June 2008

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 (UK). I confess to having been a bit skeptical prior to the lecture. I always like reading Nussbaum’s work, and she’s a great speaker, but I’m not riveted by the topic, still less by historical investigations in philosophy, and am always put off by having the name of a country in the title (or subtitle) of a work of philosophy. The talk (and now the book) convinced me that I should be more open on all counts. She gave a fascinating account of the thought of Roger Williams, the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, and made a very convincing case that his arguments for freedom of religion anticipate, variously, two of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative, Rawls’s idea of the overlapping consensus, and Locke’s sharp claim (in the Letter) that the magistrate has responsibility for secular matters, but not for care of the soul. “Anticipation” must be the wrong word in at least Locke’s and Rawls’s cases, because she convincingly argued that Locke must have been aware of Williams’s arguments, and, although she did not argue this, it is reasonable to assume that Rawls was too. She also argued that Williams’s theory of religious equality is superior to Locke’s theory of toleration on several grounds, including that it does not depend on Protestant premises, that it is more extensive (Williams, weirdly enough, believed that not only pagans, but even atheists (whom he called “anti-Christians”) could be decent people), and that it is more demanding: his argument does not merely support a stricture against persecution (which Williams termed “soul rape”) as Locke’s does, but a stricture against establishment. All this, and the guy sailed back and forth between England and the colonies, learned numerous languages, including Indian languages, and spent months at a time living with Indians. Finally, in the book, she makes a strong case for that Williams’s principle of religious equality is not parochial, but has a great deal to say to other democratic cultures: it’s been enough to get me to examine (but not necessarily to reject) my casual antidisestablishmentarianism in the UK context. Despite having about a million things to do, I’m now half way through the book which is as good, and as interesting, as the lecture promised. Highly recommended.

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.

Over on Scatterplot, there is a discussion of how CVs should look when students (or recent graduates) are applying for academic jobs. Even within one field, opinions are going to differ, so on a blog such as CT, there’s a good chance people will disagree. Nonetheless, some points may be generalizable so I thought I’d post an edited version of my long comment to that thread here. My experiences come from having applied to numerous positions in several fields when I was on the job market in 2002 (with several on-campus visits and then job offers resulting) and from having sat on a couple of hiring committees in addition to seeing CVs of additional folks who’ve been interviewed in my department and some others on campus over the past few years.

One way to approach putting together one’s CVs for an academic job application is to look at the CVs of people who’ve gotten jobs recently, jobs of interest to the candidate. If someone’s been out for a few years, it’s fine to ask them for a copy of their CV from the time when they were on the market. (On that note, it’s also worth asking people for a copy of their application letters.)
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I blogged this long ago and somewhere else, but the annual chore of assessing exam scripts has brought it back to mind. “Bill Pollard and Soran Reader at Durham devised this ideal exam”:http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0306&L=philos-l&P=106972&E=1&B=——=_NextPart_000_00C2_01C32DDD.864384A0&T=text/html :

*Philosophy Exam – First Year*

Answer two questions

Two hours

1. Patch together some things you have heard in lectures, in no particular order.

2. Has this question vexed philosophers for centuries?

3. Create an impression of original thought by impassioned scribbling (your answer may be ungrammatical, illegible, or both).

4. Does the answer to this question depend on what you believe?

5. How much irrelevant historical background can you give before addressing this question?

6. Describe two opposing views, then say what you personally feel.

7. Rise above the fumbling efforts of others and speculate freely on an issue of your choice.

8. EITHER

(a) Answer this question by announcing that it really means something different (and much easier to answer).

OR

(b) Write out your answer to last year’s question on this topic.

9. Protest your convictions in the teeth of obvious and overwhelming objections.

10. Keep your reader guessing about what you think until the end. Then don’t tell them.

Via Unfogged. I see an emerging trend:

1. Terrorist Fist Jab.
2. Black Power crypto blink.
3. Tendency to say “A glass of water, appease.”
4. Cracks knuckles-under.
5. “Whitey’s-on-the” moon.