The Academy
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Anthony Appiah’s report on “literary studies,” as part of the background research for the “Boghossian Report”
Here. I haven’t had time to compare this to Professor Kramnick’s rejoinder to the official Report, but if any readers have taken the time to examine both Appiah’s report on literary studies, and Kramnick’s essay, please feel free to post your assessment. Signed comments will be preferred (i.e., full name and valid email address [the…
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Yale AAUP Chapter lawyers up as it threatens to take legal action if Yale Admin cuts a deal with Trump
CHE story here. It’s obviously true that “deals” with a criminal like Trump are almost never reliable, but, contrary to what the article suggests, there is no “academic freedom” right to engage in unlawful discrimination in admissions. The only question here is factual: does Yale continue to discriminate against white and Asian applicants? If so,…
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More on the difficult choices facing faculty at Exeter
A propos this, philosopher John Dupre writes with an update: The redundancy project is continuing at Exeter, with at least a heartening level of resistance from staff and the staff union. There is some hope that they will succeed: a lot about the process seems entirely unjustified and of debatable legality. Please everyone consider signing…
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U of Tennessee pays $1.9 million to assistant professor wrongfully fired…
…for exercising her First Amendment rights after the murder of Charlie Kirk. She did not, however, get her job back, but my guess she will walk away with more than one million of the settlement. Hopefully these kinds of payouts will teach spineless administrators something the next time the exercise of First Amendment rights offends…
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If there is really a budget crisis at Exeter, why are all the cuts coming from humanities and social science?
A propos this earlier post, another Exeter faculty member asks, [W]hy, even if they need to make savings, are these overwhelmingly concentrated on humanities and social sciences? 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based in HASS (humanities and social sciences). That amounts to a 30% cut…
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More criticisms of the “Boghossian Report” on the state of the humanities
This time from philosopher Richard Moran (Harvard), who makes some interesting points. Those following the debates about the report should read this.
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UK higher education watch: Exeter threatening to cut 150 academic staff
So reports the BBC. I reached out to the well-known philosopher of science and biology, John Dupre, at Exter, who tells me he has received a possible redundancy notice, although he is already 80% retired. He adds: I expect I’ll go quietly to relieve the pressure slightly on people who need their jobs. I’m certainly…
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First there was the “Boghossian Report,” now there is the “Spode Report”
And it doesn’t mince words. In this case, the task was assigned to EJ Spode, “who assembled the following crack team of elite scholars to work as a totally independent group to address the issues raised in the charge: Somerset Maugham, Edmund Burke Junior, Joseph de Maistre, and Thomas Carlyle. Fortuitously, at the time the…
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An English professor responds to the Boghossian Report
Jonathan Kramnick, a philosophically-minded English professor at Yale, has an interesting response to the “Boghossian Report” which is worth reading. Professor Kramnick agrees with the Report that, “When scholarship becomes subordinated to extra-scholarly ends — when a field decides in advance what its findings must be and bends its methods accordingly — it ceases to…
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First the “book club” scam, now the scam of fake editors seeking to learn about your work (UPDATED with another example targeting a philosopher)
AI clearly generates many of the fake “book club” solicitations to authors of new books, and now there’s a new scam: fake editors of actual publishing houses (or impersonating actual academics) soliciting information about an author’s work. One giveaway in the cases noted: the “editors” used gmail and outlook email addresses, rather than university or…
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Boghossian Report, Appiah, and relativism, redux (UPDATED with reply by Boghossian, and responses from Leiter and Stanley)
A CHE editor asked me to redo this post as a “letter to the editor” which they have published here, and which I reprint below: To the Editor: In the interview with four authors of the “Report on the State of the Humanities and Humanistic Social Science” (hereafter “the Report”), New York University philosopher Paul…
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A weak response to the “Boghossian Report” by the AAUP chapters at Wash U/St. Louis and Vanderbilt (whose Chancellors comissioned the report)
The response is here. It states that, Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice. No evidence is adduced that scholars in these fields were caricatured, so we are left wondering why we should…
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A fair summary of the “Boghossian Report” by one of its co-authors (a sociologist)
Here. An excerpt: It was on #3 that the Report, unnecessarily, overclaimed, even though it’s clearly true that some scholars treat skepticism about objectivity as licensing careless or overtly politicized scholarship. 1, 2 and 4 all have clear instantiations across the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
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How is the New School selecting tenured faculty for termination…
…given its budget crisis? As this petition notes (I have signed it), only one tenured economics professor has been fired, and he was an outspoken critic of the administration and its financial mismanagement. That is, to put it gently, highly suspicious, and I hope Professor Reddy takes legal action. There is another petition in support…
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Apparently Anthony Appiah has not read Carnap (or Thomas Nagel’s “The Last Word”)
Two editors at CHE have interviewed four of the authors of the “Boghossian Report” (including the NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Anthony Appiah). Professor Boghossian says in the interview, “We say how we are taking the term ‘relativism’ to mean the very narrow view that epistemic values are always relative to nonepistemic values, to moral…
[…] 剛剛瀏覽了一下Brian Leiter的部落格，他在6月29日整理了英美哲學家的新單位，其中Mark Murphy從喬治城大學到Notre Dame，而Seth Lazar到Johns Hopkins大學去。提供大家參考。Leiter的轉載可以參考此處！ […]