From the category archives:
Academia
Gina’s post about David O’Brien’s chapter in The Art of Teaching Philosophy reminded me that I should tell you about the class our department (Philosophy) has for all beginning Teaching Assistants (beginning at Madison, whether or not they have already taught elsewhere). The focus is pretty relentlessly practical: providing them with strategies, techniques, and advice that will enable them to do better instruction in discussion sections. We do readings that we think will help them reflect on their teaching, but discussions of those readings are designed display the strategies and techniques we are trying to teach them. We also spend a fair amount of time trouble-shooting problems that they encounter over the course of the semester. And the instructor observes one section from each TA and gives feedback to them (fire-walled from any evaluation, to encourage honesty and authenticity).
Last week colleagues on the instructional resource team in our college asked me to give them a short document listing the 5 or 6 things I most wanted every TA to know and know how to do by the end of the semester and having written it, I thought it might be useful to post it here: feel free to direct your new, or not new, TAs to it (it should be useful whatever their discipline). Obviously it draws on and links to things I’ve posted here on CT over the years. And it is not supposed to be exhaustive: it’s just what I happened to prioritize when they asked me to give them something. Here goes:
This is a midsummer short and light hearted post, but I find that Summer is often the time when I am most reminded of my bodily existence, and of how naïve us philosophers are in forgetting (de facto, if not in principle) how much our thoughts and beliefs are embedded in our bodily experience. Indeed,often caused by our bodies. [click to continue…]
The value of individualism often comes up in attempts to make sense of the elusiveness of women’s empowerment. “Investing in women” has not uniformly yielded either the quick reduction in women’s poverty or the decrease in women’s adherence to sexist norms or deference to men policymakers had hoped it would. Of course, this is partly caused by the flawed equation of income with empowerment, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.
But it is often argued that women in the global South, and in South Asia in particular, do not have enough of a sense of themselves as individuals to want to form their “own” values or separate from the household (see, for example, the work of Veena Das and Naila Kabeer). I have always thought that there is something right about these claims.
At the same time, most of these claims about individualism are made in a course-grained way that is philosophically unsatisfying—and politically objectionable. The idea that South Asian women do not have their “own” values, in addition to serving as a justification for disrespect from political institutions, has always seemed to me to be downright implausible. After all, one has to know that one is separate from another person in order to make sacrifices for them, and many norms of femininity valorize self-sacrifice.
Soledad Artiz Prillaman’s wonderful book, The Patriarchal Political Order, is a gem for gender and development thinkers, because of the tools it provides for thinking beyond this course-grained individual/community opposition. The book is based on six years of qualitative and quantitative research across five districts in the Indian state of Madya Pradesh. (The dataset it is based on is itself a gem, but that’s for another time!)
Prillaman’s theory of women’s political agency is basically as follows: the fundamental unit of Indian political life is the household. The default setting for women is to participate in politics only by voting, and by expressing the same preferences through their votes that the senior men in their households do. This tendency can be understood is often an expression of self-interest within the status quo. Serving the interests of more powerful members of the household protects women’s access to goods that can be secured within the household, including protection from violence. It can also serve women’s interests outside of the household, insofar as women’s interests that can be secured by changes outside the household often align with those of their family members (women and men both, for example, might benefit from the presence of a new road nearby, or from a powerful family member getting a government contract).
Participation in microcredit self-help groups, according to Prillaman, causes women’s nonvoting political participation to increase. This happens because of the social connections women generate in these groups. Women talking to other women increases the salience of gender-based interests (like domestic violence) in their minds. It increased their skills at speaking in groups. And it decreased the costs of collective action, both by reducing startup costs (the self-help group is already there) and by spreading out potential punishments. And there are definitely punishments. Women in these groups experience backlash and violence, but they are less vulnerable collectively than they might otherwise be alone.
Okay, back to individualism. Prillaman’s analysis is particularly valuable, because it is fine-grained in a way that allows us to think more carefully about the values of individualism and community in women’s lives.
First, it specifies that what women gain is autonomy from the household where this is understood as a) the ability to conceive interests not shared with the household as capable of being politically pursued, and b) the ability to participate in political life independently from other members of the household. The rest of Prillaman’s analysis makes clear that autonomy from the household is not the same thing as what philosophers would call “personal autonomy.” Since Prillaman accepts that women’s default behavior is self-interested and reflective, she does not have to claim that their ability to have and reflect on desires, or even their ability to identify desires as their own, is impeded by the status quo. (Though she as not as consistent as a philosopher might like about the use of the term “autonomy.”)
Second, because she emphasizes that autonomy from the household can be expressed and developed through immersion in women’s groups, she offers a view that values something like autonomy while avoiding some of the troublesome implications of more mainstream views about women’s empowerment. As Kabeer has noted across her work, women in what she calls “corporate societies” may not value—and may have good reasons not to value—”striking out” on their own. This is often thought to be a strike against autonomy, and it probably is, but we need to get clearer about what form of autonomy it is a strike against.
Prillaman helps us see how joining a group can increase one’s autonomy; one develops an enhanced sense of what one wants and desires, and an enhanced ability to achieve these wants and desires, through involvement with supportive others. It also makes clear why gender and development theorists shouldn’t jettison the value of autonomy, and adjacent values like political agency, altogether. Not every collectivity will equally be a place where women’s values are respected or cultivated, or one that makes action that realizes the more aspirational among these values likely to be effective.
… at least in the “Anglosphere”
One of the striking features of the racist riots in Britain has been the wide spread of ages among those (nearly all men) convicted so far[1]. This is unusual, since criminal violence of all kinds is most commonly associated with young men. And it’s a counter-example to what has become a standard talking point.
The belief that young men have shifted strongly to the right and far-right has become a background assumption for lots of political journalism. But there’s plenty of evidence that, in Britain and other English-speaking countries[2], both young men and young women are more likely to support left and centre-left parties. The recent UK election gives a striking example
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The age gradient here is stunning. That probably reflects the division over Brexit a disaster inflicted on the young, primarily by nostalgic retirees (the vast majority of this group voted for Tories/Reform in 2024). If you squint you can see a slightly larger gender gap among young voters than in older cohorts. But, as is true elsewhere, this reflects a leftward shift among young women, rather than a move to the right by men.
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As requested by a couple of commenters, I’ve created a separate thread to discuss the issues raised by commenter “closet conservative” in response to my post on US academia. I’ll moderate, but not participate
Earlier this week, I received my contributor copy of The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch.[1] It’s an exciting book, and I’m proud to have gotten to contribute to it. My chapter on advising graduate students about teaching was coauthored with an excellent teacher (and researcher), a near-former grad student, Britta Clark.
I’m eager to read all the chapters. Welch often likened the book to a series “hallway chats,” or unplanned encounters in the hallway when a colleague tells you about a new teaching strategy she’s trying out. I’ve walked away from many such chats with great new ideas to adopt, and I know I’ll get a lot out of reading this.
I also know I won’t go in order. When the book arrived, I skipped straight to David O’Brien’s chapter on “Teaching with Puzzles.” O’Brien is a thoughtful, imaginative teacher and a wonderful writer, so I knew the chapter would be great. But I was inspired to start with his chapter by something else I’d been reading. I got an early look at Anthony Laden’s new book, Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. I’ll write more about it once it’s published later this year.[2] But I’m going spoil one tiny morsel by writing about it now, because it struck a chord and—along with O’Brien’s chapter—motivated me to try something new.
I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.
The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.
But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are openly anti-science on a wide range of issues, notably including climate science, evolution and vaccination.
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Among many other challenges in dealing with the failure of urban policy in Australia, the Minns (NSW state) government is faced with the task of renegotiating, or repudiating, the disastrous set of contracts for toll roads in New South Wales made by its predecessors (Labor and Liberal) with the Transurban group. As a review by Allan Fels and David Cousins has found, the government is at risk of being held hostage by toll operators. According to Fels and Cousins, immediate legislation is needed “as a backup to negotiations and to give the government power if necessary to determine final outcomes”.
This is by no means an isolated case. The failure of the National Electricity Market, premised on the idea of competition between private companies, has led state and federal governments to re-enter the business of electricity generation, storage and transmission. The disastrous experiment with private prisons in NSW is being unwound. Plans for the eventual privatisation of the NBN, established in response to the failure of the privatised Telstra to deliver national broadband, have been abandoned.
In the United Kingdom, where the Thatcher government of the 1980s led the way in privatisation, the complex and difficult process of renationalisation has been going on even longer. Rail privatisation was partially reversed with the renationalisation of Railtrack under the Blair Labour government, further limited under the Tories, and is now likely to be completely reversed.
The UK’s new Starmer government is also grappling with the impending failure of Thames Water, privatised under Thatcher and stripped bare by its private owners. Australian readers won’t be surprised to learn that the “millionaires factory”, Macquarie Group, was a leading player here.
The end of the UK’s private finance initiative (PFI), the model for Australian public-private partnerships, is already producing huge problems. But it is now clear to everyone that dealing with these problems is better than persisting with the hopeless failure of PFI.
Even Thatcher’s greatest political success, the sale of council homes, looks a lot less appealing in light of the current housing crisis in the UK, paralleling that in Australia. It seems clear that governments will need to re-enter the business of building and operating social housing in big way.
In fact, the failures of privatisation are numerous and obvious, while unambiguous successes are hard to find. Claimed examples, such as the pharmaceutical enterprise CSL, turn out, on closer examination, to have used public money to build private empires.
Why, then, was privatisation such a popular policy, at least among those who dominated the policy debate from the 1980s until recently?
The simplest explanation is that politicians saw privatisation and private infrastructure as a way to get access to a big bucket of money, which could be spent on popular projects without the need to raise taxes. This was a fallacy, refuted many times over, but resurrected just as often in zombie form. Either the government hands over the right to collect revenue to private operators, as in the case of toll roads, or the public forgoes the earnings of government business enterprises, as with asset sales.
Even now this lesson has not been fully absorbed. On the one hand, the Victorian Labor government has begun the process of reversing Jeff Kennett’s privatisation of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. On the other, having sold its land titles office, Labor is now poised to sell the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry where it has already increased charges for the provision of legally required information.
Economists who advocated privatisation mostly avoided this silly error. Indeed, the NSW Treasury repeatedly warned against treating private provision of infrastructure as a “magic pudding”. But, under the influence of neoliberal ideology, they committed a subtler error. Rather than examining the fiscal outcomes of privatisation, they assumed public investments should be subject to a large risk premium to make them comparable to private alternatives. This premium was not needed to cover the actual loss from failed public investments, which has historically been low. Rather, it reflected the mysterious “equity premium” demanded by private investors in financial markets. At least until the GFC, neoliberal economists relied on the “efficient markets” hypothesis to conclude that the price observed in financial markets must be the right one. In a world where meme stocks and crypto scams are now a central part of the financial system, such a hypothesis is no longer credible.
Finally, of course, there were huge profits to be made in the financial sector from the sale process and from exploiting weaknesses in the regulation of privatised companies. The list of former politicians who have sold public assets and ended up with lucrative post-politics careers is, incidentally, rather long.
The era of privatisation is nearly over, at least in Australia and the UK. But cleaning up the mess left behind will take years, or even decades.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old.
First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.
It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.
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