By Catarina Dutilh Novaes
Those of you who can’t get yourselves to be offline even during the Xmas break have most likely been following the events involving Brian Leiter (BL), Jonathan Ichikawa (JI) and Carrie Jenkins (CJ), and the lawyers’ letters regarding the legal measures BL says he is prepared to take as a reaction to what he perceives as defamatory statements by (or related to) Ichikawa and Jenkins. As a matter of fact, a blog post of mine back in July seems to have played a small role in the unfolding of these unfortunate developments, and so I deem it appropriate to add a few observations of my own.
On multiple occasions (and in particular in comments at Facebook posts), Leiter claims to have been directed to Jenkins’ ‘Day One’ pledge by this blog post of mine of July 2nd 2014, in defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings. It begins:
Most readers have probably been following the controversy involving Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Brian Leiter concerning the job placement data post where Carolyn Dicey Jennings compares her analysis of the data she has assembled with the PGR Rank. There have been a number of people reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of Carolyn Dicey Jennings’s analysis, such as in Daily Nous, and this post by UBC’s Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins on guidelines for academic professional conduct (the latter is not an explicit defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but the message is clear enough, I think). [emphasis added]
Leiter claims that this observation is what led him to Jenkins’ post in the first place, which he perceived as a direct attack on him. He also claims that this is what the passage above implies, and continues to repeat that the post “was intended by Jenkins as a criticism of me (as everyone at the time knew, and as one of her friends has now admitted), and thus explains my private response, which she chose to make public.” However, there is nothing explicitly indicating that the post was intended as a criticism of BL beyond the fact that he read it this way and keeps repeating it.
My own post was explicitly a defense of Carolyn, and also voiced criticism of BL’s handling of his disagreement with Carolyn’s analysis of placement record data; indeed, I mention him by name. CJ did not such thing, and while I (and perhaps others as well) read her post as at least in part intended to express support to Carolyn, this may well have been a misinterpretation of the post on my part. Still, even if it was not: the step from the post being a defense of Carolyn to it being an attack on BL is a very substantive one, and yet he seems to be conflating the two things.
As is well known, these events in early July then set in motion a whole series of developments, culminating in the September Statement. BL now claims (through his lawyer) that the September Statement defamed him, in particular by stating that the episode impacted CJ’s health, her capacity to work and her ability to contribute to public discourse. BL maintains that this statement is not accurate, in fact his whole case for defamation seems to rest on questioning the actual distress incurred by CJ as a result of her ‘interactions’ with him. He seems to be suggesting two things: in the period after receiving the email, CJ continued to work and participate in public discourse with no significant changes with respect to her usual behavior (he seems to suggest that he has evidence to this effect); whatever distress she may have incurred would have been related to previous facts about her health and overall condition, not directly provoked by the unfortunate correspondence.
The question I want to raise now is: does any of this matter for the main issue? BL seems to think that the signatories of the September Statement were ‘misled’ into thinking that he had caused CJ great harm, and for this reason alone signed the Statement. Naturally, I can’t speak for the other signatories, but speaking for myself, I can say that the actual impact of his email on CJ’s wellbeing was not what prompted me to sign it. Had this not been the case (as suggested by BL’s ‘hypothetical scenario’, but as appears to be the case for example of Noelle McAfee, who as far as I know has not been affected by the hostile emails she received from BL in the same way), I would most certainly still have signed the Statement. What made me sign it was BL’s behavior in the first place – in particular the appalling emails, which were actually merely the culmination of a long history of patterns of interaction with colleagues that I consider inadequate. As well put by Justin over at Daily Nous: “As far as I can tell, the only person in philosophy who has harmed Brian Leiter’s reputation is Brian Leiter. He should sue.”
That BL’s behavior has impacted a colleague in a particularly negative way is very regrettable, but is not the heart of the matter. If CJ was made of steel and had not been impacted in any way ('hypothetical scenario'), it would not have made the slightest difference for my signing of the Statement, so I fail to see in which ways the signatories could have been ‘misled’ in this way. This is a red herring. (It may not be a red herring from a legal point of view; I am in no position to judge the legal implications here. But I fail to see the relevance of the ‘accuracy’ point from a moral point of view.)
It is clear at any rate that the September Statement has been harmful to BL’s standing in the profession, in particular by significantly diminishing the participation of evaluators in the PGR (as painstakingly analyzed by Mitchell Aboulafia), and thus making it less credible — despite BL's continuous reassurances that all is good and dandy with the PGR. But is this the kind of actionable harm that should reasonably lead to a courtroom? The September Statement was signed by those who declined to volunteer their services to the PGR, in particular (but not exclusively) as potential board members and evaluators. So one might think that the September Statement did call for a kind of 'boycott' of the PGR, on grounds of alleged professional misconduct by its main editor.
Now, this is of course something BL is well familiar with. Remember the Synthese affair almost 4 years ago? The two scenarios are strikingly similar, except that 4 years ago BL was the one calling for a boycott of an academic institution – the Synthese journal – on account of alleged professional misconduct by its editors-in-chief. BL’s ‘campaign’ back then certainly caused harm to the reputation of the journal and the then-editors-in-chief (though 4 years later, the journal seems to be doing fine, under different editorship). While there may well be important disanalogies between the two sets of events, it seems to me that they are sufficiently similar so as to challenge BL’s (moral, if not legal) right to object to the September Statement on account of the harm it would have caused to his reputation. His prior actions tell us that he does not shy away from urging others to decline their services to particular institutions when faced with professional behavior he deems objectionable.
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64 responses to “Observations on the Leiter vs. Jenkins-Ichikawa affair”
I assume different people signed the September Statement for different reasons, but at least some were influenced to do so by what was claimed about the health effects on CJ by BL’s behaviour. Back in early October (http://dailynous.com/2014/10/03/leiter-responds/) I raised on Daily Nous why signers of the SS weren’t entirely happy with Leiter stepping down after the 2014 PGR, given that the SS wasn’t about the quality of the PGR itself. I had a lengthy reply from Carolyn Dicey Jennings that stressed the health issue. To quote some of the relevant parts:
I can see your perspective, David. I think you are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle, which is that the action needs to be immediate for the sake of Carrie, among others. […] Brian chose that moment to send emails to Carrie that were very damaging. Carrie tried to put that behind her, but the damaging content of those emails was made public by Brian very recently, further harming Carrie and her ability to work. Carrie is not the only one who has been harmed here, but the harm needs to be stopped now. […] The September Statement is an attempt, as I see it, to stop the harm as soon as possible. Allowing the 2014 PGR to continue would not honor that.
(The full reply is at the link above.)
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Ok, fair enough. In the post I detail my own reasons for signing it, and while I take them to be the most reasonable ones (unsurprisingly…), you are very right to point out that different people probably had different reasons to sign the statement.
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One rather important difference between this case and the Synthese case is that there was never any question that the alleged misconduct was directly related to the work the editors were doing on the journal, whereas that was disputed by many, including of course Leiter, in the other case: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/my-reply-to-simon-may.html
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It’s a fair point, but I actually don’t think the differences are this big in that respect either. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that BL’s personal ‘dislikes’ may make him not sufficiently neutral to be in charge of the PGR. Moreover, there is a worry in the other direction, namely that being in charge of the PGR was giving him powers that he then went on to misuse. So the situations are certainly not identical, but I do think there is a closer connection between his behavior and his ability to edit the PGR in a sufficiently neutral way. (Though that’s basically speculative; there is no evidence until now that he actually let his personal animosities influence how he manages the PGR. People working on French continental philosophy often point out how underrepresented this strand of philosophy is in the PGR, but that can be viewed as a philosophical decision by BL, not necessarily motivated by personal animosities.)
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Did Leiter make any (allegedly) false claims in support of the boycott of Synthese? If not, then there’s no analogy.
(To be clear, I am not defending Leiter’s threat to sue, which I find unconscionable.)
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I think Leiter made a number of unsubstantiated claims to support his boycott of Synthese, for example that the editors-in-chief were not apologizing out of vanity (why he thought he had access to their states of mind, I don’t know). (I was again caught up in the middle of this, as he used a remark of mine at a different blog, taken out of context, to substantiate his accusations of vanity.)
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The big difference between the current matter and the Synthese case is that the Synthese case was a matter of wide professional significance. Synthese is a widely read journal treated as a significant location for publication. If it is poorly run – especially if if is intellectually bankrupt – then that has wide impact on the profession. The fight between BL and CJ/JI is a personal matter blasted out on their respective blogs and presumably to their armies of Facebook friends. Despite all that noise, BL’s repugnant behavior has no immediate obvious significance for the wider profession. For those who do not know any of those involved, it seems to be little more than a personal disagreement between two senior philosophers with popular blogs.
And no I do not think that BL tries to sue every female philosopher who disagrees with him. He does patrol his sandbox, but again it’s a sandbox outside the professional arena – a blog and some stupid rankings.
This is not to excuse BL’s almost cruel behavior. I hope CJ/JI escape this unscathed. But, those are just good wishes for apparently nice enough people.
(I am not sure when self-published musings about conduct became the beating heart of academic philosophy, but so it seems to be going.)
If only we spent this much emotional and professional energy trying to do something about the sorry state of thd job market. A lot of people suffer a lot of emotional distress because of that.
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In my opinion, you fail to appreciate the huge impact that the PGR has on how the profession is organized, at least in the US and possibly other English-speaking countries. If there are reasons to believe that this impact is being negative, including on the sorry state of the job market (e.g. inflation of the importance of pedigree, at the expense of candidates from excellent schools which for whatever reason don’t rank highly in the PGR), then it becomes a matter of wider professional significance, not only an private feud between two well-connected philosophers. Ultimately, it all goes back to what happens to those who dare to express reservations towards the PGR and/or offer alternatives.
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I do not see how the PGR is bad for the job market, at least not in proportion to the significance people attach to this thing between BL and CI/JI.
Do you have any evidence that the PGR has made things worse than they were before the PGR?
Also this disagreement between two philosophers with massive social capital has nothing to do with croticizing the PGR, unless you disagree with CJ’s own claim that her “niceness” pledge had nothing to do with Leoter.
Really, what matters in our profession are things that have nothing to do with comparably rich, well-connected full professors yelling at each other. We should be talking about a lot else.
Let’s all pledge – A January Jeremiad! – to commit to doing something for the marginally employed in this profession!
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If you look at the ‘Categories’ word cloud to the right of this site you’ll quickly notice that NewAPPS has indeed been talking about a lot else, in particular about the situation of the marginally employed (e.g. adjuncts) as well as the situation of groups that are traditionally excluded (women, people of color, disabled etc.). (This observation applies well beyond NewAPPS contributors, obviously; lots of people are engaged in precisely these conversations.)
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“the step from the post being a defense of Carolyn to it being an attack on BL is a very substantive one, and yet he seems to be conflating the two things.”
In what way could the post be a defence of her, except by implicating that Leiter’s criticisms violated the terms of the pledge?
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I tend to agree with Anon Post Doc, and Concerned.
As I noted on Roberta’s thread, there are 3,000 BA conferring institutions in the US alone. Even if we assumed that all 50 ranked schools in PGR, and the 150 below them, were obsessed with PGR ratings and hired/organized in related manner, that would be 5% of the profession as a whole (in the US). The vast amount of hiring, or internal organization, in philosophy goes on with no thought of the PGR, BL, fights between philosophers at elite institutions, etc. Taken as a whole, all of this has little to do with the professional as a whole, or the professional lives of those in it, in the full sense of “as a professional as a whole.” This matters a lot to a small number of people, when taken in full context.
Moreover, though I share concerns about the relevance of the PGR system, I can’t imagine that abolishing the PGR would not simply result in a very similar way of assorting privilege by pedigree. Most of the schools in the top-50 would retain their halo effect because of the name of the institution. A graduate from Harvard, or Michigan, will continue to look impressive over a graduate from U of Southern Nowhere because it’s Harvard, or Michigan, not because they are ranked highly in the PGR. What might happen is that among the places that care about the PGR, there will be some reassortment on the basis of general “what’s the name” privilege as opposed to PGR-conferred privilege. Some will move up, some down, but in the end it will be “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
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I do not understand well the problem with the PGR because it is not clear what the problem is.
I think when someone is that offensive, as Brian Leiter was, for so little reason, and so superficial, because someone tried and did wrong with the PGR, it is not ok, to say the least.
honestly speaking, it is not like you feel like liking him when reading how he writes, right?
he was offensive with women, not even men.
or he makes no difference?
there is no justice on this planet. everybody lies, tries to make powerful friends, and go on with their own interest and what this involves.
I am very upset.
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There are clearly several connected issues in the vicinity here, but I think it’s worth keeping two of them separate: The September Statement was about inappropriate and damaging bullying behaviour by Brian Leiter. It gave the following reasoning: the reason Leiter isn’t just any random person on the internet is that he has extraordinary social power over the discipline of professional philosophy. The reason he has that power is the PGR. The September Statement was therefore a pledge not to contribute to that power via volunteer work. The September Statement had nothing whatsoever to do with whether the PGR is ultimately a good idea, or whether it is valuable, or whether it should continue. (This is something that turned off some people who might have signed but thought it didn’t go far enough in calling for an end to the PGR, and thus constituted a kind of implicit support for the PGR. This was a fallacious application of scalar implicature.)
I do think that these kinds of cultural matters are important in philosophy. It is of course true that Carrie and I are privileged in many important ways. That’s a lot of the reason why we feel able to stand up to abuses of power. Our hope is that we can do our part to change the culture for the better, so that those less able to fight these fights don’t have to.
Of course I also agree that there are other things one might worry about that are also important — even more important. But that doesn’t seem to me to be a reason not to talk about this one.
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The connection between BL’s email to CIJ and the PGR is not that BL wields power because he edits the PGR. It is that BL was responding to CIJ’s response to BL’s statements about criticisms of the PGR by CDJ.
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If the PGR has an effect on 50 large schools (and another 50 to 100 that would like to be ranked) that have large PhD programs that produce future generations, that employ a greater than average percentage of journal editors, it will have a huge ripple effect on the profession as a whole. A lot of people working at those 3000 institutions might like to move to a higher paying PGR school, for instance. So they will do what needs to be done to get there, which means creating publications that PGR reviewers like.
I grant that some schools will always have name brand recognition -Yale, say- that will provide prestige in the way that the PGR rankings provide prestige, but that doesn’t imply that the profession would be better off without the PGR’s distorting effects on what counts as good, prestigious philosophy. For instance, one way in which the PGR is problematic is that a few reviewers determine the rankings especially for the specialties. I believe there was one Kierkegaard expert and five Nietzsche scholars reviewing school’s prestigiousness for 19 century philosophy, for example. This can create a false impression that the best 19th century work is done on Nietzsche and not on Kierkegaard. Similar pushes away from continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, etc. are dangerous for the profession.
You can debate whether these negative effects occur, but the fact that they occur primarily to a subset of ranked and want-to-be-ranked schools and the fact that prestige will always exist in academia, is not relevant to the debate. As near as I can tell, anyway.
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I take the point that power reinforces power, that the powerful do what they can to maintain their prestige and position. So far as I can tell, this is one critique of the PGR, if not the main critique.
In the same vein, I wonder whether the opposition against the PGR is disinterested, as I am led to believe. In other words, I wonder about the motivations of individuals who oppose the PGR: would they have risen up against the PGR in the same manner had they come from these very prestigious programs themselves?
I would like to think that philosophers have the self-awareness and intellectual honesty to ask this of themselves.
P/S: For what it is worth, I have no associations with Leiterific programs.
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Thank you Catarina for replying. But I don’t understand when you say “there is no evidence until now that he actually let his personal animosities influence how he manages the PGR.” What is the “now” evidence you have in mind? Also, for Jonathan, I do not see how Leiter sending an obnoxious e-mail constitutes any kind of bullying of your wife, who has a prestigious Canada Research Chair, has tenure, and is basically someone over whom Leiter has no power at all.
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I’ve been getting a lot of anonymous comments that I deem problematic, e.g. personal criticism of the people involved, or speculations on their mindsets. I am not approving those. I’d be much more inclined to approve those comments if they were not anonymous.
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Just to clarify: with ‘until now’ I meant ‘to date’, i.e. as far as I know there is still no uncontroversial evidence that Leiter let his personal animosities interfere with his PGR business (though in the case of French continental philosophy, some people have argued otherwise).
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Although this extended episode has been widely presented as about Leiter’s making inappropriate personal criticisms, that narrative is at least a bit one sided, and in ways directly relevant for the topic of “ethical” and “professional” behavior ostensibly at issue.
For instance, Weinberg began his post on July 2 (linked in same day CDN post linked above in OP) by recounting his prior failed attempt to enter into the Philosophical Lexicon a name about Leiter, not roasting his philosophical views, but rather depicting him for his combining personal attacks with substantive criticisms.
Having just described his own attempt to caricature Leiter for his persona in a high profile satire site, indeed one linked by the PGR and hosted by its publisher, Weinberg states that nevertheless he is “not out to get Brian Leiter”. Yet Weinberg later made gratuitous use of an unflattering photo in breaking the news of Leiter’s stepping down from editorship of the PGR, and then depicted Leiter as the Grinch in reporting the news of his lawyer’s letter based on no more than the coincidence of the timing.
I am not sure I understand what the operating definition of “civility” is according to which Weinberg’s repeatedly lampooning Leiter in word and picture is “impersonal” or “kind”. Instead, it seems that the standards of the philosophy blogosphere are permeated with personalized criticisms on many sides.
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I think you make some important points here, although I wouldn’t go as far as saying that Weinberg is on a anti-Leiter crusade. But I’ve long opposed snark and other forms of ridicule as legitimate strategies against one’s ‘political opponents’ (a discussion I’ve had many times with previous NewAPPS bloggers). With respect to BL in particular, I have tried (though I’m not sure I always succeeded) not to resort to ridiculing him and instead to use real arguments.
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I appreciate that you have a different take on “snark” than some other bloggers, here and elsewhere. However, you do raise the important question of what are “legitimate strategies against one’s ‘political opponents’”. Critics of various blogs have accused them of engaging in moral posturing, blowing some normative issue out of proportion in order to alter the balance of power within academic philosophy.
For instance, some public responses to Leiter over Synthese, especially from the European formal philosophy community, accused him of imposing parochial concerns of American politics in an exaggerated manner over some editorial screw ups. As if the debate over teaching creationism in Texas were due to a dry theoretical journal edited by three philosophy professors from the European countries of Denmark, the Netherlands and, um, Texas.
Perhaps it is karma that Leiter fell victim to the culture of moralizing petitions that he helped foster in the blogosphere. But it isn’t clear to me that this is progress toward a new culture of kindness and inclusion rather than just fanning the flames of a professional culture of political antagonism and moral posturing. The PGR is at the center of all this since, as you say, the rankings of departments and subfields is a major battleground of academic conflict.
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‘this extended episode has been widely presented as about Leiter’s making inappropriate personal criticisms’
Has it? My impression is that it’s been widely presented as being about whether it’s okay to threaten to sue people who criticize your behavior. (There were at least some suggestions that Leiter’s original threat to sue was just a heavy-handed joke that misfired: I take it we can all accept at this point that it wasn’t.)
I think the reason that this debate has been presented in a one-sided way is that it is pretty one-sided.
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What Bill said. And I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the parties in question criticised Leiter’s behavior. At best, they criticized a kind of behavior which, apparently, Leiter takes himself to routinely exhibit, or with which he takes himself to be singularly identified.
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Bill’s comment illustrates Somebody Ese’s point about one-sidedness very well. Leiter didn’t threaten to sue anyone simply for criticizing his behavior. Saying that is misrepresenting what happened. He didn’t threaten to sue McAfee or Richard Heck, did he, though they both criticizied him? He didn’t threaten to sue Jenkins and Ichikawa for accusing him of bullying either. Instead, he threatened to sue Jenkins and Ichikawa for saying something factual but according to Leiter false, namely, that his e-mail caused “very serious” problems for Jenkins, such as an inability to work and medical problems. And, according to the letter he posted, he offered not to sue in return for an apology, which Jenkins and Ichikawa rejected. That is what actually happened, isn’t it? (Also, he has not threatened to sue for being called unprofessional by Jenkins, which was what his July e-mail referenced, but is no part of the actual lawyer letter he posted. I still think the July e-mail was pretty obviously a joke, making fun of Jenkins.)
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“extended episode” refers to the sequence of events narrated in the OP, running for over half a year initiated by CDJ criticism of PGR.
Clearly the parties involved have criticized BL, I quoted Weinberg (who in doing so engages in similar behavior), and of course Ichikawa co-authored a statement critical of BL.
The defamation issue, as I understand it, is over whether BL caused CIJ acute distress rather than any such distress being caused by a pre existing condition.
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As far as I know, BL threatened to sue and even sued many others before, in particular people he had polemics with coming from the law world. Not that I know anything about defamation laws myself, but it seems clear that certain circumstances are needed for someone to have a case, and BL obviously knows that. So this might explain why McAfee and Heck are not being threatened with lawsuits.
And do you wish to imply that Jenkins and Ichikawa were unreasonable when they declined the ‘offer’ to publish an ‘apology’? If they think they have nothing to apologize for, that’s not really a reasonable option, is it?
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‘I still think the July e-mail was pretty obviously a joke, making fun of Jenkins.’
If the fact that Leiter has now gone ahead and sued doesn’t shake your confidence that the email where he originally made that possibility salient was just intended in fun even a little bit, the problem may not be that other people are being one-sided.
As to whether Leiter threatened to sue anyone else: given that many people in the philosophy profession seem to accept the (to my mind absurd) view that letting other people know that one has received a threat of legal action is an unconscionable breach of the threatener’s privacy, it seems to me that we’re in no position to know. (If I remember correctly there’s been at least some evidence presented that he did threaten legal action against John McCumber, though, as I’m sure people will be quick to point out, McCumber is not a professional philosopher.)
For what it’s worth I’d be quite surprised to discover that Jenkins was the only person o have received a lawyer’s letter from someone representing Brian Leiter.
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“Instead, he threatened to sue Jenkins and Ichikawa for saying something factual but according to Leiter false, namely, that his e-mail caused “very serious” problems for Jenkins”
And how, exactly, does Leiter know this to be false? What grounds does he have for asserting that it’s false? For that matter, what grounds do you (or any of us) have for accepting his assertion that its false, aside from the fact that he has asserted it?
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well, what grounds we have for believing Jenkins besides the fact that she asserted it? If we all started to make public whose behavior made us feel bad and unable to work – well, many a grad student could say so about a number of advisers or professors, no? In any case, none of us had any grounds for believing anything other than the fact that the two sides asserted things.
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“well, what grounds we have for believing Jenkins besides the fact that she asserted it?”
First, Jenkins speaks from a position of epistemic authority in regard to her own experience that Leiter doesn’t.
Second, a significant number of her immediate colleagues (i.e., the initial signatories of the September Statement) apparently concurred with her assessment. (Hence, their willingness to serve as signatories).
Both these points provide me, at least, with reasons for believing what Jenkins said above and beyond the fact that Jenkins said it.
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“Somebody Else” is really something else if he expects anyone to swallow his suggested equivalence between Leiter’s years-long record of objectionable behavior (including countless insults, hostile emails, threats legal and otherwise, an outing of a gay man, an outing of an anonymous blogger, etc.) and my gentle joking around.
To address the more specific episodes mentioned:
– “Weinberg began his post on July 2… by recounting his prior failed attempt to enter into the Philosophical Lexicon a name about Leiter, not roasting his philosophical views, but rather depicting him for his combining personal attacks with substantive criticisms.” Seriously, my giving a funny name to a rhetorical move Leiter has taken a particular pride in not only exhibiting but defending is objectionable how? By the way, Leiter himself didn’t find it objectionable.
– “Weinberg later made gratuitous use of an unflattering photo in breaking the news of Leiter’s stepping down from editorship of the PGR.” I agree that intentionally selecting and publicizing an unflattering photo of someone is a bad thing to do, but I deny that I did that. Judge for yourself: http://dailynous.com/2014/10/10/leiter-to-step-down-from-pgr-the-new-consensus/ . I found an image of Leiter on the web, edited away the background, and then, on the off chance that people might think I chose an unflattering picture, applied a distorting filter to obscure details and make it more artful looking. The result does not look unflattering, in my opinion. I picked the photo because it sort of looks like he is waving goodbye in it, which matched the theme of the post.
– “then depicted Leiter as the Grinch in reporting the news of his lawyer’s letter based on no more than the coincidence of the timing.” Again, I don’t know what to say here, except that you must be a very sensitive soul if this strikes you as a problem. And if using an image of a Christmas-themed cartoon villain in a post reporting a legal threat delivered close to Christmastime seems to you comparable to the kinds of behavior of Leiter’s that people have been pointing to recently — Leiter questioned a young assistant professor’s suitability as a philosopher on his blog in front of the whole world, but Weinberg used a picture of the Grinch — then I just don’t know what to say. It strikes me as bullshit.
Some readers probably think “Somebody Else” is Leiter. It’s not. I would bet on it. If you think he cares about this kind of stuff, and if this is the stuff you care about, then you aren’t paying attention.
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So it’s a he-said, she-said situation, except that the claim in question is about her own experience. Suspending judgment would be an epistemic injustice.
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A friendly point of clarification for Bill at 29. John McCumber is most definitely a professional philosopher, even though his primary institutional appointment at UCLA is in the Department of Germanic Languages.
http://www.germanic.ucla.edu/people/faculty/mccumber/
“After receiving my Ph.D. in Philosophy and Greek from the University of Toronto, I taught at Northwestern University, The Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and the University of Michigan–Dearborn. I have authored six books, including Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom Reason (Chicago, 1989); The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Northwestern, 1993) Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger’s Challenge to Western Philosophy (Indiana, 1999, winner of a Choice book award); Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Northwestern, 2000); and Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy (Indiana, 2005; also winner of a Choice book award). I have also written over 70 articles and reviews. In 1994-96 I held the Koldyke Distinguished Teaching Professorship at Northwestern University.”
Similarly, I am a professional philosopher, even though my primary appointment at LSU is in the Department of French Studies. (I have had a courtesy appointment in Philosophy for the last three years, but I did not suddenly become a professional philosopher at that point; I had been one all along.)
There are other such instances of someone being a professional philosopher despite not having a primary appointment in a philosophy department. The most prominent of them is Judith Butler, but I’m sure readers can come up with other examples.
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If only there were some formal process of adjudication to sort out whether assertions made by someone taking legal action are well-founded…
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The claim made on DN was that one should behave in a civil and respectful manner towards colleagues in the profession. JW did not behave in this manner, and indeed did not do so in the same breath as urging the same against BL. This remains the case even though BL has a longer track record and has said worse things. Choosing a picture of BL waving, to depict him leaving the PGR, comes across as tacky gloating by a rival blogger who engaged with others to interfere with BL’s editorship of the PGR. Claiming that any of this is connected with Christmas is bullshit, that is just a rhetorical trick against evaluating BL’s case on its merits.
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I’m getting a lot of comments along the lines ‘how do we know that what Carrie Jenkins said is true’, which seem to me to be totally unproductive and speculative. As I said in the post, the whole point is precisely that it does not matter to what extent Carrie was or was not affected by Leiter’s email, and in any case none of us is in a position to say anything sensible about it. So I’m not approving those comments anymore. (Again, the fact that they are all anonymous does not help.)
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There is such a process, David, as I suspect you know. 😉
But part of the discussion here rests on the claim that Leiter’s actions in threatening suit are uncollegial, and that discussion need not wait the results of the trial (that indeed may never come).
What is collegial is more restrictive than what is legal; it is within Leiter’s legal rights to have his lawyer write letters threatening suit over a matter such as his exchanges with Jenkins, but it is certainly open to me to say that is wrong of him to do so in any sense of collegiality that values reasoned discourse and avoids legal bluster.
This Twitter exchange gets to the heart of things: https://twitter.com/drkoepsell/status/550678464010158080
Brian Leiter writes here that “Law is the only civilized form of dispute resolution, isn’t it? What else there? Happy New Year!” https://twitter.com/BrianLeiter/status/550466148446531584
To which David Koepsell replies: “arbitration…. mediation…. open debate…. discussion…. the list is lengthy. #mostpeopledontsue” https://twitter.com/drkoepsell/status/550678464010158080
By the way, Koepsell has the JD and PhD, both from SUNY Buffalo: http://www.davidkoepsell.com/
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I agree with Catarina that it does not matter to what extent CJ was, or was not, affected by BL’s inappropriate conduct. My apologies for whatever role my comments played in turning the discussion to such topics.
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Here is one thing Leiter has said about whether his action is “uncollegial” —
“Someone…claimed it violates “collegial obligations” to challenge suspected tortious wrongdoing by hiring a lawyer. I confess I laughed out loud at this. I have collegial obligations to my colleagues, not to people I’ve never met…”
Does he have collegial obligations to those he has never met?
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David Wallace, adding to what John said, isn’t the point rather not about adjudicating the claims themselves, but about the justification for initiating the process of adjudication in the first place?
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I don’t necessarily disagree. I’m commenting rather narrowly on the anonymous P2, who asked rhetorically what grounds Leiter had for making the claims his lawyer made. The point being that whatever those grounds are, they’ll have to be established – or not – in court. That’s independent of the question of whether it’s appropriate for him to sue in the first place, on which I don’t have a very settled opinion (although I don’t really see a collegiality issue: I owe collegiality to my actual institutional colleagues, and perhaps to co-authors and the like, but I don’t see that I have a collegiality responsibility to philosophers in general that’s any stronger than whatever I owe to fellow citizens or fellow humans).
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David makes explicit the view I found telling about Leiter’s remark in the 12/24 post, namely, that collegiality is reserved for institutional colleagues (and perhaps research colleagues elsewhere). He and Brian both say they do not “owe” or have “obligations” of collegiality to other people in philosophy (or, I assume, in other academic disciplines).
Surely this is in some sense perfectly true as a matter of fact: the internet and the blogospherical conversations it supports are relatively new, too new for professional norms for them to have emerged. But just as surely we in philosophy are living through a moment in which we are all discovering why social norms do eventually emerge for new kinds of activity and organization. I say emerge, because the simultaneous calls for and reservations about civility codes, along with individual resolutions (like Jenkins’s), and the disapprobation people in the discipline express about some webby actions and expressions, mean that we are in fact developing these norms (and in my view should probably not have that process prematurely curtailed by statutes, or codes, enacted by professional organizations).
So while it will never be the case that any of us will “owe” or have any “obligation” to deliver any collegiality to anyone outside our own institutions, any more than we have an obligation to make our nouns agree in number with our verbs, some day it will be true that it either will–or will not–be socially tolerable for members of the profession to threaten to sue each other over the things we say on the internet. The norms for internet-based philosophical discourse will–or will not–make threatening to file such claims subject to the social disapprobation similar to that I would face by standing up and yelling angrily at someone during the discussion after a conference paper. I don’t owe it to anyone to ask my question nicely, to modulate my voice, or to preserve a generally congenial demeanor–after all, the speaker is likely employed by another institution and I don’t know her from Eve–but if I do this even once, I will do something to my career that is difficult to undo. Those norms are in place–they work. These, for the internet–they are works-in-progress.
For me, the people in philosophy I have come to know over the internet constitute some kind of extension of the people I meet at conferences or places I give papers. They–you all!–make up a particular social group, one specific to philosophy, that is different than the group of citizens or humans I organize with differently. I don’t “owe” you collegiality, but I wish for it for us all, once we work it out.
“The organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be called ‘the generalized other.’ The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community. Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters–as an organized process or social activity–into the experience of any one of the individual members of it.”
“During the process of adjustment that takes place by reflective intelligence, the individual must occupy two systems at once–the old system, the world that was there and taken for granted, the generalized other or the Me, and that new order constructed by virtue of the activity of the creative I, an order which will lead to adjustment and enable the individual to continue in a new system.”
“The social character of the universe we find in the situation in which the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity of being several things at once.”
–G. H. Mead.
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Yes, you put your finger exactly on the crux of the matter. Ultimately, a lot of these internet controversies stem from a lack of clear (even if implicit) conventions on what counts as appropriate behavior for internet interaction. I often say that a blog post (and the comments provoked by it) is like a huge seminar room, but it seems that some people don’t think that the collegiality we are expected to extend to people we share seminar rooms with (be they our direct colleagues or not) carries over to discussions on the internet. (I think by and large it does.) In over 4 years of blogging, I’ve been faced with a number of challenges on how to behave in particular situations/interactions towards readers and other bloggers, and while I may have developed something like a personal code of conduct, there is as of yet no clear consensus in the community on these matters. (Indeed, there have been many discussions among NewAPPS bloggers on how to handle certain situations!)
All this to say that I also disagree with Leiter and David Wallace (if I understood him correctly) when they say that we have no obligations of collegiality towards members of the community at large, with whom we have no official links.
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If I were the sort of person whose labour was being solicited for compiling the Leiter reports – I’m not – the fact that that the person soliciting it felt they had no obligations of collegiality either to me or to the people whose work I was evaluating would count as a fairly strong consideration against doing so.
That’s something independent of any effects that any particular piece of a person’s self-licensed behavior might have on another person (although examples of such effects might be useful as a way of explaining why it was a consideration.)
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David Wallace seems to be right that if Leiter’s case stands up in court, we will have reason to believe his assertions. Of course, lots of cases get settled out of court, and lots of legal strategies are aimed at getting people to settle out of court, and their success need not depend only on the truth of claims being made: other considerations, including cost, convenience, the desire not to have aspects of one’s private life made public, and so on.
Wallace’s comment might be taken as a useful reminder that unleDavid Wallace seems to be right that if Leiter’s case stands up in court, we will have reason to believe his assertions. Of course, lots of cases get settled out of court, and lots of legal strategies are aimed at getting people to settle out of court, and their success need not depend only on the truth of claims being made: other considerations, including cost, convenience, the desire not to have aspects of one’s private life made public, and so
There is, of course, an asymmetry here: we don’t normally require someone to establish their case in court before we believe their claims about their own mental state , and I suspect we shouldn’t in this casess and until Leiter’s case is supported in court, we don’t have much reason to believe his allegations.
There is, of course, an asymmetry here: we don’t normally require someone to establish their case in court before we believe their claims about their own mental state. I think we shouldn’t require it in this case either.
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It is amusing to note that an attempt to show me to be “incompetent” as a lawyer for suggesting that alternative forms of extra-legal dispute resolution are available backfired in his face: Check out @BrianLeiter’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/BrianLeiter/status/551898813271924736?s=09
Check out @drkoepsell’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/drkoepsell/status/551937422393896960?s=09 Check out @drkoepsell’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/drkoepsell/status/551954574236737537?s=09
Check out @drkoepsell’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/drkoepsell/status/551954791946276865?s=09
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To Catarina: My “I don’t really see” was intentionally hedged: perhaps there is some reason for special collegiality here, but I haven’t seen a satisfactory case made.
I should say that “collegiality” doesn’t seem the same to me as “norms of conversation”. There are norms of how to behave in a seminar, but they apply equally to everyone in the seminar (including journalist or other non-academic visitor), not differentially according to whether the seminar participant is a philosopher (or other academic) or not. Similarly there are (different, and inchoate, and evolving. and blog-dependent) norms of conversation on blogs, but again they seem to apply equally to everyone participating (always assuming that they themselves adhere to the norms).
(Is there a norm of conversation for seminars that says that you don’t take legal action on the basis of what someone says, and that one might imagine extending to blogs? I’ve never heard anyone threaten to sue on the basis of a seminar comment, but I’ve never heard anyone say anything in a seminar that might justify suing! In the extreme case where someone repeatedly used seminar comments to accuse me of having bribed my way into my job, I don’t think suing would be unreasonable – but then that accusation would already place the speaker outside the seminar norms themselves.)
In any case, Leiter’s threatened lawsuit isn’t in response to any comment in an ongoing (seminar or blog) conversation but to a publicly made announcement. Assuming that there are any such announcements that would justify legal action, my point is that I don’t see why a given announcement would be fair game for a lawsuit if it was made by a journalist or businessman but not if it was made (with comparable visibility and consequence) by an academic philosopher. (But I do see why it might not be fair game if it was made by a colleague at my own institution: there might be other, internal, ways to reach agreement, and we have an ongoing relationship to consider – though in practice something drastic enough to justify legal action would probably break that relationship anyway.)
Put it this way: “collegiality” only seems to matter here to someone who thinks that Leiter is not justified in suing, but would be justified if the September Statement had originated out of an interaction with Rebecca Schuman rather than Carrie Jenkins. But does anyone really think that?
To Bill: I think collegiality in the sense relevant here is distinct from general obligation to the profession: the sort relevant for writing references, reviewing papers and the like. That feels like doing one’s share of our general endeavour, not behaving in a particular way to individuals. (I concede that, in making that general endeavour broader than a particular institution, it probably conveys to some extent on all academics in your field – though not all academics period – some level of colleague status – but not, I think, enough to be salient here.)
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As someone who is on the job market for the fourth time with no tenure-track job, this flame war between full professors and their supporters is so alien to my experience right now it feels like I’m living in an absurdist film. If someone were to find these posts in a hundred years no doubt they’d wonder why philosophers were fiddling while the discipline burned.
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