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This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
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.
Staff in undeclared relationships involving romance, sex or financial dependency liable for dismissal under regulator’s plans
Universities and colleges in England should require “personal relationships” between staff and students to be declared, with staff who keep relationships secret liable to be disciplined or dismissed, according to new proposals announced by the higher education regulator.
The Office for Students (OfS) also wants all students and staff in England to undergo mandatory training on sexual harassment and misconduct.
Continue reading...The writer has asked to remain anonymous.
History repeats itself with the governor’s attack on Florida’s higher ed
In 1956 a Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, known as the John’s Committee, was created as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and modeled on the efforts of Joseph McCarthy to root out Communists. The John’s Committee looked for evidence to connect civil rights groups, like the NAACP, to communism. When these efforts failed, the committee shifted their focus to target and remove homosexuals and the “extent of [their] infiltration into agencies supported by state funds.” Suspected homosexuals, both faculty and students, were interrogated, outed, and fired at a time when sodomy was illegal in the state. The campaign ruined the careers and destroyed the lives of many ensnared in it, both falsely accused straight and homosexual. The John’s committee also attacked academic freedom by singling out faculty for such “offenses” as the perceived discrimination against male students, teaching evolution, and assigning books they deemed “obscene.” If you’ve been following along with what Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican legislature are doing in Florida, this should all sound eerily familiar.
It is no secret that Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on education in Florida through authoritarian tactics targeting curriculum from pre-K to higher education. From book bans to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, he has k-12 teachers removing and covering up books to avoid felony charges and hiding pictures of their spouses to avoid termination. He forced university instructors to return to the classroom during the Delta variant surge, and students were asked to report non-compliance (virtual teaching) through a “course concern” button added to a phone app that was designed to report tips to the police, make emergency calls, and other functions that “improve their personal safety and security.” The Stop W.O.K.E. Act prohibits teaching any topic that might make students feel guilty based on race, color, national origin, or sex. He has declared war on Critical Race Theory (a concept he cannot even define) and asked over 2 million state college/university faculty, staff, and students to complete a survey that all experts agree would not clear the Institution Review Board’s process that ensures the protection of participants in a research study, to suss out our political leanings. There are many more truly fascist overreaches and mandates coming out of Tallahassee, too many to list. I invite you to listen to the Banished podcast “The Sunshine State Descends into Darkness (Again)” which covers Florida’s all-out assault on academia.
I am a queer contingent faculty member, and the chair of my department’s DEI committee at a very large public university in the state of Florida. I’ve watched as my personal liberties and those of my colleagues have been whittled away. The latest involves reporting of spending and resources used for campus activities that relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory initiatives, and collecting information about the faculty, staff, and students serving on DEI committees. In a separate action, DeSantis has requested information on individuals who have or are receiving gender-affirming treatment at Florida universities. These moves come on the heels of legislation passed to remove our promotion and tenure process from the departments and peer evaluation committees, and allow the university president or board chairman to fire individuals, without due process, clearing the way to fire anyone whose gender, orientation, or political views offend the political party in power.
Great. So now we are putting people on lists, and history has not been kind to people put on lists by authoritarian leaders.
We knew it was coming, but this week department chairs received the request to provide the names, email addresses, and “notes” on all members of departmental diversity and inclusion committees. This opens up the possibility of names (and notes) being submitted without our knowledge. Most of the people who serve on these committees are marginalized in some way and don’t have the protections tenure provides; committee service is always disproportionately assigned to junior faculty, and diversity work is nearly always assigned to the “diversity” members of the unit. We are afraid. What if that guidance on how to draft job announcements to broaden our search pools, or that statement my department chair asked me to write acknowledging the murder of George Floyd, offends the wrong person? Will I lose my job, or something more sinister? What is DeSantis going to do with this information? We do not trust him.
So, what can we do about it? Several groups of faculty are taking action by providing guidance in how to respond to surveys and other data gathering activities by the state, organizing responses to public comment periods, and building an understanding of academic freedom issues and how they impact ALL departments and programs. But these efforts won’t stop the governor and legislature from demanding lists and firings, nor the university administrators from complying. For those outside Florida’s education system who are concerned, please consider donating to Equality Florida or the Florida ACLU. Please also consider joining the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and please VOTE (and get all of your friends to vote).
DeSantis’s actions and this thinking are a disease, and it is spreading. Other states are watching what is happening and emulating Florida’s efforts to crack down on open discourse and inclusivity in universities. Education in the US is already faltering in international rankings. We need to figure out how to protect our faculty and students, and our academic institutions, before it’s too late.
The post History Repeats Itself: A Guest Post About The Crisis in Florida appeared first on The Professor Is In.
When several years ago I posted the screenshot of a defamatory tweet by a serial harasser on my Facebook page (for “friends” only), I did not expect how people would react to this. Tenured philosophers, including many with left-wing or liberal politics cautioned me to take down the post. They private messaged me urging I should take it down, and even publicly chided me “Why would you post such a thing?”
The following is a guest post by Helen De Cruz (Saint Louis University). A version of it first appeared at her blog, Wondering Freely.
[Artemisia Gentileschi, “Susanna and the Elders” (detail)]
When several years ago I posted the screenshot of a defamatory tweet by a serial harasser on my Facebook page (for “friends” only), I did not expect people would react as they did. Tenured philosophers, including many with left-wing or liberal politics, cautioned me to take down the post. They privately messaged me urging I should take it down, and even publicly chided me, “Why would you post such a thing?”
Well, it was already public, so what do I do about it? Should I sue him? Most certainly not. It would ruin my career. Better to keep my head down and write papers for top-10 general philosophy journals if I wanted to survive in the cut throat context of academia. Better to just plug away, work at my publication record, do not rock the boat. “You know how people are, they don’t want a troublemaker.”
I’ve since thought of this incident and many others that happened in the course of my academic career where philosophers are happy with the status quo and nothing happens.
Let me tell you about a rare instance in which something did happen. At a conference, while I was a postdoc, I told Eleonore Stump about a particular troubling case of gender harassment I had experienced, as well as about a bad general climate with drinking late into the night and difficult power relationships I experienced in the work place. She was shocked and said to me, “What our profession needs is a code of conduct.”
I thought it was a good idea. Codes of conduct are not uncommon in professions. Even clowns have them. A code of conduct by the American Philosophical Association would stipulate how we could cultivate a better professional environment. This would be an environment where people are not just at the mercy of one person (who may be excellent, of course), or where the boundaries between professional and private are frequently blurred; where professors take advantage of people in weaker situations such as putting their names on their students’ papers without contributing (common in Europe) or where they serially have relationships with their students. It would be an environment where you could go to conferences expecting these to be professional events. So we went ahead and petitioned. Thanks to the fact that I had a senior tenured colleague advocating, we got a good number of signatories and the code was adopted. I still consider this to be a significant victory for Eleonore and me.
But I didn’t expect all the pushback! Codes of conduct are bad, stifling, redundant! If a code were adopted, you can’t even have a drink with a student without being accused of sexual harassment. A lot of people I considered allies and whom I still greatly respect (and so will not link to their blogposts, etc.) went on philosophizing about the good and bad of codes of conduct. They thought deeply about the nature of codes of conduct, about what it says about a situation, about how they don’t work anyway (a conclusion they reached a priori).
The dynamics became clear. Many senior people told me, a postdoc on a string of temporary jobs at the time, that codes of conduct are superfluous at best and somehow make things worse, and that I had made things worse by petitioning for it. I felt terrible for the way our actions had been received, and I started to doubt myself.
Eleonore, for her part, was not bothered. Philosophy is a professional group of people, she told me, and while virtue is important, you cannot expect virtue to win out every time. You need good structures and procedures, and a code of conduct can help to foster those.
Thinking back of this incident from 2014, what I am now struck by most of all is that no-one who said how bad codes of conduct are actually had a counter-proposal or did anything to improve the climate and the situation for women and non-binary people in academia. All they could do was attack a junior colleague’s attempts to improve the situation. So, though the code was adopted, nothing structurally changed because the collective of academics had already decided it was a bad idea without thinking of an alternative.
And so, they could go on as before.
I’m writing this in an angry mood as I am thinking back of the literally twenty or more academics (all, except one, women or non-binary people) who told me they were victims of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and more. One particularly sticks in my mind—her married professor kept on trying to start a relationship with her when she was a grad student. She eventually relented, feeling she was in a difficult situation due to all sorts of problems in her personal life. Then, after a couple of years, he got tired of her and they parted. He never even read her dissertation, though formally her advisor. He never writes her letters of recommendation. She had the immense fortune of having an external committee member (fwiw a white man, and a lovely human being) who knew about the situation and who became her de facto adviser and letter writer. That true ally never said anything, though he wanted to, because the victim was worried that were the relationship revealed, her career would be over. After all, it was consensual. And people would say she tried to sleep her way into a better position. Meanwhile, that relationship, though long ended, is still negatively affecting her career. Her advisor, of course walks free with no repercussions.
I can tell many other stories like this. Some people do nothing because “it’s a lot better than it used to be.” This is not a recipe for doing nothing. We still have a structural problem.
Purely anecdotally and from my own and other people’s experiences, what is often happening is that academia is such a cut-throat, cold environment where your own ability to do philosophy is constantly questioned. You doubt yourself, you wonder if you have it in you. And if you are not a man, you do not benefit from “brilliance beliefs”. This was perhaps most apparent in my personal life when I was on a team of 6-7 postdocs who were all competing for the same tenure track position and all the faculty were going on about how brilliant this or that male candidate was. When I asked those faculty about my own chances, they said that surely as a woman and a person of color I would soon benefit from affirmative action. The message was clear: everyone wants to hire you, just not us.
In such a situation you can find yourself lonely, friendless and vulnerable to individuals who predate on people with that profile. They make you feel you’re special. The structural problems in academia regarding how we treat junior people, the callousness with which we discount their needs and testimony because they’re just passing through and aren’t people we need to take into account anyway, is part of why this keeps on happening. So if we seriously acknowledge that academia, and particularly philosophy, has a MeToo problem, we need to acknowledge the structures that enable these situations.
A student recently asked me why tenured people do nothing and even actively work to keep the status quo. After all, they are in the safest position to actually do something and not just philosophize the situation away or discount possible solutions. My sense is: Many people want to do nothing because it doesn’t affect them. Some might do nothing because they’re still traumatized. As a woman or non-binary person in academia you sometimes feel like you’ve navigated a field of landmines; when you come out at the other end with tenure or a TT job you say “Oh good I didn’t step on a landmine!” as you hear stories about the unscrupulous individuals you have through luck avoided to associate with.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Some people do nothing out of fear of false accusations. While these do exist (but note the incidence is low), I think their possibility is not a good reason for doing nothing. Acknowledging philosophy has a MeToo problem will indeed involve that we take seriously the testimony against repeat offenders and do something, rather than sit back, do nothing, and wait until there might eventually be a Title IX lawsuit (or the equivalent in non-American contexts). But it also just involves believing people, standing with the victims, and, for the love of God, not advising “Just keep your head down!” or “People who create a stir are seen as troublemakers, just wait until you have tenure.”
Support the victims. Believe them. Believing them does not mean you need to engage in a collective hunt against the person they accuse, but it does mean to be very cautious, and it means listening to them and thinking together about legal ways to address the situation. I’ve known a situation where a well-known repeat offender kept on getting invited for prestigious lectures at conferences, even though several women told the conference organizers that they felt unsafe with him on the program. In one instance, the organizer uninvited the person (who has since left the profession after credible Title IX allegations). This was good but it came, in a sense, too late, as this had been a pattern for years, and organizers knew about it.
Supporting possible victims before they become actual victims is even better. We should develop strong mentoring relationships, preferably in structured contexts so it does not depend on personal sympathy alone. We should find a path forward, and finally end the pervasive sexual harassment that is happening in our profession.
UPDATE: A #MeToo in Academia conference is in the planning stages. The organizers write:
We would like to form a planning committee with a group of people from various backgrounds to discuss what such a conference on sexual abuse in academia should include. At this point, the conference is not associated with any institution, discipline, or location. Thus, everyone with interest is invited to reach out. Survivors of sexual harassment or abuse, particularly in academia, are especially encouraged.
You can learn more about it here.
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