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    • Against Those Year-End Faculty Meetings to Discuss the Graduate Students

      Every year’s end at UC Riverside, the philosophy faculty meet for three hours “to discuss the graduate students”. Back in the 1990s when I was a grad student, I seem to recall the Berkeley faculty doing the same thing. The practice appears to be fairly widespread. After years of feeling somewhat uncomfortable with it, I’ve tentatively decided I’m opposed. I’d be interested to hear from others with positive or negative views about it.

      Now, there are some good things about these year-end meetings. Let’s start with those.

      At UCR, the formal purpose of the meeting is to give general faculty input to the graduate advisor, who can use that input to help her advising. The idea is that if the faculty as a whole think that a student is doing well and on track, the graduate advisor can communicate that encouraging news to the student; and also, when there are opportunities for awards and fellowships, the graduate advisor can consider those highly regarded students as candidates. And if the faculty as a whole think that a student is struggling, the faculty can diagnose the student’s weaknesses and help the graduate advisor give the student advice that might help the student improve. Hypothetical examples (not direct quotes): “Some faculty were concerned about your inconsistent attendance at seminar meetings.” “The sense of the faculty is that while you have considerable promise, your writing would be improved if you were more charitable toward the views of philosophers you disagree with.”

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    • Is this a violation of academic freedom?

      Is there a word for this, where you not only have to waste time doing something absolutely meaningless ("Kafkaesque"?), but where it's also the case that successful completion of the meaningless tasks requires enthusiastic pretense that the task isn't meaningless?

      Whatever the term is, it increasingly applies to university assessment procedures. Not only do you have to do a week or so of make-work, but more and more of the make-work is showing the people who check your reports exactly how the assessment process helps your classes get better and better to infinity.

      Is this a violation of academic freedom? I did enough philosophy of mind (and virtue ethics) in the past to know how foolish it is to think that simple quantitative surveys of the type acceptable to the assessment Czars (who know nothing about the academic subjects in question) could yield useful information of the sort that would help improve programs. Decent practical reasoning doesn't work this way. I even have a paper with Jason Megill relevant to this topic, and a substantive blog post on four sources of stupidity relevant to assessment. Yet the metastasizing assessment (which at LSU has gone from yearly to now three times a year and almost certainly soon to be quarterly) regime forces me to say things inconsistent with commonsense and the relevant scholarship (again, some of which is my own).

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    • Using Medicaid to Produce Homo Economicus

      I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus).  One reason I think this is that one finds repeated examples of where policy or governmental prescriptions specific to neoliberalism conflict with neoliberalism as a strategy of subjectification; in such cases, the strategy of subjectification generally seems to win.  Let me explain with an example which will hopefully serve as proof of concept of the admittedly very big thesis I’ve just announced.

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    • Juan Cole on Seven Myths about the Sunni advance in Iraq

      here.

      "Warning Iraq against Shiite Iranian influence is like warning Italy against Vatican influence."

    • Disabled Scholars at Conferences

      Shelley Tremain, the philosopher of disability, brought my attention to a recent article in the CHE entitled Indifference Toward Disabled Scholars, Especially at Conferences, Troubles a Disabilities Scholar .* In it, bioethicist William Peace details a "nightmare" he experience as a disabled scholar trying to attend a conference.

      Peace also blogged about the experience here.

      Tremain offers the following commentary:

      ——-
      In my article "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability" (https://independent.academia.edu/ShelleyTremain), I offered some details about ways in which the APA fails to treat disabled philosophers equally and promote our status within the discipline and profession. A recent petition that I and others circulated was motivated by this neglect. Some of the measures that the APA fails to take on our behalf concern the lack of information about disability (e.g., how to make conferences accessible, what APA chairs and presenters should do to make divisional meetings accessible, etc.) on the newly-furbished and inaccessible APA website. A recent conference on philosophy of disability at Syracuse University (at which all three APA disability representatives presented) demonstrates the impact that the APA's failure to provide leadership in this regard has throughout the profession. 
       

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    • Chelsea Manning on limits on Press Freedom during the Iraq war

      and its role in the roots of the current crisis, here.

       

      "If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

      Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

       

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    • World Cup thread!

      Here is a thread for people dying to discuss the World Cup with other philosophers!     I'll kick us off with these beautiful animations in the NYT explaining how the Dutch beat the Spanish so handily.

       

      Post your predictions, comments on past games, etc here.   If discussions get lively, I'll open up new threads as the tournament progresses.

    • The Future of the European Polity II: Institutions (part one)

      I've ended up writing two posts worth of material on European Union Institutions, so there will be a second part to this post, itself part of a series of posts on the direction of the EU. 

      The European Union has got caught up in a strange mix of technocratic centralisation, inter-state politics, and federal political institutions, which is not a satisfactory form of federalism, or confederalism, or consociationism, or whatever transnational  or interstate political structure one might believe best describes the European Union now, or what it should become. The reasons for this mix are themselves a mix of shifting compromises over  time and the belief of Jean Monnet and other 'Founding Fathers' of the European Union, that European politics could follow on from 'institutionalisation', that is the formation of European institutions with economic and 'technocratic' functions that are somewhat below the horizon of everyday political awareness. This began with fostering trade between France and Germany in the post-war period, bringing great economic and political benefits at that time. The time has come for more explicit politics, including an acceptance that integrationist schemes must be abandoned if lacking political support from citizens of the European Union. 

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    • Does taking pictures sully our memories?

      I live very close to Port Meadow, one of the largest meadows of open common land in the UK, already in existence in the 10th century, and mentioned in the Domesday book in 1086. I saw my first-ever live, wild oriole there. The land has been never ploughed, so it is possible to discern outlines of older archaeological remains, some going back to the Bronze Age. The consistent management of the land makes the changes predictable: it turns into a lake in winter, is sprinkled with buttercups this time of year (see pictures below the fold – both are taken at about the same place, but one in May and the other in November), and looks mysterious and misty in the fall. Whenever I walk on Port Meadow I take my camera, anxious to preserve any beautiful view that falls on my retina, to preserve it for future memories. And, like many other parents, I take dozens of pictures of my growing children. Recently, I saw an NPR piece (no author given) that took issue with this tendency to want to preserve pictures for future memory.

      The article launches a two-pronged attack against pictures. First, by worrying about capturing the moment, we lose the transience and beauty of the moment and enjoy it less. Second, the article cites psychological evidence that shows that people actually remember fewer objects during a museum visit if they were allowed to take photos of them, compared to when they only were allowed to observe them. The phenomenon is known as the photo-taking-impairment effect. Linda Henkel, who discovered the effect, says: "Any time…we count on these external memory devices, we're taking away from the kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember that stuff on our own." 

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    • APA prizes announced

      here

      (thanks to Amy Ferrer for the heads-up!) 

      Congratulations to Andrew Bacon, Sally Haslanger, William Lycan, Larry May, and my co-editor, Elisabeth Lloyd!