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.
New APPS 
103 responses to “The Funny Thing About Colorado”
P.S. is there some logical fallacy I’m not familiar with that prohibits comparing a committee’s view of its actions with the view the Nuremberg prosecutors took of theirs? I can’t imagine what the fallacy is meant to be, but a few people here seem to take it for granted. Could someone please set out what the fallacy is meant to be? Thank you. As far as I know, anyone can compare anything with anything else, so long as the two things are analogous in the intended respect.
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@Showalter;
I don’t see this as productive. You apparently think the report is misleading at best, downright feminist propaganda at worst. You presume that DesAutels is not to be trusted on her remarks, supposedly because she is trying to save her face. You say that Andy Cowell is a “puppet dictator” and that the current process is some kind of Nuremberg trial, aiming at “tearing down and exterminating the present culture”.
The problem is, we don’t share these assumptions. I see no reason to distrust DesAutels when she claims to be misinterpreted. The report seems fairly accurate to me, at least based on other evidence that has also been presented (such as Schliesser’s testimony on his blog). I don’t know Andy Cowell. As for “tearing down and exterminating the present culture”, if the present culture is one of persistent harassment, well, so much the worse for that culture, right?
We also don’t share the same perspectives on the proposed bans. At my department, it’s the norm (not in the sense of a instituted rule, but in the sense of a cultural issue) not to drink with our professors, to try to have colloquia in the afternoons, and to limit the interactions between professors and students to more professional ones. I personally don’t see this as bad, or as somehow hampering my own philosophical advancement. My current adviser is very careful and attentive, I have wonderful discussions with my colleagues, and most of the colloquia I’ve been to had good Q&A and ample opportunity for me to have relevant philosophical discussions or simply to make contact with interesting people. Finally, the only time that I saw a professor harassing a colleague was precisely in an alcohol driven party after a colloquium. So I’m not unsympathetic to that particular ban.
Lastly, it seems we also have different views about the prospects for the department’s reputation. From what I gathered, the department apparently had a really bad reputation prior to this event. Now, after the measures taken, people seem to be hopeful that it will become a better place. So, if anything, it seems that the department’s reputation has actually improved after this (I know that it did in my eyes).
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Daniel Nagase, I’m afraid you’ve misread what I’ve written quite radically. To quote from your first paragraph:
1) “You apparently think the report is misleading at best, downright feminist propaganda at worst.”
That’s incorrect. I think the report is truthful at best and misleading at worst, which is why I said that (I’ve never said a thing about ‘downright feminist propaganda’ or propaganda of any sort). What I said, and I think I was quite clear about this, is that we shouldn’t automatically trust the report or the department members’ version of the story, since the facts are a matter of contention, BOTH sides have a clearly identifiable bias, and we don’t have reliable independent corroboration.
2) “You presume that DesAutels is not to be trusted on her remarks, supposedly because she is trying to save her face.”
That is an utter falsehood, I’m afraid. I was absolutely explicit about this in my response to you. I said that we shouldn’t presume DesAutels’ trustworthiness on the content of her remarks, but that there might be evidence (a longer original interview) that could establish that her account was correct.
Think about that for a second, Daniel. I clearly said that there were two viable possibilities: that we should trust she is correct, or that we should suspend judgment. And you read that as my saying that we should presume she is incorrect! Can you please explain that?
3) “You say that Andy Cowell is a “puppet dictator…”
Right. As I’ve explained, the uncontested facts are that the democratically appointed chair of the department has been replaced by an external faculty member of the administration’s choosing, and that external faculty member is directly responsible to the administration rather than to the department and its democratic process. Hence, a puppet dictator. Is there something controversial about that? On what basis, please?
4) “…and that the current process is some kind of Nuremberg trial, aiming at “tearing down and exterminating the present culture.”
Almost correct. And since, as you go on to say, you think that the committee’s recommendation to tear down and exterminate the present culture, you apparently don’t dispute that description of what’s going on. So why take issue with it? I’m confused.
I’m not sure whether you, John Protevi, and others are hazy on your 20th century history, but the Nuremberg trials were good trials and comparing something another process to them is not a criticism.
However, there is a slight distortion in your representation of what I said. I didn’t compare the process to the Nuremberg trials: I said that the committee saw its role as comparable to that of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials. In other words, they saw their role as not limited to finding clear ways of dealing with the bad actors, but more broadly as reconstituting the entire culture through radical means in such a way that, according to their theories, the problems would not arise again. And you have agreed with that in your comment.
A little more charity in reading would be helpful here.
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P.S.
“From what I gathered, the department apparently had a really bad reputation prior to this event.”
Exactly. From what you gathered: this ‘international reputation’ for a culture of sexual harassment the report asserts seems to have been pretty elusive. I’d never heard about it before, and it seems you hadn’t either. I’ve talked with somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 people at different universities over the last few days about it, and none of them had heard about it either. Hm… mind you, if you say in a report that you know an administration will read that the department has a nasty ‘international reputation’, it’ll urge them to take harsh action and to worry even less about the harm it might do to the reputation of a department whose members are, they’ve been (falsely?) told, already in the bad books in international circles.
Of course, it’s possible that this is just an effect of you, me, and all the other people who don’t seem to have heard anything bad about Colorado until now being out of the loop for some reason. Still, I think it at least shows that it could be naïve of us to treat the report as gospel without supporting evidence.
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There seems to be some misplaced blame here about the publicizing of the report. There was a Colorado Open Records Act request, so by law it had to be published. Assuming all parties involved knew about the sunshine law, they must, or at least should, have known that there would be no keeping the report under wraps.
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If the committee members knew in advance that the report would be published, then it could have been no surprise to them when that happened.
Assuming all parties involved knew about the sunshine law, the committee members should be deemed to have willfully publicized every word in their report and to have deemed the harm done to the department and its members to be morally acceptable in the circumstances. It therefore makes no sense for a committee member to express regret about the fallout now unless she has had a change of heart about the propriety of her actions.
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Just because there is an Open Records law in that state and even a request for information doesn’t really mean the administration had no other recourse but to divulge immediately. Administrations in our contemporary world have gotten quite adept at hindering and stalling and canceling transparency requests, and there’s no reason why we have to believe justice comes to us through a bureaucracy easily. If we’re going to entertain any idea of there being power dynamics at work in a department, then we’re being extremely remiss to not think about the power dynamics of the more energetic system of the entire university and its money supply connections. FOIA requests and sunshine laws only work to the extent a bureaucracy is willing to comply with the law, but if we’re having to police that same bureaucracy ourselves, then the game is already up. So, this isn’t to argue or say somebody or other should have known they’d not have privacy with their secrets, but just to point out that it’s foolish to trust the administration completely if we’re willing to mistrust some culture within it. Thus, we not only need to have these kinds of site visits, but we also need to cultivate a belief that shining light into the upper administrations means willingness to shine a light into one’s own secrets. Anything else is a willingness to compromise something to protect another.
Showalter, are you for real? I mean, not just in the “Are you trolling?” sense but in the sense that you really feel thoroughly what you’re arguing for and against?
I mean, let’s put aside the technical details for how you’ve been misunderstood, and summarize what you think needs to happen with site visits in the future. I might be agreeing with you, if it weren’t for all the impetus you feel to defend yourself against whatever attacks on your character, because maybe I get the point you want to make, if it were possible to see the ends you want me to see by reading what you wrote for me to jump myself to that last little bit to the conclusion.
But I am dense. Takes a lot to leap for you or anyone, but you can help me with a summary?
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Hi, Charles R.
A summary of what I hope readers will see? Well,
1) Most of us who want to stop sexual harassment and sexism in philosophy feel an urge to rush to applaud any effort in that direction, regardless of the details, and to automatically see critics of any such efforts as attempting to resist positive changes for women and others. For reasons I’ll mention below, I think we need to resist that tempting black-and-white thinking.
2) We should not blind ourselves to the fact that there are very real moral considerations at stake on both sides here. If we don’t do enough to stop harassment and sexism, we harm women in the discipline. If we go overboard, we harm the reputations of innocent people and the viability of healthy institutions. Neither of these considerations can legitimately be ignored, and a cavalier attitude toward the harms and risks on either side is morally unacceptable.
3) Just as we must recognize the department’s agenda preserving its reputation and perhaps the status quo and the administration’s agenda to do all the nasty things administrations tend to do, we must recognize the site visit committee’s agenda in finding a positive result here and implementing its worldview in the departmental microcosm. This is a very high-stakes issue, and we cannot rightly trust one group over the other just because we like what that group stands for.
4) Whatever course of action we endorse, we need to think very carefully about what we are doing here and where we want this to go. Disturbingly, the social pressure of picking sides on these issues has apparently stopped us from doing this. Case in point: the image the general public has of academic philosophy today is one of rampant sexual harassment that is routinely winked at by pretty well every department, of blatant racism and homophobia everywhere, and so on. Two questions:
a) Is this view really accurate? On the one hand, it doesn’t square with anything I or anyone I’ve spoken to at a pretty broad range of departments has ever witnessed, and I’ve spoken with plenty of men and women about it. On the other, a great deal of bad stuff might be going on under my nose and the victims might be afraid to come forward. On the other hand again, the information I’ve seen so far would never pass muster in any decent sciences journal (forums to which people are invited to contribute bad stories anonymously, survey questions with scientifically unacceptable biases, the testimony of groups with a clear ideological bias and no proper forensic training, etc.). For all I can see, there might be just a few isolated cases of sexual harassment and inappropriate sexualized behavior in the profession (as in any profession), or there might be an enormous epidemic that affects pretty well every woman outside the small circle I know about. The right course of action seems to depend on that issue, and yet nobody seems to feel comfortable raising it.
b) What’s the best way of dealing with the sexual harassment that does exist, and of increasing the percentages of women and minority groups in the discipline? It seems generally to be taken for granted by feminist philosophers (who really seem to be the only ones publicly discussing this stuff) that it’s generally a good thing to get the word out to everyone that the discipline is really, really terrible for women and others and a really bad thing to express any doubts about the extent of the problem. As a direct result, this is how the general public sees us today: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/02/sexual_harassment_in_philosophy_departments_university_of_colorado_boulder.html
This seems to me to be a great way of vastly reducing the number of women and minorities who will be interested in majoring in philosophy, and actually of dissuading non-minority males from philosophy also (would you want potential employers to see your Philosophy BA on your resume and be reminded of the Slate editorial? Seriously, please read it through).
Some people will no doubt feel that all this is terrible for us and also terrible for women in philosophy for the short term, but that in the great scheme of things it’s worth it. I disagree, but OK — let’s have that conversation and openly discuss the pros and cons. The trouble is, nobody’s discussing it. We’re just going down a path right now, today, that nobody seems to want to talk about in a critical way.
5) Most of all, what I’m saying is that we need to discuss and think carefully about these things instead of cheering for our respective teams. We’re philosophers after all, damn it! What the hell is going on when we can’t take a breath and think this stuff through after considering both sides carefully? Why are we letting cheerleading, blind obedience to authority and our righteous causes stop us from rational and informed conversation? Someone on this blog recently advocated that we trust in a cause with the same unthinking devotion that Kierkegaard recommended for Christianity, for goodness’ sake. Didn’t we all become philosophers to get away from rampant anti-intellectualism?
That’s really it, Charles. I have some opinions about what we should and shouldn’t do and what has and hasn’t been established, but I don’t feel that confident with any of them and I’d love to take part in or observe a good discussion on these sorts of points. I’m mostly just bummed out and freaked out that, no matter how careful and insightful we philosophers are in our day-to-day work, we’ve all seemed to decide to skip the whole rational discussion process in the face of this sacred cow (if we care about the issue at all), despite the fact that this is exactly when careful, critical thought is needed. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s some good open discussion about this somewhere in which no views or arguments will get you screamed at and we can all talk like adults. But I sure haven’t found it anywhere: this is the only blog thread I’ve found anywhere on the internet where the discussion hasn’t been shut down and censored the minute the critical questions are raised. I’ve also looked for editorials, but there’s nothing.
When things get serious and big moral decisions need to be made, we need to get more self-critical and more distrustful of authority: not less. That’s the summary of the summary!
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Showalter, I have been giving you quite a bit of leeway. Enough is enough. I haven’t bothered to read your screeds, but they are getting longer and more boring by the minute. Any more, including a reply to this, and you’ll be banned from this blog. So stop, and don’t reply to this.
best regards
Mohan
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“I have some opinions about what we should and shouldn’t do and what has and hasn’t been established, but I don’t feel that confident with any of them and I’d love to take part in or observe a good discussion on these sorts of points.”
Amen Showalter. I for one thank you for continuing the conversation, and for doing so in the manner that you have. Would that there were more of that in these discussions. I also thought this remark was spot-on:
“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.”
Matthen, please permit Showalter to respond to those who are engaging with him. Now that the character-attacking and tone-policing has died down, the conversation has been respectful and forthright.
(I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that I will be met with dismissive condescension and petty attacks on my person for even so much as voicing support for the airing of Showalter’s view. And this despite the fact that if one looks over the character of the exchange here it’s abundantly clear that Showalter has been disproportionately generous in and appreciative of the objections his/her interlocutors have been raising.)
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And let me be clear, though perhaps I don’t need to mention it–I do not need to agree with Showalter or accept his/her view to think it right to continue to allow him/her to express it. Indeed, it’s because I do not have a fixed view on the difficulties Showalter calls attention to that I want the conversation to continue. I find that listening to the conversation of intelligent people of good will is a useful way of learning, and I’m not so foolish as to suppose I have nothing to learn from these discussions. So please, let them continue.
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Mohan, I find your rudeness just awful. Showalter tried to make a space for a discussion but everyone pressured him for explanations.
You won’t know this because you didn’t bother read the cpmments. but he’s the only person here defending your post. Maybe you should have added your own ‘screeds’ so someone else didn’t have to do it for you.
and how can you know that it’s getting more boring by the minute if you haven’t read it? do you have ESP?
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You know, I think a lot of us can actually get behind Showalter’s fifth point. Well, not so much the bit about being anti-intellectuals or that the Kierkegaard quote was about getting with the program, but more that this kind of situation is exactly the right time to start thinking about some of the conversations we have been following along starting from Jon’s posts about tribes and philosophical commitments and Catarina’s about charitable adversarialness. Something like authentic rivalry, the anti-Girardian account of rivals.
This is the right time to be sure we’re not getting mislead by our own ideologies, but that doesn’t mean automatically assuming this also means you mistrust the report or the reporters or the report’s authors. I think Showalter is arguing we have to recognize we are the ones, each one of us, who has to be on guard against our own blind spots. It’s like “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” all over again. Showalter tried to do a controversial thing with a very clumsy analogy, and so my teeth get set on edge. But.
It was helpful to see how a shared end might look starting from wildly different backgrounds, thoughts, theories, and habits of inferring. I guess this is why dialogue is so wonderful for philosophy it’d be a shame to lose it.
But it is worth losing if it’s only being done for bad sport. That’s how we keep the integrity of the space, that safe space to be vulnerable and share upsetting things about what we think, because sealing off that space from those who need it is when we should feel our own shame.
I hope I’m not the only person who gets into philosophy and worries about this, who worries that it’s a hell of a lot more of a thing to get not simply the facts right, or even how you come to your facts, but whether or not you’re being just. I have seen professors argue sharp and sure on arcane technical details, showing talented beauty and professional skill finely focused on these particular concepts, and later learn directly they were bullies or clods to people our society allows them authority or power over. How is this possible? How can you be so very smart and amazing, and yet not really unravel why you’re a bully, or even worse, never even consider you are one? And if it can happen to these really brilliant people, if it happens to just a number of them, if it happens across all the departments and cultures and commitments, then is it happening to me right now? Am I being a bully or a clod?
I guess the best way I try and figure this out is to listen more and more, and start saying less and less. Sorry to ramble, y’all.
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I notice that it seems to be common ground in an otherwise rather fractious dispute (cf John Protevi at 8, JW Showalter at 10) that the administration at a university are assumed by default to have a malevolent agenda. (And indeed this seems to be a default assumption in most such discussions in the philosophy blogosphere.) What justifies this? Do we have reason to think that academics are just better people than administrators, so that we should naturally be more charitable in our attribution of motives to the former? In a context of discussing our implicit and explicit biases, the possible bias of defaulting in favour of academics (people like us) over administrators (not like us) presumably shouldn’t be neglected.
(I think it’s particularly odd to object on grounds of democracy to an external chair being brought in. An academic department is a diffuse collection of (at least) faculty, temporary teaching staff, graduate students and undergraduates. The voting part of this department is only a very small part of it. There are lots of (defeasible) good reasons for Faculty self-governance, but I don’t see that suffrage is one of them.)
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Hello David, I do not think I suggest university administrators have a “malevolent” agenda. I think we should assume they are rational egoists in a complex legal-political-bureaucratic setting. In other words, we should have a Realpolitik rather than a moral horizon for interpreting their actions.
(There are also often very complex judgments to be made about factions within an administration when interpreting these sorts of maneuvers, but let’s leave that aside for now.)
I also do not subscribe to the idea that department chairs at American public research universities are “elected” in some “democratic” fashion. In many schools there are Heads, who are explicitly appointed; in some others (like LSU, which I’m assuming is not atypical) there is an advisory vote of the departmental faculty members, but at the end of the day the Dean makes the appointment even if that advisory vote is often followed.
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Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters should be required reading for anyone in academia.
It explains exactly why we should never allow administrators to appoint chairs and what the administrative agenda is.
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@David Wallace
One reason why I’m slightly suspicious of the Colorado administration is because of their prior performance in this widely-discussed recent case, which cropped up at the end of last year.
(Caveat: I read several stories which covered this case while it was going on. I’m using this link to remind people of the case, not because I endorse this particular take on the story, which i’ve only had time to glance at.) At least one administrator – Steven Leigh – seems to have been involved in both cases.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/16/colorado-professor-forced-to-retire-over-prostitution-lecture-in-deviant-sociology-course/
Note that at one person at Colorado seems to think that it would have been appropriate to refer a lecture to an IRB, which raises questions about competence, as well as motivation.
So this isn’t necessarily a case of an a priori bias against adminstrators (and I suspect that John Protevi’s attitude is informed by this particular connection).
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No, actually I am not relying on that connection at all. Mine is a perfectly general point, and in fact I think it should hold for all administrators in all bureaucracies. [Edit: all bureaucracies, be they educational, industrial, governmental, and so on.] The recommended Realpolitik horizon of interpretation is defeasible, of course, but I think it should be our starting point.
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Let me add that my starting point is suggested on the basis of analyzing the incentive structures of administrator posts: you advance by showing your superiors how well you can protect the interests of the institution (not really the administrator class — that’s a Marxist rather than Realpolitik framework). And that is accomplished by blame-shifting downward as much as possible. These incentives cash out in the term of, well, cash often enough, and with a salary and benefit increase over that of faculty members such that any one administrator can assume a faculty member would step into his or her place, and so, “since someone else will do it anyway, I might as well do it then.”
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Thanks, John – that’s helpful. I don’t mind (and have some sympathy with) incentive-structure-based analysis of administrator posts provided it’s even-handed – that is, academics too exist in an incentive-structure-based system, and both academics and administrators may or may not rise above their own incentives. (And beyond very general levels I tend not to comment on what the actual structure of US university administration is – I know or have known a fair number of people in university administration who seem to be trying their imperfect best to pursue the general good, and that tends to get my hackles up when I read general criticisms of admin, but Oxford is very atypical of the UK, let alone of the US, and I’m not in a position to predict what does and does not generalise.)
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Hello David, I completely agree that faculty incentive structures have to be analyzed as well. What we find I think is a sort of inverse of the administrator incentives. While administrators advance by showing how they can protect the interests of the institution, thus creating the institution as at least a semi-coherent collective agent, faculty member incentives are atomizing (think of merit raises, course releases, etc), so that there is no “professoriat,” only an aggregate of individuals. Save in situations of collective bargaining, of course.
Now insofar as administrative-led institutions set the incentive structures for faculty members, we can see that the institutions benefit from the atomization of the faculty: there’s no possibility of collective agency “from below” as it were. So it all runs smoothly — in the short and medium term. Whether universities would benefit in the long run from faculty unionization, well I know where I stand on that issue! (I also think they would benefit in the short and medium term too!)
There’s a twist here as well: with an atomized faculty, we also see the conditions for the administration to also act with their “class” interests in mind (the famous “administrative bloat”), as well as those bureaucratic interests in keeping the institution a smooth-running operation.
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Hi Protevi. In the spirit of Charles R’s most recent remark, I want to question you about your attitude in 68. Is your position that in order to understand what is going on in situations like this we should start from the assumption that administrators are motivated primarily (solely?) by self-interested response to incentive structures?
Also, and to the forum more generally, ought we be pleased with the thought that an APA-sanctioned committee should have this much power over departments? Let me be clear–I’m not questioning that the report was made in good faith. More importantly, I am also not questioning that the report, considered as an assessment of the situation and set of recommendations for change, is wrong or problematic. Maybe it is, but that it is not the question I’m raising. Instead, I wonder whether we ought to be pleased that this report was publicized and made the basis of both an administrative reorganization of the department and an occasion for public ridicule.
It’s not clear to me that the report was composed by the committee with an understanding that it would (or even might) be made public. At any rate, I think Showalter raises the sort of methodological questions we ought to take seriously before we go on supposing that this is how these things ought to be run. Perhaps the three feminists that came in were steeped in best research methods, are totally unbiased and fair in their reporting of ‘pseudo-philosophical’ faculty discussions, etc. I really don’t know. But nobody seems to be talking about that. And given the various addendums and clarifications that have been made, I don’t get the sense that this project unfolded as the people running it imagined it would. That alone is reason enough to give us collective pause here before we begin to praise this as a wonderful advance for women in philosophy. We can, I hope, take for granted that this will lead to an improvement in the situation for women at Colorado. But that’s consistent with wondering whether the event is in all its particulars a good thing to have happened in the way that it did.
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Also, and to the forum more generally, ought we be pleased with the thought that an APA-sanctioned committee should have this much power over departments?
Begged question number 1: who says the committee has any “power” over departments? My position is that the admin had made up their mind and is using the report as PR cover. That is consistent with what I take to be what experienced university folk assume about administrations.
Instead, I wonder whether we ought to be pleased that this report was publicized and made the basis of both an administrative reorganization of the department and an occasion for public ridicule.
Begged question number 2: who says the report is the “basis” of the admin action in replacing the chair?
Begged questions number 3 and 4: who says anyone is “pleased” that the CU situation is an occasion for public ridicule? And who, other than Slate, Gawker, and other commercial operations, has used it for “ridicule”? No professional philosophers that I have read have used ridicule about the situation, nor have they been pleased by the Slate and Gawker pieces. If you have a link to one, please provide it. It damn straight hasn’t happened here at New APPS, or at Feminist Philosophers, or at Leiter Reports.
What you seem to be ignoring here is the statement from the CU Boulder Climate Committee, which has 1) much better standing than you have to consider the procedures and effects of the report, and 2) are pleased with the report’s culture recommendations:
Perhaps you should be contacting them with your worries; they might appreciate your perspective.
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John, before you delete this final comment, you might want to read the third paragraph.
Doesn’t it seem to you that the passage you just quoted was made under duress, and comes as a conciliating qualifier at the end of a worried attempt to straighten things out in the wake of a highly distorted public portrayal?
Oh, and I recognize that this is the last comment I will be permitted to make anywhere on this blog, since Mohan is very unhappy with some comments of mine he admits to not having read. So let me take the opportunity to invite those interested in discussing this matter critically — without eye-rollings, threats, derailings and censorship — to join me at http://laughingphilosopherblog.wordpress.com . NewAPPS moderators, I trust your level of personal integrity is sufficient that you will not censor this final comment of mine. Thank you.
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The fact that Showalter and Stovall can’t help needlessly multiplying uses of the descriptor ‘feminist’ as if is inherently disqualifying with respect to the epistemic standing of anyone to whom it applies is wearing profoundly thin.
I can’t hear their comments in anything other than Rush Limbaugh’s voice at this point.
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Absolutely, it is a measure of our integrity that we let you post personal abuse that has nothing to do with the thread. Well, just to show how vicious I am, I vote for leaving this up, not because I care a whit about free discourse, but because doing so shows just how serious you are, and I think that is a good thing to display.
Preston and others: I want to emphasize one point John makes: On all the philosophy related blogs that I look at, there has been an enormous amount of time spent on how bad it is to indiscriminately blame all members of the department, or to ridicule the department as a whole. Indeed, there has been vastly more discussion of this than of the object level issue. But I have seen no one, not one single person, ridicule the department as a whole or indiscriminately blame all the members of the department. (By contrast, everyone agrees that there have been at least some examples of very serious sexual harassment.) So please explain to me the justification for continued focus on this issue.
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Hi Protevi.
Regarding question 1: I take it that the power is de facto, and precisely because the report has been appropriated by the administration for its own ends (as you seem to agree by placing the blame on the administrators), it seems to me we ought, as a community, be careful about encouraging opportunities where this sort of power will be exercised. Again, this is all consistent with supposing that the report was made in good faith, that its recommendations are cogent, that it will lead to a better intellectual and social atmosphere at Colorado, etc.
Regarding question 2: I take it as obvious, and you concede, that the administration used this report as “cover” for their actions, as you put it. That’s all I meant by ‘basis’ on that front.
As to questions 3 and 4: yes, I meant the public ridicule that we’re seeing in news outlets covering this story and disseminating it to a wider audience. There’s a deeper problem here about the caliber of public discourse today, and though philosophers are by no means immune from the poison that’s spread in these fora, it is true that conversations at NewAPPS tend to be better than most.
And I didn’t mean to be ignoring the fact that Boulder’s climate committee spoke out in support of the report. But is that support supposed to show that there’s no conversation to be had about the methodology that was used in the composition of the report, its role in the administrative reorganization of the department, or the way it has been used to pillory the ‘pseudo-philosophical’ games of philosophers? Is it just supposed to be obvious that all of this is a good thing, or that there’s no room for critically appraising the role that the APA and its committee has had in this? I’m sorry if I’m coming off as dense, but that just isn’t obvious to me. And I’ve only paid APA dues for the first time this year, so I certainly grant I’ve got a lot to learn about what all goes on here.
Also, would you mind addressing the question I raised specifically to you? I’m curious to know what your view is here.
Thanks!
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Oh, this is rich. I think if there’s one thing this thread shows, it’s how Showalter has been “censored” here. Why, he hasn’t had the chance to write 82 comments instead of just 81! Outrageous.
Actually, we’re not going to ban you. I’ve talked with Mohan, and we’ll let you go.
As for your worries about the Climate Committee being under “duress,” I really do hope you write to them with your concerns, and that you publish any replies from them at your place.
But while we’re on the subject of the Climate Committee statement, it must be this terrible “duress” that you are not at all conjuring out of thin air to avoid being a laughingstock that causes the discrepancy between their statement and the following interpretations you give here:
1) There is no mention by the Climate Committee that the site visit committee “indubitably did their research in a somewhat biased way,” nor that the report “made rather extreme recommendations, many of which seem at best tangentially related to the prevention of improperly sexualized behavior.”
2) Nor is there any hint of speculation about the motives of the site visit team; nothing along these lines that the visit “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.”
3) Curiously, the dept committee statement about the constructive advice of the report also doesn’t say anything along these lines: “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.”
4) In another odd turn of events, the dept climate committee omits any feeling that they have “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).”
5) Finally, the dept climate committee statement does something you do barely at all: mention the victims of harassment, bullying, and other unacceptable behaviors: “We very much hope that the reputations of innocent people—especially faculty and graduate students in our department—will not be unfairly tarnished by the public release of the report. At the same time, we want to emphasize that the primary victims here are the people who have found themselves on the receiving end of unacceptable behavior and that our primary focus will remain—as it has been for the last several years—to do our best to improve the situation in our Department for them and for all of us. While we firmly believe that it is a relatively small number of individuals who have generated the problem, we are adamant in our belief that any number greater than zero is too many.”
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Stovall, my position is clearly stated in comments 65, 68-69, and 71.
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Thank you, John (and Mohan).
John, I’m not sure whether I’ve made clear what I think the UC climate committee’s response is.
I think it’s a very understandable move by the department to protest that it’s nowhere near as bad as the report says it is, while not drawing ire by those who would call — and are already calling — any attempt by the accused to plead innocent as ‘circling the wagons’.
In such a press release, it’s very standard procedure — for very understandable reasons — to express gratitude to the accusers for bringing any faults to one’s attention, and to admit any accusations that are correct, and to employ a very muted and abashed tone throughout, while somehow getting across that the accusers have gone way overboard.
I’m not sure what you find implausible about that in general, or why you don’t see it clearly in the CU climate committee’s press release.
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No, I’m serious. I really want you to write to these folks
Mitzi Lee, Associate Professor
Bob Pasnau, Professor
Co-Chairs, Climate Committee
Department of Philosophy
University of Colorado at Boulder
and explain their situation to them and show how their statement should be interpreted. And I want you to publish their reply.
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Hi Ed Kazarian. As far as I can tell, I’ve used the term ‘feminist’ (and any of its cognates) only once here. But I don’t know what to do about the voice in your head. Maybe you should listen to less Rush Limbaugh?
And Mark–where has there been personal abuse posted here? And who was being abusive to whom? Looking over the discussion, the character attack seems to come from one or two people, and they’re not Showalter or myself.
As for why it’s important to talk about this: I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I’m leery of supporting an organization that has the capacity to, indirectly or directly, be a principle cause for the administrative reorganization of a philosophy department. I don’t know that I’ll have a career in this profession, and I don’t know that I think the APA is worth supporting anyway. But if I will and it is, I don’t want to be a passive recipient of institutional forces that have been insufficiently criticized. That counts for my dispositions to others in conversation, my habits toward women and minorities, the things I do to affect the habits of those around me, and the social conventions and institutions I (wittingly or unwittingly) support and undermine. Maybe what has happened is in every regard good. But that’s just not clear to me. As Charles R says above, by way of amplifying a point Showalter made, this seems to be the right time for raising questions about what we ought to do or think going forward.
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And you should also tell them that you know they would say all the things that you have said about the committee (summarized by me in 78) if only they weren’t under this terrible “duress” that you are kind enough to diagnose for them.
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To be clear, I have no desire to censor anybody. But I also think that there is decreasing utility in person-to-person point-by-point refutation. Showalter’s position was somewhat in the same ballpark as mine—though my position was more procedural with regard to the manner and motivation behind the University commissioning and responding to this committee’s report. It was not meant to be substantive with regard to what may or may not be happening in Colorado. I have to say I became less and less interested in following the blow-by-blow details of arguments between one person and another. I see exchanges of increasing length and I think “Why on Earth do I have to read this?” It’s more than a little bit of a threadjack when posters go off down their personal rabbit holes.
Speaking for myself, I thought I had been reasonably clear in my original post and didn’t feel like responding to comments that either state a view that is different from mine, or that are mildly abusive in their manner of doing so. My point of view is clear and in the open, and others are free to take whatever position they desire.
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Right, John. How crazy that I would think a department that has been trashed in the media worldwide for having an alleged culture of tolerance for sexism and harassment, and that has been put under ‘a kind of receivership’ as Leiter puts it, would feel any duress whatsoever.
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Stovall at 82: I explicitly deny that I have ever attacked Showalter’s character. Please retract this false accusation as it concerns me.
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Showalter at 85: are you going to write to Lee and Pasnau or not?
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Yup.
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Incidentally, here’s one more piece of information:
http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25063401/ex-chair-feared-cu-boulder-would-dissolve-philosophy#
Aside from the apparent threat of dissolving the department, there’s also the interesting bit where it claims that the department itself voted in to bring an external chair. So much for the “puppet dictator” thing.
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Just in case my previous comment appears one-sided, it seems clear that the administration is to blame for a lot of the problems that had and have been going on with CU. I think it would perhaps be more productive to focus on this particular problem than with alleged bias in the committee.
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Well, I don’t want to split hairs here, and I hate to turn this into a conversation about ‘tone’ again, but whatever you count this as:
“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.”
that’s the sort of thing I have in mind. You might want to reread Concern Orc’s response:
“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.”
You go on to ‘deny’ that you’ve made any claim about Showalter’s character, but that’s not sufficient given what you’ve said. Instead, the onus is on you to change your behavior toward the people you’re talking to. It is indicative, for instance, that in post 21 you explicitly defend the use of character-criticism as a mode of rational discourse. Really man, this is all pretty plain.
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I apologize for that last sentence Protevi. It was needlessly condescending (though I do think an impartial look over what you’ve written would support the contention raised above).
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Daniel Nagase’s point at 90 seems right to me, and consonant with the OP (as I understand it). But what measures are there for faculty to raise this sort of administrative criticism? Is this something the APA could (or should) be involved in? One problem of pursuing this sort of approach is that it can appear to be blame-shifting, or to give the impression that the department (or the profession) doesn’t take the problem seriously enough at the level of the department and its culture.
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Thanks for the useful link, Daniel. Here’s a quote from Zimmerman (a department member) in that article:
“After the administrators left, we talked among each other and said, ‘My gosh, we have to toe the line,’ because it looked like any transgression was going to invite them to follow through on that threat to dissolve the department.”
Does that really leave you with the sense that the department was not operating under any duress, and was acting totally freely, in agreeing to bring in an external chair to save their department from being dissolved by a stroke of the administration’s pen?
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As far as much of the above discussion is concerned, it’s also relevant that the administrative threat to dissolve the department preceded the invitation of Committee’s on the Status of Women.
More generally, I find most of the internet discussion about this depressing. If the people at Colorado fighting to improve the climate don’t get any credit, and if their successes (and I think there’s every reason to think they will be successful) aren’t recognized, then we will collectively set a horrible precedent for our field.
In broad outlines, it should be clear that there was a toxic environment that is being cleaned up by the majority of actors at Colorado (with the help of the CSW) who are of good will.
The idiots at slate and gawker can say what they want, but if we philosophers don’t get over our hypercritical selves and actually recognize the good that is happening here, then we are going to be much less likely to repeat it. By nitpicking in all these weird ways, we’re really in danger of contributing to a climate where it seems like the reasonable thing to do is to brush abuse under the rug.
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“And Mark–where has there been personal abuse posted here? ” – as is completely obvious from context I am referring to “Oh, and I recognize that this is the last comment I will be permitted to make anywhere on this blog, since Mohan is very unhappy with some comments of mine he admits to not having read. So let me take the opportunity to invite those interested in discussing this matter critically — without eye-rollings, threats, derailings and censorship — to join me at http://laughingphilosopherblog.wordpress.com . NewAPPS moderators, I trust your level of personal integrity is sufficient that you will not censor this final comment of mine. Thank you.”
It is just amazing to me how someone who has completely dominated – and derailed – this conversation can continue to whine that he is not going to be allowed to speak, and yet continues to speak, and not acknowledge the falsity of his claim. Similarly, Preston, you have now twice claimed that there was no discussion of possible bias or methodological problems in the midst of a discussion in which 75% of the comments have been on that, not to mention the OP.
Yes, this sort of stuff is a bit infuriating.
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Stovall at 91: Read my 21 again. If you get a referee’s report from a journal that says one of your submissions shows “poor judgment and melodrama” do you take that as “character-critisism” rather than a judgment of the quality of the submission?
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“[T]]here has been an enormous amount of time spent on how bad it is to indiscriminately blame all members of the department, or to ridicule the department as a whole. Indeed, there has been vastly more discussion of this than of the object level issue.”
After the second or third go around about procedure, public shaming, administrative agendas, and other tangential issues, it can be hard not to suspect that the diversion of time, energy, and purpose by the instigators is a foreseeable and preferred, if not intended, effect. How these instigators have warranted prolonged, conscientious, and mostly respectful engagement, on their terms, is beyond me.
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Stovall at 82: “Looking over the discussion, the character attack seems to come from one or two people, and they’re not Showalter or myself.”
Showalter at 40: “As for the moralizers, they will (as always) see the victory exactly where their bigotry tells them it is regardless of what is said.”
So if I say that your comment at 82 shows a poor reading of the thread by missing comment 40, is that a “character attack” too?
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I’m sorry Mark, I’m just not seeing your view here. I don’t see any personal abuse in that remark. Showalter was, as a matter of fact, treated with dismissiveness and condescension, despite trying to converse in good faith, and he was ultimately threatened with banishment from the blog by someone who confessed not to be reading him. And I don’t think I said there was no discussion–I said there should be discussion. And I was doing so by way of responding to these calls for censorship. Now that censorship is off the table, I hope the discussion can continue.
Hi Protevi–I take it you wanted me to reread 15, not 21. 15 is where you attribute poor and unbalanced judgment to Showalter; 21 is where you defend character-attack as a mode of rational discourse.
Either way, my answer to your question is ‘yes’. If someone says to me that something I’ve said or written is evidence of “poor” and “unbalanced” judgment, I take that to be personal abuse (the term that Mark originally used, and which, I contend, does not characterize anything I or Showalter has said). More importantly, though you can take this for whatever it’s worth, this isn’t the first time you’ve been met with remarks as to your proclivity for dismissiveness and personal derision. I know you think that kind of behavior is justified, but it comes off as personal abuse. The fact that you’re willing to defend character-attack as a move in rational discourse, as you do explicitly in post 21, suggests that this is just how you see the world. I’m encouraging you to look at things through another lens. (And please don’t accuse me of tone-policing. The only reason we’re talking about this is because Mark Lance accused Showalter of being personally abusive.)
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