In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been a big week in intellectual property. The biggest news item in the non-legal press was the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to cancel several of the NFL’s Washington Redskins trademarks because they were “disparaging.” This review and cancellation is required by statute, and the decision is generating a fair amount of First Amendment discussion, much of it incautious. On the Diane Rehm show today, for example, Bruce Fein went completely off the rails:
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Good news from San Fransisco Theological Seminary chaplain Scott Clark about the 2014 Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly here.
The bill sent out from committee a couple of days ago would take the "one man, one woman" talk out of the Book of Order and add an accompanying authoritative interpretation that allows teaching elders to perform marriage ceremonies for same sex couples.
Most people don't understand just how democratic reformed churches are. In the PC(USA) each presbytery sends one teaching elder (minister) and one ruling elder (non-minister serving on the Session or Deaconite) to the General Assembly. A change to the Book of Order has to be ratified by the General Assembly and then by over half of the presbyteries in the two years before the next General Assembly. So when we moved to allow ordination of gay priests and as we now move towards full inclusion of GLTB in the church this isn't something foisted on us by Bishops who have all the power (as they do in the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches). Everyone I've talked to thinks that the presbyteries will ratify this.
In other General Assembly news, it looks like the church will divest from three companies involved with apartheid in Israel. Story here.
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In keeping with the earlier post on gender, this is an overview post on the distribution of (first-listed) areas of specialization among placed candidates. I now have data on 722 candidates who have been placed in tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, or instructor positions between late 2011 and mid 2014 (ending today), drawn from ProPhilosophy (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). I aim to make the spreadsheet with this data available by around July 1st (I will continue to add new data until that date).
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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 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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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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here.
"Warning Iraq against Shiite Iranian influence is like warning Italy against Vatican influence."
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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. -
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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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.
New APPS 