Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Academia

  • Leftist Barbarians at the University of Nebraska

    Here

  • 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 received by…

  • Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost

    The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager. But the cowardice that issues in abdication of…

  • Neven Sesardić on Brian Leiter

    Leiter Laid Bare My Sesardić posts: Reading Now: When Reason Goes on Holiday Omertà Among the Philosophers Full text on Leiter below the fold: 

  • Higher Remediation

    My friends in the teaching trenches tell stories that lead me to believe that so-called 'higher education' is now little more than 'higher remediation.'

  • Andrew M. Bailey’s Analytic Philosophy Generator and the ‘Scholasticism Charge’

    The AnalPhilGen is a bit of humor from occasional MavPhil commenter Andrew Bailey.  I generated the following using Bailey's 'device':  It is a consequence of proper functionalism that polyadic predicates reduce to non-human consciousness. On the standard Kripkean modal semantics, trope theories supervene on something like Rawls' famous Difference Principle. Intuitively it seems obvious that both…

  • The Bret Weinstein-Heather Heying Caper at Evergreen State

    Having come to expect lunacy from lefties, I was not dismayed, but entertained, by the absurd bigotry that seeps out of the following passage from this Chronicle of Higher Education piece: Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein…

  • Another Liberal Witch Hunt

    Jonathan Haidt is always worth reading: the blasphemy case against Brett Weinstein.

  • Why I Resigned from Duke

    Paul J. Griffiths explains his resignation.  Back story here.  The e-mail message that got him in trouble: Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 4:26 PMTo: Anathea Portier-YoungCc: Divinity Regular Rank Faculty; Divinity Visiting Other FacultySubject: Re: Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training–March 4-5 Dear Faculty Colleagues, I’m responding to Thea’s exhortation that we should attend the Racial…

  • Potemkin Universities

    The universities are dead. Victor Davis Hanson: At most universities, if a scheduled campus lecturer expressed scholarly doubt about the severity of man-caused global warming and the efficacy of its government remedies, or questioned the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, or suggested that sex is biologically determined rather than socially constructed, she likely…

  • The Self-Murder of Academic Philosophy?

    Rod Dreher here exposes the latest lunacy in the precincts of mad-dog feminism. I have no objection to the main body of his post, but his opening sentence, written by a philosophy outsider, will give philosophy outsiders the wrong impression. Dreher asks, "Can somebody please tell me why anybody would choose to go into academic…

  • Were University Admins Always Cowards?

    There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.  That is not to say that there have never  been any who have demonstrated civil courage.  But we have to go back a long way to the late '60s and early '70s. With apologies to that unrepentant commie Pete Seeger…

  • The Cowards of Academia

    Dennis Prager: Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak this week at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week, the university announced it was canceling her speech, providing the usual excuse that it couldn't guarantee her safety, or others'. This excuse is as phony as it is cowardly. Berkeley and other universities know well that there…

  • Cal Berkeley

    Just cut their federal funding. With Trump in the saddle this is a real possibility. Why should taxpayers be forced to support leftist seminaries?  Separation of church and state doesn't go far enough. We need separation of Left and state.  Just as the state has no right to impose religion on the populace, it has…

  • Abdication of Authority in Academe

    Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA: The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this…