By: Eric Winsberg
The story about Leiter and the PGR is covered in the CHE here. I certainly hope that those who have been putting pressure on Leiter to step down from his Editorship of the PGR will find the remedy he proposes in the article insufficient and will keep up the pressure on him to step down.
There is something pathological about his inability to accept that what he has done is wrong. I like his “I’m a New Yorker, so whatcha gunna do” pseudo-excuse. It’s just like those people complaining about the PC-police who allegedly stifle a good healthy debate. But as someone rather from the other political end, this excuse is not available to him, so “New Yorker” it is.
I am going so far as to say that his various acts of activism for the “right” causes is not fuelled by principle, at least not alone, but by an insatiable need for controversy and the need to voice his opinion about others deemed inferior. Rarely if ever does he refrain from name calling when those post come up.
So, why on earth keep people collaborating with this guy?
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(Reposting from Facebook)
“In recent days, Mr. Leiter has appointed Berit Brogaard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, as a co-editor of The Philosophical Gourmet. In addition to Ms. Brogaard, he said he had offered another co-editor position to a scholar who has yet to give an answer. On Thursday he said he had created the new editing positions partly because, given “the nasty smear campaign against me,” he does not want the report associated with him alone.”
This is not good enough, in my opinion, despite the fact that I have profound admiration for Berit Brogaard (I think she’s ideally suited for the job, if anyone is!).
One of the issues with the conflation of the roles of blogger and ranker, as pointed out by Eric Schliesser, is that the neutrality required to be a ranker is at odds with being a vocal blogger. Indeed, many of BL’s worst, most aggressive reactions have been directed at people who proposed alternative ways of ranking departments (recall Linda Martin Alcoff some years ago, and more recently Carolyn Jennings). Now, as pointed out by Brian Weatherson (http://brianweatherson.tumblr.com/post/98362665004/after-the-pgr), there is much to be commended in a plurality of rankings, each based on different metrics or criteria (reputation, placement success, publications etc.) However:
“To the best of my knowledge, Brian Leiter systematically did the opposite; highlighting the deficiencies of every possible rival. I have neither the time nor the inclination to survey the archives to see if I’ve missed an exception to that claim, so it’s possible I did. But I never saw any evidence of him encouraging the plurality of surveys that I think would be optimal.” (Weatherson)
In other words, if BL remains involved with the PGR, even if with other co-editors, and remains a vocal blogger, it is quite likely that he will continue to undermine every single alternative ranking initiative, and that others will be discouraged to get anything new going for fear of being aggressively criticized by BL.
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It is clear that no arguments will ever persuade BL that he is wrong. He likes to appeal to his upbringing (yo! I’m from New York) and the way it has fixed his character. But characters can be both virtuous and vicious. And I think Aristotle was right when he said that some people’s characters are so far gone that they should be met with punishment rather than argument.
The ways in which this can be done are quite limited. One thing that can easily be done: everyone concerned should contact the departments, journals, and academic presses that advertise on his website and demand that they stop doing so. To give financial support to the platform from which he spews his hatred is indefensible.
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Anyone who goes in with him, whatever good motives they may have, is just helping him to perpetuate his status that he will, no doubt, continue to abuse, especially as it relates to those who either develop new ranking systems, argue that rankings are not appropriate or workable, or expresses views about philosophy or anything else that get under his skin a little bit. There is no indication that he has learned anything about how he should treat others and the way he should conduct himself professionally and support philosophy as a profession.
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some people’s characters are so far gone that they should be met with punishment rather than argument
Actually, I distrust those in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. That could be an aphorism.
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Casting a quick look over the last hundred or so entries on Leiter Reports confirms my anecdotal impression: they’re dominated by factual information about the profession and about philosophy, and by discussion threads on issues du jour. Of the subset that are politically contentious, they in turn are dominated by general academic-freedom matters, dominated in recent weeks by the Salaita affair (where Leiter’s position is pretty much a consensus). Even if I shared the NewAPPS/FP view of Leiter’s posts criticising other philosophers (which I mostly don’t) this is a tiny part of the blog’s content, and describing it as “the place where he spews his hatred” is extremely misleading.
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(Sorry: “dominated” three times in two sentences. Blame typing on an iPhone).
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Well, context does matter. One context that the CHE piece manages to avoid is that BL publicly abuses people in his blog and comments, too: just off the top of my head, in addition to Carolyn and Carrie, Rachel McKinnon (“singularly unhinged”), Alan Schrift (“mediocre Nietzsche scholar”), Simon Critchley (lots of ways, actually), Linda Alcoff, and of course really big names like Derrida (“charlatan” more times than I can count). There’s also a lot of guilt by association – “SPEP,” “party-line continental,” “pluralist” – and so on.
This sort of garbage almost always happens for one of two reasons: (a) someone is perceived as a threat to the hegemony of the PGR he developed, or (b) someone does the wrong kind of “continental” work – particularly if they seem to be getting media attention for it. In the meantime, Leiter has done a very good job positioning himself as a spokesperson for the profession, so when IHE or CHE wants to do a story on philosophy, he’s almost always quoted.
So, yes, many of us do read those emails in a very specific context.
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You should think more about the salience of actual persons and groups who are mentioned his more abusive posts and their impact on those persons and groups than the ratio of those posts to posts that are “factually informative.” You might also want to consider that BL and others who are caught up in following him would find what I would label (variously) his denunciatory, petulant, abusive, and sneering posts about other philosophers “factually informative.” Given the position of power (which includes prestige power) he has been granted by people in the profession and the effects his comments (and threats in emails)can have is far more relevant than your superficial, quantitative eyeballing.
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I agree. In fact, I think most of what shows up on his blog is useful and informative. The problem seems to be that he doesn’t understand the difference between speaking to power (as in the phrase “speaking truth to power”) and speaking from power, and the different kind of approach (not tone) that is required. That’s one reason I don’t like the idea of lumping in his criticisms of the likes of Derrida (or of, e.g., Phyllis Wise) with his criticisms of people like our own Carolyn Dicey Jennings or of Carrie Jenkins.
The problem is not with the blog. The problem is with the blog being run by the same person who runs the PGR.
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Eric:
He does not give criticisms of Derrida, he denounces Derrida. If you could point me to one place in his blog, or his published writings, that contains an extended, reasoned critique of Derrida’s main ideas, that would be great and I would retract. But I don’t think its there. He criticizes vehemently Wise on reasoned grounds that people can actually engage with.
The effect (entirely likely and predictable) of the former is to denigrate those who have an interest in 20th-21st C. French philosophy… from the perspective of someone who has a vociferous following and has been granted by the elites and semi-elites of profession a privileged position (until now, it seems, the PGR). The effect of the latter is entirely different.
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Someone of Leiter’s character cannot be persuaded to step down. He can only be forcibly removed.
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For the record (as I realize I may not have been clear), the analogy b/t his critiques of Derrida, Critchley et. al on the one hand, and CDJ on the other, was only meant to support the point that there’s a pattern of behavior in situations where he perceives either “bad continental” or “threat to PGR.” Obviously, a major difference is that Simon Critchley doesn’t need to fear Brian Leiter.
I do think your distinction b/t speaking “truth to power” and “from power” is helpful, as his tendency to conflate them explains why either the public or private attacks on junior folks can be so unsettling – it’s as if he thinks that by attacking them, he’s speaking truth to the (entirely imaginary!) power of “SPEP.”
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Gordon’s list of people “BL publicly abuses” is incomplete. Let me fill in a few more:
Student protesters at Northwestern: “Vigilante justice”
The Chancellor’s office, and the Board of Trustees, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “miscreants or incompetents”.
Neoliberals in general: “pernicious”.
Barack Obama: “Serial violator of human rights who has laid the foundations for the fascist state of tomorrow”
George W Bush: “petulant liar-in-chief”.
(Google should give references in each case.)
I don’t see a Grand Unified Theory of Leiter abuse here, beyond “things that Brian Leiter feels strongly about”. It’s a little worrying that the examples given tend to fit a certain political framework. (My own politics roughly track Barack Obama’s, and so are pretty far-right compared to Leiter’s, and compared to the academic median. Do I find Leiter’s condemnation of Obama-style liberalism annoying? Yes, I guess. But in a default-free-speech culture, that’s my problem, not Leiter’s.)
This is not the most abusive language I’ve seen from a senior academic recently, either: Steven Salaita’s “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” is an order of magnitude beyond anything Leiter has said publicly or (to my knowledge) privately. Would Netanyahu be offended? Probably. Does that mean that an offence was committed? Not so much.
My (perhaps rambling) point is that anyone who doesn’t want to (a) condemn Steven Salaita along with Brian Leiter, or (b) adopt an explicitly content-based attitude to abuse, where it’s fine as long as the person being abused (Bush? Netanyahu?) deserves it, owes us a proper theory of what specifically is wrong with Leiter’s tone in particular contexts. Some suggestions have been offered: is it about relative power? About particular obligations of someone in Leiter’s position vis-à-vis the PGR that don’t apply to the rest of us (never mind the fact that the PGR is Leiter’s private enterprise, not a community-led project)? About behaviour that crosses the line between one-off strong words and the kind of sustained behaviour that the courts have recognised as unprotected harassment? I’ve seen several such theories advanced (including Eric’s in this thread) and they’re worth taking seriously (though I haven’t found any conclusively persuasive as yet). But abuse per se can’t be the issue here, and some comments in this thread suggest that it is.
(& incidentally, though I’m not sure it should matter: I think my online profile is pretty abuse free (sarcasm towards risibly poor physics notwithstanding. I don’t myself think abusive language online is terribly advisable and I avoid it myself; that’s very different from thinking it’s per se a reason for censure.)
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Hi David,
You are absolutely right that it can’t be the abuse per se. And yes, I do think its “About particular obligations of someone in Leiter’s position vis-à-vis the PGR that don’t apply to the rest of us.” And that obligation doesn’t extend to taking an even-handed tone towards, e.g., Barack Obama, because Obama is not part of the evaluative domain of the PGR. But I think its misleading or irrelevant to say, in this context, “(never mind the fact that the PGR is Leiter’s private enterprise, not a community-led project)” First of all, its an enterprise that draws on the prestige of the members of its editorial board, and on the labor of its reviewers. And so those people have a right to worry about whether the person who is drawing on their prestige and leadership is abusing the power he draws from the support they lend, and the rest of us have the right to try to persuade them that their good names are being abused. Second, it is a community activity to take the PGR as a useful guide, and we can organize as a community to stop. I’ll repeat an analogy I made elsewhere: if the editor of Zagat’s was on record having vitriolic and personal exchanges with individual restaurant owners, and telling some of them that they ran a “shit restaurant,” then I wouldnt buy that book, and I would discourage anyone else from being associated with it on those grounds.
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Let’s not forget Leiter’s comments about the former philosophy PhD student Eugene Park, for which he was strongly reprimanded here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/09/philosophys-western-bias-and-what-can-be-done-about-it.html
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Eric: fair enough.
Also, rereading my post above: when I say “the examples given above” I mean “given in previous comments”, not “given earlier in my comment”; sorry for ambiguity.
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Case 1: cursing at and denouncing the head of a militarized state for killing hundreds of civilians.
Case 2: cursing at and denouncing junior (to you) colleaugues because they suggested you shouldn’t curse at and denounce other junior colleagues and graduate students.
Philosopher: i need a theory of offense that is conclusively persuasive before i will see any difference.
Sound of one head banging on one desk.
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Mark: that’s an “explicitly content-based attitude to abuse”, in the context of my post. Adopt that if you want to. But the defence of Salaita has in general been at pains to stress that it’s not about content: that even someone who thinks Israel’s actions are wholly reasonable should be outraged at Salaita’s treatment. (I don’t think Israel’s actions are “wholly reasonable” but I’m a long way from Salaita’s view; that seems 100% irrelevant to my assessment of the 1st Amendment/ academic freedom issues.) If the case for Salaita rests on him being right, heaven help academic freedom.
(Also, aren’t I a junior (to you) colleague? (Full professor only a couple of months ago, far less well known, far less internet presence.) But I guess sarcastic putdowns – even in public – fall short of denunciation.)
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Not unexpected from philosophers on the civility police beat. Maybe it’s time to rerun the New APPS post on this very theme.
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Just a minute David: NOBODY is calling for Leiter to be fired. So nobody is calling for him to have his academic freedom violated. I happen to think “Bebe” is a moral monster. So the tweet doesn’t bother me for “content” reasons. But if he had said the same thing about, I dunno, Martin Luther King Jr, I might simultaneously be defending him from being fired AND seeking to have him removed as editor of the “Ranking of the top-50 best liked world leaders.” (or maybe more precisely, I would stop wanting to be on its editorial board, and I would urge others to feel the same way.)
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p: I feel strongly that the case ought to be made here without reference to civility or tone. In fact, I felt, even years ago, that it was wholly inappropriate for Leiter to post things like “Smith is a great catch for UXYC, who are sure to go up at least three notches in the next PGR.” But who wants to be the one seen as complaining about Smith’s being praised? And also, of course, the inappropriateness is less severe than calling another department “shit,” or calling into question another philosopher’s suitability to be in the profession. But its not because of tone.
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Eric: I think we’re at cross purposes. (I was making a fairly narrowly tailored reply to Mark Lance.) But for what it’s worth (perhaps not much : I appreciate it was a quickly chosen example), doesn’t what you’re saying here imply that someone should be removed from the role of Zagat editor only if they say vitriolic things about restaurants that you think are good?
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I think what it means is: The editor of Zagats (for those not familiar: this a survey based restaurant guide) should keep his mouth shut about all restaurants, but (s)he is likely to face a popular groundswell against his or her behavior precisely when he picks on a popular but not very powerful restaurant.
that’s half the picture. the other half is:
If the editor wants to continue to sell books and rely on the free labor of his/her respondents, he should avoid acting in ways that those people who support him would find abhorent. that part is, I suppose, partly “content based,” but still has nothing at all to do with academic freedom. Leiter is, in a very circuitous way, an elected representative of the profession, and he can be impeached if enough of us think he is abusing the power we have (very indirectly) conferred on him.
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Leiter’s rhetoric is not always at its highest pitch, and there are certainly places where his speech is forceful but not appalling. But much of it is clearly over the line. I know a lot of New Yorkers, and I have never heard the kind of abusive vulgarity from them that Leiter has directed against people like Alcoff, Critchley, McAfee and others.
There are also issues of irresponsibility. He publicly called one book of mine “riddled with errors,” but when I asked him for examples he said, by email, that he hadn’t read the book. He called another book “sophomoric,” also without having read it (it won a CHOICE Outstanding Title award).
Finally, this whole thing has got me wondering what it would have been like had I stayed in philosophy and had to worry about the effects of his sustained harassment of me, over more than a decade, on my department. I suspect there would have been a lot of self-inhibition, and I sympathize with those whom he has hurt in that way as well as in the more overt ways.
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I’m just gonna jump in here and say that I think it’s fairly important to avoid seeing what’s at stake here under the guise of either:
1) academic freedom — as Eric W said above, nobody’s calling for L to be fired from his teaching position or to suffer any professional consequences unrelated to the narrow activity of running the PGR—and they’re certainly not asking for that on account of things he’s done outside the scope of his professional duties. This last probably needs some explanation, so here goes. People are saying that they don’t approve of how Leiter has conducted himself as a manager of a ranking of philosophy departments in terms of their merit or quality. I’m not, honestly, quite sure where managing PGR stands as a professional activity–though I think it’d count pretty clearly as a ‘service to the profession’ in your garden variety T&R file. I am sure, however, that as fellow members of the profession, we have a right (somewhat analogous to peer review) to say a) whether we are or are not cool with how that service has been performed and b) whether we think the person performing it has conducted himself appropriately in the broader scope of his relations with members of the profession, so as to avoid compromising his position as ‘keeper of the rankings.’ Obviously, there is (and has been for quite some time) serious and widespread concern on both of these points.
2) civility — the problem with Leiter’s conduct in the instances that people are objecting to is not a matter of form (which is where I’m putting civility for the purposes of this discussion). It may be a matter of content in some cases, insofar as that content may be inconsistent with how peers think someone managing a ranking of programs in the profession should conduct themselves–i.e., if Leiter’s views on what is and is not good or competent or even minimally acceptable philosophy are seen to be substantially idiosyncratic or widely at variance with the consensus of the profession, or if he expresses himself in ways that indicate substantial closed-mindedness where the profession as a whole has not formed a consensus, that’s going to be a problem. If you decide to play ‘ranker,’ part of what makes you acceptable in that role is your ability to avoid making large numbers of stakeholders feel like you’re not viewing them or their work fairly. But beyond this ‘content’ question is the — I think much more serious — question of whether Leiter’s conduct has been abusive. This, I would argue, is no longer a formal question of civility but a material question of harmful effect–and here the fact that such conduct may reflect only a small part of what he does is not cannot be the issue. Assuming that we do find that at least some of what’s being objected to can be properly described as abusive, then the issue must become, at minimum, a) whether the conduct was blameworthy and b) regardless of how one feels about that blameworthiness, whether the person conducting himself in ways that have been harmful is willing to acknowledge the problem with his conduct, apologize where necessary, and change his approach in order to avoid further instances of harm.
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Feynman was a publicly prominent New York-raised academic who has little time for what he saw as nonsense, and was hardly afraid to publicly say so. The worst I’ve ever read/heard him say is that something is ‘dumb’ – and this was also used of his own remarks at time.
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“…others who are caught up in following him…”
I hear some people make reference to followers of Leiter, but I must admit that I have never encountered anyone who could be reasonably described as such either in real life or on philosophy blogs. And I am someone who has interacted with a large number of philosophers from all over the US (and some other parts of the world), as well as someone who spends too much time reading philosophy blogs.
This is not to deny that Brian Leiter may have influence on the profession in other ways, but it seems to me that the extent of his influence via the expression of his personal views is being exaggerated quite a lot.
The issue of the PGR and his hostile and intimidating remarks to others in the profession are important, but one need not exaggerate his power in order to make those points.
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Ed: I should be clear that my original comment isn’t meant to establish that this is an academic-freedom issue. It was aimed at the narrower points that (i) The fact that Leiter is often rude is not in itself relevant (I take it this is your second point), and (ii) there isn’t a systematic pattern of who Leiter is rude to beyond “people who disagree with him on issues he feels strongly about”. In that sense it was mostly a reply to Gordon at 8/13.
That said (and this is also a belated response to Eric) I think a characterisation of academic freedom purely in terms of employment is too narrow. If people boycott my talks and disinvite me to conferences on the basis of my view on (for clarity) some unambiguously non-institutional issue (say, Israel/Palestine, or Scottish independence), that sounds like a violation of my academic freedom, even if I’m comfortably tenured. (As far as I recall, the BDS movement mostly acknowledges that boycotting Israeli institutions has academic-freedom issues, but that it’s a price worth paying for their larger goal.) And (to reprise my thoughts on a Daily Nous discussion a month or two back), it would be extremely problematic if otherwise-relevant scholarship was deliberately ignored because of the political views of the writer (though I’m less sure if “academic freedom” is the right label for what’s problematic here.
I’m unsure whether forcing someone out of a service role on grounds of their views is problematic in this way, though – and of course I agree that performing a service role poorly must in any case be legitimate grounds to force someone out of it, and that actual harassment is not protected by academic freedom. (Without prejudice to whether any of all of these apply to this particular case.)
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I don’t think the account Mark is gesturing towards is content-based. Or rather it needn’t be. The differences between the cases include the capacity of the blogger to affect the career of the person criticised and their absolute degree of power.
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David: you are absolutely right that a characterization of academic freedom purely in terms of employment is too narrow. I should not have implied that. Let’s even suppose its true, (i don’t really think it is but lets suppose it is) that forcing someone out of a service role inhibits their academic freedom in the same way as if we boycotted your talks. Still, I think the best analogy would be this: suppose all of your research was collaboration with 400 other philosophers of physics, but that, for whatever reason, you were always the one to present the research orally at conferences. And suppose that when you gave these presentations, you often paused in the middle of them to sound off about politics in unpopular ways. If you refused to stop doing this, or to let someone else take the mic, wouldn’t it be ok for the other 399 philosophers to stop collaborating with you?
And notice that in this analogy, we haven’t even touched on a case where you were harassing particular individuals or in a case where there was somehow a conflict of interest between your role in the research and the interstitial comments you were making.
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Eric: absolutely, but I’m not sure the analogy achieves what you want it to. If I often stopped in those presentations to sound off about politics in popular ways – indeed, if I often stopped in those presentations to discuss my views on optimal Dungeons and Dragons character builds – that would also be good reason for the other 399 to stop cooperating, but on grounds that I’m failing to do my job properly, not because of the views I hold. (That might be picking up on an inessential feature of your example, but I’m insufficiently clear on its intention to try a friendly amendment.)
I also agree that it’s at best questionable whether service is an academic-freedom issue – I’m pursuing the issue more for its intrinsic interest than for its direct relevance to the BL situation.
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David: I think there are pretty clear differences between each of the following:
Engaging in mild sarcasm in response to a recent full professor who demands a philosophical theory before we see the difference between responding to mass murder and responding to a request for more charity in our dealings with each other.
Engaging in threats of lawsuits, calls to leave the profession, and name-calling against graduate students, the untenured, and recent full professors who have disagreed with your views on something.
Engaging in vitriolic denunciations of mass murderers.
I really don’t know how to argue that these are utterly different. I don’t think a theory would help, even if I thought a call for theory was any kind of appropriate here, because if you don’t see this difference, you will find any theory I give to be false. That you insist on suggesting that I am inconsistent for engaging in the first while denouncing the second makes me want to bang my head because I don’t think that this is the sort of disagreement that discussion is likely to solve. Do you really think these are relevantly similar?
Your claim about what everyone says re Salaita is answered above. People ignore content solely when discussing the question of firing. You ignore this issue and want to say his “rudeness” is similar to Leiter’s. Here, of course, content matters. My view is that his tweets are perfectly appropriate responses to someone who is leading a militarized assault on your people. Of course we could disagree about that, but it is morally offensive to think that this sort of anger is relevant in any way to Leiter’s.
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Well, I am not sure that it is an entirely uncontroversial claim that Netanyahu is a mass murder – if so, then a lot of other leaders, heads of states, generals, and so on are also mass murders. You might want to be careful when throwing around opinions which, however obvious you might find them, are just your opinions, not necessarily shared by others. Many people – presumably all those who protested – found Salaita’s tweets offensive, hurtful, and entirely insensitive precisely because of their form rather than content. I am sure they do encounter criticism of Israeli politics and do not always react the way they did to Salaita. So I do not think you answered Wallace at all – you need an argument, not telling Wallace what he ignores.
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Mark: my post made a rather narrow and specific set of points that I think you are badly misunderstanding (Eric W has understood them fine). But my past observation of what happens in these sorts of conversations with you is that – for whatever reason – they just descend into anger and vitriol. I don’t particularly want that (I respect people’s right to respond to my comments with sarcasm and anger but I in turn have a right to find it distressing and wearying and to want no part in it) so I will bow out. In any case I think my original point, and the productive exchange with Eric and Ed, are probably as clear as anything I can subsequently write.
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To p: churlish though it is to turn down support, I don’t agree: I’m sure a large part of the objections to Salaita’s tweets were indeed on grounds of content. (If he’d said similar things about Osama bin Laden no-one would have batted an eyelid.) It’s entirely in order for critics of Illinois to point out that the criticism is politically motivated; however, an academic-freedom defence of Salaita can’t itself start from the point of view that the Palestinian position is right or even reasonable. (Salaita himself, in his comments about a “Palestinian exception to the First Amendment”, seems to understand this perfectly well.)
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True. Point taken.
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P. Here’s what I said: “My view is that his tweets are perfectly appropriate responses to someone who is leading a militarized assault on your people. Of course we could disagree about that, but it is morally offensive to think that this sort of anger is relevant in any way to Leiter’s.”
Nothing you say about disagreement is remotely relevant to that.
David: Please show me where anything I have said shows anything remotely like vitriol, or for that matter even anger. I was mildly sarcastic once and then explained as clearly as I could. I too am out of this, because my brother-in-law just died and I’m leaving town and won’t be on email. But I also don’t see how I have misrepresented a thing you said. but the vitriol charge is pure deflection.
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Ugh, sorry: ” critics” and ” criticism” in my last have different referents: the latter is to criticism of Salaita’s appointment.
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Thanks for the clarifications, David. It’d be fun at some point (perhaps not this thread) to have a discussion about where the boundaries of academic freedom do lie. I take your point re: boycotting, though I think at some point fairly fast that does become tricky. My point–just to be clear since what I wrote as a bit unweildy–was just that what’s at stake for Leiter isn’t professional consequences for extramural speech but professional consequences for how he’s conducted himself as a professional (the comments people are objecting to bear on his role as ranker, and his relation to others in the profession as a more or less direct result of that role). That’s why I think it’s unrelated to academic freedom (and that’s as much a response to Eric’s response to you above as it is to anything you were saying).
Gonna set everything else re: Salaita, etc. aside except to say that I do agree that the principled defense of Salaita on AF grounds has to suspend the question of whether content or form of his speech in those venues was right (much as it pains me to hear folks keep speaking as if what he said was oh so shocking and beyond the pale–I’m sympathetic to Mark there).
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“the comments people are objecting to bear on his role as ranker, and his relation to others in the profession as a more or less direct result of that role”
Thanks for this. I’m afraid I’ve been blurring these two distinct categories together in my replies to David, (prompting his response in 30) and they are worth keeping separate even though they BOTH apply in this case and they are BOTH grounds for moving to remove Leiter from his role as de facto official ranker in philosophy.
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Ed. It seems to me not a matter of academic freedom because no one has suggested taking any standard professional right. This may in some sense be a professional consequence but no one has a right to have others cooperate in their ranking system. That’s not part of being a prof. If anyone were suggesting firing leiter, I would oppose them and all this talk of Salaita would have some relevance.
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I realize that that is your view. But what is the argument? Why are they perfectly appropriate? Frankly, I have yet to meet people who thought of them as being such. Nobody thinks that Leiter’s anger is somehow on a par/comparable to Salaita’s. In any case, I opting out too…when part of the argument is being immediately accused of “morally offensive” thought, one loses any interest in further discussion.
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Apologies if this comment has already been made elsewhere in the thread–but how does Mark’s comment indicate anything other than an explicitly socially contextualized based attitude toward abuse? I fail to understand why his comment indicates much of anything regarding attitudes towards content.
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[This comment has been posted after consultation with, and with the permission of, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins]
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins is one of the most privileged women in philosophy at present. If there were acknowledgement of that fact, philosophers could embark on a discussion of what has really gone on between Carrie and Brian Leiter over the past months: harassment of a disabled philosopher. If philosophers were to name that for what it is, we would then have the opportunity to embark on a discussion about the hostile environment that disabled people endure in philosophy, in particular, and the university, in general. The events between Jenkins and Leiter have been narrowly circumscribed, their political character has been confined to debates about rank and civility, and the dramatic improvement that they could entail for the professional lives of disabled philosophers has thus far been circumvented. Please let us reconfigure how these events and issues are framed.
If members of the profession were to stop debating (for instance) to what extent one “full” professor has privilege over another “full” professor and when it is acceptable to be rude and to what extent, then they would also have the opportunity to reflect upon why other events have occurred at this time. Why the Statement of Concern now? Why the actions of the Advisory Board members now? I would like to think that some of the motivation for these efforts was precipitated by the spotlight that I shone on the ways in which Brian Leiter’s appalling ableist language has contributed to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in the profession and the discipline (see my “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability,” endnote 3). The fact that I called Leiter on his use of terms such as ‘imbecile,’ ‘moron,’ ‘idiot,’ and so on may have played a part in why members of the profession acted now in ways that should have occurred long ago. However, surely a significant factor is the very privilege that Carrie Jenkins has, not just in terms of prestige, area of specialization, and rank, but in terms of white skin, marital status, sexuality, and class (among other things). If these facts were acknowledged, then maybe we could embark on a self-critical examination of (for instance) the homophobia (Butler) and racism (Alcoff) that produced the inertia and indifference of the past.
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Mark: you haven’t said anything like that in this thread. It’s a prediction based on my observations over the last several years of the trajectories of NewAPPS threads (and the reason I normally keep out of them when they’re on this kind of issue), not an observation. It may be an unfair prediction; I don’t know; if you’re going out of contact, it’s anyhow moot.
I’m very sorry to hear that about your brother-in-law.
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When you say this is an issue of “harassment of a disabled philosopher” are you claiming that Professor Jenkins was targeted by Professor Leiter because of a disability? I have not seen anyone present any reasons to believe that claim, but I acknowledge that I have not read everything written about the matter. Did I miss something?
Or is the sense in which according to you this is an example of “harassment of a disabled philosopher” the sense in which it is also an example of “harassment of a philosopher employed in Canada”?
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That works, too. Yep.
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New APPS 
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