philosophysmoker-Mstarz

Here. It’s behind a paywall, and unfortunately I don’t know of anyone who has posted a PDF to the internet like last time. Sorry.

It paints a horrible picture of McGinn using mostly his own words. It has him saying stuff like, “a superior person is not necessarily arrogant, but just superior”; and how he is “the most enlightened person in the world”; and how “his situation will fan anti-American sentiment” (in the words of the author, but attributed to McGinn). He complains, again, of everyone else’s lack of senses of humor and irony.

(Which is really old hat, right? “It's not that I'm a jerk; it's that your sense of humor sucks.” Y’all jerks need to work on your excuses.)

But as far as I can see, it doesn’t say anything new or groundbreaking, other than a few stray details, with one fairly notable exception. It does contain what would seem to be the verbatim text of the handjob pun: he says that he “had a handjob imagining you giving me a handjob.” First off, that’s awfully yucky. Secondly, even if his claim that it was a joke in which ‘handjob’ doesn’t mean “handjob” is credible, it seems to me that it’s still pretty clearly inappropriate. Thirdly, although he makes another attempt to connect the stuff with the handjobs to his research, it still seems to me like that entire avenue is complete bullshit. Fourthly, even if you interpret it as McGinn says he intended, it’s still really weird. He, McGinn, had a manicure while imagining her, his research assistant, giving him a manicure. What? A) who thinks about their research assistant while getting a manicure? B) who thinks about getting a manicure from their research assistant under any circumstances? C) what is he talking about? I mean, he’s free to insist that he had created a context in which ‘handjob’ is to be read as “manicure,” and where anyone who doesn’t see that is has an irony-related disability. But the fact is that if you read it that way, the message doesn’t make any goddam sense. And this is why nobody who has ever read it has read it that way.

It has him describe his relationship with the RA as an “intellectual romance.” Whatever that means. Seriously: what does that mean? Why would anyone ever say something like that? If I were in his position, I think I’d be very careful to avoid using the term ‘romance’ in any capacity whatsoever.

He seems to suggest that the “genius project” literally had that name while it was going on, in spite of what he says in one of his blog posts:

Another time, the professor says, the student expressed reservations about her job prospects in philosophy. He devised a solution, an undertaking he called the “genius project.” He describes it as an experimental learning endeavor in which he hoped to help the student improve her philosophical abilities by fostering creativity and encouraging taboo busting.

I totally understand being worried about your job prospects. I could not be more sympathetic. I worried about that when I was in grad school, and my worries have not been assuaged since then. And I completely understand approaching your faculty honcho person with these concerns for advice and counsel and stuff. Makes perfect sense. And I totally get why the faculty member might start a formal or semi-formal project designed to put the student in the best position possible to go on the job market. I understand. With perhaps less explicitness, something exactly like that happened with me and with basically everybody I knew in grad school. We were all worried; we all went to our advisors for advice; our advisors all tried to help us get prepared. Nobody ever gave it a name, as though they were the first person to ever think of helping their students get ready for the job market, or they were really special for actually going through with it, but we were all engaged in some kind of Genius Project. If you twisted my arm, I would have just called it “My Graduate Training.” The “Ph.D. Project.” Whatever.

What I don't get is why “taboo busting” always so high on the list of Genius Project techniques. My “Ph.D. Project” consisted, in part, of various discussions with my advisor: what I should read; what I had read; how to approach the material; where my ideas fit into the larger literature/conceptual space; etc. Another substantial chunk of the project consisted of submitting written work; receiving withering criticism in return; revising the work in response; receiving more withering criticisms; and so on. We spent a lot of time working on my teaching, too.

Now, I understand that the Genius Project involved spending part of each day thinking about your own ideas without relying on outside texts, and that it also involved asking, “is that really true?” a lot, and that sounds good to me. And I don’t have any problem with the tennis or the paddle boarding. Seems basically normal. But I don’t get why busting taboos was such an important part of the project. Is there some reason to suspect that unbusted taboos cause problems for candidates on the job market? And what was the pedagogical purpose of agreeing that manicures will henceforth be called “handjobs”? That seems to come out of left field, as far as mentorship goes.

(Just kidding, kind of. I realize that the reason that the “taboo busting” aspect of the Genius Project has been getting so much press is that the taboo-busting stuff is what got him in trouble, and that the press its been getting is not necessarily proportional to its prominence in the Project. But seriously. It got him in a shit ton of trouble, and it served no clear pedagogical purpose. It was a bad idea, and he should have known better.)

There's also this passage,

When he saw the student, they would perform a “ceremony,” he says, during which they went through a series of “hand grips” simulating closeness and social interaction.

Which sort of makes it seem like they had a secret handshake. What the hell? Is he a Mason? And what would it mean for a “hand grip” to “simulate social interaction”? Is that something people do?

Another passage reads,

“The relationship was difficult,” he says, speaking in his living room. “It wasn’t natural. It was constrained by the fact that I was a professor and she was a student. … We couldn’t just go in the way people normally would.”

Which really makes you wonder. Hadn’t he been teaching for a long time? The ins and outs of the teacher/student relationship shouldn’t have been that bizarre for a senior professor like him. You’d think that it would be sort of normal. He’d been around the block a few times by then.

But it seems to me that the most substantial new piece of information is that according to the RA’s boyfriend,

McGinn once wrote to the student that they should “have sex three times in my office over the summer when no one else is around,” Mr. Yelle [her boyfriend, that is] says. He also says the professor once suggested that the student should wear shorts more often because he thought her legs were attractive.

McGinn denies suggesting sex, and says that he merely told her that her legs were muscular. He also declined to share the emails.

Now, there are a lot of potential reasons why he might not want to share those emails, and the fact that he doesn’t share them doesn’t mean he said what Yelle says he said. And from our standpoint, there's a very real sense in which this is just a he-said/she-said thing. And if you just look at how he describes his style of interacting with people in general and her in particular, it’s fairly clear that the best-case scenario for these emails is that there's a lot of very borderline, easy-to-misunderstand material there, interspersed with a few things that are genuinely inappropriate (such as the oft-mentioned handjob pun). So, best-case scenario, releasing the emails won’t help him very much, and it makes sense for him not to release them.

On the other hand, on the best-case scenario, McGinn seems like the kind of person who wouldn’t realize how harmful releasing the emails would be. Case in point: everything he’s said up until now.

--Mr. Zero

(Just so we're clear, the Pinker text is bold and      offset; my text justified normally and in italics.)

STEVEN PINKER
Harvard College Professor
Johnstone Family Professor 

So far, so good. He knows who he is and where he works.

Professor Edwin Ervin 

I'm kinda sure it's 'Erwin' with a 'w', not 'Ervin' with a 'v'. Somehow I don't get the idea that this is going to be Pinker's most thoughtful work.  

Department of Philosophy
University of Miami
Miami, FL

 Coral Gables. 

June 13, 2013 
Dear Professor Ervin, 

Again, it's Erwin. With a 'w'. At least he's consistent.

I join you and other scholars, writers, and activists in protesting the threat of dismissal

According to McGinn, any threat of dismissal has been neutralized by the fact that he resigned. 

Also, activists? What activists?

of a brilliant and distinguished scholar, Colin McGinn, from the University of Miami for apparently nothing more serious than exchanging sexual banter with a graduate student.

McGinn claims that the only charge the University was considering was a failure to disclose a consensual but non-sexual relationship. But since the University has yet to publicly comment on the matter, it's difficult to know with any confidence what they thought he was up to, how serious they thought it was, how serious it actually was, or whether he would have been dismissed over it. 

Also, depending on whether the student was interested in engaging in sexual banter, the exact nature of the banter, and whether the student's participation was strictly and completely voluntary, engaging in sexual banter with a student could be fairly serious misconduct. Again, who knows what was really going on? Certainly not Pinker.

Even if the University had a clear policy that regulated communications between professor and student,

As far as I can tell, the University of Miami does have a pretty clear and sensible policy on this stuff. As I read the policy, very little in the way of professor/student communication is prohibited, though they are careful to point out that the uneven balance of power inherent in the professor/student relationship creates practical difficulties in establishing that the student has genuinely consented. 

It also says, and I have no idea whether this is strictly relevant, that faculty are required to disclose certain kinds of "amorous" relationships to a supervisor, and that they must do whatever is necessary to guarantee that they are not in a position of evaluative authority over someone with whom they are in such an "amorous" relationship. Failure to do so would create a clear conflict of interest, it says. It threatens the faculty member's ability to evaluate the person's work objectively. It can create the appearance (or fact) of favoritism. It creates a risk that the junior person might be exploited. It creates a risk that the faculty member or the University will be sued for sexual harassment, it says. Now, I'm not saying this is the kind of wisdom you'd consider going all the way to Dagobah to receive. But at the very least, it's fairly decent advice, and McGinn seems to have largely ignored it. At his peril. 

the punishment is ludicrously disproportionate to the alleged offense.

Again. McGinn says he wasn't "punished" or even charged by the University. He says he resigned and thereby halted any disciplinary procedures before they began. There's no such thing as the punishment. It doesn't exist.

As well as harming the reputation and intellectual quality of the University of Miami,

There's some low-hanging fruit here, but I'm not going to take it. Instead, I'm going to point out that this is one of the things that makes it so hard to square McGinn's version of the facts with reality. The story doesn't jell. 

McGinn really was one of the more prominent members of the UMiami philosophy department. Though I don't mean to disparage the other members of the department, it seems to be widely acknowledged that McGinn was disproportionately responsible for the department's overall reputation. The administration would have to have known this when they called him into a meeting and told him whatever they told him about what they found out about his "relationship" with his RA, explained to him that he was required by University policy to have disclosed it, and informed him of his options going forward. And whatever they told him must have been at least kind of bad news, or else he wouldn't have resigned rather than fight the charges or accept sanctions. It is at least a little unlikely that they would have done that unless they thought it was sort of serious. Add to that the disconnect between what he seems to have done and what he says the charge was going to be, and I'm not sure how to make it add up. 

Of course, for all I know, the administration was mistaken about how serious it was, or they were out to get him even though they knew he didn't do anything wrong. 

Of course, for all I know, they were not mistaken, or he is paranoid and has a persecution complex. 

On the other hand, maybe Pinker knows more about the case than I do. No he doesn't. 

such an action would put a chill on communication between faculty and graduate students and on the openness and informality on which scholarship depends. 

Perhaps Pinker's scholarship and teaching habits differ from mine (McGinn's seem to, after all), but I have not had to rely in my teaching on lurid puns about handjobs. To a captive audience. And from what has been made public, McGinn didn't get into any actual trouble until he inserted the RA herself into the jokes, and made handjob puns that were literally about her. I don't think I'd be chilled by a policy prohibiting handjob puns involving the students themselves in my communications with them. I don't think that would make me less "open" with them--and if it would make me more closed off, that just speaks to the necessity of the policy. A policy like that would really just codify what I've already been doing this whole time, in an attempt to avoid being thought of as a creep or having to explain my offbeat sense of humor to the Dean. 

There is such a thing as too much openness informality, you know. 

If the dismissal proceeds, I will certainly bring it up with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose advisory board I sit. 

Pinker can rest assured that the dismissal will not proceed, because of the apparently little-known fact that McGinn has resigned his post. 

But really. Although McGinn's posting of the Pinker letter suggests that he substantially approves of it, it doesn't really seem as though FIRE's involvement is something that McGinn would welcome--and I base this entirely on McGinn's statements and actions, and not at all on my own suspicions concerning his innocence or guilt. He says doesn't want to spare the time or resources that a serious defense would require; he's unsure whether his passion for teaching could survive the ordeal; he's concerned about how it would affect his wife and family; he didn't like working at Miami anyway. He says he wants to put this whole mess behind him and move on. So he decided not to contest whatever charges an investigation might have turned up and resigned instead. Take this job and shove it, as the fella says. 

(On the other hand, McGinn doesn't totally act like someone who wants to put this whole mess behind him and move on. Someone who wanted to move on from this might begin by not posting fifteen blog posts about it, including seven following the one where he said he was done talking about it.)

I'm also far from convinced that this is the kind of case that FIRE could really dig its teeth into. I don't follow FIRE's activities very carefully, but it seems like they tend to go after freedom-of-speech/freedom-of-religion/due process cases where there's a relatively compelling prima facie case that someone's Constitutional rights were violated, or that the University jumped the gun in applying discipline, such that the accused didn't get a fair shake. Whereas, based on what has been made public, this seems like a case where the accused really did kind of break the rules, and where it's not possible to know whether he would have gotten a fair shake because he resigned before any shaking took place. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but it's hard for me to see where FIRE might find a handhold.

Feel free to circulate this letter, and to add my name to any list of McGinn’s supporters. 

Shorter Pinker: I'm not sure who I'm writing to, and I don't have any idea what's going on, but I have chosen sides and am attaching my name to this half-baked letter, which you should feel free to spread around. 

Man, what a pointless waste of everyone's time.

--Mr. Zero

The University of Oregon is on the "strongly recommended" list on the Pluralist's Guide's Climate for Women page. But by now it is well-known that this department's climate for women shows clear signs of being terrible: their undergraduate program director is alleged to have made sexual advances toward female undergraduates and to have groped female undergraduates in his office, and another, "feminist" faculty member is alleged to have orchestrated a coverup of this information so as not to interfere with their being recognized for their friendliness to women. As far as I can see, these charges have not been disputed. (If they have, please let me know.) Why hasn't this school been removed from the list? The "Pluralists" removed Oklahoma from the "needs improvement" list almost immediately when it became clear that they had been working to improve the climate. I mean, if there was ever evidence of a chilly and inhospitable climate for women, that's gotta be it.

But as of this morning, it's still up.

--Mr. Zero

I've been following with interest this discussion concerning the Pluralist's Guide to Philosophy Programs's "climate" ratings, which contains "information" concerning the degree to which various philosophy departments are hospitable to women. What seems to me to be the most interesting discussion is taking place in comments here.

What happened was, Linda Alcoff, Paul Taylor, and William Wilkerson have edited a ranking of philosophy departments that is supposed to compete with the PGR, and whose advantage over the PGR is that this ranking is more "pluralistic." The pluralistic rankings also contains some informatin about the climate for women, in the form of two lists: one for "strongly recommended" departments; another for departments that "need improvement." These lists are fishy. For one thing, the "strongly recommended" list is currently seven times longer than the "needs improvement" list. Based on what I've been led to believe about the actual climate for women in this profession, that seems like it couldn't possibly be an accurate representation of how things are.

For another thing, it seems that they didn't actually ask anybody at any of the "needs improvement" departments about the climates for women in those departments. At least, that's how Leiter puts it. But I think, if you read Linda Alcoff's comments in the Gender, Race and Philosophy thread, it's closer to the truth to say that they have no idea how the data was collected. The general procedure for collecting data for the Pluralist Guide was to ask experts to rate departments along the relevant dimension; this procedure was also followed for the climate ratings. We don't know who was asked to rate the climate at, say, Rutgers (who have defended themselves with the most vigor), though presumably the organizers do. It does seem clear that nobody who is currently affiliated with Rutgers, or who was until recently, was consulted. And Alcoff seems to have admitted that she has no idea how the people who rated Rutgers (e.g.) got their information (see the parenthetical remark in point #1 here). It seems to me, then, that we have no way of knowing whether the data was reliable, up-to-date, and paints an accurate picture of the climates of these departments.

This is really shameful. It's sort of unbelievable that this is actually happening. The "Pluralists" have published a web page saying that (e.g.) Rutgers is one of three departments whose climate for women needs to be improved--which strongly suggests that Rutgers (et al.) has a particularly chilly and inhospitable climate for women--and they didn't ask anybody at Rutgers whether this was true, or whether they were doing anything to improve the climate. This can also be seen in the way that Oklahoma was initially on the list but was removed when it came to light that they had been actively working to improve the climate there; it has been pointed out that the Oklahoma incident also suggests that the editors hadn't done their homework. Alcoff has made a bunch of excuses about how difficult it is to collect good data on a topic like this, but I don't see how that justifies the use of bad data.

I mean, seriously. Did they really do that?

--Mr. Zero

Regarding the Synthese kerfuffle, Anonymous wrote:

I don't know how seriously I can take all this, given the background of the atrociously bad editorial practices I suspect most journals really engage in... So the Synthese editors engaged in what seems to be bad editorial behavior. But until I have reason to believe they alone among top journals behave in this way, why shame them?

One thing the Synthese editors did, it seems, is publish Beckwith's 23 page reponse without peer review. This is based on the fact that it was received and accepted on the same day, Feb 7. This is Synthese's editorial policy:

Synthese follows a double−blind reviewing procedure. Authors are therefore requested not to include their name or affiliation in their submitted papers. Self−identifying citations and references in the article text should be avoided. Authors should thus make sure that their names and/or affiliations are NOT mentioned on any of the manuscript pages. If authors do include their names on submitted papers, anonymous reviewing cannot be guaranteed.

Obviously, Beckwith's response could not be double-blinded, since he refers to himself continuously throughout the essay. And there are fully two pages of references in which he cites his own work. And he put his own name in the keywords. But that the diatribe could not be blind-reviewed does not mean it should not be subject to peer review at all... or does it? He also in places dismissively refers to Barbara Forrest as "Ms. Forrest" rather than Dr. or Professor Forrest. And he writes this: