Philosophy, For Example ~ What Happens When Even Those (Men) Concerned About Gender Troubles in a Discipline Neglect to Pay Attention to What Their Female Colleagues Say

Last week, political theorist Jonathan Wolff published this essay at The Guardian regarding the gender troubles in the discipline of philosophy. Unfortunately, he seemed to have overlooked a set of posts the very same issue in September at "The Stone" here at The New York Times. Had he noted the earlier interventions we perhaps might've been spared some, at least, of the hand-wringing in the comments thread about the need to be snarky and snide and bullying in order to reach "truth" or "get things right." Here is one passage from a post by Linda Martin Alcoff  in the series at The Times that is directly on point:

The issue is not debate, simpliciter, but how it is done. Too many philosophers accept the idea that truth is best achieved by a marketplace of ideas conducted in the fashion of ultimate fighting. But aggressive styles that seek easy victories by harping on arcane counterexamples do not maximize truth. Nor does making use of the social advantages one might have by virtue of one’s gender, ethnicity or seniority. Nor does stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the real world contexts, rife with implicit bias and power distortions, in which even philosophical debates always occur.

Sometimes, interestingly, the aim of truth is enhanced less by adversarial argument than by a receptivity that holds back on disagreement long enough to try out the new ideas on offer, push them further, see where they might go. Sometimes pedagogy works best not by challenging but by getting on board a student’s own agenda. Sometimes understanding is best reached when we expend our skeptical faculties, as Montaigne did, on our own beliefs, our own opinions. If debate is meant to be a means to truth — an idea we philosophers like to believe — the best forms turn out to be a variegated rather than uniform set.

And, lest it seem as though I am calling attention to the foibles of philosophers from the perspective of an outsider, recall this post on gender trouble in political science.

Dr. Higgs & The Bean Counters

The Guardian has run this sobering story about physicist Peter Higgs. Here are come of the pointed bits:

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

I recommend this to those of my friends and colleagues about to launch into a Faculty Activity Report for the bean counters in one or another College or University. Of course, you shouldn't use this to persuade yourself that but for all those distracting demands - administration, teaching and publishing bundles of literature-driven papers - you'd be a Nobel laureate. Resist self-deception. But it is a nice counter-example to those pushing the rationalization of educational institutions.

Adjunct Faculty - An Infographic

More Silliness at U of R or, the Landsburg Fracas Continued

"Isn’t there some sort of contract violation here? If the students in class are paying to learn economics, is there any recourse that they have? Is it any different than buying a movie ticket to see Rocky IV and ending up being shown Chariots of Fire?"

That is the response of one of my colleagues, Michael Rizzo, to the fact that students showed up in the class of another colleague, Steve Landsburg, to protest the latter's idiotic attempt to channel Rush Limbaugh. First, let's be clear. Disrupting a class like this is inappropriate. Period. The students involved were wrong to do so. I will leave it to the Dean's to figure out how best to respond to the event.

But, second, what is wrong here has nothing to do with "market fundamentalist" nonsense about contract violations. This complaint would be laughable if it were not so sincerely asserted. Does Rizzo really want to compare his colleague's teaching to a couple of pretty crappy Hollywood films. He said it, folks, not me.

What is at issue is speech and context. Landsburg has a right to his ideas and a right to voice them. The protesting students do as well. But - to the best of my knowledge - Landsburg keeps his opinionating out of the classroom. He peddles his offensive views in other locales. The students ought to keep their protests out of the classroom too. That leaves open the matter of how they might more appropriately voice their dissent.
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PS: I will add that a Professor in our Business School - Ron Schmidt - has taken it upon himself to send an open letter (via an official list-serve) to the entire School deriding the University President Joel Seligman for publicly calling Landsburg out for his Limbaugh-Channeling.

In the Mail today ...

Ariella Azoulay Denied Tenure

Ariella Azoulay. Photograph © Miki Kratsman.

For the past decade Ariella Azoulay has taught visual culture and contemporary philosophy in the Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University. She is the author of many works, including The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) and a short paper "What is a Photograph? What is Photography?" (2010) that you can find here.

Last night my friend Mark Reinhardt passed along this news article from Ha'aretz reporting that Azoulay has been denied tenure by the University. This is a touchy matter, as a University administration may dig in their heels in the face of external criticism. And, I am reluctant to provide the higher ups at Bar Ilan a rationale for doing so in this instance. It is, after all, Azoulay's livelihood that it is at stake. However, as the Ha'artez report makes plain, Azoulay's supporters suspect that this negative decision amounts to retaliation for her political views. If you don't have time to plow through her book, you might check out her contribution to this symposium on "Photography & Human Rights" at Aperture. Does what she says there sound like the sort of view that political officials - whether Israeli or American - would find endearing? I didn't think so.

Philosophical Food Fight

"Armchair bullshit, masquerading as philosophy: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/?hp
9:50 PM Jun 13th"
via web

jcohen570

That is the reply that Josh Cohen (Stanford) - advocate of democratic deliberation - Tweeted (of all things!) to this post written by J.M. Bernstein (New School) at The New York Times philosophy blog. In the initial post, Bernstein offered an analysis (inspired by Hegel and Freud) of the anger embodied among members of the "The Party" crowd. He followed up here. Philosopher Brian Leiter (Univ. of Chicago) seconds Cohen here. And there is a rambling commentary here at Mother Jones as well. Now, I hardly put myself out as a model of tolerance and civil exchange, and my own theoretical leanings actually tend to converge with Leiter and Cohen, however their replies to Bernstein are not a great advert for doing philosophy (or political theory, or politics) in public.

I think there is a real and important question about why the radical right has managed to coordinate opposition to Obama around a set of ludicrous claims - like his place of birth or the notion, all evidence to the contrary, that he is a "socialist." Sure, there are lots of media politics at play. And the Mother Jones piece reiterates the findings that (as I suggested here) "the 'tea party' crowd tend to be ... a bunch of old, economically well-off, white guys who are 'angry' and 'pessimistic' because they think the government is paying too much attention to the needs of the poor and minorities and not enough to the rich!" Of course, that is not the only demographic among the members of the tea party 'movement'; it takes all types, I suppose.

Having said all that, what happens when you talk sense to people? What happens when you point out that the sources of political polarization in American politics derive from rising inequality and right-wing political strategy [1]? What happens when you point out that the Bush tax cuts and duplicitous military adventurism combine to underwrite the vast bulk of our current and future budget deficits [2]? What happens when you point out that redistributive spending tends to go primarily to red states [3]? Well ... there is some reason to think that despite the fear, anger and frustration that inform too much of American politics, there is some indication [4] [5] [6] that lots of voters are pretty damned sensible. They prefer to trim the military budget and raise taxes on the wealthy rather than simply slash social spending!

How does this connect to our point of departure? Well, Cohen and Leiter might have simply suggested that matters may not be nearly so bleak as Bernstein suggests, that there is reason to believe that citizens can indeed sort things out pretty reasonably despite emotional vicissitudes. (I actually think that we can dispense with the Freud and Hegel in Bernstein's initial piece and agree nonetheless that part of what has been going on is that individualistic Americans have indeed been forced to confront their interdependence and their vulnerability.) What would've been wrong with that?

Liberal Academics redux

I've written here before disparaging right wing nightmares about nefarious liberal faculty members indoctrinating impressionable young undergraduates. According to this story in The New York Times today a set of new studies show that those nightmares are ideological fantasy, no more, no less. As the conservatives quoted in the story make clear, however, the studies will do nothing to reduce the anxiety. There must be a liberal bias that we can complain about!

Suspicions Confirmed: Political Science Professors Give Good Grades for Liberal Views

Strip © Gary Trudeau (14 September 2008)

Quick! Someone alert David Horowitz! I've posted on the latter buffoon here before. My views on freedom and discomfort in the classroom are about the same as they were then. It is nice, though, to see some humor injected into what is a dreary, predictable litany of right wing complaints. Of course, I do think various high ranking members of the Bush Administration will be susceptible to war crimes prosecution too [1] [2].

"Esthetic Politics?"

"In the end, "esthetic politics" is a disaster for both of the fields
that it claims to bring together." ~ Ben Davis

The late Richard Rorty drew a distinction between "real" and "academic" politics. He was - uncharacteristically - derisive about the latter, insisting that instead of engaging in, advising, or supporting political campaigns that might in one or another way improve the lot of regular people, academics had focused, over the course of several post-1960s decades, mostly on "taking over the English department." It's not that Rorty thought that accomplishment wholly without merit; it's just that he thought it fell well short of actual political impact outside the academy. Unsurprisingly, lots of academics took umbrage at this. By and large, though, I think Rorty had the better of the argument.

In this an incisive critical essay at Artnet, Ben Davis draws something like the very same distinction as Rorty with respect to recent academic/art world hand-wringing over various political matters such as torture, war, and racism. Davis argues that instead of having an impact in the real world that most people inhabit, "esthetic politics" is pretty much vacuous and self-absorbed, encouraging disengagement (whether ironic or cynical or despairing), and so, not just beside the point of progressive politics, but an active threat to it. Just so.
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Full Disclosure: Karen Beckman and some of the contributors to the October #123 issue whom Davis challenges are my former friends and colleagues.

Self-Plagiarism

There is an interesting observation on self-plagiarism among academics here at The Times Higher Education Supplement. (Via John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.) Based on both casual observation and my nearly decade-long experience as a journal editor, the problem is rampant. There are simply too many incentives to publish the same thing or a minor variation on it again and again and again. The resulting c.v. padding is pretty pathetic. Interestingly, and I suppose not to surprisingly, the comment thread at CT repeatedly invokes "sour grapes" and references allegedly "prolific colleagues," as though complaining about this sort of thing were simply coming from the slackers and aimed at the true stars. But it is important to ask what it means to be "prolific." In some instances, one criteria for being prolific seems to be shamelessness.

I posted a comment at the original THES article referencing one flagrant case of a political theorist I know who has published, whole cloth, the same modestly interesting but hardly agenda setting paper in at least four different places. The individual involved is tenured at an elite department, so in no danger of perishing for lack of publishing. That said, there simply is nothing special about the paper except that it is hers. But being special to a paper's author is not a criterion for re-publishing it serially. This is simply an illustration, not the most egregious case with which I am familiar.

What Political Scientists Do and What They Should not ...

I am here in Oxford at a conference pondering the state of political science as a discipline. One of the most influential women in the world - Condi Rice - is a political scientist. And her influence has been uniformly negative (e.g., [1] [2] [3]). But what impact does the discipline have beyond that? Over consecutive days The New York Times offered two reports - one pretty inspiring, the other much less so - about doings among the political scientists.

The first relates studies by Norman Uphoff on the possibility of dramatically raising yields by changing patterns of rice cultivation. The jury is still out, but his efforts are an instance what I think social scientists might do to improve the world. The second story relates new efforts by the Pentagon to fund research among political scientists under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. This seems to me to be fraught with all sorts of ethical problems that its academic mouthpieces seem not to recognize at all. For a related boondoggle see this post too.

Who Knew? Political Theory Makes for a Good Career Choice

"In the years after the second world war, there was a sort of
Wittgensteinian air about philosophy, which meant practitioners
were proud of the fact that they appeared slightly esoteric and
were not doing anything practical. There was very little political
philosophy, and moral philosophy was disengaged from people's
actual moral problems, and that did lead to the subject being
marginalised. That has changed. Political philosophy is a central
part of the Cambridge course." ~ Simon Blackburn

I missed this story in The Guardian when it appeared last week. It turns out that studying philosophy is a relatively wise career choice for British undergraduates. Why? It turns out too that British employers like to hire people who can think. That seems like a novel idea! Moreover, in the passage quoted above, Simon Blackburn attributes the enhanced fortunes of young philosophers to the relatively central role now given to moral and political philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum! Of course, my home department has, without any real discussion, more or less eliminated political philosophy in favor of even greater emphasis on intellectually muddled endeavors like game theoretic and quantitative studies of international relations.* I suppose the best our students might hope for is that employers in the U.S. are less interested in hiring employees who can think than are their British competitors.
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* I will happily defend this characterization of our new emphasis if it offends anyone.
[Thanks to Evelyn Brister for bringing this article to my attention.]

Freedom and Discomfort in the Classroom

"The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient to their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than an intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression 'moral achievement' though perhaps this may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying." - Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1918).

The essay by Weber from which I have extracted this passage is, of course, typically seen as a classic brief for separating facts and values in academic settings, especially in the classroom. Let's set aside the large question of whether it is possible coherently to defend anything like a fact-value dichotomy. (On this I recommend Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy & Other Essays. Harvard UP, 2002.) What Weber is saying here is that, as a practical matter, teachers, especially university teachers, are not in the business of making the classroom a comfortable place. Their task is to challenge the opinions and values students bring with them, to make the students think and question. That may seem "inconvenient" to students seeking simply to confirm their own views, political or otherwise, but even Weber seems to view this difficult and admirable task is central to the teacher's vocation. (Of course, among the "inconvenient facts" that many students find most disturbing is that the world is full of folks who disagree with us about important things like politics, who think our own views are nutty or worse.) And the point of academic freedom, on my view, is that it allows faculty to make the campus and the classroom inconvenient and uncomfortable.

What has prompted this post? Last night I was reading a short item in Inside Higher Ed entitled "Fact Checking David Horowitz." Turns out that in his zeal to unmask "dangerous" faculty Mr. Horowitz stumbles repeatedly in terms of his own criteria of truth, fairness and so forth. The passage from Weber ought to illustrate just how far out on the fringe Mr. Horowitz and his acolytes actually have strayed. Normally I would not post even on such matters. However, this morning I arrived at my office to find a business card touting RochesterWatch (www.rochesterwatch.com) tacked to the bulletin board directly outside my office door. (There were none left on the other boards in the department, so I can only surmise that this was intended as a "special" message.) This is a group of right wing zealots who have made some inroads among the students on campus here. So, I suppose I am being "watched." Perhaps whomever left their calling card outside my office should read Weber too. Perhaps, having done so, they would say that they are simply tryig to make campus an "inconvenient" place for me too. That is fine. I am simply talking back without the veil of anonymity.

PS: Although I think that playing the "fact-checking" game with Horowitz and his minions is more or less of a time/energy black hole, there are pages that take he and they to task for (let's be polite) "dissembling." For example, see Free Exchange on Campus. (5/13/06).