Digressions&Impressions

On the Demise of Feministphilosophers

Many of us, myself included, have become increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues to help us make philosophical and real-world progress. And if I don’t think blogs are a good place to discuss stuff, it becomes a little odd to keep a blog going. Not all of us agree with this, and there may be spin-off blogs by some of our more optimistic members, which we’ll link to. But this site will soon no longer be hosting blog posts. I feel OK about this, and really good about what we’ve accomplished, but I think the time for this blog is now past and we’ve all got other projects underway.--Jennifer Saul, "Closing down FP" Feministphilosophers.

I dislike mono-causal explanations for social affairs, but it would be no exaggeration to say that the portfolio of websites hosted  by or associated with Feministphilosophers (see also the genderedconferencecampaign or 'what is it like being a women in philosophy?) transformed public perceptions of professional philosophy. They didn't just create a whole range of #metoo moments (before the term was invented) in professional philosophy, but they generated a discipline wide discussions (activism, conferences, etc.) about a whole range of professional and philosophical issues that percolated through the profession and made headlines in the international press. What seemed like a culture of silence (recall) frozen eternally, suddenly became an avalanche of bricks in the wall crumbling to dust. As this process unfolded it generated an intense set of public and more subterranean reactions many of which unsympathetic to the (diverse) aims of feministphilosophers, which changed the incentive structure for public speech. (Recall this post.) Philosophy generated its own dark web and with the frisson associated with dangerous thoughts it became a permanent, dissonant even intimidating counterpoint  to feministphilosophers.

Before i comment on Saul's remarks (see also Yap), I turn to Brian Leiter's post which quoted remarks by one of my favorite scholars, Paul Russell:*

There is, in any case, little or nothing about the debate concerning Lenin/Bukharin/Gramsci et al in the SEP. What this shows is that there are significant movements and developments in philosophy (e.g. Marxism) that are still sorely neglected in the SEP. Despite its considerable merits and achievements, the SEP has a rather narrow and contentious conception of what 'philosophy' is. It is arguable that this reflects a deeper problem, with what could be called the "APA outlook". This is an outlook that includes a rather crude understanding of how philosophy can and should be politically "active". It is heavily focused on “professional” issues (and interests) and it is largely disconnected from real world politics and history - lacking any credible understanding of the role that philosophy has had and that it might play outside its narrow academic/professional concerns. 

It is notable that a perfectly sensible point -- that SEP's coverage of the Marxist tradition is rather thin and unbalanced  -- got submerged into a broader polemic. One could have made that point by noting that G.A. Cohen is discussed more frequently than Lenin or Luxemburg (who is curiously missing in Russell's remarks) in the pages of SEP. The SEP is a public treasure, but this kind of thing is not uncommon--there are huge path dependencies and the effects of idiosyncratic views that have shaped its development. (Just recently I noticed that a student or professional interested in the godfather of formal philosophy, and himself a pioneering feminist, Condorcet was badly served by SEP.) The nice thing about SEP is that they welcome corrective feedback and encourage new entries. It is an unfolding encyclopedia not a monument to a fixed view. So Profs. Russell and Leiter could have simply made their point and helped the editors of SEP coordinate a robust number of invitations to  develop entries that provide a better coverage of Marxism and its complex development and history.

But this perfectly sensible criticism is presented by way of contrast with the rich coverage of feminist themes in SEP and not, say, Bayes (which is discussed in huge number of entries many more than feminism). If I had followed Russell's (and Leiter's) style of argument, I would have said (in line with my priors), that the SEP's fondness for Bayes represent an APA outlook (they even use "APA appratichiks"--this gave me the giggles) that favors technocratic (or scientistic) governance, etc. (Sadly no entry on Feminist Bayesianism yet.)

Don't misunderstand me, Russell and Leiter are right to ask us to reflect on the ways (recall) the steep economic and prestige hierarchies of professional philosophy, as other academic enterprises, reflect, reinforce, and help recycle (ahh) the superstructure of society. But it is a bit peculiar that they do so in the name of encouraging more focus on "real world politics and history" by complaining about encyclopedia entries about another philosophical movement. It's especially odd because feminism has been a means to advance and develop many marxist projects. (That's actually pretty clear from quite a few entries in SEP! Standpoint epistemology, say, is indebted to marxism.)

It's not that they don't have a point: I checked the number of entries on "social activism" and "political activism" (both negligible. By contrast the number of entries that mentions 'politics' is huge). No to put a fine point on it, and I am pretty bourgeois myself, it strikes me that the interests of capital are served just fine by marxist-feminist infighting over crumbs of online space. Why, if one wishes to advance the demise of capital, one would encourage such zero-sum infighting is one of the mysteries of life that elude me. Anyway, as I have argued, with the shift of global capital toward Asia, philosophical fashions and trends, even identity, will shift, too.

Be that as it may, it's possible that the brief effervescent age of the group philosophy blog is over. Quite a few group blogs have folded, and few new ones, it seems, are breaking out. There are three challenges to such blogs: (i) a lot of coordination time is lost to maintain minimal unity of the group; (ii) it is really difficult to remain fresh (and not to keep returning to same issues over and over again); (iii) because of the prevalence of online harassment and the relative slowness of blog discussions (compared to twitter), folk are increasingly unwilling to leave comments at blogs. 

Plato says somewhere that all created things must perish. So, c'ést la vie. Even so, I worry that Saul's point -- she is "increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues" -- may reflect the success of the war of attrition against feministphilosophers waged by (what above I jokingly called) the dark web. But perhaps her new projects, and those of her collaborators , will prove to be as influential and stimulating to philosophical self-awareness. 

 

 

 

 

On the Missing Footnote

But there are sad celebrations as well, whose object is either to meet a calamity, or else merely to commemorate and deplore it. These rites have a special aspect, which we are going to attempt to characterize and explain. It is the more necessary to study them by themselves since they are going to reveal a new aspect of the religious life to us.

We propose to call the ceremonies of this sort piacular. The term piaculum has the advantage that while it suggests the idea of expiation, it also has a much more extended signification. Every misfortune, everything of evil omen, everything that inspires sentiments of sorrow or fear necessitates a piaculum and is therefore called piacular. So this word seems to be very well adapted for designating the rites which are celebrated by those in a state of uneasiness or sadness.--E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Translated by J. Swain, p. 389.

Adam Smith's views on moral luck have received steady interest from excellent philosophers and scholars, including Thomas Nagel, Paul Russell, Aaron Garrett, Chad Flanders, and Keith Hankins.  Even so, I felt that the full significance and weirdness of his views were not fully grasped because his account of the piacular -- "A man of humanity, who accidentally, and without the smallest degree of blamable negligence, has been the cause of the death of another man, feels himself piacular, though not guilty" (recall) -- had received little attention. So, I worked out my view in a paper on Smith and the piacular, which I presented at a conference and then published in a fine edited volume. The paper had a companion piece, which I also presented at a conference, and then published in another fine special issue. The two papers were put together within a larger argument in my book, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP,  in press, available for pre-order here!). That book received two extensive referee reports. I turned in the final, corrected proofs on Monday. As it happens, an earlier version of my book had also been refereed by two excellent referees at Routledge (see here for what it would have looked like). So this material has been read carefully by more than half-dozen referees and learned editors.

A few weeks ago, in Oxford, I gave a talk at Blackwell's where they were running their usual 3 for the price of 2 sale on Oxford classic paperbacks. One of the discounted books I bought was Durkheim's Elementary Forms. At Chicago, as a graduate student, I knew plenty of PhD students in sociology, religion, anthropology, and social thought who had read Durkheim (for comps, etc.). But while I taught Comte and Weber, I never got around to study him seriously (although I am pretty sure I read him on suicide). Yesterday, I decided to try to read it.

As an aside, when I had more time or was younger (or both), I would happily read several books alongside each other. But nowadays, I prefer to focus on one book at a time. When I don't have an obligation to read a particular book (because of research, a deadline, some social reason, etc.), I find that I can aimlessly pick up a book, read a bit in it, and then put it down--this can be repeated several times with different books in a row; a book needs to grab me before I settle into it.

Yesterday, I started reading Durkheim's introduction: "...to study the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known, to make an analysis of it, and to attempt an explanation of it... in the first place, when it is found in a society whose organization is surpassed by no others in simplicity." This surprised me because Durkheim shows here, at once, his debt to eighteenth century Scottish social theory with its idea that societies develop from simple to complex, and that the simple societies can reveal something characteristic about the nature of a social practice. (The previous sentence simplifies the Scottish social theory methods, but let's leave that aside.) And while some of the Scots would have looked at Scottish Highlander culture or American Indians, Durkheim  promises to draw on field work done among  Australian aboriginals.

At that point -- I am still on Durkheim's first page --, I put the text down, and start looking for references to Hume, Ferguson, Millar, or Smith. I knew from Durkheim's other work (on the division of labor) that he was familiar with Adam Smith. In fact, when I first conceived my monograph, I had intended to compare Durkheim to Smith because, originally, my book was going to include a major reception history of Smith (up to Rawls and Foucault). But I came to recognize that executing this would be an excuse never to finish my monograph. Much to my surprise Durkheim does not mention any of the Scots in his religion book. (In fact, his explicit treatment of Smith is rather thin in the division of labor book, although I think Durkheim is quite indebted to Smith's social theory.)

Then I flipped to Durkheim's table of contents, and to my horror I noticed that one of the chapter titles is called: "Piacular Rites and the Ambiguity of the Notion of Sacredness." I then checked the French version on-line: Les rites piaculaires et l'ambiguïté de la notion du sacré with a footnote to Pliny. (I have traced Smith's use to Livy and the poet Lucan.) Durkheim does not mention Smith or The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), but he does mention another (once) famous book, Religion of the Semites, by another (nineteenth century) Scot, William Robertson Smith, which has a whole chapter on piacular sacrifice among the Ancient Hebrews. Robertson Smith's chapter mentions Lucian (Hume's and Smith's favorite author) en passant, but no Smith nor TMS. Now, I would be amazed if Robertson Smith was unfamiliar with Adam Smith's TMS, but that requires further research. I did find this gem, which ought to be the motto for us scholars, in William Robertson Smith:

    It is precisely the things that seem most obvious which in a subject like ours require the most scrutiny (p. 390).

Before I close, an autobiographical remark. Parts of my monograph can be traced back directly to my dissertation which I defended in 2002. But the dissertation did not hang together as a book, and I published a few chapters as papers and wrote a few occasion pieces inspired by my earlier research. When later, I moved to Europe, and entered the research grant environment, several grant reviewers complained that I did not have a monograph. (To make matters worse: I was being recruited for a prestigious chair, and then at the last minute was told that my lack of a monograph disqualified me.) While I was contemplating what I should write my book about, I read a draft of Ryan Hanley's terrific book on Adam Smith. Ryan and I had overlapped in graduate school (and one of my first publications was a criticism of one of his first papers), and I had edited one of his other papers. Even so his book was an eye-opener. After we left graduate school, Ryan had clearly re-read Smith with a fresh eye. And so, with a generous and much appreciated invitation from Brian Leiter (really!), I decided to re-read Smith and also work up a book on Smith for his series. This took me another seven years to produce. That is to say, when I turned in the final, corrected proofs, I had been researching Smith on-and-off for almost twenty years.

While I am pretty pleased with how my monograph turned out (except for the total lack of humor--I blame Adam Smith, who really was not funny), I am depressingly sure there are typos and ungrammatical sentences left in my monograph. It is what it is, I try to console myself. While I do not expect to do more original, scholarship on Adam Smith, I also know that my book won't be the last word on Smith (or public philosophy, the history of liberalism, etc.).

Then, last week, prompted by a very fine, draft paper by Maria Pia Paganelli and Michelle Bee, I wrote a blog post on material and insights that are only partially incorporated in the monograph. That post connects to the central argument of the book, and I am annoyed with myself for not discerning it more fully before I turned in the book. Even so, the vain scholar in me is even more annoyed for not catching the piacular connection between Smith and Durkheim; that would have made a fine note invisible to most readers, but impressive to the discerning. 

Then, as I was musing about my missing footnote and debating if I should write a post about it, Google teaches me that another scholar, Christopher M. Driscoll (previously unknown to me, I think), has put together my treatment of Adam Smith on the piacular with Durkheim's in a fascinating context I did not foresee at all. And not for the first time, I feel blessed that I can participate in an intellectual enterprise beyond my control and which reaches unexpected and surprising, temporary resting spaces that cause wonder.

 

On How 'We' Should we respond (a note on Tuvel)

The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.--Seneca, Letter 25.

I was away from the internet for a few days, and I returned to renewed turmoil in the philosophical blogosphere. To seasoned hands these take on a predictable sequence and by now we're far along in the cycle that Brian Leiter has used the phrase 'defamation per se;' before long we should expect, as a discerning observer noted, the conservative media (and her tactical allies]) to use the occasion to inform their readers that this whole episode is another instance of the threat to free speech on American college campuses.  Meanwhile, among philosophical feminists friendships are being tested, and an apparently well-meaning junior scholar, Prof. Tuvel, is exposed to some of the more serious perils and uncertainties of lack of tenure.

I was going to ignore the controversy (and retreat into Seneca), and treat the whole episode as a learning opportunity about the complexities of several scholarly fields and the ways these intersect with activism of various types in a profession that has some unease with activism. Yet, when Tuvel writes, So little of what has been said, however, is based upon people actually reading what I wrote, I felt compelled to read her piece. [HT Dailynous] In what follows, I won't weigh in on the merits of the piece qua contribution to existing scholarship on transracialism and transfeminism (I am an ignoramus), to what degree it is harmful to some communities (I'll let them be the judge), and to what degree Hypatia erred in publishing it.+ I do hope that legitimate, animated scholarly disputes (which may well reflect different stances on politics and strategy) can be prevented from spilling over to the law-courts.++

Yet, I do not refrain from comment altogether. That's because Tuvel's explicit stance is (I quote from the concluding section), "broadly Millian; as a rule, we should encourage “different experiments in living” and not interfere with others’ liberty unless doing so would prevent harm to others (Mill 2002, 47)." This is, in fact,, broadly, my own stance to such matters, although, at times, I incline (recall) more to Thoreau's version of it than Mill's (but recall). In addition, when it comes to racial/ethnic matters, the Millian, who wishes to be both true to her tradition and re-animate it, should show restraint and modesty given Mill's non-trivial moral mistakes on race and empire.

So, what follows is a tentative response to some elements in her piece from the perspective of a fellow-traveler in Millian philosophy. In particular, I explore her piece in light of my ongoing reflections (recall this piece a few weeks ago) on the nature of philosophical authority. For, Tuvel frames her piece with the following remark,

I suggest that Dolezal offers an important opportunity for us to think seriously about how society should treat individuals who claim a strongly felt sense of identification with a certain race. When confronted with such an individual, how should we respond?

I have to admit that I dislike the first person plural (we) here because it is identified with society. In immediate context, Tuvel does not mention (i) which society she has in mind and (ii) why any of us should identify with it. In the next paragraph, Tuvel switches to the more impersonal "a society;" in the next paragraph, when discussing obstacles to Jewish conversion, she uses "a given society" before making clear that in her article, she is talking about "our society." By this our, she clearly means  "American society" (a locution she uses a few times later in the article), a society she understands as "racist."+++

Now, near the end of the paper, Tuvel writes, "I have taken it as my task in this article to argue that a just society should reconsider what we owe individuals who claim a strongly felt sense of identification with another race, and accordingly what we want race to be." Here the "we" is identified with a clearly aspirational just society. I say, clearly aspirational because the piece is written, in fact, in part to combat status quo bias (e.g., Tuvel criticizes a particular argument by Cressida Heyes as follows: " it dangerously appears to limit to the status quo the possibilities for changing one's membership in an identity category.")

Now, for some people, the question (a) how should I respond to X while we live in a just society and (b) how should I respond to X while we live in a racist society may seem the same question. But I don't think so. For the very same behavior may have different effects (including harms) or social meaning attached to it in different contexts (and this may well influence how one answers a-b).  Moreover, if the aim is to move a society from being racist to being just, it may well be the case that one needs to do things that one would never do, or (morally) have to do, once justice is achieved. (In fact, one may well suspect that in a just society many Xs that are now subject to political and moral contestation would not be noticed or a demanding a response at all.) Here my mention of effects/harms in context is in the spirit of Tuvel's argument, which, recall, is offered in the experimental spirit of Mill's harm principle. 

I take it that within the known limits of the possible impact of philosophical writing, Tuvel's aim is, in fact, to contribute to some such changed political environment. As she writes in her conclusion:

I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I conclude that society should accept such an individual's decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual's decision to change sex.*

This is, indeed, a proper Millian stance. It is, however, peculiar that her analysis largely ignores to what degree relevant minority communities (which she grants are also oppressed) have the same obligations as 'society.' She addresses the point in an example: 

For instance, if someone identifies so strongly with the Jewish community that she wishes to become a Jew, it is wrong to block her from taking conversion classes to do so. This example reveals there are at least two components to a successful identity transformation: (1) how a person self-identifies, and (2) whether a given society is willing to recognize an individual's felt sense of identity by granting her membership in the desired group. For instance, if the rabbi thinks you are not seriously committed to Judaism, she can block you from attempted conversion. Still, the possibility of rejection reveals that, barring strong overriding considerations, transition to a different identity category is often accepted in our society.

As an aside, it is a bit disconcerting that those branches of Judaism, which allow female rabbis, are (in the example) taken to stand in for all of  Judaism because orthodox Jews tend not to accept female rabbis. This matters to the present case because the rules that govern conversion into Judaism differ among different congregations (and the differences are most notable between orthodox and non-orthodox congregations). Some branches of Judaism actively discourage would be converts as part of the routine process of (to use somewhat false terminology) screening converts.

With that in mind, let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it may be morally wrong to block somebody from taking conversion classes into Judaism. It does not follow, as Tuvel (implicitly) recognizes, that even an imperfect, liberal society should thereby oblige a minority group to accept a would-be-convert to it or accept or recognize such a conversion while the members of the minority group do not. In fact, while the state should not put any obstacles on the would-be-exit of individuals from a minority group (and even has an interest in making sure that such exit is genuinely possible to adult members), it should allow, if (Lockean) freedom of association means anything,** minority groups to decide on their (often illiberal and sometimes immoral) entry-requirements, if any, as much as possible.  (And these may well disagree amongst themselves.)

That is to say, I am inclined to say, in my more Millian liberal moments, that, in the first (and second) instance, it is not up to us in so far as we primarily belong to the very imperfect, American society to decide the most central claims about a transition/conversion/ from "identity category" X to "identity category" Y (where Y is membership in a disadvantaged/subordinate/oppressed minority). I suspect the proper Millian perspective on this, is that that such matters should be left to those that have authoritative standing in interpreting the rules governing, or the other members of (etc.), the relevant 'identity categories' (especially) even when these differ in their judgments.***

As it happens, Tuvel misses an opportunity to engage with this perspective. At one point she quotes Tamara Winfrey Harris as stating "“Ms. Dolezal's masquerade illustrates that however much she may empathize with African-Americans, she is not one, because black people in America cannot shed their race … I will accept Ms. Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her.” (emphasis added) Tuvel's response treats Harris's point as being about a question of "exercising privilege;" and so she thinks it is sufficiently allayed by "trying to ensure equal access to the resources that permit one to change race." Yet, Tuvel here misses that Harris can also be taken to suggest that members of a subordinate group should have (at least some) control over membership and recognition conditions.

Now it is possible (I honestly don't know) that Professor Tuvel belongs to one of the (subordinate) groups she is writing moral theory about, and that she is really making a claim to her peers about how such groups should engage with would be new members.  But that's not the rhetorical-authorial perspective from which she writes. (This is not to deny that her position could not be welcomed by members of such groups who, may well wish to contemplate, to quote LK McPherson, "the conceptual possibility of race or gender transformation.") Rather, she writes from a Millian-liberal perspective about what society should do; this perspective is probably not shared by many of her radical and vocal critics. But as I noted above, it happens to be mine, too. So, with her I reject her critics' strategy of non-engagement. In defiance of such attempts at silencing, I have here tried to engage with the bit of her argument that directly concerns me; and I wish to register that she does not speak for me.

 

Against the APA's Code of Conduct

First, I am not a member of the American Philosophical Association (APA). I write about its new Code of Conduct because the APA is the wealthiest and most influential professional association in the discipline. Its views will ramify out toward many corners of the profession as a purported gold standard. In addition, my blogging career started with and has been animated by, in large part, a concern with professional mores. I have also written regularly about the need of such a Code in philosophy (and economics) [for a few examples, see here and here].

Second, I have no doubt that the committee that produced this code was of good will and animated by the noblest aspirations. Some of the members I have known and admired most of my career. The code evinces a concern with fairness and its guidelines represent a response to the ways in which formal and informal power are used and abused. I thought it especially important that it mentions and articulates some of the duties of faculty toward students.

Even so, I want to register my disappointment in and concern over this code. I will largely ignore but just explicitly note the oddity that the whole section on electronic communications seems to be restricted to work done on "institutional equipment, servers, websites, and email;" this does raise concerns (ht Stefan Hessbrüggen) over those faculty that challenge their own institutional practices on "institutional equipment." The code's flaws are three-fold: (i) it is silent on existing abuses and conflicts of interest in the profession; (ii) it has a misguided view on teaching philosophy; (iii) it is a predictable consequence that, as stated, this code will be used to silence and remove folk (from positions) who challenge local or professional abuses. It is especially notable that this code seems to have been written without addressing the widely read and discussed concerns over the abuses of 'civility' and 'collegiality (neither is mentioned much in the code, but there is an emphasis on being a good colleague) articulated by Leigh Johnson and Ed Kazarian at NewAPPS.  I discuss these flaws in turn. First, there are striking omissions:

• Many of the most obvious existing ethical problems in the profession occur in the context of professional ethics. These are cases in which professional ethicists use their status qua ethicist to become company-men who fail to exercise their professional duties to care for (say) animals [recall Lori Gruen's post]; or that advocate/condone torture (and get rewarded with grants, board membership, etc.); in addition, professional (applied) ethicists have been implicated in (recall) not being reflexive about conflict of interest rules and trading sometimes indirectly and occasionally directly their professional status for inappropriate financial and sexual benefits (name your favorite examples or go read the back issues of  my posts at NewApps). 
• In the previous bullet point I hint at a problem with a particular  journal. But professional philosophy has journal practices that can be best described as journal capture, and, more politely, as not conforming (with honorable exception to Ergo) to existing best practices in the academy (recall) this post. Connected to this is that,
• Professional philosophy has citation practices that are primarily about (aspirational) status signaling and club-joining; they do not exhibit much concern with giving credit to other people's contributions or priority. (Strikingly the APA code corrects this imbalance for one's students, but not others.) It is no surprise that professional philosophy exhibits various gendered, racial, and other patterns of exclusion.

These omissions are especially notable because the APA's Code explicitly notes that Given the varying public perceptions of philosophy, and the contributions of philosophy to the field of ethics as a domain of philosophical inquiry, the APA encourages its members to consider the connections between the public perception of philosophy and professional conduct as it relates to the values identified here. Philosophers have duties toward representing other people's and cultures' thoughts [see Bruce Janz's facebook post] and also responsibilities given the way our products enter the world of policy and practice. (For example, I have long been surprised that philosophers do not think it problematic when the predictable downside risks of their policy prescription fall on vulnerable and less powerful others.) Not to put too fine point on it, but there is a sense in which this Code does not take philosophical impact on the world serious enough.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that addressing these omissions is always easy and that my perception on these problems is beyond reproach. In effect, APA guidelines on how to think about likely conflicts of interests in the context of our professional and public activities may be useful precisely to generate discussion and awareness of the complexities involved. Some of the issues noted here are hinted at in the APA's code, in part by its appeal to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Professional Ethics (but the AAUP is primarily interested in academic freedom not professional integrity). For example, the AAUP insists that "professors acknowledge academic debt," but professional philosophers have a very curious way of interpreting this duty. So, this is not just a big missed opportunity, it also means that through its silence the APA seems to appear to condone some of the worst problems in our profession.

Second, the Code's understanding of teaching is flawed and also generates serious intellectual problems (I thank Ed Kazarian for discussion). Here are some examples:

• The report suggests that  teachers present "materials in an informed and balanced way, incorporating competing viewpoints in the spirit of fairness and with intellectual honesty." Pedagogically, it can be very useful to make mistakes in one's presentation and then allow oneself to be corrected by one of the students. (I use this trick so that my students learn that I let myself be corrected in public; that was a big deal in an environment in which teachers are never wrong in their lectures.) Also, some syllabi are intentionally biased because (and this is not uncommon in seminars) they wish to develop a particular viewpoint. In addition, in contemporary American culture 'balance' has become a way to correct perceived Liberal bias in a Conservative direction. But, as I learned from Mark Lance, it's rarely used to argue for the incorporation of other viewpoints (anarchist, libertarian, socialist, etc.). Remember, lots of analytical philosophers today have no patience for pomo views, but also (as distinct from their elders) other anti-realist or idealist views. (Full disclosure: I HAVE taught David Lewis alongside Deleuze; it was great fun, but why demand balance.) The APA here has over-reached.
• All of us sometimes encounter (it even made The Onion) overconfident students (often guys) who, perhaps without fully realizing it, monopolize class discussion and fail to acknowledge other students' perspectives even if they have not done the reading (or evince other signs of lack of preparation). Sometimes, it is very important for our pedagogical aims (i.e., "to teach...students how to think, write, and speak clearly; how to read, understand, and critique philosophical texts; and how to develop their own philosophies in conversation with other people") to prevent some such students from intimidating and silencing other students. While I would not always advocate "intentionally embarrassing or belittling them," it can be very useful both for the student in question and for others, that they come to recognize their own blabbering for what it is. How to do this in ways that promotes a healthy and constructive class room requires skill and experience, but the way the Code is worded may well be used to harass the most creative and serious of our teachers. 
• Sometimes what look like no-brainers ("Teachers should assess the academic performance of each student on its merits") turn out to require considerable contextual judgment. I have used teacher discretion strategically in grading to encourage more work or reward achievement of particular individuals (etc.).

Finally, let me discuss some preliminary concerns with the section on bullying and harassment.*

• It is odd and disappointing that the document does not reflect on the obvious ways such statements can be abused to silence and remove folk that question or challenge the professional and institutional status quo. In particular, it seems predictable that if you are vulnerable and try to call out various forms of oppression in a way that others find even mildly unpleasant, you will be accused of bullying and harassment. This is not some naive thought experiment, but lived experience for many of our peers.
• In particular, a certain (let me use a stereotype, sincere apologies to all members involved) Waspy politeness in the service of keeping a shop closed gets a pass in these guidelines, whereas emotive expressions of displeasure can be easily treated as species of bullying and harassment. This Code simply pretends as if this is not a known effect of such policies. For example, I can say very politely (I learned the following point from Amia Srinivasan and Daniela Dover) that you are begging the question and insist that you accept my premises and thereby assert situational power and structure over a conversation and, thus, "diminishes the capacity" of my interlocutor "to function effectively as a teacher, worker, or scholar."
• The problem here is that the guidelines are not treated in context sensitive way in which power differentials and context can make a big difference. For example nobody (least of all me) thinks that Jason Brennan's repeated public ridicule and parody of me (he can't even get my name right here) is problematic. Even my friends call me a ballooner now. (While my name sometimes come up in the blogopshere, I have never seen any complaint about the ridicule of my persona.) There are good reasons for this lack of concern; I am not especially professionally vulnerable. 
• Thus, the blanket ban on and prejudice against professional ridicule is (ahh) ridiculous. It is, after all, no surprise that dictators and tyrants dislike ridicule and satire--it's among the most effective weapons in equalizing power-differences. It is also a very effective way to undermine pretentiousness and visibly challenge professional privilege that cannot be defended on its merits, but hangs on anyway.

Let me stop here (for now). I hope this post generates respectful, wise, and inclusive discussion.:)

 

On Proportionality of Punishment of Academic (Sexual) Harassers

We need to begin by asking whether the refusal to hire is punitive, and, if so, whether the punishment is proportionate to the offense. Or whether the refusal to hire is preventative, in which case whether there are ways to prevent that do not destroy someone’s life so completely. If the answer is ‘both,’ we need to know in what proportions, so that we can work out whether the constraints on each goal are being sensibly applied. If the answer is ‘neither, we’re just trying to send out a signal’ — then I invite you to consider whether it’s morally acceptable to use a person, any person, to do that. Unpleasant narcissists are people too and it’s not open season when one of them gets exposed for what he is. It still matters how we treat him. It shocks me that anyone would doubt whether ‘How should we treat a wrongdoer in such a situation?’ is a serious question."

Sexual harassment of students by their professors betrays the fundamental idea of a university as a place where everyone can come to learn and master an intellectual discipline, and be evaluated on their intellectual competence, rather than their sexual desirability.

That ideal has been betrayed for a long time, which has led to widespread frustration with institutional inaction in the face of sexual harassment — but also to vindictive responses from those frustrated. Liberals who no doubt believe that convicted felons "deserve a second chance" sometimes sound like they think that accused or university-convicted sexual harassers should never be heard from again. But how could that be right?

Punishments should be proportional to the offense; that is a widely accepted principle of punitive justice. No one thinks that a sexual harasser should be castrated or hung. One also hopes no one thinks a sexual harasser should be prohibited from earning a living ever again. (Even convicted murderers, released from prison, are allowed to work.)--Brian Leiter "Academic Ethics: What Should We Do With Sexual Harassers in Academe? Should they be barred permanently from teaching?" The Chronicle of Hire Education.

I warmly recommend Brian Leiter's piece (from which I have quoted above). It raises a lot of important issues about matters of principle and also some of the cases familiar from professional philosophy (McGinn, Pogge). I find all of it worth reflecting on, and I hope it inspires discussion across our discipline as well as wider university culture. Most of what follows questions the proportionality principle -- "Punishments should be proportional to the offense" -- that Leiter relies on. I offer evidence that academic life, including academic sanctions, is not governed by such a proportionality principle. (That is compatible with it governing our legal system.) I'll also say something about how we should try to think about the violation of what Leiter calls "the fundamental idea of a university" that is, "as a place where everyone can come to learn and master an intellectual discipline, and be evaluated on their intellectual competence, rather than their sexual desirability." (I explicitly ignore here both (i) the issue of citing and teaching material of sexual harassers that Leiter also discusses in passing because I can't improve on Neil McArthur's old guest-post which seems to have escaped Leiter's notice and I ignore (ii) some of my disagreement with Leiter over how he presents/interprets the cases he discusses.)

As I have noted before (while writing about the Pogge case recall), academics actually treat harms against the profession rather severely: for example, serial plagiarists (e.g., Martin Stone) are (when caught) often banished from the profession and academic life, and given no second chances. This is also true of folk that get caught in multiple cases of serious academic misconduct (Stapel, Marc Hauser, etc.). In many cases of violations of academic integrity we de facto do not believe in second chances and we think that employment in the profession should be prevented. Many years ago, a journalist pointed out to me (with a mixture of bemusement and outrage) that academics tend to treat sins against the profession/discipline far worse than society treats a whole range of awful crimes. We convey something of this attitude to our students when we can give a student a (fairly automatic) F for (serious) cheating; many universities have some kind of procedure in which a student's academic misconduct becomes either a permanent feature of the academic records or becomes a permanent barrier to completing the degree.* What is especially notable about these cases is that disciplines and universities often are far more severe than the law. (That's not true of all the cases; some grant agencies have become notably harsher than universities/disciplines.)

I am not denying that it is possible to treat the kinds of cases I mention in the previous paragraph as falling under some kind of proportionality principle. But (a) that's not the natural reading of these cases and so the principle of proportionality does not apply in violations of academic integrity; and (b) if the proportionality principle is taken to apply then the severity of these punishments is strong evidence that we take violations of the integrity of the academic enterprise as extremely serious offenses. (Of course, a reformist reader may decide that the proportionality principle does apply here, and argue that the existing punishments do not fit the crimes, or that there are half-way places between utter banishment and ongoing engagement in academic work--this came up in the Hauser case.) My own favored interpretation is actually (b) -- our practice reveals we tacitly take violations of the integrity of the academic enterprise as extremely serious offenses --, but what follows will only assume that one needs to argue for the principle of proportionality in the context of academic offenses and can't take its applicability for granted.

Now, it's quite clear that until very recently our discipline (nor the academy, although professional philosophy lags some other disciplines) treated sexual harassment of students and colleagues without any seriousness at all--Leiter also notes this in his piece. (I am hopeful that there has been a norm change, although I worry that our  collective inability to prevent various kinds of retaliation and harassment directed against victims who have stepped forward may make the new norm rather hollow in practice.) The question now is as Leiter suggests, ‘How should we treat a wrongdoer in such a situation?’ but before we answer that we also need to settle if these cases fall under the principle of proportionality (as Leiter assumes) or fall under some other principle. (To be sure Leiter also allows that "protecting possible [future] victims" is also a consideration that may be taken into account and he may well be allowing other considerations; there is no disagreement between us on this point.)

Here I want to turn to Leiter's important observation that the cases of sexual misconduct and worse violate the "fundamental idea of a university as a place where everyone can come to learn and master an intellectual discipline, and be evaluated on their intellectual competence, rather than their sexual desirability." I agree with Leiter about this (although I suspect that a lot of misconduct is not a consequence of perceived sexual desirability). This particular harm is distinct from all the other harms that follow from various forms of sexual misconduct (and let me grant that these harms may well fall under some proportionality principle). Violations of this fundamental idea are very much like violations of academic integrity. These violations undermine our collective mission to teach, learn, and master an intellectual discipline. In the case of plagiarism we have long recognized this, in the cases of sexual misconduct we have been scandalously slow to acknowledge it.

Now one may think this sexual misconduct violates only the educational/research mission of individual victims. In fact, I would argue that sexual misconduct within the academy violates this fundamental idea not just for the victim but also for the wider academic environment. I never recognized this feature until I spoke to a number of women who had not themselves been targeted in anyway, but started to wonder why they did or did not receive attention from their teacher/supervisor/colleague (who was engaged in sexual misconduct). It really pollutes, so to speak, a whole intellectual environment. (It is no surprise, after all, that universities are modeled, in part, on monastic institutions.) So, this is why we should at least consider treating sexual misconduct within the academy as a species of academic misconduct and so liable to rather serious punishment from one's peers.

 

Prestige Bias, Excellence, and Demographics

Since I know nothing about her work, it may well be that Professor De Cruz is someone who has been a victim of pernicious "prestige" bias.  Pernicious prestige bias is when someone thinks that because someone got a PhD from Fancy Pants University they must be competent (or, the reverse).   That's bullshit and pernicious, of course, and the PGR upset that apple cart a long time ago.  But what most cyber-complainers call "prestige bias" is that hiring departments prefer candidates from well-regarded departments.  That's plainly true, but perhaps well-regarded departments are so-regarded because they are actually departments with very good faculty and very goods student?  Prof. De Cruz never fairly considers that possibility.  Non-pernicious prestige bias is simply a rational and time-saving heuristic for identifying candidates with excellent qualifications trained by excellent faculty, attributes that, in the PGR era, are well-tracked by what's now called "prestige."  As Prof. De Cruz notes, "prestige" bias is a feature of academic hiring in all disciplines; the difference in philosophy is that it no longer simply tracks "brand name" universities, but now reflects where the strongest clusters of philosophers and students actually are.  (In what other academic field does everyone know that two of the very best programs are at NYU and Rutgers?  There is none.)

"Excellence" doesn't, in reality, exclude any demographic groups, except the mediocre.--Brian Leiter.

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that (i) "well-regarded departments are so-regarded because they are actually departments with very good faculty." Let's also stipulate (ii) "Non-pernicious prestige bias is simply a rational and time-saving heuristic for identifying candidates with excellent qualifications trained by excellent faculty." And, let's stipulate, (iii) more controversially, that the quality of (ii) "in the PGR era," is "well-tracked by what's now called "prestige"" in the PGR ecology.

So far so good. Now after (i) Brian also added (i*) "and very goods [sic] student [sic]." This is non-trivial and more controversial. It suggests that the best ranked departments are excellent at recruiting the very best students. Now, let's allow, again for the sake of argument, that the top PGR departments will get (thanks to influence of PGR) 'the best' applicant pools. But it also suggests that we are ultra-confident about relative judgments of quality as predictors of future quality when it comes to people (often in their early 20s) with BAs (and increasingly MAs); little is known about their ability to deal with adversity, to deal with rejection, what their work habits are, etc. I would love to see some data-driven evidence on how good recruitment metrics really are (beyond generic claims about GRE scores).

Anyway, my point is this: the PGR evaluators are not asked to rank departments' perceived ability in recruitment. I am not suggesting nobody has insight about this; undoubtedly graduate admissions officers at top departments have some knowledge about how at least some of their perceived competitors do. They are quite aware locally of the cascade of decisions that occur around April each year.

The reason why the nature of recruitment matters is that in obtaining Brian's favored conclusion -- (iv) "Excellence" doesn't, in reality, exclude any demographic groups, except the mediocre"  --  is that recruitment, too, depends on fallible heuristics. The heuristics may well do reasonable well as advertised, but that's compatible with them not catching everybody that's worthy of being caught. (It is, in fact, not unheard of, of folk coming out of lower ranked departments going on to very distinguished careers.) This matters because it is by no means obvious that those heuristics that drive recruitment won't screen out some demographics (e.g., due to tacit biases, uni-dimensional heuristics, network effects, etc.)--given that the total number of students recruited into top PhD programs annually is fairly small demographic mishaps can occur easily (especially if they all rely on similar heuristics). The PGR is simply not designed to help explore that issue.

It is undeniable (there is sociology of science research on this) that those with access to resources and willingness of others to help do well in the competitive environment of academia. Those that benefit from prestige get access to such resources and willingness. And [perhaps this is self-serving] those that flourish all tend to merit it. But it does not follow that we can counter-factually conclude that others who do no so benefit from these resources would not have flourished supposing they would have benefited from prestige. Undoubtedly, Prof. De Cruz -- who in addition to being a prolific blogger is, just for the record, a world class scholar in several areas of specialty -- is making more points than that, but she is also making that non-trivial point. I don't see why Brian Leiter can't acknowledge it.

On my response to the APA Statement

Several people have suggested privately and publicly that my previous post in which I agreed with some of Brian Leiter's criticism of the APA statement on "pervasive incidents of bullying and harassment" can be interpreted as (i) defending anonymous bullying (or worse) and/or (ii) offering blanket criticism of those that criticize anonymous bullying. This is unfortunate because I do not hold (i-ii).

It would be great if those professional philosophers that visit anonymous blogs (or hear about particular instances of online harassment) would publicly speak out against the abuse and harassment found there, and would defend or reach out to particular victims of such abuse. On the public side this happens too rarely, and undoubtedly some folk are justly intimidated by the fact that if they speak up, they, too, may become targeted by anonymous blogs--this is not a mere possibility, but has already happened (recall also my post on anonymous push-back). This generates a collective action program, and so it makes sense that our collective professional association would step up to the plate (and speak on behalf of the profession while giving everybody cover).

Even so the APA made a mistake to invoke norms of civility in its attempt to go on record. Some of my friends have denied that the APA appealed to civility, but it did appeal to "civil disagreement," and that falls under the norms of civility. Here, I do not repeat my concerns over such invocations in politicized contexts. 

Rather, when the APA goes on record in condemning abuse, it should be explicit about particular cases and the reasons for doing so--as it did with clarity in the case of Professor George Yancy in the very same statement. In fact, the APA has a special obligation to be specific and detailed because it has no credibility in such affairs. It lacks credibility because for many decades it has been silent on all the known cases of harassment by powerful folk in the discipline; it is silent on the blatant conflicts of interest that exist in bits of the discipline (bioethics, business ethics, etc.), and it is silent on the lack of professionalism that still exist in some (many?) of our journal practices, etc. (See also this powerful piece by Leigh Johnson.) 

Now, by not providing specifics and by invoking norms of civility, the APA looks like it is either engaging in symbolic politics or trying to discredit views it does not like in virtue of these emanating from a vile part of the internet. In so doing, it has opened to door to well-meaning and hostile critics to suggest that the APA represents a faction rather than the general interest. It has also generated a terrible precedent in which 'civil disagreement' will be invoked by some moralizing or powerful faction to silence critics in the future. This is why I note my dissent from the APA's statement even if I can find myself in agreement with the concern over the abuses it registers.

civil disagreement

 

On Civility and Anonymous Posts; Leiter vs the APA

Abusive speech directed at philosophers is not limited to responses by the public to published op-eds. A look at some of the anonymous philosophy blogs also reveals a host of examples of abusive speech by philosophers directed against other philosophers. Disagreement is fine and is not the issue. But bullying and ad hominem harassment of philosophers by other philosophers undermines civil disagreement and discourse and has no place in our community. Attacks that focus on a philosopher’s race, gender, or other status are unacceptable and in violation of the APA Statement on Nondiscrimination. We call upon any member who has engaged in such behaviors in the past to cease and desist.--The American Philosophical Association [HT Daily Nous]

 

Here is the statement, which now puts the APA on record as participating in the inflation of "bullying" phenomenon and, much more seriously, conflating the criminal threats and racist abuse to which Prof. Yancy was subjected with "uncivil" but lawful speech (the APA even uses, bizarrely, the language of "cease and desist"!).   Apparently some people at the APA learned nothing from the University of Illinois's crusade on behalf of "civility."  There were reasons to be skeptical that an APA statement would have much impact on racist sociopaths of the kind who were harassing Prof. Yancy, but now the APA has gone and done something much more outrageous and unprofessional.  The APA has no business regulating lawful "uncivil" speech, or legislating what counts as "civility," let alone calling on people to "cease and desist" from it....Brian Leiter

My former colleagues at NewAPPS, Ed Kazarian and Leigh Johnson (here and here), taught me to be suspicious of appeals to "civility" (recall). I am not against civility as such. Civility is, in fact, a fragile public good that can be extremely important to an academic community; it is to be cherished in practice. But those that appeal to it, and invoke it in polemicized context, tend to use it as a means to silence and regulate unwelcome speech. Civility is, thus, a norm that is best not invoked or preached, but perfectly fine to practice. (I feel the same way about Kantian ethics; great to live by, not so swell to preach.)

So, I agree with Brian Leiter that while correctly expressing "solidarity" with Prof. Yancy -- and I am glad it did so --, the APA mistakenly also took a swipe at "anonymous philosophy blogs," where it finds "examples of abusive speech by philosophers directed against other philosophers." As it happens I am aware of the existence of such blogs only because Brian Leiter sometimes quotes and links to them in ways I find annoying: that is, he sometimes appeals to anonymous others to frame a claim or to add insult to injury (etc.); this includes instances to make fun of me (recall here). As an amusing aside (well I think it's funny), at the time when Brian launched my ballooning career, he objected to me calling the dispute between Sally Haslanger and him a "dust-up" (he thought it a minor disagreement). Given the tumult that followed my qualification seems understated with the benefit of hindsight.

It is pretty clear that anonymity gives people cover to be really hurtful and worse, and provides cover for views that have no known moral defense. Rather than helping to constitute liberty or to facilitate the process of moral and (other) factual discovery that is vital to a functioning democracy anonymity primarily facilitates the reinforcement of negative affect. We keep it around because anonymity can also be a vital cover for those that have reason to fear those more powerful than them. 

The argument against anonymity  in a scholarly community is stronger. Scholarly communities rely on many layers of trust to keep functioning as an intellectual community. Recent epistemology has caught up with history and philosophy of science and now acknowledges that trust plays a vital role in lots of knowledge producing practices. There is a rich literature on epistemic virtues. I believe these philosophical insights entail that public claims ought to be traced back to individuals or, at least, recognizable intellectual personae. (This is one reason I tend not to allow anonymous posting.) But, as we all recognize,  philosophy is also a professional community with a zero-sum job market and other markers of status and success. In so far as professional philosophy is also necessarily political, it makes sense that there are anonymous blogs to allow the weak or disenchanted a safe place to vent or even explore not so popular but potentially vital views. What has made Brian Leiter's citations and strategic quoting of anonymous blog posts sometimes annoying is that for a long time he was not among the weak professionally.

So, there: Brian Leiter preaches correctly on this issue, despite the wrongness of his practice. Leaving aside Leiter, the APA should just have ignored the anonymous philosophy blogs. But what do I know?--I am just a balloonist. 

 

On the Philosophical Free Speech Warriors

About twenty five years ago, at my elite Amsterdam high school, Vossius Gymniasium, I received a final exam from our popular history teacher, Jan Blokker, in which we were asked to analyze a blatantly anti-semitic passage from Hitler's Mein Kamp. For complex legal reasons Mein Kamp is not easily available in the Netherlands (there is a de facto ban on publishing it), but I recognized the passage at once because I had read it before in my own copy (which I had bought Stateside). We had not been warned this might happen, and after the exam I wrote an editorial for our school newspaper, Vulpes, in which I criticized Blokker's decision. (I also unfairly noted the fact that Blokker's dad was a famous polemicist who enjoyed comparing his impressions of visiting Israel to Nazi concentration-camps.) I believe he wrote a response explaining his pedagogical choices, and that was the end of the local matter.

Now, I grew up in a local Jewish community full of Holocaust survivors; my choice for a secular (non Jewish) high school was, in part, motivated by a desire to escape the constant threat of terrorist attacks at our heavily guarded Jewish schools and the more general, claustrophobic environment in which a low-grade panic and persecution-complex were part of the background DNA of daily life. (This vibe exists to this day: recently a group of kids were discouraged from playing in the team colors of Germany's die Mannschaft [the reigning world champions] at the annual local, Jewish soccer competition.) But while I was upset by having to confront unexpectedly blatant antisemitism during an exam (which is not exactly a moment for shared intellectual inquiry), that was, with the benefit of hindsight, not my main reason for objecting to Blokker's decision. What really irritated me was the thought that the latent anti-semitic views of my class room peers -- who grew up to become the educators, novelists, journalists, bankers, and civil servants that help constitute the evolving public sphere -- might be encouraged or normalized not because they would imitate Hitler's views, but because their own prejudices, which I had discerned over the years, would be thought benign and modest in comparison despite a very partial overlap of commitments.

When I wrote my high school editorial words like 'trigger warning' and 'micro-agression' did not exist yet and the Dutch public sphere was less antagonistic toward minorities than it is now. At the time, Holland prided itself on its history of tolerance and there was a public culture in which any criticism of ethnic minorities was thought unwelcome in our free press alongside equally strong taboos on, say, discussion of Dutch war crimes in Indonesia or the role of Dutch farming in destroying the environment; you can imagine being the most perfect society ever created if you systematically ignore all local, social ills.

My memories were prompted by the fact that the philosophical blogosphere has witnessed the sudden growth of an alliance in defense of freedom of speech between our self-proclaimed Marxist, Brian Leiter, who is polemicizing against what he calls (a) "the New Infantilism," and my friends at Bleedingheartlibertarians who decry (b) the New Campus Censorship™ and (c) the "debate over so-called “microaggressions.""  On (c) there has been a spirited response at Feministphilosophers, While (a-b) seem to amount to the same thing, here I focus primarily on Brennan's position because he has made a more thorough effort to articulate it.

One of the oddities of the current polemic is that the so-called philosophical defenders of free speech are recycling Memes developed to prevent government interference in speech in a context in which there are student campaigns to address how universities handle (i) faculty incapable of sexual self-restraint (and a lot worse) with students; (ii) campus cultures in which students may be sexually violated by their peers; and (iii) curricula that seem to aestheticize and glorify rape and various forms of domination.

Ít is odd to characterize responses to (i-iii) as "students hiding from scary ideas," (Brennan) when it is primarily student movements that are are putting these issues on the agenda in a context of an existing culture of confidentiality that, in practice, has served the interests of administrators and perpetrators far more than victims. These students are promoting campus discussions and debates about uncomfortable facts (including the pattern of indifference of too many local police departments and university administrations to victims of sex crimes); true educators ought to be proud of facilitating endurance performance art efforts (like those by Emma Sulkowicz), and they ought to be welcomed by those that defend freedom of speech. When Swift offered his modest proposal (recall) he was criticizing the abuse, poverty, and famines of the poor by a feudal and religiously oppressive  colonial power. By contrast Brennan offers his modest proposal to defend tenured professors from (ahh) critical students.

In each case that has made the media, complex contextual and conceptual issues are at play, and it is by no means obvious how universities balance being in loco parentis (and Stateside they charge hefty dollars to be so understood), foster inclusive intellectual environments, secure academic excellence, and promoting inquiry (not to mention complying with government regulations). The proper response to these challenges is not, 'be like me,' -- for the person advocating that stance gets by just fine without putting issues like (i-iii) on the agenda -- or the ridiculing without qualification of student movements, but genuine local experimentation with norms and practices. (I would think that is the proper Libertarian response?)

Brennan, who actually does offer something like a trigger warning on his syllabi (about which below), reports that his (presumably self-selected) students "are shocked to discover how many empirical and normative premises they share with Adolf Hitler." It is by no means obvious what his students' mature views are going to be once the shock has worn off. A lot probably depends on individual developments as well as personal, social and intellectual contexts that are hard to predict and are out of a teacher's hands. But it is by no means obvious that such shock therapy is always and everywhere the best form of education.

Brennan reports that his trigger warning includes this statement (bold and italics in original): "Finally, it requires that one experience and overcome, rather than flee from, serious intellectual discomfort." Now, as it happens I find Brennan's course aspirations exciting (I may also start using his trigger warning) and I would love to audit his class it if I ever get a chance to spend a sabbatical at Georgetown. But it is by no means obvious that experiencing and overcoming serious intellectual discomfort is a necessary condition for (A) "the pursuit of truth" (which he thinks "the classroom and the university is a forum" for) or even (B) "the pursuit of responsible ideology." (By "Responsible ideology" he means "putting in the hard work to be justified in one’s political views. It requires a synthesis of humanistic and social scientific methods. It requires that one understand and, in a sense, can “get inside the head” of views entirely foreign to one’s own.") To be clear: (A) and (B) are not identical epistemic ideals if only because it is quite clear that responsible ideology (or justified political views) can fall short of truth.

On (A): a lot of known truth is pursued successfully without experiencing and overcoming, despite the presence of various epistemic and personal barriers, such discomfort. So, the pursuit of truth cannot be used as a blanket justification for promoting discomforting experiences in students. One also often hears that 'in the outside world' students will encounter awful views so it is best to expose them to these. This argument is just silly. There are a lot of injustices and scandalous features of the world that are wholly inappropriate for the class room or the university, which in its best moments has always understood itself as community with higher standards than the fallen world we inhabit. Brennan's own argument against 'safe spaces is in the spirit of this bad argument; he has great fun ridiculing the idea of 'safe spaces;' without noticing that the very idea of a safe space is a secular adaptation of what was once known as a Shining City on the hill (promoted by President Ronald Reagan among others). 

On (B): I have non-trivial sympathy for Brennan's position; it is possible that we can only have justified political views if we have really grappled with views entirely foreign to our own. It follows from this that we ought to be committed to a life-time of learning, but that due to constraints on time and opportunity costs, in practice we always fall short of holding a responsible ideology (presumably his syllabus is not the right place to announce this).

But it is worth noting that in Brennan's writings on these campus debates, he makes no public effort whatsoever to get inside the head of the proponents of the views he opposes. He also describes his opponents as 'new infants,' without doing justice to any of their arguments. Rather, he proposes norms that may work fine in an ideal theory, but that fail to do justice to the messy reality he writes about. He embraces an idealization -- the "traditional college model in which every idea, no matter how repugnant, can be discussed in an intellectual way at any time," -- and confuses it for reality. Universities and scientific/philosophical communities have always been places where some ideas get explored in careful detail while simultaneously policing the limits of legitimate speech and keeping quiet about their own unjust practices. 

On Lawsuits Against Peers and Students

it's fine to sue one's employer and its officers; it's intolerable to sue peers and students in rape/assault/harassment (etc.) cases - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/11/how-to-reduce-retaliation.html#sthash.7gWerybd.dpuf

[I]t's fine to sue one's employer and its officers; it's intolerable to sue peers and students in rape/assault/harassment (etc.) cases. So, here's a proposal (open to discussion): such a person should not expect job offers from other institutions, be invited to colloquia, special issues, handbooks and all other forms of professional honor we bestow on each other EVEN if s/he wins the ensuing court case. To be clear, this proposal falls short of professional shunning (i.e., not publishing and not citing--recall this post on the Arthur Koestler problem). This approach is also compatible with other, private acts of friendship and support (and outreach). In addition, it also takes no stance on the legal merits of individual cases.--Eric Schliesser

This proposal was rather narrowly tailored to address the deterrence and harms caused by aggressive legal strategies pursued by those peers who, after losing cases in front of university committees, go to court (recall also this post on the significance of indemnification). While my proposal generated considerable discussion, it did not generate even the semblance of a disciplinary consensus (despite Ed Kazarian's effort). Brian Leiter called it "startling and dangerous" on his blog, where he linked to one of those anonymous websites (which had plenty of criticism), and, in addition, he reproduced a misleading comment that he received by another anonymous critic. (I call it "misleading" because that critic never mentions that I am talking about contexts in which (a) one can still sue a university and its officers and (b) a university committee has already made a judgment.) But Professor Leiter was certainly not alone in thinking that I am entirely wrong in trying to discourage recourse to the courts in such cases. To be clear: my proposal was not motivated by a general aversion to lawsuits (after all, I have volunteered money to fund a student's lawsuit against a professor) nor by some nostalgic yawning after collegiality. (I am not against collegiality as such, but it seems to exist too infrequently to ask others to rely on it as a general principle.)

I was reminded of my proposal because today Dailynous reports that Peter Ludlow's case against Northwestern, various university officers, his colleague, Jennifer Lackey, and a grad student has been dismissed. I have no idea if this is the end of this case. (This case is distinct from a case involving Ludlow and an undergrad.) I am pleased by this outcome not because I have any idea about the truth of the matter, but because I worry that a full trial would have acted as a further deterrence on victims of harassment to come forward. This deterrence is not just personal (painful memories will be rehashed in public, one's character will be scrutinized intensely, etc.), but also financial. Given that few countries have generous legal aid, poorer graduate students will be at considerable disadvantage absent university support. And, unfortunately, universities do not have identical (legal) interest to the students involved.

The comments in the previous paragraph make clear that I have not been persuaded by the criticisms against my proposal. But I also have to admit that I do not have new arguments to offer. All I can report is that some male friends think it is important to keep access to  the courts open as a safeguard against cases of gross miscarriages of justice in internal university proceedings. I think this access is not diminished if one only sues the university and its officers, but have not managed to convince others. So, I welcome new suggestions about what can be done to reduce the deterrent effects of these lawsuits against colleagues and students that have come forward to report cases of harassment (or worse).

As regular readers know, I am a huge fan of Ludlow's political activism and reporting. He showed courage and a fine-tuned capacity of empathy in reporting on Manning's court martial and the trials of Barrett Brown. For those of us that are concerned about government abuses, locally and abroad, as well as the growing surveillance state Ludlow has long been the must-read-person in professional philosophy. I hope he can find a way to move on after these cases and continue to find ways to use his analytical talents to generous political ends.

Again, to be clear: it's fine to sue one's employer and its officers; it's intolerable to sue peers and students in rape/assault/harassment (etc.) cases. So, here's a proposal (open to discussion): such a person should not expect job offers from other institutions, be invited to colloquia, special issues, handbooks and all other forms of professional honor we bestow on each other EVEN if s/he wins the ensuing court case. - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/peter-ludlow/#sthash.taJHH6f9.dpuf