Making referee reports more transparent October 31, 2010

From the very interesting new blog,   New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science: 

Here’s a simple proposal (due to Alva Noe, as far as I can tell): accepted, refereed papers and books should be accompanied with the name of the referees and, ideally, their reports, if only, in the online edition. (Note rejections can still be done anonymously.)

The author, Eric Schliesser, sees a number of benefits, including the improvement in referee diligence and the transparency of connections between editors, ingroups, etc.

Read the full post here.

Import of the Browne recommendations October 31, 2010

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities). The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it.

For more, go here.

The Sunday Cat wonders how Maru is doing October 30, 2010

Maru has a new area!

Readers not familiar with Maru, Japan’s most famous cat, might enjoy our first Maru post.  Searching with “Maru” brings up more, including one irrelevant post.

Online sexism, a comic October 30, 2010

I came across this great comic about online sexism, and it’s so spot on, it needs sharing:

God Hates Figs October 30, 2010

From Boing Boing. (Thanks, Mr Jender!)

Sidewalk behaviour exercise October 30, 2010

There’s been a fascinating discussion on WMST-L about gendered differences in sidewalk behaviour– the expectation that women will get out of men’s way, and the expectation that men won’t do this for women. Jessica Nathanson reports the following:

I’ve assigned students the task of walking down the sidewalk and not getting out of men’s way and then reporting what happens. Several women have reported being bumped into. What was particularly interesting was hearing about this as learned gender behavior when one male student who was also trans talked about learning that he had to walk down the middle of the sidewalk, through crowded spaces such as clubs, etc., with his head up, eyes directly ahead, without saying excuse me or worrying about bumping into people. What my students and I learned from this exercise is that walking down the middle of the sidewalk is a male entitlement, as is expecting others to get out of one’s way in other crowded spaces. And – not only is it an entitlement, but it is also a way of performing maleness, so that NOT doing these things marks one as less than manly.

I’m definitely going to try assigning this one to students. (Although I suspect the norms will be different in the UK– people say “sorry” a lot more in general– I also suspect that some form of the this difference will exist.)

Why For-Profit Higher Ed is lobbying for its life October 30, 2010

A recent Inside Higher Ed story indicates a drastic rise in the money for-profit higher education corporations are spending on lobbying.  So I was interested to see that Newsweek now reports the first good news in a long time for the would-be students of for-profit higher education corporations:  Two of the largest are instituting reforms.  Gee, I wonder why?

Possibly it’s because

on Nov. 1 the Department of Education will announce a set of new rules that for-profit schools must follow, including an industrywide prohibition against incentives to admissions officers for recruiting more students and a revision to policies that have allowed schools to tweak the way they count credit hours in order to let students borrow more federal cash.

It’s been a tough year for for-profit education corporations, hasn’t it?  Ever since those reports about the massive debt and poor completion rates or job placement of for-profit students, such as the nice summary in “For-Profit Higher Education by the Numbers,” came out in January (link launches a pdf). 

It could make a feminist philosopher wonder about the possibility of exploitation to read that “For-profit colleges top the list of postsecondary institutions that received the most money in 2008–2009 from federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to needy students.”  That’s “24% of all Pell Grant funding, about double the proportion from ten years ago.”

Of course, they are serving needy students, which sounds great, except when one reads the section on “The Costs for Students.”

Students at for-profits are more likely to borrow and borrow more than students at any other type of college. Yet, they are also among the least likely to complete school. College completion rates are low in all sectors. Only about half of all freshman entering baccalaureate programs earn degrees within 6 years. Given the cost, low completion rates are particularly burdensome for students at for-profit schools. For example, only 8.9% of University of Phoenix students without prior college experience complete a degree in six years, including 5% of those who attend classes online compared to a national graduation rate of about 56.1% for four year schools and 30.9% for two year schools. 

I’ve voiced concerns before about the UK moving toward anything like the model we have here in the USA, which left me with over $50k in debt, but it could be worse — I could’ve been a for-profit student!  96% of for-profit students end up in debt.  You read that right, 96%.  Yep, they’re serving the needy, all right. 

Percent of Graduating Class with Student Loans and Average Debt for Those with Loans: 2008

Sector Average Debt Percent with Debt

Public four-year $20,200 62%

Private nonprofit four-year $27,650 72%

Private for-profit four-year $33,050 96%

Source: The Project on Student Debt, “Student Debt and the Class of 2008″ (Dec. 2009). Based on calculations by the Project on Student Debt using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey 2008.

Now, not all debt is “bad debt,” right?  I want to be reasonable about this.  For instance, my consolidated federal student loans are not generally held against me in credit checks, I have lots of methods of repayment with a helpful Dept. of Education, and I write off some of the interest on my taxes every year.  I’ve been told by every financial consultant that it’s the private lending that’ll kill you.

Sadly, that’s where for-profit edu-corporations’ students often turn.

In 2007-08, students attending for-profit schools composed about 9% of all undergraduates, but 27% of those with private loans. 42% of all proprietary school students had private loans in 2007-08, up from 12% in 2003-04.

I’m pretty sure it’s the next part that makes me queasiest:

Many schools have also begun offering their own credit products. For example, in 2009, Corinthian Colleges planned to make about $100 million in loans, ITT Technical Institutes about $75 million and Career Education Corporation (CEC) about $50 million.

 Man, you know you’ve got a bit of a problem when homeless shelters are complaining about the targeting of homeless people for recruitment to for-profit education and debt!

If it makes the students with the largest share of student-loan debt feel better, though, you are helping the for-profits with those mighty high lobbying expenses.

Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies (FEMMSS) wants your submissions October 29, 2010

Paper proposals are invited for the fourth conference of the Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies (FEMMSS) to be held at The Pennsylvania State University, May 10-12, 2012. For more information about FEMMSS and our past conferences see femmss.org.

We welcome new participants and perspectives from across the academy and outside it that provide feminist discussion on any topic in epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics, or science studies. Note the following broad themes of recent and ongoing interest:

* Practicing & teaching science as a feminist
* Gender, justice & climate change
* Liberatory approaches to science policy
* Feminist perspectives on cognition, logic, argumentation & rhetoric
* Liberatory methodologies
* Knowledges of resistance
* Experience, authority & ignorance
* Science, technology & the state
* Public philosophy

Proposals of 250-300 words, plus bibliography, and a CV of no more than 3 pages should be combined in a single Word (or Rich Text Format) file. Submissions by e-mail attachment are due by August 1, 2011 to hundleby@uwindsor.ca. Please note “FEMMSS4 submission” in the subject line.

Dr. Catherine Hundleby
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Cross-appointed to Women’s Studies
Fellow, Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric

MAILING ADDRESS:
Department of Philosophy
University of Windsor
401 Sunset Avenue
Windsor, Ontario
Canada N9B 3P4

PHONE: 253-3000, ext. 3947
E-MAIL: hundleby@uwindsor.ca

Straight couple demands right to civil partnership October 27, 2010

in the UK:

It is part of a legal bid spearheaded by the activist Peter Tatchell called the Equal Love campaign, which aims to redress the imbalance between heterosexual and homosexual partnership rights.

Katherine and Tom will be one of four straight couples who will apply for civil partnerships. As part of the same process, four sets of same-sex couples will attempt to sign up for marriages.

Working on the assumption that all eight will have their bids rejected – an earlier attempt by Katherine and Tom to register for a partnership failed in 2009 – Equal Love plans to launch a legal challenge on the basis of human rights legislation.

Thanks, CR!

Discussion of women in philosophy… October 27, 2010

…on Woman’s hour, Radio 4, today!

Listen here (or later on the iplayer).

CFP: Reasons of Love, Leuven October 26, 2010

I should have posted this CFP sooner, as it intrigues me and provides space for splendid feminist perspective.  Seeing the announcement on PEA Soup reminds me that I’ve neglected it:

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

Reasons of Love
International Conference
Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
30 May-1 June 2011

This conference’s title is ambiguous on purpose. The relationship between
love and reasons for action is highly interesting and complicated. It is
not clear how love is related to reasons. Love might be a response to
certain normative reasons, since it seems fitting to love certain objects.
However, love also seems to create reasons and not to be a response to
certain appropriate reasons. Love’s relationship to morality is also
complex. It is not clear how the normative reasons for acting morally are
related to the reasons of love. It is sometimes argued that love is not a
virtue because the reasons for acting morally are not the same as the
reasons for acting lovingly. But the notion of ‘unprincipled virtue’ seems
to make room for love as a motive of morally praiseworthy actions.

This conference seeks to provide an opportunity to discuss these issues.
Related questions are the following: Do ‘the reasons of love’ constitute a
genuine, distinctive category of reasons?  Are different kinds of love
related to different kinds of reasons? What are the requirements of love,
as opposed to the requirements of duty? Are love’s reasons rational or non-
rational? Can love require to act immorally? If so, are love’s
requirements more or less important than those of morality? Is an action
out of love more praiseworthy than an action done out of a sense of duty?
Are there normative reasons for acting lovingly and to what extent do they
justify partiality? How are we to understand ‘acting lovingly’?

Keynote speakers:
Diane Jeske (Iowa), Michael Smith (Princeton) and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley)

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite abstract submissions on any issue related to the main topic as
stated above.  Graduate students are encouraged to participate.

The deadline for submission is December 1, 2010. Notification of
acceptance will be sent by January 20, 2011. Abstracts of 1500-2000 words
should be sent to Esther.Kroeker@hiw.kuleuven.be  and
Katrien.Schaubroeck@hiw.kuleuven.be.

At the conference 40 minute slots will be available for presentation,
followed by 20 minutes of discussion.

A selection of papers will be submitted to Philosophical Explorations for
publication.

Conference organizers:
Esther Kroeker, Katrien Schaubroeck, Stefaan E. Cuypers, Willem Lemmens

Women in philosophy of logic *Update October 26, 2010

If you are organizing a conference on logic, truth or inference, and lamenting that there are just no women in the world you could invite, check out this rich resource.  Great list, admittedly incomplete, but a service to the profession!

Alas, a CFP on the same website includes an entirely male speakers’ list.  I have sent them an inquiring email asking if they tried /considered inviting one of these women.

**Update: Organizers responded:

Thank you for your message. We have indeed made deliberate efforts to include female speakers in the line-up of this conference, which, however, for various reasons were not successful.

We have also been working on compensating for the all-male speakers line-up in other ways. For example, we have been actively encouraging female researchers to submit a paper or apply to act as a commentators. We are acutely aware of the issues you raise and do regret the present situation.

Kind Regards,

On behalf of the the organisers

Women in logic who are reading this blog, hope you’re encouraged!  Let’s all keep on trying.

Is this clever and amusing? October 26, 2010

As a humourless feminist, it is hard for me to tell.

Here’s what happened:  I got an email from the STS group in the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at Oxford University.  They have had their first walking seminar, which involved walking around Port Meadow for two hours discussing a serious topic.  The topic was “what is it to compare two things”.  And the post had the following terrific picture, which illustrates comparing a graduate student and a cow! 

Isn’t that something!?!

Some men getting worried about porn October 26, 2010

Interesting article from the Guardian about a group of men who have set up a website “grounded in feminist principles” to press the case that there is something wrong with pornography, something about which men should be concerned. The article mentions or discusses a wide range of arguments against pornography — that it degrades women, that it leads to sexual violence, that it shapes how men think about women, that the industry is abusive, and so on. As a self-contained summary of the issues and arguments, it’s very neatly done. Some of the discussion below the line is also worth wading through (some of it, naturally, is bilge).

The website itself, The AntiPornMenProject, seems thus far to consist in a mixture of porn-related news, anecdotal articles about the adverse effects of porn on men and their behaviour, and useful summaries of links to further discussions on the subject. I should think that, as it grows, it will become quite a useful resource for people teaching the topic, particularly to classes with a high proportion of men. It’s also, of course, something that seems worthwhile in its own right, and I’m glad it’s getting press attention.

On the subject of teaching about pornography, and going back to the Guardian article, I found two things particularly interesting. First, there was this quotation from Michael Kimmel:

What also strikes me is that young men seem utterly unapologetic about their porn use. It’s like it’s so ubiquitous – what’s the problem? And they expect a similarly casual approach from their female friends.

Second, there was this passage concerning the pseudonymous subject of an interview by Gail Dines for her book “Pornland“:

Dan… is worried about his sexual performance with women, and tells [Dines]: “I can’t get the pictures of anal sex out of my head when having sex, and I am not really focusing on the girl but on the last anal scene I watched”.

I recently covered pornography in a second-year class on feminist philosophy. The class has a healthy proportion of men. The Kimmel quotation sums up the attitude of not just the men, but the entire class, to the issue, and hence to most of the arguments we discussed. Both men and women were unimpressed with Mckinnon-style arguments (“silly”), empirical arguments about links to sexual violence (“exaggerated”), and arguments about the industry (“circumstantial”).

The one suggestion that really seemed to engage them was the idea that pornography could be bad for their own sex lives. Now on this, there was a gender divide in the class. The women were very ready to agree with the idea that pornography normalises a range of sexual behaviour which should perhaps be the subject of explicit negotiation rather than of assumed consent. But the men were less willing to accept this, on the basis that they (if not other men) were too enlightened to assume consent to slapping and facial ejaculation and all that. The second quotation above provides a slightly different tack on this argument. OK boys, perhaps you’re too smart to actually do these things; but the more porn you watch, the more they’ll be on your mind; the more they’ll be on your mind, the worse your sex life will be; so the more porn you watch, the worse your sex life will become. QED.

I don’t mean to suggest that the other arguments against pornography aren’t good, or worth discussing; but this is certainly a tactical move I’ll bear in mind for when I next teach the issue to a class of sceptics about the other arguments.

Homebirth: Mother v. Baby? More like Mother v. Medical Community October 26, 2010

In july, we reported on the Guardian’s very ridiculous coverage of a very ridiculous meta-analysis of international data on homebirths that purported to show that homebirths are safer for the labouring woman, but more dangerous for baby.

Reader Wahine has just sent us links to a Lancet editorial about the findings, and its attendant angry letters. The editorial states that

Although home birth seems to be safe for low-risk mothers and, when compared with hospital delivery, is associated with a shorter recovery time and fewer lacerations, post-partum haemorrhages, retained placentae and infections, the evidence is contradictory for outcomes of newborn babies delivered at home.

The author goes on to claim that this is due to methodological problems, and continues,

Professional organisations, perhaps unsurprisingly, have issued contradictory policy statements regarding home deliveries.

This is followed by a list of various countries and their various contradictory policy statements. The author then goes on to cite the meta-analysis mentioned above, and conclude that, well, now we know it’s really unsafe for babies, everyone ought to fall in line and recommend hospital birth.

So… lots of different countries have lots of different healthcare systems, with lots of different approaches to midwifery, homebirth, and indeed birth more generally…and the evidence across all (or many) of these systems is (big surprise) conflicting (as it would be, given we’re not comparing like for like). And the fact that this ‘conflict’ is reflected in ‘conflicting’ international guidelines is…further evidence of confusion? What? Circumstances differ cross-nationally; so evidence differs cross-nationally; so advice differs cross-nationally. That’s a sign that the advice is good: that it reflects the applicable evidence.

So, alright, I’ve ranted about this already. Let me start a new rant. The author of the editorial concludes, no big surprise, that

Women have the right to choose how and where to give birth, but they do not have the right to put their baby at risk. There are competing interests that need to be weighed carefully.

And in letters there’s huge anger over this.

Reducing rights to mere interests that can be weighed changes the mother from the owner of to a mere factor in the perinatal decision process. This is directly deleterious to her right to self-determination. The weighing of interests, risks, and outcomes is part of a capable exercise of human autonomy, not the other way around.

Quite right. But here’s my further worry: the meta-analysis purports to show that standard practice (hospital birth) is less safe for the patient (the pregnant woman) than a viable alternative (home birth). This shows a problem with existing medical practice. And yet, seemingly across the board, the discussion has been (only) about whether and which way the patient herself might be at fault; what the patient ought to do; what rights the patient ought to have (NB. the rights discussion never seems to stray into the question of what the woman’s rights are wrt decent medical care; we only ever discuss her rights wrt maiming babies).

I don’t get it. Why aren’t we talking about what’s wrong with obstetrics? What the hell is going on here?

In related news, a midwife in Hungary has been arrested for assisting in home births. Read more here.

Birmingham abandons CCTV monitoring of Muslims October 26, 2010

It’s pretty pathetic when this counts as good news, but it certainly is an improvement.

More than 200 cameras targeted at Muslim suburbs of Birmingham as part of a secret counter-terrorism initiative are to be dismantled, it emerged today

Fashion crime. Seriously? October 25, 2010

Reports here about the (ironically named) People of Freedom Party’s attempt, in the Italian town of Castellammare di Stabia, to outlaw miniskirts as a form of anti-social behaviour.

Mayor Luigi Bobbio said the regulations would help “restore urban decorum and facilitate better civil co-existence”.

Of course, the way to ‘restore urban decorum’ is to regulate women’s dress. Sigh. To think that effort is being wasted on such nonsense regulation instead of the actual sexism in Italian society.

Disturbed by those scary Muslims… October 24, 2010

with their terrifying Muslim garb? Then you won’t want to look at Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things.

(Thanks, JD!)

The Sunday Cat loves Simon too October 23, 2010

Leaving out women philosophers creates gaps October 23, 2010

I’m taking advantage of an opportunity to post here on gaps in the history of philosophy or, more particularly, on a project that is said to proceed to lay out the history of philosophy without gaps.  I’m writing in the persona of a historian.

Reader MD brought to FP’s attention the podcast website from Kings’ College, London, which claims it will cover the entire history of philosophy.  The “No Gaps” logo is very prominent.  However, a feminist philosopher might well start to worry early on. In addition to the name of Peter Abramson, the lead academic, there are a lot of other names on the site:  those working on background music and editing, those advising on content and those whose work is cited for background reading.  And they are all male, as far as I can see.  The point here is not to chide anyone for this all-male start up.  Rather, the question that needs to be pressed is whether this male crew will spot the gap that is so obvious to so many women.

There are two areas where women’s names particularly need to go in.  One is with historical philosophers, and the other with the background commentators.  Fortunately, Feminist Philosophers has some good resources for the first.  A recent FP post that conveyed a request from a reader lead to a large number of comments on distinguished women to be included in a course.  For example, from Cynofish we got:

I’ve published some work on Hume and in the course of my research have developed an interest in woman philosophers of the early modern period. Jacqueline Broad’s book ‘Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century’ is a really interesting read. It’s an account of the intellectual role that six female philosophers – Elizabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Cudworth Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn – played in the seventeenth century. In addition to Princess Elizabeth’s correspondence with Descartes, Broad critically discusses Margarent Cavendish’s writings on Descartes and Hobbes, Anne Conway’s writings on Descartes and Spinoza, Astell’s writings about Descartes, Malebranche and Locke, Damaris Masham’s correspondence with Locke and Leibniz and Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s defence of some of the views of Locke and Samuel Clarke.

It is equally important to include more recent women commentators, of whom a large number are very distinguished.  Not only is the quality of work by women very high, but also some of the issues they draw to our attention are not easily found in the men’s literature. 

One of these issues is very obvious in my field, Hume Studies, and it was very much noticed at the 2010 Hume Society meeting in Antwerp.  We can see the issue as drawn earlier in Annette Baiers “Commons of the Mind.”  There she notes that Descartes thinks reason is whole and entire in each of us, and she takes Hume to have rejected this view, as she herself does.  Jackie Taylor’s work on the essential contributions of the community to moral normativity was referred to a number of times at the conference.  Further, in my own discussion of the possibly skeptical Part IV of Bk I of the Treatise, I had to point out that Garrett’s admiring use of Annette’s work gets her wrong on just this point.  He takes Hume as thinking what while the community is a help, the mind itself has sufficient resources to critique itself.

I don’t think one needs to be any sort of gender essentialist to see that women commentators on Hume are much more likely than men to see how  kind of constitutive normativity is socially situated.  Equally, in leaving out the women we will loose this theme.

There are many other resources for recent commentary by women.  One is the series editied by Nancy Tuana on Rereading the Canon, from Penn State Press.  Margaret Wilson’s brilliant essays are gathered in an anthology; her essay on primary/secondary qualities places in question some of the sceptical readings that have limited so much of our understanding of early modern philosophy. 

I find lists of names potentially invideous, though people commenting here are welcome to mention them.  But I do want to bring to the podcasts attention an Aussie they might overlook:  Genevieve Lloyd, whose Man of Reason is a classic and whose whose work on Spinoza is first-rate.