“They then chuckle together in a self-congratulatory academic manner”

In response I’d really like to do something with “pedicure” but I can’t quite make it work.

But the joke doesn’t make any sense, even on its own terms

Christ, what an asshole.

Quite the defence:

“It wasn’t sexual harassment, because I was just making sexual double-entendres to a student, and sexual harassment is presumably something that only occurs if I explicitly ask for sex.

Secondly, it was a speech act, and you have to understand its context and be really sophisticated to get my sex jokes. Please ignore the fact that this defence pertains to an imagined verbal conversation when I’m in trouble for dirty texts and emails.

Thirdly, aren’t grad students utterly terrible? Aren’t they the worst? Isn’t my grad student so lacking in sophistication because she didn’t get my sex pun? What a bitch! The interpretation of speech acts, not her! Of course!”

What would it have taken for him just to accept a little humility and apologize like a regular human being? “I made a bunch of sexual puns to a grad student. I didn’t mean them to be taken as come-ons, but they were, and I made her feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t appropriate, particularly given the power difference in a student-advisor relationship. I’m very sorry for my actions.”

Oh, and let’s face it — the “jokes” he gives as examples are about as linguistically and philosophically sophisticated as an old Beavis and Butthead episode — “Heh, heh. He said ‘dick’.”

It’s fortunate that Professor McGinn’s teaching load has been recently lightened, as he now has the opportunity to expand his blog post into an article or book. I think he’s breaking some new ground in the intersection between Gricean implicature and moral philosophy. For instance, he seems to consider it obvious that a non-cooperating conversationalist who intentionally flouts Gricean maxims in such a way as to make the “timeless” meaning of his utterance a social or moral violation does not actually commit a wrong. Or, alternatively working backwards, if the speaker can make an argument that the utterer’s meaning of an utterance with a morally objectionable timeless meaning could have been innocuous, he can thereby avoid moral criticism. He goes even further, suggesting if an interpreter interprets an intentionally maxim-flouting utterance according to its timeless meaning, and acts upon that interpretation, the interpreter, not the speaker, commits a moral wrong.

Would it matter in these situations whether the statement embedded in the utterer’s preferred meaning was factually true? Can the speaker avoid interrogation of his intent in making a non-cooperative utterance?

There are so many interesting philosophical and linguistic avenues to explore here, and I wish Professor McGinn the best of luck in pursuing them in his well-deserved and copious new leisure time.

Is he arguing that “hand job” is not a rigid designator?

It’s actually hard to see when you’ve fucked up, because you chose all your actions in a good-faith effort and if you were to run through it again you’ll just get the same results. I mean, errors-of-fact you can see when you learn more facts, but errors-of-judgement are judged using the same brain that made the judgement in the first place.

But most of what gets called “intelligence” is learned skill, and can be learned badly.

[if you’re making habitual errors of judgement, self-respect, respect for your own cognitive processes, is pretty much the root of the problem. If you fuck up you need to start distrusting yourself, and getting people to start distrusting themselves is not often a pretty process.]

Does it bother anyone else that McGinn thinks a handjob means masturbating? I’ve certainly never heard it referred to that way.

“graduate students are not what they used to be”
Indeed.

Neither are women in general. Used to be able to sneer at them and pass innuendo without any consequences. Now the bitches (female dogs —be careful how you paraphrase me!) think they should be treated well. Should have elected Romney.

Scene: search committee meeting, after a discussion of the unusually low percentage of of women on our faculty relative to any of our peers and whether we should try to do something about it.

Male colleague, voice dripping with sarcasm: “oh, that’s right: we can’t hire him, he has a penis.”
Me: “yes, because God knows there are enough dicks in the room already.”

OK, so I didn’t really say it. But I thought it. If I had known that “you aren’t sophisticated enough to understand that I meant dick as a synonym for penis” was a valid defense, I might have said it. (But probably not. No balls?)

i the only one thinks it is wierd, hundreds of web posts without *any* data (the text messages) ?
i mean, without reading the offending text, we really don’t know what is going on, do we ?
am i missing something here ?

McGinn’s “response” appears to me to be yet another extension of a pathetic tendency to satisfy only himself.

Wanker.

I find this affair to be very mysterian: what is it like to be Colin McGinn?

@28
clever, jch, but not everyone here may know that McGinn favors a ‘mysterian’ view of consciousness/mind/whatever.

“That, I think, is the really worrying thing in this thread. Here we have our “progressives” going neo-con on things moral.”
I am not sure what this means. Care to expand on this for the slower people here?

PDNFTT

@speranza

Good to know. Thanks.

We’ve been giving students head since the days of Socrates.

Sure, js….but, back then, nobody ever objected to what Socrates did to his students! ;-)

CHRIST, WHAT AN ASSHOLE.
28,9; 30: slight further consideration leads me to wonder about a song I had been thinking of just the other day, by “? and the Mysterians” (pronounced “Question Mark”), “96 Tears.” I imagine all those jokes got made some time ago, however, it being so tempting, and the song being from 1966.
39: really, rather a lot the other way around.

This looks like a fairly obvious case of someone saying something that you just Should Not Say. One can dispute whether or not it’s ever acceptable to engage in sexual innuendo, but as a general rule it’s not worth the risk. It’s amazing that people still do it.

“Does it bother anyone else that McGinn thinks a handjob means masturbating? I’ve certainly never heard it referred to that way … ”

What else can it mean?

Slightly off topic but there is a popular range of hand lotion in the UK called ‘Hand Relief’ and I seem to be the only person who finds that funny.

THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERIANS. WE KNOW YOU CAN HEAR US, EARTHMEN. YOUR UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON AGENT MCGINN HAS BEEN NOTED. OUR WAR OF NERVES BEGINS.

BE CAREFUL HOW YOU PARAPHRASE US!

Ezra — we know a lot. He voluntarily stepped down from his job, despite denying he had done wrong, and despite being represented by a lawyer. Getting someone to do this without having pretty good reasons to fire them is virtually impossible (ask any university administrator). We also have his remarkably unfortunate self-justification — note that Henry could have posted this on Monday, but refrained until McGinn made his response.

Susan C — well, someone might argue that, since philosophy depends almost entirely on laundering intuitions, some diversity of personality types is a plus! (Just as someone, more sensibly, might argue that some diversity along the lines of race, gender, social class background, cultural background, etc, is essential).

LFC@52:

I don’t think Socrates ‘did’ much of anything to his students..

At the risk of spoiling my not very good joke, that was my point. Socrates was executed for, among other things, corrupting the minds of the youth. My comment relied on the ambiguity of the word “do” (much as McGinn’s played off the supposed ambiguity of “hand job”…except in the case of my comment, the ambiguity wasn’t just something I made up, nor did it involve sexually harrassing anyone).

#48 – on aspies/autism/”on the spectrum” and sexual harassment, there have been some very good posts at feministe, e.g., “How Not To Be A Creep”
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2013/01/09/how-not-to-be-a-creep/

A post titled “how not to be a creep” sure must be very good on the issue and very sensitive towards those with mental disorders.
(I did read the first 4 sentences and they were even worse than expected)

On Susan C.’s comment: I hate to say it, but I wonder if part of the problem is e-mail. In 1990 we used e-mail very little. Even to schedule a group meeting through e-mail could result in complaints, from those who styled themselves more humanistically oriented, usually, (which obviously doesn’t mean they were 100% socialized into “normal” social norms, in fact they were often eccentric, and sometimes hid that eccentricity somewhat by explaining it as their being the only “people person” in a crowd of techies) that it was impersonal and inappropriate.

Now people in all departments spend entire days writing, and many of them were not people who ever thought their lives were going to depend on their writing ability. Much less on near-constant direct personal communication with a large number of others.

#56 – it’s unfortunate that you stopped at sentence 4. Go back and read the block-quoted material, which is the point of the post.

#58 – Maybe email is perhaps part of the problem. I recall the time I sent an “amusing” email to a female junior colleague – entirely non-sexual – and found out months later (to my astonishment and chagrin) that it was taken as being angry and hostile.

But it’s not the whole problem. McGinn’s defense is that he was joking around with double entendres. The very best possible light to put on it is that he thought he was just flirting and he thought she didn’t mind.

But a guy who goes on flirting with a woman who doesn’t respond in a way that communicates that she likes it with is a creep. Touching, double entendres, overly familiar compliments, intrusive questions, and other “innocent” encroachments are creepy. (Remember Angela Merkel’s reaction to George Bush’s shoulder rub?)

And an older man with authority over a younger woman who behaves creepily toward her is a scary creep. She can’t ignore him or tell him to go to hell, because he’s got the power to be dangerous to her. She tries to accommodate him without encouraging him and he concludes that she’s not rejecting him, but maybe she’s teasing him. And that makes him scarier than ever. This is not news to anyone, is it?

Now, you can argue that it’s not fair to him or she didn’t let him know or maybe he’s just bad at picking up on social cues or whatever, but I don’t think you can argue that a woman in school or the workplace does not have the right to be free from creeps. It’s not her job to deal with his social incompetence, even if that’s all it is.

I read McGinn’s defense, with its ridiculous analogies about glass blowers and manicures, and I said to myself, this man is a creep. He probably is not an utterly bad person, and he could probably learn not be a creep, but the most important thing is that his students have a right to be free from his creepiness.

“Sigh. Where is Derrida when we need him?

1. The guy’s a professional academic. He writes for a living. Surely we can expect clarity.
2. The problem is not that what he wrote was unclear. It was (I imagine) perfectly clear to both sender and audience. Offensive too. It’s only now he’s facing consequences that he’s claiming what he wrote meant something different, and pretending that the reading capacity of a female grad student in his department is deficient. It’s not medium of communication; it’s power. As it turns out, he mistook the amount of power he had, not the meaning of what he wrote.
3. This ignores all the people who get busted for crude jokes and verbal intimidation in the workplace. Again, judging by the results of the inquiry (his resignation), he knew what he was saying, the initial audience knew, and an outside audience knew, even with lawyers on the scene.

As a writing teacher, I’m provisionally certain, on qualitative grounds, that people who spend a lot of time writing online are more audience aware than they used to be. There is nothing inherent in textual performance that makes clarity more difficult.”

All true Patrick. Which is why my comment ended with “These comments are not meant to excuse the actions described in the linked article which seem to go way beyond “miscommunication.””

It is quite possible, if all of the offending emails were posted here, most people here would side with the prof, if we actually saw the words that were written as opposed to 2nd 3rd and 4th hand accounts

That is why Colin McGinn posted a very strange and roundabout excuse for saying “handjob” and “blowjob” a lot.

“She can’t ignore him or tell him to go to hell, because he’s got the power to be dangerous to her.”

Yeah she can. In this instance she got him sacked (or put him in a position where he was compelled to resign). I have trouble seeing him as some of mastermind harrasser, if only because if you wish to do that then doing it via an auditable email trail isn’t a the best of plans. I thinks he’s probably stupid and this was inadvertent – in which case it makes me wish there was some other solution.

This harms her via her discomfort, but his other students are harmed by losing a supervisor they want to have, he is harmed by the loss of his job, and the research community is harmed by his withdrawal from research. That seems like inflicting disproportionate harm in response to something relatively mild. There must be some way of protecting her interests while not inflicting such damage on the interests of everyone else.

Explanation 2.0 is up: “The Genius Project” Some interesting passive voice sentences in this one (“Part of this project involved techniques for encouraging unconventional thinking, and the concept of ‘taboo-busting’ was deemed helpful towards this end.”), all the better to muddy questions of consent.

leederick@67: A graduate student who makes an accusation of serious misconduct against a faculty member, particularly one regarded as the departmental star, is risking her future even if the complain is valid and termination of the offender appropriate. I doubt that she did this thinking that she was in a position of power. McGinn’s own writing makes him out to be a jackass with an inflated sense of self-worth. I applaud the student for having the courage not to suffer in silence.

BTW, I saw this sort of misconduct during my graduate education. Some of it was sexual harassment but in one case a very prominent professor put his student on the hook for mis-using state grant money (the prof had been shifting grant resources to other projects). The student wasn’t prosecuted but that hardly excused his advisor’s conduct. The student was very much aware that a falling out with his advisor would likely be damaging to his degree and his future employment so he didn’t explain the true situation.

Hilarius@71. Sure, but the proposition was that the professor has power. It quite clear that he didn’t. It is just a fact that if you have an auditable email trail proving harassment, you are in a very strong position. If you can show victimisation after making a complaint you are in an even stronger position.

Now, you are right that academia is nepotistic and there are informal ways in which people can be disadvantaged. That sucks. But that’s not a direct power the claim was the professor had. It is more an indirect influence exercised by third parties through informal social networks and the community. And it isn’t as if summary sacking of direct harassers does anything to lessen this.

I also have to say that people don’t complain when they benefit, before things turned ugly, it must have been great to be with the in crowd being invited to the guys house to play tennis and have bbqs and co-author. But there were no objections then. But if people take a social dislike to you that is terrible. I think it is merely the flip side and you can not complain about the minuses while taking advantage of the pluses. The solution is more professionalism in academia and disassociating the personal and work environments, and not trying to be mates with people.

Henry@72. The solution isn’t do nothing and take one for the team. It is to have administrators enforce professionalism, rather then having your mate the mentor involved on a social level. Formal memo responses passed to third parties. Formal minuted meetings with third parties present. That will stamp out all but the most vile harassment.

I’m reminded of an observation a counselor made to a friend of mine who’d been the victim of domestic violence. Like a lot of victims was in shock about the whole thing, and had internalized the “he just couldn’t control himself” explanation. The counselor pointed out that of course her abuser could. He never, ever lashed at out at his boss that way, or at cops, or clerks in stores, or friends, or indeed anyone but her and past girlfriends of his. It’s just that he felt no obligation to exert any self-control around her and his other targets, not that he couldn’t.

Guys like McGinn are like that when it comes to e-mail, texting, and so on. They could put forth the effort they’d put into a written memo or phone call. But they feel at liberty to be contemptuous and careless, so they are. Plenty of people much older than them, and some with substantially more authority, do just fine with it…because they care.

“@63 Yes. You were clear. If it sounded to you like I thought differently, I miswrote, and I’m sorry.”

No apology needed. Just wanted to make sure I was clear.

Henry @63 So if your mentor and boss starts laying on the suggestive I-was-thinking-of-you-while-giving-myself-a-handjob shtick in email (which, from the CHE, is what appears to have happened)

Not just from CHE. Is there any disagreement between McGinn (at least in explanation 1.0) and the accusers on the raw facts? They both are saying that he was sending texts about hand-jobs intended to be interpreted sexually. His defense is simply that the sexual part is what made it funny, but she’s too dumb to laugh.

I have trouble seeing him as some of mastermind harrasser

Yeah, that’s because he’s not a mastermind, not because he’s not a harasser.

The solution … is to have administrators enforce professionalism

Umm, that’s what happened.

It is to have administrators enforce professionalism, rather then having your mate the mentor involved on a social level.

And when administrators fail to enforce professionalism, it is up to the mentor to draw the boundary. If he doesn’t, he pays the price for the lack of professionalism, even if the student had implicitly or explicitly consented up to that. Simple as that.

They then chuckle together in a self-congratulatory academic manner

For what it’s worth, one of my guests pointed out that my PhD defense contained the words “Parce que le Q-accouplement est parfait, il reste parfait sur tout corps et le système de Kolyvagin s’étend donc à tous les corps que nous avons considérés” but only my non-mathematician guests chuckled (in French, this sentence seems to literally mean “Because the ass coitus is perfect, it stays so on every body and the system of vagina parcel service can reach all the bodies that we have examined”). I think there is a Friends joke along these lines somewhere (Ross: and the Homo Erectus… (Rachel chuckles) Joey: Erectus? Rachel: Homo!) too.

From McGinn’s post on The Genius Project:

The student (hereafter NN) and I were engaged on what we called “the Genius Project”. The purpose of the genius project was to make NN into a truly original and outstanding young philosopher (one who could expect to find an attractive job later). Part of this project involved techniques for encouraging unconventional thinking, and the concept of “taboo-busting” was deemed helpful towards this end.

Toward the end:

Most of the genius project took a more conventional form, but it is within this context that they [two email messages] should be interpreted. They were not just gratuitous snippets of risque prose, sent out of the blue. I believe that had the genius project continued it would have borne significant fruit; and indeed a colleague has remarked to me that NN’s philosophical abilities went from “good” to “superb” following the several months during which I was attempting to make her into a “genius”.

Hmmmmm…..Pygmalion?

What do you mean, “oh dear”? Why in the hell do you think he just spent all that time on a mentorship? The whole purpose of accepting an apprentice in the first place was to get the ladies nice and dependent as new grad students, so he could lead her to a nice comfortable position of subordination and have a little fun with playful banter, and she can’t refuse, because of the implication.

Well dude, dude–think about it. She’s out there in the midst of original research with an advisor-supervisor she barely knows, you know? She looks around her, and what does she see? Nothing but an oceanic span of professors whose work doesn’t mesh with hers. Ahhh, there’s no one for me to run to for recommendation or thesis supervision! What am I going to do, demand he stop talking to me like this?

No, that’s not dark; you’re misunderstanding me, bro. Yeah, you are. Because if the girl said “no more of this” to him, then the answer is obviously is no more. But the thing is is she’s not gonna to say that, she’s never going to say that, because of the implication.

The implication that he might use his leverage as the senior party and something might go wrong with her progress toward a degree if she refuses to put up with how he jokes with her. Now, not that things are going to go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.

Why aren’t you understanding this? She–she doesn’t know whether she can stomach this kind of puerile banter from him. That’s not the issue. McGill’s not out to hurt his students! Why would he ever hurt his students?

I feel like you’re not getting this at all.

So McGinn took the invitation to break taboos as an invitation to break any and all taboos, even if that resulted in a student no longer being confident that her path to success ran through the development of her philosophical powers rather than sexual behavior meant to satisfy her intellectual supervisor?

Could McGinn think of no other taboos to break in conversation? How about the effect of the Cold War on American philosophy? George Reisch? John McCumber? Those philosophers who are willing to take philosophical work of Marxist scientists such as Haldane and Lewontin/Levins seriously are few and far between–perhaps Philip Kitcher or Peter Godfrey-Smith. Or what about breaking the taboo on the topic of the masculinization of reason as analyzed by Genevieve Lloyd? Or the unacknowledged effects of Eastern philosophies on important 19th and 20th century continental thinkers as analyzed by Graham Parkes and David E. Cooper?

THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERIANS. WE KNOW YOU CAN HEAR US, EARTHMEN. IN VIEW OF WHAT AGENT MCGINN HAS REVEALED ABOUT THE NATURE OF ‘THE GENIUS PROJECT’, OUR WAR OF NERVES WITH EARTH IS ON TEMPORARY HIATUS WHILE WE INVESTIGATE.

SUBJECT TO THE OUTCOME OF THIS INVESTIGATION, WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO STRIKE WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT. IN THE INTERIM, WE HAVE ADVISED AGENT MCGINN TO SHUT HIS CAKE-HOLE.

Henry:

Tennis matches – usually OK. Emails ‘joking’ about how the mentor has been thinking about you while masturbating. Profoundly not OK. This is so blindingly, profoundly obvious that anyone who doesn’t get it is surely either trolling or socially inept on a disturbingly deep level.

Of course emails about how the mentor has been thinking of etc are profoundly not OK. I never said anything to the contrary. My point was that Leederick’s suggestion to import a ‘corporate’ solution to the problem, to forbid all social interaction of whatever kind between professors/mentors and their students, is patently foolish. I spent a fair chunk of my life as a student and although I myself was not really friends with any of my professors when I was a grad student, I know of one or two people who did have friendly relations with their professors/mentors. The notion — which I read Leederick to be endorsing — that mentors should never be friends with their students is ridiculous. And anyone who is incapable of distinguishing between “having friendly relations with X” and “sending X emails suggesting you are thinking of them in a sexual context” is, in my opinion, “socially inept on a disturbingly deep level.”

A bit of a tangent, but I’m surprised by leedrick’s claim that:
[To prevent sexual harrassment r]un philosophy departments the way, say, accounting departments are run within large corporates
Do you have any actual evidence about that?
I don’t know that much about corporate culture in the US, but e.g. in the Enron movie there was a lot of talk about meetings in strip clubs and if I recall correctly Carly Fiorina has mentioned those as well. On the less “playing tennis” level, my understanding is that golf matches are a common way of networking an making deals in corporate America – and that certainly involves junior management golfing with senior etc. So while I see the theoretical argument that more institutionalization and less informality can decrease sexual harrassment, I don’t really see much evidence that corporate America (and most certainly not corporate Europe with business meeting in brothels & sex parties) is the place to look at for that.

Whoops…the link to Explanation 3.0 didn’t work. Here it is.

I know nothing of this McGinn character, but Explanation 3.0 immediately reminded me of The History Man. Not a good direction. As Henry says: Does he not have any friends who can tell him that for his own sake, he really needs to shut up?

The spelling is just another deliberate taunt at progressive moralists. Or something.

Shocking the bourgeois? Wasn’t this a big thing in 1917? Duchamp did it better without words.

Rich P.

McGinn was once a bit of an agenda-setter in philosophy of language and mind (much more the latter), and that earlier work was important to a non-trivial number of people in those fields, but I wouldn’t call him a leading light since the turn of the century, and not really even before then.

épater les bourgeois–isn’t that what Thomas Nagel has done in Mind and Cosmos with his favorable references to Intelligent Design proponents and eschewal of the use of any scientific findings to undermine the reductionist, materialist worldview? Isn’t that what Schumpeter did (and understood himself to be doing) with his sympathetic reflections on Marx? I don’t see any evidence of that kind of subversion in the exchange McGinn seems to have had with the graduate student. He seems to have just cut the ground out from her.

Cr@p like this happens all the time. A friend was doing an MS in Comp. Sci. at a famous school under a prof. so famous everyone here would recognize the name. He, despite being married, decided to fall in love with her, and tell her. There wasn’t anything she could do but run like hell. So every time I hear about some prof. getting forced to resign, I cheer. Loudly. These schmucks deserve far worse than they ever get.

Re: 114

The actual quote was “the allegations, as I have heard them, are not particularly
serious, compared to other cases I’ve heard about in which nothing has happened to the faculty member.” The allegations as reported in CHE concerned sending e-mails with sexual content. Philosophers do far, far worse to their students, and usually nothing happens.

No one has mentioned that Brian Leiter piped in to say that the allegations “are not particularly serious”

I think that’s a pretty clear misreading of what Leiter said. His point was that the _reported allegations_ were “not particularly serious” compared to many others where nothing happened to the perpetrator. (I think that if you read the passage carefully at all, that’s the _obvious_ meaning.) I think that’s also both obviously true and completely compatible with thinking that What McGinn did was unacceptable, and that he should face discipline. Everything else Leiter has said about the situation fits that reading, and nothing but this misreading fits any other.

Once again, the irony defense:

Maxim: if you can be misunderstood you will be. My talk of “the genius project” was (of course) tongue-in-cheek. I am not a genius. I am not sure the concept makes much sense in philosophy. Nor was I trying to make the student into a genius. The idea was to try to encourage intellectual quality and originality. Irony, remember.

http://mcginn.philospot.com/index.php?story=story130609-084859

it is that not only is it possible for someone to be both an idiot and an asshole, it’s actually quite common

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

I can’t believe I half-accurately remembered a 9 year old blog post.

My talk of “the genius project” was (of course) tongue-in-cheek.

Yeah dude, it was just another “joke” that everyone else was too stupid to get. Uh-huh.

Dsquared: ” if I have learned nothing else from my forty years on this planet (and many people think I haven’t), it is that not only is it possible for someone to be both an idiot and an asshole, it’s actually quite common.”

In addition (as a few people pointed out on other blogs), the odds are extremely high that he’s been doing stuff like this for many, many years, to many, many women. And probably much worse. When a person gets away with many things many times over many years (if not decades), I imagine that their caution deteriorates.

Someone should write a book about this called the Human Stain.

Dammit, I broke the link to Enough