Tag: Colin McGinn

The New York Times had a piece about Colin McGinn yesterday, and (better) about the implications for paying attention to sexism in philosophy and universities.

While the status of women in the sciences has received broad national attention, debate about sexism in philosophy has remained mostly within the confines of academia. But the revelation this summer that Colin McGinn, a star philosopher at the University of Miami, had agreed to leave his tenured post after allegations of sexual harassment brought by a graduate student, has put an unusually famous name to the problem, exposing the field to what some see as a healthy dose of sunlight.

“People are thinking, ‘Wow, he had to resign, and we know about it,’ ” said Jennifer Saul, the chairwoman of the philosophy department at the University of Sheffield in England and the editor of the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?

“I think that’s unprecedented,” she added.

The case, which was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, has set off voluminous chatter among philosophers on blogs and social media. The discussion has been fueled partly by Mr. McGinn’s own blog, where his use of the cryptic language of analytic philosophy in attempts to defend himself seems to have backfired.

Is that what that was? The cryptic language of analytic philosophy? I didn’t recognize it! I thought it was much more the thuddingly banal language of the wannabe hipster dude who thinks he’s funny.

Two open letters, posted online in mid-July and signed by more than 100 philosophers, including a majority of Mr. McGinn’s colleagues at Miami, criticized some of the posts on his blog as “retaliation” against the student.

The first letter, at Feminist Philosophers, says this:

We are members of the philosophy profession concerned for the graduate student at the University of Miami who filed a complaint about the conduct of Dr. Colin McGinn. We are also concerned for other graduate students who may conclude from this case that, although a student pursues a complaint against a professor through the proper channels while purportedly retaining anonymity, she may have her scholarship, work performance, or conduct negatively characterized in a public forum by a powerful professor with no response or defense from her university.

We write to urge the University of Miami to protect this student from negative public assessments of her work or character by or on behalf of Dr. McGinn. Whether or not Dr. McGinn’s observations on his blog are intended to be retaliatory, they have some of the same deleterious effects as intended retaliation. We recognize Dr. McGinn’s right to free speech and his right to criticize whatever treatment he may have received by his employer, and we appreciate his stated desire to defend himself. However, the student is not in a position to defend herself publicly. We ask that her university discharge its duty to protect its students from acts that amount to de facto retaliation from professors about whom they have complained.

The second one, sent to Brian Leiter and posted on his blog, includes:

Universities have procedures and protocols in place for receiving the complaints of students in order to protect the rights and interests of those who are vulnerable. We have every reason to believe that the University of Miami investigated the matter in question carefully and judiciously. We urge those without access to all relevant details to show caution in speculating upon the situation.

As members of this department, we take the matter very seriously and support our colleague who filed the complaint. Whether or not any given complaint has merit is for the University to decide. But no student who files a complaint, regardless of whether the complaint is judged to be with merit or not, deserves retaliation and intimidation.  Such behavior serves to silence others who would come forward, and undermines the policies and procedures the University of Miami has in place to protect individuals with limited power to protect themselves.

But McGinn is still saying the same crap, apparently unabashed.

In Mr. McGinn’s telling, his relationship with the student, a first-year doctoral candidate who worked as his research assistant during the 2012 spring semester, was an unconventional mentorship gone sour.

It was “a warm, consensual, collaborative relationship,” an “intellectual romance” that never became sexual but was full of “bantering,” Mr. McGinn said in a telephone interview. The terms of his agreement with the university, he said, prevented him from saying much more. But “banter referring to sexual matters,” he added, isn’t always “sexual banter.”

The student, through intermediaries, declined to be interviewed for this article, citing concern that it might damage her academic career.

McGinn continues to babble freely while he knows that she can’t.

Amie Thomasson, a professor of philosophy at Miami, said the student, shortly after filing her complaint in September 2012, had shown her a stack of e-mails from Mr. McGinn. They included the message mentioning sex over the summer, along with a number of other sexually explicit messages, Ms. Thomasson said.

“This was not an academic discussion of human sexuality,” Ms. Thomasson said. “It was not just jokes. It was personal.”

Mr. McGinn said that “the ‘3 times’ e-mail,” as he referred to it, was not an actual proposal. “There was no propositioning,” he said in the interview. Properly understanding another e-mail to the student that included the crude term for masturbation, he added later via e-mail, depended on a distinction between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”

“Remember that I am a philosopher trying to teach a budding philosopher important logical distinctions,” he said.

And there is no other way to do that than by talking about hand jobs. No other way at all. Simply cannot be done in any other fashion.

Whatever the facts of the case, many philosophers say that the accusations of misbehavior against Mr. McGinn are the edge of a much bigger problem, one that women have long been unwilling to discuss publicly, lest it harm their careers.

Many credit the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?, which in 2010 began posting anonymous stories of harassment, with helping to highlight the issue. “Just about every woman you talk to in philosophy has experienced first- or secondhand some form of sexual harassment that is egregious,” said Gideon Rosen, a philosopher at Princeton. “It’s not just one or two striking anecdotes.”

There are signs that the publicity surrounding the McGinn case may be encouraging more women to step forward. Both Ms. Saul and Peggy DesAutels, a philosopher at the University of Dayton and a member of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women, said that in recent weeks they had each heard from several graduate students who were considering filing complaints.

Oh noes – they will scare away all the women and then the philosophy departments won’t be able to boast that they’ve pushed their percentage of women all the way up to 21%.

Scholars in all disciplines have disagreements. But philosophy is unusual, many say, in its tradition of developing ideas through face-to-face and sometimes brutal debate. “People in other disciplines think we’re just thugs,” said Louise Antony, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

That reliance on debate can pose a particular dilemma for women, she added. Argue aggressively, and they’re branded shrews (to put it nicely). Hold back, and they’re not good philosophers.

“Many people have called philosophy the combat sport of academia,” Ms. Antony said. “But if you can’t have those conversations, you’re at a disadvantage.”

“Shrews” of course is NY Times for “bitches” and “cunts.”

In an essay on implicit bias in the forthcoming book “What Needs to Change: Women in Philosophy,” Ms. Saul recalled the terror of overhearing faculty members at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D., casually sort graduate students into “smart” versus merely hard-working — or worse, “stupid.”

Women, she said, are more likely to be categorized as “stupid,” to the detriment of the field as a whole.

Fear of being labeled not smart “is bad for philosophy,” Ms. Saul said. “It makes you not want to take risks.”

This is a job that may take some time.

Eric Schliesser at NewApps took a look at the “Genius Project” excuse and found it well and truly creepy.

2. There is as Jonathan Kramnick pointed out to me on Facebook, something decidedly creepy (in a Frankenstein sense) in the very idea of Genius-Development.

3. McGinn admits to deliberately erasing the lines between the professional and the personal. This is not unique to McGinn in the discipline. As Jason Stanley noted “there is an overly personal and unprofessional aspect to the friendship and socializing in the profession.” (This feature of Stanley’s comments got lost in subsequent discussion over his views about the prevalence of assortative mating in philosophy.) We are dealing here with a phenomenon that is at the heart of many of the ‘culture’ problems within professional philosophy.

Maybe they’re all trying to re-enact Socrates and Alcibiades?

Commenters pointed out that he had included identifying information about the grad student, and how awful that was. For example:

Two things of note in this latest missive from Dr. McGinn:

1.) The behavior, and indeed the very project, he describes, both manifest classic grooming behavior by a practiced sexual predator.

2.) The inclusion of identifying information on the accuser is plainly retaliatory and should fall squarely in violation of most universities’ AA/EEO policies concerning retaliation against reporters of harassment and discrimination.

The more I learn about this, the more appalling he seems to be.

There’s also the whole issue about credibility and rhetoric and narcissism. Canadian Grad Student looks at that:

Why place any credence on his testimonial over the graduate student’s complaint? McGinn’s account is a bizarre, slightly unhinged narrative ostensibly crafted to make him the victim of quasi-conspiratorial machinations, but which reveals instead a staggering narcissism and inability to conceptualize how others might perceive him in this situation (the cult of the hand? the genius project? ‘breaking taboos’ with hand job jokes?).

If one finds what he has written compelling and plausible rather than strange, abnormal, and flatly pathological I begin to worry: who reads this and thinks, “yes, of course: a genius project–now finally this whole thing makes sense!” Why not a more mundane story where a serial sexual harasser cows graduate students with his stature until one brave soul reports him? What is more plausible, that an entitled, narcissistic jerk fabulates a Pygmalion back-story, or that a famous tenured scholar with legal representation is victimized by the local feminazis? Come on. Talk about a litmus test for one’s grip on reality.

Exactly. The combination of the obvious vanity and absurdity of the material in the posts with McGinn’s apparent confidence in their quality and persuasive power is very puzzling to an outsider, and I would imagine worrying to insiders.

And then there’s McGinn’s Plea for Calm with its paean to epistemic virtue.

Shouldn’t we philosophers be setting a good example of epistemic virtue? We are supposed to be rational, judicious, calm, impartial, non-ideological, just, fair, balanced, careful, scrupulous, accurate, above-the-fray. But such virtues have not been evident recently. Instead we have seen hysteria, presumption of guilt, ignoring of evidence, ignoring of due process and procedural justice, sloppiness, inaccuracy, ideology, vindictiveness, lack of reflection, simple stupidity, ideological fervor, ad hominem invective, and so on and on. This has been sickening to behold and shameful to the values we as philosophers are supposed to live by.

It is true that many people have not been guilty of these vices and failings. They have insisted on basic principles of reason and justice (and have been traduced for doing so). I salute them. I suspect that the bitter divisiveness that we have seen will only continue and deepen, because it reflects a basic difference of moral psychology. The divisiveness will not concern a single case but be pervasive and general. The ideologues and nutcases will hate the rationalists, while the rationalists will despise their opponents. None of this will be pretty. The ideologues will dig in, as ideologues always do, while the rationalists will grow ever more impatient and contemptuous. This will play out in the day-to-day workings of academic departments and personal relationships. Unless and until the epistemic virtues are respected, I expect to see continued strife and bad feeling. This will do nobody any good.

It’s a different version of the same thing – he’s the good one, the exemplar of epistemic virtue, and people who are critical of his behavior are monsters of epistemic depravity. He is rational, judicious, calm, impartial, non-ideological, just, fair, balanced, careful, scrupulous, accurate, above-the-fray. His critics demonstrate hysteria, presumption of guilt, ignoring of evidence, ignoring of due process and procedural justice, sloppiness, inaccuracy, ideology, vindictiveness, lack of reflection, simple stupidity, ideological fervor, and ad hominem invective. All the hooray words on his side of the ledger, all the boo words on their side.

You would think – speaking of epistemic virtue – that it would occur to him that that’s not convincing, at least. Maybe it’s too much to expect him to think it might not be fully accurate, but you’d think he could manage to notice a certain implausibility to the way he loads one scale with chocolates and cherries, and the other scale with pond scum and excrement.

What a spectacle.

I haven’t found a grab of those posts of Colin McGinn’s but he didn’t take all the posts down, and there is plenty of intolerable smugness and self-admiration still on display.

(Honestly – I’ve read other people who write this way – this horribly arch, self-conscious, pseudo-Wildean, labored, unamusing way – can’t they see how awful it is? Clearly not, but then – why not?)

The real biscuit-taker among the surviving posts is perhaps the one titled “Epater les bourgeios” [yes, sic]. You know what it’s going to be before you read more – he’s a flouter of convention, a wit, a challenger of pieties, and all these peasants have misunderstood. Yawwwwwwwwwwwn – never heard that one before.

My cultural heroes are: Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philip Larkin, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Peter Cook, John Lennon, and Larry David (among many others).

Cringe cringe cringe cringe. I can hardly bear it.

I like some of the writing (and in the case of Peter Cook performing) of some of those guys too, but I wouldn’t dream of calling any of them a “cultural hero”…or of making a hero out of any of them even without saying so. I think I stopped doing that once I was out of my teens, and even if I hadn’t, I would have chosen more carefully.

What they all have in common is the quality captured by the French phrase “epater les bourgeois”, which the OED defines as “shock people regarded as conventional or complacent”. We might paraphrase this in a number of ways: taunt the prudish and prim, ridicule the conventional and boring, outrage the pious and conformist. The cultural tradition that falls under this description sees itself as in favor of art, freedom, creativity, spontaneity, playfulness, life, and experience; it casts itself as standing against stifling social norms and dull conformity. It is given to provocation, controversy, and shock tactics. Accordingly, it is often pilloried and persecuted, and of course misunderstood. It does not see itself as against morality as such, but it does view conventional pieties with a beady and skeptical eye. It is on the lookout for hypocrisy, dogma, intolerance, suppression, and sheer dullness of spirit. These to me are admirable values that I try to bring into my own life. I am particularly fond of provocative irony, which has got me into trouble on more than one occasion (especially in irony-deficient America). I am often amazed that people fail to see the irony in this or that utterance of mine.

I trust readers will see the relevance of these remarks to current events.

He sounds like a teenager. Literally. I remember thinking like that, I remember fancying myself in almost that way…when I was fifteen. Then I got over it. I learned not to betray that much vanity with that much reckless abandon. I even learned not to think of myself that way – I learned not to flatter myself in that unabashed way even inside my own head. That’s why that shite makes me cringe so hard – it’s so shamelessly self-flattering and complacent.

And the guy’s a philosopher. Lordy.

Maybe the University of Miami made him resign not so much because of the gross-out emails but because he writes like that.

It gets worse.

There was a second post from McGinn, explaining and self-defending some more. It too is now unfindable, but Bill Benzon at Crooked Timber quotes enough to get the astonishing drift.

From McGinn’s post on The Genius Project:

The student (hereafter NN) and I were engaged on what we called “the Genius Project”. The purpose of the genius project was to make NN into a truly original and outstanding young philosopher (one who could expect to find an attractive job later). Part of this project involved techniques for encouraging unconventional thinking, and the concept of “taboo-busting” was deemed helpful towards this end.

Toward the end:

Most of the genius project took a more conventional form, but it is within this context that they [two email messages] should be interpreted. They were not just gratuitous snippets of risque prose, sent out of the blue. I believe that had the genius project continued it would have borne significant fruit; and indeed a colleague has remarked to me that NN’s philosophical abilities went from “good” to “superb” following the several months during which I was attempting to make her into a “genius”.

You have got to be kidding.