Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

More thoughts on the Sheinman case at Bar-Ilan University

The legal philosopher and legal scholar Alon Harel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) writes:

I was asked to examine again carefully the case of Hanoch Sheinman. I was told that I was misled with respect to some of the facts. I tried to do my best to explore all the relevant facts and here are my findings. [Ed.-see Prof. Harel's earlier comments]

Let me first say that the accusations that decisions of promotion and tenure at Bar-Ilan are politicized are not new and are unfortunately based in evidence. The most famous case in which Bar Ilan used political considerations was that of Menachmen Klein, who for a long was not promoted despite his scientific achievements. I believe therefore that the academic community is justified in exploring the issue carefully. Decisions concerning promotion and tenure at Bar Ilan should be scrutinized in cases of suspicion. The suspicion is of course particularly grave in the case of Hanoch because of the threats issued in an earlier letter sent to Hanoch by his dean during the operation/war Zuk Eitan.

As I see it, the current accusations against Bar Ilan University are based on the following:

1)     Bar Ilan established a mid-term review process retroactively.

2)     The faculty deviated in its instructions from the instructions of the rector as the rector instructed faculties to perform the process during the third year while the implementation at the law faculty included individuals who have completed three years.

3)     The implementation was inconsiderate, hasty, and unfair because it was sent to Hanoch when he was abroad, the deadline was much too short (one week) and Hanoch was also on sabbatical and had some family events which made it particularly difficult for him to meet the deadline.

I think claim 1 is not justified while there is some merit in 2 and 3.

I do not see that there is a problem in the 'retroactive procedure'. This is because the procedure of mid-term review does not impose harsher requirements for tenure. It is merely a procedure designed to provide feedback to the candidate. I do not think candidates are being made worse off as a result of this process.

On the other hand I think that the faculty unjustifiably deviated from the instruction of the rector in making a decision to extend the mid term review to people who have completed third year. Hanoch is right that the language of the rector's instruction does not apply to his case. Although I think the rector can extend the process to candidates at their fourth or fifth year, the faculty should not extend it to such cases.

I also think that given the circumstances of Hanoch at this time, the fact that he is on sabbatical abroad and the Bar Mitzva of his son all justified greater empathy than the one shown by Bar Ilan. This is particularly true given the history of his case at Bar Ilan.

I will again open comments, but will moderate for relevant substance, and edit accordingly.  Only comments with a full name in the "name" line and a valid e-mail address (which will not appear) will be published.

2015 in review, first quarter: January, February, March

Top philosophy journals explained (January)

University of Chicago statement on freedom of expression (January)

Mitchell Aboulafia, caveat emptor (January)

The Most Important Anglophone Philosophers, 1945-2000, poll results and discussion (January)

Marquette's attack on lawful speech and academic freedom (February)

Pedigree matters (February)

Who is reading this blog? (And also.) (February)

Editorial practices at Philosophy & Public Affairs (March)

The first five laws of cyber-dynamics (March)

Brogaard on group polarization and the Internet (March)

The most important issues facing the profession (March)

Philosopher Andrew Pessin (Connecticut College) smears Palestinians (March) 

The left and "appropriate concern" (March)

Is philosophy in the doldrums?  Poll results and discussion (March)

All "Synthese Library" volumes before 2005 are now available...

...for free!

On criticizing students: why is academic law so different than academic philosophy?

Last month's fake controversy du jour--complete with false accusations and selective presentation of evidence ("Lebron-gate" for short)--included an appearance of the weirdest trope to infect philosophy cyberspace over the last couple of years, a variation on "think of the children!"  This is the idea that criticizing a graduate student (even if you didn't intend to, and even if you didn't use his name!) is a line that can not be crossed in the minds of some putatively "professional" philosophers.   One aspect of this I find puzzling is that in academic law and its associated social media, no such norm is recognized by anyone (I realize it's not recognized by most philosophers either, but the question is why philosophy social media behaves so differently).  So, for example, right-wing law professor David Bernstein (George Mason)--an always reliable apologist for Israeli crimes and punishment of anti-Israeli speech--here chastises by name a law student at the University of Texas at Austin who disrupted a speech by an Israeli.  (As a sidenote, I think universities should prevent these kinds of disruptions, and not just of Israelis.)  Academic law blogs did not erupt in horror (real or feigned) that Prof. Bernstein had criticized a "mere" student.   And Bernstein did this on a much bigger platform, a blog nominally hosted by the Washington Post.

Maybe academic philosophy is just more of a hotbed of New Infantilism and faux-sensitivity than academic law?  That's probably true, but I think there are some other factors at work; in no particular order:

(1)  There is no culture among law students of feeling "vulnerable" and in need of "protection," whereas there clearly is in philosophy cyberspace (recall the bizarre letter from some Harvard PhD students regarding the Marquette case).

(2)  There is more respect for free speech norms among law students and professors than among philosophers; this is not surprising, given the strong libertarian tendencies of American free speech law.  As a result, there is more skepticism about the idea that certain topics can't be broached (and especially when it is something as odd as "not criticizing a student").

The sociology of cold fusion in physics

Philosopher Huw Price (Cambridge) comments.

"Normativity for Naturalists," redux

I've enjoyed a lot of correspondence about this paper over the last year; for those who are interested, it's now out in Philosophical Issues (the supplement to Nous) in a special issue on "Normativity" edited by Ram Neta.  A lot of interesting-looking papers, though I think most of the other contributors are "true believers," as it were.  I hope some of the defenders of non-naturalist realism about normativity will have something to say about the criticisms I put forth.

Harvard medical school professor David Silbersweig makes the best case for studying philosophy

And it's got nothing to do with money, and everything to do with how to think.

(My thanks to Prof. Silbersweig for calling this very nice piece to my attention.)

Oxford's Les Green on the Sheinman affair at Bar-Ilan

Here.  (Prof. Green has comments open at his site, so I will not open them here.)

Hebrew U's David Enoch replies to the Bar-Ilan Professors Regarding the Sheinman affair

Professor Enoch asked me to share his response:   Download Following the nine Bar Ilan Professors response Enoch

I am opening comments, but they will be moderated for relevant substance, and perhaps edited to that end.  Only comments with a full name (in the name line) and a valid e-mail address (which will not appear) will be approved.

Lisitsa plays Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2

I'm not sure this is my favorite recording, but it is undoubtedly the best video of the piece, which allows one to see the demandingness of performing this Rhapsody (Lisitsa, like Liszt, has very long hands).

 

Postmodern Xmas

Once again.

Bar-Ilan University continues its war on academic freedom, speech and the due process rights of faculty (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

The victim is the legal philosopher Hanoch Sheinman, one of the leading scholars in the field of his generation, who is a member of the law faculty.  The persecutors are the Dean of the Faculty of Law, Shahar Lifshitz, aided and abetted by the University Rector Miriam Faust.  Readers may recall that when, during the assault on Gaza, Prof. Sheinman expressed sympathy for all victims of the violence, a controversy ensued and more than two hundred academics signed a petition in his support.  Although the Dean purported to back down at that time, it's now clear he did nothing of the kind.  As now reported in Haaretz (behind a paywall, alas) and set out in Prof. Sheinman's lawyer's letter to Dean Lifshitz ( Download Letter to Dean Bar Ilan), in the last week of November, the Dean announced a new (and retroactive) "midway review process" for Prof. Sheinman, affording him one week to produce all the necessary materials to the Appointments Committee.  (The lawyer's letter sets out all the sorry details of this episode).

The continued harassment of Professor Sheinman by Bar-Ilan University is shocking and a disgrace.  I and others will continue to monitor the situation.  I hope it is not necessary to call for a general boycott of the university, but unless  the political persecution of Prof. Sheinman stops that seems the likely next step.

UPDATE:  Prof. Alon Harel (Hebrew U) writes:

To the best of my knowledge the procedure that Hanoch is going through is a standard new procedure that all untenured faculty members at Bar Ilan have to go through called mid-term evaluation. After three years Bar Ilan University evaluates files and also give feedback to untenured faculty as to their relative achievements vis a vis the standards required for tenure. BTW this has been a standard procedure at the Hebrew U for at least 20 years and I was surprised to learn that this is a new procedure at Bar Ilan. I was also told  that two other lecturers who have completed three years are going through this procedure. It was not invented for Hanoch and further the committee which does the evaluation has no power to fire him.

Given the conflicting accounts, we'll have to wait and see how the university responds to the letter from Prof. Sheinman's lawyer.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Several law faculty from Bar-Ilan dispute Prof. Sheinman's account and have asked me to share their statement:   Download Bar Ilan Faculty Response

AND ANOTHER:  Les Green (Oxford) replies to the preceding.

A blast from the past for the holidays

Politically correct and non-legally binding holiday wishes.

LA Review of Books on Frankfurt on inequality

Another useful and well-done review from the LARB, which, along with the Boston Review and the New Rambler, are my favorites these days.

A rejection letter that is a real sign of the times

A reader on the job market sends along a portion of a rejection letter he got (from a top department), with the notable parts capitalized (by the reader):

Thank you for applying for one of the tenure-stream positions that we advertised last fall. We regret that we will not be moving forward with your application at this time.   WE RECEIVED NEARLY SIX HUNDRED RESPONSES TO OUR ADVERTISEMENTS, INCLUDING A DISCONCERTINGLY LARGE NUMBER OF HIGHLY TALENTED AND ACCOMPLISHED APPLICANTS. ALTHOUGH we had listed these jobs as open, several factors led us to concentrate most of our search efforts on three main areas: Early Modern (before Kant), philosophy of language and certain branches of ethics that we particularly need. We had originally hoped to search within a wider array of fields but difficulties with the state legislature and the fact that several advantageous senior hiring opportunities emerged forced us to narrow our remaining attention largely to the core areas listed, which represent our greatest departmental needs (we hope that we will have a few more positions to offer in the years ahead). Please forgive the impersonal ch aracter of this note: the sheer number of applications and our SCHOOL'™S MANNER OF STORING APPLICANT FILES MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO INFORM YOU OF OUR DECISIONS SWIFTLY IN ANY OTHER FASHION.

Thank you for providing us with an opportunity to consider your credentials. WE LIVE IN A TIME OF SHORTSIGHTED EDUCATIONAL POLICIES THAT HAVE MADE OUR PROFESSIONAL POSSIBILITIES FAR MORE LIMITED THAN THEY WERE IN THE PAST.

Wisconsin Tenure Watch

As Wisconsin goes, so goes the rest of the nation, which is why everyone in academia should be watching.

Identity politics and "the perfection of capitalism"

More thoughts from Robert Paul Wolff.

On being Noam Chomsky's personal assistant

This is charming.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Brian Leiter edition

Many thanks to Clifford Sosis for his patience and diligence in putting this together.  It was a lot of fun to be indulged in recounting all these memories.

Vassar's Bryan Van Norden discusses Taoism...

...on Philosophy Talk with John Perry and Ken Taylor.

More blues: originals and covers

Reader Frank Saunders kindly sent along a great set of links to blues "originals" and "covers" (prompted by this).  I share a few here.

Blind Joe Reynolds plays the "Outside Woman Blues":

 

And so does Cream:

 

 

Texas AG says universities *must* allow guns in dorms

Just awful.  The AG's opinion is not binding, but it will give impetus to litigation by the gun nuts.  (See the attempt of UT Austin to formulate concrete rules for complying with the law.)

How the PGR helped one student decide a PhD in philosophy was not for him

A reader (who is "now in management consulting specializing in regulatory affairs...I get to read and interpret complex texts, talk about ethics with with my clients, and make decent money all at the same time") writes with "some thoughts on the PGR, grad school, and getting a job":

1. I came to philosophy late in undergrad and decided that I wanted to go to grad school. I used the PGR as a tool to help me find the departments to which I wanted to apply. I was rejected from almost all of the PhD programs, even with good grades and "famous" letter writers. But I was accepted into a fantastic "PGR mentioned" terminal MA program. I spent two years diving deeper into my areas of interest and gaining competency in other areas as well. The program was great and the people (both faculty and students) were dynamite; however, ultimately I decided not to continue on to the PhD. The PGR helped me make this decision. I was a solid philosopher, but I was never a disciplined student, and I bet my writing sample and letters of recommendation would have reflected that in my second round of PhD applications. I realized my chances of getting into a top PhD program, and with that my chances of getting a tenure-track job, were slim, so I finished my MA and exited the discipline.

And this was the best decision I ever made! I was able to pivot and quickly move into a new field. I now have a rewarding career which I love and regularly use the critical thinking and writing skills I developed as a philosopher in my work.

I mentioned above that the PGR helped me make this decision. What I mean by that is: The PGR is a valuable tool. It certainly wasn't the only tool I used, but it was the best. No other tool had the information laid out as neatly and comprehensively, with reliable and explicit rankings, and realistic advice. If used properly as a tool, and not as holy scripture (as some critics oddly think it was intended to be), then the PGR really is helpful.

My favorite on-line rendition of the "Ode to Joy"

10,000 people in the chorus!  This makes life worth living.

 

Robert Paul Wolff on the ideology of bourgeois academics like Jason Stanley, Audrey Yap, and other little Stanleys and Yaps

He doesn't mention anyone still alive by name (the essay is from the 1990s), but....

These reflections were prompted...by an incident in a seminar I was teaching on ideological critique. The participants were a group of extremely intelligent and widely read graduate students - all impeccably radical. Despite my heroic efforts to focus their attention on particular, concrete examples, such as the controversy that has developed among ethnographers of the northern Kalahari desert, the students persisted in speaking and writing in the most suffocatingly abstract and stereotypical fashion. Things finally blew up when one member of the class, making a class presentation, referred in passing to "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." The phrase rolled off his tongue as though the individual words were simply syllables of one great polysyllable - stuck together by some sort of syntactical glue. Everyone in the class was quite comfortable with the phrase. It seemed to me that they found it reassuring, rather in the way little children snuggle down in bed when they hear "Once upon a time." All except a rather abrasive German student who interrupted to protest that she, for one, had nothing against classism. Indeed, she said, she regularly judged people according to their economic class, and thought it quite the right way to go about things. The class came to a dead halt, and no one knew what to say. None of the students had ever heard anyone question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," used as a term of opprobrium. It was as though, in the middle of a class preparing little Catholic boys and girls for First Communion, a smart-mouthed trouble maker had piped up and said, "I can take the Father and the Son, but you can keep the Holy Ghost."

...I simply couldn't get the students to see how mind-numbingly banal, how drained of all genuine thought, that phrase had become. I could not even get them to attune their ears to the ugliness of it as language. Freud says somewhere, talking about the dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy, that if there is a single topic that it is not permitted to examine in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that topic. I have always found this a profound insight into what happens in the classroom as well. A classroom in which it is socially or pedagogically unacceptable to question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is a classroom in which neither real teaching nor real learning can take place. It is like a classroom at a Catholic university in which teachers are free to explore every conceivable subject - except the legitimacy of abortion. It is like the huge introduction to neo-classical economics at Harvard, presided over by former Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors Martin Feldstein, who announced, when he returned from his duties in Washington, that the purpose of the course was to teach that the market works - not how it works, mind you, but that it works.

There are a number of ways in which an orthodoxy can be imposed on a classroom. The most obvious, and hence the least dangerous, is by administrative fiat. Considerably more dangerous, because harder to spot and to confront, is the quiet, tacit social pressure that enshrines certain ways of thinking as correct, stigmatizing deviations as morally reprehensible and unworthy of serious consideration. I have come to think of this as macro-thinking. By one of the ironies of modern discourse, this pre-programming of thought masquerades as ideological critique, when in fact it is the precise opposite.

Robert Holub's book on Nietzsche and anti-semitism

I review it at the New Rambler.  The book gets some remarkable endorsements on the dustjacket from historians, though historians, I fear, who didn't know much about Nietzsche and didn't read the book too carefully.

NEH Grants to Philosophers for 2015

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY AFTERNOON (DEC. 18), JUST TO MAKE SURE IT DIDN'T GET MISSED IN THE MIDST OF THE BRUYAHAHA.

Philosophers winning NEH support include:  Hugh Benson (Oklahoma), Victor Caston (Michigan), Michael Cholbi (Cal State Polytechnic, Pomona), Samantha Matherne (UC Santa Cruz), Michael Rescorla (UC Santa Barbara), Kai Wehmeier (UC Irvine), and Joan Weiner (Indiana/Bloomington).  (Professor Matherne, I'm pleased to report, won support for work on her book on Cassirer for the Routledge Philosophers series.)  A good year for philosophers at the NEH!

(I'm opening comments in any case I missed any.)

The growth of the humanities over the last half-century

Philosopher Timothy O'Connor (Indiana) calls my attention to this interesting essay.  He writes:

It provides helpful perspective on trends in student ‘majors’ in higher ed in the US, UK, and Australia from the 1950s forward. Its major theme is the relative stability of the percentage of university students studying the humanities — and so, with the rise of mass ed, large increase in their absolute numbers — in each country. (The percentage in the UK is roughly double that of the US, with Australia in between.)  A caveat is that the range of fields of study has broadened considerably in the humanities, thereby impacting enrollments in core fields such as philosophy. 

Yet another reason Trump is going to lose Iowa (to Cruz is my prediction)

Here.  Meawhile Cruz and Christie are both rising in the New Hampshire polls, though I still expect Trump will win New Hampshire, but that may be the last one.

Thank goodness for Howlin' Wolf

"Evil"

 

 

And don't forget Cactus:

Uppsala's Kathinka Evers interviewed...

...at 3AM.

JHP Book Prize for 2014 awarded to Frederick Beiser (Syracuse)

Debra Nails (Michigan State), Book Review editor of JHP, writes:

This year's Journal of the History of Philosophy $5,000 prize for the best book in the history of philosophy published in 2014 goes to Frederick C. Beiser of Syracuse University, for his The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism 1796-1880 (Oxford University Press). 

The latest from David Wallace on the Bruya mess

Prof. Wallace has updated his critique here.   Section 6, which was added in the second version of his critique, also raises, as Wallace notes, an "academic malpractice" issue.  Wallace also offers a useful summary of his take on the issue in light of Bruya's purported response:

Bruyahaha Update #2: guess what, Bruya tries to respond to David Wallace

The form of his purported reply to Wallace will be familiar to readers of his last attempt to defend himself.  Wallace has already replied, in two parts, excerpted below:

1) It is deeply disturbing that Prof. Bruya doubles down on his relegation of his methodology to an appendix, and his appeal to a footnote as a justification. You just *cannot do this* in serious, quantitatve scholarship. You have to make it explicit, up-front, crystal clear, what your methodology is – *especially* when you are using categories acquired from your critical target and rearranging them. Prof. Bruya says that this is “perfectly reasonable to me”. It is not “perfectly reasonable” by the standards of any quantitative-science journal I have ever read. (I welcome counter-examples.) In the absence of such, I continue to think that Bruya’s coyness about this methodology (and his coyness about his methodology on evaluators’ institutions, which he has not yet addressed) is inappropriate as a matter of scholarship.

2) Prof. Bruya resorts to the very worrying methodology of saying that my criticisms are only valid insofar as they also apply to the PGR. (He goes as far as to italicise the points where he feels a double standard is applied.) *This is irrelevant.* Either the reasoning in his paper is valid, or it isn’t. You can’t defend shoddy science by pointing out that others’ science is also shoddy. It’s fine to impugn my motives and object that I only spend time on criticisms of the PGR. (The truth is that the PGR’s defenders don’t make clearly-false mathematical claims, but we can dispute that.) But the question of what I bother to spend my time criticising has nothing whatever to do with whether a given criticism is valid. Does Prof. Bruya think his arguments are valid, or not? If so, let him defend them. If not, it’s irrelevant whether other arguments are also invalid.

3) Prof. Bruya notes that I have not addressed all of the objections he raises. His criticism predates the extension of my criticism to cover his conflation of two categories of institutional association (addressed only in a graph x-axis and never in the text). I didn’t engage with the main additional point he raises (regression analysis of PGR-vs-all-subject-aggregate mark) because I lack the data. If Prof. Bruya is prepared to email me his data-set (david.wallace@balliol.ox.ac.uk) I’d be very happy to play with it, with the proviso that I have a baby turning up in the next few days!

...

On reflection I think I spoke too soon when I said that I couldn’t engage with Prof. Bruya’s regression analysis without the data. It also appears to have a severe methodological flaw, though I don’t think this is as serious a point as others I’ve raised.

Prof. Bruya calculates the difference, for each US institution, between (i) the PGR rank and (ii) the “Bruya rank”, i.e. the equally-weighted sum of all speciality marks. He then runs a linear regression analysis to determine the dependence of this difference on the equally-weighted sums of speciality ranking in four areas: History, Value, “M&E” (being Prof. Bruya’s combination of the PGR categories of M&E and Science) and Other.

The problem is that these are very strongly correlated variables: generally speaking, departments with high PGR ranks in one category have high PGR ranks in others, and running regression analyses on very strongly correlated variables has to be done with great care.

To illustrate: suppose I’m interested in whether certain things about US voters (let’s say, their salary) can be predicted by their voting patterns. If one of my regression variables is “usually votes Republican in Senate elections” and another is “usually votes Republican in House elections”, then it’s very difficult to determine the relative contributions of those two variables to a voter’s salary, since each of them is a very good predictor of the other.

You can work around this with a sufficiently large dataset, and there are statistical tests that can be done to ascertain whether a result is still significant even given a high correlation, but Prof. Bruya does not mention any such test.

Demand the resignation of the Democratic National Committee Chair...

...who has been doing everything possible to make sure that no one challenges Hillary Clinton.  For the first time in several decades we have a serious Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, who challenges the neoliberal, Reaganesque status quo that has ruled through both the Clinton and Obama Administrations.  By holding very few debates, and scheduling them on Saturday evenings no less, the DNC is trying to make sure that the preferred candidate of the Democratic Plutocrats gets the nomination.  It's an unbelievable display of contempt for democracy.  (Ironically, almost all the polls on head-to-head match-ups shows Sanders leading Trump, and by a wider margin than Clinton!)

Brian Bruya fiasco (i.e., "Bruyahaha") update #1

Philosopher David Wallace (Oxford) has officially joined the call for Metaphilosophy to retract Bruya's incompetent hatchet job on the PGR:  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8561203/bruya%20letter%20to%20editor.docx.  (Prof. Wallace correctly confines his attention to the methodological flaws, but, as I've noted before (see the addendum), the defamatory content will also require retraction and public apology.)

Meanwhile, a young philosopher in Canada writes:

Very minor comment/suggestion on the recent dustup over the PGR methodology. You’ve referred to it as “The Brian Bruya/Metaphilosophy Fiasco,” but wouldn’t a better name be “The Bruyahaha”? After all, one might aptly describe the entire affair - the article, his sanctimonious response to you - as something of a “brouhaha.” And, in this context, “haha” nicely reflects the appropriate reaction to everything he’s written on the topic.

If you like this, feel free to use it in perpetuity, though leave me anonymous, please - given how high-strung many philosophers on the internet are, it’s not worth it to me to poke this sort of fun in public.

ADDENDUM:  The writer Robert McGarvey, a longtime observer of the philosophy profession, writes:

I assume from your description this is an untenured philosopher in a Canadian school. It is sad that he/she won't put his name on a nice bit of wit. Probably it is also wise and that is sadder.  

 

What has happened to your profession when bland politeness has become the default survival position?​

Best journals for articles in ancient philosophy?

Reader David Greenwood (Aberdeen) wondered if I would run a poll about the best journals for work in ancient philosophy (here's an example of an earlier poll about journals publishing in history of philosophy).   I'm happy to run such a poll in the New Year, but I'd like to pin down the journals that should be included.   I take it the four major specialist journals are generally thought to be Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Phronesis, Apeiron, and Ancient Philosophy/.  But generalist history journals like Journal of the History of Philosophy also publish in ancient, as does, for example, Philosophical Review.  Should publications like Classical Quarterly be included?  What other philosophy-specific journals regularly publish important papers in ancient philosophy.  Comments are open for suggestions and comments.

Department of sick humor: Stalin edition

This is making the rounds on Facebook.  No comment.

Living up to its reputation, alas, Oberlin students set a new standard...

...for unreasonable, unethical, and illegal demands, including summary firings of tenured faculty, promotion without review of other faculty, and (best of all) a salary for Black student leaders making these demands!

(Link now fixed.)

Philosopher Nick Riggle (San Diego) on "style"

Here.

Jerry Dworkin breaks all records at the NY Times philosophy blog

His nicely done piece on lying the other day not only had 200,000 hits (that's a good two or three weeks for me!), but his clever poll had some 10,000 respondents, so many they had to shut it down!  Once Peter Capatano--the Times editor that all the philosophers I know praise for his editorial help--turns things over to Jerry, who knows what the future may hold, for the Times philosophy blog and for Jerry?  (Dear Peter, I know you read this blog, so please understand that everyone thinks you need to cut your pal Simon loose.  He's a congenial clown, but not a serious, or even quasi-serious, philosopher.  Seriously, ask around.)

Blog advertisting update

There was an explosion of purchases since the last update a few weeks ago.  As of now, the top spots on both sides are booked until May, when things open up again.  January is fully booked, though, as in the past, I will offer 4th from the top spots for $450 for those who have time-sensitive ads.  February still has one 3rd from the top spot, and March has a 2nd from the top spot, as well as a 3rd from the top.  E-mail me with questions.  Thanks.

What can we learn from the Brian Bruya/Metaphilosophy fiasco?

Now that David Wallace (Oxford) has destroyed the purportedly data-driven analysis in the Bruya critique of the PGR (and here), confirming with damning details the crux of my initial criticisms and adding several other important criticisms, what are the takeaways from this sorry episode? 

I begin by observing that anyone who actually read the first few pages of the Bruya paper would have immediately heard the sound of an axe grinding, a clear sign that one needed to examine carefully what's to come.  As Prof. Wallace's analysis has now established, whenever Bruya had a choice to make, he opted for massive inflation of the categories into which he put the data for analysis:  doubling the size of the "metaphysics & epistemology" category, for example, by arbitrarily incorporating all of the specialties in philosophy of the sciences, math and logic into that category; and treating institutional affiliation as meaning either the school at which the evaluator currently teaches or the school from which s/he received the PhD, thus massively inflating the institutional affiliation numbers for schools that have granted lots of PhDs over the past several decades.  In both cases, the fabrications were not acknowledged clearly in the text or even sensibly defended; the fabrications were buried in appendices and footnotes.  And in both cases, the fabrications biased the purportedly "data driven" analysis of bias, as Prof. Wallace has shown.  Between the fabrications, the mathematical mistakes (noted by Prof. Wallace) and the defamatory racism smear, it was fairly obvious that something was, shall we say, amiss.  But it's quite clear most of those enthusing about the paper on social media had not read it, and simply repeated its self-advertising as a "data-driven" critique, which we now know was a bit of false advertising. 

So here are a few lessons I think we can learn from all this: 

1.  Peer review isn't all that it's cracked up to be, at least at some journals.  Metaphilosophy is now on notice that something went very wrong, and the journal's reputation now hangs in the balance.  Between the defamation and the fabrications and the mathematical mistakes, someone wasn't really paying attention--or perhaps the referee (assuming there really was one, I don't know) shared the relevant bias so was only too happy to give the paper a pass, despite its incompetence.

2.  If philosophy is still a Wissenschaft, then it should be possible for philosophy papers to end up on Retraction Watch.  A purportedly interdisciplinary paper, in which misrepresentations and mathematical errors abound, is surely a rather good candidate.

Note to readers about the site-stealing ads popping up

A number of readers have reported that go.goadvs.com sometimes redirect readers from the blog to its ads.  If you go "back" on your browser you can usually clear it quickly.   I've notified Typepad, and we'll see what we can do to fix this in the next day or two.  My apologies for these interruptions, and thanks to the several readers who flagged it.  (It happened to me once too!) 

Also, I'm opening comments for readers with suggestions about how to stop this.

UPDATE:  Per advice from the Typepad "help" team, I've removed the remnants of the "Site Meter" widget, which stopped functioning properly ages ago anyway.  But they think it is the culprit.  We'll see.

More on the battle over tenure in the University of Wisconsin System

90% of faculty surveyed said they would leave if tenure were replaced with "renewable contracts."

The class system is alive and well at Oxbridge...

...as a new government report reveals.  Are they missing something?  Thoughts from readers?

Brian Bruya's attack on the PGR is even a bigger fraud than it first appeared to be

Philosopher David Wallace (Oxford) has expanded his analysis; I will just excerpt one of the new points he makes:

Without comment, [Bruya] excludes from the survey all features of the PGR concerning the world outside the USA. Since 87 of the PGR’s 303 evaluators had current affiliations at non-US institutions, this discards a non-trivial amount of data.

More significantly, Bruya speaks of evaluators being "from" a given school, or "hailing from" a school, or of "the school with" a given number of evaluators. At least to this reader, the clear impression is that what is meant is the current affiliation of the evaluator. In fact, apparently what is meant is that an evaluator is associated with a particular school either if they are currently affiliated at that school, or if their PhD was granted by that school. This fact is not stated anywhere in the main text, so far as I can see, but I was able to deduce it from the x-axis label in Figure 1 (p.663). It’s problematic that this isn’t clear and explicit in the text, and that vague terms like "from" are used in lieu.

In fact, the correlation between number of evaluators and PGR score is almost entirely due to evaluators’ PhD-granting institutions, and has almost nothing to do with their current affiliation.

Prof. Wallace then re-does the analysis showing how this additional fabrication by Bruya distorts his analysis.

Boston Review's "top 15" articles of 2015

Here, with links.  Some are ones we had occasion to note during the year, others look intriguing.

Bruya doesn't speak for scholars of Chinese philosophy

This should really go without saying, but no one should assume that Brian Bruya's incompetent hit piece on the PGR represents the views of all those (or even any of those) who work on Chinese philosophy (a field that I personally wish were better represented, since I have always found work in the area I've read by P.J. Ivanhoe, Bryan van Norden, and Stephen Angle, among many others, iilluminating).  In any case, a graduate student writes to helpfully make the point:

I study Chinese philosophy at the PhD level and I'll be honest: I'm a bit embarrassed by the Brian Bruya stir-up. As much as I would like to see Chinese philosophy more well-received and popular, I can't help but think his methods in this article are manifestly wrong. The rounds of Chinese philosophy grumbling after the publication of each report are nothing new, but that stuff should really stay in "comments" sections of websites, not take up space in respectable journals.

I'm a bit surprised that I'm claiming that Prof Bruya's critique is so misplaced, since he also published an article over the summer in the Chinese philosophy journal Dao that was diagnostic of the field as a whole and its reluctance to take Chinese philosophy seriously---something I thought was common knowledge among Chinese philosophy folk. That article didn't strike me quite as methodologically suspicious (I didn't read it very carefully though), but then again nor was it as polemical or manifestly wrong. 

Blaming the messenger and attacking the PGR I think does more harm then good with respect making Chinese philosophy more respectable, and since my livelihood depends upon that being the case, I felt the need to speak up. That Chinese philosophy is not "higher up on the list" is not the fault of the PGR, but the fault of the discipline as a whole and I would also say, to a certain extent, Chinese philosophy folk themselves. Of course it's an uphill battle to get programs to take world philosophy more seriously, so give them a reason to! As a person in the Chinese philosophy subfield, I can't help but think that Bruya's efforts would have been better spent giving mainstream philosophy a reason to take Chinese philosophy seriously rather than complaining that the discipline's assessors do not.

I would just like to make it clear that at least one Chinese philosophy representative finds the PGR helpful and diagnostic and condemns Bruya's confused critique.

ISNS call for papers extended to January 15, 2016 [Moving to front: UPDATED]

In the last ten days or so, we've had four philosophers ask for more time for submissions, while some members of the Executive Committee turn out to be unavailable to referee submission until after the holidays (grading, holiday travel etc.)  So the deadline for the first ISNS conference is extended to January 15, 2016.   And Mattia Riccardi (Bonn) has confirmed that we will be able to pay for travel and lodging for accepted papers from those who do not have tenure-stream faculty positions (faculty or students).

ADDENDUM:  The Executive Committee also wishes to advise those who submitted before the December 15 deadline that they may revise and resubmit the paper until January 15; refereeing of papers will take place thereafter.