Many decades ago one occasionally would see “Interludes” on the BBC. They covered up the gaps that were necessitated by the early technology.
Enjoy this one. It does get more exciting toward the end, but principally in the cat’s terms, not ours, unless you were also dying to get the waste basket contents spilled out.
Be sure to have the sound on.
There’s a thoughtful discussion in a recent New York Review of Books entitled “Free Speech and the Menace of Hysteria.” Though he passes by without comment the title’s term that associates the womb with a mind out of control (groan), Jeremy Waldron does provide an interesting review of a book by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate. A later comment by Perry Link summarizes a point Waldron argues for:
In his excellent essay “Free Speech and the Menace of Hysteria” [NYR, May 29], Jeremy Waldron shows how, in the United States over the last two hundred years, the state came to be viewed as sufficiently stable that it “did not need the support of the law against the puny denunciations of the citizenry.” To subject the state to “free trade in ideas” is by now seen as carrying little risk and as having considerable advantages for democratic rule. Next, Professor Waldron argues that the case is not parallel for vulnerable minorities—such as, in our society today, Muslims from Asia or Latinos in the Southwest. Here the hate speech that might appear in the marketplace can bring grievous and irreparable harm, and perhaps should be restricted by law.
Link also argues that there is a serious problem about who employs the restraint. I hope both the article and the comment are available electronically. It could be used to set up a good discussion.
Feminist philosophers lead busy lives. They need to relax sometimes, but meditation is so time-consuming. As is art. So many thanks to the folks at Instant Origami for bringing us a shortcut. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
First of all, you need to know that I created a PRETTY GOOD THING. My close male colleague, MN, and I also run A JOLLY NICE GROUP. And they are connected in that MN helped me with the PGT and it benefits the JNG, though in fact it helps a lot of others too.
So MN was at a conference and asked me to send him an email flyer about the PGT, which I did. PGT, we all agreed, should be open to everyone and I didn’t want it to look like it would have a dominating administrative structure or anything. The long and the short of it is that I referred faculty to myself (”Contact Dr. jj if you are interested”) but put in an unassuming title, like ‘university coordinator.’ BIG MISTAKE, because MN also sent the email flyer to our faculty listserv with his return address and everyone who didn’t recognize my name assumed I was a secretary. “Dear Ms. jj….”
But that’s not a huge deal and I just started to use a more authoritative title, so people could understand why I was actually making some of the decisions.
However, last week MN revealed that he received a letter when the notice went out. The letter congratulated him on building the PGT, and went onto the issue of his appointing me to the position. The letter actually vents a lot of academic ill will and slams my character and accomplishments, from publications to promotions, claims I used female charms (e.g., wooed the provost) to get some things, and so on and so forth. Wow! I certainly was amazed that anyone would think that wooing would win me anything. Even if I were inclined to use that, I’m far past the age where that’s a very promising strategy. But there it is. And maybe “wooing” was a metaphor? For paying them money?!?!?
The letter was anonymous, of course.
The interesting question is who is upset about what. MN is very upset about the letter, and revealed it only because someone else was attacking the PGT. (A “I don’t know who you all think you are” sort of attack from a department chair in an unpleasantly public way.)
I reckon that if the flyer had gone out to the faculty under my name with MN as the coordinator, I would have been still assumed to be the secretary. It’s the sexism, from the assumption that MN gets all the credit, to the idea that I was wooing people to get privileges that is what’s gotten to me. The hate is hopefully fairly localized; I know the sexism is not.
Mind you, I haven’t actually read the full anonymous hate letter.
So is this sort of experience typical for women when they get visible power in their society? Gosh! Whatever would make one think that?!?
Maybe if you are a journalist taking a week-long science course at MIT, having a female teacher makes a HUGE difference. Want to generalize from that? Well, maybe.
Here’s the NY Times’ Judith Warner:
I was attending a journalism workshop called “Frontiers of Brain Science.” The other participants were all real science writers, people who don’t have to rack their brains to remember the meaning of the word “ion.”
…
At M.I.T., we were mostly spoken to by men, various kinds of men, of different ages and with different speaking styles, and we interacted with them with typical reportorial formality. Some were more popular with us than others; some were more engaged with us than others. Some spoke right over our heads; some reached even me with perfect clarity.
Something very different happened, however, on the two occasions when we were spoken to by women. The atmosphere in the room changed. We all became more familiar. We asked more questions. We interrupted more. We made sounds of assent or dissent; we questioned methods, concepts, base assumptions. It was as though, with the women, the boundaries dissolved. We were all immediately drawn into relationships.
…
I know that there was no conscious desire on anyone’s part to talk back to them or treat them with less respect. But one woman in particular, Rebecca Saxe, a young, dynamic professor of neurobiology at M.I.T. who gave a riveting presentation on social cognition — “how we reason about the desires and intentions that motivate others’ actions” — was interrupted so much by her super-engaged audience that she didn’t have time to get through essential portions of her talk.
If you don’t teach, you might want to know that the “container model of education” - the professor is to pour knowledge into the students’ mind by lecturing - is not very admired. A thoroughly engaged classroom is considered a wonderful goal to aim at, at least in the US. Every book on improving university teaching I have seen has such engagement as a primary mark of fine teaching.
Of course, women profs can drone on with the best of them. It’s so interesting, though, that the journalists saw the women in this example present knowledge in terms of a personal engagement.
Addition: There are great observations in comments (1) and (3). Let me try to add to the discussion by quoting a bit more of the article. The second part seems to me really worth thinking about. The author, it should be said, worries about the sort of reaction she records.
How much of this had to do with the fact that the women tended to speak more relationally (“I think,” “I feel”), I don’t know. I don’t know if it was created by the fact that the women — to varying degrees — turned the story of their work into personal narratives.
…“What did you think?” I breathed to a fellow female fellow, as we filed out of the classroom for lunch.
“I have a crush on her [Saxe - jj],” she said. The women around us made approving noises.
“It was her passion and energy and approach that was infectious,” she later explained in an e-mail. “I really had an emotional reaction to her, and found myself day dreaming about being her friend.”
I went to a very interesting event this week, organised by Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy. A bunch of left liberal bloggers got together to talk about how blogging might engage with and have an impact on national (UK) politics.
The second part of the session (read more about what went on in the first part, and see pics here) addressed the question ‘where are all the women bloggers?’. Some of the points raised and issues aired in the lively discussion:
In the spirit of the discussion, and of drawing attention to women bloggers (and on the viral linkage, ourselves!), here are some left liberal blogs by women, that I discovered at the session. If you have such a blog, or know of others please do share the links in the comments!
Also at the session, and on the women bloggsters scene:
( And for UK politics junkies, see this:
Updated: More from the comments-
From JJ:
1.http://www.talkleft.com/
Jeralyn Merritt and her main writers are lawyers; they are interested particularly in issues about criminal law and politics
2.http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
This is a widely admired blog and well cited in the blogsphere.
I’ve heard from good sources that Digby is a woman. While not a feminist blog, its take on things is at least congenial to a feminist approach
From QuestionThat:
Clairwil (http://clairwil.blogspot.com/)
Cheryl (http://bettertobefree.blogspot.com/)
Trixy (http://more-to-life-than-shoes.blogspot.com/)
Ambush predator (http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/)
(Updated from comments, thanks! Keep the links coming!)
We received the news of electricity shortages in Bangladesh from our friend, KW. A visit to her blog is highly recommended!
Here’s a picture of her students from the Nari Jibon project that we featured here.
As you can see, 
the picture was taken during a load-shedding period..
Turn the sound off before you start it!
How can rumors be fought?
If you were interested in our discussion about the Obama campaign’s web strategy for fighting lies, you might want to take a look at an article on Salon.com. Lots of quotes from researchers, and some ideas about how to fight smears.
Warning: it does agree with the post linked to above.
This blog is obviously very concerned with how philosophy is exclusionary in ways that appear quite independent of merit, given they are often applied to groups who are typified by characteristics irrelevant to merit.
There’s a link in a post over at What Sortsof People to an interesting article that summarizes a widely accepted account of exclusion and applies it to ‘disabled’ texts. Texts are disabled when they are fall outside the norms created by “the complex web of institutionalized techniques of normalization.”
Though the article linked to is about translations, there are obvious connections and questions to be raised with regard to philosophy’s exclusions and what it accepts as legitimate texts. Here’s a particularly relevant part:
Informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of “disciplinary normalization” (1979), feminist disability studies interrogates the complex web of institutionalized techniques of normalization that sustain patriarchy, white supremacy, class power, “compulsory ablebodiedness,” and compulsory heterosexuality (McRuer 2002). These myriad, mutually reinforcing techniques of normalization subject bodies that deviate from a white, male, class privileged, ablebodied, and heterosexual norm. Seemingly unrelated technologies such as orthopedic shoes, cosmetic surgery, hearing aids, diet and exercise regimes, prosthetic limbs, anti-depressants, Viagra, and genital surgeries designed to correct intersexed bodies all seek to transform deviant bodies, bodies that threaten to blur and, thus, undermine organizing binaries of social life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender and racial identity) into docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of gendered, raced, and classed bodily function and appearance.
6. Translations, as disabled texts, pose the same challenges to the conventional norm as disabled bodies do. They deviate from monolingual textual expectations, and are thus deviant. They threaten to blur, and thus undermine, organizing binaries of social/textual/literary life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender/genre and racial/national/linguistic identity). ‘Compulsory ablebodiedness’ requires that translated texts function as docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of genred, raced, and classed bodily/textual function and appearance.
7. When publishers, teachers, readers, or translators themselves require the translated text read ‘as if it were written in English’, as an ‘elegant’, ‘fluent’ ‘good’ poem ‘in English,’ they collude with and enforce such ‘compulsory ablebodiedness.’ And this is a best-case scenario, for too often publishers’, teachers’, and readers’ anxiety over translation as an incomplete, diminished, impaired version of an original results in translation not being published, taught, or read at all.
8. The effects of compulsory ablebodiedness on translation are intense and repressive. Translations are excluded from most publications, from most prizes, from most workshops, from most ‘English’ literature classrooms, and from most performances.
It’s a cliche now of people who are working on diversity that opening a field will enhance its creativity and energy. This idea has a lot of acceptance in corporations and, to some extent, in some areas of science. As NSF puts it:
The pursuit of new scientific and engineering knowledge and its use in service to society requires talent, perspectives and insight that can only be assured by increasing diversity in the science, engineering, and technological workforce.
But perhaps expecting many people to believe this gets it back to front; that is, in widening a field, one threatens the existence of the norms.
Sophia Wong’s recent and excellent offering of mentoring tips for “someone who doesn’t look like me” generated delightful discussion on the FEAST listserve, and a couple of us couldn’t resist connecting issues regarding differences between class and educational background to issues of mentoring across race and ethnic differences. Class and educational preparation, I joked on FEAST, don’t seem all that hidden and subtle when I’m the tall, towering doofus who’s never heard an opera or heard of a Hirsch number:
Just as I felt mannish around feminine girls, when growing up (ah, nonheterosexuality rearing its confused head), so I found immediately upon starting my first job that, when around faculty from educated families and academic backgrounds, I stick out like a sore thumb. I understood little of what my new coworkers were talking about when they referred to the history of the liberal arts, the rankings of the most prestigious journals, the Ivies — I never quite got down which ones were Ivy — and subfields in a discipline of which I was scarcely cognizant before my twenties, let alone the passing references to cultural events and pursuits that no one engaged in back home. I tried to swear less and mention television less…I’ll never forget the senior colleague who said he preferred applicants with a “long, strong background in liberal arts college settings.” He wasn’t referring to work experience, he elaborated, but a lifetime of a certain kind of education. And I though my state university was such an advance, since I was the first in my family to “go away” to school.
Let me clarify that I’m not actually a first-generation college student. That honor goes to my parents, who came from working-class backgrounds and struggled to put themselves through city colleges - my dad on the G.I. bill, my mother on her wages - while living at home, taking care of their families, and working jobs, so that their future kids, unlike them, could start out middle class. Their achievements were astounding. Yet just as my own father’s decision to take the G.I. bill in the form of college tuition prompted his own dad to ask, “Why?”, so my suggestion that I could go on past the college degree to, as a teacher suggested, law school, prompted their own surprised, “Why?”
So, how can we mentor each other, my unschooled, uncouth, rube friends? Couth philosophers are invited to chip in. Here’s a start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_%28colleges%29
Thanks to Jenny Saul for encouraging me to, well, to stick out even more by posting on this topic, ha ha!
It might seem a bit early to do a “What do you think?” when the last one got no comments whatsoever. But, as always, we are wondering what you are doing, reading, happy about, worried about, etc. Conferences? Papers?
AND ALSO Calypso has drawn my attention to some problematic developments in comments over at our good friends’ Philosophy Job Market Blog. Someone has asked advice about their desire to sleep with a committee member.
One problem that can arise when A WOMAN does that is that the guys think that she’s getting extra academic benefits in return for sex and they’re mad. And I gather at least one comment goes toward this. I’m going to reserve my opinions here, because the point of this post is:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
By the way, from what one can from the comments so far, gay sex is invisible in philosophy departments.
But, sadly, quite likely bad taste. Even the folks at Cute Overload thought this was way over the top, but you have to have the sound on to get the full effect:
Apparently good old Barney doesn’t like teddy bears. He may not even have know this until he was supposed to guard a collection of highly prized ones. And then he did what a good dog has to do.
There may be times when a human being too wants to tear into prized icons, though hopefully not quite so literally.
Have a look at Leiter’s comments on a round table on modes of philosophizing in Eurozine. You can tell it’s really weighty stuff from BL’s title: “Four Philosophers Answer Questions about Philosophy: Its Purposes, Nature, History.”
Well, the guys (of course!) take up the big issues. My favorite observation comes from Jonathan Barnes, who addresses the question of whether philosophy is relevant to real life:
But surely, you will cry, moral philosophy must impinge on Real Life? After all, we do ethics – as Aristotle says – in order to become good, don’t we? And surely logic must impinge? Isn’t it the science of reasoning? And don’t we all want to reason as sharply as we can? – Well, glance about at our colleagues. There’s Professor W, who has written some brilliant pieces on ethics: Is he more honourable in his philandering than my neighbour Bernard?
Not, I have to say, the example I would use. When thinking about whether working on ethics produces morally improved people, I think of the ethicists I know who are completely ignorant of how exclusionary their highly privileged pursuits really are. And who, quite frankly, do not seem to give a damn.
On the other hand, two women philosophers are mentioned in the article.
O, let’s just go to a library and consign some volumes to the flames. Or tear them apart.
(Thanks to Calypso once again.)
UPDATE: It is possible that this post was written in a fit of pique, but, thanks to Calypso, some more substantial issues arise in the comments. Come join in the discussion!
What are the issues grabbing your attention?
Are there conferences this summer or in the fall that we should know about?
Or just tell us something you think is interesting or fun or unusual.
We’re working on some past suggestions about changes we might make. Havinv guest bloggers is one, and we may do that. I advanced the idea of a “Hall of Shame” for conferences that exclude women, but we have thought probably not.
We may well post a resource page, with publications about forming search comittees, reviewing files, etc. I started looking at some of the excellent resources on the web, including a handbook at UMich. Here’s an interesting passage from that source you might want to comment on:
Initial Discussions of the Search Committee’s Charge should:
-verify that its charge includes particular focus on equitable search practices, and the goal of
identifying outstanding women and underrepresented minority candidates for the position.• articulate the fact that diversity and excellence are fully compatible goals and can and
should be pursued simultaneously.• identify selection criteria and develop the position description prior to beginning the search.
• establish plans for actively recruiting women and underrepresented minorities prior to
beginning the search.• review practices that will mitigate the kinds of evaluation biases that social science research
has identified that result in unfair evaluations for women and minority candidates.• include discussion of how the plans to represent the school or department’s commitment to
and strategies for hiring and advancing diverse faculty are integrated into the strategies.
This may be of particular concern for departments that have few or no women or
underrepresented minority faculty. In these cases, it may be helpful to develop long-term
strategies for recruiting diverse faculty. For example, the department might consider inviting
women or minority faculty to give talks and then inviting them to apply for positions the
following year.
Does this sound like a conversation your department (or office) could or would have?
Who wrote the first computer program and/or what was their gender?
Extra credit: Explain why the correct answer is surprising.
(Thanks to AndrewCullison.)
This is an open forum. Let us know what is on your mind.
Some possible topics to pick up:
In the first open thread, we had a request from moralagent. We’ve provided a lot of dismal observations about women in philosophy. How about some strategies for coping?
In the same thread Brandon suggested we have guestbloggers. And Shelley mentioned having a guest with a point of view shaped by different cultural experiences. Any nominations?
How about recent studies on diversity issues?
I’d love to hear about what participants here are reading, whether or not it is academic.
Please don’t feel restricted to those topic!
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