May 2015
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The media and science frauds
Take note attention-seekers!
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Film footage of New York City shot between 1896 and 1905
New Yorkers will get a kick out of this.
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The Republican war on public higher education…
…and what it means for students. (Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)
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Is attrition from a graduate program necessarily a bad thing?
A senior philosopher at another top program (not Michigan) e-mailed an interesting question about attrition; she writes: [Y]our most recent post raises a question that might be worth discussing, namely whether all grad school attrition is a bad thing, and how to tell good from bad if not. I think US News etc. have done…
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Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
Interesting item from the UK, with a particular focus on the dissertation options at Oxford Philosophy. (Thanks to Mark van Atten for the pointer.)
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Capitalism and culture
An undergraduate student writes: You've linked to two articles by Todd Gitlin recently. Both indicate troubling characteristics of college students that are possibly (at least in part) attributable to the influence that capitalism exerts on American culture (e.g. freshmen are now in general more interested in great financial success than "develop[ing] a meaningful philosophy of…
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On doing philosophy of disability when you have a disability
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY, AN INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS; MORE CONTRIBUTIOSN WELCOME Stefan Sciaraffa (McMaster) calls my attention to a striking item by philosopher Elizabeth Barnes (Virginia); an excerpt: I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice…
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“Marx, Law, Ideology, Legal Positivism”
The published version, for those who are interested.
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Neoliberalism watch: higher education edition
The rich get richer.
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Owens from Reading to King’s College, London
David Owens (ethics, philosophy of action), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, has accepted appointment as Professor of Moral Philosophy at King's College, London. Together with the strong group in moral and political philosophy on the law faculty at KCL, this will make KCL one of best places in the UK for work…
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Interesting enrollment and attrition data from the Michigan PhD program
Available here. Attrition appears to be much lower than when I was at Michigan in the late 80s and early 90s. In my class of nine (seven men, two women), the two women did not complete the program, but all seven men did eventually–and that was a good year. The following year, as I recall,…
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Research misconduct watch: political science edition
The full report. Briefly: Michael LaCour, a PhD candidate in poli sci at UCLA, got a lot of attention for a paper co-authored with Donald Green in 2014: LaCour and Green (2014, Science) report a remarkable result: a ~20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser produces large positive shifts in feelings towards gay people that persist…
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Lawsky’s rookie hiring data for 2014-15
Here. Prof. Lawsky counts only tenure-track hires, whether academic or clinical; she reports a total of 70 new hires this year, slightly down from last year. (It's lower if one substracts the tenure-track clinical hires, though I have not counted carefully.) The relatively small number of Yale JDs hired (only 6) is striking, though we…
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Saturday Night Live wanted Noam Chomsky to appear…
…but his wife said 'no.' Amusing story.
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Another Todd Gitlin piece on “trigger warnings”…
…this one unabashedly against. (Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)
“Freedom’s just another word for Je est un autre.”