Tag Archives: academia

Argumentum ad Baculum

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in Academia, Bullying, Critical Thinking, Fascism, Power, Professoriate, Social Media

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

According to the American Association of University Professors (as reported by CNN), “In the last year, more than 100 incidents of targeted harassment against professors have been reported on college campuses.” These reactions have reached the level of actual death threats, so that some professors have been banned from campuses, so as not to expose the rest of the community to potential violence. This is not the kind of situation that would be rendered more secure by everyone carrying guns, since that would erase the distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” a distinction that would NOT become clearer once someone started shooting, since no one would know who started shooting first, or if it was a “bad guy” or “good guy” that started it. This is why, happy as I would be for permanent employment, I would never accept employment at a college or university that permitted any form of civilian “carry” on campus: a wild-eyed pack of posturing, untrained rubes with deadly weapons at the ready makes no one safer; it takes a special kind of stupid to imagine otherwise.

Closed

But here we find ourselves in a situation where professors are receiving enormous volumes of vicious, if not always credible, threats upon their very lives for the kinds of things they have said in public. How did all these poor little, anonymous (because the cowards are always anonymous), tragically butthurt babies come to decide that the legitimate response to the public expression of a reasoned conclusion (I avoid the vacuous notion of “opinion”) is a threat of violence or even death? Certainly the election of the “crypto”-fascist Trump has energized many white supremacist and neo-nazi groups and sympathizers, and silencing by way of the threat (or act) of violence has long been a favored technique of such people. Which brings us to the title of this post, which is the fallacy of the argumentum ad baculum, the “argument from the stick”: using threats of violence and other forms of intimidation to compel others to accept your position. Continue reading →

The Place Where Higher Ed Comes To Die

20 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by in Academia, Corporate University

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

My desire to draw these blog posts back to a more process philosophy, “Whiteheadian” orientation keeps getting hijacked by current events. But in this particular instance, the Whitehead connection is not entirely lost. That is because Alfred North Whitehead was not only a beloved educator and professor, but a highly respected administrator at London University, where he finished his career as a specifically British academician. Many of Whitehead’s most important essays on education are collected in the volume The Aims of Education. But one of the things not discussed in great detail in that collection is the administration of higher education.                                            Closed

In Whitehead’s case, this is most likely due to the fact that when and where he came up through university, when and where he taught, did his research, and performed his administrative tasks, it was in a university system with roots that stretched back to the early medieval times, and that was present at the birth of the modern university in the late 18th C. Facing forced retirement from the English university system, Whitehead (who was not ready to retire) came to the U.S., where he was confronted by a very different system of administration. Over a century ago (and years before Whitehead arrived) Thorstein Veblen was condemning the well-established forces that were trying to mutilate the comparatively nascent American system of higher-education into a profit-stream oriented business. So Whitehead’s educational writings never had much chance to address the trends, as the very thought of them was completely alien to his thinking, and his thinking was oriented toward the most significant development in speculative philosophy of the last 2300 years. Continue reading →

Independent Scholars: Return of the Modern?

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Academia, Independent Scholar

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

,

Many people do not understand how very new the current University system is, nor how that system is currently disintegrating under stresses imposed by economic and ideological interests. To the first part, the contemporary University in general traces its roots back to the very late 18th to early 19th centuries in Europe, while in this country it really only came to form itself after the Second World War. Now, there have, of course, been Universities for some thousand years or more in Europe, with the University of Bologna being formed in 1088. But the medieval and early-modern universities were primarily focal points for the indoctrination of scholars for their entry into sharply defined orthodoxies; the idea, much less the practice, of academic freedom simply did not exist. In contrast, our age has witnessed a scintillating, Camelot-like moment in history, when there was a dream (if something less than an ideal-practice) of academic scholarship coupled with freedom of thought and inquiry.Closed

But despite what the right-wing media would have you believe, it is not the demands for fairness from oppressed groups (the challenges dismissed as “political correctness” which, in fact, challenge institutionalized forms of power and bigotry expressed and manifested in language that those in power would have you believe is innocent) nor is it in the protests of youth demanding that culpability be acknowledged and justice faced, that we will find the genuine threats to the contemporary University. No, the death of contemporary academia is being inflicted in the name of business, money, “efficiency,” and capitalism. Higher education is coming to be dominated, at the highest echelons of administration, by persons who are not scholars, but are business “entrepreneurs.” Welcome to the “Corporate University,” where students are “customers,” education is a sellable commodity, and the professoriate is replaced by disposable teaching staff with neither wages, nor benefits, nor job security (in other words, easily intimidated lackeys), whose only option is to cave and cavil to their corporate directors, or face the abyss of being independent. Continue reading →

Scholarship and Public Responsibility

24 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Logic, On Bullshit, Public Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

The title addresses scholarship in general, but I will direct my remarks specifically toward philosophy, as that is the scholarship I am most familiar with.

Certainly it is the case that being a public person is a kind of exposure that is often uncomfortable for everyone. But the issue here is not what makes you cozy, but what fulfills your responsibilities.flasher

In a recent essay in The Guardian, James Mulholland offers what I find to be a deeply flawed argument against the idea of academics taking serious steps to make their work accessible to the broader public. Within my general academic area, this is known as “Public Philosophy.” Mulholland insists that, “It is time for us to reassess what we mean by public scholarship. We must recognise the value of the esoteric knowledge, technical vocabulary and expert histories that academics produce.” This is in the context of a world where, Mulholland tells us, “Academics are constantly encouraged to engage with the public more often,” advice which he rejects because, he insists, “this advice ignores the way that specialised knowledge already affects civic life. Specialisation has social importance, but often only after decades of work.”

Hearkening back to a quip by Heinlein, I might also add that, “Specialization is for insects.” Continue reading →

“Specialization Is For Insects”

20 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Academia, General Philosophy

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

James Ladyman recently published an essay in The Philosophers’ Magazine arguing (as the title of the essay would indicate) in praise of specialization within the discipline of philosophy. (Attentive purists will notice that I use American spellings, and not the British forms used in Ladyman’s article.) Colleague (and occasional commentor) Brian Burtt brought Ladyman’s essay to my attention, with a gentle prod for my thoughts on Ladyman’s argument. As a general rule, I’m quite happy to do “requests,” and so what follows are my not-quite initial reactions to the article. (Not quite initial, as they are colored by a degree of considered thought.)Praying Mantis One can safely hazard a guess as to the top layer of my remarks, from the Heinlein quote that titles this blog post. However, there are a few subtleties I hope to add, beyond just and only the Notebooks of Lararus Long. Continue reading →