The Academy
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CHE editor Len Gutkin on Appiah’s report on “literary studies”
For those who didn’t have time to read Appiah’s report, this is a balanced overview and assessment. An excerpt: The most trenchant of the report’s methodological critiques is on “identity as a basis for criticism.” Appiah prosecutes an attack on a deformed version of standpoint epistemology by which, in the words of the anthropologist David Stoll, an…
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Another journal implodes: Review of Social Economy
Roberto Veneziano, a former co-editor of the journal (which publishes a lot of philosophically-minded economics), writes: On Saturday, the 4th of July all four co-editors of the Review of Social Economy (RoSE) wrote to the Association for Social Economics (ASE) which owns the journal and announced their decision to step down. After having worked hard…
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Philosopher Paul Boghossian provides a “precis,” and reply to critics, of the “Boghossian Report”…
…at The Philosopher’s Magazine. (A relevant earlier post on this blog here.) I call particular attention to these remarks near the end of Professor Boghossian’s essay: According to the standard diagnosis, the humanities have been captured by the ideological left leading to an unacceptable viewpoint homogeneity that needs to be remedied by appointments, to be…
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Should you agree to let your books be used for LLM training?
Philosopher Daniel Wodak writes: I was wondering if you had any advice on the following issue, which might be a good topic for your blog. CUP asked me to sign an addendum authorizing them to in effect use the text of my Element in training LLMs, with the promise that I’d get 20% of unspecified…
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A very strange interview in CHE with the President of the American Anthropological Association
The CHE reporter Stephanie Lee does a really good job trying to get Professor Rouse to actually answer questions, but Professor Rouse’s responses mostly serve to confirm the doubts expressed about her field in the Boghossian Report. It’s a shame, because I am a huge fan of a lot of work done in anthropology. One…
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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…
People should understand what precipitated my remarks here at Leiter Reports. Also, a few replies and comments on the conversation:…