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    • Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the APA’s “Code of Conduct”

      by Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson

      A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which together amplified what many viewed—rightly, in our estimation—as a widespread and endemic culture of hostility, predation, exploitation, and intimidation within the profession.  Shortly thereafter, in March 2014, we co-authored a piece entitled “Please Do NOT Revise Your Tone,” articulating our concerns about the problematic effects of tone-policing, generally, and about the drafting and institution of a “Code of Conduct” by the APA, specifically.  In that piece, we argued that there was good reason to worry that such a Code would:

      1) impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to "fit in" on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority) groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession. 

      The Executive Board of the APA subsequently decided in favor of producing the document and, earlier this week, published the final version of the discipline’s official “Code of Conduct” here.

      Reading that document over, our original worries remain unassuaged and unabated, if not also intensified. We are especially concerned now that this quasi-official document—which elaborates a set of norms, but does not include any mechanisms for enforcement, adjudication, or sanction—will inevitably be used at the local (department-, college-, or university) level in unofficial, ad-hoc ways to undermine or sabotage already vulnerable members of the profession. Worse, we worry that this document will provide pretext for attempts to pressure APA members by complaining to their employers that they have in some instance or another behaved ‘unprofessionally.’ We recognize that any law or regulative code as such allows for the possibility of perverse application, but we maintain that the current iteration of this Code of Conduct is particularly susceptible to manipulation for a number of reasons.

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    • Quiet Neoliberalism: K-12 Edition

      One of the important parts in understanding neoliberalism as a particular dispositive of power (or perhaps a mode of biopower – that sort of distinction doesn’t matter here) lies in understanding the various techniques it deploys.  After all, there is no “neoliberalism” or “neoliberal power” existing in the abstract; as Foucault repeatedly demonstrates, power can only be fully understood by digging down to the mircro-level, to all the little practices and techniques that add up to a particular social regime of power.  Attention to these details has been one of my interests  for a while (for example, in the case of privacy notices, or the emergence of best practices).

       At least since Althusser, we’ve been accustomed to recognize the schools as part of the ideological state apparatus, and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish underscored the point.  The locus classicus of neoliberalism in K-12 education is of course the rise of standardized testing regimes such as those imposed by No Child Left Behind.  Another area of focus has been the rise of semi-privatized charter schools.  Here, I want to take note of another, more subtle: the use of online homework assignments.  Recall that one of the central aspects of neoliberalism at work is the erasure of the work/home boundary and the devolution of technological minutiae to employees; the result is what Ian Bogost calls “hyper-employment,” and the necessary parallel rise of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs,” a phenomenon brought about by the fact that we don’t actually have 24 hours of useful work a day to do. On the job, workers are subject to nearly unlimited surveillance, and things like employee wellness programs extend that surveillance into the home.  It is only to be expected that this surveillant, time-wasting product of the neoliberal thought collective will be visited on our children.

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    • Tenure-Track Philosophy Jobs vs. Philosophy PhD Graduates

      How has the academic job market for philosophers changed in the recent past? I noted last year that it looked as though fewer tenure-track or equivalent jobs were being offered year to year from 2013 to 2015. This job market has just started, and if we look at the period of August 1st to October 20th in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, 2016 seems no worse off than 2015, but both years have fewer jobs listed in that period than in the previous two. To get a more complete picture, I decided to compare tenure-track jobs listed over the full year, from January 1st to December 31st, to the listed graduates in APDA from 2013 to 2016. Two things are worth noting here. First, 2016 is not yet complete, so there are fewer jobs listed in that year for that reason alone. (I suspect its numbers will end up being similar to those for 2015.) Second, PhilJobs has a great many job listings, but not every job listing, so the number of tenure-track jobs are likely somewhat higher in reality (but I do not have an estimate of how much higher). Keeping those details in mind, this comparison doesn't look too bad at first, with 1,486 graduates to 939 jobs, or a TT placement rate that could be as high as 63% (if all of those jobs went to graduates of that time period, which is very unlikely as many of these jobs are "open rank" searches). 

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    • Storytelling in Philosophy Class

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      One of my regular TAs, Chris McVey, uses a lot of storytelling in his teaching. About once a week, he’ll spend ten minutes sharing a personal story from his life, relevant to the class material. He’ll talk about a family crisis or about his time in the U.S. Navy, connecting it back to the readings from the class.

      At last weekend’s meeting of the Minorities And Philosophy group at Princeton, I was thinking about what teaching techniques philosophers might use to appeal to a broader diversity of students, and “storytime with Chris” came to mind. The more I think about it, the more I find to like about it.

      Here are some thoughts.

      * Students are hungry for stories, and rightly so. Philosophy class is usually abstract and impersonal, or when not abstract focused on toy examples or remote issues of public policy. A good story, especially one that is personally meaningful to the teacher, leaps out and captures attention. People in general love stories and are especially ready for them after long dry abstractions and policy discussions. So why not harness that? But furthermore, storytelling gives real shape and flesh to the abstract stick figures of philosophical abstraction. Most abstract principles only get their full meaning when we see how they play out in real cases. Kant might say “act on that maxim that you can will to be a universal law” or Mengzi might say “human nature is good” — but what do such claims really amount to? Students rightly feel at sea unless they are pulled away from toy examples and into the complexity of real life. Although it’s tempting to think that the real philosophical force is in the abstract principles and that storytelling is just needless frill and packaging, I think that the reverse might be closer to the truth: The heart of philosophy is in how we engage our minds when given real, messy examples, and the abstractions we derive from cases always partly miss the point.

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    • Case Study for the Academic Boycott Question: North Carolina’s HB2

      This piece is in response to the discussion over at Daily Nous here.  You should read it first; I’m posting here partly because what I’ve got to say is longer than would reasonably fit into a comment, and partly because I want to think a bit about how difficult the question of whether to launch a boycott is, and Justin wanted to avoid that topic (I may be a little slow in approving comments the next couple of days, be patient).  Since I live in Charlotte, NC, I do however think my subject position gives me some space for speaking on the topic.  And to be honest, I have very mixed feelings – David Wallace’s first comment on the Daily Nous post (that we need to know the details) seems right to me.  Here’s an example of why: One might boycott Charlotte on either of two grounds: the police shooting of Lamont Scott, or the state’s passage of HB2.  I want to leave aside the police shooting for the moment, because the politics behind HB2 lend support to the difficulty of deciding whether to boycott, and if so, what to boycott (plus, police shootings are an aspect of the boycott idea, and it remains to be seen whether the protests in Charlotte manage to get anyone’s sustained attention about the city’s deep racial problems).

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    • On the Police Shooting in Charlotte, and being Ordered to Remove a Post

      For those who haven’t been following the news, there was a police shooting in Charlotte the night before last.  The facts of the case are still being investigated: the police claim that the black man who was shot had a gun; his family says he had a book.  I’m not sure the distinction matters, as North Carolina is an open carry state, so “he had a gun” isn’t obviously relevant.  There were violent protests both last night and the night before.  Yesterday afternoon, I put the following statement on the Ethics Center’s webpage (including the italicized portion marking it as my own).  I woke up this morning to an email ordering me to take it down, and to call my dean.  I am not going to die on this hill, so I removed the post.  But we live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

      I reproduce the statement in its exact form below, in case someone may find it useful. Systemic violence against people of color is worse than the loss of our universities – including public ones, as I was sternly informed UNC Charlotte is – as places of intellectual engagement.  But the latter is not trivial or insignificant, as the steady collapse of meaningful public discourse is a disaster for any viable understanding of democracy.

      UPDATE (9/22): There is dashcam footage of the shooting, which the CMPD has.  The family has seen the video, and wants it made public.  Earlier in the day, the CMPD chief had declared that the video would not be made public, because "The video does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun."  Unless this is a misstatement (but this is the exact quote I have seen, in several sources), this means that the CMPD Chief has essentially refused to release the video on the grounds that it does not clearly exonerate his officer.  Someone please show me how I am misreading this statement!   In any event, there are already too many issues to discuss here, but the national conversation has to include discussion about what to do with video footage of shootings.  North Carolina has passed a law that generally suppresses the public availability of that video.  It takes effect Oct. 1.  I do not know what the legal situation with the footage is now, but the conflict between the CMPD Chief and the family on whether the video should be released is important.

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    • How Often Do Mainstream Anglophone Philosophers Cite Non-Anglophone Sources?

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Spoiler Alert: Not much!

      I estimate that 97% of citations in the most prestigious English-language philosophy journals are to works originally written in English. In other words, the entire history of philosophy not written in English (Plato, Confucius, Ibn Rushd, Descartes, Wang Yangming, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc., on into the 21st century) is referenced in only 3% of the citations in leading Anglophone philosophy journals.

      Let me walk you through the process by which I came to these numbers, then give you some breakdowns.

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    • APDA Update

      APDA has released this year's APA report and has added an application to the website (but we are still working on its auto-update feature, so the data it represents is a few days old as of today). In keeping with our program-specific reports released in April, here are some basic charts on the programs we covered at that time. These are raw numbers for graduates between 2012 and 2016, with only the APDA database numbers reflected in the first two graphs (here and here), whereas the third graph (here) makes use of external graduation data in its "unknown" category (see the note on the 4th graph for details). At the bottom of the page is a sortable chart with percentages for these categories. We have not yet started checking new data (program representatives have added over 400 graduates since August 15th), so there may be some errors (including those noted here). We are currently working on writing up some results from the survey into one or more papers, which should be available sometime in early 2017. Feedback is welcome!

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    • Why Faculty Lock-Outs Are Irresponsible And Inappropriate

      By: Samir Chopra

      In response to my previous post making note of the lock-out of faculty at Long Island University (LIU), a Facebook friend wrote on my page:

      So, I don’t understand. What makes university professors any different than people who work any other job? If you don’t like the pay, or don’t like the working conditions, simply go somewhere else. An employeer prohibiting someone from coming into their workplace who doesn’t agree to the terms of their employment is immenently fair. I’m sure the employeer (whatever, whoever, and for whatever industry) has made a calculated position to turn away their employees because they weren’t worth the compensation they demanded. The employees may not feel that way, and maybe they can come to an agreement, but maybe not and both sides go their own merry way.

      Because students are people, not products; because education is not a commodity. That’s the short answer, and it should be enough. But let’s look a little closer.

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    • Long Island University’s Labor Day Gift To The Nation: A Faculty Lock-Out

      By: Samir Chopra

      Some university administrators manage to put up a pretty good front when it comes to maintaining the charade that they care about the education of their students–they dip into their accessible store of mealy mouthed platitudes and dish them out every turn, holding their hands over their hearts as paeans to the virtues of edification are sung by their choirs of lackeys. Some fail miserably at even this act of misrepresentation and are only too glad to make all too clear their bottom line is orthogonal to academics. Consider, for instance, the folks at Long Island University who have kicked off the new academic semester in fine style:

      Starting September 7, the first day of the fall semester at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, classes will be taught entirely by non-faculty members—not because the faculty are on strike, but because on the Friday before Labor Day, the administration officially locked out all 400 members of the Long Island University Faculty Federation (LIUFF), which represents full-time and adjunct faculty.

      Yessir, what a fine Labor Day gift to the nation this makes.  When contract negotiations with your workers fail, well, you don’t continue trying to find an agreement in good faith; you just lock them out¹ and replace them with grossly under-qualified folks instead:

      Provost Gale Haynes, LIU’s chief legal counsel, will be teaching Hatha yoga….Rumor has it that Dean David Cohen, a man in his 70s, will be taking over ballet classes scheduled to be taught by Dana Hash-Campbell, a longtime teacher who was previously a principal dancer and company teacher with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

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