Jon Cogburn's Blog

interesting leiterreports thread on gender imbalances in academic philosophy

The thread is HERE.

devil in my pocket youtube playlist

I just figured out how to make a playlist for the weird videos I've been making using public domain content and music from me and Emily's rock band. The playlist is HERE (the one's that work best video-wise are probably Santa Sangre, Zombies, and the Zoo). The general webpage for the band with lots more MP3s of songs  is HERE. I"m decent at playing guitar and writing melodies, barely adequate at singing, bad as a lyricist, and even worse at getting a decent mix and timbre when recording these things on my computer.

When playing live I can keep an audience's attention if I am wearing a wrestling mask. Once it comes off they start drunkenly talking to one another and ignoring me. There's probably some Levinasian reason for this.

Music has mostly been on a hiatus with very young children. During the sabbatical year I could be a decent father to a baby, play music, and write philosophy. When we came back to Baton Rouge and I had to teach again while trying to be a decent father to a toddler it took me a year just to figure out how to write philosophy again (as much as possible do it two hours every morning very, very early- then the rest of the day is grading, teaching, prepping lectures, administrative stuff, helping students, and being a dad). I think it's going to be another year at least before I can work realiably rocking out back into the mix. Other musician friends of mine with full time jobs tell me that when your youngest hits three things open up in a way that gives you one or two hours a day rocking out time without being a bad father.

hypothesis for why analytic blogosophere is less dysfunctionally vituperative

I think I've figured out why debates in the continental philosophy blogosphere are so much more likely to become vituperative than debates in the analytic blogosophere.

The tenure model in analytic philosophy is overwhelmingly based on number of articles published in a set of journals that generally have from three to fifteen percent acceptance rates (these are actually among the lowest acceptance rates of all academic journals). Say you are perfectly average for a published analytical philosopher. Then you'd have to submit over ten times for every one published article. So nine times out of ten you have to deal with blank rejections or referee reports justifying to an editor why your paper should not be published. And the chance of getting a tenure track job and then tenure depends upon this, so it's a huge emotional issue.

If that is your reality, then people disagreeing with you on the internet is just not that big a deal. You are already used to getting punched down and getting right back up over and over again in the one thing that most determines whether you will be able to follow your bliss. If you don't develop very thick skin the process is too traumatic and you can't do it. But then, as a result, analytic philosophers in blogs can even be fairly dismissive or challenging and it rarely escalates into ever increasing vituperativeness, personal attacks, weird defensiveness, and people being banned.

Of course these are just tendencies, and I would not have a basis for making them if I did not find a lot of the continental blogosophere to be philosophically valuable (check the links to the right).

Nausea type sublimity and scholarship

My friend Robby Burleigh had a bit of an existential freakout the other day. He was sitting in a Perks cafe in Baton Rouge preparing a class when a graduate student in English he knows plopped down next to him and began reading a much thumbed through edition of Eudora Welty.

Robby had a vision of all the dissertations, monographs, and papers written about Eudora Welty. And it made him feel physically ill.

When he described it to me I thought of the time I saw a 60 Minutes special about the production of cigarettes, and how sickened I was when I saw these gigantic machines funneling millions of cigarettes into boxes then cartons. If you smoked a tiny fragment of all those cigarettes you would feel horrible.

This kind of existential freakout is something like the Romantic era notion of the sublime, which was supposed to happen when you lose yourself before the immensity of something beautiful and overwhelming like an oncoming tropical storm or mountain peak (having been through Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav I can tell you that Kant really is correct when he says you only get the sublime when you know that things are going to be fine; otherwise it just sucks).

But sometimes the sheer quantitative immensity of something that can be counted produces a kind of nauseau, and Robby had this at the thought of all of the discrete bits of Eudora Welty scholarship. What hope did his friend, or anybody for that matter, really have for saying anything new and worthwhile about Eudora Welty? What a joke! But then human agency disappears and you lose yourself in becoming just another Eudora Welty writing machine, just part of this immense nauseauting pile of scholarship.

Today's Chronicle has a really sobering article on this issue. Mark Bauerlein looks at publication statistics to argue that the reign of "theory" came about precisely because professors had to publish but just about every worthwhile bit of exegesis one could do about just about every worthwhile author had been done.

The elevation of the critic from expositor to performer had its philosophical rationales, to be sure. But it also happened at an opportune moment. For something besides theory also made it an undesirable aim to get the meanings and representations of the work right. It was that in the preceding 35 years, the works of hundreds of artists, writers, and thinkers had already undergone thousands of examinations.

And the elevation of the critic as not merely an expositor but as a "theorist" whose reading are the real text (think reader response theory) was an amazingly successful strategy for professors to still be able to publish even though all the good expository work for the overwhelming majority of worthwhile writers had been done. Here's one of the moments of nausea type sublimity:

over the past five decades, the "productivity" of scholars in the fields of languages and literature had increased hugely: from approximately 13,000 publications to 72,000 a year. Consider the output in literary studies. From 1950 to 1985, 2,195 items of criticism and scholarship devoted to William Wordsworth appeared. Virginia Woolf garnered 1,307, Walt Whitman 1,986, Faulkner 3,487, Milton 4,274, and Shakespeare at the top, with 16,771. Type any major author into the MLA International Bibliography database and more daunting tallies pop up. In each pile lies everything from plot summaries to existentialist reflections. But for all practical purposes, such as teaching an undergraduate class, they impart the meanings and representations to the full.

As a result:

Theories and valuations that displaced the meaning of the work and prized the unique angle of the interpreter didn't just flatter the field. They empowered novices to carry on. The long shadow of precursors dissipated in the light of creative, personal critique. The authors studied might remain, but there were new theories to rehearse upon them and topics to expound through them, controversies in which to "situate" oneself, and readerly dexterities to display.

It was liberating and enabling, as subsequent outputs show. From 1986 to 2008, Wordsworth collected 2,257 books, chapters, dissertations, etc. Faulkner came in at 2,781, Milton at 3,294, Whitman at 1,509, Woolf at 3,217, and Shakespeare at 18,799. The model worked—astoundingly so. Degrees, grants, jobs, tenure, and raises rested on those publications, and if older criticism answered questions about the meaning of Paradise Lost, well, other questions had to be found.

But now the same thing has happened with "theory."

Something happened, though, in the process. As striving junior scholars and established seniors staged one reading after another, as advanced theories were applied and hot topics attached, the performances stacked up year by year —and seemed to matter less and less. Look at the sales figures for monographs. Back in 1995, the director of the Pennsylvania State University Press, Sanford G. Thatcher, asked who reads those books and revealed in The Chronicle, "Our sales figures for works of literary criticism suggest that the answer is, fewer people than ever before." Sixty-five percent of Penn State's recent offerings at that point sold fewer than 500 copies. A few years later, also in The Chronicle, Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, said his humanities monographs "usually sell between 275 and 600 copies." In 2002 the Modern Language Association issued a report on scholarly publishing that cited editors estimating purchases of as low as 200 to 300 units. Remember, too, that standing library orders account for around 250 copies. (That's my guess—also, a few librarians have told me that the odds that such books will never be checked out are pretty good.)

Why the disjuncture? Because performance ran its course, and now it's over. The audience got bored.

For decades the performative model obscured a situation that should have been recognized at the time: Vast areas of the humanities had reached a saturation point. Hundreds of literary works have undergone introduction, summation, and analysis many times over. Hamlet alone received 1,824 items of attention from 1950 to 1985, and then 2,406 from 1986 to 2008. What else was to be said? Defenders of the endeavor may claim that innovations in literary studies like ecocriticism and trauma theory have compelled reinterpretations of works, but while the advent of, say, queer theory opened the works to new insights, such developments don't come close to justifying the degree of productivity that followed. Also, the rapid succession of theories, the Next Big Thing, and the Next … evoked the weary impression that it was all a professional game, a means of finding something more to say.

At what point does common sense step in and cry, "Whoa! Slow down! Hamlet can't give you anything more." The system has reached absurd proportions. Better to admit that books by M.H. Abrams, Hartman, and a few others covered Wordsworth's poems for most practical purposes several decades ago, or that Joseph N. Riddel (my adviser) unveiled the enigmatic lyrics of Wallace Stevens well enough in 1965. Hundreds of excellent books and articles on Henry James have seen print and amply render the meaning of his oeuvre. Further additions to the 6,000-plus items that have been published since 1950 are, to be blunt, in nearly every case unnecessary.

Unfortunately, Bauerlein's solutions to this problem of "oversaturation" feeds into the hands of the educational industrial complex:

One, departments should limit the materials they examine at promotion time. If aspirants may submit only 100 pages to reviewers, they will publish less and ensure that those 100 pages are superb.

Two, subsidizers should shift their support away from saturated areas and toward unsaturated areas, in particular toward research into teaching and even more toward classroom and curricular initiatives.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone who has ever taken part in a "curricular initiative" could write something like that without suffering some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. The reality of his suggestions would be just wasting more time jumping through infuriatingly stupid hoops designed by education school types. No thanks.

I think the real solution to the problem of "theory" is coming from people who take are hooking up traditional problem spaces in the language departments with approaches and issues from other departments both in the social and life sciences.

Also we should humbly accept that most scholarship is not going to be that important. That's the one way I think analytic philosophy is pretty good. Everybody is just doing their little part, and your little part might not come to anything in the broader dialectic. O.K. I can do that and go teach my classes. In a Nietzschean fashion, the question should be whether the background of mediocrity is such that an atmosphere exists that is conducive to the few bits of greatnes that is the most any generation can reasonably expect.

bit of navel gazing after talking with Mark Silcox

One of the really scary things about philosophy in a professional setting is that you can reasonably follow the muse for a couple of years and end up not having anything new (in the sense of worthy of publication) to say about what you've been studying.

 I guess the trick is to try to keep your eye on little things for publication while still pursuing the big issues. If you are professionally lucky, then the long road to aporia still yields some publishable stuff along the way that would be helpful for fellow travelers were they to read it.

Maybe there would be a better way to institutionalize this stuff. I don't know. The publish, publish, publish paradigm certainly puts strange selective pressures on the contents of the discourse. For example, views that are implausible in the right way sometimes get selected for because they are the ones most likely to generate papers (counterexamples and inventive responses to counterexamples and then new counterexamples to those, etc.). Is it too crazy to think that something like this happened with non-cognitivism in ethics?

I'm not sure one could a priori design a better system. Philosophy is like civilization in that way, there is no algorithm for producing it and any attempt to install one leads to grief.

Proposed Addition to the Philosophical Bestiary (Introducing the Mole while Instantiating the Moaning Myrtle)

Since these overlap, they are best read in the order presented below.

Troll: (a) k punk's initial post, (b) Harman's addendum, (c) further clarification from Harman.

Grey Vampire: (a) k punk's initial post, (b) ,Harman's addendum, (c) k punk's clarification

Minotaur: post by Levi Bryant

1. The Troll is constituted by the "sneer from nowhere," (k punk) the person who does not defend any particular claim, but rather attacks the claims of others. "The Troll is someone who enters into dialogue solely with the gesture of putting the other person on the defensive, while tacitly pretending that they have no need ever to play defense themselves." (Harman)

2. The Grey Vampire is like the troll in that they take no stance, except without the sneer. They "disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Troll, the Grey Vampire's mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is a moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive - everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything." (k punk)

Some wisdom from k punk on the two:

The dominant modes of subjectivity at the end of history/ web 2.0 are those of the Troll and the Grey Vampire, the two faces of the Last Man. This isn't to say that most people are not fans; they are, but many work hard to conceal this about themselves, for it makes them vulnerable to attacks from Trolls or Grey Vampires, or the Trolls or Grey Vampires in themselves. They are subordinated to The Fear and its demand that we be irreverent, that we constitute ourselves as ironically self-deflating subjects (I'm the sort of person who....). The postmodern academic, complicit with the system that immiserates them, reflexively impotent, is required to oscilate between being Troll and Grey Vampire, between hyper-critical scholarliness and convivial sociality, kept locked into the system by just the right level of prestige and self-loathing. That's why most of the interesting work done in institutions is achieved by people who have infiltrated the academy after periods of (intellectual and subjective) destitution.

So I will admit it: I am a fan, and this holds for my philosophical, as much as my cultural, investments. The two are in any case interchangeable - there is a philosophy implicit in any cultural product worth its salt.

I think this is really important wisdom. Finding stuff to get really excited and obsessed about is a big part of what justifies spending more time on this wretched planet. If you don't let yourself be a fan you are really getting something wrong about life. Likewise with not passionately committing yourself to sustained projects.

3. The Minotaur "converts every philosophical opposition into a misinterpretation. The text(s) guarded by the Minotaur thus become a Labyrinth from which there is no escape." (Bryant)

I would add to the bestiary.

4. The Mole is the person who reads philosophy only with the interest in finding out what the philosopher in question said, with no regard for how this reading will contribute to a broader philosophical project whose goal is to discern the truth. Honest Moles just like burrowing around in texts and have no interest in surfacing into the sunlight. Some of them are good historians of philosophy, even though they have no philosophical passion (as opposed to a passion for burrowing and fights with other Moles). Unfortunately, in a process not well understood by extant science, Moles often metamorphose into full blown Minotaurs.

Internet anonymity works on some people like the full moon does on lycanthropes, giving us the Weretroll, and Wereminotaur (many Moles are Wereminotaurs), who can cover over their awful affliction by day (when people know who they are). 

I'm sure there are more. Please share (with reference to a beast of course).

[P.S. From the discussion in the comments:

5. The Moaning Myrtle (also known as the Termagant, also known as the Konaki-Jijii) is the philosopher whose ghostly internet presence repeatedly takes every criticism personally and cries about it to the whole world, often by way of unearthly shrouding of such "arguments" as she can muster in long winded supra-referential posts/comments (such as getting sublimated revenge on the people that she is whingeing about by adding to a supposed-to-be-humorous typology).]

thoughts on one of Harman's advice posts

Most of Graham Harman's advice posts are things, at the ripe age of 38, I categorize under learned-the-hard-way. [Some of the most important lessons Harman explains in vivid and entertaining detail: (1) make as detailed an outline as possible, (2) get the first draft out of the way; it doesn't matter if it's bad, you're going to rewrite anyhow, (3) surround yourself with productive people and people who you help to be more productive, (4) find a grad school adviser with the right set of personal qualities that will be helpful to you (Harman goes into these in detail) rather than someone who works in a specific area, and (5) be ruthless about simplifying your life of things that are of no lasting value (e.g. television) to make temporal and cognitive room for philosophy.]

When one of Harman's posts is one I haven't yet internalized as a result of my own travails (and don't forget that the French word for work is "travailler"] it always makes me think thrice. A couple of days ago he did an interesting one "On Bureaucratic writing" with practical details about how to keep on the sunny side when writing reports for institutions ("book proposals, book synopses, grant proposals, grant reports, annual faculty reports, feedback to administrators on job candidates, brief autobiographies, award nominations for others, reference letters, and so forth.").

Harman correctly notes that,

The usual view of these things is that they are a painful bureaucratic necessity in order to gain funding and other support from cold-hearted fools.

and then goes on to show why one should love writing this kind of thing. His arguments are powerful when restricted to book proposals, grant reports, and some institutional reports. He gives four main reasons:

[1] If you can’t give a good, crisp summary of what you’ve been doing lately in 5 or 6 pages, then chances are you’re not yet clear enough as to what exactly you are doing.

[2] I enjoy taking a chaotic situation and organizing it in such a way that new additional things become possible that were too hazy or remote to seem possible before. And that’s what writing a book is like…

[3] A piece of writing is not something that exists in your head and must be perfect before it is put on paper. Rather, think of the writing as a dialogue between your head and the paper. There’s actually not as much going on in your head as you think. Your head is not nothing without its relations to other things. . .but let’s just say– your head isn’t all that interesting apart from its interactions with other entities.

[4] You have to know the sort of people you are addressing at the publisher’s office. You have to know the existing constraints, such as word-count and timetable. You have to know the competition. You have to know the sort of thing that readers like. From all of these ingredients, with luck, a book is born. That’s why I recently said: “think of yourself as a builder, not as a monk on a holy quest.” A book is not a pristine mental entity that should be born only when “perfect.” It is a machine, and machines are not self-contained, but require fuel, fuel suppliers, buildings in which to be housed, and purchasers.

The first claim ties to his points about the importance of outlines in the writing process. The second is to claim that other forms of bureaucratic writing such as reports to administrators about your department, assessment of job candidates, tenure letters etc. are doing the some of the same thing that one does when one writes philosophy. The third point explicates one of the important morals of  Andy Clark and David Chalmer's "extended cognition" argument (read the linked article as well as Clark's excellent books on this topic) where the mind is not the brain but also the "scaffolding" the brain and body use to solve problems. The fourth point is an extension and problematization of this; one's work is part of one's "extended mind" but it is also essentially a thing in itself, doing its job in the world of other things (there's probably an interesting paper in how [3] and [4] fit together in the context of aesthetics and Clark's theory).

This is all very helpful for me. I think I've already internalized it with respect to reviewing and proofing other people's articles, books, and theses. The document I write up as part of the review process: [1] helps me organize my reactions, [2] is similar to and overlaps with philosophical writing, [3] is an indispensible part of creating my own thoughts, and [4] is better (actually even merely possible) in all these regards because it is because it is to be appropriated and used publicly.

Unfortunately, these reasons still don't cut it for most of the bureaucratic writing lots of us end up doing. The problem is, most of the reports we write make no difference whatsoever, or at best are hoops that must be jumped through merely so someobdy with more power doesn't prevent you from doing what you've always been doing (i.e. fill out these five forms every semester with narrative summaries on student answers to final exam questions, or else we'll stop counting your department's classes as satisfying the "General Education" requirement).

One of the big issues is that in most second and third tier universities there is a strict and growing division between "enhanced" departments (aristocrats) and everybody else (serfs, though sometimes actually labeled "service" departments, and sometimes not so labeled if the broader political and administrative rhetorical strategies include a pretense of following the practices at prestige universities). If you are in one of the other departments you have to write all the same reports as the enhanced departments with the pretense that they will have an effect, but they will not because the allocation of resources has already been determined. When there is new money, it goes to the aristocratic departments. When there are cuts, they are at best distributed "across the board." (See my entertaining post HERE with a letter from Mark Bousquet and meditations (with embedded music videos) on the results this dynamic is having in non-prestige universities.)

If you are in a situation where this happens year after year after year (as I think the majority of professors in American universities are), the reports become a hateful, time consuming, excercise in alleviating the hypocrisy of others: (1) the ridiculous pretense that the "build to strength" slow reduction of your school to a few enormo-departments (most of whose "external funding" is skimmed to pay ridiculously inflated Enronesque administrative salaries), and a bunch of community college like combined units (i.e. "foreign languages," "humanities," etc.) is moving in the direction of prestige universities, (2) the pretense that destroying the tenure system can be good for teaching as long as the few remaining tenured people spend most of their time writing assessment reports to other committees, or (3) the pretense that there is a level playing field in the competition for resources; that a report from a serf unit will be read with the same standards by one from an aristocrat, even if the serf unit is requesting an infinitesimally small fraction of new resources going to the aristocrats (e.g. just so the state Board of Regents won't close it down for failing one-size-fits all "assessment metrics" such as absolute number of graduating Ph.Ds irrespective of number of funded teaching assistant positions, etc).

Still, I'm going to keep in mind Harman's points to keep on the sunny side as much as possible. It's psychologically, physically, and morally unhealthy to let yourself be irritated for large chunks of time. I think I might be able to use them to be slightly less grumpy during grading. That would be nice.

Oh yeah; this song helps too.

thoughts on Mark Bousquet's disturbing data

Professor Bousquet's blog How The University Works is an invaluable resource. The following is from a recent letter of his that is going around the American Association of University Professors listservs.

At the present rate of decline, the next two decades will see the percentage of tenured and tenure-track professors plunge into the single digits.  As of fall 2007, the tenurable comprised just one-quarter of the faculty population, according to the American Federation of Teachers, down from one-third a decade earlier.

Sadly, the AFT analysis is probably conservative, relying chiefly on federaI IPEDS data  containing reporting loopholes for  instructional staff that the institution designates as“without faculty status,”* employees with another position on the campus, and some graduate employees.

Nor do these sobering statistics capture the full sense of the transformation. Tasks formerly performed by the professoriate haven't just been turned over to lecturers-- much of that work is now done by an army of nonfaculty staff, administrators, and even undergraduate students

In short, we already know what the future academic workplace will look like. It'll closely resemble many of today's for-profits and the community colleges with which they compete--operating without tenure or with tenure reserved for a small group of faculty administrators in charge of hiring, supervising, and setting curriculum for a part-time staff, typically without doctorates and earning only a few thousand dollars.

At institutions where some faculty currently engage in research, tenure is likely to survive among those populations bringing in external grants.  But departments that traditionally rely on internal funding are likely to do steadily less research and more instruction. . .

Many of these departments may consolidate on the model of the community college--more and more “modern-language departments” and “humanities departments” featuring consolidations of philosophy, art, art history, classics, and the languages—not to mention departments of “social and behavioral sciences,” “intercultural studies,” and the like.

In many cases, the income-producing research activity will follow the trend of moving into non-departmental locations –institutes, centers, and programs—that can be closed with less fuss if the income dries up. This suggests an alternate to consolidating departments at institutions where faculty do research: by redefining the department chiefly as an instructional center and not the home of exciting interdisciplinary research, the researchers will visit departments only to irritably develop syllabi to be implemented by subordinated cadres of cheap teachers, and to reproduce themselves in steadily more pro forma votes, as the real decisions about hiring and retention are made in the revenue centers.

. . .for the majority of us, this ugly future has already happened. The only reason “we” don't realize it is because those of us with the loudest professional voices haven't allowed ourselves to understand.

What the one-quarter of us bemoaning the “future” demise of tenure are most unwilling to understand is this: those of us with tenure are not just a minority--we're experiencing a radical shift in our function with respect to everyone else.

With the nontenurable majority engaged primarily in teaching, and many of the tenured released to revenue production, the remaining fraction of a fraction performs most of the service for everyone else.

More and more committee work. Longer terms in administration. More advising of more complex requirements, and more assessment of more kinds of learning. More mentoring of graduate students. More oversight of student workers, including undergraduates, both paid and donating their services. (I swear I just received a request  to serve as my unpaid “research assistant” this summer--from a high-school junior!) And a steady stream of more and more nakedly managerial responsibilities with respect to the nontenurable majority—hiring, evaluation, curricular development, professional development, and so on.

If you are tenured and feel this intensified service burden already, imagine what it will be like twenty years from now when the proportion of tenured and tenure track is 8%, not 25%.

Fortunately, there are countertrends. Most notably, the movement toward unionization of the nontenurable faculty is producing substantial new forms of job security and raising wages.  

Some points-

(1) Bousquet's decline is not going to happen at the tiny minority of prestige universities (paradigmatically the top 25 rated Carnegie institutions and the best 10 or so Liberal Arts colleges), which will continue to have large departments with decently funded Ph.D programs across the panoply of the humanities.

(2) Since unionization is the only thing to stop any of this, so called right-to-work states are going to further lag behind the rest of the country.

[For people living in more civilized states and countries reading this, "right to work" means that unions are prohibited from signing exclusive employment contracts with employers, and so employers can always fire union members and hire non-union members. This is unconstitutional, as it abrogates employees' rights to organize into their own corporations that can make service contracts. These laws were touted by anti-union forces in the 60's and 70's as ways for mostly Southern states to radically improve their economies. But all they did (and this is not controversial) was vastly decrease the middle class, lowering median income, further returning such states to the share-cropper economic status that aspects of their cultures support. [Consider Louisiana, which is the 14th richest state in the country in terms of per capita wealth, but is reliably from 45th to 50th in terms of median income.] In addition, the laws economically hammer the states by contributing to the massive outmigration of skilled labor to other states where union protections guarantee a livable wage.

And please don't bring up the canard about automotive unions causing the Big Three to go under. First, watch this excellent performance.

Then note that American car companies would still be the envy of the world if auto executives had used a tiny fraction of their political power to push for socialized medicine and meaningful federal support for energy efficient vehicles. Instead they betrayed their shareholders, employees, and customers out of class loyalty, a truly misguided alliance with oil companies, and relying on SUVs that any rational person could have said would not be profitable as soon as the next oil crunch came along. American companies are obsolete because they have to compete with car companies in countries where the government provides health care and meaningful pensions. And everybody knows this.]

(3) States without prestige universities are increasingly being governed by a political elite that attended prestige universities in other states. As with unconstitutional "right to work" laws, this will further the trends of which Bousquet speaks.

All of the life experiences of these leaders support the thought that anyone smart enough to deserve a truly liberal education would go to an out of state prestige university. But then, for the majority of Americans not wealthy or preternaturally gifted enough to travel out of state to a prestige institution, education further devolves into narrow vocational training. That this is catastrophically short sighted in a world where the most important skill is being able to learn new skills is beside the point, just as the economic and human carnage of "right to work" laws is beside the point.

(4) I think it's important to realize that when one experiences the trends Bousquet chronicles that they are not the result of moral failings of the specific administrators at your university. It's really not very much fun to be an administrator. That's why they have to pay them so much.

More importantly, the administrators at your school didn't set up the system of economic incentives that are killing research in the traditional arts and humanities and also leading to a now decades long decline in real median wages in the United States. They just work here.

(5) Likewise, I think it's important to realize that these trends are happening at most American universities (again, with the exception of the prestige schools). The age of massive investment in infrastructure to improve the things for everyone, an age typified by setting up land grant colleges and songs like this

was unceremoniously deposed in the 1980s in the United States.

If the realization that these trends are catastrophically misguided as far as the direction of our Republic is depressing, there is still some consolation in realizing that they have nothing in particular to do with your school.

(6) Complete pessimism about the trends Bousquet measures is warranted in the short and medium term. Cultivate your own garden. Give up on the illusion of "faculty governance." The powerlessness of faculty senates in the face of these changes show them to almost always be glorified student councils. Actually not even that. In American High Schools student councils get to plan the prom, which is some power at least.

To the extent that they have any role in governance anyhow, these trends turn faculty senates into Lord of the Flies type scenarios. People from the "revenue generating" departments, and the one or two humanities or arts departments who for historic reasons still have decent PhD programs at the institutions in question, have zero interest in the service departments flourishing. And the "blame the victim" mentality that is sadly intrinsic to human nature leads those of the tenurable left in one of the service departments to get treated like a peasant or child. Be seen and not heard. The big people's table is not for you.

(6) It used to be considered part of academic freedom that there was a defeasible presupposition that tenured professors were doing a decent job and that people in the departments were the experts on what and how to teach (so long as this was consistent with university requirements). I've seen this presupposition waver to the point of collapse in my ten brief years as a professor (and time as a grad student before that). More and more, we are subject to the hegemony of time-consuming, soul destroying, jumping-through-hoops, assessment measures, where you have to write report after report to committees of people not in your field just for permission to continue doing what you've always done. Never is anything actually improved by these processes!

Any private business that wasted so much time on assessing rather than doing would go out of business. But in higher ed. more and more of the business just is this kind of infinitely recursive assessment, self assessment, assessment of assessment, etc.

It's like under Mao where you had to wear dunce caps and have kids hit you as you told everybody what a crap job you were doing for the revolution. No good ever came of that either.

The hegemony of "assessment" is a complete scam that exists solely to "prove" to accreditation agencies that schools with less and less credentialed teachers are still deserving of accreditation. It really is maddening the number of insultingly useless reports you have to write to overseers whose bureaucratic Stockholm Syndrome leads them to take these things seriously, even though nothing has ever been improved as a result of any of these assessments.

A few examples: a book-like "strategic plan" for your department, every five years another book for "external review," reports every year on writing skills of senior majors in every senior level class, reports on how learning outcomes are being accomplished in every General Education Requirement class, yearly reports from every department about how the number of majors is being increased (even though the school has a static number of students), reports on how grade inflation is being addressed, a slew of reports to two committees any time any aspect of departmental curriculum is changed, etc. etc. etc.

This has gotten so bad for smaller departments (in big departments the labor can be distributed better) that one chair that I have immense respect for broke down weeping in the secretary's office a few years ago. He had been spending over 40 hours a week writing Kafkaesque reports. He quit.

But in my heart I know everything will all work out. The awesome power of this song has been rearranging the spheres even as I've been writing this.

more exam week haikus (with affirmation at end)

Did You Really Think

Did you really think
I could not use Google search
to find the paper?

You Were Never There.

You were never there.
How can you complain so much
When you weren't in class?

Determinism

Determinism.
A metaphysics topic.
The class was on art.

You Were Wrong To Cite

You were wrong to cite
Your friend as an expert source.
He doesn't know crap.

All Students Must Know

All students must know
Cogburn accepts late papers.
He is a coward.

Papers Are Lined Up

Papers are lined up.
I am laying on the couch,
Trapped with pen in hand.

Real Prisons Are Worse

Real prisons are worse
Than the metaphorical
Things they inspire.

Glad You Liked the Class

Glad you liked the class.
I like playing piano,
but I'm no damned good.

Don't Be Rude to Me

Don't be rude to me.
Your grade is not hamburger.
I'm not your waiter.

Somewhere, Somebody

Somewhere, somebody
Is not anxious, and also
Not victorious.

Mexican Wrestling

Mexican wrestling.
Barbacoa Burrito.
Si. ¡A El Paso! .

Exam Week Haikus

Ten Students Mailed Me

Ten students mailed me
About the paper topic
On the syllabus.

You Got the Tests Back

You got the tests back.
Why ask me what your grade is?
Can't you even add?

What do Students Learn?

What do students learn
Those four years spent in high school?
Not grammar. Not facts.

No I Do Not Know.

No I do not know
What your grade will be. Damn it.
The exam's today.

My Head Hurts Real Bad.

My head hurts real bad.
In graduate school I thought
I would enjoy this.

another nice info-graph about this year's funding outlook for Higher Ed.

contest

Graham Harman (of justifiable Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects fame) was getting so many trolls that he no longer allows comments on his excellent blog. This is sad. Anyhow, here's a bit of one from a few days ago.

1. Heidegger = Pedantry of Attitude. Heidegger is Master; you, reader, are Apprentice. You will now be guided very slowly through a series of steps, learning the lessons you must learn, and we will discover at the end if you are a sufficiently serious student. Some people detest the tone so much that they just can’t read him. Others let it slide. I’m one of those who let it slide– he’s a genius, surely one of the 10 greatest philosophers in the Western (i.e., Greek) intellectual tradition, and his content is anything but pedantic. It is deep, and simple.

However, a peripheral reason that I let it slide is simply because he’s dead. If Heidegger had still been alive, and I had been expected to apply for a Fulbright and “go work with Heidegger in Freiburg,” I don’t think I would have had the stomach to be treated like that in person.

2. Husserl = Pedantry of Terminology. Husserl’s subject matter is actually about as sexy as it gets, but the sexiness has been completely obscured beneath the layers of margerine and lard that his terminology shellacks on top of his gorgeous insights. In better stylistic hands, phenomenology would have become the philosophy of the aesthetes rather than of the plodding terminologists. Merleau-Ponty couldn’t quite save the movement– as brilliant a writer as he is on a metaphor-by-metaphor basis, he too structures his chapters and books in surprisingly pedantic fashion. His books actually do not flow very well, even though his best sentences are even better than the best sentences of Bergson in literary terms. Some of us let Husserl get away with it because we can see the riches that lie there beneath the encrustations of margerine and lard. Others can’t see it, and hence can’t stand to read him.

3. Gadamer = Pedantry of (for lack of a better term) Indigestion. Since this might sound like a Nietzschean affectation, let me explain. Last night I was thinking that Gadamer was much better than I remembered. But now I’m reminded why he is nowhere near my list of heroes, even though I think his judgment is often uncannily accurate about many things. Basically, Gadamer is a well-read German university professor who writes in a manner that only well-read German university professors would be likely to want to read. All of these long-winded reflections on von Humboldt and Goethe’s century and Droysen, acting as though of course the reader is fascinated by all these things from the outset and need not be lured into it. It’s not going to play very well across the decades, as even German university professors start to build up a different set of baseline cultural references. Truth and Method contains nuggets of real wisdom, but I’m afraid it’s destined for “period piece” status relatively quickly. Gadamer has read a lot, and learned a lot, but can’t fully assimilate it in his own voice in the way that the really great philosophers can.

Who in analytic philosophy belongs on this list? Certainly Quine with his preposterously and painfully a-literate alliteration (when I read in Quine's autobiography that (1) he'd wanted to be a writer in high school, and (2) he only ever read popular science magazines and philosophers responding to his own work, then it all made sense; outside of the realm of physical pain, very little is as excruciating as a badly read yet affectatious writer). McDowell? Brandom with his use of italics in lieu of argumentation? 

But for all these guys, we need an X such that we can assign to each of them some "Pedantry of X." Then we need a spiel. My brain's moving too slow to do this. Help would be appreciated, though I realize that this may not be the fun party game I in fact envision it to be.

interesting Leiter reports thread

There's an interesting Leiter reports thread in reaction to a New York Times column HERE. Read and respond!

The Crisis in University Funding (click to enlarge)

The Banality of Evel Kneivel

I almost always try to make an example interesting, which means some combination of sad, funny, and reporting actual events. But sometimes this is very bad. Occasionally students will take issue with the example in ways that completely surprise me. I try to correct them on a point I take to be empirical, but that some of them take to be political and controversial. Then all of the students are talking about the political issue and not the example. I try to bring it back to the issue at hand, but do a horrible job of that and just come across as someone trying to get students to agree with my political views.

This happened today when I used the torture counterexample to utilitarianism. The example goes like this--If the amount of happiness produced by the torture exceeds the amount of pain caused by it, then certain kinds of utilitarians are committed to the torture being morally O.K. (and even obligatory). Instead of just using the Marquis de Sade as an example, I had to try to make it more interesting by talking about actual torture involved in lynchings during the Jim Crow era and more recently during the war on terror. I thought this would be interesting because I'd seen the museum exhibit of all the postcards of lynchings and because one of my students was in the National Guard and involved in the legal defense of some of the convicted Abu Graib torturers.

But some of the students thought that the United States had not tortured. I should have dropped the whole issue right then. But my phenomenology said that it was just an empirical and conceptual question, so I cited the recent Red Cross report and also shared the history of the use of the word "torture" by entities representing the United States. I actually (and stupidly) thought I was just correcting the facts.

But then some of the students got really upset about the claim that a sizable portion of American citizens would support torture because it brought them the kind of pleasures relevant to feeling revenged, superior to others, and less not in control of their own lives. At that point I really, really should have just said I'd picked a bad example (I had). But instead I went back to talking about the postcards of lynchings, and all the smiling people getting their pictures taken with the victims who had been tortured prior to their hanging. I've read so much of the history (and psychological mechanisms involved) of normal people doing, supporting, and aiding in evil things, that this just seems unremarkable to me. But it made a certain percentage of the class very angry.

Four or five students got up and left. Maybe they had to go to the bathroom. I don't think so though. There is a decent chance though that they felt that I was trying to impose my political views on them in an inappropriate way.But I'd just wanted to craft a counter-example that they would remember. That's all I wanted to do.

In the future I I'm just going to use counterexamples from very distant possible worlds. Albeit, I can't help but think of the part in Adorno's Minima Moralia where he castigates himself for all of the times he's silently assented to claims that implicate genocide. But can one live in a society and not do this?

I'm sure if I taught ethics as a matter of course this kind of stuff would be easier. But it's not for me. It makes me sick.

Wheaton College Rescinds Job Offer to Socrates

Wheaton College was going to hire Socrates to be on their philosophy faculty (actually extending a job offer to him), but then someone on the hiring committee read the end of Plato's Charmides.

Charmides said: I am sure that I do not know, Socrates, whether I have or have not this gift of wisdom and temperance; for how can I know whether I have a thing, of which even you and Critias are, as you say, unable to discover the nature?-(not that I believe you.) And further, I am sure, Socrates, that I do need the charm, and as far as I am concerned, I shall be willing to be charmed by you daily, until you say that I have had enough.

Very good, Charmides, said Critias; if you do this I shall have a proof of your temperance, that is, if you allow yourself to be charmed by Socrates, and never desert him at all.

You may depend on my following and not deserting him, said Charmides: if you who are my guardian command me, I should be very wrong not to obey you.

And I do command you, he said.

Then I will do as you say, and begin this very day.

You sirs, I said, what are you conspiring about?

We are not conspiring, said Charmides, we have conspired already.

And are you about to use violence, without even going through the forms of justice?

Yes, I shall use violence, he replied, since he orders me; and therefore you had better consider well.

But the time for consideration has passed, I said, when violence is employed; and you, when you are determined on anything, and in the mood of violence, are irresistible.

Do not you resist me then, he said.

I will not resist you, I replied.

I don't know if the Wheaton hiring committee has gotten to the Symposium yet; that might have further influenced the revocation of the job offer. Poor Socrates.

The fact that Socrates (through Plato and Plotinus and Augustine) is one of the inventors of Christian theology did not tell sufficiently in his favor.

The fact that the Q Gospel (source material for two of the others) is very likely influenced by the traveling Socratic Cynic philosophers that Jesus saw as a child (he lived within walking distance of over twenty Greek communities, and one day's walk from Gadara, a center of Cynic philosophy) did not tell sufficiently in his favor. The professors at Wheaton College obviously know better than Jesus.

Should I Brush the Dust from my Feet?

The following twelve are people I know who have signed the counterpetition to Charles Hermes' original anti-discrimination petition.

• Daniel Bonevac (took classes with as an undergraduate)
• William Lane Craig (saw interesting lecture on special relativity)
• Ed Henderson (colleague in my department)
• Robert C. Koons (took classes with as an undergraduate)
• Jeffrey Koperski (went to graduate school with)
• R. Keith Loftin (recently graduated M.A. student of my department)
• Alasdair MacIntyre (a huge fan of his work)
• Roger Scruton (a fan of his work)
• Ed Song (a colleague in my department)
• Alvin Plantinga (ate dinner with once)
• Peter Van Inwagen (ate dinner with and got drinks with once)
• Linda Zagzebski (sat in on a class on her virtue epistemology book)

It's hard for me to be dispassionate about this, and I am in fact very depressed. (1) Among my gay friends, two were bullied sadistically and mercilessly in high school, another one died of AIDS, and another was beaten so bad that he spent days in intensive care. I can't help but to see this as more persecution of these people, as well as the other gay people I know and cherish. (2) I grew up for the most part in Montgomery, Alabama during the final parts of the original civil rights struggle (went to church with Julian McPhillips and was friends with Morris Dees' daughter). My early love of philosophy in part comes from learning it from people like McPhillips and Dees. (3) Hermes' original petition doesn't ask very much. It just says.

We, the undersigned, request that the American Philosophical Association either (1) enforce its policy and prohibit institutions that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from advertising in 'Jobs for Philosophers' or (2) clearly mark institutions with these policies as institutions that violate our anti-discrimination policy. If the APA is unwilling to take either of these measures, we request that the APA publicly inform its members that it will not protect homosexual philosophers and remove its anti-discrimination policy to end the illusion that a primary function of the APA is to protect the rights of its members.

That is, the petition only asks that the APA honor its explicitly stated anti-discrimination platform, or to change that platform. Why do philosophers oppose a simple demand for consistency (and we're not talking about truth paradoxes and the kinds of thing that animate Graham Priest here)? (4) I see the kind of evangelicalism practiced by the discriminatory institutions (one that absurdly takes the Bible to be literally true, that viciously worships a God who would consign the vast majority of people to eternal perdition because of their metaphysical beliefs, one that persecutes homosexuals) as anti-Christian (and by "Christian" here I don't mean "what most Christians believe" but "what the historical Jesus had in mind"). (5) In pursuing my own salvation, I want to believe that some things (including, and especially, philosophy) are redemptive by their very nature. The manner in which the "Christian" philosophers on the relevant Leiter Reports threads so closely approximate the bigots of my youth has completely disabused me of this. These people have PhDs in philosophy. What a complete drag.

Arguments about Hermes' anti-discrimination petition can be found on Leiter Reports HERE. Arguments about the counter-petition can be found on Leiter Reports HERE. Anyone genuinely interested in philosophical issues concerning homosexuality should order  John Corvino's book. Anyone genuinely interested in the religious issues should order Jack Rogers' book.

Petition to for APA to Follow its own Anti-Discrimination Policy

Brian Hermes' has started an on-line petition that you can sign here. The original discussion of this was on Leiter Reports here and the second page here.

Interesting Philosopher's Anonymous Thread

A nice discussion concerning what to do when one of your job interviewers falls asleep here.

Leiter reports thread

Interesting thread on Leiter Reports about the APA's failure to censure (and continuing to advertise for) institutions that discriminate based on sexual orientation here. Though I posted two things on the thread, Mark Lance brings it all home a lot better than I could:

Well, this is going around and around, and I think most of the key points have been made. But one gets the sense that some in this thread are simply losing the focus on the reality of what this sort of discrimination means to people. We live in a world in which LGBTQ folks can be fired from their jobs with impunity, can be banned from the hospital room of their dying life partner (real case, real philosopher), can be prevented from adopting, even fostering children, are frequently subject to physical assault, are routinely subject to verbal assault, are murdered. All this leads to depression, self-injurious behavior, and a host of negative effects, especially on adolescents who question how well they fit the official societal definitions of gender, sexuality, etc.

The APA may play a small part in this, but in the face of this massive, arbitrary, systematic structural violence - and notwithstanding it's explicit policy against such things - the APA is providing a free forum for colleges to offer jobs that explicitly take part in this matrix of discrimination. To call a ban on advertising in the JFP "religious discrimination" is Orwellian. To say that it "stifles free speech" when a college can pay to advertise in any paper in the country, or just email ads to every college in the country is cynical and absurd. To worry about the feelings of generally good thoughtful people who support the ban - to place, that is, the hurt feelings that result from saying to someone that their behavior and beliefs are harmful, bigoted and wrong above the effect of telling someone that she is not worthy of working unless you, the good thoughtful philosopher, get to demand her celibacy - is moral blindness and self-pity of staggering proportions. (Not even to mention that the same offended good decent thoughtful philosopher will find no worry whatsoever in saying that a just and loving God will condemn, say, me and my queer daughter to eternal torture. But of course saying that we deserve eternal suffering for having disagreed with a divine being about what genitals it's ok for mammals to rub together is religious freedom, while claiming that such views are mean-spirited, intellectually indefensible, and bigoted, but without advocating even a minute of torture, is offensive.)

Schools are using their religious affiliation to discriminate against an already systematically abused and widely despised minority. (As I've noted in previous threads, I've yet to see a university require an oath to turn the other cheek in response to violence, to eschew excessive wealth, to reject unconstrained capitalism, etc. Only allegedly Christian doctrine that targets the vulnerable is ever seen as requiring doctrinal purity, the rest is all open to debate and interpretation.) The APA is actively supporting them in doing so by funding their advertisements of such bigoted policies. It is perfectly obvious that as an absolutely minimal step toward moral decency - and as Alastair notes, simple consistency - we should stop doing so.

After taking this minimal first step, we should then get off our privileged academic asses and get out and work to change the much worse features of discrimination, bigotry, and violence that exist in our culture.