New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Reporting Tenure-Track, Postdoctoral, and VAP Hires

If you would like to report hiring information from 2013-2014, please fill in the form at this link; the data entered there feeds into a spreadsheet available here. Quite a bit of hiring information is already available at Leiter Reports, here. 

UPDATE 8 March 10:30 am CDT: This form and spreadsheet need not be limited to this NewAPPS post. If any other blog would like to link to it, they are welcome. In that case, I would be happy to make the relevant bloggers co-owners of the Google documents in question. Ideally, the information would be available in a neutral location, but having the links posted to several different blogs would come close to that. 

Donate to the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women for International Women's Day

Today, March 8, is International Women's Day.  To celebrate this day, the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women offers a challenge: you can help to raise $10,000 to support the work of the committee.  More information here:

https://apaonline.site-ym.com/news/163910/This-International-Womens-Day-help-us-improve-the-climate-for-women-in-philosophy.htm

 

Ludlow responds to student suit

NBC Chicago article here:

Northwestern University professor Peter Ludlow, the target of a sexual harassment complaint by a female student, filed a response to that woman’s lawsuit in Cook County Court on Friday, denying her allegations and stating that she was the real aggressor.

 Daily Northwestern article here:

Philosophy Prof. Peter Ludlow responded Friday to a Medill junior's lawsuit against him, denying he sexually assaulted her and calling Northwestern's subsequent investigation "flawed and one-sided.”

Open Letter from Northwestern graduate students in philosophy

The graduate students of the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, have by a majority vote, adopted the following statement:

We find the alleged behavior of gross professional misconduct recently leveled against a faculty member in our department to be deplorable. Further, we judge that the university has failed our community in the way that they have handled these allegations of gross professional misconduct. In addition, we stand in solidarity with the victim of the aforementioned misconduct, with victims of sexual harassment and violence globally, as well as with their advocates (whom we do not consider to be vigilantes). As students, and educators, we take seriously the wellness of every member of our community. The members of our philosophy department have been genuinely dedicated to promoting inclusiveness at Northwestern, as well as within the broader philosophical community. It is among our highest priorities that we create and sustain a safe environment for all members of our community. In the spirit of these affirmations, we are deeply saddened that a member of our department has been found to be in violation of these moral and professional obligations.

We feel, however, that it bears saying that the behavior outlined in the recent lawsuit leveled against Northwestern is not representative of our sense of the prevailing culture in our department. The overwhelming majority of our community — both professors and graduate students, male and female — are engaged jointly in a project of inclusiveness and mutual support.

Since 2011 our department has maintained a committee to promote and sustain inclusiveness among the graduate student community. Among their duties, the Climate Committee hosts the Annual Inclusiveness Lecture on implicit bias and other issues affecting underrepresented and marginalized groups in the discipline. That same year we also founded an initiative geared towards fostering female undergraduate majors: WiPhi is a female-only group of members of the philosophical community at Northwestern at all levels (undergraduate, graduate, and professors) who regularly meet. WiPhi also hosts the Annual Gertrude Bussey Lecture, in honor of the first woman to receive a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern.

Additionally, our course listings represent our shared commitment to exploring issues of diversity and underrepresentation in the field, and in the broader community at large: Our department makes it a priority to regularly teach courses with substantial feminist philosophy content, as well as substantial focus on issues of race. We, the graduate students, feel that our community is home to several upstanding, vocally feminist, junior and senior faculty members. Our community is committed to fighting the sexism that has long been rampant in the broader philosophical community. And while we jointly feel compelled to express our deep sadness in response to the alleged behavior of a faculty member in our department, we also feel compelled to express our commitment to our community.

A Petition to the APA through its Board of Officers

As teachers, mentors and colleagues, we, professional philosophers, take our tasks of teaching, research, and service to the profession very seriously. We want to create a supportive environment where fellow faculty members and students feel safe and where their concerns are heard and addressed.

In light of recent events at more than one university, we the undersigned hereby petition the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association to produce, by one means or another, a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of philosophy. We particularly urge past presidents of each division of the APA to sign this petition. 

Please follow this link to sign the petition: 

Andre Gombay: In Memoriam

Arthur Ripstein, Chair of the Graduate Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, writes:

It is with great sadness that I write to inform you of the death of Andre Gombay, who died last Friday, February 28th.  He died at home, surrounded by family, and without sadness or fear.

Andre loved philosophy, and was intimately involved in every aspect of our department's life, bridging everything that anyone ever thought of as a divide    He wrote and taught about both contemporary issues and the history of philosophy, in both theoretical and practical philosophy, engaging with figures classified as both analytic and continental, and he taught on all three campuses.  A dedicated and much loved teacher, Andre taught for 15 years after his retirement in 1998; last year he re-retired, joking that this made him Professor Emeritus Emeritus.

He was a model to us all.

Andre was a distinguished scholar of Descartes, a much loved teacher and colleague, and it is hard to think of Toronto without him.

UPDATE You can post reminiscences and condolences here.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Paco de Lucia

As many readers will have seen, the great Paco de Lucia passed away last week. So to honor him, here is the (to my knowledge) only song recorded by him with a Brazilian musician, namely Djavan. The song is ‘Oceano’ of 1989, and to be honest it is not among my favorite Djavan songs (it doesn’t help that it was the main theme of the ‘love story’ between the protagonists of a soap-opera, so we all got over-exposed to it back in the day). But there is a beautiful solo by Paco de Lucia between 2.30 and 3.00 mins., which already makes it all worth it. I’m also posting one of the many breath-taking duos of Paco de Lucia with the equally great (and also prematurely deceased) Camarón de la Isla, simply because one can never get enough of these two; here, 'Tu cariño es mi castigo'.

Even Foucault couldn't make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them?

It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve to some extent enthusiastically presupposing that everyone is not in fact wasting time) is a much higher echelon of evil. How can the adult human beings in this video (courtesy Washington Post) have any self-respect?*

Mark my words. First they came for the high school teachers. . .**

[*To be fair, everyone involved in making the video and smuggling it to the Washington Post gained back their self-respect fourfold.

**If I was doing my normal thing and putting a rock video in the upper right hand corner, it would probably have been Jane's Addiction's "Idiots Rule." But I realized that it didn't scan because even if team-builder/professional development/assessment types are self-deluded enough to believe in the rightness of what they make the rest of us do, it takes quite a bit of intelligence to get people so complicit in their own immiseration.]

Carol Vance and Kim Hopper petition

Friend of the blog and brilliant neurofeminist researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young asks people to visit this petition site in support of her distinguished colleagues Carol Vance and Kim Hopper. That bell tolling you hear, where if you don't bring in 80% of your salary in grants, you're fired even after 25+ years of superb work? It's for you too, soon enough. 

Helen Tartar, RIP

A terrible loss felt by many, many people. Notice is here, from Fordham University Press, where she was Editorial Director.

Journal of American Philosophical Association Launches

The journal's webpage for submissions is here. The editorial board is just about as distinguished as it could get. Editors don't write a journal, but the prestige of this board ought to make this a good venue to have on one's cv.

Open Letter from Oxford Students and Alums

Posted here at Feminist Philosophers.

You can't take it personally

Discussion on FB of this post at Leiter Reports about rejection led me to remark: 

I hesitate to say this, since I made it through the wars by dint of being married to the right person, but here goes. My wife likes to say "you can't take rejection personally; there are too many factors involved that have nothing to do with your qualifications. [Wait two beats.] In fact, you can't even take acceptance personally, for exactly the same reason."

Further reflections below the fold, taken from a talk on inclusivity in conference organizing (points which hold, mutatis mutandis, for hiring decisions) at the APA Eastern, 2013. (See also this post, on why we should change our frame away from "job market".)

How to promote the safety and effectiveness of vaccines

In a few months, my son will get the MMR vaccine. I count myself very fortunate to live in a place and time when this amazing protection against is made available for free, and I will of course have him vaccinated. When I had my oldest child vaccinated, nearly 10 years ago, there was (at least where I lived, Belgium) no vaccine debate. I was dimly aware there were some very religious people who refused vaccines, but they were so clearly an outgroup that people did not seriously consider them and their arguments. Not vaccinating didn't even seem like a live option to me. Now, fast-forward post-Wakefield UK…

The Effects of Ratings Systems

There's a worrying piece over at Inside Higher Ed quoting the president of "a mildly selective private nonprofit institution that is tuition-dependent" saying that the institution has begun to reject some applicants that it would previously have admitted because of worries about meeting outcomes targets in the ratings system proposed by President Obama in his Higher Education Plan last year. Not surprisingly, the effect of this shift has disproportionately affected applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds — and while this is only one case,* it seems to neatly exemplify what many have feared will be the effect of the proposals. 

I've written before — and I plan to write more — about the effects of prestige races on the state of higher education in the U.S. Until now, these races have been fostered primarily by the proliferation of ranking systems (US News and World Report, etc.) as structuring elements of the enviornment in which institutions are operating.  It is not difficult to link competition for prestige to the sorts of spending and other institutional policy decisions that have led to rising costs of attendence and increased institutional debt loads** — all of which has also created pressure on institutions that traditionally serve less advantaged populations to abandon or de-emphasize those missions. The Obama proposals, as the article shows, seem to have already added to that pressure without even having been put into effect. 

*There are definitely reasons to think carefully about what type of institution is being disucssed here, which may not be typical of those doing the most to serve students from disadvantaged populations.

**See, for instance, this New York Times piece from 2012

The future of electronic currency

With all the stories in the news lately about bitcoins, and with our recent discussions of the role of central banks in creating money, I thought I would post two recent articles/blog posts that I think provide a good analysis of the present situation as well as some good proposals for what the future of electronic currency really ought to look like.

The first argues that bitcoins are mostly designed to solve problems that only exist in the minds of right-wing conspiracy theorists.    And the second one outlines the real problems that a genuine electronic currency ought to solve--and how one could do it.

A new open access journal: Feminist Philosophy Quarterly

From time to time, this blog has discussed the benefits (and the challenges) of open access journals; see, e.g., here, here, and here.  New APPS  has also discussed the temporary moratorium that Hypatia had to institute (now over) because of a large backlog of submissions.  So, I am very pleased to see an announcement for a new open access feminist philosophy journal.  (Keep your eye on Feminist Philosophers for future announcements).

Below the fold, the announcement from the editors:

It's Just a Website. We're Not Going to the Moon.

Interesting story in Time (of all places) about how the Obama campaign tech team rescued the broken healthcare website.

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Que bloco é esse - Ilê Aiyê’

Carnival has already started in Brazil. The internationally most famous carnival celebration is the parade of samba schools in Rio, but two equally strong carnival traditions thrive in Salvador (Bahia) and Recife/Olinda (Pernambuco) – democratic, street carnival in both cases. What the samba school is for carnival in Rio (and a few other places, like São Paulo), the ‘bloco’ is for street carnival. Blocos are (more or less) organized groups with their own music band and participants who dance along. In Bahia, the most famous bloco is probably Ilê Aiyê, created in 1974 as an affirmation of black pride and a celebration of the Afro cultural heritage in Bahia and in Brazil more generally. When it first came into existence, it was viewed as ‘racist’ given its emphasis on the value of African-Brazilian culture, and to this day only blacks are allowed to parade with the group. Ilê Aiyê remains one of the symbols of the strength of the Afro-Brazilian culture – here is a song by Caetano Veloso celebrating their existence.

In their first carnival, in 1975, Ilê Aiyê paraded with a song that remains emblematic for the black pride movement in Brazil: ‘Que bloco é esse - Ilê Aiyê’. And so to join the carnival spirit this week I’ll be posting numerous versions of this song. It’s really a great song, and here is a bit of the lyrics translated (as usual, very hard to come up with a decent translation):

Student sues Ludlow

Article here. This suit is in state court. The previous suit was in federal court, against Northwestern, under Title IX.

A Northwestern University student who sued the University earlier this month, accusing them of failing to adequately follow up on her allegations of sexual harassment against a professor, is now suing that professor in state court....

And last night, the University’s Student Government organization added its voice, endorsing a series of reforms including the immediate suspension of any staff or faculty member found to be in violation of the school’s sexual harassment policy.

Read more on the Northwestern campus community reaction here. 

Scotland and the Pound

I have been thinking about Québec separatism for a long time now—the PQ won its first election a few months after I arrived here. I abhor the very idea of separation except in conditions where the separating entity is actively being oppressed. On the other hand if a jurisdiction votes to separate, it should be allowed to do so without undue fuss. (The Québec situation is the paradigm case of undue fuss, though, prolonged as it has been for forty or more years, with the attendant destabilization of the Canadian polity and economy. Vote yes and then goodbye, or vote no and hold your peace forever.)

This said, I am puzzled by the stand of all three national UK parties regarding the pound. Their position, and that of the Governor of the Bank of England, is that an independent Scotland cannot have the pound. I don't understand.