A Kipnis complainant speaks out

at Daily Nous.

It is true that I think the argument Kipnis offered in her essay was intellectually silly and concretely harmful to individuals in our community, but it is simply false that the basis of the complaints raised against her had to do with the stance she takes on these vexed issues. We filed complaints because in her desire to weigh in on the theoretical debate, Kipnis took factual liberties with the specific issues facing students at Northwestern. Her erroneous representation of a particular case at Northwestern, involving living, breathing, human beings, caused tangible further harm to two women already found to have been sexually harassed by a Northwestern professor. Her callous refusal to correct those factual errors once they had been brought to her attention was a violation of the norms of academic integrity, which are a necessary precursor to academic freedom.

‘Me’ Studies

A great post from Audrey Yap over at Digressionsnimpressions:

A recent column by Joseph Heath at Toronto discusses the issue of “‘me’ studies,” which I take to be a phenomenon of people studying too narrowly the circumstances of their own lives. This is in part a problem, Heath writes, because it goes against “the broad intent of a humanistic education, which is to gain some understanding of the extraordinary variety of human experience, both historically and in other cultures – to drive home the idea that different people understand and evaluate the world in fundamentally different ways.” And I agree!–Western philosophy in general has too much in the way of “me” studies, namely straight, upper-middle-class, cis, heterosexual white men studying other straight, upper-middle-class, cis, heterosexual white men. This, as far as I can tell, has narrowed the discipline in general, much to its detriment. – See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2015/06/guest-post-on-what-is-the-real-problem-of-me-studies.html#sthash.uh5s2lbz.dpuf