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    • please consider signing this open letter to defend the humanities at The University of Saskatchewan

      Brian Leiter and Simon Evnine have already signed this letter from students at The University of Saskatchewan who are attempting to convince university administrators not to gut their humanities programs. The organizers are inviting people to add their signatures by sending an e-mail to uofsphilosophy@gmail.com with your name and any relevant information you would like to share (institutional affiliation, education, etc).

      It's a very nice letter, citing Nussbaum and Bromwich on the value of the humanities while still explaining to the administrators how fantastically bizarre it is to claim to be building a top research school while destroying the humanities. With respect to the proposed changes, the authors write:

      Such poor definition entails that the university has failed in whatever duty of clarity it possessed. We know from reading the brief only that some future program shall exist, taking ‘the best parts’ from each of four programs: Religion and Culture, Philosophy, Women and Gender Studies and Modern Languages. Forgive us if we remain sceptical of the virtues of such a combination. The attitude of presumption that must be required for university administrators to suppose that they, and not the cumulative force of tradition, are sufficient to develop a new program from the base materials of these four programs is beyond us, and our understanding. Most plausibly, the four programs shall be made into one ‘interdisciplinary’ program, which offers more upper-level classes than any of the four previous programs individually, but fewer than the four programs collectively. Most students, however, are not interested in a poorly-defined ‘interdisciplinary’ program, but instead are interested in Modern Languages, or Philosophy, or Women’s and Gender Studies, or Religion and Culture. Most universities, considering applicants for postgraduate degrees, are not interested in students who have taken poorly-defined ‘interdisciplinary’ programs, but are instead interested in philosophers, or linguists, with a thorough education in their subject.

      Anyhow, please take time to read the letter and if you support it send in your info to the above e-mail address.

    • Anonymous Grading

      In my role as intructional faculty, I aim to grade everything anonymously, which is a provision I enjoyed as an undergraduate. My current method is to ask students to write their names on the back of their papers and exams, which also helps me to return them. One of my students remarked that I must do this because I am particularly biased. She may be right. But there is reason to believe that we are all biased against minority groups in our grading practices. Take this publication on the perception of grammatical and spelling errors by partners at 22 law firms: "The exact same memo averaged a 3.2/5.0 rating under our hypothetical 'African American' Thomas Meyer and a 4.1/5.0 rating under hypothetical 'Caucasian' Thomas Meyer. The qualitative comments on memos, consistently, were also more positive for the 'Caucasian' Thomas Meyer than our 'African American' Thomas Meyer." It seems obvious to me that these effects could have an impact on the grading of philosophy papers and exams. (It may be worth noting that the gender/race/ethnicity of the partner did not affect these findings, although "female partners generally found more errors and wrote longer narratives"). And take this publication on faculty assessment of a student applicant, mentioned a couple of years ago here at NewAPPS: "Our results revealed that both male and female faculty judged a female student to be less competent and less worthy of being hired than an identical male student, and also offered her a smaller starting salary and less career mentoring." The difference in mean rated competence, hireability, and mentor-worthiness was of the order of 10%. Again, it seems obvious to me that these effects could have an impact on the grading of philosophy papers and exams, which could be a grade-letter difference (i.e. the difference between a B and a C). Since perceived differences in grading standards could have an impact on whether students choose to stay in philosophy, it seems to me that anonymous grading would both be more just and would encourage a more diverse range of participants in philosophy (see other suggestions on this over at Daily Nous). What does everyone else think? Do you grade anonymously? If not, why not? 

      Update: Other posts on this topic are here and here. 

    • Is this happening to your college library?

      Nice article by slate dot com's Rebecca Schuman here,* about the move among university libraries to put more and more printed material in compact shelving where people cannot browse.

      Schuman sees these moves as one more instance of administrators and staff turning universities into strip malls with frats:

      But there’s one wholly unsentimental reason the stacks are both vital and irreplaceable, and that brings us back to Colby’s decision to replace theirs with a gleaming shrine to the corporate bottom line. As more of the books disappear from college libraries, the people in charge of funding those libraries will be more tempted to co-opt that space for events that bring in revenue, or entice students for the wrong reasons: food courts. Gaming lounges. I expect rock-climbing walls soon. Unless administrators make a protracted effort to preserve the contemplative and studious feeling, that feeling will disappear altogether, and the whatever-brary will become just another Jamba Juice.

      Faculty around the country have been trying to fight the strip-mallification of their campuses, but in most cases the administration and staff argue that financial necessity dictates whatever thing it is they are doing to make the campus worse. In most cases the faculty don't have access to what the money is really being spent on, so no way to adjudicate the claims.

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    • Does anyone remember this?

      My generation inherited from the Baby Boomers the bizarre idea that one of the most important things about you was the bands you like. This is actually not that weird, since it's just one more instance of the late capitalist Boomer belief that people are to be classified in terms of what they consume (as opposed to the traditional classifications in terms of origins, beliefs, and activities). So I can attain a certain kind of quasi-religious purity if I shop at all of the right stores and recycle, no matter that me doing these things will make no difference at all to the state of the world, no matter that this ideology legitimates the very problems from which our virtuous consumption is supposed to be absolving us.

      Nonetheless, we are all creatures of our age. I have a blue Burberry raincoat with a tear in the front left pocket. One of the stupidest thing I do is tell colleagues, "at least it's not the shoulder," and then judge them harshly when they don't get the reference (nobody I work with has yet).

      The embedded video is almost perfect for this dysfunction as applied to Generation X. I.R.S. The Cutting Edge! RE/Search magazine! If Nirvana had stayed safely on the pages of Maximumrocknroll magazine and if you still had these small bookstores with every issue of Semiotext(e) the Millenials never would have happened.

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    • Is climate change to blame for the kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian school girls, and the massacre of as many as 300 civilians in the town of Gamboru Ngala?

      This piece in the Gaurdian argues that it is.   So does the  the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace.

      "…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict."

      Many of the foot soldiers of Boko Haram, it is claimed, are people displaced by severe droughtand food shortages in neighbouring Niger and Chad and are motivate more by a need to survive than by any ideology.

    • Leiter, Schliesser, and Feminist Philosophers on Protecting Lisbeth fundraising campaign

      Especially given the amount of sock-puppetry and trolling by anonymous internet voices prior to the point where most philosophy blogs started pre-moderating, I was extremely uncomfortable with anonymous people recently making public allegations against a semi-anonymous perpetrator, and then an anonymous person soliciting money.* I also know that I'm not the only person troubled by this.

      So I think it's worth publicizing a number of things have happened very recently:

      1. In the original fund-raising campaign, the accuser claimed that the bloggers at Feminist Philosophers would vouch for her identity. Given their recent posts on the issue, (e.g. here)I don't think I'm betraying confidences to share that I contacted them and they did (without in any way telling me the identities of the two people who have made public allegations).
      2. In this post, Brian Leiter (making clear not to endorse claims which he could not have the evidence to substantiate one way or the other) unequivocally states that he knows the identity of the accuser taking legal action and that her claims deserve to be formally adjudicated.
      3. A non-anonymous friend of the second accuser, Emma Sloan, has taken over the fundraising site.
      4. Eric Schliesser provides an argument for contributing here.

      I should note that nobody I've linked to here is trying to have a trial by public opinion about the veracity of these specific allegations against the person in question. In spite of this issue, I've left comments open (though premoderated to prevent public trial by commentor).

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    • Social Policy and Explanations: Within- and Between-Population Variation

      In a post last month for Demos, Matt Bruenig argued that if one in fact cares about childhood poverty, a recent conservative position promoting marriage as a means of reducing childhood poverty rates is as cruel as it is misguided (http://www.demos.org/blog/4/14/14/single-mother-child-poverty-myth). In a nutshell, Bruenig notes that countries with low childhood poverty rates have not achieved this success via promoting marriage, nor are their rates of single-parenthood markedly different from those in the U.S.

      One way to put this basic observation is that people promoting marriage are deliberately ignoring most of the variation that matters.  Yes, it is true (ceteris paribus, of course!) that in the international sample Bruenig looks at, in every country, the children of single parents are more likely to be poor than the children of married parents living together.* But far more variation in childhood poverty rates is associated with different policies in the different countries, and not with the relationship status of the parents; indeed, even if the child poverty rate in the U.S. dropped to the level associated with children living with married parents living together in the U.S. today, it would still be substantially higher, indeed, quite grossly higher, than in the other countries Bruenig looks at.

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    • Reformation Theology

      Guilt.

      Grace.

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    • Professors’ non-existent privacy rights

      FIDLAR song NSFW, so whole post is after the jump.

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    • On Professionalization and Greatness

      Ruth Millikan’s Dewey Lecture has been getting a lot of favorable attention in the blogosphere recently. Rightly so. But I want to challenge one part of it that most philosophers seem to like. I’ll quote almost all of the relevant two paragraphs, since when I try to trim I think I do a disservice to her argument.

      Millikan writes:

      Philosophy is not a field in which piles of small findings later help to secure
      fundamental advances.       Little philosophical puzzles do not usually need to be solved but rather dissolved by examining the wider framework within which they occur. This often involves determinedly seeking out and exposing deeply entrenched underlying
      assumptions      , working out what their diverse and far-ranging effects have been,
      constructing and evaluating alternatives, trying to foresee distant implications. It often involves trying to view quite large areas in new ways, ways that may cut across usual distinctions both within philosophy and outside and that may require a broad knowledge across disciplines. Add that to acquire the flexibility of mind and the feel for the possibility of fundamental change in outlook that may be needed, a serious immersion for a considerable time in the history of philosophy is a near necessity. This kind of work takes a great deal of patience and it takes time. Nor can it be done in small pieces, first this little puzzle then that. Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason at age fifty-seven and the other critiques came later. Closer to our time, Wilfrid Sellars published his first paper at thirty-five, having lived and worked with philosophy all his life up to then. I have never tried to research the matter but I have no reason to think these cases unique…. Further, because a serious understanding of the historical tradition is both essential and quite difficult to acquire by oneself, helping to pass on this tradition with care and respect should always be the first obligation of a professional philosopher. Given all this, it has always struck me as a no-brainer that forcing early and continuous publication in philosophy is, simply, genocidal. Forcing publication at all is not
      necessarily good.

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