As many of you likely know already, Ireland has voted down the Lisbon Treaty 53.4% to 46.6%. This was a slightly higher margin than I had anticipated (in a private email, I had laid my money down on a 52-48 split). As I noted in my previous post on the topic, the Yes campaign was tired and soporific. I’m trying to place an op-ed on the issue (if I don’t succeed, I will probably just bung it up on CT), so will have more to say about this later. But for the nonce, let me just note how appalling some of the responses from politicians in “other EU member states”:http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/0614/1213369845918.html – not so much ‘the people have spoken, the bastards,’ as a Brechtian ‘let us elect a new people.’ In particular, German parliamentarian Axel Schäfer’s comment that “With all respect for the Irish vote, we cannot allow the huge majority of Europe to be duped by a minority of a minority of a minority,” would have a bit more credibility if, you know, the majority of the majority of the majority had been given a chance to vote on the Treaty themselves.
In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to ‘those busts of Silenus you’ll find in any shop in town’. You ‘split them down the middle’ and figures of gods are inside.
Obviously this is going to be something like a Russian nesting doll. Maybe exactly like one. I have seen a lot of Greek art and artifacts. I’ve seen, for example, drinking cups that are ugly Silenus on one side, beautiful Dionysus on the other. But I’ve never seen an ancient Greek Silenus nesting doll. Have you? What, exactly, were they like? Which gods were inside? Surely just Dionysus. If they were available in every shop, at least a few should have survived. Popular craft forms don’t usually just blink out of existence. They evolve down the centuries So where can I see one?
The Prospect article defending Rachel Carson I wrote with Tim Lambert kicked off a lengthy round of blast and counterblast in the blogosphere. Some of the response did little more than illustrate the continuing gullibility of the RWDB segment of the blogosphere, notably including Glenn Reynolds (start here). The more serious discussion began with links from Andrew Leonard at Salon and Brad Plumer at TNR, and a reply from Roger Bate, claiming that we had greatly overstated his links with the tobacco industry (Tim Lambert responded here and Andrew Leonard here and here, with plenty more evidence on this point). A further piece makes the claim (which I have no reason to dispute) that British American Tobacco has now switched sides and is arguing against DDT use in Uganda.
Through all this sound and fury, some progress was made. No one even attempted to defend the claim that the use of DDT against malaria had been banned, or the outrageous lies of Steven Milloy (still employed by Fox News and CEI, despite his exposure as a tobacco industry shill) who blames Rachel Carson for every malaria death since 1972. It even turned out that the much-denounced decision of South Africa to abandon DDT use (reversed when malaria cases increased because of resistance to the pyrethroids used as alternatives) was not primarily due to environmentalist pressure. As Bate noted in his reply, the main factor behind the decision was the unpleasant look and small of DDT sprayed on hut walls, which often led to repainting or replastering. A minor, but still striking point, is that DDT continued to be used for public health purposes in the US (against plague-bearing fleas) even after the 1972 ban on general use of the chemical, and is still available for these purposes if needed.
Update:Absolutely the last word Via Ed Darrell a quiet victory for friends of Rachel Carson with the abandonment by Senator Tom Coburn of a block on the naming, in her honor, of the post office in her birthplace. It appears that the campaign of denigration against Carson (and, by implication, the environmental movement as a whole) has become untenable.
They play a great game in the UK every summer (no, not cricket, that’s far more important than a mere game). In May and June 16 and 18 year-olds take externally and anonymously graded exams (A-levels for the 18 year olds, GCSE’s for the 16 year olds), and the results come out later in the summer. In June lots of journalists write about how much easier these exams are than they used to be. (This is an especially appealing hypothesis for those of us who took O-levels before they were abolished in favour of GCSEs, and struggled to get B’s and lower, but who see our friends’ children sailing through with lots of As). When the results come out in August, the same journalists look at whether average results have gone up or down. If they have gone up, this is proof that the exams are getting easier (grade inflation); if they go down this is proof that the students are stupider or the schools are worse. This happens every year, without fail, as if no-one has noticed that it happened last year and the year before. Hence this piece from Minnette Marin.
I’m going to ignore Marin’s curious attacks on my friend John White (curious, because she seems to agree with him pretty much exactly on all the issues, so I don’t understand why she feels the need to be so hostile to him) and focus on the other things she says.
First, grade inflation.
Sarah Waldeck has some thoughtful responses at Concurring Opinions to some of the comments made in the previous post as well as Larry Solum’s post on her paper.
I am amused to see a post at Redstate that begins: “We all know Democrats have their own Culture of Corruption.” If the Dems have got partisan Reps trained to concede, by implication, that of course the Republicans have a capital-C Culture of Corruption … that’s pretty darn good for the Dems, eh?
Ross Douthat takes a stab at defining American ‘conservatism’. And follows up here. Here it is:
…A commitment to the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them, and those political movements (generally on the left, but sometimes on the right) that seek to change them radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals.
This has to be a complete failure, but I’m not going to snark too severely because these little definitional exercises are always failures. Still, they can be instructive. [click to continue…]
In the comments thread about homepages of academics, reader Oisin asks:
I’m a PhD philosophy student, entering my 2nd year; is maintaining a blog a good idea for a PhD student, in addition to having a homepage? Or is it perhaps a bad idea? And if so, why?
How having a blog may influence an academic’s career is a topic we’ve discussed at CT numerous times before over the years (example, example, example). Nonetheless, taking it up once again in light of changes in the blogging landscape makes sense. As I consider the question, I will note some significant differences among blog types and why the term “blog” has limited utility.
To blog or not to blog is not really the question. What parts of one’s self one wants to portray publicly and to a professional community is more the issue at hand.
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From “Inside Higher Ed”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/11/iraq today
The missteps in Iraq are well documented by now. … Among those success stories is the American University of Iraq, a Western-style institution in the war-torn country’s northern region that promises to “lead the transformation of Iraq into a liberal and democratic society. … The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search.
… Cargol’s 2001 resignation stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee’s genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.” Cargol, who at the time was a married father of two children, went on to say that he was a “sensual kind of guy” who hoped the employee could “feel comfortable enough with me (and others) to reciprocate the same level of playfulness and affection,” the newspaper reported.
Fans of Captain Laurence and Temeraire will be delighted to hear the latest installment of Naomi Novik’s wonderful Napoleonic dragon series is almost here. And in the meantime, there’s a teaser chapter to enjoy. Roll on the 8th of July!
I’m in Ireland at the moment, reintroducing the two year old to the country of his ancestors, and, more to the point, the delights of Andy Nolan’s sausages (if you’re ever passing through Kilcullen, and you’re not a vegetarian, you owe it to yourself to pick up a few pounds), and McCambridge’s brown-bread. But in between childcare responsibilities, I’ve been trying to piece together the debate over the upcoming referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty. Ireland is the only country where the public actually gets a vote on this Treaty, and there is a good chance that it will vote No (one recent opinion poll had the No side several points ahead; another had the Yes and No side neck-and-neck). If Ireland votes the Treaty down, it will fail, and nobody is quite sure what will happen next. More discussion of the specifics of the debate under the fold – I also have a more political-sciencey” post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/06/legitimating_the_eu.html on this over at _The Monkey Cage._
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Being vexed by Stanley Fish is a mug’s game. But here goes:
Even in courses where the materials are politically and ideologically charged, the questions that arise are academic, not political. A classroom discussion of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Strauss, for example, does not (or at least should not) have the goal of determining whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized. Rather, the (academic) goal would be to describe the positions of the two theorists, compare them, note their place in the history of political thought, trace the influences that produced them and chart their own influence on subsequent thinkers in the tradition. And a discussion of this kind could be led and guided by an instructor of any political persuasion whatsoever, and it would make no difference given that the point of the exercise was not to decide a political question but to analyze it.
So you are allowed to describe positions and arguments but not to venture evaluation. You may not test ideas, theories, positions for validity or intellectual merit. In political philosophy, to argue for or against a political philosophy would be ‘un-academic’. Justification and academia are twain and never the two shall meet. So far as politics go. So most of those we think of as academic political philosophers – Marcuse, Strauss, Rawls, the list is really quite long – aren’t ‘academic’. Because they attempt to justify their own views about how the body politics should be organized. Which disqualifies them. Fine. Whatever.
I really wasn’t going to rise to the bait but the man has a follow up, which concludes:
The demand for justification, as I have said in other places, always come from those outside the enterprise. Those inside the enterprise should resist it, because to justify something is to diminish it by implying that its value lies elsewhere. If the question What justifies what you do? won’t go away, the best answer to give is “nothing.”
Now, to be fair, Fish is talking specifically about justification of the liberal arts here. There is something to be said for the liberal arts as a good ‘in itself’. But Fish feels free to formulate his defense so expansively because he has gotten too comfy with a position that is a silly sort of know-nothingism – justify-nothingism, rather. Being an academic means never having to say you’re sorry for not having reasons. Fish presents this as gracious abstention from public debates academics should not meddle in. That would be bad enough, in my book. What makes it worse is that I suspect Fish thinks the flip-side of this is academic immunity from public criticism. This gets into my reading of his other writings, which I won’t go into right now. What academic ‘interpretive communities’ do is perfectly hermetic and externally unaccountable. I don’t see how that can be right, on the most generous liberal arts education as end in itself view.
Am I unfair to the man?
UPDATE: Julian Sanchez responds thoughtfully to my post. He objects that I am too uncharitable. I think it’s fair to be rather hard-nosed in this case, but your mileage may vary. I like this bit. “On this model [Fish’s], teaching philosophy would look a little like teaching theological interpretation to atheists.” I think that is very apt. I think that in some ways Fish is to intellectual justification as atheists are to God. He just doesn’t believe in the stuff. Or rather, he believes that the things we call ‘justifications’ are all, in some deep, anti-foundational sense, just arbitrary moves in language-games. This drives him to say some odd stuff, per the title of the post.
I was lucky enough to see Martha Nussbaum give a lecture in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, based on her new book Liberty of Conscience: In Defence of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality
Laurie in the process of getting her third degree TKD black belt this weekend. These skills come in handy with the stroppier sort of commenter or more patronizing variety of audience question at the Eastern APA.
A propos the discussion of CVs for academics going on the job market, I’ve been meaning to post about the importance of having some Web presence, especially a homepage one maintains with information about one’s work.
I’ve been continually surprised over the years about how many academics fail to take advantage of the Web as a medium for disseminating their work. This seems especially important in the case of those actively seeking a job in the near future.
Whenever I go to a conference, I’m on the lookout for students doing interesting work. Recently, I saw a few impressive presentations and wanted to follow up by learning more about these students. I know we’ll be hiring next year and I wanted to share information about these potential candidates with my colleagues. I looked them up online so I’d have more to go on. Nothing. This is an opportunity missed.
What should a basic homepage include? It should have information that a CV would contain, but the nice thing about a Web site is that it can easily include additional information. In the least, abstracts of published papers would be helpful. Of course, most helpful is to have full copies of these papers. While copyright issues may arise, preprints are almost always okay to post.
Although I don’t encourage students to post too many details about papers not yet accepted for publication, it is possible to mention one’s areas of interests and expertise and that will give visitors a better sense of one’s work than no information whatsoever.