One thing that attracted my attention in the Colorado situation was the university’s use of the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women Campus Site Visit program. Judging from the description of the program on the Committee’s website, campus visits are normally advisory. Departments request site visits in which a team investigates climate issues, with the purpose of “offering practical suggestions on how to improve the climate for women.” (The Committee also says: “The team will be attentive to issues beyond gender, e.g., race, sexuality, disability, and will make an effort to collect quantitative data on these groups.” Apparently, no practical suggestions, though, about these matters.)
In this particular case, the context was rather different. It is clear that the Department, Dean, and Provost must have decided that they needed to know and do something about the spate of complaints from Department members (including students) to Colorado’s Office of Discrimination and Harassment. So the advice being sought was not general, but highly specific. In other words, the investigation of climate was not motivated by general concern but by a specific bad situation.
In this situation, it is a puzzle why calling in the APA was the right way to go. The campus site visit team is very distinguished, but do they have forensic expertise? Universities for their part have many ways to conduct forensic investigations when they think that something is amiss. Why would they appeal to a committee of this nature? It’s as if somebody broke into my house and I asked a social counsellor to investigate, on the grounds that the said counsellor has a great deal of expertise regarding petty criminals. Yes, he might. But at the same time, it’s the police I want for this particular purpose.
Judging from the boilerplate, the committee seems to have conducted its visit in its usual advisory mode. It met with various groups in the Department and gave individuals an opportunity to meet with them (but does not say whether any did). It met with the Director of the Office of Discrimination and Harassment, and may or may not have reviewed details (whether redacted or not) of specific complaints.
Documents released by the University of Colorado suggest that the report of the site visit team had a very serious effect: the replacement of the Department Chair by a non-philosopher (the Chair of Linguistics) and suspension of graduate admissions for 2014. (They are also instituting a "process for the Department to expand its current concepts of sub-disciplines within Philosophy," and initiating "bystander training" for all.) The Dean says that the actions were “based on the report and input from the Department.”
Note that the report does not recommend these actions. Presumably, the Dean concluded that they were the best response to its findings. But this suggests a context wider than just the report. Deans don’t usually place departments in receivership for the simple reason that an outside committee found problems. Usually, they only act this way either when there are quite specific and concrete problems (e.g., particular cases of wrongdoing) or when departments fail to address serious generalized problems even after they have been brought to their attention.
(A parallel situation occurred at the University of British Columbia nearly twenty years ago: accusations of sexual harassment and racism were made by a graduate student against the Political Science Department. The Department’s graduate program was suspended, but only after an ad hoc [one-person] outside committee was commissioned to investigate wrongdoing. See the second part of THIS for a recounting of that tale.)
In any event, it strikes me that the site visit committee made comments perhaps appropriate to its normal advisory function, but inappropriate to the more forensic role in which it found itself. Take as an example the statement: “the department has a reputation in the international philosophical community for being extremely unfriendly to women.” First of all, this is difficult to parse—does it mean that committee members already knew of this reputation? (I didn’t. Brian Leiter also says he didn't.) What does ‘international’ mean? (Are people talking about it in Spain? India?) Secondly, it is unacceptably imprecise and informal for this context—“extremely” unfriendly? How do you quantify that?
Another example is the claim that the department used “pseudo-philosophical analyses to avoid directly addressing the issue,” commenting that they “spend time trying to get around regulations.” (OK: I have to say that I am a little amused by the image of this “high quality” department rampantly peddling pseudo-philosophy.) These attributions of motive are unsupported. We are given no reason to believe that the Department was being shifty in this way. The committee is being casual where, if a department's administration is being held to account, it ought to be a lot more exact.
The report is also very unclear about the level of infractions. For instance, it speaks of an "environment with unacceptable sexual harassment and inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behaviour." The 'and' suggests that the harassment goes beyond sexualizing the atmosphere. Inappropriate sexualized behaviour is certainly bad, but it isn't as bad as inappropriate touching and inappropriate advances and of course (God forbid) sexual extortion.
So is the committee saying that there was sexual harassment of kinds even worse than "sexualizing behaviour"? Perhaps: they say that "perpetrators were given a slap on the wrist," which suggests that serious offences were overlooked. On the other hand, the worst specific complaint they make is that "some male faculty have been observed ogling undergraduate women students." If seriously bad stuff was going on, it is trivialized by this kind of puritanical lip-pursing. Given the ambiguity inherent in conversational implicature, we should expect that whatever is said is said precisely and directly. But then the committee might not have known the broader administrative context in which they were operating.
The University made this report public apparently because it falls under freedom of information regulations. But when they released it, the Administration decided to hang its hat on the report. It seems unlikely that the committee realized that it was producing a blueprint for major action of the sort we witnessed. They would have produced a different, much more juridical, kind of report had they known this. But it's also possible that the report itself played far less centrally in the events that took place last week.
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103 responses to “The Funny Thing About Colorado”
Thank you very much, Mohan, for this thoughtful piece.
I must disagree with you on one point, however. You point out that the administration at Colorado are not following the report in effecting “the replacement of the Department Chair by a non-philosopher (the Chair of Linguistics) and suspension of graduate admissions for 2014. (They are also instituting a “process for the Department to expand its current concepts of sub-disciplines within Philosophy,” and initiating “bystander training” for all.)” However, each of these things is recommended in the team’s report.
The replacement of the chair is urged in the report following the second bullet point at the top of p.11: “The Dean should appoint a new chair for the Department from outside the unit.” The team also agrees with and reports a critical view they allegedly found in the department concerning the former chair: “Among the faculty there is a widespread perception that the current chair has not effectively responded to issues of sexual harassment and lack of civility” (p.10, boldface in original).
A passage that begins at the bottom of p.6 and continues on to the top of p.7 insists that it is “totally unacceptable” for faculty members to denigrate feminist and other alternative approaches to philosophy in the presence of other faculty members, graduate students, or undergraduate students, whether on or off campus; and moreover, that faculty members must “gain more appreciation of and tolerance for plurality in the discipline.”
Of course, I’m not sure what motivations the administration might have concerning this matter. But after reading the report, it seems to me that the administrations actions are entirely consistent with the view that they simply wished to follow all the recommendations of the report to the letter, once it was given to them for whatever reason. Given how scathing the report is, as you say, it is difficult for me to imagine an administrator not acting on these recommendations. Once the report was in, the administration may have felt it had little choice.
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I think my comment might have been lost. Here’s a quote from the report, p.11:
“The Dean should appoint a new chair for the Department from outside the unit…”
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All the things the administration did are recommended in the report. I’m not sure why the confidence of the department was broken by someone passing the report on to the administration, but the administration probably felt it had little choice but to follow the committee’s recommendations. The report was so scathing that it’s difficult to imagine an administrator not doing everything the report says to do: sitting on a report this incendiary could be a career-ending mistake.
I agree with all the other things you say, Mohan, and am very grateful for your thoughtful commentary. It’s just that, after reading through the report and comparing it with the administration’s actions, I think we need to place full responsibility for what happened (the leaking of the report and also the steps that were taken thereafter) at the feet of the CSW committee.
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So objecting to faculty “ogling undergraduate women students” is just “puritanical lip-pursing”? Do you really want to say that? I’m going to assume that you mean it’s nothing like as bad as what is implied by that “and”, rather than what you seem to me to actually say.
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So many things here are simply so counterproductive.
I am exceptionally concerned that this post and so many others seek to undermine the usefulness of the APA site visit program. Not to say that the program is beyond critique, but the pattern of critique emerging from Colorado’s report is a deeply ironic one: message boards have targeted the APA for not ensuring confidentiality (its transparent policies notwithstanding), and others like this one undermine the APA team by questioning their assessment because the report is too vague for us to make our own–let’s be honest here–ill-considered judgments. We have both too much information and not enough, and somehow it is all the APA’s fault.
On the critique that the APA’s report is too vague: minimal reflection should reveal that vagueness is necessary to protect victims and those who were willing to speak with the site visit team at all. And, for that matter, to ensure due process for the accused in the event complaints are ongoing. I grow weary of the skepticism based on vagueness in the report, when there are very good reasons for vagueness. I grow weary of skepticism based on faulty arguments (e.g. just because the author and Leiter have never heard of Colorado’s problems, does not invalidate the claim that Colorado has a bad reputation.) And I’m am tired of seeing the much needed work that the APA site visit provides being undermined because, for example, the APA did not mention specific countries when they used the term “international”.
With the APA’s site visit program we now have a new way to address the profession’s very serious climate problems. Let’s see what we can do to support this effort instead of sowing distrust and anxiety. We have enough of that.
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Right. My point (however unclearly expressed) is that in the context of even worse offences, complaining about ogling comes across as irrelevant and beside the point. I did make it clear that in my view, ogling is bad.
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This is an utterly bizarre post–for reasons Neil and Anon have already mentioned, but also the following:
“It is clear that the Department, Dean, and Provost must have decided that they needed to know and do something about the spate of complaints from Department members (including students) to Colorado’s Office of Discrimination and Harassment. So the advice being sought was not general, but highly specific. In other words, the investigation of climate was not motivated by general concern but by a specific bad situation.
In this situation, it is a puzzle why calling in the APA was the right way to go. The campus site visit team is very distinguished, but do they have forensic expertise?”
The Office of Discrimination and Harassment is an internal University office. It’s incredibly common for such offices to operate in tandem with departments (depending on the circumstances), deans, and especially provosts. Having worked in an administrative office, I would be shocked if the provost didn’t already know what the content of those complaints were. Why would you think it’s “quite clear” that the site-visit team was brought in for “forensic” purposes? One would rather think that there was a spate of complaints might be taken as evidence of a general problem, and one the site-visit team might aptly have some recommendations as to how it could be addressed.
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JW, at 1 you say “Of course, I’m not sure what motivations the administration might have concerning this matter.” You then go on to intimate that the administration was forced into action by the report. This strikes me as somewhat naive in reading the administration’s behavior.
I think we can have as first principles in interpreting any and all university administration actions that they will seek to shift blame downward onto departments and individual faculty members, thereby 1) limiting their legal liability, and 2) in the PR realm, obscuring their own negligence in allowing situations to develop.
With that in mind, I’m coming around to the following, admittedly speculative, position on the CU affair. To begin, parts of the administration finally came to recognize their exposure to Title IX requirements by their own failure to have dealt with the phil dept. (I am not a lawyer, but uni admins have plenty of them, and, as I say above, we have to assume everything they do is heavily “lawyered up.”) Their own internal investigations, over the years, should have been enough for them to drop the hammer on the philosophy department, but they thought it would be good to get independent verification, via the APA report. To suggest, as you do above, that they were surprised by the report is, again, either naive on your part, or it suggests a real negligence on their part.
What is duplicitous on the part of the administration was letting the philosophy department think the report would stay in house instead of being used as part of PR campaign designed to shift blame and for the admin to show they are taking their Title IX requirements seriously (at last). Adding all that together, the admin decided to release the report as backup for their actions (perhaps in part because they realized they had themselves a bad rep for PC actions after the Churchill and Adler cases).
Again, I admit all of this is deeply speculative, but I do think it fits with what should be first principles in interpreting university administration actions. To repeat: they will act so as to limit their legal liability by shifting blame downward onto departments and individual faculty members whenever possible. Releasing the report should then be seen as PR in service of CYA.
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I am tempted to say that much of the analysis in this post serves as a good example of the kind of “pseudo-philosophical analyses” the report calls out. The report does not identify individuals and does not recommend punishments (unless training counts as punishment, which it shouldn’t). Receivership is a significant step, but does not punish any individual member of the department. (Including, I think, the replaced chair — administrative positions are shifted around for a variety of reasons.) So why would “forensic expertise” be a requirement on the investigators? What is pseudo-philosophical is the expectation that a real-world attempt to address a problem should meet some arbitrary standard chosen by the critic. If only everyone brought this level of rigor to their personal interactions — there would surely be much less ogling.
Members of less powerful group B are being harmed by some members of more powerful group A. A fix is proposed that doesn’t punish members of A in any realistic use of the term “punish”, but A’s hairs will be ruffled. A-folk will have to experience some unpleasant feelings, and maybe even hear some unpleasant things said about them (probably not to their faces, but maybe in blogs, and in comments on blogs). They will have to go to some boring meetings. And A-folk don’t like that — they feel that if anything they have to put up with too much of that stuff already! (After all, A-folk don’t see themselves as powerful. They think they have much less power than they should have, given their great merit.) So the fix is rejected by A-folk in favor of some ruffle-free, as-yet-unidentified future fix. And nothing happens, and the harm to members of B continues. Such a shame there’s no good fix.
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John Protevi,
I’m not sure I’m guilty of the naivete you accuse me of. I agree with you that the administration seeks above all to cover its ass. I even hinted at that in my post.
It could well be that, as you say, the administration was privy to some information that antecedently made them hungry for any excuse to distance themselves from the department as a whole by destroying its reputation in the media. That wouldn’t surprise me, actually. And quite possibly, they threw their weight behind the report (and perhaps sneakily persuaded the department to solicit it) for this very purpose.
None of that has anything to do with my line of reasoning, which is as follows:
1. The committee came in at the department’s request and, among some good things they may have done, indubitably did their research in a somewhat biased way, as has already been noted elsewhere (e.g. giving polls asking philosophy department members yes/no questions about whether they are “confident” that the school would treat sexual harassment complaints fairly, but none in which people were asked whether they were confident that the school would treat such complaints unfairly).
2. The committee then prepared a report that made rather extreme recommendations, many of which seem at best tangentially related to the prevention of improperly sexualized behavior (e.g. requesting an end to all official or unofficial department activities after 5pm, even (and explicitly) taking a visiting speaker out to dinner; barring all faculty members from criticizing feminist and other approaches to philosophy even in private, off-campus conversations with any other department members). The report also recommended that the department chair be ousted and replaced with an external department member at the administration’s discretion.
3. The committee then, despite apparent assurances to the department members who invited them in and cooperated with the site visit, handed their scathing report to the administration.
4. The administration then widely publicized the report, in the process seriously harming the reputations of more or less everyone associated with the department, and further harmed the department — which, as even the report makes clear, was for many an exciting and engaged place to work, and which contained many people who knew nothing about any of this — by putting in place the highly dubious but clearly debilitating measures recommended by the report.
Even on your cynical analysis, John, the committee played into the hands of the administration perfectly. The department has now lost its autonomy and must operate under a puppet dictator selected and presumably controlled by the administration.
Perhaps the committee was remarkably naive about what administrators do when you hand them power over a department after leaking secrets to them. Then again, this successful first outing of the site visit committee may have been quite gratifying to its members: after the style of the Nuremberg prosecutors, they not only got to survey the evidence and try to help bring the evildoers to justice, but they took the opportunity to engage in what they must have seen as the equivalent of denazification: tear down and exterminate everything that exists of the present culture and demand the re-edification of all members until the puppet government has decreed that the school has been properly sterilized, whenever that day comes.
This is not speculation on my part, but an appeal to publicly known facts. One member of the site visit committee publicly admitted today that, while she would normally regret the leaking of the report, she’s actually glad it happened in this case. She indicated no regret whatever that the department had used her report to destroy the department’s reputation worldwide for years to come.
I have no naive illusions about the intentions of the administration, and considerations like the above give us reason to doubt that the committee members did either. But please, let’s not be naive about the moral and social victory this spelled for the committee members, who cooperated fully with the administration on this.
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P.S. to Anonymous: those who would make themselves immune to all criticisms by brushing it off without listening as “pseudo-philosophical analysis” should have a particularly low circle of Hell reserved for them. At best, they should stop pretending to be participants in a rational and democratic process and admit that they have descended to the dictatorship of anti-intellectual public shaming.
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A superb rendition of the reverse-Godwin with the “Nuremberg” bit. Kudos.
As for the rest, well, I suppose “spittle-flecked” is a bit strong, but “unbalanced” a bit weak. If only I had a better vocabulary.
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What you need, John, is not a better vocabulary. What you need to do is address the argument and either admit that it refutes your accusation that I am the ‘naive’ one, or else show me where it goes wrong.
I’m waiting!
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@John Protevi:
I’m undecided on this issue but your flip response is unfair. In thread after thread you resort to your favorite two weapons, the ad hominem and the cutting off of discussion. Can’t we do better than this, please? I expect abusive ad hominem and cutting off mics from Bill O’Reilly, not among serious philosophers. It leaves me with a rotten feeling in my gut when I see it. Please stop. Thank you.
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What, you want me to track down all the examples of your poor judgment and melodrama? I’m always mystified to see that commenters think I have as much time as they do. But I don’t, at least not now. I’ll just say that in addition to the reverse-Godwin, the “puppet dictator” indicates an unbalanced judgment here. Maybe we can crowd-source the rest.
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Hahaha. “Suzanne Southam” is writing from the same IP address as “JW Showalter.” This is sock-puppetting and is bannable on every blog I know of. So much for the “serious philosophers” Showalter pretends to speak for.
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I think that’s a pretty unfair characterization of Anonymous’ post. They didn’t brush it off. Their entire post after the initial sentence is an elaboration of in what sense the analysis is ‘pseudo-philosophical’ and what its faults are: namely, Group A (the unvictimized group) finding ways to fault the ‘rigor’ of the solution because they do not want any inconvenience at the expense of pushing way solutions that would actually help Group B (the victimized group).
That sounds to me like someone participating in a rational process (they are explaining their position and giving reasons for it) rather than some sort of dictatorship ‘of anti-intellectual public shaming.’ The difference is that they don’t value the process so much as to let it get in the way of actually arriving at and implementing solutions.
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John Protevi: Sometimes sock puppets get it right.
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Alex, get what right? Concern-trolling me about snark? You want to say that I can’t make a global judgment about a comment that uses the reverse-Godwin? That uses “puppet dictator”? When do I get to use dismissive snark then, if not in response to something like that?
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OK, so you have no rational response. Thanks for making that clear.
For those with no understanding of informal fallacies: it is always a fallacy to respond to an argument by making accusations against the speaker of that argument. Always. If faced with an argument, you need to either cast doubt on one or more of the premises or show a weak link in the logical links, or admit that you’ve got nothing.
I’m still waiting, but not expectantly.
P.S. Yes, my significant other also wrote in a comment from this computer. Why shouldn’t she? So far, you’ve accused me of naivete, mental instability, and many other things, but you haven’t shown much interest in replying to my comment. If you have nothing productive to say on this matter, John, I suggest we leave it at that. Thanks.
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Oh god, a misunderstanding of the ad hominem too?
1) It’s not always a fallacy to advert to the character of a speaker.
2) In any case, I wasn’t talking about your character, but your performance on this thread.
a) I said clearly that your reading of the admin was “somewhat naive.” That’s pretty clearly a specific comment on your performance, not a global judgment on your character.
b) Similarly, when I said in 12 “as for the rest” I’m clearly referring to your comment, not your character.
c) And in 15 when I say “poor judgment and melodrama” I’m saying your comment 10 demonstrates those traits, not your character. You might be the soul of probity in your life, but that doesn’t mean “Nuremberg” and “puppet dictator” aren’t melodramatic and injudicious word choices.
As for your significant other, I’ll refer her then to the answer I give to Alex Hughes.
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John Protevi — Showalter’s rhetoric was over-the-top, sure. Your hypothesis is that this reflects some “global” property of unbalancedness or some such. I have an alternative hypothesis: it stems specifically from her frustration that you (and others on this blog) refuse to take her position seriously, and indeed, from what we might call “anticipatory frustration” that you all will refuse to take any position that is starkly opposed to yours seriously. Perhaps you think her position(s) shouldn’t be taken seriously. Fine. But I hope you can at least understand the frustration. If you want to be snarky and dismissive, at least spare people your global evaluations of their character when they respond with less-than-equanimity.
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Concern Orc (first good laugh I’ve had all day), I think our comments crossed in cyber-space. As I say in 21, I deny that what I’ve said here makes any such claim about Showalter’s character.
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John,
It is always fallacious to respond to an argument with an attack on the source of that argument.
An argument stands or falls on its own merits. If its premises are true and its logical inferences cogent, then that argument must be accepted. If you have no good reason to think there is anything wrong with an argument’s inferences or claims, then you’ve got nothing to say against it — however diverting it may be to throw mud in the face of your interlocutor.
On another point, I’d like to draw attention to how this disagreement has become so heated. I submitted a polite response to Mohan’s post. You took issue with that, which is fine; but in your reply to me, you suggested that I was being naive.
In my response to you, I treated you in a civil tone despite my disagreement. I pointed out ways in which I thought you were right in what you said. I also made clear where and why I thought you were mistaken.
Your reply to me was nasty, sarcastic, uncalled for and did absolutely nothing to respond to my differing analysis of the facts. I had done nothing at all to provoke it. You accused me of “poor judgment and melodrama” and tried to hunt down my IP address (which I found rather creepy).
I say all this not to ask for an apology, John, but just to draw attention to how you’re acting and how what should be a civil discussion degenerated quickly into pointless mud-slinging.
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It has been made clear on other sites that the APA committee undertakes to release its report to whoever was responsible for the original invitation, and in the case of Colorade, the invitation came from the department, the dean and the provost. The APA committees also urges anyone making an invitation to familiarize he selves with whatever open records laws may exist in their state.
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I share some of John’s frustration, but I’ll respond to your argument JWS:
1. The committee came in at the department’s request
–Not according to the committee – they have said the request came jointly from department and admin. Do you have some inside information that allows you to deny this?
and, among some good things they may have done, indubitably did their research in a somewhat biased way, as has already been noted elsewhere (e.g. giving polls asking philosophy department members yes/no questions about whether they are “confident” that the school would treat sexual harassment complaints fairly, but none in which people were asked whether they were confident that the school would treat such complaints unfairly).
— It is far from indubitable that their inquiry was biased. Whether there is something wrong with the question you cite depends on what was inferred from the answers, and otherwise, you are in no position to make a judgement on the quality of their work.
2. The committee then prepared a report that made rather extreme recommendations, many of which seem at best tangentially related to the prevention of improperly sexualized behavior (e.g. requesting an end to all official or unofficial department activities after 5pm, even (and explicitly) taking a visiting speaker out to dinner; barring all faculty members from criticizing feminist and other approaches to philosophy even in private, off-campus conversations with any other department members).
— I have no idea how you can say that any of these things are tangentially related to the problems. Obviously such matters depend on context, but if there are frequent problems arising in less professional contexts, then it might well be appropriate to suggest simply ending these. I also haven’t the slightest idea how you can call these “extreme”. Firing people would be, perhaps extreme. Setting business hours? Not so much.
The report also recommended that the department chair be ousted and replaced with an external department member at the administration’s discretion.
– Also, not extreme.
3. The committee then, despite apparent assurances to the department members who invited them
— Evidence??
in and cooperated with the site visit, handed their scathing report to the administration.
4. The administration then widely publicized the report, in the process seriously harming the reputations of more or less everyone associated with the department,
–Huh? How? Are you assuming that readers of the report will make the absurd inference from “the dpeartment had a problem to everyone is bad?” The report explicitly denies this inference.
and further harmed the department — which, as even the report makes clear, was for many an exciting and engaged place to work, and which contained many people who knew nothing about any of this — by putting in place the highly dubious but clearly debilitating measures recommended by the report.
— You’ve given no reason to think them dubious, or debilitating.
Even on your cynical analysis, John, the committee played into the hands of the administration perfectly. The department has now lost its autonomy and must operate under a puppet dictator selected and presumably controlled by the administration.
— “puppet dictator”??? Really? You aren’t even trying to be serious now.
Perhaps the committee was remarkably naive about what administrators do when you hand them power over a department after leaking secrets to them. Then again, this successful first outing of the site visit committee may have been quite gratifying to its members: after the style of the Nuremberg prosecutors, they not only got to survey the evidence and try to help bring the evildoers to justice, but they took the opportunity to engage in what they must have seen as the equivalent of denazification: tear down and exterminate everything that exists of the present culture and demand the re-edification of all members until the puppet government has decreed that the school has been properly sterilized, whenever that day comes.
— And now you are getting to the absurd rhetorical flourishes that John complained about and you were so shocked to see.
This is not speculation on my part, but an appeal to publicly known facts.
— Well, I’ve just pointed out, point by point, how false this is.
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JW at 24: “In my response to you, I treated you in a civil tone despite my disagreement.” Perhaps, but you weren’t civil to the members of the site visit committee nor to the incoming chair.
I am not “mud-slinging” as that is commonly understood to be casting aspersions on someone’s character. I am judging your performance on this thread.
IP addresses do not have to be “hunted down”; they are visible to blog admins with each comment. Having been burned here by sock puppets in the past, I make it a habit of checking IP addresses for unfamiliar names, such as “Suzanne Southam.” When it came up as the same as yours, then I thought it was sock-puppetry. I’ll take your word for it that it wasn’t.
Finally, you’re right about ad hominems when they are restricted to character judgments of argument makers. As I wasn’t making a character judgment about you, then it’s moot here, but you’re right, I was thinking of adverting to character when someone offers testimony, but that’s missing your restriction to argument.
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Thank you, Margaret.
Even if that is so, this is not good news for the prospects of the site visit committee unless it acknowledges that this disastrous outing in Colorado was not indicative of what future site visits will be like and that steps will be taken to ensure it does not happen again. In particular, it is very bad for members of that committee to go around expressing happiness about the public release of the report.
Here’s why I think that. Suppose I discover or suspect a disturbing trend of sexist or sex harassment-related behavior in my department. I bring it to the attention of my colleagues and we decide that we would benefit from a site visit. The odds are very high that at least one of the following will be true:
1) There will be an open records law in my state; or
2) Our department requires funding in order to bring in the committee for a site visit.
In either of those cases, we can be reasonably sure that
a) the committee will write a harshly critical report (since the very fact that they are invited in would seem to indicate that there are some problems, and the committee seems very glad to paint departments overall in a rather negative light) and
b) the administration and possibly others will receive a copy of this damning report just when we do, and we will quite possibly be publicly shamed as a result, have our chair replaced with an administration-selected outsider, be barred from holding any official or unofficial department activities after 5pm or on weekends, etc. etc.
Now, and I ask this seriously, what reasonable department would choose to go through this?
Perhaps this is only meant to appeal to departments that already have a majority of committed foes of harassment who want some way of getting rid of a few bad apples, and who are on good terms with the administration already, and think for that reason that their department may weather the storm. Does the committee wish to cater only to departments like that?
Even if the department members decide to pay whatever fee the committee charges from their own pockets, the open records law would make this a losing proposition for those departments in any such states. Again, what sane department from any such state would want this?
I’m puzzled as to why anyone who hopes this won’t be the first and only site visit would take this as a positive result.
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As a blog administrator and an IT professional, it’s easy for multiple parties to register as coming from the same IP. All you’d need is all traffic to come from behind the same gateway or proxy. This would be common for individuals at the same institution.
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I’m just gonna jump in here and suggest that when the argument becomes all about the ‘tone,’ the substance has pretty much collapsed.
I’m also gonna say that Showalter needs to do a better job of distinguishing between claims about the nature of the position he or she is taking (it’s naive; it amounts to something that can be characterized in other ways) and personal attacks. Those are pretty obviously not personal attacks, not least b/c none of us know who the heck you are and so could not possibly be attacking you on the basis of anything other than your performance in the thread. Constant, long winded pretension otherwise suggests that you’re not acting in good faith at all.
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Yes, that’s clearly correct about IP addresses. The rapidity of the response and the novelty of the second name made me suspect sock-puppetry. I’m happy to accept JW’s word that it wasn’t.
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Mark Lance,
Thanks for your reply. To respond:
1) You ask what reason I have for thinking that the department were the ones who called in the site visit committee, etc. Please have a look at this article in the Daily Camera, the university’s newspaper: http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25039305/cu-boulder-philosophy-faculty-shocked-by-decision-release
Some relevant points reported there:
– The department voted unanimously to bring in the site visit committee.
– The department, according to the article, was told by the committee that the report would be kept confidential.
– According to Graham Oddie, the department recently established a climate committee and adopted a list of recommendations aimed at improving the department for women and ethnic minorities, all of which was (Oddie feels) ignored by the APA committee. Indeed, there is no mention of this in the report.
2) You ask me to defend my judgment that the report’s recommendations, taken together, are extreme and debilitating. Well, please consider: this is a department that is, even according to the report, one in which active and enthusiastic engagement with philosophy thrives both inside and outside of the seminar room. Now, contrast that with what is being recommended:
– No gatherings of department members in any number, whether official or unofficial, outside the hours of 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday;
– No critical discussions of any approach to philosophy, whether on campus or in private;
– No outside activity among faculty or students (whether or not officially connected with the department) that is in any way connected with alcohol;
– No colloquia or other events in which topics are discussed that one would not wish to discuss in front of children (who should always be welcome);
And so on. If you think I’m making any of these up, then please call me on whichever you like and I’ll quote you the relevant section from the report.
This would effectively put an end to all departmental colloquia and grad talks, since they typically need to be scheduled at times when nobody has teaching or TA duties (i.e. the evenings). Conferences are out, since they take place on weekends. Visits to the countryside are expressly forbidden by the report. Going to the pub with one’s fellow grad students? Doubly wrong, since it’s outside of business hours and involves alcohol. Grad students and faculty won’t get to have dinner with a visiting speaker to discuss her paper, so they’ll have to talk about it before they’ve heard it over lunch (at which the visiting speaker cannot order beer or wine), while many faculty members and grad students are in class or office hours. And so on. Does this sound like a hotbed of philosophical activity? Or a nightmare for anyone who loves philosophy? Would you recommend that your students attend grad school at such a program?
I hope the answers to these questions are obvious, but I’d be glad to discuss them if you disagree.
3) You claim that I’m being melodramatic by referring to the new chair as a puppet leader. I recommend that you have a look at Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty for a good account of the very real threat of administrators taking over departments in the ongoing turf war admin has with the faculty at universities across the country. It is, and has long been, a crucial right of departments to autonomously chart their own course in the face of administrative pressure. The freedom of a department to elect its own chair and manage its own affairs has, throughout recent academic history, frequently come under attack by the enemies of free speech (think of the Red scare of the ’50s, the protests of the ’60s and ’70s, and the blowback). And yet the committee has actually recommended that the administration replace the department’s appointed chair with someone of the administration’s own choosing from outside the department, to run the department’s affairs for an indefinite period (the report never recommends a particular time for review, which gives the administration license to keep their hand-picked department chair installed in power indefinitely).
I meant no hyperbole in calling that a ‘puppet government’: it seems to be just a statement of fact. But if you think that those facts do not imply a ‘puppet government’ of the department, or that I’m mistaken concerning those facts, please explain.
Thanks,
JWS
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I also have some more general comments not relating to John P’s argument with Showalter, but more concerning the whole discussion and the OP.
Let me start by saying that what anonymous said @ 7 about how the ODH surely is working, and what other university authorities would have been well aware of a cluster of formal complaints originating in the department is tremendously important here. To amplify it, there is simply no plausible reason to think that any action being taken here is being taken simply on the basis of the CSW site visit / report, or even that the report was in any way decisive with respect to the action taken. It is, in fact, entirely possible that the report was released because it was a readily available document accurately outlining the nature of the situation which was not hamstrung by a series of more formal procedural confidentiality requirements — as things coming out of ODH, for instance, but also likely the provost’s office, would have been.
Margaret Atherton’s point @ 25 is also crucially important, as is Mark’s point 1 @ 26.
Now some more general remarks.
I find the idea that there’s a substantial question about the epistemological and empirical qualifications of the CSW site visit team to make the judgments that they did problematic. Surely they fit the description of ‘experts’ here, and so we should be treating them as authorities speaking to matters that are within the scope of their authority and their practical experience in making the judgments that they do. At very least it seems to me that we should be doing so provisionally until such time as other non-intersted parties with similar qualifications, experience, and expertise substantially contest their view.
I also worry a great deal about the impulse to demand detailed and explicit evidentiary support for all their characterizations of the situation in the department, despite the clear and one would think obvious need for much of their investigatory process to remain confidential, precisely in order to protect victims, those who are at risk of victimization, and even those who might subsequently be accused in more formal judicial proceedings.
Thirdly, the ‘reputation’ point strikes me as problematic. Because Mohan and Leiter haven’t heard anything bad, we’re supposed to worry that the ‘reputation’ is exaggerated or even non-existent? I find it easy to believe that there would have been a reputation among those who would have been likely to be negatively affected by the conditions in the department. Indeed, communities and sub-communities that are regularly subject to discrimination also regularly form networks that function to disseminate ‘the word’ on good and bad places to be. The fact that people who aren’t members of those communities aren’t aware of those networks is wholly unsurprising and, indeed, part of how they function to protect those who are.
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The Daily Currant article does nothing to challenge the repeated claims of the committee that the report was requested by the administration. At most it indicates that some in the department were not aware of that.
“This would effectively put an end to all departmental colloquia and grad talks, since they typically need to be scheduled at times when nobody has teaching or TA duties (i.e. the evenings)”
That is silly. I’ve been at three graduate programs – Pitt, Syracuse, and Georgetown. At none of these were talks held in the evenings and at all there were some whose teaching conflicted with such talks. Yet all had flourishing colloquia and grad talks.
As for the rest, if you think that not having departmental dinners is such a huge quasi-fascist punishment, I think you are seriously under-appreciating the depth of the problems being addressed.
Interesting how, in your deflecting defense, you change ‘dictator’ to ‘leader’. But notwithstanding, yes, I think you are being melodramatic – also libelous. To assimilate this to a standard unprovoked case of admin taking over a department is just to frivolously ignore the central issue of this case.
OK. I really think I’m going to let this go with that comment. Got lots of work to do today.
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Ed Kazarian wrote: “there is simply no plausible reason to think that any action being taken here is being taken simply on the basis of the CSW site visit / report, or even that the report was in any way decisive with respect to the action taken.”
Not even the fact that all the actions taken by the administration are, in fact, plainly advocated by the CSW report?
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Mark, the article does challenge the committee’s claim that the site visit was requested by the administration rather than the department. It blatantly contradicts it, in fact.
You’ve also completely mischaracterized what I said. I never said that not being able to have dinner with visiting speakers is a ‘quasi-fascist punishment’, or even a punishment at all. It is, rather, an intended preventative measure that seems clumsy and ineffective to me.
Anyway, you’ve made clear that you don’t find it worthwhile to engage with me on this subject, since (unlike me, you think?) you’re an important person with “lots of work to do today.” There’s really no need to act like an asshole about this and call my comments libellous and silly just because you are, as far as I’ve seen, constitutionally incapable of admitting or even noticing a single flaw in anything stemming from a committee that purports to be feminist, no matter how harmful its effects on the prospect of future anti-harassment site visits might be.
Yet another example of someone who, in the name of moral righteousness, refuses to meet civility with civility. This is depressing.
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Given how SOP most of those are when you have a severely problematic institutional culture, no.
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“Yet another example of someone who, in the name of moral righteousness, refuses to meet civility with civility. This is depressing.”
This sort of ‘tone policing’ needs to stop.
First, it is a standard trolling technique when one wants to avoid or foreclose upon scrutiny of the content of one’s position and delegitimate someone’s anticipated disagreement on non-content bases. For someone who makes a whole big deal about the rules of ad hominem argumentation to resort to it after someone has spent a bunch of time substantively responding to his or her claims is especially hypocritical. If you care so much about rules of relevance, abide by them.
Second, it is a standard defensive technique on the part of those speaking from or in defense of the position of privilege, where it functions to once again shift the onus of defense onto someone who might otherwise be making criticisms of that position that had to be taken seriously. The fact that you explicitly use it to dismiss ‘moral righteousness’ is a pretty interesting signal.
Third, even if the above weren’t the case, you seem determined to make this entire thread about your sense of being wounded. But really, your fee fees are about as low as any issue at stake in this thread could possibly get on the order of relative importance. So what you’re doing is wildly disproportionate.
If you had a substantive point. You’ve made it, and offered reasons aplenty in support of it. You’ve also been given several careful responses. Given all of that, any more of this is far more than is necessary, welcome, or in anything mildly resembling good taste.
Enough.
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I’m hesitant to weigh in on an issue that is really beside the point (and thereby further enable the discussion’s veering away from the heart of the issue here), but JW Showalter is simply mistaken in his interpretation of the relationship between the Daily Camera’s claim that the department requested the visit and the claim that the administration requested the visit. The former doesn’t contradict (“blatantly” or inconspicuously) the latter, since it turns out they’re both true. If we read the opening paragraph of the “Summary of Report by the American Philosophical Association to the University of Colorado Boulder”, we see that the invitation was issued by the department, the dean, and the provost:
“In April 2013, the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women
was invited and approved to conduct a full review of the climate for women in the department.
The invitation to conduct that review was issued by the philosophy department, Dean Steven
Leigh of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Provost Russell Moore. That review was
conducted in late September 2013. The report from that visit was submitted to the University in
late November. ”
Much like the bar in the Blues Brothers, this committee has both kinds of invitation: administrative and departmental.
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Last word on the matter:
Matt, please let me quote from the Daily Camera article to you: “many said they felt blindsided and shocked by the administration’s decision to release a document they were told would be kept confidential.”
Ed, anyone reading through this thread carefully will see that I have never relied on ‘tone policing’ in place of solid arguments and evidence. I’ve carefully put together arguments that engage with the issues, and I’ve cited sources in support of all contested claims. Mark Lance and John Protevi at first tried to argue cogently, but then resorted to dismissiveness and name-calling as they retreated from the scene rather than honestly reappraising their views when their reasoning was shown to be faulty. Please don’t blame me for mentioning that in passing in an (unsuccessful) bid to urge them to return to a fair and non-abusive discussion.
You are right to draw attention to my criticism of moralizing. The moralizing spirit, I’m afraid, has very little to do with improving the world. Scratch a devotee of a moral cause — any moral cause — who can’t abide dissent without stomping off in a huff or trying to sabotage unfavorable discussions in other ways, and you’ll find a bully in sheep’s clothing. It never fails.
I do agree that the debate seems to have run its course. Anyone who cares to read over this thread impartially will easily see which arguments have been dealt with and which have not. As for the moralizers, they will (as always) see the victory exactly where their bigotry tells them it is regardless of what is said.
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I just want to second Ed’s point at #33. I have heard from a source I deem reliable about this department’s reputation (something pretty egregious), and Eric Schliesser posts on his blog today about how he came to hear about it.
http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/02/the-irretrievable-shame-of-professional-philosophy.html#more
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@ Showalter;
Without entering in the discussion, I’d just like to highlight two issues. First, the quote from the Daily Camera article doesn’t contradict Matt’s statements. Matt is claiming that the decision to have a visit was taken together by the department and the administration. The claim from the DC article simply says that many members of the department were surprised with the fact that the document was released. That the decision to release the document was taken by the administration, without prior consult with the department, is obviously consistent with the decision to have a visit in the first place have been taken by both department and administration.
Secondly, you have repeatedly claimed that prof. DesAutels was actually happy with the release of the document. However, this post contradicts that claim: http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/colorado-out-of-context-quotes/
Here’s the relevant claim:
“This may give the misleading impression that DesAutels supports the release of the report, and that she commented on the specifics of the Colorado case. Both of these are false. The fuller context is that she refused to comment on any specifics of the situation at Colorado. She was then asked to comment on what the negative and positive effects of this particular public release might be. She said that it might be beneficial simply because it documents a problematic environment and steps that might be taken to improve it.”
Obviously, just because she mentioned a beneficial effect of the release doesn’t mean she actually endorsed it.
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Daniel, you can’t comment without entering the discussion — by definition!
Since you call me out specifically, I’ll respond.
1) You make a good point about the Daily Camera article and Matt’s statements. I see now that, as he and you both said, the two things are consistent. I seem to remember seeing somewhere that someone in the department had claimed the committee had assured them that the report would not go to the administration, but quite possibly I misread that in the same way I seem to have misread the Daily Camera article. If that’s true, then the committee was not guilty of leaking the document as I had previously thought; and of course that’s good news to hear. I appreciate the correction.
2) I’m a little less reassured by your second claim. I did read that recent post at feministphilosophers in the late afternoon, and if that report is correct it obviously shifts the blame away from DesAutels and the committee, which would be reassuring. However, I’m hesitant here for two reasons:
a) Minor reason: how do we know this about DesAutels’ motivation in saying what she said? Did she just make that claim to the writer of the post at feministphilosophers? If so, then I don’t know why we should trust what could easily be a rationalization after she started to see trouble on the horizon. If, on the other hand, a transcript of the complete interview was posted prior to whatever conversation DesAutels may have had with the poster, then that would be a different story. Do you know which it is?
b) Major reason: even if DesAutels’ account of her motivation for saying that is accurate, it doesn’t seem that much less disturbing to me. DesAutels’ account, as I understand it, is that she was asked whether she thought there was anything good about the leaking of the report to the media. And the correct answer to that question is “No, I’m afraid that nothing good will come from the broadcasting of the report: it is a terrible result through and through that our team would never have permitted and we are deeply sorry to all those whose reputations have been irretrievably damaged by a report that was never intended for such a purpose.”
A sincere and contrite statement to that effect by the three team members — even if the decision to broadcast the document were against their wishes — would seem a wise course now. Unless, that is, they don’t really feel bad about it.
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Clarification question: are the committee’s recommendations (no gatherings outside office hours etc.) meant to apply just for a set period or indefinitely? I take it that they don’t mean that all departments should adopt such rules, but only those with bad climate. So presumably once the climate improves the restrictions can be lifted. If that’s not their view (which I think it is) I doubt they’ll get many more invitations.
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An attempt to explain what seems to be getting lost here:
1. The committee came in at the department’s request and, among some good things they may have done, indubitably did their research in a somewhat biased way, as has already been noted elsewhere (e.g. giving polls asking philosophy department members yes/no questions about whether they are “confident” that the school would treat sexual harassment complaints fairly, but none in which people were asked whether they were confident that the school would treat such complaints unfairly).
• In an environment that women find toxic, where an individual is targeted or even just excluded from normal departmental discussions and decision-making, the difference between the two questions you mention doesn’t strike me as important. What is important is to discover some of the spirit of the people there, what is in the air? Are they hurting because of perceived sexual harassment, caustic remarks, exclusion? If so that’s one thing. Are they hurting because they feel there is no place to turn to find help in dealing with it and resolving it? That is another. I would want answers to both. That’s at the heart of what’s at issue, not the exact questions that are asked in a survey. I don’t know what happened at Boulder. I’ve never been there. But the point is simple. I’ll talk you through. You’ve been shoved in the breast, pushed down the stairs, excluded in a meeting, (pick your poison)… when that is happening in the department the discomfort of the bully really doesn’t matter. Neither does the discomfort of colleagues. You and I both want the same thing – we want awful behavior to stop, whatever form the awful behavior might take. Of course we don’t want to replace it with a different kind of awful behavior – vendettas and retaliation. But we do want that bully, or those bullies, to stop bullying. When he does then we can work together to deal with any fallout. Until then, it is not obvious that you and I are on the same side. Philosophy departments are sometimes curl-your-spine bad. Most women will not talk constantly about the abuse they suffer in toxic departmental environments. Most don’t want to identify as ‘victim’. Only trusted colleagues will know and only anonymous surveys will tell. So if a department needs to gather general information, then it will be wishy-washy questions in a survey. What they are after is an indication about whether people in a department feel safe.
2. The committee then prepared a report that made rather extreme recommendations, many of which seem at best tangentially related to the prevention of improperly sexualized behavior (e.g. requesting an end to all official or unofficial department activities after 5pm, even (and explicitly) taking a visiting speaker out to dinner; barring all faculty members from criticizing feminist and other approaches to philosophy even in private, off-campus conversations with any other department members). The report also recommended that the department chair be ousted and replaced with an external department member at the administration’s discretion.
• Extreme? Tangentially? Why suppose that? I rarely hear of ‘improper sexualized behavior’ beginning in the office or during the workday. When students have sought help from me about these things, it turns out the behaviour almost always started at a department dinner. Usually when someone in a position of authority was drinking. Further, the offenders I know of are all men who do openly criticize approaches to philosophy that do not very narrowly match their own. They criticize these other areas to their colleagues in order to enforce an exclusion of these areas, and when hiring they tend to argue that ‘we should build on our strengths’ – ie, not hire someone who isn’t doing what we ourselves are already doing. Most philosophers shrug when they hear such talk. But it’s surprising to see how effective it can be – some people just do not want to engage in such discussion, so the bully is often the only voice. Students hear it and are taught, because of the lack of other voices challenging the bully, to emulate him – it sounds strong, like staking a philosophical position, so they copy. Junior colleagues see standing up against it a political minefield, e.g., “I don’t want to have to fight that fight.” I hear this sort of thing about many areas, but not usually about feminism probably because it is so far off the radar around me. But I hear it about Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, phil religion, formal logic, formal semantics, formal epistemology, phil mind, modal realism, metaphysics of dance, applied ethics, and more.
3. The committee then, despite apparent assurances to the department members who invited them in and cooperated with the site visit, handed their scathing report to the administration.
• Who then handed it to the world. And something helpful happened: People who are intimately involved got their story told, so they don’t have to always start on the back-foot, explaining away their situation, their behavior, their inability to thrive or even just to cope. If they aren’t any longer the targetted victims of bullies, then they can focus more on philosophy. Something else helpful happened: Other victims in other places of what is sometimes a horrendously hostile culture got to hear some of the story of Boulder. And they found that they are not so entirely alone. Parents and loved ones who wondered why their philosopher is so unhappy, tempermental, fretful got a neutral party’s (neutral in that it is not family; perhaps I should say a professional party’s) discussion of what one real philosophy department is like to work in, and they learned that their family philosopher might not be a loser but a victim of a culture that no one has been brave enough to fix.
4. The administration then widely publicized the report, in the process seriously harming the reputations of more or less everyone associated with the department, and further harmed the department — which, as even the report makes clear, was for many an exciting and engaged place to work, and which contained many people who knew nothing about any of this — by putting in place the highly dubious but clearly debilitating measures recommended by the report.
• This week, maybe it’s the case that everyone’s reputation in Boulder is harmed. But it sounds like that’s because there were factions and bullying and game-playing, and there wasn’t a safe collegial environment. Soon there should emerge some sighs of relief from the good guys who’ll start saying to themselves ‘thank goodness that’s over’, or at least ‘we are being given a chance to do better.’ When bullies leave or are silenced, everybody else usually does relax and get happy again. Philosophy usually gets better too, not worse like the bully said. ….But about “an exciting and engaged place to work” — when some colleagues are harassed, belittled, shoved, etc, and others are excited and engaged then why wouldn’t members of the first group see the others as creeps? Any department with a very lousy track record makes it easier for bullies to bully. It seems that has been part of Boulder’s problem. Debilitating measures are precisely what is needed to force a change. Not a horrid change that compromises philosophy, but a change where good philosophy is associated with a safe and collegial workplace. Think about how it would feel to be pushed down the stairs and to be told that yes we have many complaints about his behavior but his research is too valuable to the university and nothing can be done. The Boulder report is an important step for a department and a university to begin to make that kind of answer no longer accepted. Relax and get onside. Help us fix the discipline. Yes, seriously, don’t have drinks with colleagues – don’t let them drive drunk either. Same lesson. Use your position to protect so that there aren’t victims.
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“Not a horrid change that compromises philosophy, but a change where good philosophy is associated with a safe and collegial workplace.” Can’t it be both? I mean: it is clearly bad for colleagues not to be able to meet after hours and have a drink together. It is clearly bad for graduate students not to be able to meet after hours and have a drink together. I learned so much from my peers at just such events. Additionally: friendship is a pretty important thing and friends often go out together… I am not even sure how to be friends with someone without going out at night with them. [And: none of this addresses the good for graduate students of being introduced into the social networks of older philosophers.]
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Enzo Rossi asks “Are the committee’s recommendations (no gatherings outside office hours etc.) meant to apply just for a set period or indefinitely? I take it that they don’t mean that all departments should adopt such rules, but only those with bad climate.”
It seems pretty wild to me, also, that the committee would be intended to apply such rules to all departments. And yet, they clearly do. I refer you, for instance, to p.12 of the report, concerning a planned meeting outside of business hours: “Under no circumstances should this department (or any other) be organizing the social calendars of its members” and “best practices for family-friendly speaker events include taking the speaker out to lunch instead of dinner so that participants may have their evenings free to attend to other obligations.”
Also, please note that Sis advocates something similar immediately above (comment 45, section 2) as Mark Lance apparently does, too (comment 34, second paragraph). So yes, it seems that the serious recommendation is that all departments should stop having activities outside of 9-5, Mondays to Fridays, and so on.
Sis: Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think you and I have a fundamental difference in what we are prepared to take for granted here. Neither you (as you admit) nor I have personal knowledge of the situation in Colorado, so let’s look at the facts. We both agree that two cases of sexual harassment have been substantiated there (whether it was the same harasser in both cases is not known), and that there have also been thirteen other alleged cases. Those other thirteen cases may have been clear instances of serious harassment where there was insufficient evidence for a finding, or they may have been trivial nothings, or they may have been false and vexatious charges, or any range of other options. We just don’t know, beyond the two cases; and for those two cases, we have no real information about what happened.
Beyond that, the information is conflicting. On the one hand, many people at the department say they were working to resolve the problems and that the department was a great place in which to work. The fact that the department was unanimous in voting to bring in the site visit team (according to the news story) seems to speak at least a little in favor of this interpretation. On the other hand, the report alleges that a very different picture is true: the department’s discussions are pseudo-philosophical, there is a constant climate of sexism and harassment that nobody cares about, and so on. Which view should we trust?
It seems to me that we would be naïve to trust either view. Though I think we should always assume the best in people unless given adequate evidence to the contrary, the department’s positive account of itself could be biased both because its members have a vested interest in protecting their reputation and because they may be unaware of what is going on: everyone seems to recognize that immediately. But oddly, nobody seems to recognize that the committee, too, has a likely bias. All the members of the committee have an explicit orientation toward feminist philosophy, and had a shared political ideology before even looking at the Colorado material that almost certainly colored their views and report in at least some respects. The biased survey questions I drew attention to confirm that suspicion, as does the fact that the report seeks to promote a range of practices in the department that, while in line with the ideologies of feminist philosophy, seem to have little or no relevance to the harassment issue (e.g. the prohibition on faculty members privately discussing negative views on feminist philosophy).
Moreover, my significant other was once a member of a (non-philosophy) department that brought in a committee of self-described ‘radical feminists’ to prepare a similar report, and the result was very similar despite the fact that she had first-hand knowledge of the falsity of the charges through knowing the principals. The department ended up with a scathing report based on loaded survey questions and the ignoring of inconvenient facts (for radical feminists) was handed over to the media before the department could even consider it, and a reputation that was put through the public wringer long before the department was able to cobble together enough information to call the ‘report’ into question. But by then, the media circus had moved on. The moral of the story, she and the department concluded, is never to allow a committee made up entirely of people of a single ideology to conduct such a report, particularly if that ideology can be furthered by a negative (or positive) finding.
So I guess I’m just not ready to take for granted that this group of politically motivated people got things right this time, particularly since I can see that some of the questions are biased, since their claims are in dispute, and since I don’t have additional evidence to confirm or disconfirm the findings. I know about two cases of (unclear) sexual harassment in Colorado, but beyond that I can only speculate and have no good reason to trust the department or the committee. It sounds as though you’re in the same epistemic boat.
Now, given all that, should we support the public airing of this document, the replacement of the chair with an admin-appointed substitute, the prohibition on activities after 5pm, the ban on criticizing feminist philosophy on or off campus, the need to only present colloquia that might be appropriate for children of all ages, etc.? On the one hand, you could be right in guessing that things are so outrageously bad there that these extraordinary measures are the only way to prevent terrible outcomes for women. Even if the report’s worst factual assertions about the department are wholly correct, I find it difficult to see why these measures would be the right ones to alleviate the problem. Conversely, if there is at least some exaggeration in the report’s dismal picture (and given how brief the visit seems to have been and how sweeping the condemnations are, even on points the committee could not have witnessed to any depth, that’s got to be pretty likely), then the extraordinary measures have little or no justification. But they do limit the actual function of the department, which — let’s remember — is to do philosophy and promote the philosophical work and development of its members; and much more important, this has trashed the reputation of people we have no good reason to think are guilty (unless for some good reason you think that everyone associated with that department is guilty).
So unless we get better
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JW Showalter,
You claim that we really have no evidence of the severity of the climate in the Boulder department. But this is only true if you take the APA report to have no evidential value. And you’ve presented absolutely no reason to distrust the report. Indeed, many of the specific factual claims that you make on this tread have been shown to be false.
“while in line with the ideologies of feminist philosophy, seem to have little or no relevance to the harassment issue”
This rather gives away the game, I think. Especially in the course of a thread in which you have: called the APA committee biased and ideologically driven, called Peggy DesAutels a liar, called the incoming chair of the Boulder Philosophy Department a puppet dictator, and made comparisons to Nuremburg.
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The “only 2 substantiated cases of harassment” argument seems pretty weak to me. Shouldn’t that be viewed as a lot? Philosophy departments aren’t very big. These means at least one professor, on more than one occasion, acted in such a way that 2 different individuals went through the unpleasant process of reporting inappropriate activity and that this activity was confirmed.
Why should that be acceptable and if the department continued to have a weak response then they can’t be trusted to have weekend getaways and regular nights out at the bar.
By the way, I don’t think even the report says that grad students can’t get together for drinks. It says official department meetings must be held in a more “professional” time and environment.
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jkdbrown,
One of the claims I’ve made was shown to be false. As you can see, I was intellectually honest enough to admit that. I have yet to see any of the supporters of the report in this thread do that. If you find any of my other claims to be false, please provide evidence.
I’ve also made clear what reasons there are for not automatically trusting everything in the report or the department’s self-description. And I invite you to make clear to me why a demand not to critically discuss feminist philosophy is crucial for the prevention of harassment and should not be taken as suspicious coming from a team of three people who all happen to champion that philosophical approach.
Left Philosophy,
I certainly don’t think that two, or even one, case of sexual harassment is acceptable. Without a doubt, departments must do whatever they must to reasonably prevent such cases. I’m not questioning that at all. However, I’m assuming that no reasonable person would suggest that the only way to prevent a few cases of sexual harassment would be the implementation of the measures demanded by the report. The report seems to move from the questionable premise that the department is shot through with sexual harassment and a culture of a denial that these extreme measures need to be implemented, whatever their cost. I don’t think that the inference is a good one, but it’s particularly weak if the description of the departmental culture is exaggerated, which it likely is, given the clearly biased wording of the survey questions, the fact that the committee makes claims that depend on how meetings are conducted in the department (and the committee seems not to have attended more than one of those meetings at most, and those meetings are discussed very differently by department members who did attend, etc.).
You ask whether the report prohibits groups of grad students from getting together for drinks. A couple of quotes from the report:
p.5 “This means no alcohol served at any events connected with the Department (and this must extend beyond only “sanctioned” departmental events), and no evening socializing.”
p.6 “Events should be held during normal business hours (9-5) and should be such that you would feel comfortable with your children or parents being present. This holds for official department events as well as those attended by individual faculty, on or off campus.”
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