New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

on budget allocations within universities

This is interesting: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/10/confessions-of-a-central-planner.html

It doesn't get the story right for places with endowments (as the author acknowledges) nor for academic scenes where outside research grants play a big role (besides the natural/medical/technological sciences also European Humanities/Social sciences).

On the revival of the political right

All politics is local, but clearly there are transnational trends that are hard to ignore. One is the revival of the so-called political hard-right in a lot of places Stateside and Europe. But such political labels are a bit misleading. In many places this revival is a coalition between elderly, aging middle-class (and higher) whites, who are  protecting privileges conferred by the modern welfare state (mortgage deduction, generous retirement benefits, subsidized education, etc), and culturally alienated (mostly white, but undoubtedly less homogeneous) lower-middle classes, who often have born the brunt of the economic and social costs of rapid changes due to increasing globalization and liberalization of economies (including immigration). This move to the Right has puzzled folk who thought that with financial crisis would benefit the so-called Left.

James Vernon: "The end of the public university in England"

This is one of the very best analyses I've read. It puts the English situation in both geographical and historical context, and never substitutes narrow-minded "economism" for the necessary political economy perspective. 

Excerpts: 

I graduated from the University of Manchester in 1987 with no debt. I paid no fees and received a maintenance grant to earn a degree in Politics and Modern History. If my seventeen year old son were to follow in my footsteps he would graduate with debts of at least £50,000 and were he to study in London that could rise to £90,000. In the space of a generation we have witnessed the destruction of the public university.... 

Interesting Leiter Report Thread

It's HERE, and in response to a plea from SUNY Albany faculty.

I just posted a comment trying to explain why adminstrators do what they are doing at places SUNY Albany and Middlesex. Given the discussion of economics issues in our blog (I made one shout out in my comment), I think more of us could contribute productively to the string.  

NLRB moves toward Graduate Assistant unions in private universities

See the story in IHE here. In effect, the ruling questions the story of "apprenticeship" used by Brown University to win a 2004 decision from the NLRB that graduate assistants are primarily students whose teaching is an apprenticeship, rather than employees exchanging labor for wages and benefits. 

This is important, because the job system in US universities does *not* begin post-PhD, but post-BA. It's just that the lowest-level jobs are aren't called "jobs," they're called "assistantships." But anyone involved in graduate admissions knows it's a labor market, with competition at the level of salaries, benefits, and styles of labor offered by universities and weighed by students. That there's *another* labor market post-PhD shouldn't blind us to that fact, nor should it blind us to the relations between those two markets, a theme of Marc Bousquet's commentary.  

[UPDATE: a nice discussion of these issues, especially with regard to NYU, is here at Crooked TImber.]

Voting is the opiate of the masses

I don't entirely agree with Jodi on the issue of voting, but I'm close.  I will vote, because at a minimum many local races do matter.  There are much bigger differences there, but the others do also. There is a slightly lower chance of a new war being launched by Democrats, and things will go slightly better for the poor if they retain power.  So in the absence of an organized and broad boycott of voting - which I would support in a minute, but without which not voting is a pointless gesture - I'll vote.

But voting takes about 10 minutes every two years, and it's importance in the scheme of real politics strikes me as roughly proportional to the percentage of my life it occupies.  Indeed, the great and enduring lie that prevents real politics from occurring in modern industrialized society is the lie that voting is democracy, that voting is political participation.  A huge part of the world's ecosystem is dying before our eyes, millions die of poverty each year, the last remnants of civil liberties are being destroyed, the US continues to prosecute two insanely illegal wars, continues to produce more weapons than the rest of the world combined, continues to hold a nuclear stockpile many times larger than needed to kill everyone on the planet, sells more weapons than the rest of the world combined.  Our "liberal" Democratic president thinks that the US has the right to execute citizens on his declaration, with no judicial review. 

And not a single candidate from either party will so much as say a single serious word about any of these things, pro or con.  I would fall down on my knees and thank any deity you like, if someone would so much as name these things - come out and say "Yes, I believe we need more nukes than are necessary to kill everyone."  But this will never happen, because the system we call "democracy" does not so much as allow serious issues to emerge to the level of conscious thought. 

None of this will change without organizing, activism, and revolution.  That revolution may be constructive and nonviolent, if enough people get off their asses and work for it: stop spending all their time telling us how wonderful Barbara Boxer is (a woman who defended the murder on the high seas of nonviolent activists by the chief US client state, and who defamed the UN and Amnesty International in the process), and start changing this corrupt system.  Or it may be a violent conflagration that leads to facism: likely when the environment and economy collapse as it will  without massive systemic change. 

Voting is the opiate of the masses.  But the people are in massive pain, so I'll give my little shot of morphine in a few days, and then get the hell back to trying to cure things.  I wish more comfortable liberals, and disengaged academics would join me. 

Jodi Dean: No Vote

Jodi Dean writes: 

I'm not voting. Deliberately. The election won't do anything but secure a false sense of connectedness from those who do vote to the oligarchy that continues to exploit us.

I'm not saying voting doesn't matter. It does--to the pundits who want to talk about it, the networks who amp their ratings through it, the ad makers who collect the money poured in to the campaigns, the corporations with enough money to buy their members of congress (who seem to get more expensive the more worthless they become).

 

On Transparency in refereeing.

Here's a simple proposal (due to Alva Noe, as far as I can tell): accepted, refereed papers and books should be accompanied with the name of the referees and, ideally, their reports, if only, in the online edition. (Note rejections can still be done anonymously.) I have written about this before (in the context of plagiarism: http://www.newappsblog.com/2010/09/on-the-significance-of-a-recent-high-profile-case-of-plagiarism-and-what-we-can-do-about-it.html).

I hope this will have four positive consequences.

1. People can get credit (including for tenure and grants) for work done and this should increase number of responsive referees. Given the increased reliance on objective performance metrics (and the ongoing, general expansion of higher education in the world with Brazilian and Chinese universities soon sporting there own research orientation), there is an avelange of papers joining the refereeing pipeline.  This alone is putting stress on the system. The most likely referees are being overwhelmed with requests. (Short of charging submission fees and paying referees, this is probably best way to improve the system.)
2. It should increase transparency about intellectual networks. Small groups of incrowds have a tendency (perhaps unconsciously) to favor work done by friends or that cites them.
3. With publicity becoming the norm referees have an incentive to do diligent work, that is, try to catch plagiarism and make sure that relevant scholarship is cited, objections are raised, etc.

4. It makes the role and choices of of the editor subject of more careful scrutinity. Now they often appear as a neutral clearinghouse--but in their choice of referees and their interpretations of them they have considerable leeway. 

Right now refereeing is organized like a secret priestcraft. The underlying message is, 'trust us.' But this will not do anymore. We should not give up on expert review, and we should promote the gift-giving culture that is a quickly vanishing within academia. Some mild transparency may actually go a long way here.

 

The French Strikes and the Zomian Highlands: Reading James C. Scott on Anarchism

There was something about the French strikes that, like so many things recently, had me feeling out of step with my peers. It was not the particular content of the strikers' demands, in the particular context in which these demands were made, that bothered me; in fact I strongly supported the strikers' effort, and was disappointed when it failed.

It was rather the assumptions behind most of the international (read: North American academic) support for the strikers that I could not entirely accept. How many times did we hear phrases to the effect that the strikers, in fighting to keep in place the relatively generous social welfare system that had been built up in France over the course of the 20th century, were doing nothing less than fighting to defend the 'minimum conditions for a just society'? This got me asking myself: do the highland peasants of Southeast Asia, who live outside of the scope of nation-state control, live in unjust societies? Is there any conception of justice on which the minimal conditions of its being present need not be met by states, but instead might be met by sub-state associations of people? Even if such associations are not up to the task of maintaining the minimum conditions of justice in today's France or the US, is this sufficient reason to neglect them altogether as possible models for the future?

A suggestion for the gendered conference campaign

Back from my holiday, I had planned first to blog on something not related to feminism (namely about the intuition-based methodology in philosophy and reasoning biases). But after Mark’s post of today, I figured this was a good time to 'not just fucking sit there' and talk about an idea I’ve been contemplating for a while in the spirit of the gendered conference campaign of the Feminist Philosophers.

Here’s the idea. I was thinking of how one could actually apply some additional ‘pressure’ on conference organizers on the matter of gender balance and keynote speakers. So far what we’ve been doing is talking about it in a nice, not-too-confrontational way, and I really think this is a very good approach. But what else could be done? So I came to the idea that conference organizers are highly sensitive to the willingness to participate on the part of the MALE keynote speakers they invite. Now, my impression is that at least some well-established, highly regarded male philosophers who receive constant invitations to be keynotes at conferences believe it would be important to promote gender balance in the profession. (I can think of at least some ‘big names’ who in personal communication expressed their concern with the issue.)

Failures of public intellectuals: racism

A while ago I posted about the failure of academics in the face of the immigration debate, allowing the most important issues to be ignored. A similar thing is happening on racism - a concept that has been utterly degraded in public discourse, at least in the US. In a recent Washington Post editorial on "school reform" the Post responded to pretty carefully written criticism of DC schools chancellor Rhee. The criticism had been that much of her work had functioned to strengthen existing privileges for white kids in NW DC while damaging some of the few good schools that African American kids from poorer neighborhoods had access to. The Post responded by saying that the claim that Rhee doesn't care about black kids was libelous.

And that's the thing. "racism" in the popular mind has come to mean nothing but explicit, conscious, negative mental states vis a vis racial minorities. Structural racism and habitual unconscious racism have disappeared almost entirely from public view. Part of the cause of this is right-wing insistence that race no longer matters because hardly anyone expresses explicit racist attitudes anymore, and explicit legal discrimination is a thing of the past. Part of the cause is also a range of black leaders and black organizations that focus more on the incautious remark than on the massive structural racism of prisons, health care, poverty, etc. But the effect is to make it nearly impossible to raise serious issues of race in the US. To point it out at all is instantly taken as a charge of conscious explicit hatred - a charge easily dismissed as either unprovable or hyperbolic.

And academics, in my view, are to blame. How many of us study these issues, without ever bothering to write op-eds explaining the basics to the public. In a country in which being a black man is a vastly better statistical indicator of spending time in prison than is committing an imprisonable offense, in which urban black folks typically have worse health conditions than people in the third world, in which poverty is seriously racialized, etc, I don't think it is too much to ask that we engage in a bit of public pedagogy designed to make these facts recognizable.

Next time, don't just fucking sit there

I've been reading, rather obsessively, the many stories on "What is it like to be a woman in philosophy" and there is a pretty obvious theme that I'd like to illustrate with a story from my own life, one that taught me a lesson I've tried to live up to since.

I grew up in Columbus Ohio and graduated High School in 1977. At the time, like most Americans, I did not know that I'd ever met a sexual minority. Kids got taunted with charges of "fag" often enough - me as much as any - but even then I realized that this was more a charge of being insufficiently male, rather than a claim about sexuality. In Fall 1977 I went to music school at OSU to study trumpet, and quickly met loads of out gay guys and equally quickly decided that this was not a moral issue. I did not, in that first semester, realize that my closest friend - a trombone player - was gay. (Brass culture, at the time, fancied itself more macho than other musical subcultures, and it was less easy to be out.) One day a bunch of brass players are sitting around telling homophobic jokes. I'm uncomfortable and don't join in. Suddenly, my friend stands up, says "Don't you assholes know I'm gay?" and storms out.

Shortly, I go to find him and to offer sympathies about the other assholes. He is distant and cold. After a bit I finally get put off and say "What the hell? Why are you mad at me? I wasn't joining in." And he replied: "Next time, don't just fucking sit there."

Indeed. And that's the overwhelming lesson of the WILTBAWIP blog, it seems to me. Academics are just fucking sitting there, blowing things off, not wanting to make a scene, valuing shallow collegiality over creating a safe and equitable environment for female students and colleagues. I wonder what percentage of philosophers have witnessed something like what is reported there. And I wonder what percentage spoke up - not later in private to offer support, but publicly and immediately to declare the action inappropriate. My guess, almost all of us, and pretty close to none of us. Every APA I see widely known serial harassers treated with respect and friendship by other academics. I've seen all manner of sexist, racist, and homophobic comments made by academics and more than once been treated as a trouble-maker for speaking up. (One scene, nearly verbatim from a meeting of chairs and program directors: Prof x: "My problem with interdisciplinary programs is that so many of them keep bringing these damned dirty Arabs to campus." Me: "What did you just say? You do realize that is an incredibly offensive and racist comment, right?" Chair: "Mark, can we stay on topic here?")

So that's my thought. Could we all refrain from just fucking sitting there the next time?

on the history of experimental philosophy

There is a new Otago-based blog centered on a fun, timely, and interesting History and Philosophy of Science project: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/emxphi/
With the rise of experimental philosophy, renewed interest in earlier attempts at experimental philosophy are timely, and I wish the Otago group much luck! In a recent blog I critically discussed some of the underlying assumptions of the project: <http://itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/2010/09/speculative-vs-experimental-philosophy.html> 

In particular, I criticized the groups distinction between speculative and experimental philosophers in the early modern period. While I applaud dropping the Empiricist/Rationalist distinction, the Otago group's distinction cannot do justice to the most important philosophic current in early modern natural philosophy: the group that focused on theory-mediated measurement (think Galileo, Huygens, and Newton), which (retrospectively) helped lay the groundwork for 'modern' science.

Leigh Van Valen, evolutionary theorist (1935-2010)

Leigh Van Valen, who was one of the great, imposing presences at the Conceptual Foundations of Science meetings at The University of Chicago, pased away. He would be a disheveled presence with a tennisband holding his overflowing hair barely in place. At colloquia he would often (unintentionally, I think) bewilder famous invited speakers by asking profound questions from left field (often dropping a few minor premises along the way). My favorite lines in a recent obituary is this: "Considered unconventional even by eccentrics, Van Valen had a wide range of interests, spanning the history of all life forms. “I don’t work linearly,” he explained in a note to his department chair."

Anyway, I quote a few paragraphs from the obituary that give one pause about the nature of higher education.

Most underrated philosopher of the week

The Dutch Science Foundation has showered money on the philosophy departments of three favored technical universities; these have made almost no effort to strengthen the intellectual life or the philosophic culture of the Netherlands outside their niche. However, something good has resulted from this major investment and may, perhaps, vindicate the project. The Technical University of Eindhoven's philosophy department has been making some splendid hires in recent years. My most underrated philosopher of the week is one of these, Joel Katzav: http://home.tm.tue.nl/jkatzav/

"SUNY Under Siege" website

Here: http://sunyundersiege.pbworks.com/. Also adding this to our blogroll. 

Admission of guilt

I deleted à recent blog entry that degenerated into mudslinging. Mea Culpa. I will repost the most underrated philosopher of the week tomorrow.

Macropolitics, Micropolitics, and the French Unions

This article (make sure you read the comments as well) at Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb, is a bit of inside baseball, leftist politics version, but worth the read. The author reads a Le Monde article on a recent meeting of French trade union leaders which signal their desire (their resignation, in the eyes of the blog post author) to working within the parliamentary system, their desire to avoid a widening of the struggle beyond their control. The author's key points: 

[From a union leader]: “Our responsibility as trade unionists is to construct compromises that make sense, and not to threaten the legitimacy of parliament or politics.” The intersyndicale communiqué reminds that the mobilisations will continue “respecting property and people” and makes no mention of other actions and strikes concurrently underway, making links with other confrontations and thus generalising the movement.

What's interesting is the push-back in the comments, where readers criticize the piece: 

Jean-Luc Nancy discovers the Leibnizian inspiration of the SUNY Albany administration!

"A single language alone, cleansed of the bugs of reflection, would make the perfect university subject: smooth, harmonious, easily submitted to pedagogical control."

Read the whole thing. 

Power Point on what the French are striking about: "ce qu'on ne nous dit pas ..."

From the Collectif villefranchois « Faire entendre les exigences citoyennes sur les retraites » (which seems to be w/o its own website, though info on their activities can be found here), comes a PDF version of a Power Point poking holes in the Sarkozy line about the "necessity" of "reform," as well as in lazy inherited narratives about the strikers inability to "understand" the economic situation. Good reading when coupled with Bob Vallier's post. 

Bee Deaths, Bought Science, and the New York Times

This article on the very important bee death phenomenon (aka Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD) has a little bit of everything: ecological disaster, corporate buying of favorable scientific findings, and a confusion of proximate and ultimate causality on the part of the New York Times. 

A few weeks ago I wrote how case studies offer us a way to go from an actual situation to the virtual or differential field of conflicting tensions animating it. This article seems an excellent example of just such a case study. Deleuze and the bees, in other words. 

Reducing Stereotype Threat

Sally Haslanger has posted a link to this excellent resource on stereotype threat (roughly speaking, the negative effects of the awareness that one's behavior might be seen as conforming to a stereotype), from the equally excellent Gender, Race and Philosophy blog, which we've just added to our Blogroll. 

 

What Have The French Got Their Culottes In A Bunch About ?

By now everyone has heard that various sectors of France’s working class are, once again, on strike, and that there have been several large-scale demonstrations and other smaller-scale but perhaps more effective strike actions for the last six weeks.  The last week or so has witnessed a series of headlines screaming that “The French Strikes Escalate,” or “French Strikes Turn Violent,” or “France Paralyzed.”  Such headlines are of course designed to sell newspapers, but also to sway public opinion.  This latter is evident in  many responses to the French strikes on various blogs and in the comment sections of articles in major media websites outside of France, which have tended to trade on popular stereotypes—aka misconceptions—about the French, their right to strike, and that horribly dangerous political formation known as “European socialism.”   So what’s really going on?  What’s at stake in this battle, and why do all French, not just the working class (72% of those polled support or strongly support the actions, according to the latest data) so strongly believe that this battle is worth fighting?

Misogyny at Yale

Most of you have probably already heard of the incident that took place last week at Yale, involving members of the DKE fraternity who marched in public spaces chanting offensive slogans. Here is a brief passage from the description of the episode in a post over at the Feminist Philosophers's blog:

"Last Thursday night, pledges to the DKE fraternity at Yale marched through various central and public spaces on the Yale campus chanting. Among the slogans they repeatedly shouted were “no means yes, yes means anal.” Footage of the incident is available online both on the Yale Daily News website and YouTube."

Stanley Fish isn't quite so bad this time around

Here. He acknowledges the Newfield pieces we cited below on cross-subsidies (here and here) and, while his reliance on Mark Yudof (who is much more part of the problem than part of the solution) is much too complacent, all in all this version of his argument is far superior to the previous effort. Which certainly isn't saying much, but it is saying something. Damning with faint praise, soft bigotry of low expectations, etc. 

[UPDATE 3: an excellent piece by Chris Newfield on the Fish column is here.]

[UPDATE 2: a much better analysis of this Fish column than mine can be found here.]

[UPDATE: Aaron Bady points out in comments that I'm not criticizing Fish's reliance on Yudof enough. I think that's a fair assessment. As Bady says: 

Yudof was appointed by the Regents, who were appointed by the same people who make the budget. He *is* Sacramento, and if Sacramento is the problem, then so is he. But by pretending that there's a grand drama playing out where admins battle with state legislatures, Fish gets to ignore the fact that his new best friend Mark Yudof was essentially hired to transform the UC into exactly what Fish says he doesn't want it to be transformed into.

You should follow the link. It leads to an excellent analysis.] 

Anglo-American Shock Doctrine

George Monbiot has a nice piece (here) in the Guardian about how the current financial crisis in the UK is precisely the crisis that makes possible the types of neoconservative reforms that Naomi Klein details in her book Shock Doctrine. Monbiot also providea a brief summary of Klein's arguments for those who might be unfamiliar with them. Needless to say, Monbiot's claims are equally valid for what's going on in the States as well. His arguments don't seem to apply as well to Europe, however, as the protests in France show, but Sarkozy seems to be far from giving in either.

How the humanities are useful

Many years ago,I developed a little shtick for my intro classes about the usefulness of the humanities for life. I got a lot of feedback on it from students and eventually wrote it down. I haven't seen its ideas stated fully by anyone in this latest round of skirmishes, so I will publish it below. It's a bit long, but may be useful.

Here goes:

De Waal on "Morals without God?"

Frans De Waal has a post on The Stone blog of the NYT on primate behavior and human morality entitled "Morals without God?"

We read De Waal's Primates and Philosophers (which includes comments by Robert Wright, Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer), in the course on Evolution and Biology of Morality I've offered the last few years. Here are notes and study questions on Primates and Philosophers, as well as notes on MIchael Tomasello's Why We Cooperate, which has some brief, technical criticism of De Waal's work. 

McQuillan analysis of Browne Report: "privatisation of the humanities" in the UK

Martin McQuillan of Kingston University and the London Graduate School, offers this analysis of the Browne Report, which recommends unlimited fees, set by universities, and also recommends total elimination of state support for arts and humanities study.  

Excerpts: 

In effect Browne’s committee ... has at a stroke privatised the arts and humanities in England. The committee recommends that the state should no longer have any investment in these areas and that private individuals who wish to pursue such things at their own cost should pay for them.... 

The fundamental reason to oppose tuition fees of any kind is that those who benefited from a free higher education as a democratic right should not when in government (as a result of that free higher education) tell future generations that they must now take on mortgage-sized debts to pay for the same privilege.... One should not just resist this situation; it has to be refused utterly.... This is a culture war in which critical thought is threatened with extinction. 

 

A blog on the extended mind

I didn't know that Ken Aizawa had a blog on the extended mind - polemical, but fair (?) and interesting :

http://theboundsofcognition.blogspot.com/