story here and here. None of this is good for even the most cynical defenders of American geopolotical and economic interests. Its certainly no good for American security against "terrorism." Even from the most cynical 'Merika-owns-the-world point of view possible, this a greater failure than even the most strident opponents of the Iraq war predicted.
recent posts
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 9): Alienation and Historicity in Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 8): The Marx of Logic and Existence
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship
about
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Yesterday I posted data for tenure-track placement from this past year. The data below include postdoctoral, VAP, and instructor hires sourced from PhilAppointments. Please check the data and make corrections in comments or by email (cjennings3 at ucmerced dot edu).
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Anyone who spends a modicum of time on the internet will have been exposed to the recent hashtag battle opposing #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen, so I don’t need to rehearse the details here. What I think is significant is that there may well be a sense in which both camps are right: it may well be the case that the proportion of men engaging in the more extreme forms of sexism and violence against women – the limit cases being sexual assault and rape – is relatively small, while the proportion of women being victims of these assaults is very high. There is no contradiction between the two.
Indeed, a 2002 study mentioned in this recent Slate article (which Eric W also linked to in a recent post – btw, it’s Eric’s post that got me thinking about this issue) on the sexual histories of college men found that ‘only’ 6% of those interviewed had attempted or successfully raped someone. But the catch is that there was an average of 6 rape attempts per perpetrator. So the math is simple: in a population of 100 college men and 100 college women, if 6 men are rapists but each engage in rape attempts 6 times during their college years, then it is perfectly possible that 36 of the 100 women, so more than a third of them, will have been the victims of successful or attempted rapes. (Naturally, there may also be cases of men sexually assaulting other men, but it seems that, in the college population in particular (as opposed to the prison population, or among younger male victims), the wide majority of cases is of male perpetrator and female victim.)
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Here is a nice antidote.
(h/t Benny Goldberg)
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Thomas Frank has a nice analysis up on Salon.com on college tuition and debts. In it, he points out that the crisis is of long duration, and people have been asking for more than a generation when the “college bubble” will burst. Along the way, he shows that a number of standard explanations (overpaid professors, insatiable student demand for gymnasiums, etc.) don’t make any sense, at least not on their own. His concluding point, though, seems vitally important. Here’s a good-sized chunk of text (with significant ellipses); I’ll follow with a couple of additional thoughts:
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There is a lot of controversy and protest among the students at Stanford University concerning what many are calling the mild punishment of a male undergraduate, found by a university committee to have been guilty of sexual misconduct and sexual assault using force. The student will receive a five-quarter suspension, which will begin after he graduates, and he will be allowed to enroll at Stanford as a graduate student (he had already been admitted) after taking a “gap year.”
In this article about the events at Stanford, the Huffington Post details some disturbing statistics about the punishments doled out to sexual assailants at some of Stanford’s “peer institutions”. It appears to be Stanford’s policy, for example, to allow such assailants to return to campus once their victims have graduated. Since the victim in this case is graduating this year, the suspension is very short. (And, inter alia, since 20% of U.S. college women have suffered some form of sexual assault by a male student, but around 5% of male college students sexually assault women, allowing students to return to campus to repeat offend seems like a terrible idea.)
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I originally intended Europe after Habermas and the Populist Surge, to be a stand alone post and did not have any thoughts about promoting my own tentative views of European politics, and the appropriate theoretical references for discussion. It was just intended to be a timely account of the limitation of one approach to Europe and an indication of the role of one kind of theory in that approach.
I have been challenged to put forward my own views on the political and theoretical issues, and I do not think I can decently fail to respond, as clearly it is easy to take shots at someone else's point of view that put forward an alternative, which might become a target itself, and might disappoint some people who agree with my critical remarks. Another aspect of putting forward your own views is that it requires more space then defining weaknesses in another point of view, and this process is going to take more than one post. The present post will set up an overview and will be followed by posts dealing with institutions, policies, and theory.
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Last year I posted some statistics on tenure-track, postdoctoral, and VAP placements between 2011 and 2013. I aim to continue these analyses for a third year. Along the way, I will post progress on data collection, in the case that corrections are in order. The data below include tenure-track or equivalent hires sourced from PhilAppointments (I will provide a new post with postdoctoral and VAP data soon). Please check the data and make corrections in comments or by email (cjennings3 at ucmerced dot edu).
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Philosophers on social media, blogs, and other platforms have been increasingly discussing the Student Union ban on the Nietzsche Club at University College London in the last day or so. Sorry I'm not providing links, because I'm not looking for an online rumble, but here are some links to news stories. The first thing to say is that this ban is horrendous and the second is that it has been lifted pending legal advice. What also needs to be understood is that the student union decision was not an attempt to ban discussion of Nietzsche, though it certainly circumscribes discussion of Nietzsche in UCL student union facilities.
The ban was in reaction to a poster of the 'Nietzsche Club' advertising discussion of Alain de Benoist and Julius Evola, alongside Heidegger and Nietzsche. Benoist is the founding and presiding figure of the 'Nouvelle Droite' (New Right, but not to be confused with the Anglosphere free market New Right of the 1980s) in France, which is anti-globalist and anti-free market, also opposing cultural pluralism within nations. Julius Evola (1898-1974) was a writer on southern Asian religion and spirituality, and known to some only in that role. He was also an advocate of authoritarianism, hierarchy and 'tradition', with tradition to be understood as inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and anti-modern. Like Benoist now, he liked to present
New APPS 