Maverick Philosopher – Page 519 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

David Gelernter on the Diversity Obsession

From The War on Truth (emphasis and a bit of ascerbic commentary added):

How can we explain intelligent, articulate, intellectually vigorous people stuck in time, repeating themselves endlessly like robots? Even if the diversity crusade hadn’t become an embarrassment and a sham, the sheer mindless obsession of it suggests a seriously neurotic institution. Yale doesn’t lack diversity, just rationality. Of course it lacks intellectual diversity, but that problem has been solved by shipping “diversity” off to redefinition camp. American English is feeling a lot better, thank you, now that it’s been lobotomized by political hacks. (Covered by Obamacare!)

[. . .]

The good thing about the “diversity” problem is that you can obsess over it forever with no risk of solving it, because it is insoluble—based as it is on a wholly implausible lie. The diversity kingpins aim for group representation in all academic fields based on a group’s numbers in the student population, and in America (eventually the world) at large. But why would anyone suspect that both sexes and all races and nationalities have approximately the same skills at everything? And the same interests in everything? And the same physical qualifications for everything? Doesn’t diversity imply (for lack of a better term) diversity?

No!—and that’s the best thing about the diversity crusade. It is actually an anti-diversity crusade, waged by people who detest diversity. Its goal is to suppress diversity of every sort. Yale women must behave just like Yale men: must major in the same things at the same rates, go out for sports in the same numbers, get the same jobs, make the same money, care to the same extent in the same way about children, family, money, power, sex, and everything else. So why are there “Women’s Studies” departments? Because (dammit!) women and men are totally different! So why is there a diversity campaign? Because women and men are exactly the same!

The United States accomplished the amazing feat of virtually extinguishing race prejudice in a single generation, between the late 1950s and the early ’80s. It was a superb accomplishment, on the order of the Moon landings. But young Americans get no chance to take pride in it: We don’t just suppress the facts, we lie about them. We teach our children from kindergarten up that America still struggles with prejudice against approved minorities and women, when they can see with their own eyes that prejudice in favor of approved minorities and women is everywhere—in education, industry, and government. How are they supposed to learn that it is important to tell the truth? How will they learn what the truth means?

This problem is not keeping the Obama regime up nights. A Hillary administration would be equally indifferent.

War on Truth is the Obama administration’s middle name, and sometimes seems to be its actual goal. Releasing the toxic phrase “War on Women” into the political atmosphere was a risky move for the left—they have got away with it only because Republicans are so timid and lazy. That Republicans are antiwoman is an absurd lie, and what does it say about Republican women? Are they dupes or traitors? Or just dumb broads? (You know how women are about politics. Hopeless.) There was a time when honest Americans of every political type would have exploded at the sheer, filthy dishonesty of the phrase. No more. American culture is changing.

BV: It is indeed. Clear proof is that Obama gets away with his repeated outright lies, his Orwellianisms and his nine-to-five shuck and jive. Something is wrong when even conservative commentators refer to his brazen lies by saying that the POMO prez "misspoke."

While the Obamacrats rave on about the War on Women (believing that abortion poses an ethical question being tantamount, after all, to mowing down young girls in the street as they emerge from the shelters in which they have gathered, cowering, in fear of Republicans)—while they denounce the War on Women, Obamacrats have been merrily waging a war on jobs, a war on small business, a war on the best-by-far health care system in human history, a war on America’s international influence and prestige, a war on economic recovery, a war on energy independence, a war on the Constitution, and many other battles around the edges. But the War on Truth matters most, hurts most, and will be remembered longest.

Do Republicans care about the cultural mainstream’s real prejudice against white boys? Not in the least. Will Republicans challenge the diversity racket, the “affirmative action” con game that still dominates so many important institutional decisions? Americans dislike affirmative action and always have, but Republicans are too scared to speak up. Elections are approaching. Let us at least hear about this war on truth, from every last Republican candidate, for every office, at every level, every day. American culture, society, civilization are at stake. Please.

The chickenshit RINOs are too much enamoured of their perquisites, power, and pelf to take a principled stand on anything. They are go-along-to-get-along, kick-the-can-down-the-road types out for themselves first and foremost, and the Republic be damned. They are as republican as the Dems are democratic.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: British Invasion ‘Fs’

Marianne Faithfull, As Tears Go By. A lovely tune by a lovely lass in a stock chord progression. In the key of C: C, Am7, Dm7, G7.

Freddie and the Dreamers, I'm Telling You Now. A goofy act, hard on the knees as the boys must be experiencing long about now.

Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, The Game of Love

________________, Groovy Kind of Love. Still sounds good. I stopped saying 'groovy' at the end of the '60s. So why are you Gen-X slackers still saying 'awesome'?

The Fortunes, You've Got Your Troubles, I've Got Mine. This one holds up well, too.

The Fortunes, Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again

Georgie Fame, Sunny. Excellent cover of the Bobby Hebb song. Fame says "A to Zed" which wrecks the rhyme.

Philosophy and Livelihood

A reader asked about this and about 'going maverick.' Here is a post from five years ago, and it links to another. The comments may be of interest too.

Obama Watch

An Orwellian Nation of ObamaThink

Is it Over and We Just Don't Know it?

Why Privatizing Marriage Cannot Work

Francis Beckwith explains.

As I see it, the right place to start this debate about marriage, same-sex 'marriage,' and privatization is with the logically prior questions: Is state involvement in marriage justified? and What justifies the state's involvement in marriage? The only good answers are that (i) state involvement is justified, (ii) because of the state's interest in its own perpetuation via the production of children and their development into productive citizens. (There is also, secondarily, the protection of those upon whom the burden of procreation mainly falls, women.) It is the possibility of procreation that justifies the states' recognition and regulation of marriage. But there is no possibility of procreation in same-sex unions. Therefore, same-sex unions do not deserve to be recognized by the state as marriage. This is not to oppose civil unions that make possible the transfer of social security benefits, etc.

Fuller discussion: Why Not Just 'Privatize' Marriage?

Sophistry in True Detective: On the Supposed Illusion of Having a Self

The other day I referred to the following bit of dialogue from the new HBO series, True Detective, as sophistry. Now I will explain why I think it to be such. Here is the part I want to focus on. The words are put in the mouth of the anti-natalist Rustin Cohle. I've ommitted the responses of the Woody Harrelson character.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Sorting through this crap is as painful as reading the typical student paper. Where does one start with such a farrago of Unsinn? But here goes. The main points made above are these:

1. The emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness in human animals is an accident, a fluke of evolution.

2. We are each under the illusion of having, or being, a self when in fact there are no selves.

3. We have been programmed by nature to suffer from this illusion.

4. The honorable thing to do is to deny our programming, refuse to procreate, and embrace our extinction as a species.

Each of these theses is either extremely dubious or demonstrably incoherent, taken singly, not to mention the dubiousness of the 'is'-'ought' inference from (3) to (4). But in this entry I will address (2) alone.

'There are no selves' is what our anti-natalist means when he say that everybody is nobody. For it is a Moorean fact, undeniable even by our anti-natalist, that every living human body is some living human body or other. He is not denying that plain fact but that these living human bodies are selves.

Performative Inconsistency

Now 'There are no selves,' if asserted by a being who understands what he says and means what he says, is asserted by a conscious and self-conscious being. But that is just what a self is. A self is a conscious being capable of expressing explicit self-consciousness by the use of the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' Therefore, a self that asserts that there are no selves falls into performative inconsistency. The very act or performance of asserting that there are no selves or that one is not a self falsifies the content of the assertion. For that performance is a performance of a self.

The claim that there are no selves is therefore self-refuting.

Assertion is a speech act. But we get the same result if one merely thinks the thought that one is not a self without expressing it via an assertive utterance. If I think the thought *I am not a self,* then that thought is falsified by the act of thinking it since the act is the act of a self.

The point can also be made as follows. If there are no selves, then I am not a self. But if I am not a self, then I do not exist. Perhaps some living human body exists, but that body cannot be my body if I do not exist. What makes this body my body is its connection with me. So I must exist for some body to be my body. My body is my body and not my body's body. So I am not identical to my body. I have a body. 'This body is this body' is a tautology. 'I am this body' is not a tautology. If I exist, then I am distinct from my body and from any body.

So if I am not a self, then I do not exist. But the thought that I do not exist is unthinkable as true. Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if 'I' picks out merely a momentary self. (I am not committed by this line of reasoning to a substantial self that remains numerically the same over time.) So we have performative inconsistency.

This reasoning does not show that I am a necessary being, or that I have or am an immortal soul, or even that I am a res cogitans in Descartes' sense. What it shows is that the self cannot be an illusion. It shows that anyone who carefully considers whether or not he is a self can attain the certain insight that he is at least as long as he is thinking these thoughts.

Soviel Schein, soviel Sein

There is another way of looking at it. If each of us is under the illusion of having a self or being a self, then who is being fooled? To whom does this false seeming appear? There cannot be illusions in a world without conscious beings. An illusion by its very nature is an illusion to consciousness. So if consciousness is an illusion, then it is not an illusion. The same holds for the self. If the self is an illusion, then the self is not an illusion.

There cannot be Schein (illusion) without Sein (being). "So much seeming, so much being."

Husserl’s Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Suppose I am conscious of an object in the mode of visual perception: I see a bobcat in the backyard. Does it make sense to try to analyze this perceptual situation by saying that 'in my mind' there is an image or picture that represents something 'outside my mind'?

In the Fifth of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl refutes this type of theory. One point he makes (Logical Investigations, vol. II, 593) is that there is a phenomenological difference between a genuine case of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and ordinary perceptual awareness. Suppose I am looking at a picture of a mountain. The picture appears, but it refers beyond itself to that of which it is a picture, the mountain itself. In a case like this, it is clear that my awareness of the object depicted is mediated by a picture or image. Here it makes clear sense to speak of one thing (the picture) re-presenting another (the mountain). But when I look at the mountain itself, I find no evidence of any picture or image that mediates my perceptual awareness of the mountain. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence of any epistemic intermediary or epistemic deputy. So on phenomenological grounds alone, it would seem to be a mistake to assimilate perceptual consciousness to image-consciousness. The two are phenomenologically quite different.

A second consideration is that consciousness of a thing via a picture or image presupposes ordinary perceptual consciousness inasmuch as the picture or painting must itself be perceived as a precondition of its functioning as an image. How then can ordinary perceptual consciousness be explained as involving internal images or pictures?

Husserl also points out that, no matter how carefully I examine the picture, I will discover no intrinsic feature of it that is its "representative character." (593) That is, there is no intrinsic property of the picture that confers upon it its reference to something beyond itself. So Husserl asks:

     What therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone is
     present in consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a
     certain extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between
     image and thing will not help. (593, Findlay trans. slightly
     emended.)

Why won't resemblance help? If picture and thing depicted both exist, then of course there will be resemblance. But it cannot be in virtue of X's resemblance to Y that X pictures or images Y. "Only a
presenting ego's power to use a similar as an image-representative of a similar . . . makes the image be an image." (594) Husserl's point is subtle. I'll explain it in my own way. A picture considered by itself is just a physical thing with physical properties. What makes it be an image? Its physical properties cannot account for its being an image. And the fact that it shares physical properties with some other thing cannot make it an image either. A painting of a mountain can be a painting of a mountain even if there is no mountain of which it is the painting. Pictures of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas are pictures of said hotel even though it has been demolished. The intentionality of a photograph can survive the destruction of its 'subject.' A depiction of Cerberus is what it is despite the dog's nonexistence.

But even if there exists something that a picture resembles, that does not suffice to make the picture a picture of a thing it resembles. Suppose I have two qualitatively identical ball bearings. In an Andy Warholish mood, I take a picture of one of them, the one closer to my computer. Gazing fondly at the photo, I say, "This ball bearing is the one that is closer to my computer." Since the photo resembles the other ball bearing as well, but is not of that ball bearing, it cannot be resemblance that confers upon the photo its intentionality.

What Husserl is saying in effect is that pictures, paintings, movie images, and the like possess no intrinsic intentionality: what intentionality they have is derived from conscious beings who possess
intrinsic intentionality. For Husserl, and for me, the project of trying to account for intrinsic intentionality in terms of internal pictures that resemble outer objects is a complete nonstarter. For one thing, it leads to a vicious infinite regress: "Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object be itself constituted through an image . . . ." (594)

There are both phenomenological and dialectical reasons for rejecting the image-theory (Bilder-theorie) of consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence that ordinary perception is mediated by internal images. In addition,

   1. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance,
   but resemblance cannot explain the intentionality of pictures that (i)
   never had an object, or (ii) lost their object.

   2. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance,
   but resemblance cannot account for a picture's being of the very
   object it is of as opposed to some other one that it merely resembles.

3. The image-theory is involved in a vicious infinite regress.

   4. Since image-consciousness presupposes ordinary perceptual
   consiousness, it is impossible to explain the latter in terms of the
   former.

   5. The image-theory tries to locate the intentionality of
   consciousness in the intentionality of a picture when it is clear that
   there is nothing intrinsic to any picture that could account for its
   intentionality.

Pessimism and Anti-Natalism in True Detective

True Detective is a new HBO series getting rave reviews. This bit, I am told by Karl White from whom I first learned about the series, is from the first episode. It's good. I'll leave it to you to sort through the sophistry of Rust's spiel.

Here is some TD dialog about religion. I'll say this about it: it is well done and stimulates thought.

The scriptwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, is a very interesting cat who abandoned a tenure-track university gig to try his hand at writing for TV. It takes balls to give up security for a long shot. Especially when you have a kid. At that point nothing-ventured-nothing-gained risk-taking begins to taper off into irresponsibility. If I had had young children I wouldn't have quit my tenured post. Conservatives are cautious and responsible, fiscally and otherwise.

Pizzolatto earns a place in my Mavericks category. Bio and interview here. Excerpt:

Do you think part of the reason why television had so much appeal for you was that you knew you’d be able to reach an audience? Everyone has a TV in the living room. Not everyone reads literary novels.

That’s a great point. I think, with myself, growing up in rural Louisiana but having TV—TV jumps all these class boundaries. For a kid to even have a disposition to be willing to sit down and read literary fiction and not regard it as a waste of time—that requires a certain amount of cultural influence and education. But TV sneaks in, no matter what. I really like that. And the idea that you could put your heart and soul and every bit of yourself into it, the same way you could a novel, and stay there and make sure it was done right? That was all appealing.

That reminds me of my old entry, Books and Reality and Books, which begins:

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation? One corresondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation. So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation. A hard saying!

What are the possible views on this topic?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble. But he didn't say that in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem. Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation. Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted. The view of the ordinary cave-dweller.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy. But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time. The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6. More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)? Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. II, The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences . . . .
. . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

Towards a Phenomenology of Aunts

John Niemeyer Findlay, The Transcendence of the Cave (Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 218:

And it [a sound phenomenology or existentialism] will surely find room for a phenomenological characterization of the brotherly, the sisterly and the cousinly, and will perhaps find room for a special chapter on aunts, that interesting transitional category between maternity and random femininity, devoting perhaps a special study to the romantic aunt, who, dark, interesting, and beautiful, brings into the nursery the rumour of strange voyages and amazing encounters, as well as sympathies almost unbearably touching.

Findlay once told us that Ruth Barcan Marcus had referred to him as a "high-minded sentimentalist." Well, if I were to be banished to the moon tomorrow, and forced to choose between Marcus and Findlay as my sole philosophical reading matter, the choice would be an easy one.

Libertarians and Drug Legalization

An old post from about three years ago that bears reposting in the current climate.

………………

Libertarians often argue that drug legalization would not lead to increased drug use. I find that preposterous, and you should too. There are at least three groups of people who are dissuaded from drug use by its being illegal.

1. There are those who respect the law because it is the law. 'It's against the law' carries weight with them; it has 'dissuasive force.' For these people the mere fact that X is illegal suffices for them to refrain from doing X. It doesn't matter for the purposes of my argument how many of these people there are or whether they are justified in respecting the law just because it is the law. The point is that there are such people and that the mere illegality of doing X supplies a motive for their not doing X.

Now suppose the legal prohibition on doing X is removed. Will every one in this first class begin doing X? Of course not. The point is that some will. So it should already be clear to anyone with common sense and no ideological axe to grind that drug legalization will lead to increased use.

2. There are those who may or may not respect the law because it is the law, but fear the consequences of getting caught breaking it. These people don't like rude encounters with cops, jail time, fines, loss of reputation, etc. Among these people are libertarians who favor legalization and have no respect for current drug laws but obey the current laws out of fear of the consequences of breaking them.

3. There are also those who are quite confident that they can avoid the consequences of breaking the drug laws, but fear the consequences of contact with drug dealers. They fear being cheated out of their money, being given diluted or poisoned product, etc.

Now take the logical sum, or union, of the three classes just menioned. The membership of that union is significant. Legalize drugs and some of those people will begin using drugs. And of those who begin, some will end up abusing them, becoming addicted, etc.

Therefore, it is utterly preposterous to claim as libertarians typically do that drug legalization will not lead to increased use. So why do people like Ron Paul make this claim? It is hard to figure. Why say something stupid that makes your case weaker than it is? Is it just knee-jerk oppositionalism? (I can't find my old post on knee-jerk oppositionalism, but I'll keep looking.)

Why did Paul say, "How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would."? That's just a dumbass thing to say. Paul is assuming that whether one does X or not has nothing to do with whether X is legally permissible or legally impermissible. He is assuming that people who use drugs will use them no matter the law says, and that people who do not use drugs will refrain from using them no matter what the law says. That is a bit of silliness which lies beneath refutation. So again I ask: why do libertarians maintain extremist stupidities when there are intelligent things they can say?

After all, libertarians do have a case. So my advice to them would be to concede the obvious — that legalization will result in greater use — and then argue that the benefits of legalization outweigh the costs. They will then come across, not as fanatical deniers of the obvious, but as reasonable people who understand the complexity of the issue.

As for Ron Paul, I'm afraid he has already blown his 2012 chances with his remarks on heroin. It's too bad. The country needs to move in the libertarian direction after decades and decades of socialist drift. But the American people do not cotton to fanatics and the doctrinaire.

The Poor are not Poor Because the Rich are Rich

As Robert Samuelson points out.

The two conditions are generally unrelated.

[. . .]

It's also not true, as widely asserted, that the wealthiest Americans (the notorious top 1 percent) have captured all the gains in productivity and living standards of recent decades. The Congressional Budget Office examined income trends for the past three decades. It found sizable gains for all income groups.

True, the top 1 percent outdid everyone. From 1980 to 2010, their inflation-adjusted pretax incomes grew a spectacular 190 percent, almost a tripling. But for the poorest fifth of Americans, pretax incomes for these years rose 44 percent. Gains were 31 percent for the second poorest, 29 percent for the middle fifth, 38 percent for the next fifth and 83 percent for the richest fifth, including the top 1 percent. Because our system redistributes income from top to bottom, after-tax gains were larger: 53 percent for the poorest fifth; 41 percent for the second; 41 percent for the middle-fifth; 49 percent for the fourth; and 90 percent for richest. [Emphasis added.]

Is Atheism Irrational? Gary Gutting Interviews Alvin Plantinga

Here.

There are currently 980 comments. More proof that the only good combox is a closed combox. Equivalently, the best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

The Stromboli Puzzle Revisited

Here is a little puzzle I call the Stromboli Puzzle. An earlier post on this topic was defective. So I return to the topic. The puzzle brings out some of the issues surrounding existence. Consider the following argument.

Stromboli exists.
Stromboli is an island volcano.
Ergo
An island volcano exists.

This is a sound argument: the premises are true and the reasoning is correct. It looks to be an instance of Existential Generalization. How can it fail to be valid? But how can it be valid given the equivocation on 'exists'? 'Exists' in the conclusion is a second-level predicate while 'exists' in the initial premise is a first-level predicate. Although Equivocation is standardly classified as an informal fallacy, it induces a formal fallacy. An equivocation on a term in a syllogism induces the dreaded quaternio terminorum, which is a formal fallacy. Thus the above argument appears invalid because it falls afoul of the Four Term Fallacy.

Objection 1. "The argument is valid without the first premise, and as you yourself have pointed out, a valid argument cannot be made invalid by adding a premise. So the argument is valid. What's your problem?"

Reply 1. The argument without the first premise is not valid. For if the singular term in the argument has no existing referent, then the argument is a non sequitur. If 'Stromboli' has no referent at all, or has only a nonexisting Meinongian referent, then Existential Generalization could not be performed, given, as Quine says, that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."

Objection 2: "The first premise is redundant because we presuppose that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents."

Reply 2: Well, then, if that is what you presuppose, then you can state your presupposition by writing, 'Stromboli exists.' Either the argument without the first premise is an enthymeme or it is invalid. If it is an enthymeme, then we need the first premise to make it valid. If it is invalid, then it is invalid.

Therefore, we are stuck with the problem of explaining how the original argument is valid, which it surely is.

My answer is that the original argument is an enthymeme an unstated premise of which links the first- and second-level uses of 'exist(s)' and thus presupposes the admissibility of the first-level uses. Thus we get:

A first-level concept F exists (is instantiated) iff it is instantiated by an individual that exists in the first-level way.
Stromboli is an individual that exists in the first-level way.
Stromboli is an island volcano.
Ergo
The concept island volcano exists (is instantiated).
Ergo
And island volcano exists.

Now what does this rigmarole show? It shows that Frege and Russell were wrong. It shows that unless we admit as logically kosher first-level uses of 'exist(s)' and cognates, a simple and obviously valid argument like the the one with which we started cannot be made sense of.

'Exists(s)' is an admissible predicate of individuals, and existence belongs to individuals: it cannot be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, instantiation. This has important consequences for metaphysics.

For more on the topic of existence see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis," in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, forthcoming.

A Reader’s Comments on the A. P. A. ‘Climate’ Report on The UC Boulder Philosophy Department

Philip Sheridan writes,

I read the 17 page American Philosophical Association site visit report on the University of Colorado, Boulder, philosophy department. As a consultant, I wrote many reports like this — you interview, obtain documentation and data, analyze the information, compare performance to best practices, and then finalize recommendations. Most of the time outside consultants are hired because there is a known problem; the consultant provides an 'objective' viewpoint as someone experienced in the subject area and, importantly, as someone with no personal stake in the outcome.

The troubling thing about the report is that it provides no detail, no who-where-what information that would document the basis for the conclusions. Ostensibly this lack of detail protects confidentiality, but the report was never intended to be made public. As a former consultant, I would say that the conclusions and recommendations are not supported by the content of the report. All of the allegations are vague and without specifics. No one writing such a report should want to provide salacious detail for no reason, but in fact the detail is extremely important. In a criminal trial, no accuser gets away with making vague allegations. Only the reference to 15 complaints filed with the ODH indicates that there may be specific actionable problems, but obviously the UC was already aware of those, so in fact the report contains nothing new that is specific enough to justify the recommendations. Vague comments like "the department has a reputation in the international philosophical community for being extremely unfriendly to women" are not really acceptable, as the authors appear to be merely repeating gossip obtained before their arrival in Boulder.

The 'best practices' reference is just silly. They are making all of this up as they go along, that's plain to see, and the UC philosophy department is the first department to be subjected to this inquisition, so there is no 'best practice' that even exists. The insistence that events must be "family friendly" appears to be based on some theory of academic work (or indeed, any adult work) that is not articulated but that is probably completely unfeasible. At a minimum it should be debated by all concerned, not just presented in passing as the thing that must now be done.

If a junior consultant gave me this report as a first draft, I would make these sorts of comments and would help them understand that that their report did not meet professional standards and could not be presented as is to senior management.

I conclude that the APA CSW should not be doing this sort of thing at all. Referring to the last sentence of my first paragraph above, the CSW ladies are not wholly disinterested; they are gender warriors. They are not objective as a consultant from outside philosophy and academia would be, nor are they subject area experts (they are philosophers!) and they have done a disservice to Mr. Forbes, the department, the University and philosophy in general. They should go back to teaching and writing and complaining on their blog; if this sort of thing is to be done, it should be done by professional, objective outside consultants.

Compare the above with this supine reaction to the Site Visit Report by two faculty members of the philosophy department.