as a field.  A brief excerpt:

For Guillory, the pivotal development in the whole story was the arrival of ‘criticism’ as the dominant approach in the 1920s and 1930s, whether in the form of I.A. Richards’s ‘practical criticism’ in the UK or the New Critics’ ‘close reading’ in the US. This is when, in his view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all kinds of tensions, and Guillory urges that many of the issues agitating the field in recent decades are best seen as a working out of these tensions. For example, ‘criticism’ never quite shook off the aspiration to be in some way the criticism of society, not just literature, saddling the activity with exaggerated ambitions still evident today. At the same time, the logic of professionalism required a form of specialisation, a process carried further in the pressures towards intradisciplinary specialisation, which for the past 150 years has tended to take the form of expertise in the literature of a particular period. Even where the most ambitious conception of the discipline retains some overarching claim to underwrite the criticism of society, the cross-grained pressures of professionalisation demand ever greater subdivision: not to specialise is to risk one’s professional status by reverting to being an ‘amateur’.

A similar story might be told about academic philosophy in America one suspects, with the pivotal moment being the logical positivist invasion and takeover of America after WWII.  Thought on Guillory's analysis (or Collini's review) from those more knowledgeable about literary studies welcome (as well as thoughts about the relevance to philosophy).

 

Petition in support of tenure in the Florida public university system

Here.  The petition is prompted by a proposed post-tenure review system.  The basic problem with the proposal is that it eviscerates the due process protections that are supposed to attach to revocation of tenure:  individual decision-makers (chairs, deans, etc.) have too much discretion in this process to deem a faculty member's performance "unsatisfactory," which can lead to immediate termination.

 

Academic freedom and tenure

I spoke to United Campus Workers of Mississippi about the philosophy and mostly law of tenure and academic freedom, and then answered questions related to attacks on tenure and academic freedom in Missisisippi.  The discussion was well-received, and faculty elsewhere might find it useful.  There are a lot of basic facts about what tenure means, and what academic freedom involves, that are often not well-understood.

The war on academic freedom in Florida continues, however

A VAP in Florida writes:

One thing that many are not fully aware of is that the SUS BOG (State University System Board of Governors) has independently incorporated a provision into the system’s regulations that is modeled on the [Stop WOKE Act] tself but is supposed to be enforceable independently as an employment provision. This is SUS BOG Regulation 10.005, “Prohibition of Discrimination in University Training or Instruction.” Most of us here in FL are thrilled that the courts have struck down the state law; but the status of the BOG regulation remains unclear to us. And so the threat to academic freedom continues — but the call is coming from inside the house, so to speak, since it’s the university system’s Board of Governors itself and not only the legislature/DeSantis that is trying to change the conditions of our employment and to weaken our academic freedom protections.

If you are able to draw attention to the continuing uncertainty around the BOG regulation on your blog, or if you find further coverage of this aspect of the situation, I know that many of us in Florida would be very grateful.

I was unaware of this, and I can't see how it can be lawful after the federal court's decision.  The faculty union should seek a declaratory judgment from a federal court to enjoin that provision.  Comments are open for readers with more information about this.

Federal judge in Florida strikes down as unconstitutional Florida's "Stop WOKE Act"

Rightly so, and hopefully other federal courts will soon follow suit in other parts of the country where similar legislation has been passed.

The ten "most regretted" college majors

Some deserving ones on the list, some surprising ones; this is by percentage of those who majored in a subject who would now have picked a different one:

1.  Journalism (87%)

2.  Sociology (72%)

3.  Liberal arts/general studies (72%) [not sure how this is defined]

4.  Communications (64%)

5.  Education (61%)

6.  Marketing management & research (60%)

7.  Medical/clinical assisting (58%)

8.  Political science/government (56%)

9.  Biology (52%)

9.  English language & literature (52%)

Curious what readers make of this list. 

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  As Professor Mayer points out in the comments, this is based on a survey of “job seekers,” so not at all a representative sample of colleges graduates.  

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.