Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Good Morning, Senator

    The ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ issue seems to be warming up. Unfortunately. Because the idea seems as full of holes as a colander. It seemed leaky when I wrote an In Focus on the subject a year and a half ago (it doesn’t seem that long, but it was), and it seems leaky now. The difficulties seem so obvious…I mentioned some –

    Who would decide the law was being violated? What would the criteria be? What would constitute evidence? Would the testimony of students be sufficient? If so, what of the possibility that for instance a student who’d received a C, or one who’d been bored, or one who simply disagreed with a teacher would file charges? If student testimony would not be sufficient, would administrative staff sit in on classes? Would they go undercover? Might that lead to an underage hence underexperienced and underqualified administration?…And what about all the issues that don’t divide along a neat left-right axis? What about points of view that aren’t really particularly political at all but that the legislature doesn’t happen to agree with? So perhaps we begin to see the advantage of dealing with such issues by means of discussion, debate, argument, books and articles and websites, rather than handcuffs and subpoenas.

    And Brian Leiter mentions similar ones –

    The problem is that it is plainly within the purview of academic freedom for instructors to determine what counts as “serious scholarly opinion” and what counts as “human knowledge.” The only way, then, that this provision can have any bite is if it authorizes others (who exactly? the Ohio legislature?) to override the instructor’s academic freedom in setting the curriculum…suppose the student’s political, ideological, or religious beliefs with respect to the subject matter of the course are false, i.e., contradicted by “serious scholarly opinion” and “human knowledge” as assessed by the instructor? Does the creationist get a free pass for her ignorance in evolutionary biology simply because she has a “religious belief” that conflicts with the scientific content of the course? Is the NeoNazi entitled not to be graded down when he writes a paper for his Anthropology or Biology class defending his “ideological belief” that “the Jewish race is biologically inferior”?

    Just so. Question after question. But that hasn’t stopped the Ohio legislature, as Leiter usefully points out. Coming soon to a university near you: teaching entirely taken over by political hacks, lobbyists, bribers and bribe-takers, and religious zealots who have the ear of the political hacks. Spiffy. That will certainly improve things.

  • Felicide

    Any of you read the TLS? An informant told me via email that ‘apparently’ there is a review of the Fashionable Dictionary in the latest one, but that it doesn’t seem to be available online. I asked a few questions, such as who wrote it, but the informant didn’t answer, so I’m thinking it was probably a joke. I love jokes. So – if any of you do read the TLS – is there a review of the DFN in there? Silly of me to be so curious, I know, but – well it’s probably an American thing.

  • Teach Children to Call Each Other Poofs? Maybe Not

    Nick Cohen: how not to conform to Daily Mail stereotypes of PC prigs.

  • History in the Service of an Ideology

    We take from the past what suits us; too often it’s a blinkered, nationalistic view

  • Academic vs. Horowitzian Truth Standards

    28 January 2005

    Dear Mr. Horowitz,

    Thank you for
    your response
    to my recent
    investigation     of your interest in promoting left-right balance.
    In it, you urge me to comment more on the specific contents of the
    Academic
    Bill of Rights    , rather than on your statements in defense of
    the Bill. While I’m more than happy to share my thoughts on the
    Bill’s contents, it is not easy, in the context of our exchange,
    to separate this material from your own arguments. Indeed, I think
    it would be very enlightening to show how your own way of thinking
    epitomizes many of the things that most trouble me about the Bill.
    A consideration of competing concepts of truth (or, as some would
    have it, “truth”) should make the case.

    To my mind,
    one of the ABOR’s most unsettling features is its encouragement
    of epistemological relativism. For instance it
    states     that

    human
    knowledge is a never-ending pursuit of the truth, that there is
    no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge,
    and that no party or intellectual faction has a monopoly on wisdom.

    Further down,
    the Bill refers to “the
    uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge    .”
    My gut reaction to this kind of radical relativism is a pragmatic
    one. As the saying goes, it’s good to keep an open mind, but don’t
    keep it so open that your brain falls out. Unlike those people who
    only ever put the word “truth” in quotation marks, I feel that some
    principles, ideas and conventions are more right than others, even
    in cases when their truth-value is not categorically demonstrable.
    Otherwise, what is to prevent us from slipping into a dangerous
    moral relativism?

    When it comes
    to loosening prevailing standards of truthfulness, you certainly
    practice what you preach. For instance, in paragraph 11 of your
    latest
    response    , you imply that you had not read a
    document     which is written in the first person, and published
    in your magazine, complete with your name and an image of your signature
    at the bottom. After insisting that the piece was entirely ghostwritten,
    you go on (in the interest of denying that you never talk about
    balance) to disclaim any knowledge of the statement that the ABOR
    “demands balance in reading lists,” even though you cannot deny
    my observation that this very passage is actually an unsourced quotation
    (or variation of a quotation) of something you wrote elsewhere.
    You wrap up this prodigious little nugget of indirection by simply
    “plead[ing]
    guilty to not paying more attending [sic] to my fund-raising mail    .”

    To those of
    us who don’t share your ABOR-endorsed relativism, you’re guilty
    of a lot more than neglecting to check your mail. By the measure
    of the enduring civil standards upheld in reputable academic research,
    this kind of double- or triple-dealing is simply inexcusable. Like
    every academic I know, I personally make a habit of reading all
    first-person statements that I authorize to bear my signature. Indeed,
    I go so far as actually to write any such statements myself.
    After that, I stand behind my words. In my profession, writing one’s
    own material, and standing behind it, is nothing short of an ethical
    imperative. For academics, serious writing is properly viewed as
    an outward sign of inner integrity — or, as the case may be, lack
    of integrity. That’s why we consider plagiarism and ghost-writing
    to be such grave offences. (Another practice that keeps us honest
    is linking
    readers to our sources by means of footnotes or other citation methods,
    even when these sources complicate our argument.)

    In short, by
    academic standards, your cavalier practice of allowing your name
    to be attached to an influential document that you didn’t write
    (even if it is “very obviously a direct mail solicitation,” as if
    that matters) and your subsequent effort to shirk responsibility
    for the content, amount to a serious abuse of your readers’ trust.
    Given the discrepancy between the standard academic reverence for
    truthfulness and your own more nonchalant attitude, is it any wonder
    that academics question your motivations when you try to force us
    to submit to “the
    uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge    ?”
    This phrase, coupled with your own instrumental view of truth, makes
    me worry about how moral relativists might act on the idea of the
    “never-ending
    pursuit of the truth    ,” or on the phrase that “there
    is no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to
    challenge    .”

    Let’s see how
    this last pronouncement breaks down in real life, by applying it
    to the following truth-claim.

    People
    should always strive to be honest and free from delusion.

    Does anyone
    care to challenge this? This statement is certainly not ‘open
    to challenge’ according to my principles. I believe it to be
    both ‘humanly accessible’ and absolutely, categorically
    true. Anyone who wants to pass blanket legislation suggesting otherwise
    had better come up with a pretty good explanation of what could
    possibly be wrong with my truth-claim, or my principles, in this
    particular instance.

    On the subject
    of truth and delusion, I continue to be astonished by your persistent
    denial     of the fact that the ABOR movement has repeatedly pushed
    for ideological “balance.” In the face of all
    my evidence    , you have had little choice but to back down just
    a little, yet you now ask

    If
    “left-right balance” were the agenda of the Academic Bill of Rights,
    or the academic freedom campaign, why wouldn’t it be at the center
    of both?

    Given the facts
    of the matter, how can I respond, except by offering yet another
    example of the very term you initially denied using at all, and
    by choosing it from the “center” of your campaign? My latest example
    is a phrase in the Students for Academic Freedom Mission
    and Strategy statement    . It asserts that

    [b]ecause
    the university is not the arm of any political party but an institution
    whose purpose is to promote learning and the exchange of ideas,
    student programs of a partisan nature should be fair and balanced
    [my emphasis].

    There you have
    it. That pesky “b” word again, and once again in an explicitly political
    context. Are parts of the SAF Mission Statement also ghostwritten,
    and full of things that its authors (whoever they may be) didn’t
    mean to assert? Or is this sentence something that you’re willing
    to stand behind? If you do admit to the reality of this call for
    “balance,” how will you then reconcile it with your insistence that
    the “balance” issue isn’t (as you now rephrase it) “at the center”
    of your freedom campaign. If a “Mission and Strategy” statement
    isn’t “at the center” of a movement’s agenda, then it’s a funny
    kind of mission statement.

    Thank you for
    your attention. I look forward to any future responses.

    Graham Larkin

    Stanford University, Department of Art & Art History
    CA-AAUP VP for Private Colleges and Universities

    To join the fight against the Academic Bill of Rights, get involved with the AAUP, tireless defenders of academic freedom since 1915.

    ©2005 CA-AAUP

    This article was first published on the California AAUP website and is republished here by permission.

  • Proud Atheist Mother of Atheist Daughter

    She’d rather do things herself than have someone do them for her.

  • Tsunami as Missionary Opportunity

    ‘What an incredible opportunity God is giving us to provide Bibles for the Bhojpuri for the very first time!’

  • Iraqi Trade Unionist Attacked and Kidnaped

    Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions yesterday denounced attack on one of its elected officials.

  • The Clash

    This articles intersects with a couple of issues we’ve been talking about lately. (Well, I say ‘we’ – I’ve been talking about them. I know that. It’s just me, going jaw, jaw, jaw. I realize that. But I think of it as a discussion anyway – I think ‘we’re’ talking about them. Because…because of a lot of things. Comments, and emails I get, and that tiny little high-pitched voice that no one else hears, and – what meds? I’m fine, cut it out, get your hands off me – )

    Sorry. Where was I. A couple of issues. The one about various tensions between cherished goals and ideas, and the one about special treatment of religion.

    In the bitter controversy that followed, the Christian Legal Society sued Ohio State, charging that the university’s nondiscrimination policy violated the group’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion by forcing it to accept unwanted members. This past fall, without ever going to court, the group won a complete victory when Ohio State changed its policy to exempt student groups formed to promote “sincerely held religious beliefs.”…Requiring a Christian-student association to admit non-Christians or gay people, “would be like requiring a vegetarian group to admit meat eaters,” asserts Jordan Lorence, a senior lawyer at the Alliance Defense Fund, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “It would be like forcing the College Democrats to accept Republicans.”…Emotionally charged conflicts like the one at Ohio State have forced colleges to choose which of two basic principles is more important: freedom of religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment, or equal protection under the law, as established by the 14th Amendment. “There are times when constitutional rights come into conflict with one another,” says Jeffrey Gamso, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

    Aren’t there just. And such times force one to think hard about which rights, goals, values, ideas are more important (or valuable or basic or non-negotiable or central or various other terms indicating which is less possible to give up) and which are less so. And often such thinking gets one nowhere but at a stalemate, an ‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t know. Because groups are discriminatory, aren’t they. If you have a book group, you discriminate against people who never read. If you have a cooking group, you discriminate against people who eat out of tins and foil bags. If you have a runners’ group, you discriminate against people who prefer to amble or sit or lie flat. And so on. But you don’t really want to see the same principle extended to the Anti-Semites’ group, or the Misogynists’ Club, or the Homophobia Alliance. So you seem to want to judge groups on the merits of their principles of discrimination – and what a can of worms that would be to get into! What a lot of time and trouble that would be. As all these college adminstrators and litigators remark in the article.

    Critics of the change are particularly concerned that the settlement exempts only religious student groups from nondiscrimination rules, which may represent an unconstitutional favoring of religious groups over nonreligious ones, says Ruth Colker, a professor of constitutional law at Ohio State. She predicts that the decision could lead to future lawsuits if nonreligious groups are denied recognition because they practice some form of discrimination.

    Well, exactly. Here we are again. Why do ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ get special consideration when other kinds of sincerely held beliefs don’t? There seem to be a lot of reasons – habit; religion is consoling; religion is taken to be central to people’s identity; religious people are willing to sue; and no doubt more. But none of them really seems like a knock-down argument or reason, does it. Which is why people aren’t always pleased when sincerely held religious beliefs get special treatment that sincerely held secular beliefs don’t.

  • ‘Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs’

    Colleges forced to choose between freedom of religion and equal protection under law.

  • Education Secretary and Opus Dei

    Particularly unquestioning form of religion seems at odds with background in rational inquiry.

  • Simon Schama on Letters of Isaiah Berlin

    ‘The strenuous journey of an exceptional mind toward its own self-realization.’

  • Buster the Bunny Visits Perverts in Vermont!

    Lesbians, maple syrup, PBS – it’s all too much for US Education Secretary.

  • Circumstances

    I said I was going to drone some more about ethical commitments. Why? Because the subject interests me, especially now, when there is so much pressure to take religion seriously, to be sympathetic towards religion, to give religion the benefit of the doubt, to be careful not to dismiss religion ‘lightly’ or ‘contemptuously’ or quickly or any other way that doesn’t involve the aforementioned taking it seriously. I don’t say there is no merit to those suggestions and urgings, but I do think they are too much in fashion right now, and the other view is too much out of fashion. So I think it’s useful to take a look at the underpinnings of the idea. I take the thought that religion is one important source of ethical commitments, to be one of those underpinnings. Hence the utility of poking away at the thought.

    Ethical commitments are not just general, they are also particular. Let’s look at them in particular – as the ethical commitments of people in particular situations. Because what situation one is in makes a considerable difference to how one forms one’s ethical commitments. The phrase has very different meanings depending on whether the person who holds them is: autonomous; responsible for others; in control, authority, power over others; subordinate, owned by, obliged to others.

    The phrase also has different meanings depending on past history. Has the person who holds them ever been in a position to think about and choose them, to consider alternatives, to look around them on all sides, to decide? Has the person been issued the ethical commitments from birth? Were they issued as orders and commandments, as imperatives and mandates? Were they issued as mandates by a person or people who (as part of this ethical commitment) was/were in a position of unquestionable power, authority, ownership over the person? Are the ethical commitments the commitments of everyone the person has ever met, heard, seen, read? Are they actually commitments rather than an inherited conglomerate? Does it matter?

    The meaning also depends on context, environment, geography, social and national history as well as personal history. Also on what kinds of indoctrination, socialization, education the person has had access to. Is the person able to go to a library? Can she go by herself and read freely, anything she wants to? The meaning depends on the nature of the schools, religious institutions, libraries, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books that are available. Bookshops, coffee houses, gathering places. The police, security service, military. Vigilante groups, gangs, militias. Security cameras, and who is watching them.

    So, to put it more concretely and specifically. The ethical commitments of a single man or woman in London or New York who had secular liberal parents and went to state schools and a secular university, have been arrived at in different ways from the ethical commitments of a married woman in a village in Bangladesh who never went to school and was married off at age twelve.

    And not only formed differently but ontologically different. Different all the time. It seems reasonable to wonder if some people – people in certain situations, situations not of their own making or choosing, situations that are controlled and given and coercive – are in a position to have anything that can be called ethical commitments at all. Or if they can be called that, can the people who hold them be said to hold their own? Or do they hold other people’s? In which case ‘ethical commitments’ would be an oxymoron, wouldn’t it? So they don’t have them. They have rules; they obey. A ‘commitment’ can’t be something imposed on them from the outside, can it? Or can it. It seems like a contradiction in terms. Commitment is voluntary or else it’s not commitment, it’s something else. Isn’t it?

    It’s obvious what I’m getting at (the female pronoun is one clue). Some people have much more freedom, power, authority, responsibility, to have ethical commitments than other people do. And, furthermore, some people are in a position to impose their own ethical commitments on other people, while other people are in a position such that they are required to accept them. Others again are somewhere between these two extremes.

    Some people have more of this freedom because they are of a gender, class, status, caste, and in an environment, such that they are allowed autonomy, they are allowed to think for themselves. Other people are not. In many contexts and situations, a male parent has the ethical commitments for everyone in the household. He has the freedom to have them (except that within many religions he actually doesn’t), and he also has the power, authority, and responsibility to impose them on all the people below him in the hierarchy. He would be considered to be failing in his responsibilities if he didn’t impose them. The responsibility to impose his ethical commitments is in fact an ethical commitment itself. (As, it could be argued, is all teaching and persuasion. Yes. But it does surely make a difference how mandatory the teaching is. What backs it up. [Whipping? Incarceration? Disapproval? Regret?] Who does it, what the relations between the two parties are.)

    The man has the freedom and duty. What about the others? Does the woman in such a situation (subject to a male head of household) have ethical commitments? And is there any way to know whether she does or not? Is there any way to judge whether she is simply doing what she is told, or actually agrees with every commandment she is given?

    And the same questions for the children, doubly so for the girls. The boy children expect to grow up to impose ethical commitments on other people, the girls expect to grow up to have them imposed on them. That must make a large difference in the meaning of ethical commitments for each.

    Which is not to claim that ethical commitments can be formed in a vacuum. Obviously they come from somewhere in all cases, they’re not created ex nihilo, there’s always influence, from parents, teachers, friends, books, tv, music, all sorts. But all the same. Some choices are freer than others. Some people are in a position to choose among alternatives while others are not; with variations in between.

    So, in a sense, one can see what is meant by concern for ethical commitments, but even so, it seems relevant that not all ‘ethical commitments’ are ethical commitments. It may be worth asking if it is simply naive to take them all as on a par with one another – all as formed in the same way, by people with fully equal freedom and opportunity to form them, consider them, question them. What can an ‘ethical commitment’ be if you never actually had the chance to form it yourself but merely had it inserted into your head like a coin in a parking meter?

  • Wedging Creationism into the Academy

    Barbara Forrest and Glenn Branch on a case study of the quest for academic legitimacy.

  • Teachers and Their Pesky Personal Preferences

    ‘She had an attitude like because she has a PhD we were wrong and don’t know as much as her.’

  • Hitchens on Jihad in the Netherlands

    Victims not just secular artists but people of Muslim origin who do not accept homicidal fundamentalism.

  • Antony Flew’s Flawed Science

    Gerald Schroeder on the physics of Genesis – it’s a joke, right?

  • Katha Pollitt Asks: Jesus to the Rescue?

    ‘God’s politics tend to be the politics of the people who claim to speak for him.’

  • Lather Up, Joe

    I’ve been thinking some more about this idea of ethical commitments as the best argument for treating religion differently from other systems of thought. I didn’t make clear enough in yesterday’s post that both Amy Gutman and Jonathan Derbyshire think that argument fails, despite being the best one available. I’m not taking issue with Jonathan, I’m just trying to poke at the idea to see where it gives. One place it gives, as Jonathan mentioned, is the fact that religion is not the only source of ethical commitments. But I think there are other places.

    For one thing – ‘ethical commitments’ sounds like an individual item. It sounds like something that goes with the self, and matters to the self. But ethical commitments are about what the self does to other people. So this idea – “ultimate ethical commitments of individuals -which may be religious or secular in their source- are an especially valued and valuable part of individual identity” – seems to need some poking. Though I’m not sure exactly what kind. It’s not that I disagree that ethical commitments are a valued part of individual identity; I’m sure they often are. I suppose I disagree (tentatively) about what follows from that. (And, again, I’m not disagreeing with Jonathan, I’m disagreeing with whatever nebulous body of opinion holds to that idea. Joe Lieberman, maybe. Yes, that’s it! He’s just the kind of person who thinks that kind of thing. Okay I’m arguing with Soapy Joe again.) Ethical commitments aren’t like clothes or haircuts, or tastes in music or books; they’re directly, not indirectly, about how one treats other people. Your taste in music doesn’t affect me unless you live next door and play heavy metal at top volume – in which case I have you killed. But your ethical commitments are likely to, if we have any dealings together.

    Ethical commitments are for one thing about telling people what to do. Christopher Hitchens talks about this and about the way religion is used to back up what may be quite tottery in an interview on the Atlantic’s site.

    However, if a grown-up says “I’ve just a heard a voice telling me what to do,” what they really mean is “I can now tell you what to do.” That’s what I don’t like. What I noticed when I was a kid wasn’t just that what the headmaster was preaching at sermon time was rubbish (which was easy to see), it was also that it seemed very important that the headmaster be able to invest his otherwise rather feeble authority with religious authority. In other words, I could see already when I was eight that religion is used to say, “You better listen to what I say. My power is not just of this world. I have divine right.” That’s where you have to say, “Say that again and I’ll burn your church.” That’s fascism. I loathe it. And I tend to loathe the people who believe it, because they are making a claim on me.

    So, yes, ethical commitments feel like an important part of the self to many people, and so do the supernatural sanctions that are taken to back them up. But that isn’t necessarily a good argument for treating religion as special or deserving of consideration. It could just as well be an argument for doing precisely the opposite. For being quicker, not slower, to subject religious sources of ethical commitments to close scrutiny and sharp questions. Yes, it may be an important part of someone’s identity that he keeps women under control to please Allah, or that she tells children who play with their genitals that they will burn in hell, or that he whips his children for disobedience because the Bible says he should, or that she told her gay son to get out of the house and has never spoken to him since because she thinks that’s what Jesus would do. But what of the identity of the people subject to such ethical commitments?

    I have more poking, but it’s rather long-winded, so…later.