Saturday, February 28, 2009 |
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Professor Reports Student to Police for Defending Concealed Carry |
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By Paul Hsieh @ 10:01 AM   
At Central Connecticut State University, student John Wahlberg was reported to the police by his professor Paula Anderson, after he gave a presentation in class on campus violence in which he defended concealed carry.
After Wahlberg raised the point that allowing students with concealed weapons permits to carry on campus might have saved lives in incidents such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, Professor Anderson filed a complaint with the campus police against Wahlberg stating that his presentation was making students feel "scared and uncomfortable".
The police questioned Wahlberg about his own firearms and where he kept them:"I was a bit nervous when I walked into the police station," Wahlberg said, "but I felt a general sense of disbelief once the officer actually began to list the firearms registered in my name. I was never worried however, because as a law-abiding gun owner, I have a thorough understanding of state gun laws as well as unwavering safety practices." I guess Professor Anderson doesn't think that academic freedom extends to students arguing to exercise certain constitutionally-protected rights.
As another student noted:"If you can't talk about the Second Amendment, what happened to the First Amendment?" asked Sara Adler, president of the Riflery and Marksmanship club on campus. "After all, a university campus is a place for the free and open exchange of ideas." Update: As others have noted here and elsewhere (e.g., Volokh and Instapundit), we may not have the full story. So appropriate caution is warranted before leaping to hasty conclusions.Labels: Academia, Guns
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Thursday, February 26, 2009 |
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Philosophical Gourmet Report |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 12:21 PM
The Philosophical Gourmet Report was just updated for 2009. It's the ranking of graduate programs in philosophy. I'm delighted to see that University of Colorado at Boulder has risen to #26.
Toward the end of my coursework in 2004/2005, our department was in shambles. About half the faculty had left for greener pastures, and even the chairman was on his way to Oxford. The remaining faculty was worried. We graduate students were in something of a panic. If the department tanked, we faced an unpleasant choice of (1) completing the much-disvalued Ph.D at Boulder, then facing less-than-stellar job prospects or (2) starting over (or nearly so) at a different Ph.D program. Almost all of us decided to stay, based on some reasonable assurances that the department would be rebuilt.
From what I understand, the primary difficulty with rebuilding the department was foot-dragging from the administration. The university uses the salaries of vacant faculty positions for other programs, so they wanted to keep our hiring to a snail's pace.
Happily, Bob Pasnau took over as chair. By working some kind of medieval magic on the university administration, plus making some very clever hires, he managed to build our department back up to nearly full strength. Then -- two years ago, I think -- David Boonin took over as chair. He continued to build the department, with excellent results. We're now quite full, as far as I understand.
Overall, the department is better than it was in 2002 when I entered -- not just in terms of its rank, but also in its overall atmosphere.
Hooray!
Note: If you wish to say something unpleasant about my department -- and thereby disrespect me and make an ass of yourself -- you are most emphatically not welcome to do so in these comments.Labels: Academia
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Friday, December 05, 2008 |
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Stop Drinking Responsibly, Adults! You Might Corrupt the Binge-Drinking Children! |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 2:49 PM
Wow, this story is undoubtedly the worst kind of false-alarmist local television news:
Despite years of fighting their "party school" reputation, the University of Colorado hosts regular drinking events for staff, students and visitors, a CALL7 hidden-camera investigation found.
Over several days, CALL7 investigators visited the Boulder campus, finding drinking events that appear to have little to do with enhancing either research or education at CU. [Scary, bad, scary... the story continues...]
Here's what the story is actually talking about: After departmental colloquia and other scholarly events, alcoholic beverages are sometimes served to and consumed by the faculty, graduate students, and visitors in moderation to facilitate friendly conversation. In other words, the legal grown-ups in an academic department awkwardly chat over a glass of bad wine in a plastic cup after a somewhat boring lecture. Notably, such alcohol cannot be purchased with state funds; it can only be purchased with money from donors who must sign a form saying that they understand that the money might be used to purchase alcohol.
According to 7News reporters, Arthur Kane and Tony Kovaleski, such events are "parties" of the same sort that make CU Boulder known as a "party school." Somehow, departments are setting a bad example for the many CU Boulder undergraduates who regularly drink themselves into a blackout, rub genitals to persons unknown to them, and fall asleep in their own vomit.
In other words, responsible drinking by legal adults is a serious problem at CU Boulder that must be stamped out immediately, lest underage binge drinkers get the wrong idea.
Um, okay.Labels: Academia, WTF
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Monday, October 20, 2008 |
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Getting Rand Wrong |
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By Brandon Byrd @ 12:01 AM
As someone who takes ideas seriously, I've always found it frustrating when philosophers take it upon themselves to offer judgments on subjects they haven't bothered to devote serious time and attention to studying. The charge that philosophers (academic or otherwise) sometimes judge where the epistemically virtuous would fear to comment isn't new. (For instance, it isn't rare to hear someone claim that speculation from the philosophical armchair is a poor method of settling some contentious issue.) What makes this phenomenon -- the venturing of unwarranted opinions -- especially pernicious in the case of philosophers is that philosophers are supposed to be the guardians of rationality, revering the mind by sacrificing hasty conclusions at the altar of the well-formed argument. Philosophers are supposed to love wisdom and shun mere belief; when they make assertions that betray culpable ignorance, they sin against their profession as well as the truth.
I don't know what it is about Ayn Rand that makes many philosophers think they can get away with saying whatever they damn well please about her without having studied her work carefully and honestly. I suspect that the real explanation has less to do with Rand and more to do with personal biases on the part of her critics. But whatever the cause, the phenomenon is nevertheless real. It isn't just that many philosophers dislike Rand. We philosophers are an opinionated bunch; we dislike all sorts of things. Rather it's that many philosophers will attribute all sorts of nonsense to Rand without actually considering what she has to say.
To offer an example, below is a passage from Rosalind Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics. This work, published relatively recently by Oxford University Press, is intended to be used as a textbook on, unsurprisingly, virtue ethics.
"We can interpret Thrasymachus, and more obviously Nietzsche and Rand, as saying that, rather like hive bees, human beings fall, by nature, into two distinct groups, the weak and the strong (or the especially clever or talented or 'chosen by destiny'), whose members must be evaluated differently, as worker bees and the drones or queens are." Um... what? Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Rand's ideas will realize that she believes no such thing. Rand's philosophical anthropology -- her theory of human nature -- does not recognize a distinction between types of human beings. Her ethical theory evaluates individuals on the basis of their choices, not their unchosen attributes, and she appeals to a univocal standard of moral evaluation -- not to distinct standards for distinct types.
Hursthouse does not provide any sources that might justify her 'obvious' interpretation of Rand's philosophy. But this totally wrongheaded interpretation of Rand was good enough for her editors and peer reviewers at OUP (as well as the numerous philosophers who gave her editorial comments on the final manuscript). Apparently that group of distinguished professors found nothing objectionable in Hursthouse's characterization of Rand. Of course, realizing Hursthouse's error would have required reading Rand.
(On a grimly ironic note, the above passage comes from chapter 11 of On Virtue Ethics. The chapter title? "Objectivity.")
Hursthouse isn't the only person who presents Rand's views incorrectly in a way that betrays ignorance. Chandran Kukathas's entry on Rand in the otherwise excellent Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is another example. No, Kukathas... Rand didn't think that integrity was "at the root of the idea of freedom," her "real concerns" were not "the defence of the value of integrity (to the point of self-sacrifice) in the face of evil and moral despair," and The Virtue of Selfishness was not a novel.
So far, we've seen a philosopher attribute views to Rand that she 'obviously' didn't hold, and we've seen another philosopher misunderstand the fundamentals of Rand's politics and misconstrue her central concerns. But Gerald Dworkin, a professor of philosophy at UC Davis, has recently exemplified yet another way of getting Rand wrong: saying that her ideas lead to catastrophe.
The forum in which Dworkin makes this charge is Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog -- a blog featuring "news and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture... and a bit of poetry." The blog is run by Brian Leiter, currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values. Leiter is also the editor of The Philosophical Gourmet, which ranks the top philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. I read Leiter Reports semi-regularly, as it is a good source of professional news related to academic philosophy (faculty hires, moves, deaths, retirements and whatnot). In addition to this valuable material, the blog also features occasional leftist cultural commentary of more dubious value. Of extremely dubious value is Dworkin's post "Blame it on Ayn Rand" in which he claims Rand is a cause of our economic troubles. Dworkin doesn't really provide much of an argument for this claim, so I'll attempt to provide him with a charitable reconstruction (a courtesy I'm not so sure he deserves... but for the sake of argument...).
Dworkin quotes a recent New York Times article on Greenspan's involvement in the current financial crisis. (That article seems to get Rand wrong too; Rand didn't have "a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly" but that's beside the point.) The article implies that Greenspan's positions on regulation -- specifically the regulation of derivatives markets -- were causally relevant factors in producing the recent financial crisis. Why did Greenspan hold his positions on regulation? Here, Dworkin invokes Keynes:
"...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." (I can't resist noting that Rand held a similar view to Keynes about the importance of philosophy in history, though her insight was deeper than Keynes. Rather than viewing history as being primarily driven by political philosophy, Rand viewed metaphysics and epistemology as being much more influential. For more on Rand's insights here, consult the title essay of For the New Intellectual, as well as the title essay of Philosophy: Who Needs It. Peikoff develops Rand's insights on the philosophical motor of history in Ominous Parallels, the epilogue to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and in his forthcoming book on how epistemology shapes society.)
Greenspan was a student of Rand, and Rand argued for the principled separation of the state and economics, and thus for an absence of government interference in voluntary economic exchanges. She was a categorical opponent of governmental regulation in financial markets. Greenspan opposed regulation of derivatives markets. The current financial crisis was supposedly brought on by an absence of regulation in these markets. Thus Dworkin claims that Rand is "an important cause of the catastrophe we are in."
Let us examine this argument.
This argument gets its force from the claim that Greenspan was practicing what Rand preached. In an update to Dworkin's post, Leiter snarkily remarks that "Greenspan was not only a friend of Rand's, but a lifelong devotee of her ideas and her 'philosophy,' such as it is." While it is true that Rand and Greenspan were friendly toward one another, it is demonstrably false that Greenspan was "a lifelong devotee of her ideas." It doesn't take a hell of a lot of legwork to discover this; thanks to Google, I didn't even have to leave my armchair.
In The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan's recent autobiography, Greenspan discusses the important formative influence Rand had on his intellectual development. In his discussion, he talks about how Rand encouraged him to look beyond mere economic data and more deeply into the values and ideas that move history and influence human action (including economic action). She was credited with broadening his perspective on the world and helping him reject logical positivism. He even describes himself as "writing spirited commentary for [Rand's] newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte...". But this enthusiasm was not to last; Greenspan's autobiography claims that Rand's philosophy has inherent contradictions, and that his "fervor receded."
So Greenspan isn't an Objectivist. His policies, as we shall see, reflect this fact.
We're in the midst of a recession, teetering (some might say) on the precipice of a depression. What were Rand's views about recessions and depressions? Well, Dworkin doesn't say. His blog post doesn't even bother to discuss which of Rand's ideas were supposed to get us into this mess. He doesn't explicitly discuss her ideas at all. If one consults Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal to discover her views on the causes of recessions and depressions, one is directed to the works of Ludwig von Mises. It is important (for getting Rand right) to recognize that while Rand found Mises's economic analyses convincing, she had substantial philosophical and methodological disagreements with him. Mises was a Kantian who viewed economics as a primarily deductive enterprise (and thus was inclined toward epistemological rationalism). He also attempted to do economics in an ethical vacuum, divorcing economic analysis from any underlying normative framework. Rand, of course, rejected Kantianism, rationalism, and a strict division between morality and economics. But despite his errors, Rand thought that Mises's economic theories represented a significant achievement.
At this point, I don't want to provide a lengthy, detailed summary of Mises's views on the business cycle. I may write something in the near future about the causes of our current economic woes, but I'll hold off for now. The following short summary should provide a general indication of the economic views Rand found most convincing.
The most salient aspect of the Austrian theory of the business cycle is that implicates central banks as the fundamental cause of depressions and recessions. Ah! The plot thickens! Wasn't Greenspan the head of our central bank? He was indeed. How do central banks cause recessions?
In a free market, the interest rate (the price of money) is determined by the law of supply and demand. Roughly, the supply of loanable funds that banks have (our savings) determines the interest rate, when taken in conjunction with the overall demand for money and the riskiness of potential debtors. Central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, distort this market mechanism by setting artificially low interest rates (interest rates below the market rate). What happens next? I defer to Wikipedia:
Low interest rates tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking system. This expansion of credit causes an expansion of the supply of money, through the money creation process in a fractional reserve banking system. This in turn leads to an unsustainable "monetary boom" during which the "artificially stimulated" borrowing seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. This boom results in widespread malinvestments, causing capital resources to be misallocated into areas which would not attract investment if the money supply remained stable. A correction or "credit crunch" -- commonly called a "recession" or "bust" -- occurs when credit creation cannot be sustained. Loose monetary policy by central banks leads to people taking on more debt than they otherwise would. Artificially low interest rates allow more credit to be extended to risky borrowers. In our current case this lead to skyrocketing real estate values, since there was an increased demand for houses (made possible by banks extending credit to more and riskier debtors). This effect is obvious enough in the case of commercial banks, which more than doubled the amount of real estate loans they made (thus allocating large amounts of resources into the real estate market -- allocations that wouldn't have occurred in a free market for money and credit.
And then there's the welfare state. Don't let's forget about Fannie and Freddy. The former is a holdover from the New Deal; the latter is a "government sponsored enterprise" created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1976, and designed to increase home ownership. Both of which did their part to screw us all by spurring on the housing bubble... and they were able to borrow money at a (de facto, if not de jure) subsidized rate in the marketplace because the public viewed them as being low risk (since the state would presumably bail them out, should the need arise).
All of a sudden, everyone's in debt and no one wants to lend. Small wonder. Small wonder that risky investors are defaulting on their mortgage payments. Small wonder that the derivatives markets are screwing up (I'd argue that we can only make sense of the kerfuffle in the derivatives market in light of monetary policy). Small wonders that major financial institutions are losing their credit rating because they took on too many risky debtors.
We frequently hear that that the market got drunk. What was it drunk on? Cheap credit. Who was the man behind the bar? You can probably guess.
In May of 2000, the Fed Funds rate was 6.5%. By June of 2003, Greenspan had slashed it to 1%, and it stayed there for more than a year (and remained ridiculously low for much longer). Would Rand have found this type of monetary policy commendable (or even tolerable)? Of course not. She'd read her Mises. Moreover, she regarded central banking as morally repugnant and politically unnecessary.
There's much more to be said about our current credit crunch and how to evaluate it in light of Rand's moral and political philosophy. But it should now be evident that Dworkin (and Leiter) are wrong on all counts. They were wrong about Greenspan; they were wrong about Rand. Their errors on these subjects betray a culpable ignorance. One needn't do much research to figure out Greenspan's real views on Rand, or Rand's views on economics. Twenty minutes with Google and Wikipedia would probably have gotten the job done. If a philosopher is going to assert, in a public forum, that another philosopher's ideas lead to disaster, then they have an obligation to carefully consider that thinker's ideas, to understand them, and to show how (in practice) they would result in catastrophe. When a philosopher fails to do that, they do a disservice not only to the thinker they criticize, but also to the truth, to their profession, and to themselves.
Academic philosophers often get Rand wrong. They often have only themselves to blame.Labels: Academia, Economics, Ethics, Finance, Objectivism, Politics
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Friday, June 20, 2008 |
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Software Recommendation: EndNote |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 1:27 AM
Sometime early in graduate school, Paul recommended that I buy EndNote, a program for managing citations in writing. Since I've found it an invaluable time-saver, particularly for large projects like my prospectus and dissertation, I'm passing on the recommendation to other academics and writers.
The program allows you to maintain a database of citations, easily insert them into your papers, and then format them in whatever format you want, e.g. Chicago 15th A. In addition to standard formats, you can customize existing formats or create your own. It handles parenthetical citations, footnotes/endnotes, and bibliographies. In addition, it allows you to make notes on sources, include keywords and abstracts, etc. So for my dissertation, EndNote has served as a master database of sources. So I know that I've skimmed, read, and/or taken notes on a source; I know what sources I need to review or read as I write each chapter; I know whether a source will likely be helpful. For me, EndNote is software that I cannot write without.
The program is available for Mac and Windows. EndNote "X1" is a bit pricey: $110 for students and $220 for non-student educators from the Academic Superstore. However, I've found that it's well-worth the price. With every paper I write, the program has saved me enormous amounts of time in preparing citations and bibliographies.Labels: Academia, Recommendations
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Friday, May 23, 2008 |
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Swallow My Postmodernist Propaganda Whole -- Or Else! |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 12:19 AM
This story of a Dartmoth English professor threatening to sue her students for challenging her postmodernist views is beyond mind-bloggling. I can't help but quote the whole article, as the insanity just never ends:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expos&e, which she promises will "name names."
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.
Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.
After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.
Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.
Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.
That said, even at -- or especially at -- putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.
I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.
Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.
The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet. That's absolutely abominable behavior for a professor. It's good that students question what they're taught in college, rather than simply swallowing it, regurgitating it for the exams and papers, and then forgetting about it. Students have every right to be skeptical of some pet theory of a professor -- and to express objections to it in class. The professor should make the best arguments he can, then move on, accepting that students will make up their own minds about the material. Certainly, despite my strong views on various subjects, that's always what I strive to do in my own teaching.
In contrast, Priya Venkatesan thinks that she's entitled to agreement from her students. As an interview with her makes clear, she's so completely immersed in postmodernism that she cannot even grasp the meaning of any criticism thereof. Sadly, from what I know of English Departments, she was likely encouraged in that attitude -- and shielded from any non-postmodernist views or anti-postmodernist criticism -- in graduate school.
Thankfully, this kind of intellectual authoritarianism is pretty rare in philosophy departments today. Philosophers are generally willing to entertain a wide variety of views, so long as they're defended with arguments. In fact, at least some of the philosophy professors at Boulder are pretty thoroughly appalled by the dogmatic teaching of postmodernist crap in some other humanities departments.
(Notably, Christiana Hoff Sommers said as much about philosophy departments in a lecture on the problem of lefist bias at universities given at CU Boulder a few years ago. In fact, if memory serves, I asked her about philosophy departments, and she made some positive remarks on their willingness to consider a wide variety of views due to their focus on arguments.)
Of course, philosophy departments have their own slew of problems, some quite serious. Yet they also have many virtues, particularly relative to other humanities departments. So... two cheers for philosophy departments!Labels: Academia
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 |
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Conceptual Art on Global Warming |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 7:21 AM
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
TO: All CU-Boulder Students
FROM: Center for Energy & Environmental Security, University of Colorado Law School
SENDER: dorank@colorado.edu
DATE: 10/22/07
SUBJECT: Famous Artist Lectures on Climate Change
What: The Art of Climate Change
Where: Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law
When: Oct. 25, 7:00 - 8:15 p.m., Free Event
Dear CU-Boulder Students:
Climate change is arguably the defining environmental and social issue of the 21st century. You are invited to attend a special lecture by Ms. Lucy Lippard on the use of art to impact climate change. Ms. Lippard is an internationally renowned writer, activist, curator, and acclaimed art critic.
This is not a lecture about the science of climate change; nor is it a lecture about laws and policies dealing with climate change.
Rather, this distinguished lecture is about the use of conceptual art to illuminate our understanding of the environmental, social and political dimensions of climate change; and perhaps more importantly, the ability of art to substantially influence our response to the challenges posed by climate change.
Ms. Lippard's lecture, entitled "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change," will present imaginative and inspiring collaborations between acclaimed artists and world-class scientists designed to address, in a variety of ways, the issue of climate change. In a New York Times article published on Sept. 23, 2007, Ms. Lippard commented on these collaborations: "The critics used to say that conceptual art brings in too much other stuff, too many ideas. I love the idea that art can become something that acts in the world."
Please join us in welcoming and learning from our distinguished guest, Ms. Lucy Lippard.
For more information on this event, please visit: http://www.colorado.edu/law/eesi/Weather_Report.htm. Oh, how I do love the auto-parody!Labels: Academia
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007 |
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Ward Churchill, Begone! |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 8:33 AM
Thank goodness:
TO: CU-Boulder Students
FROM: Office of the President
SENDER: officeofthepresident@cu.edu
DATE: 07/24/07
SUBJECT: Communication from President Hank Brown on the Board of Regents Vote
Dear Students of the University of Colorado,
The Board of Regents today voted to accept my recommendation to dismiss Professor Ward Churchill from the faculty.
I made the recommendation for the good of the university. CU's success depends upon its reputation for academic integrity. A public research university such as ours requires public faith that each faculty member's professional activities and search for truth are conducted according to the high standards on which CU's reputation rests.
We are accountable to those who have a stake in the university: the people of Colorado who contribute $200 million annually in tax dollars, the federal entities that provide some $640 million annually in research funding, the donors who gave us more than $130 million this year to enhance academic quality, the alumni who want to maintain the value of their degrees, the faculty and staff who expect their colleagues to act with integrity, and the students who trust that faculty who teach them meet the high professional standards of the university and the profession.
Given the record of the case and findings of Professor Churchill's faculty peers, I determined that allowing him to remain on the faculty would cast a shadow on our reputation for academic integrity.
Throughout the case, we have adhered to shared governance procedures as determined by the CU Faculty Senate Constitution and Bylaws and adopted by the Board of Regents. During the course of two-plus years, Professor Churchill presented his position in writing, in person, with his attorney and with witnesses of his choosing. He was afforded full due process.
More than 20 tenured faculty members (from CU and other universities) on three separate panels conducted a thorough review of his work and found that the evidence shows Professor Churchill engaged in research misconduct, and that it required serious sanction. The record of the case shows a pattern of serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct that falls below the minimum standard of professional integrity, including fabrication, falsification, improper citation and plagiarism. No university can abide such serious academic misconduct.
Professor Churchill fabricated historical events and sought to support his fabrications by manufacturing articles under other names. His publications show more than just sloppy citations or using the work of others without crediting them. The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct found multiple instances of falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. Any student engaging in such a wide range of academic misconduct would be seriously sanctioned. We should hold our faculty to a high standard of professionalism
While Professor Churchill's peers on the faculty panels were unanimous in finding research misconduct, views on the appropriate sanction varied. Some faculty recommended dismissal while others suggested a less severe penalty. My obligation as president is to recommend to the Board of Regents an appropriate sanction that is for the good of the university.
Some on the Boulder campus and beyond claim Professor Churchill was singled out because of public condemnation of his writing about September 11, 2001. They see this case as a referendum on academic freedom. The university determined early in the process that his speech was not at issue, but that his research was. The prohibition against research misconduct extends to all faculty, regardless of their political views. We cannot abandon our professional standards and exempt faculty members from being accountable for the integrity of their research simply because their views are controversial.
Professor Churchill's activities not only run counter to the essence of academic freedom, but also threaten its foundation. Academic freedom is intended to protect the exploration and teaching of unpopular, even controversial ideas. But that pursuit must be accompanied by the standards of the profession. Academic freedom does not protect research misconduct. After his research misconduct was identified, Professor Churchill did not admit any errors or come forward to correct the record, as is expected in the profession.
CU's most important asset is its academic reputation. Professor Churchill's actions reflect poorly on the University of Colorado, but we will not let the research misconduct of one individual tarnish our reputation. Our faculty members take pride in their work and demonstrate their respect for the high standards of their profession and this university day in and day out. Professor Churchill's research misconduct is an affront to those who conduct themselves with integrity.
We will remain accountable to those who have high expectations of Colorado's flagship university. And our faculty will remain true to high professional standards to ensure our reputation for academic integrity remains intact.
Sincerely,
Hank Brown
President I think I'd like to throw a party!Labels: Academia
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Monday, July 23, 2007 |
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OAcademics |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 1:06 PM
Now that OCON is past, I'm posting one final announcement about my new OAcademics list before opening it for business tomorrow:
The OAcademics mailing list is a private forum for Objectivist academics to discuss teaching, research, coursework, dissertations, job prospects, publication, and all other aspects of life in (or after) academia. The list is basically a means of sharing knowledge and experience as ever more Objectivists enter academia.
The list isn't limited to philosophers. All Objectivists in academia, whether professors or graduate students, are welcome. Future academics, i.e. those in the process of applying to graduate school, may also join.
No subscriber is obliged to participate in list discussions. However, I do make two requests:
(1) That subscribers post the syllabi from the courses they teach (including the list of readings) at the beginning of every semester so that others may consult them in the process of their own course development.
(2) That subscribers post any significant announcements about their work, e.g. the successful defense of a dissertation, an article accepted for publication, a fabulous new teaching job, leaving academia to hunt bears in Alaska.
These are strong recommendations but not ironclad obligations.
The list is not moderated. Posts should be polite, friendly, and reasonably relevant to life in academia.
Messages will be archived, but those archives will be available only to other list members. List members should not forward list messages to anyone else or post them to any other forum without permission from the author(s).
If you have any questions, please e-mail Diana Hsieh, the list's owner and administrator, at diana@dianahsieh.com. To subscribe, enter the relevant information on the web interface. Also, please feel free to forward this post (or a link thereto) to anyone you think might be interested in joining the list.Labels: Academia, Objectivism
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Friday, July 13, 2007 |
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On Ashland University |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 8:22 AM
Ashland University's insanely unjust treatment of John Lewis was recently detailed in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Tenure Shrugged. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has posted some further details (correcting some small inaccuracies in the CHE article, as far as I understand) here: Ashland University: No Objectivists Need Apply.
Notice that the source of Dr. Lewis's troubles were (1) neocons and (2) evangelical Christians. From what I understand, the run-of-the-mill liberal faculty were rightly shocked and outraged by his treatment by Ashland.
Also, I might as well mention that I was quoted in the Chronicle's introduction to its three articles on Objectivism in academia:
The articles in this special Chronicle report are about a different group of scholars: those who believe that Rand created a true and complete philosophical model, which must be widely spread or else civilization will perish. These scholars believe that the road to cultural renewal runs through the philosophy department: If the public adopts the correct metaphysical and epistemological beliefs, then peace, justice, and prosperity will naturally follow. (In this respect, the famously anti-religious Randians are oddly similar to Catholic philosophers in the Thomist tradition.)
"The serious study of Ayn Rand's work -- in and out of academia -- is only in its nascent stages," wrote Diana Mertz Hsieh, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, on her blog in 2005. "If stillborn, our culture is doomed. ... It's not just some academic game: It's literally life and death." In case you're wondering, I've not blogged because I've been at OCON in lovely Telluride. I've enjoyed myself well enough, although I'm eager to return to real work on my dissertation and to preparation for my fall "Intro Phil" class. I probably won't return to regular blogging for another week.Labels: Academia, History, Religion
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Monday, June 18, 2007 |
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New List: OAcademics |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 9:32 AM
Along the same lines as my OBloggers mailing list, I've created a list for Objectivist in academia: OAcademics:
The OAcademics mailing list is a private forum for Objectivist academics to discuss teaching, research, coursework, dissertations, job prospects, publication, and all other aspects of life in (or after) academia. The list is basically a means of sharing knowledge and experience as ever more Objectivists enter academia.
The list isn't limited to philosophers: all Objectivists in academia, whether professors or graduate students, are welcome. (Those in the process of applying to graduate school are also welcome to subscribe.) If you're not an Objectivist in academia, please do not subscribe.
No subscriber is obliged to participate in list discussions. However, I do make two requests of subscribers:
(1) That you post the syllabi from the courses you teach (including the list of readings) at the beginning of every semester so that others may consult them in the process of their own course development.
(2) That you post any significant announcements about your work, e.g. the successful defense of your dissertation, an article accepted for publication, a fabulous new teaching job, or leaving academia to hunt bears in Alaska.
The list is not moderated. Please make sure that your posts are polite, friendly, and on-topic.
Messages will be archived, but those archives will only be available to other list members. Please do not forward list messages to anyone else or post them to any other forum without permission from the author.
If you have any questions, please e-mail Diana Hsieh at diana@dianahsieh.com. Objectivists in academia are welcome to subscribe themselves to the list. I'll also be contacting people privately, but since I don't have e-mail addresses for all the Objectivists in academia I know, please feel free to spread the word.
FYI: If some responsible person wants to manage an "OLawyers" or "ODoctors" or "OWhatevers" list, I might be willing to host that. Just drop me an e-mail. It's not that I want Objectivists to talk to each other in some cloister -- quite the contrary, in fact. The point is to foster success in the real world by sharing advice, experience, and expertise.Labels: Academia, Objectivism
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Thursday, May 03, 2007 |
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Progress |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 7:45 PM
I'm beyond delighted to report that I've made significant progress on my Ph.D over the past year -- after suffering from far too much hideously painful demotivation, disorganization, and overwhelmedness for the prior two years. In essence, I've completed all the work that I need to do to advance to candidacy. So provided that the two papers awaiting grading from faculty pass muster, I should be declared an official "Ph.D candidate" in the fall. I'll be writing my dissertation prospectus this summer. Then my goal is to write my dissertation at breakneck speed so that I can graduate in May 2009.
Mostly, I have Debi Ghate to thank for that miracle. I couldn't have done it without her help; I was floundering too badly. As my OAC graduate mentor, she acted as an excellent manager by helping me focus on priorities, set deadlines, evaluate my progress, and the like. Most helpful were the "Weekly Reports" that I began writing her about two months ago. On Sunday night, I'd write her a brief e-mail of detailing what I'd done that week and what I planned to do the next week. That was enormously helpful, as I had to be totally explicit and objective in reporting to her. (She'd often write back with helpful questions, suggestions, and plain old encouragement.) For the other graduate students without perfect skills of organization, monitoring, and self-motivation, I'd strongly recommend writing such reports to someone who will gently hold your feet to the fire. (You can't have Debi though! She's mine!)
So over this past academic year, I managed to write and complete my "Fifth Semester Qualifying Paper," as well as three papers for incomplete classes. I helped organize and promote the new "Think!" lecture series for the Philosophy Department, with good success for the four lectures and particularly the two debates. I taught my own courses for the first time: three introductory ethics courses of about 30 students each.
I also wrote a review of Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist for The Objective Standard. I took Eric Daniels' excellent year-long History of Capitalism course. I've also contributed a bit to FIRM's fight against the imposition of socialized medicine in Colorado.
And... I've stayed in excellent shape. I've learned to play bridge. I've taken my dog Abby to regular acupuncture appointments to help slow down the progress of her degenerative myelopathy. I wrote a long essay on the election of which I'm still very proud. I've blogged regularly. I've listened to the whole Bible, as well as tons of other fiction, philosophy, history, and more. I endured eight straight weeks of winter snow. I've been a reasonably well-behaved wife. I've not gone totally nuts.
So I'm pretty damn proud of myself.
My semester isn't entirely finished though. My students still have their final exam to take, so I'll have that plus revised papers to grade next week. (That's a piece of cake though!) After that, Paul and I will take our traditional "enjoy life by physically working yourself to near death in some fantastically beautiful location" May vacation. This time, we'll be mountain biking around the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
That'll be a really, really well-deserved vacation for me!Labels: Academia
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Thursday, April 12, 2007 |
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Teaching Next Semester |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 8:08 PM
Much to my delight, on Tuesday I found out that I'll be teaching just one section of "Introduction to Philosophy" in the fall. It'll be from 12:30 to 1:45 pm with 25 or so students.
I've not taught that course before, so I'm definitely looking forward to constructing it. As with the three sections of Ethics that I've taught over the past year, it's wholly my own class. So once again, I'll probably create my own course packet. (I'm a GTPI -- a Graduate Part-Time Instructor -- no longer in the special limbo of teaching purgatory reserved for TAs.)
Happily, it's precisely the course that I wanted to teach. (My other alternative was to teach applied ethics (i.e. "Philosophy and Society"), but I'm pretty sick of teaching ethics. Even better, the class in the middle of the day, not at 8:00 am! I've taught at that abominably early hour both semesters this past year, meaning that I must drag myself out of bed to commute the hour to Boulder at 5 am. That's damn unnatural behavior for me. I swore that I'd teach German Phenomenology, a subject about which I know absolutely nothing, before teaching at 8 am again.
And best of all, until just recently, I thought GTPIs taught a four course load each year of 25 - 35 students each class. So I thought I only taught a single section last semester because it was my first semester teaching. However, as it turns out, we only have a three course load each year, so I'll always have one semester of teaching just one course. That's delightful news!
As an aside, we're supposed to get about a foot of snow over the next 24 hours. Seriously.Labels: Academia
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Saturday, March 24, 2007 |
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Teaching Evaluations for Socrates |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 6:13 AM
If Socrates Had to Undergo Teaching Evaluations by His Students:
"He always keeps talking about these figures in a cave, like they really have anything to do with the real world. Give me a break! I spend serious money for my education and I need something I can use in the real world, not some b.s. about shadows and imaginary trolls who live in caves."
"Also, I believe this Republic that Prof. Socrates wants to design — as if anyone really wants to let this dreadful little man design an entire city — is nothing but a plan for a hegemonic, masculinist empire that will dominate all of Greece and enforce its own values and beliefs on the diverse communities of our multicultural society."
"My first thought about this class was: this guy is really ugly. Then I thought, well, he's just a little hard on the eyes. Finally, I came to see that he was kind of cute. Before I used to judge everyone based on first impressions, but I learned that their outward appearances can be seen in different ways through different lenses."
Heh.Labels: Academia, Funny
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Sunday, December 31, 2006 |
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Religion in College |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 11:36 PM
While I haven't been teaching long enough to notice any difference in the religiosity of my students over the years, this professor's observations are consistent with my general knowledge on the topic. He writes:
More American college students seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion today than at any time in my 30 years of teaching.
At first glance, the flourishing of religion on campuses seems to reverse trends long criticized by conservatives under the rubric of "political correctness." But, in truth, something else is occurring. Once again, right and left have become mirror images of each other; religious correctness is simply the latest version of political correctness. Indeed, it seems the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.
The chilling effect of these attitudes was brought home to me two years ago when an administrator at a university where I was then teaching called me into his office. A student had claimed that I had attacked his faith because I had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche's analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes. The administrator insisted that I apologize to the student. (I refused.)
My experience was not unique. Today, professors invite harassment or worse by including "unacceptable" books on their syllabuses or by studying religious ideas and practices in ways deemed improper by religiously correct students.
Distinguished scholars at several major U.S. universities have been condemned, even subjected to death threats, for proposing psychological, sociological or anthropological interpretations of religious texts. In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition.
At a time when universities are obsessed with public relations, faculty members can no longer be confident they will remain free to pose the questions that urgently need to be asked.
For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed. A growing number of religiously correct students consider this challenge a direct assault on their faith. Yet the task of thinking and teaching, especially in an age of emergent fundamentalisms, is to cultivate a faith in doubt that calls into question every certainty.
Any responsible curriculum for the study of religion must be guided by two basic principles: first, a clear distinction between the study and the practice of religion, and second, an expansive understanding of what religion is and of the manifold roles it plays in life. The aim of critical analysis is not to pass judgment on religious beliefs and practices -- though some secular dogmatists wrongly cross that line -- but to consider the many functions they serve.
It is also important to explore the similarities and differences between and among various religions. Religious traditions are not fixed and monolithic; they are networks of symbols, myths and rituals, which evolve over time by adapting to changing circumstances. If we fail to appreciate the complexity and diversity within, and among, religious traditions, we will overlook the fact that people from different traditions often share more with one another than they do with many members of their own tradition.
If chauvinistic believers develop deeper analyses of religion, they might begin to see in themselves what they criticize in others. In an era that thrives on both religious and political polarization, this is an important lesson to learn -- one that extends well beyond the academy.
Since religion is often most influential where it is least obvious, it is imperative to examine both its manifest and latent dimensions. As defenders of a faith become more reflective about their own beliefs, they begin to understand that religion can serve not only to provide answers that render life more secure but also to prepare them for life's unavoidable complexities and uncertainties.
Until recently, many influential analysts argued that religion, a vestige of an earlier stage of human development, would wither away as people became more sophisticated and rational. Obviously, things have not turned out that way. Indeed, the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Religious conflict will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not.
The warning signs are clear: Unless we establish a genuine dialogue within and among all kinds of belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism, the conflicts of the future will probably be even more deadly.
Mark C. Taylor, a religion and humanities professor at Williams College, is the author of "Mystic Bones." (This op-ed was also printed in the NY Times a few weeks ago.)
Many serious Christians are genuinely committed to replacing the political correctness of today's academia with their own Christian dogma. They are determined, they are numerous, and they are extremely well-funded. That's not good news: rule of academia by religious correctness would be no better -- and surely much worse -- than rule by political correctness. Sadly, my general impression is that the conservative criticisms of academia's closed doors will enshrine religious correctness, not merely overthrow political correctness. Too many in that movement aim to do just that.
Personally, I do worry that I'll face serious student complaints someday, probably sooner rather than later, for my teaching of Christian ethics. I'm not similarly concerned about the leftists.Labels: Academia, Religion
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Tuesday, October 03, 2006 |
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Applying Utilitarianism |
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By Paul Hsieh @ 9:30 AM
I don't know if this is a true story or just an urban legend. But it's funny nonetheless:A famous decision theorist who once taught at Columbia got an offer from a rival university and was struggling with the question of whether to stay where he was or accept the new post. His friend, a philosopher, took him aside and said, "What's the problem? Just do what you write about and what you teach your students. Maximize your expected utility." The decision theorist, exasperated, responded, "Come on, get serious!" (From "Smart Heuristics" by Gerd Gigerenzer.)Labels: Academia, Ethics
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005 |
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Philosophy as Integration in Academia -- Or Not |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 6:45 AM
Via Boing Boing, I found this list of the fifty most cited texts in the humanities from 1976-1983. Although those dates are pretty musty by now, the dominance of philosophy texts on the list is noteworthy -- even though so many of the philosophers are the postmodernist freaks beloved by fashionable academics outside philosophy. (Postmodernism, a.k.a. Continental Philosophy, is quite rare in American philosophy departments, as it's generally not regarded with much if any respect.) Here's the list:1. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962
2. J. Joyce, Ulysses. 1922
3. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957
4. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
5. N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965
6. M. Foucault, The Order of Things. 1966
7. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology
8. R. Barthes, S/Z. 1970
9. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. 1927
10. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1948
11. H-G Gardmer, Truth and Method. 1960
12. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. 1971
13. J. Joyce, Finnegan's Wake. 1939
14. J.R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 1969
15. J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. 1975
16. G. Genette, Figures. 1966
17. N. Chomsky & M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English. 1968
18. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. 1922
19. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. 1962
20. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object. 1960
21. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. 1914
22. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1922
23. J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916
24. W.C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961
25. C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. 1958
26. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900
27. V.Y. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. 1928
28. F.D. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. 1915
29. J-P, Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 1943
30. S.A. Kripke, "Naming and Necessity" 1972
31. E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. 1966
32. K.R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. 1963
33. J. Lacan, Lacan Ecrits
34. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference. 1967
35. N. Chomsky, Chomsky Syntactic Structures. 1957
36. R. Jacobson, "Linguistics and Poetics" 1960
37. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation. 1967
38. C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. 1962
39. E. Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. 1925
40. P.L. Berger & T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. 1966
41. M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 1965
42. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 1945
43. W. Iser, The Act of Reading. 1976
44. K.R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. 1972
45. U.A. Eco, Theory of Semiotics. 1976
46. E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1946
47. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. 1960
48. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 1964
49. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest. 1968
50. K.R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1935 The dominance of even these mostly awful philosophical texts in the list reflects the unique position of philosophy as the fundamental integrator of all human knowledge, particularly in the humanities. At its best, philosophy identifies the basic principles to guide all specialized inquiries and check all further conclusions. So with Objectivism, the axioms preclude certain supposedly scientific theories, like behaviorism in psychology. The purpose of art establishes basic standards for the objective judgment of literature to be further developed and applied by scholars. The nature of concepts forbids the use of package-deals like "Stalinism" and "McCarthyism" in politics. The metaphysical value of sex suggests an important subject of psychological study. The historical study of Soviet Russia shows the particular ways in which collectivism in theory results in mass slaughter in practice. And so on. Obviously, other philosophies have other kinds of effects upon specialized fields of study, many of them deeply pernicious.
To be clear, my point here is not that all roads go to and from philosophy. Rather, philosophy is the central nexus point in a web of related domains of knowledge. So although psychology, history, and economics will be directly related to each other in various ways, the strongest ties between the major disciplines will all run through philosophy.
Of course, that's not really the current state of affairs. The fragmentation of the humanities over the last century or so is both widely-known and often-lamented. Professors and graduate students have almost no contact with people working outside their own discipline. At this point, productive conversation is almost impossible, as scholarly interests are too narrowly specialized in both content and method to be of much interest to anyone else, including those in the same discipline. In fact, a person could lead a totally normal life as a graduate student and professor of philosophy without ever conversing with anyone outside philosophy about any topic of intellectual substance. By current standards, that person would not even be remiss if he never read a book on any topic other than philosophy! I suspect the same is true of other disciplines, albeit perhaps to varying degrees.
The intellectual world wasn't always so fractured. During the Enlightenment, philosophers, historians, chemists, physicians, industrialists, economists, physicists, artists, and the like actively gathered together to discuss topics of mutual interest. (For a nice example, see Andy Bernstein's discussion of the Lunar Society in The Capitalist Manifesto, pages 88-92.) In light of that community, it's hardly surprising that so many accomplished intellectuals were accomplished in multiple fields. So although Hume is almost exclusively known today as a philosopher, he also wrote an excellent and popular history of England. Adam Smith is studied almost exclusively as an economist today, even though he wrote treatises on ethics. Voltaire was not merely a popular essayist on philosophical topics; he also wrote volumes of plays and poetry, not to mention highly influential popularizations of Newton's new physics. In those days, the boundaries between disciplines were simply not the impenetrable walls that they are today.
From what I've read on the ills of academia, few if any academics realize that philosophers are almost entirely to blame for the absurd compartmentalization of our universities. The analytic philosophy dominant in the twentieth century rejected the ideal of the systematic integration of knowledge, even within the domain of philosophy itself. The old goal of constructing a philosophical system was deemed naive and futile. Instead, philosophers were supposed to engage in detailed analyses of narrow slivers of topics totally isolated from any surrounding context or general principles. Unsurprisingly, philosophers have discovered that they cannot prove anything in that manner, so they now often resort to offering pathetic rationalizations for their prior beliefs under the guise of Rawls' "reflective equilibrium" or Nozick's rejection of "coercive philosophy."
As an aside, Tom Regan's arguments for animal rights are a perfect example of rationalization as philosophic method. When he openly admits (in "The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights") that "if it were possible to show that only human beings are included within [the] scope [of the rights view], then a person like myself, who believes in animal rights, would be obliged to look elsewhere," any self-respecting philosopher should refuse to seriously consider his views any further. Instead, philosophers treat them seriously, as if the reams of tangential technical discussion render his work rigorous. In particular, Regan steadfastly refuses to offer any substantive argument for his claim that subjects-of-a-life have that ever-so-mysterious property of equal inherent value. Consequently, it cannot be refuted. That's quite convenient for Regan, of course. The only proper response is to reject the whole enterprise as arbitrary.
Although analytic philosophy has lost much of its strength in recent years, its basic policy of disintegration is still very much in force in philosophy departments. (Certainly, my graduate papers are still supposed to analyze some narrow, out-of-context issue to death!)
The widespread opposition to the integration of knowledge in philosophy over the past century or so has substantially affected the standard practices of other disciplines. By routinely engaging in hyper-specialized nit-picking irrelevant to life, philosophers largely removed themselves from that central location in the nexus of human knowledge. Since they defended intellectual disintegration on philosophic grounds, they also encouraged scholars in other disciplines to engage in their own form of compartmentalization. That they did, apparently while also turning to the crazed continental philosophers for the required philosophic foundation to varying degrees. The current fractured state of academia is the end result of that process. It won't change until philosophers seriously commit themselves -- in both theory and practice -- to cognitive integration.
From what I've seen, today's only intellectual community seriously committed to integration across the various domains of knowledge is that of Objectivists -- as made possible largely by the Ayn Rand Institute and the Anthem Foundation. That community is still in a nascent form: some disciplines aren't adequately represented yet, if at all. (Personally, I'd much prefer to add more historians, psychologists, economists, and the like to the mix, rather than more philosophers, as I'll learn more that way!) Nonetheless, the lively discussions and thoughtful debates amongst well-grounded Objectivist intellectuals and scholars seem to be quite stimulative. I certainly experienced that for myself at ARI's fantastic Teaching Workshop, held after OCON this past summer. I've also seen/read the excellent fruit of others scholarly workshops, such as Tara Smith's fascinating talk on judicial activism at OCON.
That's perhaps the only good news for the future of academia, I think.Labels: Academia
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Thursday, March 17, 2005 |
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The Intellectual Dead End of Postmodernist Academia |
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By Paul Hsieh @ 8:58 PM
I just read this devastating critique of modern academia. Some excerpts:While Republicans were commandeering the nation's political apparatus," noted historian Richard Wolin, the theorists of a postmodern left, cuckolded by history, were conquering academia. Their victory has come at a high cost. Once a forward-looking hothouse for discussion and debate, academia, taken as a whole, has been increasingly dominated by freeze-dried 1960's radicals and their intellectual progeny, who have turned much of the humanities and social sciences into a backwater.
It has gotten so bad that philosophers at a prestigious university have asked to be detached from the humanities department because the English and history departments are so mired in subjectivity that faculty members in the same department can barely speak with each other, let alone across disciplines. When the academic philosophers are disturbed by the horrible methodology and rampant subjectivism of their peers in other departments, it must be getting really bad! Read the whole article -- it's worth it. (Via Rand Simberg.)Labels: Academia
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Sunday, March 06, 2005 |
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Plagiarism by Professors |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 12:02 PM
I sent this to my fellow graduate students at Boulder a few months ago, then forgot to blog it. But the article is still available -- and it is no less relevant than in December. Here's what I said then (with some editing to make it bland but safe):
The Chonicle of Higher Education recently published an interesting article on plagiarism in academia -- among professors, not students.
The upshot of the article is that the phenomenon seems fairly widespread, yet mechanisms for the identification and punishment of wrongdoers are often grossly inadequate, if available at all. Often the mere retraction of the plagiarizing work is difficult to obtain.
In many cases, the only alternative to allowing someone to steal your work at will is going public with the charge of plagiarism. Frankly, I would worry about being sued for so accusing a fellow academic with plagiarism, no matter how blatant the offense.
The article doesn't mention any problems with plagiarism by or of philosophy professors, although the whole situation obviously involves some interesting ethical questions about the proper personal and institutional responses to immorality.Labels: Academia
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Tuesday, September 21, 2004 |
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Academic Plagiarism or Academic Bureaucracy? |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 7:34 AM
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Juan Non-Volokh posted some comments on a rather strange case of plagiarism by a Harvard law professor. A passage from a book by Yale law professor Jack Balkin was printed in a book by Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree as if it were his own. Juan quotes a bit of the Harvard Crimson article which explains how that happened:
Ogletree told The Crimson that he had not read the passage of Balkin's book that appears in his own work. An assistant inserted the material into a manuscript and intended for another assistant to summarize the passage, according to Ogletree's statement. The first assistant inadvertently dropped the end quote, and the second assistant accidentally deleted the attribution to Balkin before sending a draft to the publisher.
When the draft returned, Ogletree did not realize that it was not his material, he said in the statement.
As Juan notes, that means "Professor Ogletree did plan to publish the work of others -- in this case, his student research assistants -- under his own name." Juan opines:
Of course it is common for prominent figures to use ghostwriters in preparing manuscripts, and many authors include material prepared by -- and perhaps even drafted by -- research assistants and others. In this Professor Ogletree would hardly be alone. But is this the appropriate standard of scholarship for a tenured law professor? At Harvard? Perhaps I have an old fashioned perspective on these sorts of things, but I am disturbed by the idea of tenured professors at prestigious institutions using research assistants to draft portions of their scholarly work. It this a reasonable view? Or do I have an outmoted view of legal scholarship? After all, attorneys regularly sign documents draftd by others, so why shouldn't law professors do the same?
I think that Juan is quite right to be disturbed. And the semi-justification offered by one of his readers, Fabio Rojas, quoted in this post, offers no comfort:
During grad school, I discovered there were two modes of "legitimate" academic work: craftsman and bureaucrat. The craftsman worked alone, or with one or two colleagues, to carefully write papers and books. This is the "classic" scholar approach. When you think of a philosopher mulling over every turn of phrase or a historian carefully citing ancience documents, you are thinking "craftsman."
Much to my surprise, I also learned that a lot of scholars are "Bureaucrats": they have grants, research assistants and a large network of co-authors. This kind of scholar is more like an architect - he designs the overall project, but an army of helpers puts together the final project.
At first I was horrified, but I came to realize that some research has to be conducted in this fashion. You simply can't conduct national surveys all by yourself. At the Chicago Soc dept (where I got my Ph.D.) you had a lot of both. Sociology (and political science as well) produces research that requires huge team efforts as well finely crafted individual work. Lot of mass surveys/experiments as well as carefully argued social/political theory.
I also realized that big name scholars get their reputation by being brilliant craftsmen or by being extremely competent academic entrepreneurs. I grew up worshipping the craftsmen - Ron Coase is a great example - infrequent, but outstanding publications. But now I realize a lot of famous names only produce their quantity because they rely to heavily on assistants.
I was shocked to find out that a legal scholar whose work I respect writes a fairly small amount of his later work. He often hires brilliant grad/law students to do most of the leg work and then he assembles the products into his larger manuscripts. It's simply impossible to write a book every other year, fly around the world, teach classes, be a consultant and satisfy your university service requirements without a lot of help.
Given that's a path to success, I'm not surprised that the work becomes sloppy very quickly. Scholars barley have time to closely monitor every product they produce. Not every highly productive scholar is that way, but more of them operate that way than we'd admit.
All of that is well and good: Some academic projects require the help of a small army of research assistants and assistant writers, while others are best done solo. Some professors excel as bureaucrats, while others are better suited for the role of the craftsman.
Yet the question remains: Should professors present the work of their students as their own? Surely not. Students who write portions of a text richly deserve the credit of co-authorship. Students who substantially contribute to the research behind a text deserve at least a footnote or two of credit. Part of the job of a professor is to help along the careers of his students. To take credit for their work subverts that purpose, as the open recognition of work done through co-authorship adds substantial weight to a CV. Such attribution is also directly in the interest of the professor. Students will likely be more careful with a text (such as in proper attribution of sources) if their own name is on the line. And the blame for mistakes can be more easily spread to the culpable party if co-authors are openly acknowledged.
In academic medicine, co-authorship of articles is standard when attending physicians and residents collaborate -- which is why articles in medical journals often have three, four, or five authors. Less substantial contributions are also appropriately noted in footnotes. As far as I understand, such acknowledgement of the contributions of graduate students is also fairly standard in collaborative works in sociology, psychology, economics, and the like. If academic lawyers are going to be bureaucrats rather than craftsmen, then they need to honestly acknowledge that by giving due credit to those under their management.
The fact that court decisions are often substantially written by law clerks and that books by politicians are often ghostwritten by professional writers not relevant. That is work-for-hire, which is a whole different animal. Without a work-for-hire agreement, no professor should (either in a legal or moral sense) take credit for the work of his students. More importantly, no reputable academic institution ought to allow professor to make use of work-for-hire. What is forbidden to students as plagiarism -- buying work to pass off as one's own -- ought to be forbidden to professors. In the context of academia, I can't think of enough unpleasant words for such a practice, although dishonest, unprofessional, hypocritical, and abusive come to mind.
Professors can be bureaucrats without being plagiarists -- and their colleagues ought to insist upon it.Labels: Academia
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Sunday, September 19, 2004 |
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Tenure and Bias |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 2:05 PM
The idea that tenure protects academic freedom is a joke. Those with unwanted opinions (i.e. non-leftists) can be easily weeded out of academia long before the protections of tenure are ever applied. So I was pleased to read this op-ed by a former Middlebury College president arguing against the tenure system. Dr. McCardell writes:
To faculties and governing boards: tenure is a great solution to the problems of the 1940's, when the faculty was mostly male and academic freedom was at genuine risk. Why must institutions make a judgment that has lifetime consequences after a mere six or seven years? Publication may take longer in some fields than in others, and familial obligations frequently interrupt careers. Why not a system of contracts of varying length, including lifetime for the most valuable colleagues, that acknowledges the realities of academic life in the 21st century?
Moreover, when most tenure documents were originally adopted, faculty members had little protection. Today, almost every negative tenure decision is appealed. Appeals not upheld internally are taken to court. Few if any of these appeals have as their basis a denial of academic freedom.
I certainly agree with McCardell that the greater flexibility afforded by a contract system would be good for all concerned, I wholly disagree with his presumption that academic freedom is alive and well at our universities. The problem with tenure is not that academic freedom is wholly secure, but rather that the protection afforded by tenure is "too little, too late."
Just yesterday in the grad lounge, I walked in on a spirited conversation making great fun of all those ignorant and stupid conservative students, particularly those who claim discrimination by professors and instructors. After listening a while, I noted that the present conversation surely proves that conservatives have no reason to complain or worry about discrimination against them. At least some of my fellow graduate students understood the irony.
If I were a less cantankerous or more sensitive person, I would find the hard leftism at Boulder's philosophy department completely overwhelming and intolerable. Instead, I've learned to take a sort of pleasure in occasionally needling my fellow graduate students with my primitive and backwards ideas. All considered, that's probably not a very healthy attitude to adopt, but I doubt that I could endure graduate school any other way.
And speaking of graduate school, I have reading to do!Labels: Academia
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004 |
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Institutionalized Fraud |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 10:19 AM
An astonishing article in The Chronicle of Higher Education details the ways in which fake degrees are being used in academia to advance careers:
While experts on diploma mills -- broadly defined as unaccredited institutions that require students to do little or no work to earn degrees -- warn of the damage they do to the integrity of higher education, many satisfied customers say they get their money's worth. "Just the ability to put Ph.D. behind my name is what I was looking for," says Wayne J. del Corral, who teaches finance part time at Tulane University. "It'll make things a lot easier with respect to submitting papers to journals and so forth."
He also appreciates that his diploma from Lacrosse University looks so real. "The seal is very nice," he says.
And that's not the worst of it:
Valdosta State University's Web site lists an assistant professor of management as "Dr. Jack Malehorn."
What the Web site doesn't say, and what students and colleagues probably don't know, is that Mr. Malehorn's Ph.D. is from Shelbourne University.
Shelbourne does not exist. It never existed. It claimed to be based in Ireland, but actually was one of more than a dozen names used by an international diploma-mill company that sold degrees, beginning in the mid-1990s, for $500 to $2,500, according to an investigation last year by the Federal Trade Commission. The company, based in Romania, sent millions of unsolicited e-mail messages around the world, promising recipients that they could receive degrees without doing any academic work. Along with the diplomas, the company also provided fake transcripts and phony letters of recommendation.
When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Malehorn at first denies that his Ph.D. is from Shelbourne, even though his résumé says it is. "No, no, I'm sorry," he says. "I wish I could help you."
After further inquiries, Mr. Malehorn acknowledges that his doctorate is, in fact, from Shelbourne. He also contends that he did actual academic work to obtain it. "It was all through an Internet connection," he says. "My dissertation certainly seemed legitimate." His boss doesn't think so. Kenneth L. Stanley, dean of the College of Business Administration, says he knew before hiring Mr. Malehorn that he had a fake Ph.D. "Hell, we knew it was worthless," says Mr. Stanley. "Give us a break!"
But he hired Mr. Malehorn anyway because, according to the dean, it's not uncommon for professors, or even top administrators, to have bogus credentials. "I've dealt with provosts with degrees from mail-order institutions here in the United States," Mr. Stanley says. (He declines to name any of those provosts or their institutions.)
What's important, he argues, is that Valdosta State does not recognize the degree, nor was it a factor in the decision to hire Mr. Malehorn. "If Jack had come here and we had hired him thinking, 'Oh, well, he's doctorally qualified,' and we're claiming that qualification, then we're idiots and he's wrong," says Mr. Stanley.
Contrary to the dean's insistence, however, it appears that Valdosta State does consider the degree valid. Why else would the professor be referred to as "Dr." in the bulletin that announced his hiring in 2002? Why else would he be listed as "Dr." in the university's telephone directory and on the management department's Web site? And why else would he be allowed to call himself "Dr. Jack Malehorn, Ph.D." when he contributes articles to the Journal of Business Forecasting?
When all that is brought to Mr. Stanley's attention, he is quiet for several seconds. "It's a little embarrassing," he admits. He recalls referring to Mr. Malehorn as "Dr." on several occasions, including in front of students. "I guess, you know, we're guilty of institutionalizing a fraud," says Mr. Stanley.
The dean pledges that references to Mr. Malehorn's Ph.D. will be deleted from official university material. Six weeks later, the management department's Web page still calls him "Dr."
Professors who fake credentials are bad enough, although perhaps to be expected on occasion. The fact that some administrators are willing to not just look the other way, but also promote the fraud is astonishing and disgusting. Perhaps the administrators don't see much value in academic degrees -- but that would be an even greater fraud since such degrees are the allegedly valuable product offered by their universities. Really, it's horrible any way you slice it.
Update: An earlier version of this post was all screwy in its formatting, such it presented material from the article as if I wrote it. (Hey, at least it wasn't an article on accidental plagiarism!) I regret any confusion that might have caused.Labels: Academia
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Friday, April 30, 2004 |
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Moving Down the Food Chain? |
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By Diana Hsieh @ 6:36 PM
Eric O'Connor of Critical Mass has some interesting comments on her choice to move from her tenured position as a professor of English to teaching English in secondary school. After lamenting the terrible job market in academia, she writes:
There is one market, though, that is WIDE OPEN for humanities M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s, and that is the independent school market. "Independent" is mostly a contemporary code word for "private," though it can also mean "charter." Your Ph.D.--or, if you are ABD, your M.A.--is a very attractive qualification in this market. In contrast to the public school system, it counts as a teaching qualification (thus preventing you from going back to school to get a highly redundant ed school teaching certificate). Independent schools are eager to add people with advanced degrees to their faculty--in part, this raises the profile of the school and looks good to parents and donors, but far more importantly, these schools recognize that refugees from academe can make marvelous high school teachers. They know this to be true because their faculties are already full of them.
The Village Voice piece linked above tells the story of one such refugee, who is happily earning twice what he would have made as an adjunct teaching at a private high school in New Jersey. I've met a number of such refugees from a number of schools this year. The schools themselves have been as different from one another as people are--but at all of them, the refugees say, entirely independent of one another, that the work they have found in the world of independent school teaching far surpasses the academic life. All say they are able to do the sort of intensive, personalized teaching they dreamed of doing as college teachers, but could not do in a higher ed setting; all say they feel more intellectually alive than they did in academe; and all say, too, that they have a much greater sense of purpose and of professional satisfaction than they did in academe. They are palpably happy, and the differences they are making in kids' lives are real and meaningful. They also have summers off and, having jumped the assembly-line production schedule of the academic track, can follow the far more ethical and constructive course of pursuing their own research and writing projects when and as the spirit moves them. The pay ain't bad, either.
Locating and applying for such jobs could not be easier. There are agencies whose entire mission is to match you with schools that are looking for candidates like you. The agencies are entirely free to the candidates. They are not gimmicks. They work.
Why do you hear absolutely nothing about this career option from within academe? Why do academic departments pretend this entirely dignified and deeply meaningful career path does not exist--even though it could be just what many of their otherwise unemployable Ph.D.'s, not to mention their dissatisfied faculty, are looking for? Why do they treat as beneath their notice a type of work that they ought to be embracing as a seriously significant alternative to the dead-end academic career of the adjunct? Do I really have to ask?
The comments from those who have made such career moves bears out her generally positive assessment of this path. The only downside seems to be the complete lack of respect given to the decision by other academics, even though the terrible job market isn't exactly a secret. (Such elitism is relevant to those who do not wish to give up their research goals, as it might make publication much harder, if not largely pointless.) Along those lines, Amanda Leins notes:
I have been following your blog off and on over the last year. I finished my PhD coursework in Classics last year, and decided to say to hell with academe for all of the reasons that you have so eloquently placed before your readers. I now teach Latin, History, and Anthropology at an independent school in NY, and could not be happier with my choice. I left the lofty position of my chosen field after 9 years dedication, both as an undergrad and a grad student.
I would like to add another point of view to why these types of jobs are not heralded by the academic communities. In my field, as in others, I presume, teaching at an institution that is not either a college or community is a sign that the person who left "can't cut it" and his or her work never was and could never be up to the rigorous standards of XXXXX University. From the discussions I had with various members of the faculty at my graduate institution, teaching middle and upper school is really a reflection of the limitations of the person who leaves; there is no personal glory to be earned if it isn't higher ed! Leaving is perceived as admitting that one is weak/unintelligent/not dedicated/insert other adjective here.
I still struggle with my decision--even though I don't regret a moment of it. Nevertheless, the stigma of teaching somewhere else besides a university or college is very strong. Am I happier? Yes. Am I doing what I wanted to do all along, namely teach Classical literature, culture adn archaeology? Yes. Do my peers understand? Many of them do not. To them, I am washed up, a disgrace--good riddance! Despite the fact that I received a fellowship at the graduate level that was university-wide and only open through nomination by department, my presence there in that instituion was clearly a mistake made on the part of the administration; my choice to leave proved that.
For a while now, I've considered teaching in secondary schools as an option. One obvious reason is the general glut in the academic job market. But I also have some particular reasons for wishing to stay in our present location. Paul has an excellent job that would be hard to adequately replicate elsewhere in the country. Colorado is one of only six states that is not either in or approaching medical malpractice crisis, plus the state offers fairly good protection for gun rights. Colorado is also one of the few climates in the United States amenable to both Paul's and my tastes. There is also a large contingent of smart, serious, and friendly Objectivists along the Front Range. Leaving Colorado isn't out of the question, but I'd certainly be reluctant to do it in order to teach at Podunk U. For the moment, I'm simply trying to keep as many options open as possible.
Of course, I can't expect to find too many openings for philosophy teachers in private and perhaps charter Colorado high schools. To get my foot in the door, I'd really need to be able to teach some primary subject, e.g. math, science, history, English. Without a doubt, history would be of the greatest interest to me. Since the course of history is driven by philosophy, the particulars form a basis for philosophical inductions. My interest is not merely driven by philosophy though, as I do find the subject fascinating in its own right.
So my basic thought is that I might pursue an M.A. in history, likely after the Ph.D. in philosophy is finished. Even if I end up in academia, the extra degree might help my job prospects, particularly if I choose related areas of focus in each. Of course, all of that is rather far off. But if I'm going to keep my options open, then I need to plan for it!Labels: Academia
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