New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Why are there so many female academics in Turkey?

Feminist philosophers drew attention to this THE  article on gender equality in academia. The article highlights striking differences between countries on gender participation in academia, with a 47% female participation rate in Turkey, and an abysmal 12.7% in Japan as two extremes (see the map through the link). For most of my academic career, I have studied and worked in Belgium, where gender participation is very poor (it's one of the red countries on the map). Only 13% of full professors in Belgium are women. In the EU, only Cyprus and Luxembourg do worse. In this post, I want to examine  causes for the disparity (the high % in Turkey; the low % in Belgium), drawing amongst others on personal experience, and on this highly relevant article on Turkish academia.

apology

In THIS ATTEMPT TO TELL A HUMOROUS STORY I used the word "gaydar."

After some thought, I realize that it was wrong. Use of the word in a public forum like this encourages essentialist thinking about gay people. I apologize.

Unlike the r-word (see video to right), I do think there are occasions where "gaydar" is appropriate. In less enlightened parts of the world if you yourself are gay it's extraordinarily important to be able to pick up on whether other people are gay prior to explicit conversation. This how I learned the word a couple of decades ago, and it's a fine word in those contexts. But it seems to me that a good rule of thumb is that if you are straight you don't get to use it.

Michael Sandel responds

I would sure have loved to see an effort to tackle the broader issues of the SJSU letter, and to take the concerns a bit more seriously.  But in any event here it is.

anyone else notice these correlations?

During my five or six years in graduate school two pretty strong correlations held up: (1) married students (at least the majority whose spouses were not academics) who did not have children were much less likely to complete the PhD than unmarried students, (2) married students with children were much more likely to complete the PhD than unmarried students.

I think the first one held because the demands of cultivating the relationship with the non-academic spouse (and his or her work friends) often ended up eating into cultivating relationships with fellow graduate students and fully participating in the life of the department.

The second one was utterly surprising to me. But now that I have children I think it probably holds for four reasons:  (1) having a kid makes you much, much better at time management, (2) a lot of the stuff you give up when your kids are young are things that actually work against academic success, (3) raising a kid is much harder than academic work, so the time you get to actually do your academic work starts to seem no longer like work at all but rather a break, (4) the kind of anxiety that leads to graduate school writer's block doesn't really apply any more; worrying about your kids liberates you from all sorts of narcissism, including lots of useless anxieties.

Does this jibe with other people's experiences? Anything I'm missing? 

Brazilian music on Fridays: Paulo Vanzolini

One of the greatest samba composers of all times, Paulo Vanzolini, passed away a few days ago, aged 89. He is the composer of classics such as ‘Ronda’ (1951), ‘Volta por cima’ (1959), and ‘Boca da noite’ (1969), songs which any self-respecting Brazilian can sing without missing a beat, and which have been recorded by all the great singers. What is equally remarkable about Vanzolini is that he combined his music career with a highly successful academic career as a zoologist. Among other feats, he was the director of the Zoology Museum of the University of São Paulo from 1963 to 1993, and even after his retirement continued to do research at the museum virtually until his death. (I’m sure this combination of excellence in music and science will make a number of readers somewhat jealous.)

How About a "Fair Made" Label?

The disastrous fire in Savar, Bangladesh has prompted some of the wrong kinds of response from western media. The discussion revolves around the correct idea that western consumers are crazy to buy cheap clothes, and that retailers like Walmart, Gap, Benetton, and, here in Canada, Joe Fresh provide these by manufacturing the clothes with almost-slave labour working in unsafe Bangladeshi facilities. The proposed solution that I have heard again and again is that in the absence of more information, western consumers should simply buy western made goods. 

Is this the right solution? Surely, we want the Bangladeshi economy to prosper, provided workers are safe, well-protected against labour abuses, and well-paid, relative to the local standard of living. We do not want to support people who become rich in Bangladesh by using slave labout. 

Recently, Gildan Activewear (a large Canadian manufacturer of casual clothing) publicized its ethical investment in a Bangladeshi factory. The Globe and Mail reports that Gildan bought Shahriyar Fabrics in Savar for $15 million:

Kenneth Appel 1932-2013

An annoyingly inaccurate, but touching obituary in the Washington Post. Not only did he solve one of the grand conjectures - and one of the easiest to explain to non-mathematicians - but he launched a subliterature in epistemology, by providing the classic case of indirect evidence of the existence of a proof. 

An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel from the Philosophy Dept at San Jose State

The eloquent and well argued letter is here. I do not think they are being alarmist in their diagnosis of the ultimate function of this and other attacks on the traditional university.  (Let's keep discussion here to the open letter and the function of MOOCs specifically.  I'm going to start another thread today for discussion of things that we might organize publicly to resist these trends.)

weirdest reaction to confronting an academic philosopher?

Over at Spiros' place there's a nice discussion (HERE) about weird expectations people have about academic philosophers. I'm interested if any friends of the blog have similar experiences.

The most depressing reaction I get is sometimes naked hostility from Tea Party types. It's a weird inversion in the American South, because when I was a kid in Alabama if anything university professors were put up on too high a pedestal. I mean, a professor would certainly be allowed to sit on the nice couch in the parlor, the one still had the plastic wrap on it.

The weirdest reaction I've ever gotten though is from a carpenter who both confused philosophy and psychology and who had that weird 1950s belief (cf. psychiatrists in shows like "I Dream of Jeannie") that learning psychology gave one the ability to automatically discern people's deepest beliefs and desires by little behavioral tells that we all give off at various times.

Now here's the weird thing. My gaydar was pinging extraordinarily loudly in the direction of this carpenter, despite (because of?) his projecting a very stereotypical southern guy toughness. And he kept saying "What am I thinking right now?" I didn't go there though, and instead just kept saying that my colleagues were much better at this kind of thing than I was. He was a nice man (and extraordinary carpenter), and I felt pretty bad that I couldn't tell that he was thinking about his phone bill or whatever.

On anonymous grading

This semester, I’ve experimented with anonymous grading for the first time. Now that I think about it, it is a mystery why it took me so long to realize the obviousness of it, but better late than not at all, I suppose. As many other countries, the Netherlands does not have a tradition of anonymous grading at all, but I recently found out that in the UK it is fairly common practice, showing that it can be done. This was one of the topics of Jennifer Saul’s recent Aspasia Lecture in Groningen, and I am happy to report that she made such a good case for it that my colleagues in the evaluation board of the Faculty are already looking into adopting anonymous grading systematically.

Why should it be done? Well, for those of you familiar with the literature on implicit biases, the answer will not be hard to find: we inevitably rely on stereotypes and preconceptions to perceive and judge people, which serve as convenient heuristic shortcuts. This can have a negative effect on how we judge members of stigmatized groups (based on gender, ethnicity, class, geographical origin etc.), and it can also unfairly boost our judgment of privileged groups. With grading in particular, it has been noticed that anonymity significantly increases the average grades of members of these stigmatized groups, simply because their work is looked upon more objectively without the association to a particular person. (See this informative report by the British National Union of Students.)

Government protecting corporations - iteration #10,741,692

Here is a truly appalling story concerning the rise of corporatism in America.  The general issue I want to raise is this: most of those who defend capitalism in the sense that includes allowing for private ownership of the means of production, wage labor, and massive wealth disparities as a result, typically claim that genuine capitalism must be distinguished from "crony-capitalism" and that we cannot allow the government to become an organ for the support of the most economically powerful.  But I've simply never understood how this was supposed to work.  The whole theory of the beast presupposes that people are self-interested maximizers.  Does that not apply to those in government?  And if it does, then how exactly do we prevent their corruption?  Is there some magical way to take the possibility of graft in all its myriad forms from bending government to the will of those with the most money?  In short, if the watchdogs of the level playingfield are just people like us, growing up in a system that encourages self-interest and greed, why would one think there was any hope of stopping the slide from capitalism to corporatism.

Anyway, even if you don't share my concerns about the general issue, I trust that this story is revolting enough to be worth a post on its own.   

The Psychology of Academic Deceit

About 18 months ago, I did a meta-post on Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg, and before that of Groningen. In that post, I linked to Retraction Watch, which recounted Stapel's misdeeds, a social psychologist who didn't falsify, but outright manufactured, data-sets in numerous scientific papers, 54 of which have now been retracted. Stapel, now known as the Lying Dutchman (see this post by Catarina) was an international star and rose to be Dean of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Tilburg before he was fired for academic fraud.

The New York Times Magazine has now published (28th April) a fascinating story by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on the man and his career. Here is some of what we learn:

Translating French Realism conference schedule up

Full schedule HERE (conference web page HERE). Man, I'm going to learn a lot at this conference.

To the extent that American and British metaphysics is historically informed it tends just to be because of the labors of a few crossover medievalists and a general awareness of the agonies of logical positivism. It's just so exciting to see the emergence in Europe a new generation of metaphysicians aware of the agonies of phenomenology as well as the other essential aspects of our post-Kantian inheritance.

I'd love to see an era where Anglo metaphysicians as a rule also live in the space opened up when one takes seriously the period from Kant to Hegel, 19th century anti-metaphysics, the (related) rise and fall of phenomenology (and the Spiders from Mars), as well as the great French philosophers of the 60s and their philosophical offspring.

Given the quality of work being done at places like the University of New Mexico (especially when combined with the limitations of post-Quinean analytical metaphysics), I think that this kind of metaphysical ecumenicalism really could happen in our lifetime.