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My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
23 responses to “Open thread on issues in the profession for the week of March 30, 2015”
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I've heard mild complaining about "inside hires" (for instance, over at the smoker) — when departments hire, for instance, an adjunct to a tenure track position. I've also heard complaints when the person hired is a spouse of someone already on faculty. I'm wondering what people think about these scenarios. They seem totally legitimate to me (although perhaps the spouse should recuse themselves from the hiring committee?). But I am one half of an academic couple, and so I am on the other side, so to speak. I'd like to see more departments hiring full couples, both tenured or tenure track, or hiring spouses on to the tenure track where one person has got a job? It's worth mentioning that most junior people aren't power couples working for research universities; a typical scenario is that one spouse gets a job (say, at a lesser-known state school) out of grad school, and the other person comes along and works as an adjunct. Is it legitimate/good for the school to hire the spouse when a line opens up (assuming the person is qualified, and his/her AOS and talents fit the line to a reasonable degree)? Is this unfair to others on the market?
A related question, is it really the case that a department must conduct a full search, even when they know who they are going to hire? It seems the practice of some departments to do this, but not others. It causes so much stress, anxiety, time, etc., for the people who are candidates in a faux search, so to speak (although I suspect fully faux searches, in which the committee is not at all open to hiring a different candidate than the one they have in mind, are fairly rare). Can something be done about this?
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I've heard it said a number of times that Brian Barry saved Ethics. I've also heard that claim expanded upon in two ways: (1) that the University of Chicago Press said they would stop publishing the journal unless he agreed to be editor (I believe this came from an obituary published in a journal), and (2) that the quality of the work published in Ethics was comparatively low in the period leading up to his editorship. I've never heard any detail beyond this, though, and I'm curious about the story if anyone is willing to share more about it.
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Proff Leiter – why do you get so upset at the toxic culture of the internet while at the same time make posts on your blog with the tag "Merciless rhetorical spankings of fanatics, villains, and ignoramuses" which just reads to me as a highfalutin way of declaring you intend to be toxic, or at least toxic to people who you deem wrong? I've never read Derrida myself, but it's my impression that if someone is respected in some corner of the academic community, it's not good for the culture of that community for people to just mercilessly bash that figure of respect. Interested to hear your response.
Best,
politics undergradBL COMMENT: I'm not upset at the toxic culture of the internet. I obviously think criticism, including wicked criticism, has its place. Derrida, in my view (and not only mine), was a pernicious charlatan, and Nick Cohen is a disgraceful apologist for criminal wars of aggression. I assume you are referring to last week's post about "the left and appropriate concern." I did not take that to be an issue about toxicity, but about being able to discern what is morally important and what not.
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Brian,
This is apropos the update to your entry on "Social Justice Warrior".
I too only fairly recently (less than six months ago?) encountered the term. It may be that it originated in the Men's Rights Movement (another phenomenon I've only very recently come across, independently). But the term is certainly catching on far more widely, precisely because of its aptness across virtually all contemporary identity politics. I've seen it by now in many such contexts.
The attempt to close down its use stems from its very resonance; those who align themselves with identity politics don't, of course, like ridicule that sticks. And the method of attack on the term — associating it with a disreputable movement — is a classic Social Justice Warrior tactic.
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With regard to "Social Justice Warrior":
The term was coined with something like the interpretation that Brian's correspondent indicated. It still has this use, but I think is now somewhat disfavored among honest participants in the debate, due to semantic poisoning.
What semantic poisoning? There was (and still is) this internet thing called 'gamergate'. Supposedly it was about ethics in video game journalism, but mostly it was entitled male gamers sending death threats/ rape threats/ persistent harassment to women who criticized the rampant misogyny both in the companies that make video games, and in the content of those games. "Social Justice Warrior" as used by the gamergaters, came to be a pejorative for "feminist/ lgbt activist/ anyone who actually cares about actual social justice." Google 'Anita Sarkeesian" + "social justice warrior" and you will find how nasty the people who use the "SJW" label are. Google 'Anita Sarkeesian' and you might learn how little that term applies, if you are using it with the original meaning.
I personally think "SJW" is more of a taunt than a criticism, and its current use seems mostly to be to bully women and to justify bullying them. If someone has bad arguments, you can just point them out. It's not ideal, in my opinion, to use terminology that (nowadays) most clearly aligns you with 4chan and the gamergaters.
BL COMMENT: The definition my correspondent offered had nothing to do with these usages.
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RE: "Social Justice Warrior": My experience with the term at UC Davis School of Law is that it is used primarily by the National Lawyers Guild chapter president (and National Executive Committee member) to refer to her fellow NLG members. I'm unsure as to where the phrase originates or whether or not it's been co-opted, but at least in my law school community, the phrase is employed as a sort of call-to-arms for the militantly left-wing faction of the student body. For them, "Social Justice Warrior" means someone who came to law school to use their degree to fight poverty, injustice, capitalism, etc. as opposed to working at a law firm or something. The Social Justice Warriors at my law school do like to shrilly protest guest speakers they don't like, and they are big on creating "safe spaces."
BL COMMENT: Interesting, that's clearly a non-pejorative usage, and it actually has something to do with social justice too, which is nice!
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My own impression is that the term "social justice warrior" followed a trajectory similar too "politically correct", although much more rapidly.
As readers here are no doubt aware, PC was originally coined by the left to mock a certain type of ultra-doctrinaire Marxist back in the 70s, and by the late 80s the term was being used in earnest by conservatives to attack leftist thought.
Similarly, my impression is that SJW was coined by progressives during the early days of social media as a term of (mild) mockery. It referred to someone on twitter/tumblr, usually young, who had just discovered activism last week and was REALLY REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT IT EVERYONE!!! The term was subsequently adopted by the right as a genuine insult aimed at online progressives. Although this story is complicated by the fact that progressives have "reclaimed" the term and now unironically self-identify as SJWs in a way they didn't before.
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Google Trends indicates that the term predates (early 2013) the "GamerGate" controversy, but it really took off in August 2014, which would be at the same time.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=social%20justice%20warrior
As pejoratives go, it strikes me as pretty mild.
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The social justice warriors, as described above, are obnoxious and do nothing to further the cause of the oppressed minorities they claim to represent.
My natural tendency, upon running into them online, is to ask them who appointed them "political commissar", but although sometimes I get the impression that in certain cyber spaces they lead a unified lynch mob aiming to hang me high, I'd wager that most people, rather than share their self-righteous enthusiasm, are just scared of them and that while it's impossible to reason with the social justice warriors themselves, there are ways to appeal to passive readers who venture in the same cyber spaces.
What tactics or strategies or argumentative moves do people have for dealing with the social justice warriors without alienating the passive spectators and even winning over a couple of the "swing voters" among the passive spectators?
Generally, insulting the social justice warriors just makes one look as bad as they are in the eyes of the silent majority, but on the other hand, appearing conciliatory and weak does not win people over either.
It would useful to look into positive ways for facing the social justice warriors because they aren't likely to go away.
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Since the behavior of 'Social Justice Warriors' as functionally defined in that entry has little or nothing to do with actually fighting for social justice, but rather has to do with attempting to signal (to oneself and others) that one is such a 'warrior' (and more generally to allow oneself to signal moral superiority and vent cruelty in the name of compassion), and perhaps also because of the term's unfortunate provenance, it would be best to call these people (so well and humorously captured by Brian's correspondent) 'Social Justice Posers' or some such. Yet another reason for the name change is that there are genuine social justice warriors out there whose mantle the posers wish to assume. Calling the posers warriors makes it easier for unscrupulous types to associate genuine warriors (who really care about social justice and are willing to work hard to promote it) with the mere posers (who don't and aren't).
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From my experience, "social justice warrior" has nothing like limited meaning the correspondent describes (someone who cannot distinguish between minor and major offenses, participates in cybermobs etc.) but is actually used against anyone who advocates on issues like racism and sexism to disparage their concerns. (Which I think is really exactly what the term suggests) I have never, ever heard the term "Social Justice Warrior" used by anyone that thinks social justice issues are real and to be taken seriously, and it's very often directed against anyone who brings up any social justice concerns at all.
One of the easiest ways to get called a SJW is to disagree with a racist or sexist joke online. I'm not talking about calling a mob in response to a slightly sexist joke, I'm talking about voicing disagreement with blatant racism and sexism that's "just a joke." I've been called a SJW a handful of times, every time because of something along these lines.
BL COMMENT: Given the evidence already adduced in this thread about the myriad uses, I don't understand how the preceding can be seriously asserted. The term obviously has different meanings as used by different people. This is a familiar phenomenon in language.
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The TOC for the APA's first issue is up:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=APA&tab=currentissue
Thoughts? I've got to say I'm already worried about editorial practices given the number of "big names".
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@BL: So because the term "obviously has different meanings as used by different people," you don't understand how it "can be seriously asserted" that "grad student" has primarily experienced in being used more broadly than your original correspondent?
BL COMMENT: Please reread what 'grad student' said.
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I'm going to risk "persecution" here and make the claim that the SJW is a contemporary manifestation of Calvinism. The first definition in the original post — despite some implications of the untoward — is more correct than otherwise. Particularly the connection with Nietzschean critique. Like the Calvinist Puritans, there is little room for ambiguity. The accusation of heresy is the evidence of heresy. And I don't believe that critics of SJW behavior are, on the whole, so naive, mean, or debased as to appreciate the distinctions between legitimate racism and sexism, and those promulgated by the SJW crowd, much of whom have little at stake in the causes they so vehemently support. In fact I will be so brash as to say that their hatred is stronger, more acute, than that of those they rail against. They put the right before the good, to borrow from Sandel.
I'm glad that philosophy now has the balls to reply to this lot.
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I think the original correspondent and others are positing far too much insidious intent and self-awareness on the behalf of the so-called SJWs. Generally, that is not how these these things work. The vast majority of these people are no doubt convinced that they are doing something important. Their actions are almost certainly driven by a strong emotional response to things they think are oppressive, and are likely reinforced by a tendency to overcompensate due to feelings of guilt at being socio-economically privileged (the vast majority of these people are likely middle or upper class). This is a sort of self-reinforcing phenomenon. The more hypersensitive people become, the more perceived oppression there is, and the more extreme and hypersensitive their positions become. And this is on top of the sort of general tendency toward extremist views within in-groups noted by Prof. Brogaard previously on this blog. I think it is only in very rare cases that the individuals are explicitly driven by a desire to be perceived as warriors. In the majority of cases, this is to commit the same mistake as those who argue for the descriptive claim that people are driven by an explicit desire to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. It is to conflate a causal and mechanistic explanation of behavior with an explanation of intent.
Bearing this in mind, I do not think the phrase "social justice warrior" and the correspondent's description is very apt. For the most part, these people are not charlatans. Rather, they are simply delusional. They have a distorted view of what oppression is because they have been trained to have a distorted inner emotional life. They have been trained to see flippant remarks as part of a general edifice of an oppressive system, when in reality the fact that their colleagues might say something thoughtless has no real causal link to the large-scale socio-economic forces that lead to real inequality and oppression. Moreover, they are unlikely to have really dealt with these forces first-hand. They care about what is present in their immediate experience, which consists largely of flippant remarks and other stupid and insensitive behavior on the part of their colleagues. Since they know that there are oppressive forces at work in society at large, they immediately infer that what they personally experience is a result of the same systematic forces, and thus that they are doing just as much to fight systematic social injustice by railing against someone on social media as someone who pushes for things like education reform.
I am reminded of something Nietzsche said about how the middle class German women of his day likely experience more pain from a single hangnail than any creature hitherto (I am paraphrasing; I can't remember which of his works the quote comes from.) With that in mind, I think there is a far better term for these people: hangnail activists.
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For what it's worth, my experience is the pretty much the exact opposite of 11.'s. I.e., in my experience the term is used almost exclusively for people who participate in cyber-mobs of smearing, shaming, dogpiling, toxic abuse (telling others to "die in a fire", accusing people who are plainly nothing of the sort of being "rape apologists", etc.)… all in the name of social justice. The term mocks them not for their commitment to social justice but for their apparent belief, or sense, that they are justified in this kind of behaviour because they are something like cyber-warriors in a noble cause.
E.g. (again in my experience) the term is *not* applied to people like me who advocate many of the standard progressive causes such as abortion rights, same-sex marriage, higher government spending on education and healthcare, etc., though in a non-abusive way, and who also protest at such things as smear campaigns and public shaming of relatively powerless individuals.
I think it's useful having a term of ridicule for this, and once we have one it's difficult to change deliberately to another one.
All that said, I'm not comfortable with throwing the term around freely IRL or in using it online. Obviously(?) there can be shades of grey as to whether a particular person is acting sufficiently badly to be mocked with such a harsh term. Also, I think that the worst of them are probably young and misguided. Somehow they've been trained to think that this behaviour is how you should be a good political activist. Some compassion for them may not be out of place. Also, there are often more precise things to be said in a particular case, rather than reaching quickly for the weapon of mockery.
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I think anyone concerned with social justice shouldn't use "social justice" as part of a pejorative expression. "Warrior" is also used as part of a pejorative expression, ie "keyboard warrior", but it is politically neutral (it is used to describe a person who argues obsessively and rather fruitlessly on the internet).
Perhaps it's telling we do not have a term equivalent to "social justice warrior" for someone from the conservative side of the political fence, yet I am pretty sure that the sort of horrible behavior "social justice warrior" is supposed to refer to is not perpetrated only by those who espouse a commitment to social justice. Maybe people should use a term like "bullying", for example, rather than "social justice warrior", because it does not have the problematic political implications of "social justice warrior" and is not open to the sort of politically vexatious misuse that "social justice warrior" is.
BL COMMENT: "Bullying" is the most overused word in the language these days, so much so that it's close to meaningless.
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The term "social justice warrior" is an appellation of the moral crusader's own creation, it first began seeing use in some of the most caustic circles of the online social justice hugbox (tumblr/srs) around 2009/2010 and not long after became commonplace among communities critical of dogmatic progressivism who used it not just as a descriptor but also as a form of ridicule when speaking about the most derisible elements of the perennially offended pc crusaders.
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I would just like to point out that SJW does not in fact originate from the MRA*, it's a bit more complicated than that. SJW originated as a term originated among the very people who think they can fight social injustice via writing essays on the internet to refer to themselves. Possibly as a way to give their "slacktivism" – as it has been called in unkind words – a bit more legitimacy. If you really truly care to dig up old screenshots and internet archives, you can see that many of the SJWs refer to themselves as SJWs on their twitter and tumblr profiles.
As far as I know, the term was then adopted – possibly with the help of the MRA* – as the standard term for the "slacktivists", rather than simply being one of the multiple terms they used to refer themselves. Due to the negative connotation it has gotten due their own actions (as it started out as their own term), they are now trying to rewrite it's origin in the hope they can escape those very same self-made connotations.
*Just to clarify here, I have not truly looked into the MRA movement, since it does have a truly repugnant subgroup (I would like to say minority, but I don't know its size relative to the MRA as a whole), and its very creation seem to hurt the equality side of the struggle between Equality and Female Privilege within modern feminism.
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I think the discussion of SJW etc. has exhausted itself. Move on to other topics, like JAPA or some of the original items in the thread. Thanks.
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On JAPA: I read the Rovelli article on Aristotle's Physics. Being interested in Aristotle and competent enough at math to follow the equations, but pretty much totally in the dark about philosophy of physics, I found it really interesting and entertaining. I would love to know what knowledgable readers thought.
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As a former editor of Ethics I can say something about this. Before I had any official connection to the journal I was asked by the University of Chicago Press to evaluate the journal. I gave my opinion that under its then editor Warner Wick the journal had not kept current
with contemporary work, that the journal was not of the same class as Philosophy and Public Affairs, and that no journal could be run, as Ethics was, by a single person. Subsequently Brian Barry was selected as the Editor, and four people–myself included– were selected by him as Associate Editors.I never heard anything to the effect that the Press said they would stop publishing if Brian declined to become the editor.
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So in your April 03, 2015 at 06:11 AM post on Critchley you correctly note that one is not supposed to edit one's own wikipedia page, yet this is something you are widely believed to engage in obsessively. Do you deny ever editing your own wikipedia page?
BL COMMENT: Are you for real? If my Wikipedia entry looked like Critchley's, I could imagine someone reasonably believing that, but my entry doesn't, does it? Once about 7-8 years ago, I tried to correct a factual mistake, which was promptly reversed by some editor, so I gave up. Last year, I corrected Noelle McAfee's vandalism of the entry, and reported that I had done so to Wikipedia and asked the editors to intervene, which they did. And that's it. But seriously, outside of some anonymous idiots like you in the bowels of cyberspace, no one believes I spend my time editing Wikipedia, whereas it's pretty transparent that Critchley and his student Kesselman write his entry in its entirety.
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