Category: Academia
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Still More on the Colorado Situation
Laughing Philosopher talks sense. I've corrected some typos, added a hyperlink, and intercalated some comments (in blue.) Excerpt: I applaud the move to end sexual harassment seriously in the discipline. However, there are many ways in which the APA committee’s report seems extremely problematic. While I don’t know the nature of the alleged harassment or alleged inappropriate…
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The Philosophy Situation at University of Colorado, Boulder
I have no opinion yet on the goings-on at the UC Boulder philosophy department. I just hope it is not another instance of the US becoming the SU. If you are interested, click away. Here, here, here, and here. And two of the articles infra. Update (2/7) A conservative take: Something Fishy in Colorado. Related…
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The Decline of the West: How Long Can We Last?
Victor Davis Hanson, The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization. "Note the theme of this essay: the more in humane fashion we provide unemployment insurance, food stamps, subsidized housing, legal advice, health care and disability insurance, the more the recipients find it all inadequate, inherent proof of unfairness and inequality,…
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It Pays to Publish, but Don’t Pay to Publish
I am regularly solicited by Open Journal of Philosophy for article submissions. The e-mails never reveal the dirty little secret behind publishing scams ventures like this, namely, the charges levied against authors. Poke around a bit, however, and you will find this page: Article Processing Charges Open Journal of Philosophy is an Open Access journal accessible…
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Linkage
Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues The Highly Educated, Badly Paid, Often Abused Adjunct Professors
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ObamaCare Puts the Screws to Faculty Adjuncts
Adjuncts are the peons of the academic world, the lowest men and women on the collegiate totem pole, the bottom-most rungs of the ladder of higher education — pick your metaphor. But a consequence of ObamaCare, intended or not, is that many are now worse off than they were before. There is some irony in…
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Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?
I have discussed this question several times before. Here is my short answer. By all means, go to graduate school in philosophy, but only if you satisfy all of the following conditions. 1. Philosophy is your passion, the one thing you think most worth living for. 2. People in the know have advised you that…
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The Professor-Student ‘Non-Aggression Pact’
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134: Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well…
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Colin McGinn and Paula Deen
What do they have in common? Not much, except that in each case the 'punishment' seems wildly out of proportion to the 'crime.' Here is the latest in the McGinn saga.
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The Higher Education Hustle
I am tempted to excerpt parts of this longish piece by William Voegli, but, as they say, it's all good. In fact, it is the best thing I have read on this topic to date.
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Liberal Education and Government Abuses
Peter Berkowitz has an excellent column under an awful title: Tenets of Liberal Education Underpin Government Abuses. (I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that Berkowitz chose the title.) The problem is not liberal education. The problem is the hijacking of liberal education by leftists, and the PoMo Prez who is a product of left-hijacked educational institutions. …
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Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News
First the good news: Homunculism, McGinn's NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token. The devastation…
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Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle
In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin. Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of…
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On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’
If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a…
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Universities as Leftist Seminaries
'Seminary,' like 'seminar,' is etymologically related to 'semen,' seed. seminary (n.) mid-15c., "plot where plants are raised from seeds," from Latin seminarium "plant nursery," figuratively, "breeding ground," from seminarius "of seed," from semen (genitive seminis) "seed" (see semen). Meaning "school for training priests" first recorded 1580s; commonly used for any school (especially academies for young…