Harry

I see via Larry Solum (an indirect route if ever there was one) that Alan Rubel has posted his paper “Privacy and the USA Patriot Act: Rights, the Value of Rights, and Autonomy” (forthcoming in Law and Philosophy) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

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Via Brian Leiter I see that David Horowitz has produced a list of the 100 most dangerous professors in the US. As with any such list, everyone will quibble with the details, but I shan’t insult any of the winners by suggesting they should be demoted. Brian congratulates philosophers Alison Jaggar (Colorado) and Lewis Gordon (Temple), to which I add my own particularly to Anatole Anton (SFSU) and to my former colleague Bob McChesney (Communications, Illinois). But jolly good show, all of you; keep up the good work! (And don’t drink and drive or play with guns — those activities actually are dangerous).

(Update: I’ve changed the link to the list, because I couldn’t get the other one to work. The original link is semi-available through Leiter).

In the comments to Kieran’s incendiary post, christine asks a clever trick question:

Hugh Laurie in House or Hugh Laurie in Blackadder?

The answer, of course, is

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Peter Levine wants to know what parents want their kids to be like. He reports the results of a decade-long survey asking parents what single quality they valued most for their child. The winner by far is honesty. For me, there’s no question: kindness. And you?

It’s starting to look as if the government is going to compromise on the Education White Paper (explained here), though it’s not clear what form the compromise will take. The debate’s been exciting, if a bit frustrating. As one friend said to me, what has come out pretty clearly is that a lot of people are remarkably satisfied with the state schools their children attend, or else it would be impossible to get so many people so excited about what is, in fact, not a very threatening white paper. That’s good. The critics are right, as I’ll explain later, to focus on admissions, not because the government is proposing any kind of retrograde step (it isn’t, as far as I can see, and I have, unlike lots of people who write about this, actually taken the trouble to read the white paper), but because the position the government has always had and continues to have is wrong and its about time that it gets changed.

But I’m surprised the government hasn’t put the case for the more controversial aspects of the white paper more forcefully, or at least gotten its friends to do so. Although I tend to side with the critics I’ve more sympathy with the government than most, and see this (as I, perhaps wrongly, didn’t see the debate about the 2001 White Paper) as a reasonable disagreement. The core of the case, as we’ll see, rests on the pervasive finding of school effectiveness research that successful schools have high quality managers. So the government is determined to improve the quality of management of schools, and this priority crowds out concerns with fairness etc when they conflict. This is neither venal nor stupid, even if you disagree with the priorities (as I think I do…)

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Chris Brooke really is excelling himself these days. First, a relentless (and funny, and good) take down of Anthony Browne’s pamphlet The Retreat of Reason. Then a slightly obsessive-seeming savaging of everyone’s favourite right-wing left-winger, Stephen Pollard. And cat pictures too. Enjoy him while he’s in such a good mood.

Max Hastings had an interesting piece in the Guardian during the break attacking the comments on History teaching in the recent QCA report. I haven’t read the report, so can’t evaluate his critique, but I can say that he gets one thing exactly right.

He singles out the ‘alarm call’ about the

perceived “lack of relevance” of history to pupils’ future working lives. This echoes the notorious remarks of Charles Clarke, when education secretary, dismissing medieval and classical studies.

and rightly knocks on the head the idea that everything in the school curriculum should be relevant to our working lives:

At the weekend, I glanced at some of my old school essays. The questions seem interesting: “Should one think of Henry II as a lawless and arbitrary monarch, or as the founder of an orderly legal and administrative system?”; “Why did Edward I succeed in Wales and fail in Scotland?”; “Can anything be said in favour of James I’s foreign policy?”
Even in 1961, one could scarcely argue that familiarity with such themes contributed much to employability. They were no more “relevant” to middle-class white teenagers then than to schoolchildren of West Indian or Muslim origins now. We addressed them, first, because education is properly about learning to think, and objectively to assess evidence; second, so that we knew something about a broad sweep of the history of the society to which, whether by birth or migration, we belonged.

He’s right to attack the utilitarian approach he identifies to the curriculum.

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Speaking completely selfishly, for me the worst immediate outcome of the 1997 Labour victory was Tony Banks’s inclusion in the government. I had not anticipated it (I gather that he, too, was “gobsmacked”), and I realised instantly that it meant he could no longer be a participant in the World Service’s Talking Politics program; his participation had been the icing on the cake, as it were. Very sorry to hear of his death, and my thoughts go out to his family. The BBC obit violates the norm of not speaking ill of the dead by mentioning his favourite football team. A cute account of his wit is here.

Update: A much fuller obit in the Grauniad.

I’m deeply disappointed in Daniel, Tom and Chris (especially Daniel, our house monitor of GG’s career) because this is the kind of news I expect to hear from them, not to have to provide by myself. Aren’t you all devotees?

BTW, do all the really unlikely contestants have the initials GG? Gary Glitter next, no doubt.

The Christmas issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement carries a piece by Steve Fuller defending Intelligent Design, though in a very roundabout way, and a piece by me which is very unkind about Intelligent Design but not about faith schools. (Both free content, accessible without registration). If anyone gets the paper edition, by the way, I’m curious how the photos turned out — I went through 2 45-minute photoshoots, which convinced me not to make a career change to become a model.

A.J. Julius posted an earlier version of this paper on his website a few months ago, and I’ve only just got around to blogging it. It is a crisp and powerful critique of Nagel’s recent defence of the claim that the scope of justice is limited by national boundaries (free content). Julius makes the same foundational assumptions as Nagel and shows, elegantly, that the boundaries of justice are nevertheless….well, global. I’m a big fan of Julius’s work, so I might be a bit baised, but I think its terrific. Forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs, presumably in the issue after the one that’s just been announced, so get it while its hot, as Larry Solum likes to say.

Interesting article by Steve Landsburg in Slate about how to calculate the opportunity costs for future income of becoming a mother. He’s reporting a study by Amalia Miller (pdf), who claims that delaying childbirth for a year in your twenties increases your prospective income by 10%. I was most interested in the method, and am even more interested in hearing what economists have to say about the method and the findings (open invitation). Landsburg on the method:

How does Miller know her findings are reliable? It would never do for her to simply compare the wages of women who gave birth at different ages. A woman who gives birth at 24 might be a different sort of person from a woman who gives birth at 25 and those differences might impact future earnings. Maybe the 24-year-old is less ambitious. Or worse yet (worse from the point of view of sorting out what’s causing what), maybe the 24-year-old started her family sooner precisely because she already saw that her career was going badly.

So, Professor Miller did something very clever. Instead of comparing random 24-year-old mothers with random 25-year-old mothers, she compared 24-year-old mothers with 25-year-old mothers who had miscarried at 24. So, she had two groups of women, all of whom made the same choices regarding pregnancy, but some of whom had their first children delayed by an act of chance.

The BBC is obsessed with the anniversary of Lennon’s death. For my own part I have four memories — the shock of Radio 4 (the Today Programme) announcing the death in the morning; the amazing sense of loss at school, mitigated only by the bizarre spectacle of Lennon-look-alike Nick P crying his eyes out all day long; somebody on Question Time saying that everyone would remember where they were when they heard about Lennon’s death, and finally, watching Not the Nine O Clock News that week (Thursday?) and wondering all the way through the show how they would respond to his death — and being first touched, and then shocked, by the way they did it (am I the only person who remembers this?)

Anyway, I’m deliberately posting this the day after the anniversary in order to alert you to 2 wonderful shows full of cover versions:

Mike Harding’s show, with numerous folkies covering songs from Rubber Soul (released 40 years ago this week? Amazing)

and

Lennon Live with numerous non-folkies covering Lennon songs, with varying degrees of success (My favourite: Teddy Thompson, whom I’d never heard before, and is eerie)

Other Lennon-related radio shows include a portrait narrated by Mark Ratcliffe and a play based on Ray Connolly’s reflections on his death.

Oh, and you can hear Libby Purves reminisce about him, too, but its a bit odd.

Here’s an interesting story about the UW system. The student government at UW-Eau Claire has voted to charge students a fee which would pay directly for pay raises for factulty and other instructional staff. The article is pretty good; the students who support the raise are clearly worried about their degrees being worth less as a result of the defection of professors who can get paid more elsewhere; the opponents see the move (rightly) as creeping privatization, in an environment in which there are moves among a significant group of legislators to cap both tuition and spending. Does anyone know if this is happening elsewhere?