Academia – Page 13 – Maverick Philosopher

The Age of Feeling or the Age of Pussies?

Both. Here is a liberal professor, writing (not very well) under a pseudonym (of course!) who says he or she is terrified of his or her liberal students. But he or she does make a good point when he or she points to the consumerist mentality that prevails among students. That's been in place for a long time now and is one of the reasons I gave up a tenured position in 1991.

Charles Cooke comments on the above piece here.

One of the phrases one increasingly hears these days is 'comfort zone.' I humbly suggest that if you are not prepared to leave said zone on a regular basis you will never really live.

One needs stress to grow, mentally, physically, and in every way. Stress is not to be had in a 'safe space.'

Glaubt es mir! – das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heißt: gefährlich leben! For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 283, tr. Walter Kaufmann)

There is a website by the name of The Philosophers' Cocoon. You read that right: cocoon. On the masthead: "A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers."

Years ago I answered a reader's e-mail on line, providing his full name. The topic was technical and non-political. A while back he contacted me because he wanted his name removed from an arcane post buried deep in my archives. I did so. But then he started worrying about his name's occurrence in the ComBox . . . .

Now I sympathize with the young and unestablished. We live in nasty, illiberal times. I've made mine, so it requires no great courage to speak the truth under my real name. But it requires some, and more need to 'man up' and 'woman up' to confront the fascist scum on the Left. There is such a thing as civil courage without the exercise of which by large numbers we are done for as a free republic. Click on the link for another example of a reader who requested that his name be removed from my weblog.

And if you are unfamiliar with the disgusting Laura Kipnis affair, bang on this. Dreher's piece ends ominously.

UPDATE: A nationally known conservative college professor, a man who is well into his career, and protected by tenure, just wrote to say “it’s worse than you think,” then sent evidence. He said this has definitely had a chilling effect on the lectures he gives, for fear of triggering a Little Empress or Emperor, who will set out to ruin his academic life. I’m not going to quote his post, because I want to protect him and his position on his campus. But he adds:

If I had to do it over again, I would have never, ever entered academia. I cringe when I think of the few young, ambitious, and bright conservatives who are entering the academy now who have no idea of how even uttering their viewpoints will be turned against them to destroy them.

A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. – See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf

Micro-Agressions = Micro-Nooses

No day without some new bit of academic lunacy. Re: the brouhaha surrounding poly sci prof Jerry Hough of Duke University.

How Liberals Ruined College

Kirsten Powers. And here is a good one (can he write a bad one?) by Peter Berkowitz: The Left's Crusade Against Free Speech.

So much incisive and intelligent writing by people of good sense. But it is not enough. What is to be done?

College Encourages Lively Exchange of One Idea

Is this a freaking joke? (HT: Spencer Case who tells me the piece is "accurate.")

The only kind of diversity liberals care about is politically correct diversity, diversity in respect of skin color and reproductive plumbing, not a diversity of ideas.

I've been pinching myself a lot recently. Am I awake? Is this stuff really happening?

Last night at five I turned on the TV to see blacks rioting in Baltimore. I should think that crapping in one's own pants is not the most effective way of protesting something. Where are the adults? Abdication of authority. Clowns and fools, race-baiters and liars, in high places.

At the same time, fascist abuses of authority as in the John Doe raids in Wisconsin.

UPDATE 1: Joshua Orsak tells me The Onion is a joke site. Spencer Case, NRO journalist, said the piece is "accurate." I am tempted to go Hillarious: In this POMO age, what difference does it make? The Prez and the Veep are jokes, Nancy Pelosi is a joke, our foreign policy is a joke, the universities of the land . . . . In this day and age jokes are realities. 'Trigger warnings' for example.

UPDATE 2: Elliot writes,

Regarding your 28 April post on the Lively Exchange of One Idea: it sure looks like a joke, but I also fear this type of thinking is present in American higher education.

I've had a university administrator tell me and fellow instructors during a faculty meeting that, when grading papers, we should be less concerned with providing educative feedback and more concerned with providing feedback that "makes students feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable." This is just a sample of many similar comments I've heard over the years.

I sometimes suspect that (at least some) universities seek to pamper rather than educate students. This coddle-desire puts instructors who actually want to educate in a difficult spot.

I also worry that educational confusion is widespread at the elementary school level. You may have seen the following article.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/?_r=0

Thanks for your work.

PhilPapers has Incorporated Phil Research Index

This from the PhilPapers team:

The merger of Philosophy Research Index into PhilPapers has now been completed. More than half a million items have been added to the PhilPapers index, greatly improving our coverage of older publications and print publications not available online. At 1.75 M items, our index is now three times the size of the nearest commercial alternative. We thank our colleagues at the Philosophy Documentation Center for their ceaseless efforts to collect relevant data.

My PhilPapers page sports some new entries though in several cases the bibliographical information is incomplete.

Now all of this sort of thing is what Heidegger would dismiss as Betriebsamkeit and with some justification. Fascinating our capacity to distract ourselves from the essential and lose ourselves in all sorts of busy-ness. Which is not to deny some value to this sort of frenetic scholarly industriousness. But let's hope that a further layer of Leiterization is not added. What this might consist in I'll leave it to you to imagine.

Atheist Ireland Outfit Dissociates Itself from PZ Myers

This is good news. (HT: Mike Valle) People on one's side will tolerate a little scumbaggery, but not a lot, as both Brian Leiter and PZ Myers are learning the hard way.

Here is one of the articles in which Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland documents Myers' viciousness.

After reading through the examples Nugent adduces, I wonder whether Myers is quite sane. In the case of Leiter, his mad attack on Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins raises similar doubts.

Philosophy and Livelihood

Recently over the transom:

I'm wondering, as a 17 year old early entrant to university who's looking for a direction in his life: how do you manage to make a living from what you do?

Also, keep up the great work!

I have been asked this question many times and have written several posts in reply. Here are three of them:

Philosophy and Livelihood: Build a Slave!

A Reader Wants to be a Professional Philosopher

Work, Money, Living and Livelihood

Petition to Save the Husserl-Heidegger Chair at Freiburg im Breisgau

Here.

Tenured Professor Loses Job over Blog Post

"Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible."

More evidence, as if more evidence is needed, that the universities of the land are increasingly becoming leftist seminaries, hothouses of political correctness. Story here in The Atlantic.

Hat tip: Tully Borland

The Wages of Political Correctness: A Climate of Fear

This from a graduate student whose paper I posted:

Shortly after you posted my paper, I got an email from a friend who also reads your blog. My friend wondered if this was, all things considered, bad for my chances on the job market. He thinks in this age of Google searches, having my name come up on your blog will be viewed negatively by some hiring committees, given that most are leftists. It is completely absurd to me that someone might chuck my application in the trash just because they see a serious metaphysics post on a blog that defends conservative views some of the time, and I'm quite happy to have my name associated with yours, but I was wondering what you thought.

Might it be better to change the post and title a little so it doesn't mention my full name? If it is indeed true that some departments would not hire me because of this post, there is a significant part of me that doesn't want to work with such people anyway, but then there is another part of me that loves teaching philosophy enough that I'd be willing to try to put up with such people, at least for a while. I don't know. I'm not terribly worried about it at this moment, since I won't be on the job market until fall of 2016.

I did remove the author's name out of concern for his prospects. I suspect his friend has a better understanding of how bad things have become than he does. The universities have become leftist seminaries. The few exceptions prove the rule. And where there are leftists there is political correctness and the party line. Anyone who refuses to toe it, anyone who thinks independently and critically and speaks out against leftist excesses and outright inanities runs a serious career risk. But even if one does not speak out, and is only tenuously associated with a website that publishes some conservative material, one is at risk.

I've made mine, so I can afford to speak the truth. A little courage is involved, but not much. I cannot recommend that people who are young or starting out take career-destroying risks. And I ought not expose them to danger. Never underestimate how vicious and vindictive leftists can be. The case of Brian Leiter is very instructive. Details of some of his recent antics here.

And don't ever underestimate the lengths of lunacy to which lefties will go. Recent example: CUNY. Morris Raphael Cohen must be rolling over in his grave.

UPDATE: Another philosophy graduate student refers us to Students Object to Job Candidate for Offensive Views. It begins:

Graduate students in a philosophy department somewhere in the English-speaking world did some online sleuthing about a job candidate for a position in their department, and learned that the candidate seems to hold views they find offensive. In particular, they found reports (including alleged quotes) that the candidate had expressed in online fora the view that homosexual acts and premarital sex are immoral.

It is a good thing Immanuel Kant did not apply to this department. He holds that "Every form of sexual indulgence, except in marriage, is a misuse of sexuality and so a crimen carnis." (Lectures on Ethics, tr. Infield, Hackett, p. 169.)

The Low Intellectual and Moral Level at Oxford and Other Universities

The piece ends with good advice:

. . . if you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel . . . . The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values.

The sad fact is that if you love education, revere the life of the mind, care about the pursuit of truth, think young people need to receive wisdom from their elders, and value moral clarity, the university is the last place you would want to send your 18-year-old.

Brian Leiter’s Christmas Present to Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins

He's baaack, bearing 'gifts.' Professor Christian Munthe has the story:

Remember The September Statement from earlier this year, signed by 648 academic philosophers in North America and elsewhere against Chicago philosopher and law professor Brian Leiter's unacceptable treatment of his UBC colleague Carrie Ichikawa-Jenkins, ending in Leiter's statement of resignation from the institutional ranking operation he had founded and coordinated up till then, the Philosophical Gourmet Report? If not, a recapture of some of the essential of this sad and disgraceful story is here (start at the bottom to get the adequate chronology). This detailed chronological account is also rewarding.

One would have thought that after this, Brian Leiter would prefer to lay dead and lick his wounds for a while, waiting for the memory of the scandal and his own disgrace to settle, and maybe find new pathways to having himself feel good about himself besides bullying and threatening (apparently mostly female) academic colleagues for one of the other, more or less fathomable, reason found by him to justify such behaviour. Maybe do something meriting a minimal portion of admiration and respect from academic colleagues, perhaps?

Not so at all.

As revealed on Christmas eve by Jonathan Ichikawa-Jenkins, Carrie's husband, Leiter has recently had a Canadian lawyer send a letter to them both, threatening with a defamation lawsuit unless they publicly post a "proposed statement" of apology to Leiter, with the specifically nasty ingredient of a specific threat that such a suit would imply " “a full airing of the issues and the cause or causes of [Carrie’s] medical condition;”. Moreover, the letter asks the Ichikawa-Jenkins to apologise not only for the personal declaration of professional ethos that made no mention of Brian Leiter whatsoever but that for some reason – to me still incomprehensible as long as a deeply suppressed guilty conscience or outright pathology is not pondered – to to be an attack on his person, but also for the actions of other people, such as this post at the Feminist Philosophers blog, and The September Statement itself – implying obviously that all the signatories to that statement would be in the crosshairs of professor Leiter. The full letter of the lawyer setting out these threats is here. The (expected) response from the Ichikawa-Jenkins' lawyer is here, stating the simple and obvious claim that all that's been publicly communicated on this matter – such as making public bullying emails of Leiter – is protected by normal statutes of freedom of speech.

[Read it all and follow the links.]

Conservative Marquette Poly Sci Prof Suspended for Blogging

Via John Pepple, I just learned that John McAdams, a tenured associate professor of political science at Marquette University, has been suspended with pay and barred from campus for criticizing a graduate student philosophy teacher who shut down a classroom conversation on gay marriage. As McAdams puts it at his weblog Marquette Warrior:

It created more controversy than any blog other post we have done: an account of a Philosophy instructor at Marquette who told a student that gay marriage could not be discussed in her class since any opposition would be “homophobic” and would “offend” any gay students in the class. Not only did the story echo among Catholic outlets and sites dedicated to free speech on campus, but it created considerable blow back among leftist academics, who pretty much demanded our head on a pike.

This incident further illustrates what I mean when I say that the universities of the land, most of them, have become leftist seminaries and hotbeds of political correctness. The behavior of the philosophy instructor illustrates the truth that there is little that is classically liberal about contemporary liberals.

I will add Marquette Warrior to my blogroll.

Jonathan Haidt on Liberal Bias in the Social Sciences

Here. Follow the internal link to the article by Haidt et al. to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Haidt is good. My Haidt posts here.

On Relevance in Education

From the mail bag:

I have taught high school and college-aged kids for many years, and am very often lobbed the relevance question. The logical coherence of the concept of God. Theories of space and time. Classic questions in epistemology and metaphysics. "How is this relevant," they ask. It annoys me. I make an impotent gesture toward the intrinsic value of knowledge, but am always left frustrated by having to defend what is so obvious to me –and to everyone else prior to the mid twentieth century–the indelible importance of these topics. Maybe you can help me out?

I don't know how much help I can be, but here are some thoughts.

1. The philosophy teacher has a problem the calculus instructor, say, does not. The latter does not have to show the relevance of his subject or motivate an interest in it. Perhaps two thirds of the students before him are engineering majors who need no convincing of the relevance of higher mathematics to their career goals. They are interested in mathematics, if not for its own sake, then for the sake of its use. The philosophy teacher, however, has not only to teach his subject but also, unlike the mathematics professor, to argue its relevance and motivate interest.

2. At this point lame justifications of philosophy come thick and fast. It teaches critical thinking; it is good preparation for law school, etc. I knock the crutches out from under these lame justifications in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy and the Humanities? As I say there:

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. [. . .]

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school." You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions. Put him on the spot. Play the Socratic gadfly. If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?"

3. "I make an impotent gesture toward the intrinsic value of knowledge, but am always left frustrated by having to defend what is so obvious to me . . ." Most of the people who need to have this explained to them are not equipped to appreciate any explanation. So we humanists are in a tough spot. One of the conclusions I came too early on was that philosophy simply cannot be a mass consumption item at the college level. Although I didn't mind, and actually enjoyed, teaching logic courses, which can be of some use to the masses, I loathed teaching Intro to Philosophy and other philosophy courses designed to satisfy breadth requirements.

Part of the problem is that college level is so low nowadays that it has become a joke to speak of 'higher education.' People are not there to become educated human beings but to garner credentials that they believe will help them get ahead economically and socially. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but then why waste time on the pursuit of truth for its own sake? The average person has no intellectual eros; what he wants and needs is job training.

4. There is an irony here. People like you and me and thousands of others would never have had the opportunity to make a living from teaching philosophy if the level had not sunk so low, not so much because our level is low, but because there would simply have been no jobs for us if 'higher' education had not metastazised in the 1960s and beyond. So while we complain about the low level of our students, we ought to bear in mind that we have students in the first place and are not selling insurance or writing code because of the democratization of 'higher' ed.

5. I am an elitist, but not in a social or economic or racial sense. Everyone who has what it takes to profit from it ought to have the opportunity to pursue real education — which is not to be confused with indoctrination in leftist seminaries — in institutions of higher — no 'sneer' quotes — education. Equality of opportunity! But of course there will never be equality of outcome or result because people are not equal.

Philosophy — the real thing, not some dumbed-down ersatz — cannot be a mass consumption item. It is for the few. But who those few are cannot be decided by criteria of race or sex or age or religion or national origin. High culture is universal and belongs to all of us, even though we individually and as members of groups are not equal in our ability to contribute to it.