…but it’s not had any effect on her praxis! This is a devastating analysis by a Portland State professor, that brings Cudd’s philosophical work to bear on how she has treated faculty and programs at PSU. An excerpt:
In Analyzing Oppression, Cudd is clear that the most dangerous form of oppression operates through economic forces that exploit people’s own rational choices, concealing the coercion from those who suffer it and from sympathetic observers. The manager who implements layoffs because the budget demands it is not exempt from Cudd’s framework. She is, in Cudd’s terms, perpetuating oppressive structures through individually rational choices made within a coercive institutional environment. The theory does not give administrators a pass because they face constraints. It identifies that pass—“I had no choice”—as the ideological mechanism by which oppression reproduces itself.




Let me recommend Eleanor Knox’s essay on IAI a few months ago for what I think is a much more…