Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Justin Fisher's avatar

    To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…

  2. Mark's avatar

    Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…

  3. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  4. Keith Douglas's avatar

    Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…

  5. sahpa's avatar

    Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.

  6. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  7. Mark's avatar

What is going on at Drexel? And is Drexel a real university?

Several readers flagged this other IHE story about political science professor Ciccariello-Maher, whose case I wrote about at CHE last Spring, when Drexel seemed to be doing reasonably well.   His latest "controversial" tweets seem to me vaguely idiotic, but that's not the issue:  the issue is that however insightful or idiotic they are, they led to his being put on "administrative leave" (I assume that means he's out of the classroom but being paid).  Drexel owes the academic community–forget the BreitbartBozos and the DrudgeDumbdumbs, Drexel!–an explanation of what their policies are.  Are there concrete threats of violence?  What is law enforcement doing about them?  Drexel may be a private university, but it's clear that Cicchariello-Maher's speech is constitutionally protected speech on matters of public interest:  his speech is not unlawful, therefore he should not suffer professional sanction because of that speech.  If the situation is so extraodinary in terms of the criminal threats against him and the university that he must be put in hiding, then Drexel needs to broadcast the details to the world, since that really is what fascism looks like:   otherwise lawful faculty speech has so incensed the fascists that the university can not function because of the threats of violence.  Is that's what is going on?

I welcome links and further information from anyone with details about this weird turn of events.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

One response to “What is going on at Drexel? And is Drexel a real university?”

Designed with WordPress