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A statement from philosophers in response to the knife attack on the professor and students in a philosophy of gender course at the University of Waterloo this week, in which they “affirm our commitment to academic freedom, and condemn all uses of violence, intimidation, or derogation that attempt to undermine philosophical examinations of gender and sexuality” has been published and is open for signatures by other members of the philosophical community.
The statement was authored by Robin Dembroff (Yale), Justin Khoo (MIT), and L.A. Paul (Yale). It states:
The statement is posted here. Those interested in adding their name to the list of signatories can do so via this form.
The post Statement from Philosophy Professors & Graduate Students on University of Waterloo Attack first appeared on Daily Nous.
Recent philosophy-related news*, and a request…
1. Stephen Kershnar (SUNY Fredonia), whose February 2022 discussion of adult-child sex on the Brain in a Vat podcast sparked viral outrage and led to his removal from campus, has “filed a lawsuit this week in U.S. District Court in Buffalo asking the court to declare that Fredonia’s administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from the classroom after the comments he made on a podcast kicked off a social-media firestorm,” according to the Buffalo News. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed the lawsuit on his behalf, Kershnar says.
UPDATE: Here is the lawsuit and the motion for injunction (via Stephen Kershnar).
2. The editors of Philosophy, the flagship journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, have announced the winners of their 2022 Essay Prize, which was on the topic of emotions. They are: Renee Rushing (Florida State) for her “Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account” and Michael Cholbi for his “Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve.” Mica Rapstine (Michigan) was named the runner-up for his “Political Rage and the Value of Valuing.” The prize of £2500 will be shared between the winners, and all three essays will be published in the October 2023 issue of the journal.
3. Some philosophers are on the new Twitter alternative, Bluesky. Kelly Truelove has a list of those with over 50 followers here. And yes, you can find me (and Daily Nous) on it.
4. One philosopher is among the new members of The American Philosophical Society, a learned society that aims to “honor and engage leading scholars, scientists, and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship.” It is John Dupré of the University of Exeter, who specializes in philosophy of science. The complete list of new members is here. Professor Dupré joins just 21 other philosophers that have been elected into the society since 1957 (the society was founded in 1743).
5. I’ve decided that some news items I had been planning to include in these summary posts over the summer should instead get their own posts. These are posts about philosophers’ deaths and faculty moves. Regarding the former, it would be wonderful if individuals volunteered to write up memorial notices for philosophers they knew, or whose work they are familiar with, including at least the kinds of information I tend to include in these posts (see here). Recently, philosophers Henry Allison, Richard W. Miller, and Donald Munro have died. If you are interested in writing up a memorial notice for one of them, please email me. Generally, over the summer, these posts and faculty move notices may take longer to appear than usual.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.
A student at a public charter school in Oklahoma, where the definition of a charter school is being challenged.
During the summer slow-down, many news items will be consolidated in occasional “philosophy news” summary posts. This is the first.
Discussion welcome.
The post Philosophy News Summary first appeared on Daily Nous.
No matter how unlikely it seems, Elon Musk claims not to know that NPR is not a state-run media institution. A series of NPR's email exchanges illuminate the decisive and well-informed decision-making process that Twitter's ill-informed buyer apparently used to equate NPR with Pravda. — Read the rest
Dr. Fayneese Miller, the president of Hamline University, lost the confidence of the university’s full-time faculty members.
Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.
Christian Coons, associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), is facing disciplinary proceedings that could lead to his termination for a series of events that began with him raising questions about how a job search was conducted, continued with him voicing concerns about the lack of evidence being considered in an investigation of his department, and led recently to his being removed from campus mid-semester for sending emails asking for clarification and support.
[Charles Sheeler, photograph of Egyptian Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art (detail)]
The controversy began in 2015, when the department hired a professor and Coons felt the candidate did not meet the qualifications for a history of philosophy position. Coons was told that “the application alone leaves out critical information that is very important,” and he soon found out what was so important about this professor. In 2019, that professor helped the department receive a $1.6 million grant from the libertarian Charles Koch Foundation. Coons has expressed his view that the Koch money corrupted the hiring process in the department and continues to occasionally raise these concerns in emails to colleagues…
There is no doubt that Coons’ colleagues and the administration are annoyed at him and would prefer he shut up about the past disputes. Unfortunately for them, both academic freedom and the First Amendment do not allow their preferences to be imposed on Coons.
Coons is accused of three crimes: sending emails to faculty who didn’t want to receive them, insubordination for violating an order not to send emails, and violating a provision in the union contract urging faculty to show “respect” toward others.
First, there is no right not to receive email. People are perfectly free to ignore Coons, but not to silence him. What Coons wrote does not meet a harassment standard.
Second, there is no subordination because there was never a direct no-contact order to Coons that sending emails would violate campus policies. (Indeed, in a Feb. 1, 2023, email that led to his suspension, Coons wrote, “I still need a rule for the emails I can’t send you. I’ve asked for guidance from everyone, and no one will share any rules.”) And there wasn’t a direct order because a ban on sending emails is not legal.
The third charge against Coons is more complex, but equally implausible. Coons is accused of violating a provision of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) stating that faculty “should be respectful toward all members of the university community and are prohibited from any oral, written, or physical actions that: (a) have the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s employment or professional performance; and/or (b) have the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, offensive, or abusive climate for an individual’s employment, academic pursuits, living environment, or participation in a University activity.” Obviously, saying that faculty “should” be “respectful” is not enforceable, but creating a hostile climate is prohibited. Still, it’s hard to imagine how unwanted emails from someone powerless to do anything can be deemed a hostile climate. (Coons’ critics and the administration, by seeking to have him punished for his emails, have much more clearly violated this rule by creating an intimidating climate for Coons.)
The background to these complaints is complicated. (Some of it is described in this previous post.) Coons himself has described the situation this way to me:
In Spring 2018 I made a report of retaliation for internal complaints of illegal activity in my department—including sexual discrimination, fraud, and possible self-dealing. The complaint and reports were directed away from the appropriate channels, and sat for a year in the College of Arts and Sciences. The investigation was quickly conducted in May 2019 by a pair of assistant deans and then closed—without notice or action taken. On this all parties seem to agree. The dispute is about the nature of the investigation.
I maintain the investigation was “fake”—all evidence was barred, the findings were inaccurate, and it exploited and knowingly suppressed the retaliation I had tried to complain about. I have experienced persistent unjust retaliation just for complaining about the matter.
BGSU and my peers maintain the investigation was “sound,” that my allegations are either delusions or malicious fabrications, and that I have no grounds for complaint about my long-pending 2018 retaliation charge, because three years later a “neutral investigator,” an outside lawyer, unofficially looked into the central allegations.
Coons maintains that the outside lawyer’s investigation was partisan, flawed, and defamatory of him.
He says:
The current administrative action in which I am named is the latest in a series of blatant acts of discrimination, retaliation and abuse taken against me following my initial questioning of the propriety and legality of a faculty selection process in my department in consecutive years.
The evidentiary record reveals the work environment in BGSU Philosophy exhibits an extreme and expanding crisis of illicit, abusive, sexually discriminatory, and retaliative conduct. It also reveals BGSU Administration has just one pattern of response: unrelenting, costly, and extreme cover-ups and retaliation.
I had been subject to escalating sequences of retaliation like this before—in 2016, 2018, and 2019—without remedy. All for reports of misconduct, and each including objections to sexual discrimination. But I have never recovered from what happened in 2019.
In Summer 2019, I made my first public complaints about the Fake Investigation, and the neglected reports of abuses by my Chair. My peers, directed by [Colleague X], said I may not mention any misconduct by the Chair (during the Chair Succession Meeting) as it already had been thoroughly investigated by the assistant deans. But the allegations against my Chair were not even in the scope of that investigation. [Colleague X] knew my allegations were true and asked to help, he had seen the evidence—just please be quiet until his Koch grant was signed—he pleaded. So I did. Now that it was signed, however, he and everyone else—with the help of BGSU Administration—went into cover-up mode and fabricated things, apparently to have me fired.
The emails from Coons that form the basis of the current disciplinary hearing—which are supposed to be instances of Coons creating a hostile workplace for his peers and of violating a university “diversity and respect for the individual” policy of treating members of the university community “with civility and respect,” and which are supposed to warrant his removal from campus and possible termination—followed a philosophy faculty meeting about a new departmental statement of principles and reporting policy. At the meeting, Coons says, he voiced worries about the new policy given the department’s history, referring to the retaliation he says he was subject to for making the kinds of reports that the new policy requires. In response, Coons says, “the chair agreed to share evidence that might help address the concern, and was open to discussion and polling among the faculty prior to the vote. No faculty member objected. The vote was then announced by the Chair, via email.” You can read these emails (along with some others, for context) in chronological order here.
Molly Gardner left BGSU in 2020 to take a position at the University of Florida. On Twitter, she writes that the BGSU Philosophy Department seems to be involved in the “coverup” strategy of “make Christian Coons’s life so miserable that he resigns.” She adds: “I mean, they also made my life so miserable that I resigned. That’s part of it, too. I applied for at least 20 different academic jobs, and if I didn’t get any of those jobs I was making plans to just leave academia.” She collects various Twitter threads she has posted about the situation at BGSU here. Some of these (e.g.) concern the consideration and treatment of women candidates during a job search conducted by the department in 2015-16. Others concern the environment there, such as this thread in which the chair appears to lie to cover-up a false statement he made that Coons opposed hiring her.
David Faraci (Durham), who earned his PhD at Bowling Green in 2012 (Coons was on his committee), has also written about the situation at BGSU on Twitter, noting “how hard it is to talk about a case this complex, especially to share evidence when its weight in isolation is so different from its weight in combination.” You can read his thread on it here.
In his post about Coons’s case, Wilson focuses on the punishments that Coons has been subject to and his possible termination:
Bowling Green needs to reject the idea that professors can be fired for critical emails, and fix procedures to ensure that investigations of protected speech (and preemptive suspensions) never happen again. If Bowling Green fires Coons for making allegations of corruption, they will prove he was right.
A hearing about Coons’s possible termination had been scheduled for yesterday but has been postponed.
Note: comments on this post are closed. Those who have firsthand knowledge of what has been happening at BGSU philosophy are welcome to email comments to [email protected] for possible inclusion in an addendum to this post.
EMAILED COMMENTS
The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School in Philadelphia, where the bounds of tenure and free speech protections on campus are being debated.
The University of Pennsylvania law school has been roiled by the statements of a law professor.
Reporting on movie studios developing their own cinematic universes is like checking a "days without incident" sign at work. No matter how long the gap between incidents is, you know that another one is inevitably waiting right around the corner. Granted, since the MCU has started to incur more criticism from fans and critics alike, the endless conversations about every studio developing a cinematic universe have thankfully stalled. — Read the rest
Republican Florida State senator Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants to make things hard on bloggers who cover politics. A current bill he has proposed will treat bloggers like political lobbyists and force them to register with the state, and fine them for failure to do so. — Read the rest
In the face of legislation proposed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis that would violate academic freedom, erode tenure protections, and diminish faculty governance at the state’s universities and colleges (see a summaries here and here) the Florida Philosophical Association (FPA) has issued a letter to the leaders of those schools calling for them to “uphold and publicly defend academic freedom, tenure, and shared faculty governance in the educational institutions for which you are responsible.”
Objecting to DeSantis’ plans to prohibit the teaching of certain topics, they write:
The professoriate stands accused, by politicians, of “indoctrinating” students. Like Socrates (famously, and falsely, accused of “corrupting the youth” and “impiety”), we teach our students to think critically about common wisdom, to question authority, and to welcome fresh perspectives and ideas—even when doing so results in discomfort. We urge you to reject political edicts that prohibit the teaching of ideas on which we might disagree, that replace critical academic inquiry with pre-packaged state-approved lessons, and that demand fearful obedience rather than the courage to have difficult conversations about truth and justice.
Here’s the complete text of the letter (dated February 25th, 2023):
Dear Academic Leaders at Florida State Colleges and Universities,
As members of the Florida Philosophical Association (FPA)—faculty and students across Florida’s many colleges and universities—we write to university and college boards of trustees, presidents, provosts and other academic leaders regarding our professional commitment to uncensored inquiry and our responsibility to provide our students with knowledge and critical thinking skills spanning many areas and styles of philosophical inquiry.
Founded in 1955, the FPA is one of the largest and most active regional philosophy organizations in the United States, whose mission it is to facilitate the exchange of ideas among all those engaged in this field of inquiry, regardless of rank, age, status, gender, race, ability, or other differentiating characteristic. Our members include those who study classical Western philosophy and those who study non-Western, feminist, decolonial, environmental, and other philosophical traditions raising sometimes difficult and uncomfortable questions.
We write with a sense of urgency to implore you to uphold and publicly defend academic freedom, tenure, and shared faculty governance in the educational institutions for which you are responsible. We are alarmed by recent government overreach into the academy, including but not limited to the following: attempts to legislate what and how classroom instructors may teach material within their professional areas of expertise, attempts to eliminate faculty governance over the curricula, attempts to abolish or otherwise compromise tenure, attempts to eliminate faculty involvement in hiring their colleagues and leaders, and attempts to discredit processes of external accreditation by professional peers.
As philosophers, we have a special interest—and considerable training—in the analysis of concepts such as “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “freedom,” “responsibility,” and “fairness,” among other norms that the governor and legislature claim to uphold. Indeed, such concepts are at the core of philosophical work. They are also core to our understanding of the value of a healthy democracy. As anyone in our field—and, indeed, anyone with a doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.) in any other field—knows, such concepts are complex, difficult, and frequently contested. As those historically entrusted with care for such concepts, we object to the ways in which they are being weaponized for political gain while demonizing those who have devoted their lives to careful study of them. This attack is not only on philosophers, but on the very idea of academic expertise and scholarship in all disciplines. And it compromises not only what faculty may do, but what students may learn.
The professoriate stands accused, by politicians, of “indoctrinating” students. Like Socrates (famously, and falsely, accused of “corrupting the youth” and “impiety”), we teach our students to think critically about common wisdom, to question authority, and to welcome fresh perspectives and ideas—even when doing so results in discomfort. We urge you to reject political edicts that prohibit the teaching of ideas on which we might disagree, that replace critical academic inquiry with pre-packaged state-approved lessons, and that demand fearful obedience rather than the courage to have difficult conversations about truth and justice.
Academic integrity and scholarly rigor depend on inquiry and debate guided by the norms of our professions, rather than political parties. Responsible teaching depends on pedagogical expertise and a willingness to experiment with new ways of reaching students with diverse experiences, aspirations, needs, and abilities. The Florida Philosophical Association joins the American Philosophical Association (APA), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in affirming the importance of shared governance in higher education, free from partisan political intrusion.
We urge you, as our academic leaders in the state of Florida, to uphold academic freedom and the ability of all instructors to teach and research responsibly and without fear of state censorship. We urge you to resist political intrusion into higher education.
Sincerely, The Florida Philosophical Association
There is also a copy of the letter at the FPA site, here.
(via Brook Sadler)
Related: “APA Issues Statement on Academic Freedom in Florida”
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