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    • Zubik v. Burwell: out with a whimper, not a bang

      The Supreme Court today issued a much-anticipated ruling in Zubik v. Burwell, the latest lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive provision.  The ACA requires that insurance plans offer contraceptive coverage at zero cost, and includes a clause that employers who object to providing such coverage can request exemption from it, in which case the insurance company provides the contraception coverage, and the government pays them.  In the current case, the nonprofit petitioners said that even being required to request exemption from the contraception mandate substantially burdened their religious freedom, since it would make them "complicit" in their employees' acquisition of contraception.  As I do every time someone mentions this case, I'll point out now that these employees also receive wages from the company, which could also be used to purchase contraception.  So that theory of the case would imply that wages are immoral.  Given the political climate in the U.S., I should probably add that I consider this argument a reductio. 

      Now we know how the Hollow Claim ends. After oral argument the Court requested additional briefs to see, essentially, whether the parties could work things out themselves, providing both contraception and religious accommodati0n.  Both parties submitted supplemental briefs indicating they could, and so today the SCOTUS ordered them to get busy on that project:

      "Following oral argument, the Court requested supplemental briefing from the parties addressing “whether contraceptive coverage could be provided to petitioners’ employees, through petitioners’ insurance companies, without any such notice from petitioners.” Post, p. ___. Both petitioners and the Government now confirm that such an option is feasible. Petitioners have clarified that their religious exercise is not infringed where they “need to do nothing more than contract for a plan that does not include coverage for some or all forms of contraception,” even if their employees receive cost-free contraceptive coverage from the same insurance company. Supplemental Brief for Petitioners 4. The Government has confirmed that the challenged procedures “for employers with insured plans could be modified to operate in the manner posited in the Court’s order while still ensuring that the affected women receive contraceptive coverage seamlessly, together with the rest of their health coverage.” Supplemental Brief for Respondents 14–15.

      In light of the positions asserted by the parties in their supplemental briefs, the Court vacates the judgments below and remands to the respective United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Fifth, Tenth, and D. C. Circuits. Given the gravity of the dispute and the substantial clarification and refinement in the positions of the parties, the parties on remand should be afforded an opportunity to arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered by petitioners’ health plans “receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage.” Id., at 1. We anticipate that the Courts of Appeals will allow the parties sufficient time to resolve any outstanding issues between them."

      In the meantime, it is worth pointing out that this is an exercise in the Courts ordering biopolitics to happen, and rejecting efforts to get out of that process through judicial fiat.  I mention that only because (shameless self-promotion), I think the logic, if not the language, is on the general same page as how the Courts handled school desegregation in its heyday: the Court sets the outer parameters, but basically they want a policy-making process to happen, if with juridical supervision.

    • The Gender Situation Is Different in Philosophy

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      As Carolyn Dicey Jennings and I have documented, academic philosophy in the United States is highly gender skewed, with gender ratios more characteristic of engineering and the physical sciences than of the humanities and social sciences. However, unlike engineering and the physical sciences, philosophy appears to have stalled out in its progress toward gender parity.

      Some of the best data on gender in U.S. academia are from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED). In an earlier post, I analyzed the philosophy data since 1973, creating this graph:

      The quadratic fit (green) is statistically much better than the linear fit (red; AICc .996 vs .004), meaning that it is highly unlikely that the apparent flattening is chance variation from a linear trend.

      Since the 1990s, the gender ratio of U.S. PhDs in philosophy has hovered steadily around 25-30%.

      The SED site contains data on gender by broad field, going back to 1979. It is interesting to juxtapose these data with the philosophy data. (The philosophy data are noisier, as you’d expect, due to smaller numbers relative to the SED’s broad fields.)

      The overall trend is clear: Although philosophy’s percentages are currently similar to the percentages in engineering and physical sciences, the trend in philosophy has flattened out in the 21st century, while engineering and the physical sciences continue to make progress toward gender parity. All the broad areas show roughly linear upward trends, except for the humanities which appears to have flattened at approximately parity.

      These data speak against two reactions that I have sometimes heard to Carolyn’s and my work on gender disparity in philosophy. One reaction is “well, that just shows that philosophy is sociologically more like engineering and the physical sciences than we might have previously thought”. Another is “although philosophy has recently stalled in its progress toward gender parity, that is true in lots of other disciplines as well”. Neither claim appears to be true.

      [I am leaving for Hong Kong later today, so comment approval might be delayed, but please feel free to post your thoughts and I’ll approve them and respond when I can!]

      [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

    • Dept. of Justice Threatens UNC over NC’s anti-LGBT Law

      When the North Carolina legislature passed – in 12 hours from start to governor's signature – HB2, consigning transgender individuals to the bathrooms of their "biological sex" as listed on their birth certificate, UNC''s new system president Margaret Spellings issued a prosaic statement that "university institutions must require" restroom access policies that comply with the law.

      The US Dept. of Justice, following its letters to the governor, has now sent a letter to Spellings and other top UNC administrators informing them that HB2's bathroom provision violates both Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act.  The system apparently nets somewhere around $1 billion in Title IX money annually.  The letter does not (as popular media tends to report) threaten that money directly – but it does threaten to get a court order forcing the system not to enforce HB2.

    • Reading List: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

      In critical work on neoliberalism, there’s probably two or three main schools of thought.  One approaches the subject as a matter of political economy.  David Harvey, whose analysis is explicitly Marxian, is the most well-known figure in this approach; another prominent author in that camp is Philip Mirowksi.  The other major school is broadly Foucauldian, taking its cue from Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures.  A third group, represented by autonomist Marxists like Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, and of course Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, attempt a synthesis (I won’t have much to say about them here).  All sides have methodological critiques of the other; here I just want to note that the Foucauldians generally tend to be concerned with a topic that seems neglected in political economy: granted that neoliberalism expects us all to behave as homo economicus, defined as a risk-calculating, utility-maximizing investor in himself (gendered pronoun deliberate), how does neoliberalism get people to actually do this?  After all, it is not a natural human set of behaviors.  More specifically, not just how does neoliberalism get people to do this, but how does it get them to do so enthusiastically, treating the definition of the human as homo economicus as the true, correct and only way to be human?  In other words, Foucauldians insist that critiques of neoliberalism need an account of subjectification.

      Wendy Brown’s new(ish) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015) makes a substantial contribution to the Foucauldian camp by focusing on “Foucault’s innovation in conceiving neoliberalism as a political rationality” (120).  The political rationality is “governance” as “the decentering of the state and other centers of rule and tracks in its place the specifically modern dispersal of socially organizing powers throughout the order and of powers ‘conducting’ and not only constraining or overtly regulating the subject” (125).

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    • Orange on the Seder Plate

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      … and celebrating the death of children?

      “Does it matter if the story of the escape from Egypt is historically true?” Rabbi Suzanne Singer asked us, her congregants, on Saturday, at the Passover Seder dinner at Temple Beth El in Riverside.

      We’re a liberal Reform Judaism congregation. Everyone except me seemed to be shaking their heads, no, it doesn’t matter. I was nodding, however. Yes, it does matter.

      Rabbi Singer walked over to me with the microphone, “Okay, Eric, why does it matter?”

      I say “we” are a Reform Judaism congregation, but let me be clear: I am not Jewish. My wife Pauline is. My teenage son Davy is. Davy even teaches at the religious school. My nine-year-old daughter Kate, adopted from China at age one, recently described herself as “half Jewish”. We’re members. We volunteer, attend some of the services. Sometimes I try to chant the chants, sometimes I don’t. I always feel a little… ambiguous.

      I hadn’t been expecting to speak. I came out with some version of the following thought. If the story of Passover is literally true, then there’s a miracle-working God. And it would matter if there were such a God. I don’t think I would like the moral character of that God, a God who kills so many innocent Egyptians. I’m glad it’s not literally true. It matters.

      I find it interesting, I added, that we (“we”?) have this celebratory holiday about the death of children, contrary to the values of most of us now. It’s interesting how we struggle to deal with that change in values while keeping the traditions of the holiday.

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    • State Religious Freedom “Restoration” and the Confusion between Public and Private

      In adding a clause to Hegel, Marx remarked once that the great world historical events occur twice: first as a tragedy, and then as a farce.  For a 21st century version, I propose adding that it’s getting harder to tell the difference.  I am of course talking about North Carolina’s infamous HB2, which requires trans* individuals to go to the restroom of their “biological sex” as recorded on their birth certificate, AND makes several forms of discrimination (racial, etc.) illegal in the state (but not against the LGBTQ) AND bars local municipalities from extending further protections (it does more, but those are enough for one blogpost).  The clear intent, and the net effect, is to deprive gender non-conforming individuals from equal protection of the law, and to invite discrimination against them.

      In defense of the inevitable firestorm this caused, most of the few state leaders who both support it and who have spoken on it have basically gone into a defensive crouch.  The governor claimed to be “blind-sided” by questions about the law, and unclear about its implications.  More generally, supporters busy themselves telling fairy tales about the danger to public safety that having “biological” men in the women’s room will cause, no matter how much those men have transitioned into being women.  Nevermind that there is zero evidence that there has ever been a problem in this regard, including in the hundreds of jurisdictions that have passed ordinances like Charlotte’s, and nevermind that transitioning is about the most difficult possible way to prey on people in public restrooms.  Oh, and nevermind that the law is without theoretical foundation unless you think that trans* individuals are sexual predators, and that cis folks are not.

      On the farce side, this means that people who appear to be men will have to use the women’s room (and vice versa), which will almost certainly cause greater discomfort for more people than the previous status quo.  On the tragic side, the law is totally unenforceable, and so encourages vigilantism against all gender non-conforming individuals, since they are now all on a continuum that ends with “not being not manly enough to use the men’s room.”  As Mary Elizabeth Williams writes on Salon:

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    • APDA: Contact Information Request

      As noted in the APDA update posted over a week ago, we are in the middle of two important projects:

      • We are adding individual editing to the website in May 2016. Up to March 2016, placement data were edited by project personnel, placement officers, or department chairs. In the future, individual graduates will have the option to claim their entry. To do this, we require a contact email for the graduates in our database. We currently have email addresses for roughly one quarter of the database. For graduates: to ensure that you are included among those who have access to individual editing, please provide your email address here: http://goo.gl/forms/mXUbpeH5ic
      • Along with individual editing, in May 2016 we will add a brief qualitative survey for graduates. We will use linguistic analysis to compare these responses across graduates, connecting them to metadata on graduating institution, gender, graduation year, area of specialization, and placement type. Participants will be compensated for their time. Again, to do this, we require the contact email for the graduates in our database. For graduates: To ensure that you are sent the qualitative survey, please provide your email address here: http://goo.gl/forms/mXUbpeH5ic

      Please feel free to send the form to past philosophy graduates you know who may want to be included! As it says above, time they spend filling out the qualitative survey in May will be compensated (by a $50 Amazon gift card raffle for every 50 participants). And note: it is our policy to treat the email addresses as private and accessible only by project personnel.

    • 2015 APDA Report Update with Program-Specific Data and Graphs

      This is a brief notice that APDA has finalized its update for the 2015 report. Here is the report from 2015 and here is the update. Please contact me (cjennings3 at ucmerced.edu) with feedback or leave comments and suggestions below. 

      Update: I replaced one of the links as I noticed that the AOS table had been mismatched to the gender table.

      Update (4/15/16): I will list here errors that are discovered in the data/report:

      University of Washington–4 grads (2 2012, 2 2014) should be listed as temporary academic, but are currently permanent (but non TT) academic.

      University of Texas, Austin–placement records are missing several graduates and should be checked against the placement page (the placement page was down when we attempted to check it in November). 

      University of Arkansas–this program was not contacted for data and should be included in future reports. 

       

    • Online sexism and racism is a thing (surprise surprise!)

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      Yesterday the Guardian published the results of a research conducted on the over 70 million comments that have been placed at Guardian articles over the years. The question was: is there a pattern in who gets most abusive comments? Given the Guardian’s policy to block comments (blocked by moderators) when they are not aligned with the spirit of constructive debate, this constitutes an extremely dataset to explore online behavior (it is reassuring by the way that only 2% of the 70m comments were blocked!). It has been long felt that women, and in particular women speaking from a feminist perspective, receive much online abuse in reaction to what they write. (Comment sections are one such venue, but think also of Twitter and other social media platforms.) But crunching the numbers is the right way to go if one wants to move from the level of ‘impressions’ to more concrete corroboration. The results will probably not come across as surprising:

      Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

      And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

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    • Big Data, Commodification and Original Accumulation

      In an interesting new piece, Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan and Dillonn Mahmoudi propose that big data functions in the context of capital as “accumulation by dispossession,” which is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” the process by which capital adds to its wealth by taking goods from others and adding them to the system.  Marx: “so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Capital I, 875 [I am using the Penguin edition]).  Perhaps the best example of this is the one detailed by Marx: the enclosure movement in England involved the privatization of agricultural common spaces in England, such that it was no longer possible to graze sheep on lands held by the community in common; the result was that a lot of peasants, who ended up with no or inadequate amounts of private property, lost everything of value they had and became “free labor,” forced to sell themselves to the emerging factories.  As Marx sums up the process:

      “The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.  They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians” (895)

      I am very sympathetic to the thesis, and there is something profoundly right about it, insofar as Thatcher et al. rely on the separation of the valued information from the person who produces it.  But I also think it needs tweaking, for reasons that emerge in the paper itself: the data trail that a person leaves is generally itself without value, and only becomes valuable when aggregated with a lot of other data.  In other words, as I tried to argue a while ago, data is itself without value; it is only when it becomes information that it realizes that value.

      It seems to me that the accumulation processes of big data is involved in a much earlier stage, the commodification of data into information itself, which involves both the elevation of exchange value over use value, and the conversion of qualitatively different items of data into commensurable units of information.  These are, to an extent, equivalent processes, as Marx notes: “as use values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange values, they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value” (128).  Still, I think it’s worth teasing the two threads apart here.

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