August 2018
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New Books in August
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil by Candice Delmas (Oxford University Press, 2018). Angels in Mourning: Sublime Madness, Ennnui and Melancholy in Modern Thought by Roger Bartra (Reaktion Books, 2018). Virtue Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction by Liezl van Zyl (Routledge, 2018).…
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15 Most-Cited Law & Social Science (excluding economics) faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (UPDATED AND CORRECTED)
Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the fifteen most-cited law & social science (excluding economics) faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May of 2018, and that the pre-2018 database did expand a bit since then). This is meant to capture scholars who…
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Ontario arbitrator rules against use of student teaching evaluations in promotion and tenure cases…
…based on two expert reports about their validity (or lack thereof). Interesting development! (Thanks to Paul Raymont for the pointer.)
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The ‘It’s complicated’ defense of Ronell
A good take-down (The New Yorker piece was a recent instance).
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Yet another case of transgender activists assailing speech (in this case research) they don’t like
Brown University behaved miserably in response.
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Former TA believes the accusations against Ronell
At CHE; an excerpt: It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather. Stories about Avital’s “process” are passed, like notes in class, from one student to the next: how she reprimanded…
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‘Judith Butler, President-Elect of the MLA on Twitter’
Well, not really, but so far it's funny.
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Katha Pollitt on L’Affaire Ronell at The Nation
Another good essay on the Ronell case, short and to the point: read it all if you've been following this affair. An example: To me, her hundreds of histrionic e-mails read like a humorless novel of obsessive passion. Not so, she claims; they were lighthearted fun “between two adults, a gay man and a queer…
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Job Candidate Mentoring for Women in Philosophy
Philosopher Amanda Greene (UCL) asked me to share the following: The Job Candidate Mentoring Program for Women in Philosophy (https://jobmentoringforwomen.wordpress.com/) is recruiting both mentors and mentees for the upcoming job market season. Mentors should currently hold a permanent academic post and have had job market experience at the junior level in the past seven years.…
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Literary scholar Marjorie Perloff on the Ronell case
This is a very good piece by a very serious scholar; an excerpt: In discussing the Ronell case, every article I’ve seen from The New York Times to The New Yorker takes as a given that Ronell is indeed, in the words of the Times, “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world.” The…
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Huppauf on Ronell, Part II
(Part I is here.) (I continue my summary and translation of parts of Prof. Huppauf's Tumult article, which was published last week and will be on-line September 4.) After Ronell's coup and the movement of Ronell and Derrida to the center of the curriculum in the German Department, Professor Huppauf reports that there were now…
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Masha Gessen responds to critics of her New Yorker article on Ronell…
…via a public Facebook posting. She is persuasive and sensible on points 2-4, but not on the first point, concerning her false description of Ronell as "a literary scholar and philosopher at New York University" who is "by all accounts, one of the great academic minds of our time." Gessen writes: The idiom "by all accounts"…
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Correcting for the problem of multi-author articles cited as “John Smith et al.” in citation studies
Ted Sichelman (San Diego) contacted me with a proposed solution to the problem of undercounting multi-author articles in citation studies, a problem that washes out at the school level, but not necessarily at the level of individual authors, as noted before. Prof. Sichelman here explains what he did: Using the HeinOnline citation data, which does…
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Pope Center: UNC Chapel Hill remains “a problem” for suggesting that programs to alleviate poverty might help alleviate poverty (Michael Simkovic)
When North Carolina researchers who study poverty criticized conservative law makers in North Carolina, political leaders reminded academics of the dangers of speaking out against their bosses. Republicans responded by shutting down the law school's poverty center, crippling its civil rights center, and voting for draconian cuts to UNC Chapel Hill law school's budget. North…
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And you thought laughing babies were *merely* cute
Here's the truth. (They are also cute, especially with dogs.)
I wonder how feasible and time-intensive it would be to make it a standard policy check for undisclosed AI usage.…