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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Speaking of mealy-mouthed, the non-profit that owns Hypatia…

Brian Leiter

…has issued a statement (over at a "safe space" blog) about the mistreatment of Professor Tuvel.  The "corrections" (#5 in the statement) are rather comical, I have to say:   the Associate Editors posted their defamatory statement about Prof. Tuvel's article on the official Hypatia page, where it remains.  The Associate Editors did not literally call for the "retraction" of the article; here's what they did say:   "Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process. In addition to the harms listed above imposed upon trans people and people of color, publishing the article risked exposing its author to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable."  There's nothing in the new statement indicating that the Associate Editors will face any consequences for their misconduct, and there's no apology to Prof. Tuvel for the mistreatment she suffered at the hands of Hypatia. 

On the plus side, they reaffirm their support for the editor's statement about this matter.

I'll open comments here for reactions, though please be substantive, and I will moderate for relevance and content.

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15 responses to “Speaking of mealy-mouthed, the non-profit that owns Hypatia…”

  1. Tom Hurka

    I thought #3 in the statement censures the Associate Editors' statement pretty severely, given the generally politic language the statement uses. The censure is largely on procedural/collegial grounds, but those will be specially salient inside the journal. And does "without adequate consultation with the Editor" in #3 mean, as I suspect it does, that the Associate Editors didn't discuss their statement at all with Sally Scholz before issuing it? If so, shades of Kipnis not consulting the NU graduate student before publishing her book.

    Reply
  2. Jason Brennan

    "To those unfamiliar with the issues, outrage about a particular academic publication is often dismissed as nothing more than the censoriousness of hypersensitive groups. The objectionable features of the particular case, considered in isolation, seem too minor to outsiders to warrant the degree of outrage focused upon it. Such dismissal reflects ignorance of the cumulative history of marginalization, disrespect, and misrepresentation of oppressed groups."

    This is garbage. Many of us thought the letter and the persecution of Tuvel was awful. Why and how are the editors so confident that it's because we don't understand the background context, that we're ignorant of cumulative history of marginalization, and so on?

    Actually, if we're going to play the epistemic privilege game, I'm all in. Sounds like a game I can win. Not only am I personally extremely well educated in the issues the editors bring up in the quotation above, but I am also an expert in political psychology and how people use moralistic language for personal or group gain. Accordingly, as far as I can tell, I, and only I, am in a position to render an accurate judgment about whether the signatories acted badly or not. I'd be happy to educate the statement's authors on this stuff, but I'm busy, and would need to be compensated for my time.

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  3. Larry A.

    In partial response to/extension of Jason Brennan's last point, it is amusing but also troubling how often "scholars" purporting to work in feminist theory toggle between two stances: on the one hand, "I, by virtue of my identity as a [form of minority] need to educate you, who by virtue of your identity could never understand these issues without my tutelage," and, on the other hand, "I'm so tired of having to educate you and explain this to you; just accept my word as Gospel."

    I couldn't help but glance at the Twitter page of the person Brian linked to earlier today, who characterizes her "enemies" as, in her own words, "cockroaches" — a young woman, still in school, constantly tweeting about how she must "educate" her professors, as opposed to the other way around, or even a semi-equitable two-way relationship. How tiring it indeed must be, to be the one person who must always *educate* everyone around you!

    This stance, and the epistemology behind it (if we can so dignify it), is not worth much more time than a blog post or two. But, for the well-being of this profession, I do sincerely hope young scholars find a way towards just a *little* more humility and open-mindedness, an ironic set of virtues to have to stress in the space of feminist theory, of all places!

    (Finally, thanks to Brian for opening up this space. I posted a similar but even more benign comment on the Daily Nous website that was summarily deleted, presumably because I did not toe the party line…)

    Reply
  4. Eric Campbell

    Jason, if you don't mind my undercutting you, I've also been studying the usage of moralistic language and other strategies to achieve personal and group ends for coming up on 20 years. I've published on how moralistic language and cognition can systematically deceive oneself and one's allies about one's motives, and how this leads to the systematic but unwitting violation of one's (professed or actual) values (Ethics 2014). I wrote a 550-page dissertation around this topic (which was very well-received) and am working on a large project on the value (and dangers) of self-awareness in the socio-politico-moral realm. I've also taught multiple course on morality and psychology at the upper division level, focusing somewhat on this theme. I've been looking for an excuse to write a fairly detailed comparison between the moralistic rhetoric of American foreign policy, and how it undermines American interests and values on the one hand, and various moralistic language and tactics on the left and how it systematically undermines the interests and values of the groups it ostensibly aims to protect. To Whom it may concern: I will beat Jason's price. No offense Jason. I really need the money and motivation. I have other qualifications regarding familiarity with and concern for oppressed people I can detail on request. Thank you for your consideration.

    Reply
  5. Jason Brennan

    Having read Eric's work, I defer to him.

    Reply
  6. Ophelia Benson

    They say "the Board would like to take this opportunity to learn from the expressed outrage" as if outrage were automatically righteous. Those guys with torches in Charlottesville last weekend were expressing outrage; Trump expresses outrage hourly; not all outrage is educational.

    Their failure to defend Tuvel robustly is appalling.

    (I blogged about it: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2017/hypatias-statement/)

    Reply
  7. Dean C. Rowan

    Gotta chime in with a tangent, drawn from a thirty-year-old article (it appeared one year after the founding of Hypatia) by feminist legal scholar Christine Littleton, "Reconstructing Sexual Equality," published in California Law Review. Her footnote 91 essentially abandons the epistemic privilege game in favor of a species of social constructionist game that credits abundantly, albeit with limits, the capacity of outsiders to understand the experiences of insiders. She writes:

    "The question of the extent to which men can 'do' feminism (as opposed to writing about feminism) is itself a matter of debate within the feminist community…. Pro-feminist men play an important role in disseminating and implementing feminist ideas. But as to whether men can speak *as feminists*–i.e.,speak from the perspective of women's experience–my own position is as follows: I take the experience of living a goodly number of years as a woman to be a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite of feminism. Ergo, on my definition, men would have to give up their class status in some nontemporary way in order to meet the minimum qualifications. This does not appear to me to have occurred to any significant degree.

    "A somewhat different (and less exasperating) question than whether men can be feminists is whether anyone other than feminists can make a meaningful contribution to discourse about sexual equality. The answer to this question is clearly yes. While feminism, and thus feminist equality theory, is necessarily built on the experience of women analyzed from the perspective of women as a class (i.e., from the feminist perspective), women do not occupy the world alone."

    Seems to me that "X do not occupy the world alone" is a prudent maxim by which to live, conduct research, generate scholarship, and publish journals. On the downside, if the AEs at Hypatia had acted according to the maxim, Jason Brennan and Eric Campbell would have one less income opportunity for which to compete.

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  8. AnonPhD

    The defense of Tuvel is virtually non-existent. The Board "condemns any ad hominem and personal attacks," which shouldn't have to be said in the first place. The Board then heroically "recognizes Professor Tuvel for her work," whatever that means.

    The problem is that the Board is trying to maintain reasonable academic publishing norms while placating a bunch of illiberal cultural leftists who wish to overturn those norms. Hence, they talk the talk about outrage and intersectionality but ultimately endorse Scholz's statement.

    Unfortunately this balancing act won't succeed; at least, not until the next pseudo-crisis. Its past time to recognize that the authoritarianism of the cultural left must be confronted and dealt with as such.

    Reply
  9. PhD in soc

    Re: #5: I do think it's fair to say that the Associate editor letter didn't call for a retract, it was the open letter. In my mind, I conflated the two. Still, the associate editors said "Clearly, the article should not have been published" and calls out not only the editor but the review process and how it should change and scholarship needed to engage in a particular literature to be published.

    Reply
  10. AnonPhD

    I'd like to emphasize a point that Jason Brennan and Eric Campbell are raising, which is that the illiberal left predictably invokes their beloved 'standpoint epistemology' whenever you refuse to get on board with the latest outrage.

    In their hands, unsurprisingly, the "implicit biases" and "privileged perspectives" always seem to operate in one direction. If you defend Tuvel, it must be because of your implicit bias and white privilege. But if you join in the chorus of outrage, it must be because you've somehow transcended these influences. (Never mind the fact that scholars of race and trans folks themselves have defended Tuvel. Perhaps they're all self-hating.)

    Or it must be because you're ignorant of the "power relations" involved, as if the attempt to shame a junior scholar and force a journal to retract a perfectly adequate piece of scholarship has nothing to do with the abusive exercise of power.

    On multiple occasions I've heard white philosophy professors who've spent their entire lives and careers within some of the most elite institutions in the world invoke standpoint epistemology to defend some garbage argument or another. This is a peculiar form of moral self-deception that certainly deserves further study.

    Reply
  11. Eric Campbell

    I am once more in your debt, Jason.

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  12. David Ross

    As editor of a journal, what I find fascinating is the number of entities who seem to be able to speak "officially" for Hypatia. Looking over their governance documents, they have: (1) Editor in Chief; (2) Editorial Board; (3) Board of Associate Editors; (4) Advisory Board; (5) Local Advisory Board; (6) Board of Directors of Hypatia, Inc.; and (7) Wiley-Blackwell overlords.

    That's too many.

    Reply
  13. Russell Blackford

    This seems to me a very weak statement. All they strictly needed was the bit about standing behind the editor's decision to publish the article based on the advice of the reviewers.

    If they wanted to go further, they could have given the article itself more support. Anyone who has read it and has the slightest understanding of academic philosophy can see that the article is academically competent and that it's well within normal standards for rigour, scholarship, sensitivity, etc., applying to the discipline of philosophy. Why not say so explicitly, since we've reached this point?

    They could also have been far more forthright in condemning the disgraceful open letter and the cowardly and distasteful (and, it now seems, unauthorised) response from the associate editors. The whole statement smacks far too much of appeasement for my taste. This is a time for pushing back clearly and hard against the sort of people who engage in witch hunts against decent individuals, such as Tuvel appears to be – and against the sort of people who readily cave in to them. It's not a time to mince words and offer concessions.

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  14. Abe Roth

    FWIW the Board states its support for the decision to publish the article and recognizes Tuvel for her work. And though item #1 says we shouldn't be dismissive of the standpoint of those outraged by the article, it carefully avoids endorsing the judgment of harm underlying that outrage, describing the harm as alleged. It seems to me that the Board and the statement of the Associate Editors are miles apart, and quite at odds with one another.

    Reply
  15. Eric Odgaard

    If the Hypatia Board believes that this statement will somehow help restore the reputation of Hypatia, they have one teensy weensy little problem:

    1. Cressida Heyes first posted the Associate Editors' condemnation on her personal FB page (per Jesse Singal's NYMag piece)
    2. Heyes is therefore at least a strong endorser, if not co-author, of the Associate Editors' piece
    3. Heyes' work is criticized in the Tuvel article in question

    I am neither philosopher nor feminist, but in my neck of the woods we call that "conflict of interest" and "abuse of authority." That Heyes still sits on the Associate Editors Board (she's still listed as of this morning) is a mockery of the Board's statement.

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