gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee

Slouching Toward Annapolis

November 27, 2007

conflict, diplomacy, Israel, Palestine, politics, trauma

This morning, up the road a ways in Annapolis, MD, the Bush administration is hosting belated Mideast Peace Talks between Israel and Palestine. Maybe this is just a last race to save face for the Bush administration after all it has done to create havoc in the Middle East. But still we all hope for the best.

Two op-eds in this morning’s Washington Post bring home what is at stake and how hard it is going to be—maybe not in the cushy confines of Annapolis but certainly back home in Palestine and Israel. Richard Cohen describes the impasse between two mothers, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, whose two daughters were killed when one of them set off a suicide bomb.

Beyond the Reach of Annapolis

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, November 27, 2007; Page A17

On March 29, 2002, an 18-year-old woman walked into a Jerusalem supermarket and blew herself up. One of her victims was a woman just a year younger than herself. The two women looked so much alike, Palestinian and Israeli, and their mortal wounds were so similar, that the pathologist had trouble reassembling the two girls. They had so much in common.

So it was perhaps understandable that the mother of Rachel Levy would try to contact the mother of Ayat al-Akhras because they, too, had so much in common. read more

Also on the Post’s op-ed page, Maher Najjar, the deputy director of Gaza’s water utility, pleads with the west to help persuade the Israeli military to stop its collective punishment of Palestinians by cutting off electricity, fuel, and clean water whenever militants set of a Qassam rocket. As the Israelis try to punish the Palestinians into policing themselves, the Palestinian reaction, as anyone would suspect, becomes more defiant.

The majority of the 1.5 million men, women and children living in Gaza do not fire Qassam rockets. Most of us want normal lives, starting with the ability to provide for ourselves. We want to live in peace with our neighbors. We hope that Israel will realize, before it is too late, that in Gaza, playing with water is playing with fire.

It’s going to take more than a couple of days eating crab cakes together in Annapolis for Israelis and Palestinians to get through these impasses and begin to forge some kind of peace. Still, fingers crossed.
Philosophy and the City

November 26, 2007

philosophy, public life, Uncategorized

My friend and colleague in philosophy, Sharon Meagher, is starting up a really great project on philosophy and the city. The premise is that philosophy is at its best bound up with the public affairs of a particular place. Meagher argues that the philosophical pretense to adopt a “view from nowhere” ignores the ways in which philosophy is entangled with the problems of the world, and the problems of our own communities, increasingly large urban places. One of the innovations of Meagher’s work is the idea of a philosophical walking tour of a city. Imagine taking your students on such a tour, pausing at the places that caused major social upheaval, other places in which new social relations and ideas were worked out. Meagher’s site is still under construction, so check it out now as well as later for new ideas on how to engage philosophy students in the problems of the world.
Women, Children, and Philosophy

November 25, 2007

children, philosophy

Why are women only 21% of faculty in philosophy compared to 41% in the humanities overall? See links on the SWIP page for thoughts on this question as well as a post on Lemmings. Here’s an additional possibility: Might it be that conventional philosophy in America styles itself more like the sciences than like the humanities? And we know how women fare in the sciences.

And of this 21% why is it when I go to academic conferences so few of the accomplished women scholars there have children? Is it that women in philosophy largely decide not to have children? Or is it the other way around — that having children with the usual division of labor makes it incredibly tough to teach, write, and travel? Is it that the women philosophers who are parents drop out of the profession more or simply can’t get away to go to conferences? There are amazing counterexamples, including two brilliant feminist theorists, one a Foucault scholar and another a Merleau-Ponty scholar each with four or more children! How do they do it? Probably with immense help from their partners, for the profession itself, and its societies, does very little in the way of providing childcare at conferences. How does philosophy compare to other disciplines? What factors make a difference?
Philosophy Rankings

November 24, 2007

academic analytics, philosophical gourmet, rankings
The other day someone named Ann posted a comment to an earlier thread about philosophy rankings, including Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report. The upshot of her comment is that (1) she recalls a paper “statistically analysing the feedback and showing near total consensus amongst faculty from the entire range of depts assessed as to who was top and who bottom” and (2) she thought that “at least Leiter’s methodology is explicit and based on up-to-date information. Thanks to the statistical analyses it’s possible for people to be fully informed of the fact that having metaphysicians will count for more than having historians of philosophy (and know exactly how much that counts). Whatever else you think of the PGR, it at least allows people to think clearly about these matters.”

Let’s do think clearly. Years ago I took 3 semesters of graduate level statistics, including survey research methodology. And subsequently I worked on some deliberative polling projects in which some of the nation’s top survey researchers participated. I saw how careful and exacting they were about survey methodology. This doesn’t make me an expert by any means, but I do know the basic fundamental principles, including this one: If done right, a survey of x number of people will tell you what that x number of people thinks. We are tempted to think that we can generalize from that sample to the larger population, just as it’s tempting to think that we can generalize from the people that Leiter has enlisted to do the rankings to the discipline as a whole. But the only way this can be done is if, at minimum, the original sample is (i) randomly selected and (ii) a large enough sample size, which is generally at least 350 people. Given that Leiter’s sample fails either criteria, all his rankings tell us are what those people think. So, Ann’s remark that because Leiter’s analysis is statistical it can fully inform us that one type of philosophy counts more than another is wrong. Leiter’s analysis only pertains to what counts for that specific group. It tells you nothing more than that. Nothing. And, as Ann herself suggests, (1) could be so—and I’d love to see that report—only because the profession at large has come to believe the conventional wisdom.

Granted, Brian Leiter selected his group because they are accomplished in their fields, but again the result is only a reputational ranking of what those particular folks think of the schools that teach their own particular fields. If you analyze the 2006 report, you will see that not a single professor at a “top ten” department had a Ph.D. from a Catholic university. The vast majority of professors teaching at top-ranked departments got their Ph.D.’s from the very same set of departments. Of course, we would expect that Ph.D.s from “top” departments would get jobs at “top” departments. But the problem is that the Leiter report provides no objective measure for ascertaining what are in fact the top departments. Hence it commits a classic logical fallacy. The Leiter report presumes what it sets out to prove. There is no objective measure in the report for ascertaining what in fact are the “top” departments.

And notably underrepresented in the group of rankers and the departments ranked well are outstanding departments such as Michigan State University, Vanderbilt University, SUNY at Stony Brook, the University of Oregon, Emory University, the University of Memphis, Penn State University, and CUNY Graduate School—despite the productivity and influence of their faculty and the success of their graduate students.

Potential philosophy graduate students have good reason to seek out objective ranking of departments. First it’s important to find a good place to study with good faculty where one can fruitfully pursue one’s interest. Second it’s important to find a graduate school with a good placement record. The first is often accomplished with a little sleuthing and good advice, identifying who is doing interesting work in one’s field, or if one is not quite certain yet, what department has broad, plural research taking place. The second requires some study of actual placement success over the years.

For students interested in studying in the areas in which the Leiter report covers, the report can help those students find a congenial place to study. But it won’t help them identify what place has a good placement record. For students interested in studying fields that the Leiter report looks down on or omits altogether, the Leiter report does a huge disservice.

We need studies of Ph.D. granting philosophy departments on criteria like these:
- the quality and influence of faculty members’ research in their fields (Academic Analytics’ rankings are a step in this direction)
- faculty-student ratios
- teacher training
- preparation for the job market
- placement records for graduate students
This would be a real service to the profession. In the meantime, I ask any administrator who is taking seriously the Leiter report to confer with the statisticians in his or her own university to get an objective measure of the soundness of these rankings’ methodologies.
Public Scholarship Conference

November 11, 2007

Uncategorized

George Mason University and the University of Maryland are co-hosting a conference on public scholarship June 10-11, 2008, at Mason’s Arlington campus. The event is also sponsored by The Democracy Imperative and the Kettering Foundation. A call for papers is forthcoming. In the meantime send inquiries to the event’s organizer, Noelle McAfee, at nmcafee@gmu.edu.
Sally’s Links

October 30, 2007

adoption, feminist theory, philosophy

MIT’s Sally Haslanger, professor of philosophy and feminist theorist, has some terrific links on her website for anyone interested in philosophy on the Internet (including philosophy blogs), feminist theory, or adoption matters. Check them out here.
An interview on the book, A Year of Living Biblically

October 29, 2007

christianity, judaism, the bible

Today I heard a terrific program on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show. From WAMU’s website:

A.J. Jacobs says he’s officially Jewish, but “in the same way Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant”. But after being raised in a secular New York City household, he decided to live an entire year following the word of the bible– literally. He joins Kojo to discuss the big rules (thou shalt not kill), the obscure ones (no mixed fibers), and his personal adventures with “the Good Book”.

Guests

A. J. Jacobs, Editor-at-Large, Esquire Magazine; and author of “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible” (Simon & Schuster)

Jacobs previous book was “Know It All,” based on his life experiment of reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. Kojo interviewed Jacobs today for his new book, which involved another kind of intense research, a year trying to follow every rule that can be found in the bible. Jacobs found over 700, and he spent a year trying to follow every one, from not cutting the corners of his beard (and since he didn’t know where the corners were, he simply didn’t shave) to not sitting anywhere his menstruating wife had sat. He tried to follow all ten commandments and every other rule the bible laid out. He found not lying to be particularly difficult, especially when raising a three-year-old boy. (Who’s not tempted to tell the kid that the candy store is closed?) He started all this off as an agnostic jew, and he ended it all in pretty much the same way. But the experience seemed to make him much more appreciative of ritual, sacredness, and other matters spiritual, most of which this writer has little acquaintance. Still, it’s interesting.

Jacobs seems to have gone into the experience partly to show the folly of taking the bible literally. At the same time he wanted to be open and take seriously the sacred rituals in this book that’s the “best seller of all time.” He says he came out of the experience a “reverent agnostic”: appreciative of the difficulty of some of the rituals (just try to follow the commandment not to covet while working at Esquire and living in NYC) and the mystery of other rules (e.g., stoning adulterers). It’s worth downloading the program just to hear his story about how he did, in fact, stone an adulterer — with some pebbles he had in his pocket just for the occasion.

It seems that he went into the experiment partly in bad faith (bent on showing how it was impossible to take the bible literally) yet at the same time open to what might come of it all.

Someone called in a question along the lines, “people spend more time deciding what kind of car they might buy than what kind of god they should believe in — did this experience help you understand that the Christian god offers a better deal than the Jewish god?” To his credit, Jacobs didn’t take the bait. No, he said, he didn’t become a christian; he became a more respectful agnostic.

I’d love to find time to read this book.
Good Science, Bad Science

October 28, 2007

gary taubes, nutrition, obesity, science

I just finished slogging through 460 pages detailing 150 years of research on nutrition, obesity, disease, and weight gain accompanied by 100 pages of documentation: Good Calories, Bad Calories written by Gary Taubes and just published by Alfred A. Knofp. Had I been Gary Taubes’s editor, I would have insisted on putting the conclusions up front. But, no, someone like me didn’t edit this book; so this reader had to read every study, every turn, every machination, every bungle, every fabrication, excuse, rationalization, and machination that led to the current travesty of nutrition science.

The book is brilliant and well-worth the slog. But let me give away the end for those less patient than I am. Without the work of slogging through the studies, the results will be quite shocking. So read the book. In the interim, here is the upshot:

Dietary fat doesn’t make you fat or prone to heart attacks or cancer. In fact, some studies suggest that the less fat you eat, the more likely you are to get cancer.

Carbohydrates—especially refined ones, sucrose, and high-fructose corn syrup—upset the body’s homeostatic mechanisms. They spur insulin secretion. “Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated—either chronically or after a meal—we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel.” (p. 454) These carbohydrates may be the most likely causes of “the diseases of civilization,” including heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s (inadvertently), diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.

To say that obesity is the result of eating too much is like saying that alcoholism is the result of drinking too much. Both are tautologies, and both fail to cover cases where people eat “too much” without getting fat or drink too much without becoming alcoholics. There may well be a link between overeating and obesity (though often that link is missing), but the association tells us nothing about causation. A third factor should be considered. Taubes finds this third factor to be insulin increasing as the result of carbohydrate consumption. The more sugar or insulin floating in the blood stream, the less the body will metabolize and burn fat. (This is my way of putting it, not Taubes’s.)

“Fattening and obesity are caused by an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue and fat metabolism. Fat synthesis and storage exceed the mobilization of fat from the adipose tissue and its subsequent oxidation. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this balance.” (p. 454)

The notion that getting fat is a result of eating more calories than one burns off is completely unsubstantiated. Cutting back on calories makes one hungry, makes the metabolism slow down, makes the person less likely to exercise. Exercising more makes one hungry. The best way to control eating is to control hunger, and hunger is an effect of how much insulin is cruising through the system. Carbohydrates spur insulin, inhibit fat mobilization, and make us hungry. The less insulin, the less hungry one is. The more fat we eat without eating carbohydrates, the more satisfied we are.

How can what Taubes be saying be true when we’ve heard everything to the contrary? Taubes makes a compelling case that all we’ve heard has been the result of a bandwagon or (see John Tierney’s terrific article) a cascade effect: one researcher comes up with a theory that fat is linked to heart disease, a theory poorly tested; this theory gets a lot of good press; the next researcher who comes along is sobered by the new conventional wisdom and interprets his results in keeping; others select studies and cases that serve to back up the conventional view; and soon anyone who dares to say anything to the contrary is dubbed a heretic. Or dismissed without comment. This is a book that will interest the philosopher of science as much as the person worried about how to feed her kids.

Taubes’s book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, points the way forward to some good science.
The Congo

October 7, 2007

rape, trauma, Uncategorized, violence against women, war

There is an epidemic of rape occurring in the Congo.

Jan Goodwin documented this three years ago for The Nation:

Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who’d disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts.

Is the epidemic of rape that’s devastating women in the Congo politically motivated? From today’s New York Times article, it seems rather to be an effect of the trauma of the genocide in Rwanda. So many men have become severely damaged, and now women are being brutally and savagely damaged in turn:

BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.

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Sexual Violence in Eastern Congo

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Times Topics: Congo

The New York Times

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.

Find the NYT article to read more.
Long time, No blog

October 2, 2007

Uncategorized

The summer was really hectic: finished editing a book; hung out with my kids; did lots of good work with the Kettering Foundation; worked on other projects. But not enough — there’s never enough time in a summer. At the end of May, the summer stretches out in all its glory, seemingly ample time to work on so many projects. By July 1 one begins to feel a little antsy. By August 1 one becomes ansious. By September 1 it is all over, and teaching begins anew.

I’m beginning to think that the summer work ideal is really a hoax, at least with children. Who can get work done? It’s the academic year, with its rhythms and expectations and structure that provides space to think about writing projects. At least that’s how it is for me this year. My classes are terrific. There’s nothing better than teaching Phil 100 (and I love being at a place that actually calls it that) along with teaching a graduate seminar.

The book is due out in March. Stay tuned.

Guests

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