gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee

PGR participation…

February 11, 2014

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For the 2009 Philosophical Gourmet Report ranking of US doctoral programs, Brian Leiter circulated a list of the faculty at 99 US programs. But for the 2011-12 rankings, the list was of only 60 programs. That’s a 39% drop, in the space of just two years, of departments willing to participate. No wonder Leiter has not published the list in the usual spot under methodology. But it can be retrieved as an rtf document from this page. [Edit: see correction below in my comment replying to Leiter.]

[Nonetheless] I compared the list of 60 faculties [used for the Philosophical Gourmet Report’s 2011 rankings] to Julie Van Camp’s ranking of departments by their percentage of tenure-stream women faculty. From top to bottom of these women-friendly departments (in terms of having above average percentage of women faculty), here is a list of those that do not participate in the PGR rankings:
- University of Georgia
- University of Oregon
- Emory University
- Villanova University
- SUNY-Albany
- University of New Mexico
- University of South Carolina
- Arizona State
- SUNY Binghamton
- University of Oklahoma
- Loyola University – Chicago
- SUNY Stony Brook
- University of Cincinnati
- University of Kansas
- DePaul University
- Fordham University
- Marquette University
- Temple University
- University of Memphis
- Duquesne University
- University of Kentucky
- Michigan State University
Bravo to all these programs — both for hiring women to the tenure stream and for saying no to the PGR.

[Edit: For background see yesterday’s post on the PGR’s un-women-friendly epistemology.]
The PGR’s un-women-friendly epistemology

February 10, 2014

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Julie Van Camp just updated her Spring 2004 article, “Female-Friendly Departments: A Modest Proposal for Picking Graduate Programs in Philosophy” that pointed out the under-representation of women on the advisory board of Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report. This month Van Camp expanded the postscript with numbers showing that in the past ten years little has changed.

Postscript: November 20, 2004 [updated 2/3/2014]

The 2011 Report:
The list of the Top 51 doctoral programs is included in the 2011 Philosophical Gourmet Report. The 56 members of the Report’s Advisory Board for 2011 included nine females (16.1%) and was based on the reports of 302 evaluators, including 46 women (15.2%).

The 2009 Report:
The 55 members of the Report’s Advisory Board for 2009 included eight females (14.5%) and was based on the reports of 294 evaluators, including 37 women (12.6%).

The 2006-08 Report:
The 56 members of the Report’s Advisory Board for 2006-2008 included seven females (12.5%) and was based on the reports of 269 evaluators, including 26 women (9.67%).

The 2004-06 Report:
The 59 members of the Report’s Advisory Board for 2004-2006 included eight females (13.6%) and was based on the reports of 266 evaluators, including 32 women (12.0%).

The 2002-04 Report:
The 43 members of the Report’s Advisory Board for 2002-2004 included five women (11.6%) and was based on reports from 177 evaluators, including 24 women (13.6%).

Van Camp also notes that the very “top” six programs in the PGR have a lower percentage of women on the faculty than the national average for doctoral-granting programs. Go HERE to see her helpful chart showing percentages of tenured and tenure-track women faculty in doctoral-granting programs.

On that chart she includes when and how a school was ranked on the PGR since 2002. Of the top ten on her list, six have no ranking——meaning they have not shown up (since 2002) as one of the PGR’s top 51 programs . That can happen in two ways: (1) the program was ranked at 52d or worse or (2) the program did not turn over its list of faculty, meaning, it chose not to participate at all.

The 2009 PGR was based on a list of faculty from 99 doctoral programs. How many were on the 2011 list? Leiter provides previous lists under methodology, but not the 2011 list, at least not as of this writing. I know anecdotally that many of the programs with more women on the faculty choose not to turn over their lists to Leiter. I think this is because of his explicit bias against self-identified pluralist programs, most of which tend to have more women on the faculty. Regarding some problems with this bias, see this post on see on the New APPS blog.

Is there a systematic bias in the PGR methodology that leads it to value more male-dominated departments? Well, yes. An unrepresentative and hand-picked advisory board plus unrepresentative and hand-picked evaluators will lead to a slanted take on the value of the work going on in the profession. You don’t have to be a stand-point epistemologist to see this.
Rick Roderick and the Political Unconscious on Diet Soap #201

January 9, 2014

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A while back I wrote here about how a video of my late friend Rick Roderick had surfaced on the web. I was so astonished by that video — to hear his voice and brilliance after all those years. This wild man of philosophy, a Texo-Marxist genius with a hellacious drawl, was too busy being an activist to get tenure at his first job at Duke University; so he became an itinerant philosopher. And one of his gigs was teaching a series of lectures for The Teaching Company. And now more than a decade after his premature death, he has garnered quite a cult following because of those videotaped lectures now on the web and web sites and a wikipedia entry.

Because of my connection with Rick, the novelist Doug Lain of the Diet Soap podcast invited me to be on his show. We talked about Rick, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and my book on the political unconscious. Doug just posted the wonderfully edited podcast, with clips from Rick’s lectures, the Art of Noise, and other interesting snippets.

Check it out!
2013 in review

December 31, 2013

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 8,000 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.
Standing Vigil in Watts and Syria

September 10, 2013

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When the Watts riots broke out in 1965, the woman who was to become my mother-in-law 27 years later gathered together a group of Quaker women to stand vigil outside the barricades that the LAPD had erected around the neighborhood. For days they stood in a line peacefully outside the barricades, taking turns in shifts, witnessing what was occurring and trying, in the process, to minimize the violence. If they had not been there, surely even more blood would have been spilled.

Syria reminds me of this daily. We have all been witnessing the atrocities, but at a comfortable distance while the Syrian people have been routinely brutalized, gassed, and murdered. This is not a civil war, but a barbaric attack by a leader against his own people. As Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes in today’s New York Times, “Here in Syria, there is a regime that has been killing its subjects with impunity for the last 30 months.”

In his speech tonight the President said, “We seek to ensure that the worst weapons will not be used.” Well, I don’t see any real difference in dying by gunshot, fire, or poison gas. Killing is killing. That Obama is moved to do something only when the “red line” of the use of sarin has been amply demonstrated is terribly disappointing. Isn’t a red line crossed when an elementary school is bombed with napalm? When rape becomes a weapon of war? What’s the point of “reprimanding” a tyrant for using one kind of death machine rather than another? I’m all for the Russian plan to get Syria to divest itself of its chemical weapons, but what about all the other weapons? And what of the total illegitimacy of this regime?

I am ashamed that we in the rest of the world have stood by, paralyzed by cowardice or trepidation, for all this time while the government of Bashar al-Assad has brutalized and killed thousands every month. But I also understand and share the worry over going to yet another war.

So might there be a nonviolent alternative — something akin to the line of Quaker women standing watch? That might mean sending in UN “peacekeepers,” though that is still very militaristic and might not be the only viable option. What if we civilians, pouring in from the civil societies of the world, took up watch inside of Syria, just as so many journalists have tried to do? We need to stand closer.

What’s to keep a dictator from killing those standing watch? Very little. But is there any other decent alternative? Can we claim to be a really human race when we fail to be humane, when we stand by helplessly?
On Being a Woman in Philosophy

September 8, 2013

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Five women philosophers examine what’s wrong with philosophy, that is, why the profession has been so hostile to women. Read their short pieces in the New York times opinionator blogs. The problems seem to be especially bad at the so-called “top” schools, at least tops in terms of the bleiter establishment as opposed to those at the top of the Pluralist Guide.
Pluralist Guide for Philosophers

September 7, 2013

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Here’s a welcome alternative to the bleieterreport. http://pluralistsguide.org
A Message from Istanbul

June 3, 2013

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I am sharing this with the permission of the author, a colleague in and from Istanbul, who sent this to me this morning….

6 days ago, a few thousand people started a peaceful protest against an urban development project in Gezi Parki, Taksim, Istanbul. An illegal process to uproot 20-year old trees in the park gave rise to these people camping out in the park all night, reading books, singing together, and protesting the project, which proposed to build a new shopping mall/bazaar/pedestrian walkway, where there is currently a park. There were families and children, young and old people of various political ideologies camping out there. At 5am the next morning, the police attacked the tents with tear gas bombs and caused a fire there as the people were asleep. People put out the fire on their own, but refused to leave. Turkish media did not report on this, but social media helped with distributing the news; as a result, tens of thousands of people started marching to Taksim square in Istanbul in support of the protestors and to draw attention to police brutality. The next morning there were around fifty thousand people in the square, but this time police used hundreds of tear gas bombs (often fired directly at people and causing serious injuries), water cannons to knock people down, and plastic bullets. As the police continued to use excessive force, people from all around the country started marching to Taksim, if they could, or started demonstrations all over Istanbul and Turkey in their home towns. At one point, there were around two hundred thousand people in Taksim; right now, twenty thousand or so still remain. These demonstrations quickly became about protesting the police violence, and by extension, condemning those who ordered it, the government. It is correct to say that what is going on right now is no longer about the park, but it is a civil disobedience movement against the current authoritarian government, who is using chemical weapons against its own citizens who voice their dissent.

The prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, said that this was a handful of marginals from the opposition party, being provoked by the enemies of Turkey within and without. In truth, there is no one party, organization, union, ideology behind these protests. Nationalists, secularists, leftists, rightists, soccer fan groups, LGBTQ groups, university students and faculty, old people, children, veterans, disabled people, … all participate in these. The prime minister is taunting the people, saying that he has 50% support and he has so far been keeping his voters on leash. He is acting as if he is only the prime minister of those who voted for him, and as if the people on the streets are doing something undemocratic by peacefully showing their concerns. One important fact to note is that people who did vote for him, often religious conservatives, are also on the streets protesting. One uniting slogan for the demonstrators has been a call to end police violence and a call to the prime minister to show responsibility. The response from the government has been increasing police violence and use of more tear gas grenades, plastic bullets, and arrests. The more the police is present and tries to supress the protests by force, the more the people react and take to the streets.

Let me repeat: the Turkish media has not reported on the events that have been going on for the past 6 days. At all. Not a single word. I personally witnessed the events in Taksim on Saturday, the police brutality, and none of the mainstream media sources reported on it. It is crazy-making. We had to livestream the protests from a Norwegian TV channel, but not a single story appeared in the Turkish news sources. It is clear that they are being censured. Two days ago as the police was withdrawing from the square, some news channels started reporting it, but they were spinning the story to support the discourse of the prime minister, and hiding its real reasons and real extent/seriousness. They are making it sound like it was about the park and it is now over. It is clear to those of us who have been paying attention is that it is no longer about the park but about opposing to the government and its dictatorial tendencies as well as condemning police brutality. The Turkish media is making it sound like it is smaller and less significant than it actually is, like the police was justified in using excessive force (by the way, they used incredible amounts of tear gas, plastic bullets, and there is talk of agent orange being in the mix. I don’t think it can be agent orange, but there are various kinds of red orange chemicals in the tear gas that has different effects on people.) For the past two days, it has been radio silence again on Turkish media (tv as well as newspapers, except for one low-budget cable channel, which was previously a shopping network). Facebook and Twitter have been the only outlets to get the word out to the foreign press and international institutions.

The protestors are asking the prime minister to do the following immediately: 1) Stop the police violence, everywhere in Turkey; 2) Start holding the police/the mayors/the governors accountable; 3) Stop taunting and provoking people by misinforming the public. The prime minister today went on a tour to Tunisia and Marrakech in the midst of the upheaval.

The police brutality stopped in Taksim (because the police was ordered to withdraw from this very cosmopolitan and touristic neighborhood) but it is still going on in different parts of Istanbul and Turkey. The police is attacking people on the street and people in their homes. Those who cannot be on the streets started their own campaign to “make noise:” they are banging on pots and pans in their balconies at 9pm every night. People who live close to the violent areas are opening their homes to the protestors to apply first aid and to provide shelter. Doctors and lawyers are offering their help pro bono to those wounded and arrested, circulating their contact information and availability via email and social media. Unions declared a general strike starting tomorrow. Highschoolers are wearing all black in solidarity. Anonymous is hacking government websites one by one. It was finals week at universities, and presidents and deans are supportive of make-ups, cancellations or deferrals.

Public intellectuals such as Chomsky, Ranciere, Zizek, and Hardt recently came out in solidarity. There are all sorts of petitions (Amnesty International, avaaz.org, the White House) going around asking the prime minister to stop this.

http://humanrightsturkey.org/2013/05/31/take-action-now/

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Erdogan_End_the_crackdown_now/?aIUaMeb

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/condemn-actions-taken-against-peaceful-protesters-istanbul-turkey/zDGtGCDZ

You can also help by calling attention to these events; at this point, the government will only respond to international pressure to stop the police brutality and it’s all the more important since the Turkish media is not at all reporting what is really happening. I am pasting some good sources below for your reference; it would be very helpful if you can also share them widely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/world/europe/police-attack-protesters-in-istanbuls-taksim-square.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/middleeast/development-spurs-larger-fight-over-turkish-identity.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/protests-show-turks-cant-tolerate-erdogan-anymore/276447/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/istanbul-park-protests-turkish-spring

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/31/a-guide-to-whats-going-on-in-istanbuls-gezi-park/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/incredible-and-frightening-photos-from-istanbuls-occupygezi

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/gezi-park-crackdown-recalls-most-shameful-moments-of-turkish-history-says-chomsky.aspx?pageID=238&nID=48018&NewsCatID=341

A brief collage video here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/01/a-stunning-90-second-video-of-turkeys-protests/

Proofs of police brutality (in Turkish): http://delilimvar.tumblr.com/

Besiktas (another important neighborhood in Istanbul) on the news http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22749750

Soccer fans united: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/united-ultras-join-forces-against-police-violence-in-taksim.aspx?pageID=238&nID=48077&NewsCatID=341

Updates: http://www.whatishappeninginistanbul.com/

Livestream from the only cable channel in Turkey (in Turkish, but you can see, especially at night time, the police brutality with your own eyes :http://www.canlitvizletv.com/2013/01/halk-tv-canl-izle.html

On Twitter – #direngezi parki, #occupygezi

Some sources are calling these events the Turkish Spring or Occupy Turkey. I am wary of these labels as I believe that each historical, cultural, geographical, and political context is unique, but I will leave it up to history to decide what label is appropriate.
A Bad Year Gone

May 23, 2013

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I can hardly believe the year that has just passed. At the beginning of it I would never have imagined that people would stop and praise me for my mastery of Robert’s Rules of Order or for my leadership on campus. A year ago today I’d never read RRO and I was still very much a newcomer to my campus. But then this past September the dean of Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences announced a roster of cuts to undergraduate and graduate programs and everything for me changed.

One of the programs he cut was one that my husband was teaching in as a senior lecturer, so that was an immediate incentive. I suppose I could have then gone to the dean and tried to strike a deal, but I didn’t. It seemed better to stand up on principle for everyone so affected, not just those with my particular circumstances. I got deeply involved because I’m a democrat all the way down, and the long-standing principles of faculty governance call for faculty control of the curricula. Emory’s administration just swatted that principle away as if it were a gnat. I find this abominable.

So I got deeply involved in the newly reconstituted Emory chapter of the American Association of University Professors. And I spoke up often during faculty meetings and occasionally on the college faculty listserv. And I posted a bit on this blog about what was going on.

Colleges and universities across the country and the world are under financial pressure. But the stupidest thing they can do is cut programs. This is the time to expand the crucial role of higher education not the time to shrink it. The leaders of my U are definitely leaning stupid. Buck up, guys. Get it together. Don’t succumb to the marketization of the university.

I’m hopeful that our new provost, a gal, Claire Sterk, can help Emory chart a better direction. And maybe the board of trustees will wake from their deep slumber and realize that they have some fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the bylaws of the university, which guarantee its nonprofit status and its accreditation with SACS, are actually being followed–but which are not.

And here’s link to Emory’s board of trustees.
Be Extreme, Extremely You

May 15, 2013

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My good friend, the composer Carman Moore, whom I talk with much too rarely, wrote me a little poem many years ago. I keep a copy of it handy wherever I’m writing, and it serves me well. So I offer it to all of you who happen across this blog. It’s sage advice. And note the composer’s riffs:

Be extreme, extremely you,

Follow the good line all the way.

Then maybe it bears repeating.

Then maybe it bears variation.

Then maybe it bears offspring.

When it’s over, you’re changed.

You can never go back to where you were.

–Carman Moore

After all these long years I notice something I hadn’t considered deeply enough before: by being extremely oneself one changes . We can never go back to who we were. So who is this “self” that one was being so ardent to? Maybe a daimon?