Via Larry Solum, an interesting article by Sarah Waldeck on private university endowments in the US. She analyses the data, arguing that it is more informative to look at endowment:expense ratios than absolute endowment sizes (on the ratio ranking, Harvard is #9 and Grinnell #1, whereas on endowment size Harvard is #1 and Grinnell #25). Waldeck points out that taxpayers subsidize these endowments (by giving substantial tax deductions to donors) and suggests that one reason universities benefit from largesse is that they find it easy to absorb large amounts of money and so are attractive to donors. They also, unlike foundations for example, have no obligation to spend the money! She is pretty convincing that there is no good literature defending the accumulation of endowments. But, like Solum, I am a bit skeptical of some of her proposals for taxing and regulating endowments. In particular, in so far as her aim is to lower tuition across the board, that seems a regressive measure: regulating endowments so that they lower tuition ends up reducing the price of an elite education for children of the wealthy (most of these schools already have incredibly low true tuition for children from non-wealthy families). Solum:

[click to continue…]

The Spencer Foundation has just announced a small grants program, specifically to encourage philosophers to work on issues in education. The grants are up to $40k and the application process is relatively easy. This is part of a larger long-term Intitiative to help build Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice. (Full disclosure: I’ve been working with the Spencer Foundation over the past couple of years to develop this intitiative, and am, with Mike McPherson, its co-director). One of the things I have noticed during my career is how many people who work in ethics or political philosophy start doing some medical ethics or bioethics, usually after being enticed, or invited, by medical schools to comment on various issues. Although there are numerous fascinating and difficult issues in the institutional world of education, it seems to me that far fewer normative philosophers get pulled into that arena, and the Initiative is an attempt to start to correct that. We’re especially hopeful that good philosophers who are nearing (and reasonably confident of getting), or have just gotten, tenure will explore this opportunity, even if they haven’t previously worked in this area.

One other comment. I kind of fell into working on educational issues, and did so before getting tenure. I probably would have done it anyway, but the strong encouragement of a couple of senior colleagues was a big help in assuring me that by taking up a neglected field I was not doing something that would be disapproved of. I suspect that some younger scholars worry, and usually wrongly, that philosophy of education and applied ethics generally might be frowned upon, so if you are a senior philosopher and have a junior colleague whom you think should take this up, it would be a good idea to tell them about it, approvingly, and directly.

Amartya Sen turns 75 later this year (on November 3rd, to be precise), and we are going to celebrate this. In academic style, of course. “Kaushik Basu”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/kb40/ and “Ravi Kanbur”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/sk145/ have edited a 2-volume Festschrift, aptly called “Arguments for a Better World“:http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199239993. I am not sure when Sen is going to read those 1400 pages, but that detail shouldn’t spoil the party. And Basu and Kanbur are also organising, together with the Institute for Human Development “a conference”:http://amartyasenconference.net/ to celebrate his birthday. That event will take place in New Delhi on the 19th and 20th of December. “The Call for Papers”:http://amartyasenconference.net/call-4-paper.asp, which so far I haven’t seen circulating, is only open to young economists and social scientists, with ‘young’ being defined as those under 40. It’s a pity, though, that political philosophers are not invited to submit papers, given Sen’s important contributions to that field.

Youtube is where BBC 4 documentaries go to live, I see. Two lovely documentaries: one on John Wyndham , and another on Nigel Kneale; two of the great creators of British science fiction united by their dependence on utterly sensible and reliable heroes (and in Wyndham’s case, heroines — as the documentary points out, the Midwich Cuckoos aside, he often seems to be a proto-feminist), unmarred by self-absorbed hang-ups and disorderly emotional lives. Kneale founded the British tradition of dark but humane television scinece fiction, with 1984, Quatermass, The Year of the Sex Olympics, and The Stone Tape (which scared me witless as a kid, and which I now realise my mother bought a colour television in order to watch). Many Dr. Who stories are just recycled Kneale stories; I have a special affection for the movie Quatermass and the Pit because I watched it on TV the night of my job interview at Madison.

Wyndham is especially hard to get good information on: he’s almost absent even on the web, so it is great to have an insight into his life, even though a bit too much time is spent on the novels and films. One mystery that is not solved is what happened to all his writings prior to The Day of the Triffids. I’ve managed to get hold of just one of the pre-Triffids books, The Secret People, which is derivative and slow-paced, if readable, but nothing like as good as his 50’s and 60’s novels. (Wyndham fans might want to put pressure on my erstwhile colleague Noel Carroll, who once proposed to write a book about Wyndham’s work, which would be lovely to read if only he’d write it).

This should be Kieran’s thread really, since he came up with the concept. But, having made that acknowledgment, I’ll jump in. His first nomination is the truly awful Chasing Amy: I watched 15 minutes before deciding that there was a perfectly good toilet to clean in the other room. henry (not the famous one) proposes You’ve Got Mail, which sounds plausible. But my nomination is more serious: The House of Sand and Fog. I rarely dislike a movie enough to warn people against it, but this is one of the worst, and most unpleasant, movies I’ve watched. (I see that someone has vandalised the wikipedia entry on this one, saying, hilariously, that it and some of its actors were nominated for awards!)

The premise is implausible. A woman has her house taken from her, by mistake, for failure to pay a business tax that she did not genuinely owe. She had 8 months to correct the mistake and did nothing. Now, the only possible explanation in the circumstances is that she was severely depressed. Whatever plausibility that explanation has is undermined by the fact that, on screen, the actress has no sign at all of being, or ever having been, depressed. She seems bratty, to be sure, but not ill. Now, an exiled Iranian general purchases the house at a steal at an auction from the County. He is, unfortunately, played by Ben Kingsley, who seems to be the only actor in the movie who can act, thus unwittingly preventing it from being hilarious (up to the point at which it turns gratuitously nasty). He is also, understandably given his own circumstances, unwilling to give up the house and the bounty that it represents, so a battle of wills ensues, in which Jennifer Connelly is assisted by the most wooden actor I’ve ever seen in a big movie (he makes Arnold, on a bad day, look like Olivier by comparison — Dolph Lundgren territory), a rogue cop who leaves his happy family for a depressed alcoholic (Connelly) – that part of the story seeming plausible only because Connelly is manifestly not a depressed alcoholic, but looks healthy, happy, and well-made up every time she appears onscreen.

Why did I watch to the end? Well, the box promised a surprising ending, and the only morally acceptable ending seemed to me to be one in which the general kept the house and Jennifer Connelly and her beau descended into the pits of daytime TV. Below the fold is a short spoiler that will save you from wasting your time:

[click to continue…]

It’s nice to have “Fafblog back”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/audacity-of-hope.html.

That is all.

You know when you wake up in the middle of the night, having dreamt of a great idea. And maybe you wake up on a plane, with your chin and a fair bit of drool on your chest, and, waking, you still think it’s a good idea. And then, the next day as you disembark you think to yourself, ‘wow, that’s a good idea’. You’re probably just jetlagged and waiting for your soul to catch up with you, as William Gibson would say.

Here it is; a transitional use of technology until those instantly downloading paper-like tablets intersect with the demand curve.

When you wake up on a plane after your pretend night’s sleep, and you’re eating the rubber omelette or the semi-defrosted muffin, you don’t want Internet connection and crumbs in your laptop (and the expectation that you’ll do work). What you really want is your morning paper.

In Brussels where there’s a big market of expats you can buy a locally printed version of your home newspaper. The publisher sends an electronic version of the day’s paper to a local printer and it gets delivered to the shops along with the national papers. It’s not on newspaper print, but it’s a more or less identical paper version of your daily comfort. It’s kind of an umbilical cord, and a good bit cheaper than the air-mailed version you get the next day.

Well, why not have this on planes? Stick one of those printers somewhere in the galley (where there’s loads of room…) and let passengers pay a premium to order their paper in advance and have it delivered with their rubbery breakfast. Then you get to read something a bit more timely than the in-flight magazine and get off the plane fully up to speed on the markets, international news and celebrity gossip. How cool would that be?

Nearly five years ago (it’s a bit terrifying to think how long I’ve been blogging here), I wrote a “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/10/15/indexing-as-artform/ on the artistic, humorous and malicious uses of book indexes. Now this bit from the _LRB_ describing Hugh Trevor Roper’s revenge on his Cambridge college.

bq. Trevor-Roper had taken the title of Lord Dacre of Glanton, and had left the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford for the mastership of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. His years at Peterhouse (from 1980 to 1987) were far from happy. An ultra-reactionary caucus attempted to frustrate the master’s attempts – however cautiously liberal – to reform the college. …As it happened, the doings of 17th-century Peterhouse featured in the splendid collection of essays he published in the year of his retirement, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans. The index entry for ‘Cambridge Colleges, Peterhouse’ betrayed uncanny parallels, some believed, with Trevor-Roper’s perception of its members in the 1980s: ‘high-table conversation not very agreeable . . . four revolting fellows of; main source of perverts’. Just as admirers of his hero Gibbon often head straight for the footnotes, so the first port of call for connoisseurs of Trevor-Roper is the index.

Here’s one of the few bits of parenting advice I offer my students: Do not allow your child to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian until they have seen Spartacus.

Other nominations of films that must not be watched in the wrong order?

I’ve been meaning to write a review of John McGowan’s American Liberalism: An Interpretation For Our Time for some time now. He’s a friend. I read the first draft and hashed it out with the author himself at length. The final version is much better. But it’s taken me a while to recharge for a second go. I’ll just pick on one point:

Liberalism, both as a contingent historical fact and as a matter of its most fervently held principles, is a response to pluralism. We reach here the closest liberalism ever gets to metaphysics. By metaphysics, I mean a claim to have identified an unalterable and universally present fact about the universe. (pp. 40-1)

[click to continue…]

I’ve received an email from the political science department at King Saud University about the detention and imprisonment without charge of one of their colleagues, Matrook Al-Faleh, asking “all political science departments and civil society organization to exert all their pressure upon the Saudi government to release” Al-Faleh and other prisoners. The likely reason for the arrest is that Al-Faleh (who has protested in the past against torture and prison conditions in Saudi Arabia) had written a general email criticizing conditions at Buraida General Prison. Human Rights Watch has “more here”:http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/05/21/saudia18895.htm. The letter itself is after the fold.

[click to continue…]

Stephen Hayes was on NPR a few minutes ago complaining about how Scott McClellan wasn’t very interesting, because he was just delivering ‘left wing blogworld talking points.’ This complaint itself, of course, being itself a re-iteration of a “Karl Rove talking point”:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/05/28/rove_disputes_mcclellan_book.html. The deeper you go in …

(title stolen from “The Poor Man”:http://web.archive.org/web/20070101010304/http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/03/24/all-quiet-on-the-western-front/)

In a classic discussion of scientists sampling the ground in the Amazon rainforest, Bruno Latour details the process through which physical bits of soil are turned into recorded measurements and data points for comparison and analysis. He remarks,

Stage by stage, we lost locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity, such that, in the end, there was scarcely anything left but a few leaves of paper. … But at each stage we have not only reduced, we have also gained or regained, since, with the same work of representation, we have been able to obtain much greater compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality, such that by the end, inside the field report, we hold not only all of Boa Vista (to which we can return), but also the explanation of its dynamic.

Now, via Andrew Gelman, a fascinating story from Quirin Schiermeier at Nature about the social production of data.

[click to continue…]

This piece by Edward Lengel in in the Washington Post has a lot to say about something I’ve long regarded as critically important in explaining the strength of the war party in the US: the absence of any real recollection of the Great War of 1914-18, the opening round of the bloody conflict that dominated the history of the 20th century, spawning Communism and Nazism, Hitler’s War and the Cold War, and even, in large measure the continuing war in the Middle East. Of course, the US came late to the war, and its losses (50 000 combat deaths) were comparable to those of Australia, with around 10 per cent of the population. But there is more to it than that.

Lengel (a military historian writing on Memorial Day) makes the striking observation

Americans haven’t forgotten about the doughboys. We just didn’t want to hear about them in the first place.

and continues

“The boys would talk if the questioners would listen,” said one embittered ex-doughboy. “But the questioners do not. They at once interrupt with, ‘It’s all too dreadful,’ or, ‘Doesn’t it seem like a terrible dream?’ or, ‘How can you think of it?’ or, ‘I can’t imagine such things.’ It shuts the boys up.” … The Civil War and World War II seem to lend themselves to good storytelling, as long as one avoids the ugly, depressing bits. They appear to have clear beginnings and endings, with dramatic heroes and villains. They move. World War I, by contrast, with its images of trench warfare and mustard gas, is not so easy to manipulate in a marketable manner. Popular historians consequently avoid it.

It would be charitable to interpret the reluctance of Americans to talk about the horrors of the Great War as evidence of inherent pacifism and perhaps this element was present. As Andy McLennan points out in comments at my blog, the main reaction to WWI was an increase in isolationist sentiment: the problem was Europe, not war itself. After isolationism was discredited (which did much to strengthen the War Party) from a distance it looks like WWI was simply forgotten,and the end state is functionally equivalent.

In any case, in the long run, the absence of this most bloodily futile of wars from historical memory has been a huge boon to the war party. With a historical memory of war dominated by the “Good War” against Hitler and the Axis, it’s unsurprising that Americans have been much more willing than the citizens of other democratic societies to accept war as part of the natural order of things.
[click to continue…]