The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, in which the craft store chain is suing for exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. According to Hobby Lobby, it has religious objections to certain forms of contraception, and so should be exempt from the mandate on First Amendment grounds. According to Dahlia Lithwick – who is usually pretty good at this sort of analysis – the oral argument didn’t go well for the government. Conservatives on the court were signaling their support of Hobby Lobby, and Justice Roberts even has a way to apply the case narrowly (by declaring that only tightly-controlled or family-run companies can make the religious-objection argument). This case has broader implications than it might look like on the surface.
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I had a weird visceral thought after reading two recent NDPR reviews:
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics (ed. Robert Batterman, including a cool piece by friend of the blog David Wallace), and
- Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics (Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen, and Roberta L. Millstein, of newapps fame)
If Plutynski and Weatherall's reviews are right (and they read wonderfully) both books in different ways seem to me to mark decisive moves away from Generalized Philosophy of Science. The very first paragraph of Weatherall's reads:
If this collection has an overarching theme, it is that the details matter. If philosophers hope to understand contemporary physics, we need to engage in depth both with the technicalities of our best physical theories and the practicalities of how those theories are applied. The authors in this volume brush aside an older tradition in the philosophy of physics — and the philosophy of science more generally — in which actual physics entered only to illustrate high-level accounts of theories, explanation, or reduction. Of course, by itself, dismissing this tradition is hardly worth remarking on: such an approach to philosophy of physics has been going out of fashion for decades. Taken as whole, however, this volume pushes the theme still further, in ways that mark important shifts in recent philosophy of physics.
And Plytinski's second paragraph is:
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“Whenever you have a 'southern' or a 'northern' or an 'eastern' or a 'western' before an institution's name, you know it will be wildly underfunded." –Richard Russo
On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff in the Hannaford Lecture Hall, a spacious and new lecture hall (more often rented out than used for classes) to unveil the University of Southern Maine's new vision as a “Metropolitan University.” Two days later, on the twenty-first, twelve members of the faculty from such programs as economics, theater, and sociology met with the provost of the University to be "retrenched." Both of these events followed the proposal to eliminate four programs (American and New England Studies, Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and Arts and Humanities at the Lewiston Auburn Campus) the week before. It was a strange and tumultuous week, and one that I fear offers a frightening glimpse of a future of higher public education in the US.
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Unfortunately various pressures on my time, including the flow of news about the struggle with the government block on Twitter in Turkey, led me to miss Catherine Dutilh Novaes very useful post The night twitter went down, and miss the opportunity to comment in a timely manner. As I am in Istanbul, teaching at Istanbul Technical University, a full length post on the complex changing situation here is probably the best response to make in any case. What follows is even a double post, the first part deals with the immediate situation. Those who wish to have more background can then go on to the second part of this post, or even go to it first as a basis for following the more immediate issues.
The Twitter block was followed by an enormous growth of activity on Twitter as those interested in social media found very easy evasive methods, drawing on previous experience with a YouTube block. I was even able to use Twitter without any tricks as the block was not applied in my university campus where I live as well as work. The government then introduced more aggressive blocking to precude the more simple switches in DNS used at first and started working on VPN networks, and the apps using them like Hotshield. Nevertheless, I have been able to stay constantly on Twitter with minimum effort, using Opera mobile browser, which uses servers in Iceland on my smart phone, and the Google Chrome app ZenMate on my personal computer. Yesterday (24th March) evening normal twitter access strangely resumed at my university campus and some others, while still otherwise remaining in force. During the blockage conflicting reports have circulated on whether a critical article in The Guardian had been blocked, and whether that might be a sign of a very deep crackdown on the Internet, along with all the other indications for and against a deepening attack on freedom of communication.
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The following is a guest post by Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director
When I wrote a blog post on diversity issues more than a year ago during my guest series on Leiter Reports, I said the following:
Perhaps the most powerful tool we have to increase diversity in philosophy is data collection: there are many good ideas about how to make philosophy a more welcoming place for minorities and women, but we have no way of knowing whether our efforts are effective if we cannot measure their impact. And there are minorities about which we have little or no data: the prevalence of LGBT philosophers and disabled philosophers, for example, has rarely been tracked, so it’s very difficult to know how philosophy compares to other fields on inclusiveness in these areas.
I believed then, as I do now, in the business adage that “you make what you measure”—that is, by measuring, you can (even unconsciously) begin to see patterns in your measurements, and do more of the things that improve the metrics that matter to you. When it comes to measuring, philosophy, and the APA too, have been lacking. But the APA’s strategic planning task force, which reported to the board of officers last fall, included data collection as one of its priorities for the APA in the next few years, along with "providing membership services in an efficient manner, … development, and improving the public perception of philosophy."
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The following is a guest post by Amy Ferrer, APA Exectutive Director
Before putting up my first substantive post later today, I want to take a moment to thank the folks at NewAPPS for having me, and especially John Protevi and Eric Winsberg, who will be moderating comments and working with me along the way.
Many readers will know that this is my second guest stint on a major philosophy blog, after an appearance over at Leiter Reports in late 2012. At that time, I was still new to the APA and my wide-ranging posts functioned, as much as anything, to introduce me and my priorities to the philosophical community. This time around, I’m going to be focusing on one particular area of interest: diversity and inclusiveness. Many conversations have happened online and off over the last several months on these important issues, so this week I’ll be talking about some of the APA’s ongoing work related to diversity and inclusiveness, joined on a couple of occasions by colleagues as co-authors. I can’t possibly take on every facet of this broad topic in just a few posts, of course, but I think we’ll have more than enough material for some lively and productive discussions throughout the week.
Stay tuned!
[Please note: My appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]
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A comment on Shelley Tremain's post Disabling Philosophy concerns a different, but related, issue. Commenter Tara Nelson said:
Relatedly, a truly sexist and essentialist view of women's abilities in philosophy has reared its head on the blogosphere, and Showalter seems unable to respond to it effectively. Hope someone here can nip this in the bud. It's in the comments section.
Tara is referring to comments by commenter "Highly Adequate"–comments which include this one:
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My friend Alan Nelson recently posted a link on facebook to the following article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/business/economic-view-when-the-scientist-is-also-a-philosopher.html with an appropriately snarky note that the author, N. Gregory Mankiw (the Chair of the econ department at Harvard, natch), seemed to be arguing that the only changes to the status quo permissible are those that are verifiably Perato efficient improvements. An obvious corollary is that, since every reasonably substantive and complex policy change will have winners and losers, we should never change policies at all.
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By Shelley Tremain, draft of a comment that is forthcoming in the April issue of The Philosopher's Magazine.
Data compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy indicates that the disparity between the labor-participation rates of employable disabled people and employable nondisabled people across all sectors of American society is abysmal: 21% for disabled people compared to 69% for nondisabled people. More specific figures for the disparity between disabled and nondisabled people employed as full-time faculty in academia are even worse, with philosophy boasting the greatest disparity in this regard of all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, comparable only to the STEM fields. For although disabled people comprise an estimated 20-25% of the North American population, surveys conducted in 2012 and 2013 by the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) suggest that they comprise less than 4% of full-time faculty in philosophy departments in the U.S. and, according to a 2013 survey conducted by the Equity Committee of the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), they comprise less than 1% of full-time faculty in philosophy departments in Canada. In other words, nondisabled people comprise an estimated 96-99% of full-time faculty in North American philosophy departments. These figures are shocking, constituting almost complete exclusion of disabled people from professional philosophy.
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As Protevi likes to keep reminding everyone on Facebook, it's been awhile now since I first started arguing that we haven't been paying sufficient attention to the role of institutional debt as a driver of the increasingly alarming developments in U.S. universities, especially those in the public sector. I've gestured in this direction before on NewAPPS, but the appearance of a new piece on the subject by Josh Freedman on Forbes.com provides a perfect opportunity to develop the point a bit more.
Let me begin, then, by making a fairly bold claim. Taking the problem of institutional debt seriously makes it possible to provide a consistent account of many of the major problematic trends in U. S. higher education: rapidly accelerating tuition costs; significant declines in financial aid coverage; cuts to or elimination of low-enrollment departments and programs, experiments with mass-market distance learning and online education, and a general move toward 'Responsibility Centered Managment' (RCM) administrative models; dramatically increasing pressure on faculty at the level of compensation, workload, job security and working conditions; the outsourcing of many university functions to private contractors; building booms, especially those aimed at increasing campus amenities or leveraging university owned real estate for commercial purposes; and finally, continuing increases in administrative spending, especially in development offices and other areas concerned with financial management and business operations.
All of this, which may otherwise seem contradictory and difficult to make sense of, can consistently be referred back to the urgent pressure that rising institutional debt imposes upon university operations: the need to maintain a sufficiently robust revenue stream to satisfy credit rating agencies and thus keep borrowing costs, and the costs of servicing existing debt, from exploding. Freedman provides, especially in the later parts of his article, an excellent discussion of how this works.
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