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    • Institutional Debt and the Crisis of U.S. Higher Ed (again)

      Back in March, I wrote a long piece about the effects of institutional debt on the current, destructive trends in U.S. Higher Education.  In the same vein, there's a new article by Michelle Chen up at The Nation discussing a new report by the Debt and Society group called Borrowing Against the Future: The Hidden Costs of Financing U.S. Higher Education. 

      The report concerns the ways in which debt manifests itself throughout the system, and how these various forms are tied to one another—thus the titlte of Chen's piece "Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It." But Chen is right to highlight the institutional debt side of the equation, which has been overlooked despite the fact that it appears to be a structural driver for other forms of debt and institutional disinvestment in education, etc. She also emphasizes the degree to which one of the most pernicious consequenes of rising debt: the degree to which it makes even public institutions essentially subservient bond ratings agencies.

      In the long run, however, these amenities often don’t pay off in terms of revenue for the schools, which grow increasingly beholden to bond investors. Those financiers, in turn, often favor not the highest-quality schools but rather “the safest prospects for investment.” Because of market pressures, the researchers warn, “bond markets can reward behaviors that generate greater revenue but are at odds with the goals of public higher education.” In other words, do you want your university’s future budget projections dictated by a Moody’s rating?

      Or, as I've been arguing for awhile, rising institutional debt is what is making 'revenue at any cost' into a management imperative that trumps all others and essentially stripping institutional leaders of the freedom to make management decisions on the basis considerations like their institutions' primary missions, the best interests of their faculty, staff and students, etc.  I urge folks to read the whole piece.

    • Is European Monetary Union causing a rise of fascism in Europe?

      Of course, the rise of fascism all across Europe has many causes and origins.  But is the monetary union pushing a critical mass over the edge in a dangerous way?

    • Facebook’s Social Factory

      I’m currently teaching a summer gen-ed class on the topic of “Ethical Issues: Technology,” and when I teach this class, I always make a point to discuss Facebook early-on. Specifically, this time we’re talking about the “is Facebook making us lonely” question, using a piece from the Atlantic and a critique of it that appeared a few days later on Slate.  But I always try to include time for talking about Facebook in general.  And my students say more or less what the research says: almost all of them are on it, and they use it mainly to keep up with and enhance offline social networks.  They gain considerable social capital from their use of it.  But they also don’t like it all that much.  They resent the constantly changing settings, and they’re getting fairly cynical about FB as a business.  They don’t much like having to untag themselves from photos all the time.  They tend to think FB either takes them for granted, or even takes advantage of them.  More than one said they’d leave if they could figure out how.  And they do worry about privacy.  All of that is anecdotal, of course, but it’s been a pretty consistent response for a few years now.

      A great deal of the value of a company like FB is network: like telephones, the more people who use them, the more valuable yours is.  This is part of why students don’t have much of an exit option, as leaving FB would basically give them the SNS equivalent of a one-phone system.  FB then rubs it in: there’s no way to export all of your material from it to another system, so a decision to leave is a decision to leave however many hours of socializing and networking behind.  This sort of state of affairs led Tiziana Terranova to note – before FB – that websites extract a lot of surplus value from the users who produce them simply because of this network effect. 

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    • Froggy Fresh – The Fight

      One of the worst things about WWE's "attitude era" was that parents had very good reasons not to let their kids watch professional wrestling. The story-lines went beyond R rated and were often morally reprehensible as well. The promotion also at times seemed to be competing with ECW to see who could injure the most wrestlers.

      It's been very nice to see something of a return to the classical mode (Roland Barthes' titanic struggle between good and evil) these last few years. As a "smart fan" I'm not supposed to appreciate John Cena, but maybe being a parent has changed this. The guy's never been afraid to do gimmicky stuff to appeal to children (part of why he alienated smart fans) and as part of that he's never taken a heel turn in over a decade. His work with the Make a Wish foundation has been indefatigable (over 300 visits), going well beyond what would be required if it was just a work.* I also think he helped change things where you could have an old fashioned face like Daniel Bryan actually get over with the kids and the smart fans.

      Anyhow, the most Cena-centric Froggy Fresh video after the jump (second verse is sort of sexist, only sort of because partially satirizing his own incompetence with respect to standard rap music sexist tropes):

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    • CFP: Conference on Diversity in Philosophy

      Over at Feminist Philosophers, they've posted the CFP for a conference on Diversity in Philosophy that, I'm proud to say, is being hosted and co-sposored by my alma mater, Villanova University, along with Hypatia and the APA's Committee for the Status of Women.  

      The conference will be held at Villanova on May 28-30, 2015 and the deadline for submissions of 250-500 word proposals is January 1, 2015.

      More info and the full CFP follows after the break. 

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    • The many problems with peer-review (yet again), and some proposed solutions

      I’ve written a few posts in the recent past questioning the whole idea of anonymous peer-review as a reliable guide to quality – in philosophy as well as elsewhere. In other disciplines, there have been numerous recent cases of ‘false positives’, i.e. papers which made it through the peer-review process but then were discovered to be fundamentally flawed after they were published (leading to a very large number of retractions).

      The issue with false positives is well known, but as I’ve suggested in some of my previous posts, the issue of false negatives is equally serious, or perhaps even more serious, and yet it tends to be under-appreciated. A recent piece by JP de Ruiter, a psycholinguist at the University of Bielefeld, articulates very nicely why it is serious, and why it remains essentially invisible.

      The two main goals of a review system are to minimize both the number of bad studies that are accepted for publication and the number of good studies that are rejected for publication. Borrowing terminology of signal detection theory, let’s call these false positives and false negatives respectively.

      It is often implicitly assumed that minimizing the number of false positives is the primary goal of APR. However, signal detection theory tells us that reducing the number of false positives inevitably leads to an increase in the rate of false negatives. I want to draw attention here to the fact that the cost of false negatives is both invisible and potentially very high. It is invisible, obviously, because we never get to see the good work that was rejected for the wrong reasons. And the cost is high, because it removes not only good papers from our scientific discourse, but also entire scientists. […] The inherent conservatism in APR means that people with new, original approaches to old problems run the risk of being shut out, humiliated, and consequently chased away from academia. In the short term, this is to the advantage of the established scientists who do not like their work to be challenged. In the long run, this is obviously very damaging for science. This is especially true of the many journals that will only accept papers that receive unanimously positive reviews. These journals are not facilitating scientific progress, because work with even the faintest hint of controversy is almost automatically rejected.

      With all this in mind, it is somewhat surprising that APR also fails to keep out many obviously bad papers.

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    • Great Sam Wheeler interview

      If Derrida's Baby Boomer detractors were correct about him being a charlatan, then thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Sam Wheeler, Lee Braver, and Martin Hagglund would have to be the lowest kinds of carny marks, about as gullible as the professional wrestling connoisseur from the American South who has yet to cotton on to the fact that the match endings are predetermined. You can always pick out this type because he tells you during intermission just what he's going to do if CM Punk tries to shave his kid's head.

      Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy probably did the most to help me get over the analytic/continental culture wars that I saw so many of my undergraduate professors wage. But Wheeler's recent NeoDavidsonian Metaphysics (the introduction is available here) looks fascinating independent of that context.

      Check out this recent 3AM magazine interview, (hat tip Leiter*) where Wheeler articulates the connections between Davidson and Derrida. It's fascinating stuff, making explicit a number of issues sympathetic readers of Rorty will have already sort of suspected:

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    • In memoriam: Sandra Bem

      Another sad loss this week: psychologist Sandra Bem, a pioneer in the empirical study of gender roles, passed away on Tuesday, May 20th. Here is the most complete obituary I could find so far, which details nicely her scientific contributions and the practical impact they had in gender policies. For example, it was largely based on her scientific work that the infamous practice of segregating classified job listings under "Male Help Wanted" and "Female Help Wanted" columns was finally abandoned, after a 1973 decision of the US Supreme Court ruling against the practice. (The case was against a particular press, but within a year all other newspapers in the country changed how their classified ads were listed.)

      There are many other aspects of Sandra Bem’s life and work worth mentioning, but let me focus on two of them. As an undergraduate in 1965, she met Daryl Bem, then a young assistant professor, and a romantic relationship between them began. (Yes, there are successful stories too, apparently…) Initially, she did not want to get married, as this course of events seemed to preclude the professional path she had in mind for herself. But Daryl was not deterred, and so together they agreed on an arrangement that would allow her to flourish professionally, and which would basically consist in what is now known as equally shared parenting – an ideal that many couples aspire to, but which remains a challenge to implement (speaking from personal experience!). The ‘experiment’ was largely successful, and Sandra narrates all the ups and downs of raising two children (a boy and a girl) on this model in her 1998 book An Unconventional Family. (I’ve been meaning to read the book for years, and now may well be the time to stop procrastinating.)

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    • A minor annoyance with “Breaking Bad” – Biomedical Ethics Edition

       There is a story told about “Breaking Bad”* and our healthcare system, and it goes like this: “Breaking Bad” demonstrates what’s broken (less so now with the ACA perhaps, but perhaps not) about the healthcare system in the U.S.  Walter had to go in the meth business in order to pay for his healthcare costs.  Had Walter not stepped up, meth money in hand, Hank would never have walked again.  For-profit insurance ensures that the people who need care will be denied it, in order for those insurance companies to reap ever higher profits.  There is a joke, told in comic-form, and in other formats, that implies that had Walter had access to universal health insurance, as exists in most reasonably well-off countries, none of this (the meth, the show) need have happened.

      OK, that’s the story, but it’s just wrong.  Really.

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    • Next best thing since The Bell Curve

      In an earlier post, I discussed Nicholas Wade provocative new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, and mentioned that it had been getting a lot of reviews and attention because of its controversial claim that contemporary science supports the view that biological races really exist after all.  But now, the definitive review has been written and posted to the Gentopia blog. Stephen Colbert couldn't have said it better himself.  Check it out.