UWM Philosophy Statement on Executive Order
We, the undersigned faculty of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, unequivocally condemn the immigration and travel ban enacted by President Trump on January 27, 2017 and express our strong support of our students, alumni and applicants to our programs affected by it.
The Executive Order impedes our academic mission. It obstructs our ability to build richly diverse cohorts of students, including international students. Recent graduating classes from our Master’s program include students from the countries named in the Executive Order as well as from other Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries. Our current pool of applicants includes students from these countries as well.
More fundamentally, the Executive Order attacks the values of mutual respect, diversity, and freedom of personal movement on which scholarship and higher learning depend.
We express support for students, instructors, researchers and faculty who are affected by this ban across UW system and across the country. And we re-commit ourselves to the values intrinsic to our mission which are threatened by this ban.
Margaret Atherton
Miren Boehm
William Bristow
Edward Hinchman
Stan Husi
Stephen Leeds
Michael Liston
Blain Neufeld
Nataliya Palatnik
Robert Schwartz
Joshua Spencer
Richard Tierney
Andrea Westlund
We, the UWM Chapter of the American Association for University Professionals, state our unequivocal condemnation of the immigration and travel ban enacted by President Trump on January 27, 2017, and affirm our support for our students and colleagues affected by it. We recognize the ban as part of a broader agenda that threatens the university and the very spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.
Many colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students at our university are citizens of the seven countries affected by this executive order. In Fall 2016, 104 graduate students from these nations attended UWM. Many other students are citizens of other Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East. All these people are full members of the university community; the university belongs to all of us. The travel restriction interferes with their studies, their work as intellectuals, and their freedom of movement as people.
We affirm that public universities are places of free inquiry and collective endeavor for all people, regardless of race, religion, sexual identity, or national origin. We are a nation of immigrant entrepreneurs and refugees, travelers, slaves and indigenous occupants; at UWM, our diversity is our strength in research, teaching, and community service.
We likewise affirm our support for the many students, faculty, and staff throughout the UW System and across the country, facing discriminatory and exclusionary migration policies. We reiterate AAUP-UWM’s advocacy for the rights of our undocumented students to security and privacy. We call on our university leadership to speak out whenever and wherever possible on these pressing issues.Here is the APA statement:
American participation in the global exchange of ideas depends on free movement of students and scholars to and from institutions of higher education, academic conferences, and other venues for study, research, and scholarly interaction. The executive order issued on January 27 limiting entry into the United States by refugees and those from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and deterring travel abroad by immigrants in the US, disrupts the work of philosophers and scholars in all disciplines around the world and impedes students, teachers, and researchers from engaging in their educational and professional pursuits.
The APA’s mission is to foster open dialogue and the free exchange of ideas. Inclusion and respect for diverse people, religions, cultures, and ideas are at the very core of our work. This order goes against these values—values on which the United States itself was founded.
The APA is working to assess the impact of this executive order on our members and participants in our upcoming meetings. We will take steps to ensure that those affected are able to participate in our meetings to the fullest extent feasible and to advocate for and support philosophers whose lives and work are harmed by this order.
We stand with learned societies, colleges and universities, and others around the world in calling on the President and Congress to reverse this executive order and to denounce religious intolerance in all its forms.And here is the APT statement:
The Association of Political Theory condemns, in the strongest terms, the travel ban recently issued by the federal government and demands that it be immediately rescinded. As clarified in our mission statement, the purpose of the APT is to promote the study of political theory and political philosophy in North America by advancing scholarly interaction, collaboration, and debate among political theorists from diverse intellectual perspectives. Our membership includes scholars from many different parts of the world including those covered by this travel ban. As an Association, we stand both with these scholars and in solidarity with all refugees and immigrants who have been negatively impacted and endangered by this executive order. We now commit to taking concrete actions to prevent the harms to our members that this policy threatens. We will begin exploring ways to do this and we welcome suggestions from our members about how best to help.I’m also relieved to note that I have yet to interact personally with any academic who is remotely sympathetic to the new Trump regime and its manifestly malevolent policies. To use a Rawlsian term, there seems to be an ‘overlapping consensus’—amongst liberal egalitarians, centrist liberals, classical liberals, libertarians, democratic socialists, etc.—against the quasi-fascist regime now wreaking havoc in Washington D.C.
During the election campaign, Trump relied upon well-established conservative organizational networks that could reach into many states and communities. … [H]e benefitted indirectly from Koch network operations centered in a nation-spanning, political party-like federation called Americans for Prosperity. Even more important, after his campaign squeaked through on November 8, an unprepared President-Elect Trump started to fall back on people and plans offered by the Koch network, which aims to dismantle not only Barack Obama’s accomplishments but much of what the federal government has done for 75 years to promote security and opportunity for ordinary Americans.Read the whole thing – and despair.
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Despite loud pronouncements from Charles Koch that his network would not support Trump, the Kochs’ massive political operation worked over many months to turn out Republican voters in key states. Above all, AFP was deeply involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, especially in the critical swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
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Having helped to elect Trump and a fully GOP-controlled Congress, the Koch network is now positioned to staff and steer much that happens in Washington DC.
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For the emerging Trump White House, Vice President Mike Pence, long a Koch network favorite, was put in charge of transition planning for federal personnel appointments – and one of his senior staffers for this effort is his long-time associate, Marc Short, recent head of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the lynchpin of the Koch network’s fundraising operation.
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In addition to Pence and Short, newly-named White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has had strong ties to AFP’s chapter in Wisconsin – a chapter that has been central to all aspects of politics and policy in that state during the ascendancy of Governor Scott Walker.
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After apparently denouncing and opposing GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan during the election campaign, President-Elect Trump did a quick about-face to fully embrace Ryan and his radical government-shrinking policy agenda. Speaker Ryan has been a featured politician at many Koch donor conclaves over the years, and Washington Post reporter Matea Gold has described Ryan as “clearly a favorite of the Koch donor network.” It is not hard to see why. Ryan’s main priorities, already spelled out in budgets that House Republicans have repeatedly passed, include slashing federal funding for Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other parts of the social safety net for the poor; privatizing Medicare for future generations of American retirees; instituting large and regressive tax cuts rewarding corporations and the very wealthy; gutting what remains of labor regulations and union rights; and eliminating business and environmental regulations.
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With all of these leadership ties in place, is it no surprise that specific plans have rapidly emerged to advance the Koch agenda in the new Congress that convenes in January 2017, perhaps enacting bills so quickly that opponents will be disorganized and most Americans will not understand what is happening.
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With total GOP control of Washington DC about to happen, the Koch network dream of an enfeebled U.S. domestic government is on the verge of realization.
Teaching philosophy in schools, and promoting it in society, is urgently needed to enable citizens “to discriminate between truthful language and illusory rhetoric”, President Michael D Higgins has said.
Speaking at a function at Áras an Uachtaráin to mark World Philosophy Day, which fell this week, the President expressed concern about an “an anti-intellectualism that has fed a populism among the insecure and the excluded”.
Amid claims that we have entered a “post-truth” society, he asked how we might together and individually contribute to a “reflective atmosphere in the classrooms, in our media, in our public space”.
“The dissemination, at all levels of society, of the tools, language and methods of philosophical enquiry can, I believe, provide a meaningful component in any concerted attempt at offering a long-term and holistic response to our current predicament.”
[…]
“The teaching of philosophy is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected and uncertain world,” Mr Higgins said.
“A new politics of fear, resentment and prejudice against those who are not ‘like us’ requires the capacity to critique, which an early exposure to the themes and methods of philosophy can bring.”(From: “Teach philosophy to heal our ‘post-truth’ society, says President Higgins,” The Irish Times [2016-11-19].)
"Perhaps I am overreacting, but I do feel as though yesterday was one of those moments, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, that alters the trajectory of civilization. That’s because the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency is deeply discrediting to Western-style democracy. In fact, I think the big winner, globally, from Tuesday’s election, is Chinese-style authoritarianism."I think that the possibility that what happened on Tuesday will be perceived in the way that Heath describes is a real danger. It reminded me of the following observation by John Rawls:
"If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered society is impossible, then the quality and tone of [political] discussions will reflect that knowledge. A cause of the fall of Weimar’s constitutional regime was that none of the traditional elites of Germany supported its constitution or were willing to cooperate to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime to be possible. Its time had past."(From the Preface to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism [my emphasis].)
The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.As Ornstein and Mann point out in the Vox article, the nomination of Trump – and the collapse of any serious opposition to that nomination amongst the party’s elites – vindicates their earlier thesis.
In the end, the exploitation of anti-government sentiment by Republican leaders, and the active efforts on their part to make all government look corrupt and illegitimate, reached its logical conclusion. The Republican political establishment looked no less corrupt, weak, and illegitimate than the Democratic one, and the appeal of a rank outsider became greater.It’s grim reading. And it underscores how vital it is that Trump be defeated in November. Even if that happens, though, Ornstein and Mann are skeptical that the Republican Party can become a constructive force in American politics for the foreseeable future.
Here is the truth. Nobody called for a moment of silence for Micah Johnson. Eleven U.S. cities are not on the brink of racial violence. He, Trump just made that shit up so his followers can stay afraid and angry at the people he wants them to fear and hate. This lie was a marching order and the Party of Lincoln is right in step with him, straight into the burning Reichstag of this man's mind.
Welcome to the 2016 Republican convention: a four-day celebration of the ritual suicide of American democracy.
With balloons.
