Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Brazen violation of contractual rights of a faculty member at Hobart & William Smith Colleges

Professor Jodi Dean, an anti-Zionist political theorist at Hobart & William Smith, a liberal arts college in upstate New York, wrote a blog post a few days ago expressing support for the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and has now been suspended from teaching by the college.  I am not, shall we say, a fan of this genre, but that is neither here nor there.  Professor Dean's college is committed to the AAUP academic freedom principles, and her speech is clearly covered by the AAUP protection for extramural speech.   Hobart & William Smith Colleges is now in breach of contract.  That the President is a lawyer, no less, is a case study in "the rules in the books, and the rules in action" are often two different things.  The President should be fired, and Professor Dean should be immediately restored to the classroom.  I fear neither will happen, but I hope FIRE and/or the AFA will provide legal assistance to challenge this lawless conduct by the college.

The message from the benighted President is below the fold.

An English professor reflects on the decline of the humanities at the University of Florida over the last several decades

Grim reading, which resonates with yesterday's piece.  An excerpt:

Things got bureaucratic and fiscalised. There was more jargon, more acronyms, more metrics. Fatuous measurements were introduced, to express in hopelessly inadequate numbers what we were endeavouring to do with words. Pepsi got a monopoly on drinks machines. Students were discouraged from using their offices on campus. We had to account for our own presence there. In our brutalist 1970s building – designed, it was said, to be indefensible and sit-in-proof – there were no longer any chance conversations at the copy machine or the water-cooler. It’s always midnight now, all the time.

Managerial layers that once protected us from administrative curiosity – to put it no higher; others might speak of mischief or idiocy – were stripped away. People who once might have been expected to stand in the way seemed rather to turn on us; the downward transmission of power became the rule. Our laborious and trivial autonomy became merely burdensome, a foolish pretence, a charade. Think of replacing the threads in a mobile with metal coat-hangers. There is no give, no movement, no flexibility, no sway, no grace; only a tautening; a jerky, creaky, clanking, humourless expression of will over long distances, with little to choose between push and pull.

(Thanks to Michael Magoulias for the pointer.)

"On Gutting the Liberal Arts"

Philospher David C.K. Curry, the last philosophy faculty member at SUNY-Potsdam, comments at CHE; an excerpt:

At Potsdam, a few facts are indisputable. We face a $9-million annual operating deficit. Enrollment has fallen from 4,224 in 2012 to 2,501 in 2023, a decline of around 40 percent. “There will be no bailouts,” President Suzanne Smith announced last fall, explaining that the SUNY system refuses to help. Personnel costs account for the vast majority of Potsdam’s expenses.

But focusing on the fiscal tree, as the administration wants us to do, causes one to lose sight of the forest. Echoing Gordon Gee, Smith aims to restructure the academic programs offered. Potsdam’s “Financial Stability Plan” is meant to “close the gap and focus our finite resources toward those programs that are most in demand in today’s marketplace.” The rhetoric unsurprisingly echoes that of higher-education consultants like the rpk Group, which focuses on “maximizing Mission, Market, and Margin®.”

But who decides what the employment needs of the future will be, and which courses will be most relevant? In a humanizing moment, Smith teared up while announcing the cuts. While I have no doubt that her news was genuinely difficult to deliver, it was more difficult to receive...

Years of state disinvestment have laid the groundwork for these cuts. Frederick E. Kowal, president of United University Professions, argues that SUNY’s financial crisis is “manufactured,” and the real crisis is that the State of New York has failed to fulfill its obligations. In 2004 New York funded the SUNY system at just under $1.9 billion; in 2023 the funding for SUNY was just $1.34 billion. If you factor in inflation, SUNY received almost twice as much state support in 2004 as it did in 2023. Similar funding cuts have occurred nationwide.

That decline in funding combined with the pandemic-era enrollment declines created the perfect opportunity for authoritarian administrators to impose their increasingly corporate visions of higher education onto their institutions. While faculty and staff members scrambled to educate their students during a pandemic, administrators sharpened their knives, shamelessly seizing the opportunity to gut programs, the faculty, and faculty governance.

Ibram Kendi: we need a new definition of intellectuals...

...that includes grifters!

UPDATE:   A longtime reader writes:

Thank you for sharing the take-down of Kendi’s Atlantic piece. He is even more wrong than the comment assumes. The term intellectual as we use it dates back to a racist scandal, the Dreyfus affair, and, meant, from the beginning, writers/thinkers who search for truth and advance social justice. Emile Zola and other defenders of Dreyfus used it for themselves to characterize their public intervention in this political affair. And they were ridiculed as intellectuals because they took a political stance. In German, the term was more often used as an insult for progressive thinkers until 1945. Here are some resources that are easily accessible via a Google search:

https://intellectualsandthemedia.org/2021/12/11/the-dreyfus-affair-and-the-image-of-the-intellectual/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230006096_2

The German resources are especially informative:
https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/32481/intellektueller-schimpfwort-diskursbegriff-grabmal/

https://edoc.unibas.ch/5607/1/%5BHistorische%20Anthropologie%5D%20Emile%20Zola%20%20oder%20die%20Erfindung%20des%20Intellektuellen.pdf

Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy on "diversity" statements

In the Harvard Crimson; an excerpt:

For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests answering questions such as: “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”; “How do you design course assessments with EDIB in mind?”; and “How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?”

The Bok Center’s how-to page mirrors the expectation that DEI statements will essentially constitute pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else.

Playing ball entails affirming that the DEI bureaucracy is a good thing and asking no questions that challenge it, all the while making sure to use in one’s attestations the easy-to-parody DEI lingo.

It's a shame Professor Kennedy associates the pro-DEI position with "academic leftism," since DEI is, as Adolph Reed has argued, a case of neoliberal ideology, not actual leftism.

Boston University admin tries to break graduate student strike

Although the suggestion of a Dean to use AI to do the work of striking TAs has attracted most of the attention (the Dean has since recanted, I am told by a BU faculty member), the real story is that the BU admin is going all out to break the strike.  As a philosopher at BU writes to me:

News articles are generating a lot of noise about our dean’s slip when it comes to recommending the use of AI to replace striking workers, but I actually the more important issue is that the dean is going all out to have us use pretty much any method, including employing workers from elsewhere, to make sure discussion classes continue. In other words, this is all out union busting. Striking graduate students will not be paid from next week onwards. The university is so desperate that we not cancel discussion classes that the dean suggests:

• Combine discussion sections (on Zoom, for instance) and record the meeting so that students who are unable to attend can watch them asynchronously; those participating asynchronously can be asked to submit written exercises or complete an additional written assignment to make it clear they watched the discussion”

Some departments, like my own, have communicated to the Provost that they will not be doing any work (grading, holding discussion classes, etc.) that the Teaching Fellows would be doing if they were not on strike. Other departments, have much less sympathy with the striking workers. But it’s very clear that the deans in our college want to make sure that the teaching fellows are not missed by the undergraduates. 

On retiring

An apt comment, from the earlier thread, from philosopher Paul Guyer (recently emeritus at Brown University) that deserves special notice:

We have it good in philosophy and other humanities fields: retiring does not necessitate the end of research and writing, as it might for natural scientists dependent on maintaining a lab, including continuing to get grants. On the contrary, it can mean more time for one's own work, if one wants to continue doing that. And since philosophers often think about what we owe to future generations in the abstract, it is good to think about it in the concrete. In a non-expansionary period for philosophy and other disciplines such as we find ourselves in, at some point, which can no doubt not be determined mechanically, one should think about making room for younger people -- if indeed retiring will facilitate that, which is not always the case. This was hardly my only reason for retiring, but I did think that after fifty years of enjoying the benefits of good positions and perks in leading universities, it was time for me to let someone else have a crack at a job and a career (which did indeed happen at my well-off university). Otherwise, what have we been training new PhDs for?

This point seems to me well-taken; does anyone disagree with it?  If so, why?  Note that it is premised on the thought that one's position will be filled by someone else, which is not always the case obviously.

Another UK university crisis brewing: University of Essex

According to the academic staff union, the administratio has proposed "a new Academic Framework, including (among other things) a *45-week* teaching period, up to *3* entry points for students within the year, and sweeping rigid changes to module structure."   Comments are open for more details about what is going on at Essex, and also what is going on more generally in UK higher education (a topic discussed before).

Another free speech crisis in the universities in Israel

Hebrew University in Jerusalem has suspended (with pay) a professor who gave an interview denouncing Zionism and raising doubts about the October 7 atrocities.  In the U.S., her speech would be protected (in principle) under the AAUP "academic freedom" rubric, which includes extramural speech on matters of political interet under its protection--but American academic freedom law is an outlier in this regard.  In Israel, as I understand it, this is a pure "free speech" issue.   I welcome more information about this case, and the law of free speech and academic freedom in Israel, in the comments; I do not welcome off-topic comments about Israel generally, Gaza etc.

(Thanks to David Enoch for calling this case to my attention.)

Are there too many "elderly" faculty?

Mandatory retirement for faculty in the U.S. ended in January 1994, and the forecasts about its likely effects were, we can say in retrospect, rather Panglossian:

A 1991 study by the National Research Council, an arm of the academy, found that most tenured professors chose to retire before age 70, and, on many campuses, before 65.

The study predicted that those patterns would continue in the absence of mandatory retirement....

A recent CHE article asked, "Are there too many elderly professors?"  As the piece notes,

In some fields, especially in the humanities, there’s no guarantee that earlier retirements will in fact result in greater opportunity for younger scholars. As Jonathan Zimmerman wrote a few years ago in our pages, “A mass retirement by senior professors wouldn’t derail the adjunctification train; if anything, it would speed the train up.” I have spoken to aging scholars who would in fact like to retire but are reluctant to do so because they know their tenure line will not be replaced.

At least at the major reseach departments, however, retirees do tend to be replaced.  

Citation mills, a case study from mathematics

This is alarming, and casts further doubt on the "Shanghai Rankings," which focus only on the natural and social sciences, and are heavily dependent on dubious citation data:

Mathematics, an open-access journal produced by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, published more than 4,763 articles in 2023, making up 9.3 percent of all publications in the field, according to the Web of Science. It has an impact factor of 2.4 and an article-influence measure of just 0.37, but, crucially, it is indexed with Clarivate’s Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus, and other indexers, which means its citations count toward a variety of professional metrics. (By contrast, the Annals of Mathematics, published by Princeton University, contained 22 articles last year, and has an impact factor of 4.9 and an article-influence measure of 8.3.)

One important citation metric targeted for citational gamesmanship is Clarivate’s prestigious “Highly Cited Researchers” list....The Highly Cited Researchers list also feeds into one indicator in the Shanghai Ranking, an academic ranking of world universities....

In 2023 a network of around 100 researchers [in mathematics] managed to co-author 17 papers — and get those papers cited 396 times from 2023 to early 2024. That is a remarkable citation rate. All 17 papers are on Clarivate’s “Highly Cited Papers” list for mathematics in 2023.

Texas Tech suspends (with pay) a professor over his Twitter account

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

I don't know a lot about this case beyond what is described here, but it sure looks like a First Amendment violation.  The important thing to note is that the recent Congressional jihad against speech critical of Israel is having real effects.  As the University itself states:

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has recently warned universities that they have the duty under Title VI to take prompt action if it knows, or even should have known, that discriminatory harassment has occurred. The OCR stated that, “…a school violates Title VI when it fails to take adequate steps to address discriminatory harassment, such as antisemitic harassment.”

I expect we will see more cases like this.  If anyone has more information, please add links in the comments.  I will be moderating comments for relevance, so this is not a general invitation to air grievances:   I'd like more information about this case.  Thanks.

UPDATE:  The AFA letter to Texas Tech, which seems to me exactly right.

Deciding Between Admissions Offers: The Importance of Visiting/Talking With Current Students

MOVING TO FRONT FROM LAST YEAR (SINCE TIMELY AGAIN--originally posted March 6, 2009)

Applicants to PhD and MA programs are now receiving offers of admission and, if they are lucky, are beginning to weigh choices between different departments.  I want to reiterate a point made in the PGR, namely, that students are well-advised to talk to current students at the programs they are considering.   There are often things you will want to know that you won't glean from familiarity with the excellence of the faculty's work, even if that remains the most important, if defeasible, reason for choosing a particular department.  Here are some examples of information that no ranking, no departmental brochure, and no "official" departmental representive will tell you about; all of these are drawn from stories I've heard from students over the last few years about ranked departments (the departments will remain unnamed, obviously).  You can think of them as representing "types" of problems you should be aware of before enrolling.  I've tweaked some of the details to protect identities.

The Absent Faculty:  Are the faculty who look so good on paper actually around and interested in working with students?  I heard a story about a key senior person in one department who is an alcoholic, and who simply ignored his students.  In another department, almost all the graduate students had to sign an open letter to the faculty a number of years ago protesting the failure of faculty to return graded papers and their general lack of interest in mentoring the students.   In yet another department, a well-known senior member of the faculty spent so much time travelling and lecturing around the world, that he rarely had time to review or discuss work carefully with students. 

The Sexual Predator Faculty:  Are women treated as young philosophers and aspiring professionals, or do faculty regularly view them as a potential source for dates and sexual liasons?  It's a bit shocking to realize that this is still a live issue in some departments, but, sadly, it is.  Are faculty-student sexual relations common in the department?  What happens when the relations end?  Are there repeated cases of sexual harassment complaints against faculty in the department?  Do they ever result in discipline?  I suppose it is possible this could be an issue for male students, but all the reports I've gotten over the years have been from women victimized by male faculty. 

Law school at University of New Hampshire fires tenured professor for criticizing the administration

This is really an appalling case.  Signatories for the boycott letter are being sought from legal academics, although the Provost apparently backed up the outrageous behavior by the law dean.

The "literature review" as "symbolic violence" and "epistemic theft"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 28--AN INTERESTING, AND OFTEN AMUSING, SET OF COMMENTS, BUT ALSO SOME DEFENSES OF THE AUTHORS

I came across this curious abstract from the Applied Linguistics Review on Twitter:

Literature review becomes violent in the Bourdieusian sense because it imposes particular configurations of privileged knowledge on researchers. Thus, in this paper, we argue that literature review is an enactment of symbolic violence and, in the process, epistemic theft, and central to this practice is the construction of research questions. Literature review, as a site of scholarly conversations, dictates the kinds of questions we ask, thus unwittingly framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies.

Discuss.

Why don't Harvard students take their academic work seriously anymore?

Grade inflation and the resume arms race, according to one Harvard student.

"Scientific publishing in the digital era"

Reflections from Dr. David Ozonoff, who retired at the end of last year as the co-Founding Editor of Environmental Health, a public health journal.  Many of the issues he raises will be familiar to academics in other fields, and which we have discussed on the blog periodically. 

The latest on the Amy Wax case at Penn

The University seems hellbent on a textbook violation of contractual academic freedom rights; this whole thing will end up in court.

Against "diversity" statements in job applications

I confess I'm amazed the APA Blog published these "incorrect" thoughts, but good for them!   These aren't the strongest arguments against the use of diversity statements, but I certainly agree they are a "waste of time," except as an end-run around legal prohibitions on using race/ethnicity as a factor in hiring.

The Republican war on higher education (and academic freedom) comes to Indiana

From IHE:

Indiana’s Republican-dominated state Senate wants to do both at once. Earlier this month it passed a bill that takes aim at both tenure and DEI in public colleges and universities, tying them together with language that shifts focus from racial or other notions of diversity toward what it calls “intellectual diversity.” Senate Bill 202, now being debated in the majority-Republican state House of Representatives, defines that term as “multiple, divergent, and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.”

The legislation would leave it to boards of trustees to determine what intellectual diversity means for individual faculty members’ disciplines, to gauge whether those faculty members have delivered it and to decide how much they should be punished if they fail to do so. Many of these trustees are appointed by the governor, currently Republican Eric Holcomb. Critics have said this means the bill would subject “hiring, tenure, and promotion”—and even employment after earning tenure—to “reviews that judge faculty based on political criteria.”...

The "cosmic inquisitor"

Speaking of nuts in cyberspace, this is an amusing profile of a very loud one, whom we've encountered before.

A triumph for democracy in Wisconsin

Voters will now get to pick their representatives, rather than representatives (i.e., Republicans) picking their voters.  This should be good news for the public universities as well, who have suffered under minority rule by the Repugs.

Yale faculty in favor of Yale being a university

A new website.  Only one philosopher (Daniel Greco) has signed on so far, but I trust others will.

UPDATE:  Now there's a "rejoinder" letter from Yale faculty, signed, so far, by two philosophers (Robin Dembroff, Jason Stanley).  We'll see how the tally evolves!

ANOTHER:  Law professor Paul Horwitz writes with an apt observation:   "What I find striking (but not terribly surprising) about them is that while there are plenty of signatories in the 'rejoinder' from area studies departments and public health, there are no area studies or public health signatories to the 'be a university' letter." 

Northwestern students now facing obscure criminal charges after producing parody of the student newspaper...

...supporting the Palestinians.  I can't believe any prosecutor would take this case, which clearly implicates core First Amendment values.

UPDATE:  Joel Pust points out to me on Twitter that the charges have now been dropped, thankfully.

Petition in support of humanities & other subjects under threat at the University of Kent

Here, a propos this.  Please sign.  Universities dislike adverse publicity, so when thousands and thousands of academic sign a petition like this it makes clear to the decision-makers that their "brand" (that's how these people think!) is being damaged!

Another editorial team revolts against Wiley journal policies: Journal of Economic Surveys

The statement from the editors is here:  Download Public statement Resignations from the Editorial Board of the Journal of Economic Surveys (final).  From the statement:

The...documentation submitted to our analysis [by Wiley] appeared to emphasize quantity over quality of the papers submitted and strongly favoured cross pollination among the various Wiley publications also in relation to papers that we would have not considered favourably for the Journal of Economic Surveys increasing – in our perception – risks of proliferation of poor-quality science.

For earlier coverage, see this from the editor of P&PA, and this comment from David Velleman on an earlier thread:

The initial hope behind the academic OA movement — at least at Philosophers' Imprint, which was the first OA journal in Philosophy -- was that universities would cut commercial publishers out of the knowledge-dissemination business entirely, by redirecting the funds traditionally spent on paper-and-ink journals (including not only subscriptions but selection, binding, storage, etc.) to in-house OA publishing operations. We were encouraged in this hope by our librarian colleagues at the University of Michigan, who were on the leading edge of digital librarianship at the time. We wanted the academic world to become, insofar as possible, self-sufficient in the dissemination of academic work. If academic libraries had gradually moved their periodicals departments into OA publishing, it might have worked.  Unfortunately, the commercial publishers quickly captured the OA market and turned it into a source of profits, and most academic institutions made no effort to participate in the work of disseminating scholarship. Looking back, we can see that our vision would have required some central coordination as well as central funding for the transition. We were too idealistic -- or perhaps I should say, too soft-headed.

Bristol sociology professor terminated for his anti-Zionist views prevails in employment tribunal

We noted this case several years ago, and now the termianted professor, David Miller, has prevailed in his case before the employment tribunal.   The UK, unlike the U.S., actually protects all employees from discrimination based on their "philosophical beliefs" (American constitutional law provides some protection for public employees in this regard, but private sector employees are out of luck).   The full opinion is available from Professor Miller's twitter account.

(Thanks to Joe Cairns for the pointer.)

Plagiarism vs. copyright infringement

An interesting point in this essay:

Plagiarism...is normally understood as «[p]resenting work or ideas from

another source as your own, with or without consent of the original author,

by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement». This

Oxford University definition goes hand in hand with definitions stated in

various dictionaries that systematically define plagiarism as the

misappropriation of «work and ideas» and not as mere replication of words.

 

This is reasonable, since «work and ideas» should pertain to the intellectual

content and not to the words used to convey that content. It is possible to

steal someone’s research work and ideas, scientific discoveries or scholarly

contributions and present them as one’s own without repeating the same

words, without committing any copyright infringement and without being

caught by modern computer-based tools that check the originality of

research publications.

Of course, what the author calls "copyright infringement" can also be plagiarism.

(Thanks to Nick Zangwill for the pointer.)

 

Masters of Legal Studies at University of Chicago Law School

This is a great opportunity for PhD students in fields other than law whose dissertation work would benefit from legal study for a year.  The ideal doctoral candidate should have completed coursework and just be embarking on dissertation work that has some connection to law.  The program is also open to established scholars whose work would benefit from legal study.

 

More on the campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on campus

Apt comments from my law colleague Tom Ginsburg on a very foolish essay by a Penn law professor.

More Harvard craziness: "controversy" over appointing Harvard's "Director of the Center for Jewish Studies" to lead an anti-semitism taskforce!

Bill Ackman and Larry Summers are both a disgrace, Summers especially so since he should know better.  Ackman is too stupid to know better.  If Harvard caves on this, it would set a really terrible precedent.

A mandatory DEI "reorientation" session for first-year law students at Wisconsin

 The details and a critique from a law professor here.  The criticisms are apt, although students have no legal right to academic freedom, and they don't have a principled claim either since they lack a scholarly discipline which is the foundation of a claim to academic freedom.  What they do have is a constitutional right not to have political indoctrination imposed on them as a requirement for study. 

Claudine Gay and Harvard: what really happened?

Philosopher Richard Moran (Harvard) corrects the record:  Download Moran on Claudine Gay

(My thanks to Professor Moran for giving permission to share this on the blog.)

UPDATE:  See also the essay in LRB from Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy.  (Thanks to John Bogart for the pointer.)

The financial future of UK universities (outside Oxford and Cambridge)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 11--SOME INTERESTING (AND ALARMING) COMMENTS--MORE DISCUSSION WELCOME

From a philosopher in the UK:

I just don't see the basic math working long term, even for [a leading UK university, but not Oxbridge]. Tuition fees for UK students are capped at c. £9K, and have been at the same level for well over a decade. Neither main political party shows any willingness whatsoever to raise these, and have indeed ruled this out. Nor do they show willingness to increase the modest governmental subsidy to higher education institutions. Staff and other operating costs go up each year. There is thus a scramble to get more and more undergraduates and to try to attract students from abroad (esp. China), who pay more in fees. There is no endowment to fall back on, no appreciable donations in comparison with similarly research-intensive places in the US, and they have ambitious plans for new buildings and the like, which they borrow money to build. Financially, I feel as though we're, in essence, bailing out water, and soon will not be able to bail it out fast enough. Sinking isn't imminent, but I do worry about the longer term horizon of 5-10 years or more. 

Curious to hear whether this rings true to other UK academics.  If you don't want to use your name, please use a real email address, which will not appear.

The mission of the university, and the need to resist external pressures

Philosopher Ned Hall comments in the Harvard Crimson; an excerpt:

It would not surprise me in the least if politicians like Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) — people who care not one whit about preserving colleges and universities as sites for the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, but who definitely smell blood in the water — press for yet more influence on institutions like Harvard. I’m prepared for the next headline announcing congressional ‘investigations’ into ‘woke curricula on college campuses.’

When these actors do turn up the pressure, the proper response won’t be to ignore them; even weasels arguing in bad faith can say things worth considering. But it will be to resist the temptation to respond with anything but a clear-eyed evaluation of the facts. Not because we owe nothing to the world outside our walls, but because we owe so much.

A very sensible piece on Harvard's mixed track record on free expression...

...and some sensible proposals for how to move forward, from the former Dean of Harvard Medical School.

Rashid Khalidi's open letter to the Columbia administration...

...and its efforts to suppress lawful political speech in support of the Palestinians.

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 bloodbath at SUNY Potsdam (with echoes of West Virginia)

The latest; an excerpt:

It is too late for philosophy, or the liberal arts in any meaningful sense, at SUNY Potsdam. Our Provost has finally admitted that they plan to retrench faculty in discontinued programs. We were told, and I quote, “with the discontinuation of the program, the plan is to decrease the number of faculty by 1.” (Interim Provost Alan Hersker, 12/05/2023). So no hope here at Potsdam. But the disease spreads.  SUNY Fredonia has released an eerily familiar plan to cut 13 programs.​

 

Nonetheless, there is still hope for other public institutions of higher learning if we can spread the word.  What is happening at SUNY Potsdam (and WVU and SUNY Fredonia, among others) is just a sign of the times to come for public higher education. The sign is not a good one. A tide of forces threaten the future of liberal arts education in the U.S., but they go unacknowledged, and hence unaddressed. 

CNN's Fareed Zakaria's critique of American universities

Critiques like this, whatever their merits (which are mixed), probably do reflect the Zeitgeist, and maybe will even have a salutary effect by putting an end to the "diversity" mania in American higher education.  Some excerpts, with a few comments interspersed:

American universities have been neglecting excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.

An overstatement, but unfortunately, there is some truth to it, although it varies by field.

As the evidence produced for the recent Supreme Court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed the merit-based criteria for admissions in favor of racial quotas. Some universities’ response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized test like the SAT. That move would allow them to take students with little reference to objective criteria. (Those who will suffer most will be bright students from poor backgrounds, who normally use tests like the SAT to demonstrate their qualifications.)

In the humanities, hiring for new academic positions now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups.

Quebec's "war" on its Anglophone universities (including McGill)

This is pretty perverse.  Curious to hear from readers in Quebec about what's going on and how this is expected to play out.

A "radical" proposal for Penn's future

Here: 

Many institutions today deliver research and teaching mixed with other social and political agendas, somewhat like the religious agendas of elite Universities of the 1700s.

To recommit to Franklin’s vision, Penn’s sole aim going forward will be to foster excellence in research and education. This aim is in the best long-term interest of all members of society. 

Even more radical, the proposal suggests that faculty appointments be based on merit!  (Imagine believing in meritocratic criteria?  Very radical.)   I note that, as of now, not many Penn faculty have signed.

For a different vision of Penn's future, this embarrassing call for the suppression of lawful speech by a Penn law professor makes for chilling reading.

On Harvard President Claudine Gay

I agree with this assessment by a Washington Post opinion writer.

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.)

The Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn were much too nice to the Republicans in Congress...

...during the recent hearing about alleged "antisemitism" on campus.  This was a case where the best defense is a good offense, and they should have followed the lead of a street-brawling lawyer like Joe Jamail (hands folded on right) (see also) or George Galloway's evisceration of Senator Norm Coleman (start around 6 minutes).  If I were the Penn President, this would have been my opening statement:

Although we are a private university, we have committed ourselves to the free speech principles embodied in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.   First Amendment protections are at their strongest when it comes to political speech, which includes speech in support of Israel and speech critical of Israel, speech in support of the Palestinians or even Hamas, and speech critical of the Palestinians or Hamas.   It protects speech that is vulgar, offensive and hurtful.  Some countries, with more limited civil liberties, do not protect such speech, but that is not our constitutional tradition, and that is the tradition we, as a private university, have committed ourselves too.  The First Amendment does not protect assault, battery, or speech that creates a hostile work or educational environment.   We have been vigilant in preventing and punishing such incidents, and will continue to do so.  There is no antisemitism crisis on our campus, that has been manufactured by you with the aid of the media.  What is happening is that a minority viewpoint, critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinians, has been voiced much more loudly than before.  This speech is certainly out of step with the bipartisan consensus about Israel in Congress and in much of the country.  But First Amendment protections are most important when it comes to expression of a minority point of view.  I am dismayed and disturbed that the Congress of the United States would bring pressure on universities to suppress or punish speech that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

SUNY Fredonia to close 13 undergraduate degree programs, including philosophy--which has only one tenure-stream faculty member, Stephen Kershnar

This will surely become an issue in Professor Kershnar's lawsuit against the university for violating his constitutional rights; philosopher Neil Feit (now emeritus at Fredonia) writes:

I thought I'd let you know that SUNY Fredonia's president and administration yesterday recommended the discontinuation of 13 undergrad degree programs, including the BA in Philosophy. With respect to Philosophy, Stephen Kershnar is currently the only tenured or tenure-track member of the department, and he is still banned from campus and teaching as his suit against the campus president and provost plays out. Until this academic year, I was the only other member of the department, but I retired as of 9/1/2023, sick and tired of being treated like crap by an incompetent and malicious administration. I link to President Kolison's bizarre "Roadmap to Financial Stability," and below that paste the list of programs identified for discontinuation.

https://www.fredonia.edu/about-offices/president/roadmap-financial-stability

1. BA Visual Arts and New Media, Art History
2. BA French
3. BA French: Adolescence Education
4. BS Industrial Management
5. BS Mathematics: Middle Childhood Specialist (grades 5-9)
6. BA Philosophy
7. BA Sociology
8. BA Spanish
9. BA Spanish: Adolescence Education
10. BFA Visual Arts and New Media, Ceramics
11. BFA Visual Arts and New Media, Photography
12. BFA Visual Arts New Media, Sculpture
13. BSED Early Childhood (Birth - Grade 2)

Hiring of non-US PhDs in US departments

A philosopher trained outside the US and UK (who now teaches in the UK) writes:

I appreciate that you recently brought up the Oxford DPhil post. One comment mentioned something about the UK vs US PhD issue. I do not wish to be identified, but if you find the issue worth discussing, I would like to see someone comment on whether non US PhDs have a disadvantage worldwide or specifically on the US job market. My question comes from my past and current institutions. I did my PhD at [a top Australasian program]. I currently teach at [a strong UK program].  Both are decent institutions. However, I looked at the placement records, and neither seem to have a remotely decent history of placing people in US Universities.

Reason I’m asking is because my course work students at [my current UK program] seem to be relatively uninterested in applying for US PhDs, and I’m deeply concerned whether this would limit their options in the future.

A few observations of my own, but I am very interested to hear from readers with relevant experience.   In philosophy, hiring is hugely affected by "familiarity," and that often counts against non-US PhDs, unless they come from one of the handful of overseas universities whose main faculty are well-known here in North America.  One of my kids is pursuing a PhD in a core natural science discipline, and while some of the pattern from philosophy repeats there, it is also striking, to me, how often it does not.  I assume this has something to do with non-subjective evaluations in the assessment of candidates (how often is your research being cited, for example).   One's research can get a lot of citations, even if one's advisor was not friends with the right people.

Rampant grade inflation at Yale...

...makes the NYT:  80% of grades are A or A-.  Discuss.

Faculty fleeing Viktor DeSantis's Florida

Not surprising.

How "open access" turned into a cash cow for publishers

Oy veh!

(Thanks to David Velleman for the pointer.)