A few days after I published this post, a tenured member of UC Boulder's philosophy department wrote me (in strict confidence) to complain about (in his words) "the hatchet job" performed by the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in its report on the site visit to Boulder (hereafter 'the report'). I was a bit surprised by his note because in that post I had written about my experience of meeting another tenured member of the philosophy department at Boulder at a conference a year ago, who had shared with me testimony about the culture of sexual harassment at Boulder. The otherwise unfruitful exchange between us made clear something that is also very clear from the report itself (and from subsequent news accounts--see, especially, this piece by Annaleigh Curtis): Boulder's administration is not a trusted partner and almost certainly part of the problem (see also this earlier account of how it deals with sexual harassment in engineering).
The report itself does not name names nor does it offer statistical evidence of the climate problems at Boulder; it's not a document prepared either to prosecute or exonerate individuals. It's also not a brief in preparation for a lawsuit. Rather, it makes a lot of detailed, context-specific suggestions on how to move the department forward. The lack of specificity on the offenders and offenses has caused the men in the department obvious reputational damage; it’s no surprise that they would fear that they are viewed as active or complicit sexual aggressors. In fact, this prompted six senior female faculty to release a statement that "none of our currently untenured male colleagues or current male graduate students has engaged in sexual misconduct (nor, indeed, have most of our tenured colleagues)." It does not take an advanced degree in logic to understand that it follows from this letter that some of the tenured folk at Boulder are seen by their very colleagues as a source of grave problems.
But not according to Michael Tooley [HT Leiterreports]. Tooley is incapable of even acknowledging this minimal fact. I have never met Tooley, but I have read some of his papers (on laws and (ahum) on infanticide) and I know that he is a distinguished senior, professional philosopher. If we are going to make professional philosophy, a welcoming, inclusive place to all, it's folk like him that are going to have to be part of the solution. Here's what he writes:
I have been in half a dozen philosophy departments over the course of my career, and it does not seem to me that female members of those departments were treated differently in any way than male members. I did not, for example, see any differences between, on the one hand, the way in which male philosophers interacted with female philosophers and, on the other, the way in which they interacted with each other. Nor did I see any prejudice against women faculty when it came to decisions to hire, to tenure, or to promote, or against female students when it came to admission to graduate school. Indeed, in recent years, I have seen cases involving bias in the opposite direction, both as regards hiring, and with respect to graduate admissions.--Michael Tooley.
Tooley has spent a life-time in professional philosophy, and all he is capable of acknowledging about our climate problems is that (recently) there is affirmative action in favor of women! This change of topic is more appropriate for a politician running for, say the Tea Party's endorsement than for a professional trying to address the perceptions of his peers.
Now buried in Tooley's website, which is largely devoted to discrediting the report, is this nugget:
Only one tenured or tenure-track member of the Philosophy Department has been found guilty of sexual harassment, and that in two cases. That person was punished both times, and in the second case, the punishment was not one that could plausibly be perceived, contrary to what the Site Visit Report tends to suggest, as “a slap on the wrist” (page 9): it involved, among other things, one semester’s suspension without pay.--Tooley.*
So, in fact, Tooley knows that there is a serious problem with at least one repeat offender in Boulder's department. I have been unable to find a single statement on Tooley's website that acknowledges the costs of having a colleague with a predilection for sexual harassment. Given his experience and status, I would love to learn from him how he has managed to deal with the psychological and moral complexities of such situations; how he has reached out to the victims and how he and his colleagues have reflected on shared complicity. Instead, on his website, Tooley now offers his pet theory on the socialization of young women in society and what one can charitably describe as talking points to folk that would wish to circle the wagons.
Boulder's departments struggles are not unique in the profession. I have spent my adult life in professional philosophy; I have seen boorish behavior (often involving alcohol) that might well qualify as harassment; I have witnessed sexism in the class room; I have been close to situations where professors slept with their (undergraduate and graduate) students (and even been told this in a job-interview as a way to recruit me to a rural university); I have friends that were accused of sexual harassment; I have seen senior men advance the careers of (otherwise unremarkable) junior versions of themselves with little regard to more talented women nearby; I have seen outright hostility toward alternative ways of doing philosophy based on the flimsiest knowledge and engagement.** (I have come to fear that some such hostility is woven into the DNA of how we do professional business.) In most cases my bystander behavior can be described as unheroic and pragmatic.
In fact, my self-identity is tied up with the idea of being a philosopher, even a successful professional philosopher. I would love to emulate professor Tooley’s career. It's clear that my own, current department is not the most welcoming place to study philosophical feminism. Does it point to a deeper problems with gender? I hope not, but I don't feel very confident (and I recognize that there are huge cultural differences between academia Stateside and in Flanders). I know that in professional contexts I have engaged in behavior toward other philosophers that can only be described as bullying, without apparent professional cost. All of us routinely experience unreceptive professional philosophers that do not wish to see the best in each other's attempts. It can't be enjoyable to have colleagues that belittle the worth of one's work (another issue mentioned in the report).
So, the Boulder report and responses to it hits close to home. Prof. Tooley, all of us in professional philosophy need to do better. In a better world somebody with his status would be at the center of attempts to improve the situation. I understand that he is irritated because he apparently feels shafted (correctly, I think) by Boulder's administration and (incorrectly, I think) by his peers in the profession who wrote the report. Even so, as a profession, we have honored him with distinctions and recognition. His response does not reflect well on us. I am stating this in public because I hope more of our colleagues will let him know this. I have come to expect little moral courage from the senior members of our profession (we're all humans, after all), but Tooley's inability to "see" is, well, a disgrace.
*University administrators routinely use concerns over privacy to hush up problems on their campuses; one consequence is that professional peers rarely learn of the punishments received by their colleagues elsewhere.
**I mention this because the report is not just about sexual aggression. It’s also about work-place bullying and lack of civility toward alternative philosophical projects.
Bravo. Excellent post.
Posted by: Mark Lance | 03/04/2014 at 03:24 PM
Nice (and honest) post, Eric!
I just skimmed through most of Tooley's self-apologetic treatise (from the little I have seen, I don't think it's worth my time or my anger) but, in doing so I stumbled into the second passage you quote and I was taken aback!
How is punishing a repeat sexual harasser who is being disciplined for the second time with one semester's suspension without pay *not* a slap on the wrist?
What measures were taken to ensure that after that semester the repeat harasser would stop harassing for good this time?
How do you navigate being colleagues with someone who seems to have a habit of harassing your colleagues and/or your students?
Apparently, Tooley is too busy salvaging his professional reputation and attacking the Site Visit Team to tell us. In the process, he's essentially outing himself as someone who has no intention to be part of the solution, for, according to him, there is no problem in the first place. In fact, if there is a problem, it's that the white guys are being discriminated against. It's the typical reaction of white dude who feels his privilege is under threat and it's very disappointing coming from someone as smart as Michael Tooley, but, unfortunately, I fear that this view is shared by many philosophers of Tooley's generation. It's just that Tooley felt pressured to express these view in public. Let's hope they retire soon (the climate in philosophy for old white dudes is becoming so hostile! :-) ).
Posted by: Gabriele Contessa | 03/04/2014 at 04:07 PM
Very, very well said, Eric.
Posted by: Remy Debes | 03/04/2014 at 05:08 PM
Yes.
Posted by: Katy Abramson | 03/04/2014 at 08:49 PM
Eric, it does come as something of a surprise to me that only one tenured member of the Philosophy Department has been found guilty of harassment, and that he was suspended without pay on the second occasion. After all, the Report does say things like: "the Department maintains an environment with unacceptable sexual harassment, inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior, and divisive uncivil behavior," that only slaps on the wrist were handed out, and that the department has an international reputation for being unfriendly to women.
True, these statements are compatible with Tooley's. But I still think that Tooley was right to make his point about how many people had actually been found guilty.
Now, as to his never having witnessed a single case of sexual discrimination within our profession, that is a load of codswallop and you are totally right to point out that it is so.
Posted by: Mohan Matthen | 03/04/2014 at 11:10 PM
Mohan, it seems we were surprised by the same fact.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 03/04/2014 at 11:13 PM
[Prof. Tooley has asked me to post this response on his behalf.--ES]
Dear Professor Schliesser,
Because of other things to which I have been attending, it is only today that I got around to following the link in the letter you sent me, and to reading your reaction to the documents that I posted.
I had expected that you would be responding to the criticisms that I had advanced of the site visit team, and so I was rather surprised when you didn’t seem to address those criticisms at all. In particular, I was struck by the fact that in your post you do not mention two of the main points that I made, and at considerable length. First of all, there was the site team's violation of their agreement with the Philosophy Department. Second, and even worse, the site team then proceeded to assert something that there appears to be excellent reason for thinking is false, viz., that the Dean and the Provost had joined the Department in requesting the site visit. Yet you say nothing at all about any of this.
One of the documents that I posted on my website describes the significant disagreement that exists within the Philosophy Department over whether it would be wise to release a serious and thorough-going criticism of the site report, along with the reasons that some of my colleagues have offered for not doing so. Among those reasons is the fear of the sort of response of which your post is a rather vivid example. But another, and rather more serious concern, is the fear of retaliation and of a negative reaction on the part of the University Administration. One may very well expose oneself to criticism, for example, merely by saying that the Administration, by refusing to release statistical information about the number of cases of sexual harassment, uncivil behavior, and other types of unprofessional behavior that have occurred, has failed to do anything to minimize the harm that has been caused to innocent members of the Department, including untenured junior members, to present graduate students, to recent Ph.D. graduates who are currently on the job market, and to all of their families.
As I indicate in that document, I’m not convinced that the reasons that I mention there are good reasons for not criticizing the site report, but my hope is that more of my colleagues will come to share my view that we should not remain silent, and that hope is the reason that I have not yet posted the document containing my full account of the background to the site visit, along with my detailed response to the site report. Your post, with its vigorous title, “Michael Tooley, sees no evil, hears no evil,” does, of course, dramatically bring out the personal downside for me in holding off on the release of the document in question, since in that document I do discuss the different types of problematic behavior that have occurred in the Philosophy Department. Ultimately, however, I will release that document, and I’ll be interested at that point to hear whether you are willing to defend the view that the site report provides a fair and accurate account of the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado.
In the meantime, perhaps I can draw your attention to a document that, as I can see from the date of your email to me, I hadn’t completed at the time when you posted your reaction, namely, “A Brief Historical Overview of the Actions Taken by the Philosophy Department.” Here are three paragraphs from that document:
“Because of the veil of total secrecy that I have just described, most people in the Philosophy Department were, for a number of years, completely unaware that any of their colleagues had behaved in very unacceptable ways. Gradually, however, information leaked out, and as it did, the Philosophy Department asked itself what action it could take.
The first thing that the Philosophy Department did was to create, in December of 2011, an ad hoc Departmental committee to look into the issue of behavior that the Department considered unacceptable, including behavior that is highly undesirable in spite of the fact that it does not violate any of the University’s policies. (This ad hoc committee, of which I was a member, was subsequently replaced by a permanent, ‘Climate Committee’, within the Department.)
That committee immediately began deliberations, consulting with the Office of Discrimination and Harassment as it did, and the result of that committee’s deliberations was a recommendation to the Department by the Climate Committee that led to the adoption by the Department of a detailed “Code of Conduct Concerning Relationships,” of which I was a principal author, and which was posted on the Philosophy Department website along with links to the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics, as well as to the discussion, in the CU Faculty Handbook, of Principles of Professional and Ethical Responsibilities, together with the University of Colorado’s official policies concerning sexual harassment, discrimination, and amorous relationships. (The detailed “Code of Conduct Concerning Relationships” document has, however, been taken down by the External Interim Chair, Professor Andrew Cowell.)”
Given my involvement in the Department’s attempts to deal with unacceptable behavior, your “sees no evil, hears no evil” characterization is completely inaccurate, and your use of the word "disgrace" is, well, disgraceful. As for "moral courage," you have things entirely back-to-front. In the present environment at my university, raising any criticism at all of the site report is what most people find very difficult.
Sincerely yours,
Michael Tooley
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 03/09/2014 at 07:56 AM
Dear Prof. Tooley,
Thank you for your response to my note.
First, I posted a link to your webpage in my original post so that my readers could make up their own mind about your criticism of the site visit report; in my post I note that it is "largely devoted to discrediting the report."
I would not be surprised to learn that the site visit made mistakes or that their visit has been badly handled by a host of parties involved. It's a new institution, so that is to be expected. I have no idea why you think I would have to respond to your criticism on their behalf; I am not a member of the committee nor a member of APA anymore.
Second, as I make clear in my original post, I think the Administration at Boulder is clearly mistrusted by your department, and I have come to believe that you all have good reason for that. (I find it odd that you do not seem to notice this about my original post.) I am very sad to hear that Boulder has become a fearful environment.
Third, you have every right to criticize the report; everybody benefits from good faith efforts at improving the situation. In my original post, I explain why your approach of doing so strikes me as counter-productive.
Fourth, I heartily recommend that you re-read Profs. Lee and Pasnau's response (in their capacity as Co-Chairs, of the Climate Committee) to the site committee's report: . It manages to address the harms done to victims without giving up a critical stance either toward Boulder's administration nor, it seems, the site visit's Report.
Finally, I am sad that you do not address my substantive criticisms of you. I am, however, relieved to learn of your personal attempts to improve climate at Boulder; I hope you make us all proud in turning things around.
Sincerely,
Eric
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 03/09/2014 at 08:32 AM