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    Inappropriate correspondence — to say the least!

    Many readers will have seen this already, but it needs to be widely shared and viewed: David Velleman and Sally Haslanger have been collecting instances of Brian Leiter threatening people with legal action, among other kinds of intimidating tactics, in private correspondence. Here are some examples. (My understanding is that there are more such examples, which may eventually be posted as well.) These are people he disagrees with on a number of issues, but the level of aggressiveness in his responses is astonishing, shocking, and unacceptable in a professional context (or any context, for that matter).

    (This is why my comment to his recent post on having been threatened with legal action only once in his blogging career was: the question is not how many times he was threatened with legal action; the question is how many times *he* threatened others with legal action. Answer: many times, from the looks of it.)

    The emails speak for themselves; no further comment is required. At the very least, I think this calls for those involved with the PGR in various capacities (board members, evaluators) to reassess their involvement.

    UPDATE (09/24): there is now a statement in support of Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins signed by her colleagues at UBC and many colleagues elsewhere (myself included).

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    22 responses to “Inappropriate correspondence — to say the least!”

    1. r Avatar
      r

      At times like these, we may be grateful that US law is so much less friendly to this type of legal action than that of other countries, and so grateful for the fact that most of these threats are empty–indeed, the self-important bullying on display here is a reminder of why it’s so good for our courts to be generally hostile to this type of legal action.
      I continue to think the PGR is a great service to the profession. But this behavior is dismal.

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    2. anonymous prof Avatar
      anonymous prof

      “Should we proceed with the 2014 PGR?”
      Well, not if the “we” includes you. I think it is perfectly reasonable to want the PGR to continue but to also want BL to have absolutely nothing to do with it anymore. My objections, at least, are not to the rankings themselves (though I do recognize many of their problems). My objections are to the man himself.

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    3. Anon Avatar
      Anon

      Strongly agree with the above poster. (21:51)

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    4. philosophers Avatar
      philosophers

      Great idea. There’s no good reason that someone else couldn’t run PGR for a little while. If Leiter is right that his methods are sound, then they don’t depend on his being at the helm. Sounds like an interesting opportunity. Maybe APA can step up (finally)?

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    5. David Wallace Avatar
      David Wallace

      Is there a suggestion here that any threat of legal action against anyone for anything they say is per se inappropriate? If so that seems strange. US libel law is one of the most permissive frameworks in the world but there still are things that it is illegal to say: is the view that even this law is too strong and that completely free speech should be adopted? That’s defensible (if radical), but so’s the contrary, so condemning someone for enforcing their existing rights seems a little strong. (I might feel differently if BL was systematically bluffing, but I don’t get that impression.)
      I sometimes have the impression that people forget how radically different it is to say something in person and to publish it on the Internet. Internet discussion boards can seem like a cosy circle of friends chatting, but they are publicly accessible. If you grouse to your colleagues over drinks that (say) David Wallace plagiarises, that’s one thing. If you publish it in sight of the entire world, it’s a very different thing.

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    6. Eric Avatar
      Eric

      Did anyone else laugh loudly when he seemed to say to Carrie Jenkins that OTHER philosophers were sanctimonious assholes, while leaving himself above the fray? Coffee came out of my nose on that one.

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    7. David Avatar
      David

      David Wallace: But surely you don’t think Leiter’s legal threats were normatively reasonable (even if he was technically entitled to them) in this context, let alone his nasty bullying tone and personal attacks on people’s philosophical competence?

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    8. Frank Avatar
      Frank

      On the issue of inappropriateness, one should also have a look at Leiter’s Nietzsche blog where he viciously attacks a young UK philosopher (as “hack” etc. – insult was retracted after some comments, but is still up on his twitter) for a review of a collection Leiter edited. It is really spinning out of control (and, as is now apparent, has been for some time). I hope that philosophers think very carefully about the extent to which they want to collaborate with someone who is repeatedly behaving in this dismal, unprofessional manner and whether they want him to be the editor of the most important professional ranking.

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    9. M Avatar
      M

      I’d be a lot more sympathetic to all of this righteous indignation were it not so hypocritical. Brian has been talking this way to and about “fanatics, villains, and ignoramuses” — including philosophers whose religious, political, and moral views were different from his own, and from the mainstream of the profession — for many years. It is only once he started speaking this way to some of the more treasured members of the profession that there was a collective gasp of ‘oh no’ and a clutching at chests.

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    10. r Avatar
      r

      David Wallace, my impression is that Leiter is in fact systematically bluffing with those threats, insofar as they have absolutely no chance of standing up in court. At minimum, to win a such a case he would have to not only prove that what was said about him is false, but that it was said at the very least with negligence with respect to its truth–which is near impossible to prove even when true and here probably not even true.
      In other words, this line is simply false: “This is how the law works: if you say false things intended to damage someone’s reputation, you have acted illegally.” Rather, the Supreme Court has held that States cannot write laws which criminalize the combination of falsehood and damage all on its own; there needs to be some ‘guilty mind’ component as well.
      Given all this, the legal threats really are just baseless attempts to push people around. Even though they would have no chance of success qua legal actions, they might succeed at scaring people who don’t know better or who’d rather avoid the nuisance issues involved in responding. That’s really bad behavior.

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    11. Jennifer Frey Avatar
      Jennifer Frey

      I do not see the current reaction/conversation as hypocritical in the least. I think, lately, what we have witnessed is a certain consensus emerging that our professional norms need adjustment for a variety of reasons, and that Brian Leiter is one of the worst offenders when it comes to unprofessional behavior (e.g., bullying over email and in person, which is an abuse of institutional power; using his blog as a bully pulpit to disparage other professionals, rather than engage in constructive rational dialogue with them, using the PGR as a weapon to denigrate others as losers in shit departments with axes to grind and ulterior motives, etc). Brian Leiter’s unprofessional behavior is indiscriminate; he vociferously attacks all kinds. I will not attempt to diagnose his reasons, but just add that I too find it repugnant. And I really must stress: this is an opinion I am entitled to have and entitled to express without fear of receiving threatening emails from Brian Leiter. If thinking we can do better than this makes me a “sanctimonious asshole,” so be it. But for Brian Leiter to think that this entitles him to send me vitriolic emails and threats is a very dubious proposition. We should not accept it.
      My sense is that folks are, collectively and in large numbers, just embarrassed and fed up with these kinds of shenanigans. To claim that there is some organized “smear campaign” behind this is, to put it mildly, not very credible. No amount of repeating it will magically confer credibility upon this claim. There is no organized conspiracy to take down Brian Leiter. There is, however, a groundswell of support for an alternative to the PGR, or for someone else to run the PGR. And this is obviously related to the fact that there is an increasing consensus that Brian Leiter behaves in a manner that many find less than desirable and less than befitting for a professional philosopher, and that some of his behavior is most certainly “of concern.” That’s it.
      Philosophy is in a sad state if we cannot discuss professional norms calmly and professionally. It’s in a sad state when philosophers threaten and bully one another in these ways. Surely we can do better than this. Surely we can set a better example for our students and for our colleagues in academia.

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    12. Philip Kremer Avatar
      Philip Kremer

      I believe that Brian Leiter owns the PGR (in the same sense that he owns the Leiter Reports). The only way someone other than Leiter could run the PGR for a little while would be if he let them and on his sufferance.

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    13. Clement Loo Avatar
      Clement Loo

      At the risk of taking this conversation off onto a tangential direction: I noticed that a number of people objected to BL but believed that the PGR is a service to the profession and that rankings are useful.
      Might I ask: why?
      I ask the above because it strikes me that rankings do little other than stoke the egos of people in highly ranked departments. Data about attrition, placement, and the distribution of the AoS of the faculty of departments collected in one place would be a useful tool for those applying to grad school but rankings based on the reputations of faculty doesn’t seem, to me at least, nearly as useful.
      What is it that others find useful about rankings that I’m missing?

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    14. Simon Gurofsky Avatar
      Simon Gurofsky

      Hi Clement,
      Speaking only for myself: I used the PGR when I was an undergrad looking for graduate departments. I found it useful in this respect, that it reflected not too inaccurately the consensus in ‘the field’ (under a certain aspect, no doubt!) about what departments were good for what specializations. I want to be clear about what I did NOT take that to entail: a) I was fully aware the PGR did not reflect the view of the field of philosophers at SPEP-friendly departments, among others; b) I was fully aware that reputation need not track quality of work; c) I was fully aware that there might be lots of professors, or whole departments, doing excellent stuff that were not well represented in the PGR. Still, knowing what something like the majoritarian views were about various departments and faculty was useful. (Some will no doubt argue that it’s a bad state of affairs when students choose where to go on the basis of ‘reputation’, but I think that objection ignores that students were doing that before the PGR and just doing it on the basis of a much worse grip on what comparative reputations actually were.) Not only that, but I think knowing the view of whatever constituency in philosophy the PGR represents would still have counted as useful even if I had chosen entirely to disregard it. Finally, it’s worth noting that, because of the PGR, I ended up at the University of Chicago, a department that no professor at my undergraduate institution independently suggested or recommended, and that one or two were less than enthusiastic about when I brought it up; and that’s notwithstanding that many of those professors have at best mixed feelings about the PGR. Indeed, U of C ended up being my top choice, even though it is somewhere in the 20s on the PGR (depending on whether we judge only by other US departments or worldwide), well below other departments to which I also applied.
      To be clear, I did not go for Chicago solely because of what the PGR told me. Once directed to it, I learned more about it from various other sources and was convinced it was the place I wanted to be. But I’m sure the PGR played a major part in my discovering it, and I cannot say with any assurance that I would have discovered it anyway, independently.
      So that’s basically anecdotal, hence not decisive, but it gives a sense of how the PGR was useful for me without totally dominating my decision-making process in some nefarious way.

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    15. Clement Loo Avatar
      Clement Loo

      Simon,
      To clarify did you choose U of C because it was decently ranked on the PGR or because seeing U of C on a list made you consider it as a possibility when no one else had mentioned it to you?
      From your hedging regarding your views of the limits of the PGR, one could interpret you as just saying that having a list of schools that highlight specialties where they are particularly well represented would help people. If that’s the case then it still seems unclear how having an ordinal ranking adds more than just information about specializations, placement, and attrition.

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    16. Simon Gurofsky Avatar
      Simon Gurofsky

      Clement,
      Re your question, definitely the second and not the first.
      Re your remark, I don’t want to get too deep into debating the merits of ordinal rankings myself — I am happy to pass that mantle off onto someone else!

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    17. TBC Avatar
      TBC

      Let’s be clear: if we abolished the PGR today, there would be an instant rush to create new, alternative rankings, if only to increase the power and prestige of the publishers of those rankings. Rankings also reflect ideology, so creating a new ranking system would rehash all the debates that have marred the philosophy blogosphere over the past couple of years. The PGR isn’t neutral, but it’s about as close to neutrality as we can get.
      As for whether BL will continue to run the PGR, I wonder whether choosing a successor would not also occasion the kind of ideological conflict mentioned above. I suspect many would reject whoever is chosen to succeed BL unless he or she did something to ensure the rankings reflect climate issues. We all remember how well that went with the Pluralist’s guide. If BL steps down, I hope his successor does as little to change the original format as possible.

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    18. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      M: I have been bothered by BL’s derisive attacks for a long time and I was genuinely bothered by the fact that someone like this has so much power in our profession. I feel there is now finally some momentum to rethink that concentration of power, first with the installation of Daily Nous as a genuine alternative news site for philosophy (and not just a collection of rants against America’s religious right and Spiros has a posse!) and New Appointments in philosophy as a much more readable and inclusive list of appointments. PGR is the next step. It’s an opportunity to think how we can do better – what kind of info do we need to give to our students, who should organize it, should there be rankings (I think not, because of the biases that creep into ranking, but I am open to perhaps rankings per subfield).

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    19. Lexington Avatar
      Lexington

      One thing that isn’t understood well enough is that PGR essentially is a monopoly in philosophy program ranking and placement. This is in much the same sense as Microsoft has been a monopoly in desktop operating systems and office applications, Google is a monopoly in search, and Facebook is a monopoly in a basic area of social media. The effective barriers to entry in all cases are so high that it is practically impossible to compete. To compete with PGR would require that a person, or group of people, somehow manage to get the same level of responses from programs and volunteers, as well as the same level of interest in its target audience, as does PGR; but of course it’s virtually impossible to get one without the other. This is the classic “chicken and egg” problem that confronts any contender for dominance in an area where so-called “network effects” operate. The first winner takes all in such cases, and PGR was the first winner in ranking and placement.
      But here’s the thing. In our society we tolerate monopolies only if they are reasonably well behaved, and do not abuse their monopoly status.
      The problem is, because PGR is entirely owned (so far as I know–correct me if I’m wrong) by Brian Leiter, it is he, and he alone, who, when push comes to shove, controls it and profits from it.
      How many people really believe that Brian Leiter has been well behaved, and has used the status that PGR affords him in a fully responsible manner?
      I’m thinking the profession needs to find some way to wrest this power from his hands.

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    20. Anonnon Avatar
      Anonnon

      This might just be an instance of what was mentioned above, but I’ve been having a really hard time with Leiter’s reaction to this in the email exchange:
      “I will not accept or treat those whose behaviour regularly fails to meet these standards as normal or representative members of my profession.”
      Leiter took this to mean: I will not treat those who behave like Leiter professionally (and so the spit/bat reply from Leiter.) Jenkins (fairly obviously? certainly in its greater context) meant it as: I will not accept the behavior of those like Leiter as representative of the norms of how to behave in this profession (and so I will be sure to set a different example for students, etc…) The way he took it seems just bizarre to me. He is a target insofar as he adheres to that different set of norms, but the norms are what are under discussion, not some bizarre notion about how he’ll be treated uncivilly in personal interactions. Read appropriately, I think she’s of course right – you shouldn’t normally behave in the abrasive way Leiter often does. It’s not unreasonable to think that it is not a good general way to behave professionally and so should not be a professional standard. This might then leave room for Leiter to agree – he does not intend to be setting a norm for how one ought to engage in philosophical debate generally when he lays into people, he could point to all his scholarly work, his engagement with students and with other scholars at conferences in talks, etc… the question would then become: ought one ever to engage in such rhetoric? Leiter would probably say yes – what about cases of malicious misrepresentation, etc…, Jenkins probably no, or at most in a much, much smaller set of cases, that malicious misrepresentations are few and far between, that even they may not warrant such hostile personal responses, a different response can be as or more effective, or whatever, and you could have a productive debate… and so: if “professional” carries normative weight, and such disagreement is reasonable/not without grounds (surely it is, right!?), there’s nothing that could count as defamation in calling this kind of behavior unprofessional, right? Where are the missing facts?
      It seems absurd that the standard bearing ranking system of our discipline is run by a single person linked on his personal blog rather than by some greater organization or committee (never mind, for this general point, who that single person may be, never mind if they were a perfect saint, even.)

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    21. anon Avatar
      anon

      thanks to jennifer frey for that excellent post.

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    22. StephenG Avatar
      StephenG

      Brian Leitner has stated in threatening emails that he is a lawyer.
      To all of you similarly threatened and as far as can be ascertained, Leitner is not admitted to practice law in any jurisdiction and therefore is neither an attorney nor a “lawyer” nor is he entitled to hold himself out as one. . (See e.g., District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Ethics Opinion 16-05, issued June 17, 2005, foot note 1 < .)”>http://www.dccourts.gov/internet/documents/rule49_opinion16-05.pdf&gt;.)

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