Hmm. There’s an odd statement in here – in the AAUP’s statement on the Ward Churchill fuss. Well, that’s not surprising, I guess. Pretty much whenever people start talking about freedom of speech and academic freedom, odd statements get made. It seems to be a subject that inspires odd statements – no doubt because there are so many competing goods at issue, and because people don’t always notice the competitive aspect, so they’ll cheerfully make contradictory statements from one sentence to the next.

Needless to say, the AAUP thinks Churchill should not be fired for writing the ‘little Eichmanns’ article, no matter how livid the right-wing pundits get. Needless to say, I agree with them, however much I may mock … Read the rest

A couple of further thoughts on the Taboo question. There is a lot of tension in all this – because there are some rational, non-ostrich-like, non-fingers-in-ears, non-You Can’t Say That reasons for worry about, for instance, saying that a particular identifiable set of people may have, in however small a statistical sense, less of a given ability than another set or sets. One such reason is the self-fulfilling prophesy. The worry is that if you tell people – especially and all the more so if you tell them officially academically scientifically studies have shownically – that they are, or they belong to a group or subset of the population that is, statistically, however slightly and tail end effectly, innately less … Read the rest