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[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
I have noticed, in passing (recall), that in Ideals and Illusions Stebbing is without being a utilitarian quite favorably disposed to Mill's philosophy. In fact, to be more precise, Stebbing is rather dismissive of Mill's "ill-expressed and ill-planned pamphlet Utilitarianism" which she also (elsewhere) dismisses as "hastily written." She much prefers Mill's "pamphlet On Liberty" which shows "clearly what his ideal was; these writings provide the most effective criticism of his Utilitarianism." She reads On Liberty (to simplify) as able exposition of the democratic creed articulated in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence in favor of individual happiness and freedom, and opposed to human suffering.
In the first chapter of On Liberty, Mill and Taylor (whom Stebbing does not mention) make it clear that in conditions of domination and subordination, reigning moral views will tend to favor the self-interest of the ruling classes: "Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority." Among the examples they give are slave societies and patriarchy. It is, thus (recall), not far-fetched to see in Mill and Taylor theorists of what is now known as ideology.
Now, contemporary analysists of ideology tend to claim that in addition to justifying the interests of the ruling class, it also creates a form of ignorance among the ruling class. While the former is quite plausible, the latter claim has always struck me as quite odd because it would entail that elites don’t realize how they benefit from the status quo or what social mechanisms maintain class privileges and security. (I am equally mystified by the interest in tacit bias.) If that were so, one would see ruling classes give up their privileges and sources of power willingly (or at least by accident).* However, this rarely occurs. And the one time it manifestly did – the warm embrace of the early stages of the French revolution on the Enlightened part of the nobility – it ended so badly that it has been a stark warning ever since reinforced by many facts of our liberal arts education.
For Mill and Taylor, ideology produces a deformation of “the moral feelings of the members” of the ruling class, and they emphasize (this is a bit surprising), “in their relations among themselves.” I call it ‘surprising’ because one would have expected them to emphasize the maltreatment of the subordinate class (a topic that is of genuine interest to them). To be sure, I don’t mean to suggest this is missing from their analysis.
Echoing Hume (and Smith), and anticipating Dicey, they go on to claim that “the likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion.” So for Mill and Tayler a society’s laws and norms always express to a considerably degree the interests of (at least a part of the) ruling classes and these, in turn, do not merely secure ruling class hegemony, but they come at a cost of a corrosion of the moral sensibility of the ruling class. This seems quite plausible.
In On Liberty, Mill and Taylor don’t really explore the nature of this deformation of the ruling classes’ moral sentiments except, perhaps and non-trivially, that it produces conformism. In the context of a critical discussion of Clive Bell’s (1928) book Civilization (hitherto unknown to me), Stebbing does take up the issue (in Chapter V). She first quotes Bell and then comments as follows:
What interests me most in Mr. Bell’s pronouncement is his uneasy and unwilling admission that [among the elites] “a sensitive and intelligent man cannot fail to be aware of the social conditions in which he lives.” If only he could shut himself up in an ivory tower how delightfully and valuably he might pass his time. But a “ civilized man ” must be sensitive and intelligent, so, as Mr. Bell is reluctantly forced to admit, either he must harden his heart or be discomforted. It is very unfortunate, but that is how things are. How satisfactory would it not be for a civilized Nero, if only Rome were not burning? But it is burning, and he cannot, if sensitive and intelligent, be unmoved by its plight. To-day, although Rome is not burning, not a few of the cities of Europe are, or have been, in flames— deliberately set on fire. What does it matter to us, if we be sensitive and intelligent men, provided that our own city is not in flames or, if it is, if we can take refuge in California and there produce masterpieces, or at least enjoy the masterpieces of others? Mr. Bell has, I think, given us the answer. We cannot remain unaware of what is happening; we may escape the danger and the discomfort; we may still, far removed to a safe place, continue our civilized pursuits; but we do so at a cost—the cost of callousness or a sense of discomfort.
Before I continue it is worth noting that Stebbing herself goes on to note that there is something really wrong with Bell’s position; he ignores the Kantian dictum that we should treat people as ends not merely as means. The fundamental problem with social hierarchy is not its side effects on the social elite, but the maltreatment of the have-nots and the militarism it licenses. (She is writing in the immediate context of WWII.)
But she is clearly intrigued by the fact that even somebody who defends the possible worth of social hierarchy (in terms of aesthetic and hedonic qualities) has to concede, first, that those at the top are not unaware of the conditions that produce their social privileges and, second, that this awareness generates permanent unease and cruel disregard (“callousness”) to others among (at least a part) of the social elites, and, third, encourages forms of escapism among the elites. She repeats these points multiple times in immediate context. She notes that “there is some slender ground for hope in this discomfort.”
In fact, and to reiterate, there is no doubt that Stebbing wants to draw on more capacious social, psychological, and ethical resources than this slender hope; in addition to Kant’s dictum, she also discusses the significance of cultivating the sympathetic imagination (she cites Hume, but sounds like Adam Smith) in the same chapter. And, as I noted recently, in Thinking to Some Purpose she clearly argues that considerable social-economic leveling is required.
Even so, it may be worth a brief reflection, in closing, why Stebbing dwells on the existence of elite discomfort. Part of the answer can be found in the next chapter when she writes that “Only a deep dissatisfaction with our present mode of life combined with a definite hope for the not distant future will make-this destruction of Europe endurable.” We can discern in this passage a hint of a kind of secular theodicy. (She is clearly no Christian.) Perhaps, ‘theodicy’ is too strong, but she clearly believes that a democratic faith requires some hope that present suffering can be overcome in the future if at the end of the road there has been a definite social change (for the better).
For Stebbing, democratic hope presupposes that at least some of the social elites have to be willing to buy into minimal change. (She is no advocate of violent revolution.) And they will do so, she thinks, when some of them recognize, as they inevitably will, that the existing social hierarchy harms them psychically in various ways. That from the perspective of social elites, in democratic life social change, thus, need not be understood exclusively in terms of the risk of loss of privilege, but that it also may bring not just better social relations with the existing have-nots but also better self-relations (among elites and individually). Thus in drawing out Mill’s and Taylore’s ideas on the perversion of morality in social hierarchy, there is lurking here a commitment to the claim that social elites will recognize themselves in the Socratic doctrine that when one harms others, as social hierarchy inevitably entails, one really harms oneself and this will reduce resistance to social reform.
*To be sure, and to avoid confusion, I do not deny that academic literature in the social science and humanities or that press reports may exhibit such strategic ignorance.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
Ideals and Illusions, Susan Stebbing's (1941) moving wartime work, published while she and the Kingsley Lodge school for girls (of which she remained the principal in addition to being the first female British philosophy professor) had moved to the far end of Cornwall, aims to rectify the absence of an ideal that speaks to what one may call democratic and spiritual yearning in British public life.* In fact, Ideals and Illusions, deserves some mention in the history of political theory. While not wishing to ignore some of the limitations of the work, I list three reasons that, perhaps, invite you to read this book.
First, Ideals and Illusions decisively challenges an idea then promoted by political realists of her age (especially E.H. Carr) that debate between realists and democratic theorists within political theory is, and now I quote Hans Morgenthau (who explicitly cites Stebbing), "...tantamount to a contest between principle and expediency, morality and immorality." Morgenthau (1952) de facto concedes Stebbing point, and this led him to reformulate political realism (and its opposition to a kind of democratic idealism as follows): "The contest is rather between one type of political morality and another type of political morality, one taking as its standard universal moral principles abstractly formulated, the other weighing these principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to lead." (p. 988; see note 25) To what degree Stebbing would eschew paying attention to prudent evaluation of political consequences may well be doubted. (I return to that some day.)
But the important point here is that Stebbing's criticism of Carr shaped the development of the most influential articulation of post-war realism (in IR).+ And it it is worth noting that Ernest Nagel, who was a serious admirer of Stebbing (1885 –1943), was (in 1947) quite critical of Morgenthau's version of such realism. There is, thus, lurking in the relatively early history of analytic philosophy a polemic, from the perspective of a democratic and liberal theory, with (so-called) political realism that has gone largely unnoticed. (I have discussed Nagel's polemic a bit here. )
Be that as it may, as is well known, in his autobiographic manifesto Liam Kofi Bright writes: "There is something within us that takes joy in the happiness of others, sees their misery as something regrettable, and compels us to act in solidarity and friendship with fellows." In an accompanying footnote, Bright cites (rightly) the fourth chapter of Stebbing's Ideals and Illusions. This chapter articulates a democratic creed that is explicitly indebted to the preamble of the American declaration. Stebbing connects this creed eloquently to Bentham's and Mill's frontal attack on acquiescence in human suffering. Stebbing is by no means a utilitarian/Radical, but she recovers the enduring significance of the Radical program (which one wishes contemporary longtermists would heed).
But not unlike Jefferson, she inscribes her ideal in a republican political philosophy (while being more attentive to the ills of slavery). In fact, and this is my second point, she deserves to be re-inscribed in the genealogy of modern republicanism, for after claiming that her creed can be captured with the ethical principle, "all men alike ought to be free and happy," she writes:
The democratic ideal does not confine a man within the limitations of his own narrowly conceived self-interest; it widens his interests to include all men, so far as this is possible to the limited intellectual grasp and the groping imagination of a finite human being. To achieve this ideal we must make such political machinery as will enable every man to have his needs considered and to contribute to the working of this machinery according to his ability. No one must be slave to another nor subject to the arbitrary will of any of his fellows, whether he lead or be led. We must create such an economic order as to allow to every man the satisfaction of his primary needs and to permit the development of himself as an individual. (Chapter VII, "Conflicting Ideals," p. 157)
Stebbing clearly embraces the idea that being subject to the arbitrary will of another is a fundamental problem in political and economic life and should be combatted. While rejecting Marxist economics (and explicitly rejects Marx as "prophet"), she quotes The Communist Manifesto approvingly on the idea of "a community of individuals, each of whom counts, associated together in such a way that 46 the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.” (pp. 144-145) Stebbing's republicanism was already visible, and (as I discerned) presupposed, in her (1939) Thinking to Some Purpose, but it is much more subtly and carefully developed in Ideals and Illusions not as a normative theory in a post-Rawlsian sense, but as a living faith apt for her times. (I return to that below.)
Third, one of the key theme among my friends in the ‘'bleeding heart’ wing of contemporary libertarianism is the insight that the closed border regimes of our age are not just a frontal attack on the rights of outsiders or non-natives, but are a very sly and insidious attack on the rights and lives of citizens/insiders who often don't realize initially that many of their own liberties are undermined (often due to aggressive policing of border zones, but not limited to this). I first learned the point from Jacob T. Levy, and it’s a very important theme in Kukathas' Immigration and Freedom. (Levy and Kukathas are, thereby, developing an insight lurking in Mises but not as well developed there as one would wish.) I don't mean to suggest it's only a libertarian talking point; many (Foucault-inflected) scholars in security/immigration studies have developed a similar analysis (and as a skeptical liberal I will make it my own).
Here's Stebbing's version of a related insight:
[D]uring the Victorian age and up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war there was considerable advancement in the direction of the ideal of the American revolution. It is convenient to call this the ideal of a civilized democracy. This ideal is far from having been accomplished. That, however, is not the point that is of main importance for my present purpose. The point is that it was an ideal consciously held and, on the whole, deliberately pursued. The moral significance of this period lies in the fact that there was a widespread conviction that there was an ideal worth pursuing, that there were high aims to the achievement of which a man might fittingly devote his life; to live strenuously for an ideal is more difficult and exacting than to be prepared to die for it. During the last twenty years this ideal has not only been explicitly denied and vilified in certain countries, it has further faded as an ideal even in those countries where the citizens continue to admire the sound of the word “ democracy.” For, it must be remembered, the democratic ideal is founded upon the moral principle that all men alike ought to be free and happy. It requires a temper of mind free from suspicion of others, from hatred of the foreigner, and from intolerance. It requires further an active sympathy with those who are oppressed. In all these respects the last twenty years have seen a serious deterioration. Before the last war it was possible to travel from one end of Europe to the other without a passport; during the last twenty years it has not been possible. This may seem unimportant; in fact, it is not. Its importance is that it is a symptom of the change for the worse that has befallen us. Each State in turn has tightened its restrictions upon the entry of foreigners. In a world which is economically so interdependent that it may be said to be a unity, certain of the most powerful States strive to be wholly sufficient in their economic requirements. The growth of economic internationalism is in conflict with an emotionally sustained nationalism. Hatred of others is fostered. (Chapter VI, pp. 112-113 [emphasis added—ES.])
What I wish to highlight here is that Stebbing discerns that a closed border policy doesn't just restrict the inflow of people, commodities, and capital, it also transforms the very ideals, the pattern of thoughts, and even morals of one's own polity. For Stebbing a 'temper of mind' -- we might say ethos -- is rather important to democratic life. With this diagnosis she is rather close to the liberal-realists explored (recall) by Cherniss in his recent Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century.
Okay, let me wrap up. I leave you to discover her fantastic genealogical analysis of conscience, and her excellent critique of Bradley's political theory amongst other gems. I have suggested before (recall here; here etc.) that the narrative that there 'was no political philosophy within analytic philosophy' before Rawls is a lie that keeps us in a self-imposed tutelage. To be sure, this fact is difficult to see as a consequence of the division of labor in which (inter alia) economics and philosophy split, and political philosophers became specialists in normative theory and judge each other accordingly. From the perspective of contemporary philosophy, Stebbing’s book would seem to lack something.
But in so far as political philosophy aspires to educate the thoughtful citizenry in the reasons for its commitments (it should hold), Stebbing's book is, warts and all (and I have not developed my criticisms here), without parallel in early analytic philosophy. (No, I am not ignoring Popper or Russell's political essays!) Neurath insisted on the very point in 1946:
*For a summary of the book, I recommend chapter 8 of Siobhan Chapman. Susan Stebbing and the language of common sense. 2013.
+For some further details see S. Molloy (2006) The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics, pp. 64-70. (Molloy treats Stebbing as a historian of science.) In a different work, Peter Wilson (2000) acknowledges the significance and cogency of Stebbing's criticism, but suggests she drew heavily from Leonard Woolf. (I have not been able yet to verify this.)
**This is also quoted in Chapman's book, p. 165.
Last week we reported on how Christian Coons, associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), is facing disciplinary proceedings that may lead to his termination from the university (here). This development has its origins in Coons’s complaints about irregularities in a job search conducted by the Department of Philosophy during the 2015-16 academic year.
In the following guest post, Molly Gardner (University of Florida), who was assistant professor of philosophy at BGSU from 2015-2020, describes that job search, arguing that the search was not fair, and specifically that it involved discrimination against women candidates.
(I am aware that some readers may object to the public discussion of a problematic job search, thinking that matters like this are better handled “in house”. The problem is that “in house” procedures appear to have failed in this case; investigations appear to have been superficial at best, and substantive institutional responses appear to have been limited to disciplining the whistleblower.)
[“Knot 2” by Anni Albers]
In this article, I want to take up the following question: Was the 2015-16 job search at Bowling Green State University (“the search”) fair? I will first provide some context to help readers understand why this question matters. I will then distinguish this question from some related questions. Finally, I will offer some considerations to support the conclusion that no, the search was not fair.
Why does this question matter? First, it is relevant to whether Christian Coons, currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, ought to keep his job. In early February of this year, Christian was removed from his teaching responsibilities and barred from campus in a letter that informed him that his “continued electronic communications to colleagues, administrators, and students have prompted safety concerns and elicited intimidation, fear, and disruption.” He is currently waiting to find out whether his job will be terminated on the grounds that his emails allegedly violated the Code of Ethics and Conduct Policy, the Collective Bargaining Agreement, and various written and oral directives issued by Dean Ellen Schendel. What were his emails about? Every one of the emails that has been cited, either as grounds for removing Christian from campus or as potential grounds for terminating his job, was an attempt to elicit some acknowledgment from colleagues or administrators that the search was deeply flawed, that he had suffered retaliation for reporting wrongful practices related to the search, or that investigations related to the search had also been deeply flawed. Even though the question of whether the search was fair is not the only question Christian has raised, and even though he confirmed to me that, in his mind, it is not the most important question he has raised about the wrongfulness of the search, the question of whether the search was fair still matters to him.
Second, the question of whether the search was fair also matters because, even after seven years, it has not been settled. Two Associate Deans, Dena Eber and Marcus Sherrell, investigated and then issued a report about the search in 2019. Since then, there have been other investigations related to the search. However, in their report, Eber and Sherrell did not make any overall pronouncements about whether the search was fair. Instead, their main finding, based upon their interviews with philosophy department faculty members, was that there was “no provable conspiracy, manipulation, or intention to disrupt the search.” (The references to “conspiracy, manipulation, [and] intention to disrupt the search” were a response to Christian’s allegation that Kevin Vallier had manipulated the search committee to get us to offer the job to a specific candidate whom Kevin had planned for us to hire before the search had even begun.) The Eber and Sherrell report did not cite any evidence other than their interviews with faculty members, even though emails would have served as useful, independent evidence. (I also found some emails that appeared to contradict some of the statements in the report.) Moreover, none of the subsequent investigations related to the search attempted to re-litigate the findings in the Eber and Sherrell report. For example, an investigation carried out in 2020 by independent lawyer Jennifer McHugh found that “allegations regarding the 2015-16 search process … are outside the scope of this investigation, moot, and untimely.” Thus, the 2015-16 search was only officially investigated once; the final report did not cite any email evidence; and the question of whether the search was fair was not explicitly addressed.
Having provided some context for the question about whether the search was fair, I would next like to distinguish that question from some other questions. A related but distinct question is whether the search was all-things-considered unjust. Someone might argue, for example, that although the search was unfair, it was not unjust. Maybe the unfairness was too slight to qualify as an injustice. Or maybe almost all academic job searches are unfair, and they are usually unfair in virtue of discriminating against a particular kind of candidate. Therefore, the proponent of this argument might say, insofar as the search discriminated against the opposite type of candidate, the search balanced out some of the unfairness elsewhere in academia. And when an unfair job search helps to counterbalance the unfairness of other unfair job searches, this brings us closer, in the end, to justice. I don’t find this argument to be particularly plausible, but it is not my focus; I am simply stating it to distinguish its motivating question from the question about fairness.
Yet another set of questions concerns what has transpired in the years since 2016 and what should be done now. Did BGSU officials respond to Christian’s and my allegations about the search appropriately? Should Christian be classified as a whistle blower, and should some of the harms he has suffered be classified as retaliation? Because I was perceived to be a supporter of Christian, was I also subjected to retaliation? Should Christian be fired, or should he be permitted to keep his job? These questions are important, and I encourage people to take them up. But to keep this post manageable, I will not take them up here.
Having provided context for the main question of this essay and having distinguished that question from other questions in the neighborhood, I now want provide some considerations that support the answer that, no, the search was not fair. First, I take it to be true that if an academic job search discriminates against candidates on the basis of sex, then the search is not fair. The search discriminated against female candidates. Therefore, it was not fair.
Here is how the discrimination played out. Between January 7 and January 9, 2016, the search committee conducted phone (conference call) interviews with somewhere between 11 and 14 candidates we had selected from the pool of everyone who had applied for the job. (I am providing a range because I can’t remember whether some of the candidates withdrew their applications before or after their phone interviews, or whether we might have informally eliminated some of the candidates even before we officially voted on who to fly out.) On January 10 at 11:37 a.m., search committee member Kevin Vallier emailed the other committee members and the department chair and asked us to vote on which four or five candidates we wanted to fly out to campus for job talks and more extensive interviews. He wrote,
We will bring at least four, one will be a woman. I think we can consider the top three independently on [sic] the female candidates, given that the good female candidate was too narrow, and the broader ones were worrisome. I think most people think [female candidate’s name] is 1 or 2. And I think we can settle that fairly quickly. So that means we have to place seven people in three or four spots.
He then listed the names of seven male candidates, made a few remarks about them, and asked us to send him our rankings.
Although the email is ambiguous, I interpreted him as saying we had one flyout interview to allocate to one of our three female candidates and three or four flyout interviews to allocate to three or four of the seven male candidates. In other words, I took him to be asking us to rank the female and male candidates separately. In response, I sent him a ranked list of the male candidates only. (Contrary to something I mistakenly said on Twitter, I did not rank any of the female candidates at all, perhaps because I took it to be a foregone conclusion that the female candidate he had named was the one we would fly out.) Search committee chair Sara Worley seems to have interpreted Kevin’s email the same way I did; she sent him a ranked list of eight male candidates and a separate ranked list of three female candidates. Christian sent Kevin only one list in which he had ranked thirteen female and male candidates together, and so did department chair Michael Weber, who was not officially a member of the search committee.
Later that day, at 6:37 p.m., Kevin emailed us again. He wrote,
Folks, I’ve just finished with my church group. I haven’t had time to compile everyone’s rankings and I am driving at the moment. So I may be a bit late turning them out. As a result, it might be worth starting the conversation with the female candidates, while I set up and score the other candidates.
I take this 6:37 p.m. email to confirm that my interpretation of Kevin’s 11:37 a.m. email was correct; he wanted us to consider the female candidates separately from the males. As further confirmation of this interpretation, at 7:35 p.m. Kevin sent us a spreadsheet in which he had compiled everyone’s rankings. He compiled the rankings separately for the women and the men; in one section of the spreadsheet, he listed the voters (Michael, Sara, Christian, Kevin, and me) horizontally and our respective rankings of eight male candidates vertically. In another section of the spreadsheet, he again listed the voters (Michael, Sara, Christian, Kevin, and Me) horizontally and our respective rankings of three female candidates vertically. He had entered the female candidate I had already assumed we were flying out as my first choice, and he didn’t list any other female candidates as my second or third choices.
You may be wondering why there were eight ranked men when Kevin’s 11:37 a.m. email listed seven. This is because he had forgotten about one of the men he took to be in the top eight; he reminded us of that candidate in a follow-up email at 11:52 a.m. You may also be wondering why the total number of candidates on the spreadsheet was eleven, even though Christian and Michael had each sent Kevin ranked lists of thirteen candidates. My guess is that Kevin did not think we needed to include two of those thirteen candidates in the vote at all. One of the two was a man and one was a woman.
At 9 p.m., the five of us met over Skype to finalize our list of fly-outs. Over the course of the discussion, we changed our minds about how to rank the eight male candidates, and Kevin once again compiled our rankings. At 11:15 p.m., he sent us a spreadsheet with the new results. The new results on the spreadsheet were for men only; this time, there was no ranking of the women at all. In the body of the 11:15 p.m. email, Kevin wrote, “It appears that we have collectively settled on an on-campus list:” [emphasis in original]. He then listed three men (which he numbered 1, 2, and 3) and one woman (numbered 4) and speculated about how the men might fare in future deliberations. Finally, at the end of the email, he wrote, “If one of the top three bombs, I would support bringing [another male candidate] in.”
The reader may wonder why this 11:15 p.m. email seems to include a ranking of the top four candidates, rather than a mere list of the top four. After we had determined who our top male and female candidates were, had we then ranked the top woman against the top three men? This certainly didn’t happen over email, and I have no memory of it happening over Skype. My best guess is that Kevin inferred, without taking a formal vote, that putting the woman in fourth place was the will of the committee. Indeed, he had seemed to be relying on a similar inference when he had written, in the 11:37 a.m. email, that “the good female candidate was too narrow, and the broader ones were worrisome.” I believe he formed these judgments about the will of the committee on the basis of informal conversations we had been having about the candidates over the past month or so. And to be sure, we had had lots of informal conversations about the candidates. For example, I remember that in early November at the BGSU graduate workshop, Kevin had asked me, before I had even looked at any of the applications, whether I would favor hiring the particular candidate who we eventually ended up hiring. In any case, putting the female candidate in fourth place in the body of the 11:15 p.m. email shouldn’t have mattered too much; this list was supposed to determine who we flew out to campus, not who we were going to offer the job to after the candidates had completed their visits. On the other hand, Kevin’s comment that “if one of the top three bombs, I would support bringing [another male candidate] in” indicated that in his mind, at least, the numbers he had assigned to the candidates carried some significance: they seemed intended to reveal who the “top three” candidates were.
My memory of what happened next is a little hazy. I believe there were more emails exchanged between Sara and Michael. There may also have been other emails exchanged between members of the search committee. However, the spreadsheet that Kevin had sent around at 11:15 p.m. on January 10 was the last record of any rankings being compiled. A later public records request showed that at some point (the email is not dated), Sara sent Michael the official recommendation of the search committee. She wrote,
As we have discussed, the search committee has arrived at a set of recommendations for on-campus interviews. We have an ‘A’ list and a ‘B’ list. … (The purpose of the ‘B’ list is to provide a back up in case we lose some of the candidates from our ‘A’ list before we are in a position to extend offers.)
The A list contained three male candidates and one female candidate, and the B list contained one male candidate and one female candidate. The public records request also shows that the “request to interview” paperwork Michael filed with the university—which he signed and dated January 11—followed the recommendation in Sara’s email: there was one woman on the A list and one woman on the B list.
I take it that the documents and emails I have summarized so far indicate that the search was biased against the women. Although we had had many informal conversations about the candidates, Kevin’s inferences about the collective will of the committee were not based on any formal votes. Specifically, the judgment that “the good female candidate was too narrow, and the broader ones were worrisome” was never explicitly put to a vote. Yet that judgment seemed to serve as the justification for ranking male and female candidates separately. And the decision to rank male and female candidates separately virtually ensured that even the top woman would come out below the men, as Kevin’s 11:15 p.m. email seemed to confirm. Moreover, even if the top female candidate was still assured a flyout, our ranking system, alone, would have guaranteed that none of the other female candidates had even the slightest chance of getting a flyout. Perhaps that is the worry that motivated Sara and Michael to add a second woman to the B list before Michael submitted the request to interview to the university.
At this point, a reader might raise the following objection: even if our ranking system discriminated against the female candidates, the search process on the whole did not discriminate against the female candidates, for Michael and Sara seemed to have noticed the problem with the ranking system and addressed it by adding another woman to the B list. The reader might then object that, on the whole, the search process discriminated against men, rather than women. After all, not one, but two women made it into the final six, and they made it in without having to compete against any of the men.
It is certainly true that the two women who made it into the final six were never officially ranked against the men, at least in a vote that included every member of the search committee. As I noted above, I didn’t rank any of the women at all, and neither Sara nor Kevin ranked the women against the men. Christian and Michael ranked the women against the men, but they constituted only one quarter to two-fifths of the search committee (depending on whether you count Michael as an unofficial member of the search committee). Therefore, there is some prima facie plausibility to the objection that both the woman on the B list and the woman on the A list had an unfair advantage over the men.
However, being on the B list was never ultimately to the second female candidate’s advantage. Although we ended up flying out the male candidate who had made it onto the B list, we never flew out the woman from the B list. When we were considering whether to fly out the man from the B list, Michael sent an email to the Executive Associate Dean asking, “If we would like to invite candidates from our ‘B’ list, must we invite all candidates on the ‘B’ list? We have just two on the list, but wish to invite only one.” This email suggests that not only did we never actually fly this woman out to campus, but we never even wished to fly her out to campus.
What about the female candidate on the A list? Did she gain an unfair advantage over the male candidates? My answer here is also no; bringing her to campus did not boost her chances of being hired in any significant way. I suspect that the negative opinions that some committee members had formed of her candidacy before we flew her out were not altered by her on-campus job talk and interviews. This is not to say that her flyout went badly, or even that everyone on the search committee had started out with a negative opinion of her. To the contrary, even though I had never voted on flying her out, I had been a strong supporter of this candidate since December 20, when I had originally rescued her dossier from a folder of applications that other committee members had rejected. And once all the candidates’ campus visits had concluded, I formed the opinion that this candidate’s job talk was the best of all the job talks, and so did Christian. The graduate students were impressed by both her job talk and her meeting with them, and they reported that they favored her over all the other candidates we had flown out.
Nevertheless, in informal discussions about the candidates, other faculty members cited a number of reasons not to hire her. For example, the consideration that her work was “too narrow” was mentioned again. Her marital status was also mentioned. Faculty argued that if we offered the job to her, she would want us to hire her spouse as well. (Here it should be noted that this candidate had never told us she was married—we had discovered this independently—and she had never asked us to consider hiring her spouse.) In previous years, the department had hired another married couple, and that couple had left relatively soon after being hired. Kevin argued that this was likely to happen again with the female candidate and her spouse. In an email dated February 13, 2016, he wrote, “And don’t even get me started on another dual offer to Princeton PhDs. That, to me, is the worst option of all. We will get royally screwed out of two faculty members again.”
Perhaps the strongest evidence against the claim that our female candidate received an unfair competitive advantage is that she was entirely excluded from the final vote. To explain how this happened, I need to provide some more details about how the final few weeks of the search unfolded. Recall that on January 10, Kevin sent us the email in which he listed the four candidates we would bring to campus. On January 11, Michael signed the official paperwork to request to interview those four candidates, plus two additional B-list candidates. Campus interviews of the four A-list candidates were conducted on January 26, February 1, February 5, and February 10. At the conclusion of the fourth visit, the search committee (and possibly some other faculty members, although I do not recall exactly who was there) met in person to rank the candidates. On February 12, Sara sent an email to Michael with the ranking. Brandon Warmke was ranked first, and the female candidate was ranked third. Sara wrote, “There was lively discussion and a variety of views expressed about each of the candidates, since they each have different portfolios of strengths and weaknesses. The rankings of the first three candidates were fairly close together.”
But because the rankings were so close, tensions in the philosophy department began to build. Some faculty members voiced strong opposition to offering the job to Brandon. Many worried that it would be imprudent to extend an offer in the face of so much disagreement. Someone then suggested that we bring out one of the candidates from the B list. Yet this was going to be difficult: Brandon had informed us that he had a job offer elsewhere, and we inferred that he did not want to reject that offer unless he had an official offer from us. Michael expressed our dilemma in a February 15 email to Sara in which he wrote, “I feel very much in a bind. … Bringing in more candidates risks losing Warmke.” Sara replied to Michael, “I agree on all counts. … I suppose we could try to get [B-list candidate] in this week, but that risks losing Warmke, and, as [another faculty member who was not on the search committee] says, there are risks with [B-list candidate] too.” Michael then replied to Sara, writing, “How about this (if it is kosher, and approved by the dean): invite [B-list candidate], and get him here as soon as possible; if Warmke tells us in the meantime that he must either accept or reject his other offer, then we go ahead and offer the position to Warmke. This might not be kosher because we are not allowed to make an offer until we have completed on-campus interviews with all those invited. I am meeting with [administrator] later today and will raise this issue.”
Michael’s suspicions proved to be correct: he was informed that the department could not make an offer until we had completed on-campus interviews. Nevertheless, it was decided that we would try to bring the B-list candidate to campus anyway, as quickly as possible. The candidate was invited to campus, and he delivered his job talk on Friday, February 19. Then on Saturday, February 20, the department conducted their final vote. For this final vote, the voters consisted of the search committee members as well as other faculty who had not served on the search committee.
The pace of things felt chaotic. One faculty member who had not been on the committee expressed his confusion about the final vote in a later email, writing,
The way this was done was mystifying to me. I received an email from Michael on Saturday saying that I need to vote right away, so my assumption was that the vote was [male candidate from the B list] or Warnke [sic]. I thought the only thing I could do was abstain since … I hadn’t had time to read the paper or listen to the talk and hadn’t been able to meet [male candidate from the B list]. After I sent that, I immediately thought what exactly did I just abstain on? I emailed for clarification but didn’t receive any for some time, by which time presumably it was too late to change anything.
Sara replied to this email to assure the faculty member that his later, post-abstention vote had been taken into account. But for the faculty members who were in the room at the time, it was clear that there were three candidates they could vote on—not two, but not five, either, even though we had by then flown five candidates out to campus. The names of the men who had been deemed our “top three candidates” were written on the white board. These “top three” candidates consisted of the two men who were ranked first and second in the February 12 email from Sara to Michael and the B-list candidate. Even though Sara’s February 12 email indicated that the top three candidates were “fairly close together,” the name of the woman who had been ranked third in the February 12 email was not written on the board. Faculty members in the room then stated their rankings of the three men, and the rankings were written on the board. In a later March 16, 2016 email, Michael wrote that the candidate to whom we ultimately made the job offer “was selected from a pool of the three top candidates who came to campus.”
I think it was unfair to exclude the female candidate from the final vote. I think it was unfair to rank the female candidates separately from the men when we were determining who we would fly out to campus. I think that both of these actions—and some of the other, subtler actions that I described above—stacked the deck against all of the female candidates, including the woman we flew to campus. None of the women who applied for the job that year had a real chance of getting the job, no matter how well they might have done on their phone interviews, or, in the case of the woman we flew out, her campus interview. The search discriminated against candidates on the basis of sex, and for that reason, it was unfair.
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.
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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December 2022 saw the publication of the first two issues of the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists (JHWP).
JHWP “is the world’s first journal dedicated to restoring and discussing the history of the texts written by and about women philosophers. The Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists seeks to integrate women’s intellectual heritage into the canon of philosophy, the humanities, and the natural and social sciences… The time period investigated by articles in the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists ranges from 2200 BCE to the 20th century CE in both the Western and non-Western world.”
Its founders and editors are Ruth Edith Hagengruber (Paderborn) and Mary Ellen Waithe (Cleveland State, emerita).
The journal, which makes use of double-anonymous peer review, publishes two issues per year, with each issue focusing on a particular theme so that “each issue is a collected anthology of continuing interest.”
While the journal is not entirely open-access, several pieces are unpaywalled, and the publisher is providing individuals with free access to all of the journal’s content through the end of 2024 with the use of a token (explained here).
In their foreword to Issue 1, Volume 1, Professors Hagengruber and Waithe write:
Anyone who studied philosophy with open eyes could not fail to notice that from the very beginning, women philosophers have had an important function in the history of philosophy. How could we philosophize without starting with Plato and Socrates, and ignoring Socrates’ female teachers? And yet this has been the reality in the institutions of philosophy teaching, in universities, schools and academies, worldwide.
Philosophy and its traditions have been taught only in part. It was as if Newton had only measured every other planet to determine the dynamics of dependencies. How was it possible that so many famous names were mentioned but not taught? Theano, Diotima, Aspasia, Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, Margaret Cavendish, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Émilie Du Châtelet, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Harriet Taylor Mill never completely disappeared, even though they had been eradicated from the patriarchal canon of institutional teaching. Early in the 1980s Mary Ellen Waithe started to bring these ideas and their authors together in a four-volume set, compiling much of the knowledge that was accessible before the creation of the internet. Waithe documented the biased philosophical approach to philosophy’s history. While many great philosophers did not care to name the women by whom they had been influenced, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Mill did name them, yet even today, some ignore that reality. Not all philosophers are right. The history of philosophy itself needs to be critically examined. One of the most important factors contributing to rewriting the history of philosophy in a more reliable way is to bring in women’s ideas. That will demonstrate the epistemological gain of works that have long been suppressed or ignored. No loss of knowledge is good.
While the ideas of women have been presented separately and cut off from the canon for many decades, now is the time to bring it together, to rewrite a history of philosophy that is more complete than it has been up to now. Working together for now and the future, we participate in the creation of anthologies, translations, encyclopedias, conferences, symposia, research programs and curricula devoted to reclaiming, restoring and reconsidering what women’s contributions have been to our discipline.
Philosophy is the mother of all theoretical academic disciplines. Accordingly, the net we cast through this, the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, is necessarily broad. We welcome contributions on the whole history of philosophy, from antiquity to the present day, and we also welcome discussions on women philosophers who do not belong to the Western tradition of philosophy.
The field of philosophical disciplines here at stake includes all traditional fields that belong to the field of philosophical discipline practiced today, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, mathematics, philosophy of religion, and so forth. Here, however, we stretch even further. Precisely because women have often and for so long been excluded from academic philosophy, and consequently have published in and were contributors to related sciences, their texts and analyses find their space here. The Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists provides a scholarly venue for discussing works by women who have made significant contributions to what is now the academic discipline of philosophy as well as to the theoretical foundations of other disciplines, including the physical sciences, mathematics, social sciences, medicine, economics, religion, and so forth. We are the venue for examining the ideas of scientists such as Ada Lovelace or Grete Henry-Hermann, and theories developed by theorists from Mary Sommerville to Florence Nightingale, from Hildegard of Bingen to Oliva Sabuco, from Hazel Kirk to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman. We welcome also articles on philosophy of religion ranging from Rabiy’a al ad’Wadia to Julian of Norwich, and from ‘A’isha al-Ba’uniyyah to Teresa of Avila. We also welcome articles about women’s contributions to philosophy of law and jurisprudence. Articles about aesthetic theory as articulated by women in the fine arts and performing arts are likewise desired. Although pedagogical material does not fit the framework of this journal, articles about educational theories developed by women, for example, the educational theories of Maria Montessori and Mary Everest Boole are within our scope.
You can learn more about the journal here.
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