Academia

At the Château of Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire.

We’re in another round of concern about the “death of the book”, and, in particular, the claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books. I’m not going to push too far on the argument that this complaint is ancient, but I can’t resist mentioning the response of my younger brother, who, when asked if he wanted a book for Christmas, answered “thanks, but I already have one”). That was around 50 years ago, and he went on to a very successful legal career.

Fifty years ago, the main competitors for books were TV and radio. Critics at the time decried the passive mode of consuming these broadcast media, compared to the active engagement required by reading. Now, in many respects, the complaint is the opposite. The various services available on the Internet are interactive, and engrossing, finely tuned to keep our attention.
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I really liked and admired Agnes Callard’s essay, “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead” in The Point (September 29, 2024) [HT Dailynous]. My post is, despite some quibbles, primarily about amplifying a point Callard (Chicago) makes. I do so not just because there is considerable overlap between our positions (recall here and here), but also because she advances the discussion on the nature of campus speech.

Before I get to our agreement, I accentuate one difference first. Callard presupposes as a normative or practical ideal that universities are sites of leisure: “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” On Callard’s view this is only possible once “a world of justice, peace and plenty” has been achieved. And because we are not there yet universities engage in a bunch of non-intrinsic activities: “Forced to find a place for itself in a world unfriendly to sheltered gardens, the university employs police, hedge-fund managers, construction companies, a fundraising office and PR teams.”

Now, I have remarked before (in responding to Jennifer Frey here) that the serious cultivation of leisure is very far removed from the public ethos I inhabit (in a relatively underfunded public university). Students and faculty (as well as the PR teams) are like hamsters kept on a treadmill of busy-ness often without obvious relation to any intrinsic nature of the university. I am increasingly convinced that this contributes to the existential and medicalized psychological crises among our students. So, Callard’s comments resonate.

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Over the eight decades following the end of World War II, the US has taken part in dozens of land wars, large and small. The outcomes have ranged from comprehensive victory to humiliating defeat, but all have received extensive coverage. By contrast, the US Navy’s admission of defeat in its longest and most significant campaign in many decades, has received almost no attention. Yet the failure of attempts to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping has fundamental implications for the entire rationale of maintaining a navy.

Operation Prosperity Guardian was launched in December 2023, following a series of attacks on shipping undertaken by Houthi rebels. The US dispatched a carrier strike group, led by USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and supported by ships from the Royal Navy and other European forces. Despite intensive bombardment of Houthi positions, attacks on shipping continued and traffic through the Suez canal fell by 70 per cent.

In July, the Dwight D. Eisenhower quietly returned to returned to Norfolk, after what the Navy correctly described as “a historic nine-month combat deployment” but not historic in a good way. The strike force without achieving any of its goals. And then, in late August, came the official admission of  defeat As reported by Voice of America:

Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who heads the U.S. naval efforts in the Middle East said that not only have U.S. strikes and defensive efforts done little to change the Houthis’ behavior, it now appears unlikely the group will be swayed by military force.

“The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system,” Wikoff told an audience in Washington, speaking via video from U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

“We have certainly degraded their capability. There’s no doubt about that. We’ve degraded their ability,” he said. “However, have we stopped them? No.”

Why has this failure attracted so little attention? Why, for example, has it not even been mentioned by either side in the course of the Presidential election campaign? The answer, quite simply, is that the strategic rationale for the mission turned out to be spurious. “Vital shipping lanes” are not actually vital at all.

The closure of the Suez canal has, indeed imposed higher insurance costs on shippers using the canal, and has led much of the traffic to be diverted to the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope. But the overall impact on freight rates has been modest, and any effect on global economic activity has been too small to be observable. 

There shouldn’t have been any surprise here. Despite some hyperbolic claims at the time, the six-day blockage of the Canal in 2019 (due to the grounding of the Ever Given) caused only modest disruptions, with massive insurance claims being quietly settled for much smaller amounts

More notably, the Canal was closed for lengthy periods in the 20th century allowing studies of the economic impacts. These turned out to be very small except for India and Pakistan, both of which were then heavily dependent on trade with the UK and Europe.

And what is true of the Suez Canal is just as true of other “vital shipping routes”, such as the Straits of Malacca. It’s almost always better to take the long way around (for example through the Sunda straits or even through Australian waters in the Southern Ocean) than to fight a war to keep a short cut open.

On the other side of the coin, the failure of Russian attempts to block Ukraine’s exports of wheat and grain provides further lessons on the limits of naval power. Ukraine’s tiny navy was wiped out on the first day of the 2022 invasion. But Russia’s much-touted Black Sea Fleet has fared little better, being driven from its Sevastopol base to ports in Russia, out of reach of Ukrainian missiles. By sailing close to the western coast of the Black Sea, ships carrying Ukrainian grain can be protected by land-based defences, while sailing in waters too shallow to permit attack by submarines.

In summary, as a recent commentary put it, the failure of Prosperity Guardian poses an “existential threat” However, the threat is not to the world economy but to the US navy and, indeed, all the navies of the world. If keeping “vital trade routes” open is neither militarily feasible nor economically important,  a large part of the rationale for surface navies disappears.  

It’s unlikely that defeat by the Houthis will have much effect on perceptions of the US Navy in the short run. But with so many other demands on the defense budget, the rationale for maintaining a massive, but largely ineffectual, surface fleet, must eventually be questioned.

I haven’t discussed the broader horror of the various Middle East wars, which gave rise to the Houthi attacks. My long-standing view is that the US can do nothing useful and, beyond humanitarian aid, should do nothing to help any party. Please don’t derail discussion by talking about this.

Kids today probably don’t know about punched cards, but when I was at school we all had to play around with them a bit as we learnt about state-of-the-art computing …. But the technology derives from weaving, and from the Jacquard loom of 1804.

One of the most interesting developments in the little world of political theory / philosophy in recent years has been the mass resignation of the editorial teams of both Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Journal of Political Philosophy. Public statements from both groups suggested they were disturbed by their existing publishers’ injunctions to publish in higher quantities, perhaps at the cost of academic quality. Both ultimately moved en masse to found new open access journals – allowing them to continue their intellectual traditions with guaranteed independence. Neither P&PA nor JPP ceased to exist, as such; but both entered an odd, editor-less period, in which their futures appeared uncertain.

All of this raised wider questions for academic publishing: would these moves help weaken the for-profit, pile-’em-high business model of commercial journal publishing, in favour of a pro-bono model? Well, that might depend on the academic community continuing to boycott the journals in question. An enduring boycott might cause publishers to reflect that pressuring academics to do things they aren’t comfortable with can come with high costs. It might increase the bargaining power of editorial teams who had not yet jumped ship. In the meantime, we might find that the pro bono model works, even flourishes.

Today, however, brought the news that Philosophy & Public Affairs now has a new editorial team, and is asking for submissions once more. Will this undercut any pressure on commercial publishers to reform their practices? Prediction is perhaps a fool’s game. But consider this a space for armchair prognostications! To be clear, what I am interested in is informed discussion of the likely ramifications for journal publishing, at least within our little field. What won’t pass moderation are comments on any of the personalities involved. Those are not our topic.

Back in 1991 my co-blogger here at Crooked Timber, Elizabeth S. Anderson, reminded every one of the significance of John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living (Ethics, 102(1): 4-26). She situated Mill’s views on the matter in the context of a debate with Bentham (and Parfit) over the nature of the good in which Mill wanted to defend a hierarchy of goods in an empirical fashion. In the paper, it’s Mill’s actual life that is the paradigmatic experiment in living “or a valid test of a conception of the good,” (p. 15; see also the use of ‘disconfirmation’ on p. 16.)

What’s striking about this conception of an ‘experiment in living’ is how first-person-ish it is. In Mill’s case the experiment was done on him by his father, and he himself could refute it in virtue of the crisis he experienced and the lack of remedy Bentham’s theories afforded. As Anderson notes this is ultimately a quest for self-understanding. (p. 24) As she explains, “The crucial test for a conception of the good is that it provide a perspective of self-understanding which is both personally compelling (has normative force for the agent) and capable of explaining and resolving her predicament-the reasons for crisis and for recovery from it.” (p. 24) An experiment in living is both epistemic and therapeutic in character.

In what follows, I am not mostly interested in these features of experiments in living. But they do lurk in the background of what I am after.

About a decade ago, my friend Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) also drew on Mill in his “Expanding the justificatory framework of Mill’s experiments in living.” Utilitas 27.2 (2015): 179-194. Here “experiments in living are meant to provide the engine of social progress: not only do we have the opportunity for improving our cultural and moral condition, but we can also better discover why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful.” (179) Notice the first-person plural; the perspective is clearly social and collective in character. The experiment still has an epistemic quality, but now it is primary a means toward discovery and social progress.” Interestingly enough, Muldoon builds a vindicatory aspect — “why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful” — into his approach.

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I work at a very large University. I am the parent of a child who has just started secondary school, and of one in the middle of their primary school journey. I am currently taking what in the UK is called a Level 2 Adult Education course. In all four of those domains – and more – there is a conspicuous absence of  a streamlined place to access, or input, material – be it learning materials; homework; stuff to mark; lecture slides; lists of students; exam dates; you name it. Things are instead, scattered through a multiplicity of platforms and apps, with no particular rationale, order, or clear chain of command. [click to continue…]

My latest in The Guardian

Announcements from major employers, including Amazon and Tabcorp, that workers will be required to return to the office five days a week have a familiar ring. There has been a steady flow of such directives. The Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, attracted a lot of attention with an announcement that workers would be required to attend the office for a minimum of 50% of the time, while the NSW public service was recently asked to return to the office at least three days a week.

But, like new year resolutions, these announcements are honoured more in the breach than the observance. The rate of remote work has barely changed since lockdowns ended three years ago. And many loudly trumpeted announcements have been quietly withdrawn. The CBA website has returned to a statement that attracts potential hires with the promise, “Our goal is to ensure the majority of our roles can be flexible so that our people can work where and how they choose.”

The minority of corporations that have managed to enforce full-time office attendance fall into two main categories. First, there are those, like Goldman Sachs, that are profitable enough to pay salaries that more than offset the cost and inconvenience of commuting to work, whether or not they gain extra productivity as a result. Second, there are companies like Grindr and Twitter (now X) that are looking for massive staff reductions and don’t care much whether the staff they lose are good or bad.

Typically, as in these two cases, such companies are engaged in the process Cory Doctorow has christened enshittification, changing the rules on their customers in an effort to squeeze as much as possible out of them before time runs out.

We might be tempted to dismiss these as isolated cases. But a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.

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In an article published last year, I tried to show that our moral judgement is heavily biased when it comes to migration. For instance, an action that we regard as a minimum moral obligation towards compatriots becomes, towards migrants or foreigners, non-obligatory and even forbidden. I tried to show that even ethicists well disposed towards foreigners – cosmopolitans, so to speak – suffer from the same bias. Nationalism stifles creativity to such an extent that we are often unable to imagine doing to foreigners what it is a minimum moral obligation towards compatriots.

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Like most academics these days, I spend a lot of time filling in online forms. Mostly, this is just an annoyance but occasionally I get something out of it. A recent survey in which the higher-ups tried to get an idea of how the workforce was feeling, asked the question “Do you think of the University as We or They?”.

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