Observations on the Leiter vs. Jenkins-Ichikawa affair

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Those of you who can’t get yourselves to be offline even during the Xmas break have most likely been following the events involving Brian Leiter (BL), Jonathan Ichikawa (JI) and Carrie Jenkins (CJ), and the lawyers’ letters regarding the legal measures BL says he is prepared to take as a reaction to what he perceives as defamatory statements by (or related to) Ichikawa and Jenkins. As a matter of fact, a blog post of mine back in July seems to have played a small role in the unfolding of these unfortunate developments, and so I deem it appropriate to add a few observations of my own. 

On multiple occasions (and in particular in comments at Facebook posts), Leiter claims to have been directed to Jenkins’ ‘Day One’ pledge by this blog post of mine of July 2^nd 2014, in defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings. It begins:

Most readers have probably been following the controversy involving Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Brian Leiter concerning the job placement data post where Carolyn Dicey Jennings compares her analysis of the data she has assembled with the PGR Rank. There have been a number of people reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of Carolyn Dicey Jennings’s analysis, such as in Daily Nous, and this post by UBC’s Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins on guidelines for academic professional conduct (the latter is not an explicit defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but the message is clear enough, I think). [emphasis added]

Leiter claims that this observation is what led him to Jenkins’ post in the first place, which he perceived as a direct attack on him. He also claims that this is what the passage above implies, and continues to repeat that the post “was intended by Jenkins as a criticism of me (as everyone at the time knew, and as one of her friends has now admitted), and thus explains my private response, which she chose to make public.” However, there is nothing explicitly indicating that the post was intended as a criticism of BL beyond the fact that he read it this way and keeps repeating it. 

My own post was explicitly a defense of Carolyn, and also voiced criticism of BL’s handling of his disagreement with Carolyn’s analysis of placement record data; indeed, I mention him by name. CJ did not such thing, and while I (and perhaps others as well) read her post as at least in part intended to express support to Carolyn, this may well have been a misinterpretation of the post on my part. Still, even if it was not: the step from the post being a defense of Carolyn to it being an attack on BL is a very substantive one, and yet he seems to be conflating the two things.

As is well known, these events in early July then set in motion a whole series of developments, culminating in the September Statement. BL now claims (through his lawyer) that the September Statement defamed him, in particular by stating that the episode impacted CJ’s health, her capacity to work and her ability to contribute to public discourse. BL maintains that this statement is not accurate, in fact his whole case for defamation seems to rest on questioning the actual distress incurred by CJ as a result of her ‘interactions’ with him. He seems to be suggesting two things: in the period after receiving the email, CJ continued to work and participate in public discourse with no significant changes with respect to her usual behavior (he seems to suggest that he has evidence to this effect); whatever distress she may have incurred would have been related to previous facts about her health and overall condition, not directly provoked by the unfortunate correspondence.

The question I want to raise now is: does any of this matter for the main issue? BL seems to think that the signatories of the September Statement were ‘misled’ into thinking that he had caused CJ great harm, and for this reason alone signed the Statement. Naturally, I can’t speak for the other signatories, but speaking for myself, I can say that the actual impact of his email on CJ’s wellbeing was not what prompted me to sign it. Had this not been the case (as suggested by BL’s ‘hypothetical scenario’, but as appears to be the case for example of Noelle McAfee, who as far as I know has not been affected by the hostile emails she received from BL in the same way), I would most certainly still have signed the Statement. What made me sign it was BL’s behavior in the first place – in particular the appalling emails, which were actually merely the culmination of a long history of patterns of interaction with colleagues that I consider inadequate. As well put by Justin over at Daily Nous: “As far as I can tell, the only person in philosophy who has harmed Brian Leiter’s reputation is Brian Leiter. He should sue.”

That BL’s behavior has impacted a colleague in a particularly negative way is very regrettable, but is not the heart of the matter. If CJ was made of steel and had not been impacted in any way ('hypothetical scenario'), it would not have made the slightest difference for my signing of the Statement, so I fail to see in which ways the signatories could have been ‘misled’ in this way. This is a red herring. (It may not be a red herring from a legal point of view; I am in no position to judge the legal implications here. But I fail to see the relevance of the ‘accuracy’ point from a moral point of view.)

It is clear at any rate that the September Statement has been harmful to BL’s standing in the profession, in particular by significantly diminishing the participation of evaluators in the PGR (as painstakingly analyzed by Mitchell Aboulafia), and thus making it less credible -- despite BL's continuous reassurances that all is good and dandy with the PGR. But is this the kind of actionable harm that should reasonably lead to a courtroom? The September Statement was signed by those who declined to volunteer their services to the PGR, in particular (but not exclusively) as potential board members and evaluators. So one might think that the September Statement did call for a kind of 'boycott' of the PGR, on grounds of alleged professional misconduct by its main editor.

Now, this is of course  something BL is well familiar with. Remember the Synthese affair almost 4 years ago? The two scenarios are strikingly similar, except that 4 years ago BL was the one calling for a boycott of an academic institution – the Synthese journal – on account of alleged professional misconduct by its editors-in-chief. BL’s ‘campaign’ back then certainly caused harm to the reputation of the journal and the then-editors-in-chief (though 4 years later, the journal seems to be doing fine, under different editorship). While there may well be important disanalogies between the two sets of events, it seems to me that they are sufficiently similar so as to challenge BL’s (moral, if not legal) right to object to the September Statement on account of the harm it would have caused to his reputation. His prior actions tell us that he does not shy away from urging others to decline their services to particular institutions when faced with professional behavior he deems objectionable.