Academia

For a long time, I’ve been convinced that we can only improve our teaching practice in a reliable, systematic way up to some threshold. Below that threshold, we can read books, talk to those who have more experience, and refine our teaching by growing our knowledge of best practices for getting students to learn. But once we’ve really effortfully done all that, further gains just aren’t something we can get through any sort of studied practice. We hope we continue to improve, but our best bet is just to figure out over time how to fully inhabit our teaching skin.

This was never meant as an excuse for complacency: Further reading and study might make improvement more likely, so we shouldn’t let up our efforts once the low hanging fruit begins to seem depleted. (For one thing, we might be wrong about its being depleted!) But the kind of progress we can hope to make is different above the threshold than below. Above it, for example, there are few standards of success that aren’t endogenous in important ways to questions of value that we settle at early stages of thinking about what we as teachers want for our students.

To put it roughly: I thought that below some threshold, teaching is a science, and above it, an art.

Harry’s contribution to the Fall 2019 issue of Daedalus is beginning to convince me otherwise.  The issue “Improving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience,” features thirteen essays that focus on “what goes on inside the ‘black box’ of teaching and learning.”

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And yes, this is a colour photo!

Since becoming a parent I’ve been experiencing a new flavor of gentle inter-generational antagonism. The thing that I call a “pack-‘n-play? My parents call it a “play-pen.” This linguistic development is amusing to them. I kind of think they’re right to be amused. I’m not sure if it’s funny that we can’t handle product names that evoke a sense of our children as animals, or if it’s funny that we can’t accept that our children basically are (sometimes) just animalistic things to be contained. But they’re right that there’s some plausible story behind this product’s evolution that says something sweetly laughable about those of us on this end of it.

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I’ve been on an extended hiatus from Crooked Timber. Trying to finish a book, teaching new classes, and generally trying to stay off the internet to get some new writing and thinking done. But I’m really happy to come back to announce that The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, a book I’ve been working on for six years and periodically blogging about here, goes on sale today.

With the help of a rave review in this morning’s New York Times. In the Times, Jennifer Szalai writes:

It’s a provocative thesis, but one of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence. He doesn’t have to resort to elaborate speculation or armchair psychologizing, relying instead on Thomas’s speeches, interviews and Supreme Court opinions. Just as jurists make ample use of the written record, Robin does the same.

…

The result is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive.

…

It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has made me think again.

If you’d like to read a little more about the book, there was a long excerpt of it two weeks ago in The New Yorker. It also has been widely reviewed—among other places, in Bookforum, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and National Review, which, despite the criticisms, called the book “thoroughly researched and engagingly written…a valuable and overdue engagement.” I was also interviewed about the book in Vanity Fair.

You can buy the book at Amazon, or if you prefer other vendors, there’s a list here.

I hope you will get the book. I worked long and hard on it, and not only do I think it does something new, but I think that you’ll learn something new. A lot of people have an understandable block against Thomas, not really wanting to hear much about him at all. This book won’t convince you he’s any less dangerous or toxic than you already think he is. Nor is it designed to do that. Instead, it will convince you that he’s far more interesting, and speaks to many more constituencies, than you might have thought. And is, therefore, perhaps, even more dangerous and unsettling. And thus worth learning about.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

As the UK’s Prime Minister has followed up his multiple parliamentary defeats with a devastating judgement by the Supreme Court on his honesty and competence today, an email from the Irish government popped into my in-box. Now, the Irish government is far, far from perfect, but this email is an example of the basic competence we expect from minimally adequate governments; it has informations about available resources and activities for businesses affected by Brexit.

“Enterprise Ireland is encouraging businesses to step into new markets and ensure that their exports are sufficiently diversified. Find steps to support Irish companies here
The Construction Industry Stakeholder Forum took place last week, where discussion was held around no deal Brexit. Businesses manufacturing or using CE-marked construction products could be affected, learn more here
Free seminars on “Practical steps to keep agri-food trade moving” continue over the next week. Invaluable advice and information will be available at events in Wexford and Cork, further details below.
Panel discussions and engagements around Brexit were held in the Government of Ireland Village at the National Ploughing Championships, where thousands of the Getting your Business Brexit Ready – Practical Steps booklets were distributed.”

It goes on in this vein with links to events, advice clinics and financial resources. I’ve been getting these emails for two years, now, and just wanted to post it here as a reminder of what governments are meant to do. Not lie and hide information about whether we’ll still have life-saving drugs, fresh food, access to markets or freedom of assembly.

Don’t get me wrong. Brexit is still all manner of cluster-f*ck for Ireland, and we won’t be offering more than the basic, self-serving cooperation to the UK any time, soon. But this is mitigation, folks. This is information. This is the minimum we should expect from an adequately functioning, medium-capacity late-capitalist state in the face of wholly man-made disaster.

*I have done some edits on September 24th, thanks to some input by Tim Waligore and Brian Carey, whom I thank.

There is no need to point out to the readers of this blog that the debate between gender critical feminists (henceforth GCFs) and the supporters of strong transgender rights* is both as lively and, unfortunately, as toxic as ever.

I have long been sitting on the fence with respect to this issue, for very obvious reasons of self-preservation – apart from organizing a small workshop on the topic last May, whose primary aim was to bring people together hoping that a genuine debate might ensue, rather than taking a stand.

I still have no plan to leave the fence properly (let alone for the fact that I am no expert, to say the least!), but let’s say that this post is a timid attempt to take a peek at what happens if I climb down from it and take a few steps. The aim is to very tentatively make three points which, to my knowledge, do not feature in the debate as it is currently unfolding -  although the first two are actually fairly long-standing insights within the feminist literature more broadly, beyond the gender identity debate narrowly construed. And by the way: I am very happy to be corrected if this is not the case and these points are actually being made in the current debate! So – bracing myself – here we go. [click to continue…]

I have no idea how he found it, but George Monbiot read an (open access) academic article that I wrote, with the title “What, if Anything, is Wrong with Extreme Wealth?‘ In this paper I outline some arguments for the view that there should be an upper limit to how much income and wealth a person can hold, which I called (economic) limitarianism. Monbiot endorses limitarianism, saying that it is inevitable if we want to safeguard life on Earth.

As Monbiot’s piece rightly points out, there are many reasons to believe that there should be a cap on how much money we can have. Having too much money is statistically highly likely to lead to taking much more than one’s fair share from the atmosphere’s greenhouse gasses absorbing capacity and other ecological commons; it is a threat to genuine democracy; it is harmful to the psychological wellbeing of the children of the rich, and to the capacity of the rich to act autonomously when it concerns moral questions (which includes the reduced capacity for empathy of the rich); and, as I’ve argued in a short Dutch book on the topic that I published earlier this year, extreme wealth is hardly ever (if ever at all) deserved. And if those reasons weren’t enough, one can still add the line of Peter Singer and the effective altruists that excess money would have much greater moral and prudential value if it were spent on genuine needs, rather than on frivolous wants.

Monbiot wrote: “This call for a levelling down is perhaps the most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse.”
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A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity.

“Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students.

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

“Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.”

One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”

We are right not to trust our phones. They serve several masters, the least of whom is us. They constantly collect data about us that is not strictly necessary to do their job. They send data to the phone company, to the manufacturer, to the operating system owner, to the app platform, and to all the apps we use. And then those companies sell or rent that data to thousands of other companies we will never see. Our phones lie to us about what they are doing, they conceal their true intentions, they monitor and manipulate our emotions, social interaction and even our movements. We tell ourselves ‘it’s okay, I chose this’ when we know it really, really isn’t okay, and we can’t conceive of a way out, or even of a world in which our most intimate device isn’t also a spy.

Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.

I ‘m really proud of this piece. The rest of it is here.

Comments here at CT v. welcome especially as there’s more I’d like to say about Kate Manne. Anyone here read ‘Down Girl, the Logic of Misogyny? Her thing is that while sexism is the rationalising part, misogyny is the law enforcement branch of patriarchy. (this is a scandalously short and impertinent summary. It’s a fantastic book and I recommend reading it.) I’m thinking that, analogously for surveillance capitalism, exploitation is the rationalisation and predation the policing mechanism. But not sure if that quite works, i.e. if the terms match up, as well as the overall analogy.

It doesn’t seem like 18 years, but it is. Babies born that day are now voters, among other things. Crooked Timber, 16-years old now, came out of the eruption of blogging that followed 9/11. In the atmosphere that developed after 9/11, many of the ways of thinking, arguing, abusing and obfuscating that we associated with the new populism became commonplace. Those who expressed critical opinions, even people of the stature of Nelson Mandela or Mary Robinson, were subject to character assassination by armies of keyboard vigilantes. Ordinary people who said something critical had no chance: recall Cindy Sheehan? Fake and fakish news and associated panics became part of the landscape. In the subsequent wars, particularly in the Middle East, criticisms of US or Israeli actions were blunted by swarms of amateur online experts comparing and undermining photographic evidence. Maybe we’d have ended up here anyway, but that terrible and murderous day set us on the path to the pit of Trump and Brexit, a pit that will be hard to climb out of.

UPDATE: I’m reminded via twitter that the anthrax scare was about a real thing, even though the anti-Muslim spin that was part of the panic around it was confected. I’ve changed the OP to reflect that.

I spent a couple of hours the other afternoon reading Amia Srinivasan’s wonderful paper [“The Aptness of Anger”](http://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/jopp.12130.pdf). One theme of that paper is that anger can be a fitting response to a moral violation and that our evaluation of whether someone should be angry does not reduce to instrumental considerations about whether being angry does any good. I find Srinivasan’s argument persuasive but I also found myself wondering about a side-issue that is not really dealt with in the paper. If anger is an apt response to a moral violation, where that violation might be a betrayal by a friend or global injustice, we obviously need an independent theory of morality to anchor our judgements about when anger is appropriate. After all, people get angry all the time when they are denied something they believe themselves entitled to, but the anger is only a candidate for being justifiable when they are actually entitled to that thing. (Srinivasan [has written eloquently about incels](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex), who are very angry at being denied something they are not entitled to.)

Some of the angriest people around at the moment are supposed to be the so-called “left behinds”, althouth perhaps relatively prosperous people often perform “being angry” on their behalf. Insofar are they are angry about the neglect that they and their communities have suffered at the hands of central governments, the lack of regional and industrial policies, or the growth of inequality, then their anger does seem to be a reaction that is indeed an appropriate response to a moral violation, namely, social and economic injustice. But a lot of the anger that we’ve seen stoked up in recent years has been anger towards “immigrants”, where “immigrants” denotes both actual immigrants and non-white people perceived as such by those who resent them. The “moral violation” that this anger corresponds to is the sense that those people don’t belong in the bigot’s safe space. It is the mere presence of such “foreigners” in a space the haters think of as being theirs and reserved for them that constitutes the perceived outrage and generates the anger. (Similar anger at mere presence of unwanted others can be seen in other cases, such as, for example, gentrification.)
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Here’s my latest piece at ACUE, this time on class participation, what it is, how to make it happen, and why we probably shouldn’t grade it (if you read it it says that we shouldn’t grade it, but I doubt that’s true in all circumstances). Here’s a taster:

Unfamiliar with the practice [of grading participation] I started asking faculty why they graded participation and what they counted. The standard response was that you have to grade it, “otherwise students won’t talk.”

I was skeptical. Whereas we can provide students with a reasonable understanding of what is required when writing an essay, taking a test, setting up an experiment, or making a presentation, participation is vaguer. But let’s assume that participation is, as colleagues tended to say, speaking in class—an action that is, in principle, readily observable and gradable. A number of problems arise.

The first problem is obvious: It’s not just talking, but talking productively, that we care about. Saying things that are interesting and useful to the conversation is a sign of good participation; saying things that are off-topic is a sign of bad participation. If we’re going to grade students’ talking, we should focus on quality, not quantity.

Students need to know this. But once they do, some feel pressure to impress you with correct or pat comments. In setting expectations, it’s hard to overstate that quality includes getting things wrong—for good reason. As a recent graduate wrote to me, “One thing I’m especially grateful for: I’m more willing to risk getting things wrong in discussion and writing than I used to be because you made it clear in class that making mistakes is part of engaging rigorously with philosophy and not something to fear. That seems obvious now, but it wasn’t always.”