On McGinn, again....

DailyNous has posted three stories (here, here, here) about how Colin McGinn was voted a position by the philosophy department at Eastern Carolina University (ECU). According to the Chronicle, it involves The Whichard distinguished professorship, which pays $110,000 in order "to teach two undergraduate courses, offer a weekly faculty seminar, and deliver two public lectures." But ECU's Administration decided to rescind the offer without explanation. The Chronicle implies that McGinn believes it's the "the sexual-harassment allegations at Miami [that] were behind the decision to reject him." Apparently, ECU's administration refuses to say (one suspects after consulting a lawyer).  Of course, if one Googles, say, "Collin McGinn" in conjunction with "Miami" --  one can imagine an administrator doing this while preparing a department's recommendation to the board of trustees -- one encounters lots of media reports (in Slate, the New York Times, etc.) on the McGinn affair and one may well encounter McGinn's blog and the discussions his self-presentation generated on other blogs.

Most of us outside of Miami are in an epistemically disadvantaged position to evaluate the merits of the case against McGinn, and the terms of McGinn's resignation ensure that the relevant details would remain unavailable (that may be thought convenient to McGinn).  Yet, my guess is that when future historians and sociologists of philosophy will describe the "McGinn affair," they will focus less on what may or may not have happened at Miami, and will focus more heavily on the ways McGinn presented himself in his blogs and how because of his own words, he became an object of ridicule (Google, say, "McGinn" and "Genius project"). 

Refreshingly our philosophical peers at Eastern Carolina University do not seem to read blogs. Here's what the Chronicle reports:

Michael Veber, an associate professor of philosophy who led the search committee at East Carolina that chose Mr. McGinn, says he didn’t put much stock into what went on at Miami. "After reviewing the evidence, Miami never even accused him of harassment," says Mr. Veber. "So I don’t see how anyone could justify denying him a position because of any of that."

Nicholas Georgalis, a distinguished research professor of philosophy at East Carolina, says his department wanted to hire Mr. McGinn because of his eminence as a scholar. "His publication record is amazing, he is a rare public intellectual, and his letters of recommendation from top people in the field were extraordinary," says Mr. Georgalis, who has been at East Carolina since 1973 and says he can’t remember administrators ever turning down a philosophy-department hire before this. "We felt this was a great opportunity."

As for the reaction to the sex-harassment allegations Mr. McGinn faced at Miami, Mr. Georgalis says "a lot of it was hysteria, reactions based on rumor." He adds, "I evaluated him based on his academic credentials, which are stellar."

If McGinn is to be hired because of his credentials, in part, as a "public intellectual," I find the judgment of my colleagues at ECU very odd. If there was "hysteria" (not a word I would choose given a sexist history of it being deployed to disqualify women's intellectual standing), then it's, in large part, because McGinn's blog posts generated it.

So, let me stipulate for the sake of argument that it is possible that McGinn was treated unfairly at Miami; I also understand why some folk would want to give him a new chance within professional philosophy. But it is a bit rich to pretend that McGinn never expressed a lot of views on the nature of his own philosophical pedagogy, views -- which (recall) sexualize the student-teacher relationship and erase the boundaries between the personal and the professional -- that ought to weigh quite heavily against hiring him in a modern university. I am not suggesting that such reasons ought to be decisive, but they are not wholly irrelevant. 

Comments

[Catherine McKeen]

I also find ECU philosophy department's position strange. They seem to be claiming that they have no concern for the firestorm around McGinn at Miami. But no doubt McGinn would not have considered a post at ECU absent this firestorm. This puts ECU's philosophy department in the odd position of at least down-playing the phenomenon of which they are a direct beneficiary (if one would call it that).