[Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian]
We trust it won’t come as a surprise to NewAPPS readers that the reputation of professional Philosophy has been taking a well-deserved beating in the public sphere. The really bad press started two years ago with the Vincent Hendricks scandal, gained momentum a year later with the Colin McGinn scandal, and has unleashed its full fury this year with the triplet of scandals at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Northwestern University and Oxford University. Given the severity—and, in some cases, alleged criminality—of the behaviors reported in these scandals, what IS surprising to us is the turn that recent intra-disciplinary conversations about them has taken. As two non-tenured professional philosophers, we’re particularly concerned with the new enthusiasm for policing “collegiality” that seems to be emerging in and from these conversations, which in almost every case promotes a norm that we fear only serves to make the vulnerable among us even more vulnerable.
An exemplary instance of how “collegiality” standards can backfire is found in Brian Leiter’s quasi-authoritative “please revise your tone” comment (and more general attitudinal disposition) in this discussion on the Feminist Philosophers blog, followed by his longer a fortiori post (which he removed from his blog within hours, but which has been preserved here) on the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics” of conversations about sexual harassment in the profession. (For the record, we want to note that the sexual harassment problems in our profession are far uglier than the conversational cyber-dynamics in our profession, though it’s really a lose-lose in that determination.) It is important to take note of the dynamics on display in these threads, which demonstrate more than a little bit of our "climate" problem. Leiter invoked “tone” in reprimanding critics of his position on the issues under discussion and he directed his opprobrium at, among others, a graduate student speaking to the vulnerability she and many of her colleagues feel in a profession with an increasingly well-documented hostile climate for women. Many of the other commenters in the thread, including the post’s author, argued explicitly against attempts to police matters of tone (see comments 10 and 16).
To be precise, we're troubled that insistences on a certain set of normative standards for “collegiality” are regularly being forwarded on behalf of people like us—i.e., colleagues from underrepresented groups in the profession, those with provisional employment, and/or those whose status as stakeholders in the profession is undervalued—presumably in the interest of making the space of professional (philosophical) disagreement friendlier and “safer” for us. What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real consequences. And so, to those attempting to police these standards of collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.
We understand that our objections herein may seem counter-intuitive to many of our colleagues. Collegiality is, after all, widely perceived to be one of the core academic virtues, something to be valued and cultivated as a basic structuring element in our community, perhaps even one of the necessary conditions for the possibility of an academic community. In order to make room for the intellectual space required for ‘dissent,’ the traditional understanding of collegiality goes, we’re obliged to be (or at the very least, behave like) ‘friends.’
Our contention, however, is that this requirement is excessively regulative in a way that almost inevitably leads to exclusionary results. The rule of ‘collegiality" qua smooth conforming social behavior, "fitting in" in a way that doesn't ruffle feathers, is the sort of requirement that only works, practically speaking, in very homogenous communities. If we may be permitted an analogy, collegiality is like ‘togetherness’ as analyzed by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities. There, Jacobs is concerned with how cities can work as communities of “strangers” (she emphasizes that frequently encountering strangers is an inevitable fact of city life, just as it is in our profession), and with how the largely anonymous interactions of sidewalk life might potentially perform a number of positive essential functions, e.g., providing for general safety and contact between people in a neighborhood. Her discussion of togetherness arises with regard to how otherwise-rare ‘contact’ is handled in the absence of a constant circulation of people on the street, emphasizing that lack of contact is the most frequent outcome in cities. (To wit, Jacobs’ concerns about the lack of “contact” in city-life reflect the very same concerns that plague professional Philosophy now, namely, that we “philosophers” are joined together in a community only by virtue of a minimal, almost-entirely “professional,” and increasingly exclusively digital, that is to say, tangential and, at best, entirely impersonal connection.) But it is Jacobs’ description of the consequences of opting for “togetherness,” in the absence of something that might genuinely constitute togetherness, that are of interest to us here.
Specifically, we’re concerned that Jacobs' claim that “where people do share much, they become exceedingly choosy as to who their neighbors are, or with whom they associate at all,” has come to unfortunately dominate the determination of collegiality within and among professional philosophers. Jacobs’ analysis elucidates, saliently in our view, that this implicit and unavoidable “choosiness” among and between self-appointed protectors of a community’s “togetherness” makes real diversity not only unwelcome, but nearly impossible to support. In a passage that is highly resonant with much of the agonizing about ‘fit’ that goes into hiring decisions, as well as the difficulty that many departments—not to mention our discipline as a whole—have with retaining a broadly diverse group of students and faculty, she writes:
People who do not fit happily into such colonies eventually get out, and in time managements become sophisticated in knowing who among applicants will fit in. Along with basic similarities of standards, values and backgrounds, the arrangement seems to demand a formidable amount of forbearance and tact…
City residential planning that depends, for contact among neighbors, on personal sharing of this sort, and that cultivates it, often does work well socially, if rather narrowly, for self-selected upper-middle-class people. It solves easy problems for an easy kind of population. So far as I have been able to discover, it fails to work, however, even on its own terms, with any other kind of population (65).
As an ideal, what a certain formulation of “collegiality”—dominant in recent discussions and exemplified by Brian Leiter’s “please revise your tone” comment at FP—relies upon is an abstract notion of ‘collegiality" that, when implemented among real professional philosophers, requires a common manner, disposition or set of behaviors, even across many important social differences. As a regulative ideal, we do not object to that notion of collegiality. What we do object to is the mandating of it—because we recognize that, in practice, what is being mandated can only be behaviors that mimic “togetherness” where such togetherness is manifestly not the case. Members of traditionally privileged groups in academia (tenured, white, straight, cis men chief among them) might experience collegiality as the glue that allows them to “get into it” with one another at a paper presentation, in a department meeting, in print or in the various digital versions of print, and then subsequently wash away any potentially lingering disagreement over a few beers. But members of out-groups do not share in the easy sociality of ‘the guys,’ nor do they share in the personal or professional safety that makes that easy sociality possible.
What is or is not permitted as acceptable speech or behavior, what is or is not viewed as “anti-social,” “un-professional” or “un-collegial”—that is to say, what strikes the ears of community members as resonating with an inappropriate “tone”—will always be defined and policed according to the norms of that group’s social interchange, norms that are determined by those to whom such norms are the most advantageous. Those for whom such norms of collegiality do not render benefits will find, as a matter of course, the professional insistence on “collegiality” exponentially more demanding. Indeed, as long as this particular formulation of collegiality remains a professional standard, underrepresented groups will find themselves locked into the false choice between ineffectively participating in hostile spaces (and being called out for their non-allegiance to the rules of collegiality) or, what is often worse, not participating (and consequently being seen as ‘aloof,’ ‘disengaged,’ ‘unprofessional’ or whatever other code for “antisocial” one wishes to cite). The predictable result of this dynamic is just what the comparison with Jacobs’ ‘togetherness’ would lead us to expect, namely, professional Philosophy will continue, as it has for millennia under the guise of good-faith efforts to prevent the same, to drive-out or force-out marginalized and underrepresented groups from the community/conversation in disproportionate numbers.
Some might object that collegiality, these days, is a far less robust standard than we are claiming, that it is really no more than an insistence on some variation of “civility,” a virtue with which it is grouped in the APA Committee for the Status of Women’s Report on the situation at UC-Boulder, for example. That Site Visit Committee, regrettably charged with offering up an analysis of and practical fixes for what was an all-too-common and fundamentally structural problem, also opted to reinforce (in our view, unfortunately) the “collegiality” norms with which we want to take issue here. Insisting on “family-friendly” conditions for the possibility of professional interaction, as the UC-Boulder Site Committee’s Report does, may be (at least in UC-Boulder’s case) a marginal improvement on the current conditions the Site Visit Committee was charged with diagnosing, but their diagnosis was not leveled without its own costs, not the least of which is that “family-friendly” is not the measure by which every professional philosopher does (or ought to) judge standards of collegiality.
What is more, even if “collegiality” is interpreted more narrowly and held to bear simply on norms of professional (real, print or digital) conversation, our professional norms of collegiality still tend to stack the deck against anyone expressing a dissenting view. And, let’s all be honest, what professional Philosophy needs most now, ante omnia, is a norm that welcomes without prejudice the stranger. Our professional norms for collegiality are typically much harder to satisfy in terms that everyone (especially the target of the “un-collegial” criticism) will agree are collegial. This is especially true, as evidenced in recent conversations by Leiter et al, given how likely it is that our colleagues will take claims that they are being insufficiently sensitive to diversity issues as personal attacks or claim that their critics aren’t being ‘collegial’ (or, as long as collegiality is around as a professional standard, ‘unprofessional’), thus neatly diverting responsibility away from themselves and back onto the person who objected in the first place.
Leiter threw his institutional weight and influence around to attack junior colleagues ("Current Student" and Rachel McKinnon, particularly) by suggesting that they were professionally unsuitable to engage in conversation; he employed the age-old rhetorical strategy of discounting women’s voices by appealing to female hysteria; he insisted that his critics “please revise [their] tone” when he was being called to account for his mendacity; he offered up a left-handed “apology” for his misbehavior by endorsing a bona fide race-baiting analogy to “lynch mobs,” and he did all of this under the guise of calling for justice, fairness and collegiality. Taken together, this strikes us as a remarkable example of how the “problems” with collegiality, as it is currntly understood and enforcedd by the dominant colleagues in our field, are all too frequently manufactured by them.
To wit, we argue that the structural problems with collegiality standards (and other similar standards, like civility, friendliness, appropriateness, etc.) may be reason enough not to support the unreflective policing of such regulative criteria as those suggested in the Petition to the APA for a “Professional Code of Conduct for Philosophers.”
To summarize our objections, we worry that these standards will: 1) impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to "fit in" on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority) groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession.
No one wants to work in a climate of hostility or incivility, of course, least of all those of us for whom such a climate is the most disadvantageous. We acknowledge that some behaviors can be, ought to be, and in fact are already legislated by extant (college, university and federal) codes of conduct. Hearts and minds, on the other hand, ought not and cannot be legislated. It is at the level of hearts and minds that our (professional philosophers’) real problem lies. Before we sign on to any program that mandates certain attitudinal dispositions, we ought to think seriously about the extent to which those initiatives in fact work to further discredit and marginalize the very voices they are intended to protect.
Professional philosophy has now found itself, and is being forced to reflect on itself, in the midst of crisis. Let’s not opt for handing our problems over to (what Kimberle Crenshaw aptly called) the crisis-oriented, neoliberal mode of thinking. Our objections are not about “personal responsibility”; we’re concerned, primarily, with leveling the playing field and what we hope has become apparent in the above is that the “collegiality” playing-field is not, and has never been, level.
New APPS 
129 responses to “Please do NOT revise your tone”
I’m late to the party, and want to say thanks for the post–this is really interesting, and I don’t think about the exclusionary power of norms as much as I should.
But isn’t this all just a call for better norms of civility? It’s a genuine and serious problem when norms of civility require the idioms and mannerisms of those at the top. It’s a genuine and serious problem when norms of civility are invoked for the sake of ignoring the substance of a comment or criticism. It’s a genuine and serious problem, in general, when norms of civility are used to silence people who “don’t belong”.
There is, however, no reason why norms of civility have to serve an exclusionary function, right?. They can have several important benefits:
-Some have already pointed out that such norms can limit “punching down”, which protects people at the bottom from being silenced.
-A norm of not punching up seems like a good default too: regardless of one’s position, it is hard to have productive exchanges with people who are punching you. A norm of not punching at all (up or down) can therefore lead to more productive exchanges.
-It doesn’t seem crazy to think that punching up down or any direction is at least prima facie incompatible with the respect that we ought to be showing each other.
Obviously, it will be tricky to spell out the content of better norms. But here’s a norm of civility that I, anyway, have trouble seeing a downside to: “Assume that your interlocutor has a point, and try to get to the bottom of it before dismissing the criticism.” And I think could come up with several more… (Of course, if other posters show that this norm is exclusionary in ways I haven’t anticipated, I retract the claim.) Note: I also think that such norms are defeasible; the question of how to respond to someone whose thrown civility out the window is an altogether different than the question of whether we ought to have civility norms in the first place.
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Thank you for an amazing post. Very thought provoking and cathartic.
One point perhaps worth mentioning. If one person is telling a second person to manage his/her tone (in the way discussed in the OP), this requires that there is a manifest power imbalance between the two people (the first person takes for granted something the second person lacks). But this is compatible with the first person not only trying to be an “ally” of an underrepresented group, but with the first person themselves belonging to an underrepresented group. Given the opening of academia to the middle class and other cultural changes in the last fifty years, many people, including many white males, who are now tenured could not have been so fifty years ago (or could not have been tenured at the places they now are). It is thus possible that the majority of academic philosophers identify in some sense as belonging to an underrepresented group. If this is correct, tone policing as it is now might be best seen not as between exemplars of the well-represented and the under-represented, but among people who identify in myriad ways as under-represented. To put it simply, if everyone identifies as part of a revolution rather than as the status quo, then tone policing is an issue internal to the myriad revolutions.
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I think that debating the virtues of “punching” in one direction (up) vs. another (down) misses a larger point, as does general talk of power. I would say the problem is not power per se but violence, the use of force that makes another into an object. One can have power in a conversation in many ways that are themselves morally neutral (e.g., intellectual mastery, rhetorical flourish, devastating good looks), but using that power against the interlocutor with the intent of diminishing their agency, turning them into a thing, is a problem.
Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” comes to mind here. Weil argues that force harms not only the victim, but also whoever wields it, because it is intoxicating, numbing the senses of reason and pity. Force can turn its possessor or victim into an unthinking automaton driven by rage or, in its modern, blogophied form, snark. She writes movingly of both the need for and the rarity of restraint.
In more practical terms, I think of work in the field of non-violent communication (NVC). If Brian Leiter had not issued a command (“Change your tone”) but instead used a formulation beloved of couples therapists (when you X I feel Y), the thread would likely have not gotten out of hand. Brian could have written: “Matt, when you use sarcasm I feel my blood pressure go up. I really want to be civil here, so I’d appreciate it if you can help me out.” For that matter, others on the FP thread could also have expressed their feelings and needs without volleying Brian’s forcefulness right back at him. The fact that things quickly heated up, with labels and commands flying right and left, seems to me to be clear evidence that emotions are highly contagious, whatever our status within a social system: belligerence, contempt, dismissiveness, judgmentalism, etc., whether in graduate students or tenured faculty, has a way of raising hackles unproductively. On the other hand, scholars in the field of NVC have amassed a good deal of evidence that a more direct and honest expression of feeling tends to establish connection and empathy, freeing the participants to understand one another.
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I received a similar, veiled threat email from Brian within 3 minutes of my calling him out on the FP thread:
“I’m curious, are you the Rachel on the FP blog? I assume you are, unless you tell me otherwise. I also caught some of yoru [sic] FB posts (‘asshat’).”
No salutation, nothing. I take the “I assume you are, unless you tell me otherwise.” as a thinly veiled threat.
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Ammon Allred @ 46: I don’t think we are disagreeing about very much. I entirely understand if a grad student or post-doc wants to stay anonymous, for just the reasons you give: philosophy is a precarious way of making a living for junior scholars. (And by the way, I got my first tenure track job eight years after my PhD, so my experience of this is personal.)
Where I disagree with you (if I do) is when you ask what a senior member of the profession stands to lose when they are “punched” on the Internet. I assume that you think that the power difference should keep the senior person from responding in kind, or escalating the conflict. Here, I am sceptical. First of all, as I pointed out, one tends to get irritated. To give you an example, I sometimes post a purely philosophical piece on matters on which I am expert, and get an abusive response from somebody who doesn’t seem to know much about the topic. (You know, the kind of response that Jon Cogburn illustrated @21, except from somebody “punching up.”) It takes an effort to bite my tongue, and sometimes I don’t succeed in suppressing an acrid response.
My question is this: if somebody, whether named or not named, is disrespectful to me, why should I not respond in kind? (I am trying not to make a judgement about the case discussed in the OP, which is why I have changed the topic to me.)
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Thank you for this great article. Hugh Miller’s point is well taken. Numerous places still have collegiality as a fourth criteria–it’s a great catch-all for “we just don’t like you” and I know of several cases it was used against minorities who had spoken out about their universities. Also, the larger discussions of tone are not difficult: just think of the whole “let’s change the tone in Washington” BS, which means lets be nice moderates that don’t change anything. It silences vigorous dissent as mean–in line with what Robin James says above. FINALLY: can we stop letting us get trolled by Leiter? We can have discussions in philosophy that have nothing to do with him, no matter where this conversation may have started above.
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In the OP, the authors argue (convincingly) that the appeal to collegiality can and is often used as a silencing tactic. They then proceed to argue that we should resist the effort to adopt a professional code of conduct, for similar reasons.*
For the moment, I am not persuaded that there is any connection between these two proposals. One cannot scuttle the whole project of setting up professional standards just because it is possible to do it badly.
Moreover, I do not see any reason to believe that the linked petition is making anything like a tone argument. The closest that the petition comes is to mention “safe spaces”. And it is true, as Robin (25) points out, that the term “safe space” is not unproblematic. But on first glance, I would like to think that interventions based on some operationalized notion of ‘safety’ is potentially less likely to invite capricious application than applications of some notion of ‘tone’, ‘collegiality’, and so on. At any rate, it will depend on the details.
* That said, collegiality is indeed an aspirational ideal, and must be treated as such. At the moment, I am only inclined to think that many troubles arise when people think collegiality is something other than an ideal.
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I received a similar contact from Brian Leiter, just as Stacey and Rachel did. And I’ve heard from other people who did, too (that is, in addition to myself, Stacey, and Rachel).
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what is the “threat” being “thinly veiled”?
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Senior people will rarely admit to reading the philosophy blogs, but readership numbers and an occasional email suggest otherwise. (I get a steady stream of unsolliited commentary from the peanut gallery.)
It’s true that few senior folk write blogs, but among the active bloggers there are quite a few senior types.
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If Leiter saw you call him an “asshat” on Facebook, what kind of salutation were you hoping for?
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I found this a very good post and I agree with a lot of the claims made. I was, however, a bit confused about some of the contentions in the third-to-last paragraph. I think the solution to the problems of mandated collegiality/civility in 1) and 2) might be both, “better” norms of civility, like Luke Maring suggests, and ways in which those at the bottom can protect themselves from the punching down without having to punch up.
I think I understand all the ways in which mandated-collegiality is a tool (whether intentional or not) for suppression and oppression of those at the bottom as detailed in the post, and put generally in this part:
“What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real consequences. And so, to those attempting to police these standards of collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.”
I see this as a problem with the way the collegiality is policed (who gets the rights to police) and not necessarily with ‘policing collegiality in general’. To use two examples:
1. Comments policies in sites such as this one, FP, Daily Nous, etc: In submitting comments (and expecting them to be published) we are agreeing to the rules set out in the respective comments policy. We accept that the moderators have the power to moderate the comments in this way. In this case there isn’t so much a norm for civility as an outright declaration of what is allowed and what not. One of the grating things about BL’s actions in the FP comments thread was that he felt it was his place to do the policing in another blog with it’s own moderators.
2. Talks and seminars with a chair: One of the ways in which (in my experience) there is a leveling of the playing field, so-to-speak, is in the question-asking policies and seminar moderation of the department where I did my MA. Both graduate students and faculty attended talks given by external and internal speakers. There is no deference to seniority of the questioner or perceived ‘quality’ of the question. Everyone gets their turn, whether grad student or faculty member. As a shy, unconfident student some order and officiated norms of conduct are essential to the ability to be hear, ask a question, and make a point. This is a case where very formal codes of conduct (at least in my department) benefit those at the bottom by limiting the ability of those at the top to punch down (you can’t ignore my question bc I am a student, just call it stupid and refuse to respond, shout down my attempt to make a point, etc).
I point out these because maybe the codes of conduct that the APA petition is trying to establish are more like the kind in good departmental seminars and blog’s comments policies. These might not be cases of mandated civility and collegiality that the OPs had in mind so I might be missing the point. Additionally, as a white male I might be missing the negatives in the cases I deem to be positive. In both cases fellow commenters could hopefully point out my naivete.
I can also see that the blogs I mention and the department in which I was studying might be ‘best case scenarios’. It, of course, is the case that those in power as blog moderators and department chairs abuse their power and apply it discriminatorily. However, wouldn’t a profession wide code of conduct be a good way to reduce that? Or at least allow those affected by oppressive behavior in their departments to appeal to someone else?
I agree with the OP’s point that we should be critical of what is suggested for a professional code of conduct, for the reasons they gave. I was just wondering if the more easily remedied problem might be who has the rights to police. If rights were given to those at the bottom then the punching up might not be as necessary because the punching down can be dealt with.
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Just to clarify something that was posted above. Northwestern’s policies have never allowed an individual to be in a relationship with another individual with whom there is a supervisory or evaluative relationship. Northwestern’s current policy goes further and does not allow for relationships between faculty and undergraduate students full stop.
“When undergraduate students are involved, the difference in institutional power and the inherent risk of coercion are so great that no faculty member or coaching staff member shall enter into a romantic, dating, or sexual relationship with a Northwestern undergraduate student, regardless of whether there is a supervisory or evaluative relationship between them.”
http://policies.northwestern.edu/docs/Consensual_Relations_011314.pdf
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Leiter’s post prior to the “champ” comment already includes a personal attack on Drabek. Of course, this might have been in response to Drabek’s use of “little display”, which was in response to Leiter’s use of “vigilante justice” and so on….
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Mohan Matthen (55) asks, “if somebody, whether named or not named, is disrespectful to me, why should I not respond in kind?” It depends on the circumstances, but often there’s very little, if anything, to be gained. Often it escalates an already tense state of affairs. Often, it causes a counterproductive defensiveness on the part of one’s interlocutor. Granted, there are occasions when a gentle reproach, made in a collegial and generous spirit, can lead to an amelioration of the discussion. If someone calls you “buddy” or “champ”, you might first reply to the substance of their remarks, and then add, “I appreciate that blog commentary can be frustrating, especially when people don’t see eye-to-eye on difficult topics. But maybe you agree with me that it will be easier for each of us to appreciate the other’s point of view if we stick to the substance of the argument.”
What about a case when the original disrespect is expressed with racist/sexist/ableist/genderist epithets? This is a special case because it’s no longer just about you. If someone calls a woman “bitchy”, for example, it might be productive for her or for other discussants to note that this expression is sexist, and perhaps to give reasons.
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Do you deny Leiter’s assertion that you were “even implying that [he is] not acting like an adult”? If so, why is that not the focus of your complaint rather than your relative statuses in the profession? If not, why is it a “problematic thing” for him to say to you?
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Wow! Just wow! This sounds kind of like bullying to me, and worse for being in private, I guess because it seems so much more deliberate and difficult to explain away as `being in the heat of the moment’.
It’s pathetic, and I am embarrassed that he is the public face of our profession.
It is just this kind of petty righteous behavior which helps make the climate in philosophy so bad.
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How accurate is it to summarize at least one of themes of the OP and discussion as “although it is incorrect for senior people in the profession to harass their juniors, it may be okay and even desirable for juniors to harass seniors”?
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“One of the grating things about BL’s actions in the FP comments thread was that he felt it was his place to do the policing in another blog with it’s own moderators.”
Why is BL not allowed to be his own “active bystander” or “ally” (to use the terminology popular in this discourse) with respect to others’ treatment of him?
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That he knows who she is or can find out, and negatively influence her career. In the same circumstances that is how I would take it.
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I literally have no idea why you think any of this is a response to me, but I agree with everything you say here, and have been pretty consistent in trying to make these points visible for several years.
I still don’t see why anyone is saying anything that challenges the claim that there is a defeasible norm against being an asshole to anyone ever. People point out quite rightly that one should call out powerful people for bad behavior and do so forcefully. Of course. Again, I’ve been doing it here pretty consistently and made lots of enemies. (And yes, suffered in material and psychological ways. That non-tenured people have much more to lose is certainly true – that’s part of why I try to be the visible defender of unpopular views so often – but that needn’t blind us to the obvious fact that for many of us being cursed, denounced, lied about, etc. is pretty unpleasant. I’m not going to go into the list of places I will never be invited to as a result of standing up for various issues, and again, I don’t remotely equate this to the risks of non-tenured folks or other marginal members of the profession. But it is real.) The point is that a defeasible rule is one that can be defeated by good reasons. ANd there are lots of good reasons for forceful call-outs. But reasons are called for.
but that was a remark about the thread in general. Since you explicitly say that you don’t endorse punching, I repeat that I agree with everything you say.
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That last was a response to 46. I’ve been on a plane.
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Leiter was right that I implied that he was not acting like an adult. What I find problematic is his assertion/implication that I “had no business” chiming in on whether he was acting in a way befitting a mature, responsible member of our community. That phrase carries the connotation that I was uppity and out of place. That’s problematic for a professor to privately email a gradate student and imply that they have no place criticizing a more senior member of the community. Again, even if he did not explicitly mean to make it such, that’s a form of intimidation. Though he may have had a valid claim that I was not extending full charity or respect to him, I think such a claim is eclipsed by him refusing to give respect while demanding it of others with less professional power/clout than he.
Also, I’m a graduate student posting under my real name. I would appreciate if someone who would like me to explain my actions and reasoning would be willing to enter into conversation with me publicly, and not anonymously.
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I don’t know what sense of “active bystander” and “ally” you mean. One can, of course, respond to criticisms. But attempting to silence (in one way or another) those criticizing you is different. Moderators have the power to ‘silence’ by not publishing comments, removing them, warning the user, etc. There is a different between bringing up an unfair and/or aggressive comment to moderators and actively commanding them to stop.
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“By all means be careful not to piss off your graduate adviser, or the particular person in your own field who you want a reference from, or someone on the hiring committee of the particular school you’re applying to, but don’t worry about pissing off the supposed sinister figures who secretly run philosophy. At least in my experience, it doesn’t work that way.”
Given that your experience seems out of alignment with mine–and mine seems at least as relevant in this context–your advice to post-docs and grad students doesn’t seem helpful. Or, maybe I should say, your advice doesn’t seem helpful to members of professionally vulnerable groups, insofar as you might have had them in mind. There’s a reason such members often choose to go anonymous, speak softly, or simply remain silent when contentious discussion breaks out–and it’s not about their imagining “supposed sinister figures who secretly run philosophy” or other nonsense. But due to a congenital deficit of professional prudence, I sometimes choose to act as if we’re not in a climate marked by indifference, hostility, and implicit reprisal.
I can confirm that for a Black philosopher, for example, there might well be costs to making pointed criticisms of the profession’s embarrassing racialized dynamics. Sources of professional risk are not limited to graduate advisors, recommenders, and hiring committees of particular schools to which one is currently applying. The faith (to put it charitably) implied by your advice suggests that gatekeepers in philosophy are narrowly focused and bias free–such that there hardly are, and hardly would be, professionally vulnerable groups in the first place. Members of such groups are better advised to be aware of the actual reality for them, and most of them already are aware.
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Mark, I hadn’t yet seen your reply when I posted the response that I just did, but I hope that it answers your question. I was simply trying to point to one economic way in which, without knowing the backgrounds or particularities of any two interlocutors and without endorsing a simply linear view of power, there were good reasons to be MORE concerned with “punching down” then “punching up.”
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I’m an anonymous part of cyberspace posting withing the comments policy of this blog, thanks. If you feel the content or tone of my comments are out of place, you can request the moderators delete them. You initiated a comment on this blog post explaining your actions, I’m just seeking clarification of what that explanation is, feel free not to respond.
You acknowledge that he “may have had a valid claim” but you think he should not have communicated it to you. You say this is because he is a professor and you are a student, and therefore his communicating his arguably valid claim is “intimidation”?
You add because he refused to give respect, but to who? To Drabek, for adopting what he perceived as a disrespectful tone? To you, for implying that he is not acting like an adult? Your position, if I understand it, is that it is okay for you and Drabek to be disrepectful but not Leiter.
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The thing about how anonymous is right about the criticisms anonymous makes but also on the wrong side of the issue (stay with me here) is that it just goes to show you that if you are going to speak truth to power, you have to do so with the utmost moral fiber from within the power’s own values. Otherwise, all they have to do to undercut you is show you sinned according to the dominant value. This is because from the equation of “to have the truth of being is to have power over being” (something I think is consonant with what philosophyadjunct said in #45 about the cult of genius) follows an idea that someone morally wrong is therefore factually wrong. It’s a very common cognitive bias we all share to varying degrees. anonymous is able to get away with pointing at the moral faults we make in our move to act because failing-for-justice is exactly what’s being ideologically supported with the idea that it’s okay for the right side, the side of the little guy, to commit immoral acts for justice. Since the little guy, the oppressed guy, is on the right side, then the little guy can get away with doing what the big guy is admonished for (not punished for, since there is no power to punish the big guy, by definition). This is enough for someone like anonymous to come in and undercut the right side, which is why it offends the senses that the wrong side anonymous takes has some truth on its side, too.
But it’s exactly the same moral-factual reasoning that makes some people infuriated at how Leiter responded. “It just isn’t right that this guy, who thinks he’s on the right side, has the temerity to demand we conform to standards that only really make him out to be the saint in this.”
And because we’re all guilty of this at that fundamental level where we’re humans before we’re philosophers, an anonymous can easily come along and calmly, slyly, yet without much subtlety point out that, hey, we’re all sinners.
So, why not avoid this altogether, and just never sin?
Until we figure out some way to collectively disassociate ourselves from the logic that connects moral righteousness with factual verisimilitude in a very tight approximation of equality, so that sinners as much as anyone are welcome as prophets or oracles to truth (where we admit the truths from this Caesar if and only if we admit those of these crucified), then be angry, yet do not sin.
I blame the tone of this comment on reading a bit too much Kołakowski lately. Forgive me.
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‘How accurate is it to summarize at least one of themes of the OP and discussion as “although it is incorrect for senior people in the profession to harass their juniors, it may be okay and even desirable for juniors to harass seniors”?’
I would say: not very accurate. I understand the theme of `punching up’ is shorthand for speaking truth to power. There are many people in the profession who are unhappy about the how the hierarchy in philosophy is determined; that different standards are applied to senior and junior; that who is successful is determined in ways not as meritocratic as the rhetoric of the successful suggests, (i.e. who you know matters more than what you know, pedigree etc.); basically that too much of one’s career depends and security in that career depends on the subjective judgements of people higher up, and this has resulted in a distribution of institutional and disciplinary goods which is inequitable, in jobs and respect and so in protections against bad behavior. I get the sense that people feel that they cannot voice what they deem to be legitimate concerns or alternative visions of the nature of the discipline and have a reasonable expectation that they will be taken seriously, or do so without in some way damaging their careers. I wouldn’t call that harassment.
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BL attempted to get his interlocutor to change his tone, not to “silence” him, and he has no power of “commanding” anybody to do anything on that blog.
By the admission of the moderators of FP, they did not thoroughly moderate the discussion on that posting. So why should the commenters leave it to the moderators to stand up for them?
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thanks, but actually I haven’t asserted anything here about the issues, just asked for clarification of what the positions are.
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well, not before the comment before that one.
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OK. So I admit I haven’t read ALL of the numerous posts, but in regard to Drabek’s claims that Leiter harmed him is utter crap because I am the one that alerted Leiter to his libelous posts, unapolegitcally I might add, and Leiter quite graciously, did not reveal his identity in mentioning the issue on the blog. Drabek is just trying to justify completely unjustified behavior, and is making, once again, mountains out of mole hills. BUT, the McKinnon stuff was utterly unwarranted and she deserves an apology in my opinion. I plan on discussing this further with Leiter when given the opportunity.
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The following is a reconstruction of an earlier response, so my apologies if it shows up twice.
To David Wallace @47: I am not especially wedded to making a claim about the importance of any one particular philosopher, and I”m sorry if I got too side-tracked by that. But I want to emphasize that it is not unreasonable for junior scholars to worry that their entry into debates about the status of the profession carries risks that simply don’t obtain for their more senior colleagues (LK McPherson gives one set of reasons @72). Given the terribleness of the job market (and particularly given the fact that one of the primary reasons for just how bad it is is the corporatization of the university, where the precariousness of employment is used as an explicit control on the professoriat), I think that it behooves all of us who care about the profession to be mindful of the vulnerability that the most junior members face. I think that it is generally very difficult for more senior members to fully understand this. (But I do want to be clear that even though my remarks were prompted by Mohan Matthen and to a lesser extent Mark Lance’s remarks earlier on, I was not trying to accuse either of them of being blind in this respect. My observation was intended to be general.) (FTR and in the interest of full disclosure, though I don’t know that it matters, I”m a TT but untenured professor so although I’m not presently on the market, I have been recently).
(continuing response to David but also now responding to Mohan Matthen @55) Again, and although I hate to harp on one example, the exchange between Leiter and Concerned Student was particularly instructive. I can understand why Leiter could have lost his temper from previous posts on the thread (though I don’t accept that there was any warranted reason to in the case of Concerned Student’s post). But, what apart from his cool and maybe a little respect, did he really stand to lose? On the other hand, even if he has no particular power over Concerned Student in this instance, the threat of the wish that he invoked against her (and his reiteration of that wish many hours later on his own blog, presumably after he’d had plenty of time to regain his composure) is indicative of a very real vulnerability. We know that many graduate students will leave the profession, some by choice and some by economic necessity — and we know that students from marginalized groups and working on marginalized issues are particularly susceptible to being pushed out. For a professor at a R1 university to publicly and casually invoke that sort of threat ought to be regarded as entirely unacceptable.
To that extent, I do think that yes, the standards that apply to senior professors ought to be different than those that apply to junior members of the profession. Even though it is every bit as understandable why a senior philosopher might get his or her dander up, when it comes to issues that touch on this vulnerability they absolutely ought to be held to a higher standard of control.
(With regards to Mark Lance’s comments @68 — this is what I had in mind. My point was simply that without knowing all the relevant subjective factors and without endorsing a simply linear conception of hierarchy there is at least one extremely salient material difference that makes “punching down” more problematic than “punching up.”)
That said (and continuing my response to Mohan and Mark, but also responding to anon @49), I’ve tried to stay out of the question as to whether or not a better code of civility is a desideratum. I’m genuinely agnostic on this question — and although I’m sympathetic to the argument in the OP, I’m not entirely persuaded. That said, where I do agree with them completely, is that codes of civility, tone and professionalism as currently enforced paper over very real material differences without ameliorating them. This is particularly egregious, as Leigh and Ed (and I and many other commenters) make clear when the discussions in question are about our discipline’s historical problems with being closed (and sometimes outright hostile) to marginalized groups and forms of discourse. Where I think (hope?) we’re all in agreement is that any discussion of how we conduct ourselves ought to be oriented towards the goal of opening up, rather than closing down, possibilities for constructive philosophical thinking.
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David, I have to disagree with you. Grad students and non tenure track faculty, especially one’s who do not carry any institutional badge of prestige, have a lot to lose if they get in an online fight with a senior figure who wields power like Leiter. When I was doing my PhD I had a faculty member hear of an online/blog-based debate I was having with Leiter over the value of continental philosophy and tell me even though he agreed with me, I needed to lock it up so that I didn’t create a bad name for myself. People google candidates, and (somehow) Leiter has a lot of power, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone googled a candidate, see them critiquing Leiter (or Leiter critiquing them) and move on to another one of the 250 applications on their desk.
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Let me just reiterate that all of this, especially the bit about silencing, needs to be read in terms of Leiter’s propensity to mention and threaten libel both publicly and via e-mail, which I can personally attest has had a silencing effect on (at least my part of) the philosophical blogosphere.
On “silencing” here’s comment 47 by Brian Leiter at http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/on-ludlow-northwestern-and-the-ethics-of-teaching/#comments :
Someone who makes false statements of fact about professional competence should be silenced. If s/he is an American, you are right, s/he may get away with it. But s/he may not be. In any case, his/her post violates the commenting rules here and I assume will be removed.
So your comment (#75) is particularly infelicitous.
Note that this is not the first time Leiter has raised the spectre of other countries with illiberal libel laws. He did the same thing with respect to Graham Harman in Egypt. It’s frankly disgusting. What decent, well informed person would support Egyptian libel law? If you don’t support illiberal libel law, why mention it in the context where you’ve just threatened someone. Note that 47 was a defense of comment 41:
Anon: you have just defamed me, per se, by making false statements of fact. If this doesn’t disappear quickly, I will have your identity within the week and you will hear from my lawyer.
This is the threatening context in which he mentions other countries with illiberal libel laws.
I know you are going to say that he’s within his right to threaten to ruin people financially through lawsuits. But jeez, talk about uncollegiality! When someone publicly says something false about me (and this happens plenty of times given the things I blog about) I either ignore it or just try to remonstrate with them, not threaten to ruin their livelihood via lawsuit.
I don’t have anything against Brian Leiter. I just wish he’d stop invoking libel law/defamation like this. It’s really troubling.
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“BL attempted to get his interlocutor to change his tone, not to “silence” him, and he has no power of “commanding” anybody to do anything on that blog.”
Yes the “silencing” bit is more in reference to the reactions to Current Student and his overall presence on that comments thread.
He does not have the power that everyone commenting on a blog would agree the moderators have in policing the comments. He is acting as if he should, however, by issuing the command. That is what is grating. Again, there is a difference between telling someone off or criticizing what they say (or how they say it) and commanding, or threatening, or telling someone that they don’t belong in philosophy. All of these use his power as a distinguished and prominent philosopher to silence and command others. Im not saying he is wrong in addressing it, just the way in which he did.
“By the admission of the moderators of FP, they did not thoroughly moderate the discussion on that posting. So why should the commenters leave it to the moderators to stand up for them?”
Why not? They responded to the exchange and both parties backed off. Although it is debatable whether personally attacking a student and their qualifications as a philosopher constitute ‘backing off’ in tone. Again, there is a difference between calling it out, bringing it up, etc and issuing a command.
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I think it’s ironic (there’s much irony in this debacle) that Leiter claims that the anonymous commenter defamed him per se, and calling me “singularly unhinged” and “crazy” is itself defamation per se (falsely claiming that someone has a mental disease is one version of defamation per se). But hey, I’m not even a law professor.
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You say,
“[C]odes of civility, tone and professionalism as currently enforced paper over very real material differences without ameliorating them. This is particularly egregious, as Leigh and Ed (and I and many other commenters) make clear when the discussions in question are about our discipline’s historical problems with being closed (and sometimes outright hostile) to marginalized groups and forms of discourse.”
Could you clarify what you mean by “paper over” and give an example?
I guess it seems to me that there are loads of discussion about the discipline’s lack of diversity that complies with codes of civility. It seems to me, for example, that the Feminist Philosophers blog complies with those codes, and yet discusses the issues you point to in an effective way. I’ve also seen excellent conference presentations on these issues that, again, conformed to these codes. I did see one presentation once that became uncivil (the presenter pointed someone out as an example of a problematic behavior). I thought the uncivility made this presentation less effective. Research shows that accusatory or aggressive approaches are less effective in doing things like reducing bias or changing behavior. Anyway, that last bit is a bit of a digression, since I don’t take you to be advocating uncivility. But I’m just trying to understand what you don’t like about civility codes.
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Heidi Savage (#78) is indeed correct that she was the one who “outed” my post that she falsely and ridiculously claimed to be “libelous.” I’m not interested in re-litigating that here, except to say that I think her behavior is utterly shameful.
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If BL does not in fact have a power to “command”, then in what way does he represent himself as having such power? The imperative mood may express exhortations, etc.
So the blog moderators have a monopoly on “tone policing”? If so, then since the poster/moderator of the FP post in question affirms favoring some discussants over others (based on their positions in the profession, attitudinal dispositions, or whatever), then it would seem questionable whether that forum is a “safe place” for discussion.
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“On Labeling Women ‘Crazy’”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harris-oamalley/on-labeling-women-crazy_b_4259779.html
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I was endorsing what I take to be the argument of the OP here. Their discussion does a much better job then I can.
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It seems that a lot of people accept the OP’s claim that codes of civility can inhibit discussion of or paper over important issues. You say you were endorsing their argument. I see in the OP the assertion that codes of civility do the bad things you allude to, and a theoretical explanation of how they could do so. I don’t see any arguments that they actually do so, or concrete examples. (Again, except for the example of Brian Leiter’s contribution to a blog post shitstorm.) That’s why I compared this claim to Republican paranoia about voter fraud. And I also find your and the OP’s position on this less plausible as a default for the reasons I give in 84 (people can and do raise all kinds of issues while conforming to civility codes + research suggests that non-conformity to such codes is generally less effective).
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FWIW- I think Leiter’s penchant for mentioning libel laws and defamation (which he did in the thread under consideration, once again ominously invoking the illiberal libel laws of other countries*) actually is extraordinarily problematic.
This is a very important point Jon Cogburn is making, and which he reinforces again in post 81. Under U.S. libel laws, it’s absurd to threaten someone for getting in a fight on an internet comment section. And rightly so, as imposing civil penalties for public discussion would have an incredibly chilling effect on discourse. (Carried to its logical extreme, it would basically shut down the net as a public forum). But of course a lawsuit doesn’t have to make any sense to have an impact — if you’ve got deep pockets and your target doesn’t, then just suing them can put a serious strain on their finances. The tactic of threatening litigation which Leiter is fond of, and which I hear Prof. Ludlow has also been trying to use to chill internet discussion of his case, is exactly what big corporations use to shut down public discussion of their behavior by community activists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation). It’s the worst kind of bullying and is based entirely on the power differentials created by wealth and poverty.
Our society is already a responsibility-free oligarchy, which is becoming more and more entrenched by the day. One consequence of this is that the idea that power, authority, cannot be challenged is becoming increasingly common and explicit…it seems especially in professional philosophy. This is due to our worship at the Altar of the Cult of Genius, that is the wide-spread belief amongst too many philosophers that they’re just so much smarter than everyone else, that philosophy is the Queen of the Sciences (even when it is merely an under-laborer for science), that since philosophers should be kings philosophers know best….When you couple this aspect of our discipline with the growing culture of intolerance towards dissent you get a particularly bad case of concentration of power in the hands of senior philosophers married to a special obliviousness to the harms their actions can have (what nubile student wouldn’t be honored to be groped by a genius!)
Philosophyadjunct’s post 45 is worth quoting in full, but I’ll just include a bit — s/he really hits the nail on the head. Any change in tone in the online discussions of this strikes me as people who have been harmed by this attitude finally speaking up for their own experiences. And I think there is some real frustration in that things like the Northwestern and Colorado situations — which to me seem like stuff that any objective observer would say are totally unacceptable behavior and cannot be tolerated in a professional educational context — have gotten a pretty muted, kid-glove type of reaction from within the philosophy community. Contrast, as a previous thread on this blog did, the rush to judge and condemn Colin McGinn, whose behavior was not as bad as the accusations in these recent cases, but who is not well connected to the most powerful people in philosophy.
Which is, hyperbolically, to say that we have an disciplinary culture of veneration for, and consequent obedience to, what we perceive as intellectual skill and insight. This is gives those who reach the pinacle of such regard, which we tend to equate with those who hold positions at well-ranked departments, an inordinate amount of disciplinary power (they set the fashion, they determine who is in and who is out, who is ‘smart’ and ‘has potential’ and who does not, etc.), which is only increased by their actual institutional power as allocators of resources and goods (admissions, jobs, letters of recommendation, fuding etc.). But our veneration for genius also exacerbates a sense of infallibility — one is prominent and powerful because one is smart — and consequent defensiveness when challenged; such a challenge is to question their judgement, their intellect, hence their power.** When you couple this aspect of our discipline with the growing culture of intolerance towards dissent you get a particularly bad case of concentration of power in the hands of senior philosophers married to a special obliviousness to the harms their actions can have (what nubile student wouldn’t be honored to be groped by a genius! I write this as a joke, but seriously I have met philosophers who think like this.)
Philosophy has a climate issue because we do not have disciplinary norms for calling out and correcting the bad behavior of the powerful. I
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I assume you’re talking about Brian Leiter calling Rachel McKinnon and current grad student “unhinged”. If so, as bad as that was of him, both you and the OP authors are wrong to try to construe that as sexism (if not, then the rest of this post only applies to the OP). The OP authors claim he was using an old strategy of painting women as hysterical. Mere use of the word ‘unhinged’ isn’t sexist or part of the strategy in question, though. As I pointed out 48, Leiter uses the term all the time for people of both sexes and genders. I repeat: it’s shameful to make accusations of sexism so cavalierly.
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Whoops, apologies, the last two paragraphs in my post 94 were left over from a cut and paste of philosophyadjuncts post, I meant to delete them.
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In reply to anon 100: It’s not just women that get the label “crazy” in order to be discredited, but ANYbody who dares to say shit if they have a mouthful to those who are in a more powerful position than they are.
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He has no ‘sanctioned power to command’. He does have power in the ways I described, or at least represents himself as having that power by policing the comments.
I was going to say in my other comment this but it got cut out in some copying and pasting: Mine and others might be uncharitable in our interpretation in that exchange. And Matt Drabek is also at fault for the tone of that exchange. But taking into account BL reactions to others on the thread and in private communications I don’t think it is unreasonable to find his tone-policing in a context where that should already (and was) being done “grating”, especially considering the manner in which he did.
It is not just questionable whether that specific comment thread was a safe place. It was not. Specifically for the people who were both bullied/threatened AND stood to lose much more than those whose professional status is comparatively very secure.
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I think this is the calm before the storm–as the powerful one has said that he will be replying soon with a more extended message to accompany the apology he gave.
I was trying to imagine what sort of thing he’ll say and then I considered that there might be a way to roughly approximate this sort of thing. The powerful one (hereafter PO) didn’t come to total power by accident and nor did he stay in power by accident, for over a decade–as the dictator of a discipline that has (perhaps) some of the most clever academics in its ranks.
What we might expect him to do therefore might be the very kind of thing that historically powerful people have done to stay in power (and in some sense applicable to a case where one wields power has he does).
here it’s helpful to look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli writes:
“I (Machiavelli) conclude that since men love as they themselves determine but fear as their ruler determines, a wise prince must rely upon what he and not others control.”
We can probably suspect that since Leiter controls his blog, he will rely on that blog (and not other blogs, where administrators can delete his comments, and where he lacks editorial control) to make his case.
Machiavelli says further that “If he aquires a state he should absorb the surrounding and identify the enemies.” We can rest assured PO is studying carefully the New Apps blog and the Daily Nous blog, looking for their weaknesses or pressure points.
Continuing, Machiavelli claims ‘ It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.’ As PO is currently not loved and so cannot be both loved and feared just now, we might anticipate in the coming days a higher frequency of legal threats and/or outings of people by name so that we will fear him more.
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