An Overdose of Academic Shenanigans, Composing Corrections, 16/06/2016

Call this a correction, of a sort, to yesterday’s post. Because in the last day, I’ve learned a lot more about on the on-the-ground situation around Udoka Okafor’s mess at my old department. Mostly, I learned some of the details behind why she ended up on the wrong side of so many of my former colleagues. 

So I’m going to explain how I came to believe what I believed by the time I wrote that post to go up yesterday. Call it an apology if anyone thought I blamed them for something as individuals. Because I think we can still get the most good out of Okafor's story if we take it as an expression of institutional problems that exist regardless of the intentions of people in it.

Here's how I first discovered this whole mess. A couple of friends of mine who are currently grad students at McMaster’s Philosophy Department posted a link to Brian Leiter’s blog. The post on Leiter’s blog was only a couple of sentences long, and contained a downloadable .rtf file.*

* Whose idea was it to make this post an rtf file? What is this? 1997?

That file was Jorge Sanchez Perez’s harsh, short, condescending, and virtually evidence-free rebuttal to a piece Okafor had published on Huffington Post a few days prior. Sanchez’s piece included little actual argument and mostly just repeated conservative buzzwords like ‘political correctness’ and denounced calls for ‘diversity.’ 

This was the first I’d heard from Sanchez Perez or Okafor, because they joined the department’s community well after I left. So I had no idea of their personalities. All I knew of Sanchez was these cruel, dismissive words filled with the messages of those opposed to the democratic movements of our time. 

Having read this statement, I wanted to find out what provoked them. And this condescending short essay made me very sympathetic to the position of whoever provoked it. This was before I had read it. The response was so cruel and empty of reason that I could no longer consider its perspective reasonable.

So I read Okafor’s HuffPo piece, I found a lot of points that were true – when we were speaking on the scale of academic institutions as a whole. 

Yes, the humanities’ academic canons concentrate too much on the ideas of the West alone. Yes, many prominent humanities academics abuse their institutional positions for selfish ends. Yes, universities as a whole face a financial crisis – starved of funding while overloaded with administrators, passing all the costs to students with high tuition and researchers with low pay and insecure work.

And to be frank, I’ve seen many former colleagues at McMaster – student and faculty – carry on as if all of this is somehow fine. They’d say there were problems. They’d make gestures at fighting for small improvements in the face of universal disaster. 

But they’d behave – in small, innocuous, but telling ways – in the same hierarchical, conservative ways that got us in all this mess in the first place. But it’s not morally blameworthy – it’s just acting according to what your institution affords you to act. We can easily get so ingrained in a place that we can’t even conceive of how to move in other worlds. Even if those other places are more free.

So I could see how a student could find themselves on the wrong end of those institutions. Even as they had great ambitions to contribute to the field from inside those institutions. 

When I learned that Okafor’s situation involved a collision of egos as well as a disagreement over principles and ambition, I changed my sympathies a little. There are no perfect victims, after all. But in how they chose to express themselves, both could engage sympathies well.

Maybe Okafor had more base motives than the appeal to principle. But that didn’t ultimately matter.

Yes, she was rightfully upset about the hypocrisy of a thinker’s sordid life professing and advocating a compelling vision of real justice. Yes, she was rightfully upset about the continuing cultural insularity of the humanities – closing their eyes to the riches of the whole globe.

McMaster’s faculty aren’t villains here. At most, they’re ordinary professionals doing their best with what they’re given. Institutionally speaking, they aren’t responsible as individuals for the systems in which they’re embedded. They do literally what they can. Only what they can.

And Okafor’s piece was a clear description of the institutional issues the humanities faces. Worst case, she’s manipulating a popular view of the department for her own gain (somehow). Best case, she feels genuinely wronged by an academic situation that went south, and has reasoned how it happened from an institutional perspective.

Sanchez, stuck in the department where all this was way too personal, wrote a direct defence, as if she had truly written a direct attack. He issues a clumsy rebuttal to her points. But he doesn’t use the terms and ideas of modern activist politics to let his writing express a truth and legitimacy beyond whatever spite actually motivates her. Like she did.

He uses the insults of the reactionary conservative movement Okafor’s themes oppose, in a simple essay that’s nothing but assertion. Sanchez’s 300 words contain no reasons why her situation doesn’t truly express these righteous themes. He just asserts that she’s “crying wolf.” 

You know who "cries wolf?" Insolent little children who end up getting mauled to death by predators at the end of the story. Okafor – legitimately or otherwise – effectively linked her story to the major issues facing the university system today. Sanchez responded by essentially calling her a spoiled brat and offering no counter-evidence to her narrative.

Sanchez should have spun us a narrative of colliding egos. He should have revealed enough of the real relationships between Okafor the ordinary flawed young woman and her ordinary flawed middle-aged professors to show how ordinary and flawed they all were. How those ordinary flaws provoked accidental alienation. Okafor made her story an activist opera. Sanchez should have made it into a farce.

But he didn’t. He just made himself sound like a fuming, grumpy old man. Okafor made her story sound like the future realization of our dreams for a world of justice.

Not only would Okafor make an excellent lawyer, as is her ambition – she’d also be a great activist, philosopher, and public relations specialist. 

The Difficulties and Rewards of Multi-Disciplinary Thinking, Jamming, 18/09/2013

My friend Iain Coleman was good enough yesterday to offer a correction to my account of special relativity’s implications for the nature of time yesterday. The theory’s destabilization of traditional conceptions of past, present, and future have their cause in the concept of interval between events that was a radical change from what was acceptable before. 

Basically, in special relativity, the interval between events never changes with the relative motion of a frame of reference. Because the interval never changes, the actual distance between them in space and time can change. The flexibility of the time coordinate of an event results in changes to what events may be considered past, present or simultaneous, and future as you jump from one frame of reference to another. I de-emphasized this because I wanted to concentrate on the moral concern awakened by the peculiar new brand of determinism that the block conception of time implies. Making the jump in quite that way was a mistake.*

* So far, that counts as my second on the blog so far, which is pretty good for 11 weeks in.

But if I can gain a benefit from that screw-up, at least it indicates the genuine difficulty that a multi-disciplinary research program faces. Almost all my peer-reviewed publications (as of this summer, seven since the start of 2010) are in interdisciplinary journals. One of my specializations is in environmental ethics; I’m preparing a book-length project to shop for publication this year. Not only does this field draw from many different disciplines in the sciences and humanities, but the premier journal of environmental ethics, the eponymous Environmental Ethics, is multi-disciplinary. The majority of its articles come from philosophy, but they also publish sociology, literary and film studies, less formalized ecology, and some history. 

Yet at times, I have been told that interdisciplinary journals are not a truly prestigious publication, not something where the best work is to be found.** This would include Environmental Ethics, the leading journal in that field, and a journal that truly deserves all the praise it can get. This journal has published my work, they’re considering another of my essays, and I’m proud to call myself (I hope, if this peer-review goes well) a regular contributor. Though in the spirit of friendly critique, I will venture to say that their website is a little Geocities. 

** Now, this isn’t the only advice I’ve received about reading philosophy. But it does remind one that not all advice is of equal quality.

Of course, if you remember my post from the end of August about the growing problem of philosophy’s institutional insularity, you’ll understand that I can’t really put much stock in this kind of advice. It grates against so many of my ideals of what makes exemplary philosophy, the kind of books and essays that aim to be remembered when historians write the history of the discipline. We should all aim to write this way, but too often we all-too-dutifully follow the advice to stick to the mainstream of our field. Robert Frodeman has written a short essay criticizing the unfortunate insularity of my discipline at the open-access review section of Social Epistemology, another publication of which I’m proud to be a regular contributor. It’s a wonderful and punchy essay, discussing the problem the discipline of philosophy faces when we turn away from the problems of other disciplines and the wider public to concentrate on our own prestige and traditions. Are we keeping a tradition truly alive when we only write books to ourselves? 

Did he wonder if, one day, his work
would inspire drunk Russians to shoot
each other?

What made the news today was a report of an argument between two Russian men at a bar. The discussion eventually became so passionate that one of the men shot the other with rubber bullets. They were arguing about Immanuel Kant. I doubt these people are seeking tenure.

So maybe start small. I'm just one person, after all, and can't change an entire discipline from this chair. When I’m presenting my work at conferences (some of which have been interdisciplinary), I’m regarded as a peer whose research is worth considering on the same level as everyone else on the program. And my approach, drawing material for philosophical argument from a variety of different disciplines, gets the greatest approval possible from an audience of philosophers. They tell me my work and my ideas are very interesting, that I’ve given people a lot to think about. And if a philosopher can’t provoke interesting thoughts, he should really think about a career change. 

When Blogging Makes a Fine Albatross Necklace, Composing, 19/07/2013

Not every experiment works. Not every idea pans out. Sometimes an inventive thought is a dead end. That’s basically how I feel after getting some feedback from yesterday’s post. 

I made George Zimmerman a central focus of an idea I had about the importance of empathy in moral philosophy. The general philosophical goal of that post was to express my feeling, after several years working in moral philosophy, that matters like empathy don’t always get a fair shake in many of its major theoretical camps. And I briefly wondered what kind of principles a moral philosophy for whom empathy and remorse was paramount would produce. 

But I got burned. I had a dedicated follower of the Zimmerman trial call me out on my oversimplifications, stereotypes of Zimmerman himself, mistakes in analysis of the court’s judgment, and presumptions about Zimmerman’s thoughts. I had a medical doctor tell me that if he wasn’t able to tune down his remorse when he loses patients, he’d collapse and be unable to do his genuinely beneficial work. This last point is an especially egregious ball-drop for me, because I've taught medical ethics on and off since 2010, but I didn't think of this angle when I was just thinking in the context of street crime and state-administered executions.

I wrote a bad post. I departed from the facts of a real-world case in a way that I thought would be philosophically interesting, but wasn’t. I thought of an idea that I myself don’t actually have any time to pursue in detail. It was a post that discussed part of how I’ve engaged with moral philosophy over the last few years. I chose a notable example that I had been paying attention to in my real life, but used it in such a way that I did a disservice to the facts of a very sensitive matter.

It’s dangerous for me to put these little thoughts, semi-random conjectures, and ideas I come up with in my research or my memory on the internet. I’m going to apply for a spate of tenure track jobs over this Fall, and every one of those hiring committees will be able to find this blog. And if they happen to read it in a week where my posts include a higher frequency of dead ends or a couple of conceptual duds, I will likely be passed over and face another year as an unemployed academic. If someone on that hypothetical hiring committee reads a post he doesn’t like, or that is a dead end, or that considers a point that he finds easy to refute, then I don’t get any work. 

This is why many young academics are tempted keep their mouth shut and don’t publicize their publications, stay off the internet, and never risk saying anything philosophically controversial. At risk of upsetting someone who may be in charge of hiring them, they never say anything at all. It’s for this reason that on Thursday afternoon, I seriously considered deleting this blog, all the tweets and facebook posts that linked to it, and forgetting that the entire thing happened. 

But even the peer-reviewed publications, which we have to write if we want to secure a permanent position, will contain ideas that a hiring committee doesn’t agree with. Someone on the hiring committee might read an article included with my application as a writing sample and absolutely hate it. And enough academics today are familiar enough with personal and professional blogging that they know not every post will be conceptual manna raining from Wordpress. 

One danger of a blog with daily updates about philosophical ideas will be posting ideas that are, at the time, little more than suggestions and brief speculations. Not all of them will work. Some of them might turn out to be a little silly. But I’d ask you to turn to my July 17 post, and remember that while a new idea has some problems, that doesn’t mean that it consists only of problems and that the idea has nothing of value. 

I’ve seen professors who talk down to students and belittle them for a speculation that isn’t of the best quality in a discussion. In contrast, I’ve seen good professors tactfully point out the limitations of a mediocre expression, knowing that not everything said in an improvised discussion or a brief daily blog is going to be meticulously researched, impeccably defended against every possible counter-argument. And the student might just have made a mistake. Anyone can make a mistake. I did in Thursday morning’s post.