On the ‘anti-conservative bias’ of academia

Wisconsin Republicans like to whine about the ‘anti-conservative bias’ of contemporary universities. Such complaints have been used to help justify their ongoing destruction of the University of Wisconsin system (including: the recent de facto prohibition of student protests by the [Scott Walker-appointed] Regents of the UW system; the attack on academic freedom through the evisceration of tenure two years ago; the massive budget cuts to the system over the course of Walker’s time as governor; etc.).

For a helpful explanation for why this ‘bias’ exists in academia, read this post by Joe Heath (a philosopher at the University of Toronto).

One of Heath’s key points is something that I’ve long held to be obviously true—viz., universities are inherently ‘pro-reason’ (broadly understood to mean an overall pro-evidence, pro-argument, pro-logic, etc., outlook). So insofar as much of political and social conservatism is anti-reason (anti-evidence, etc.), then academia inevitably is going to be a hostile environment for most political and social conservatives. And to the extent that anti-reason conservatives go to university and become less conservative as a consequence, this is not (or at least not primarily) due to ‘brainwashing’ by Marxist profs, but rather because they become acclimated to a rationalist way of seeing the world. (In contrast to anti-reason conservatives, libertarians are massively overrepresented in academia, especially in the US. But of course libertarians think that they have arguments for their positions; they’re ‘pro-reason’, like their liberal and left-wing interlocutors.)

Another thing that I like about this post is Heath’s take down of the irritatingly influential Jonathan Haidt. What I find most grating in much of Haidt’s work is its unargued premise of moral non-cognitivism. (Heath also criticizes Haidt’s ‘political moralism,’ which strikes me as fair, but is not something that causes me to tear my hair out in annoyance.)

A public discussion of free speech at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

I'm heading back to Milwaukee for a couple of days to take part in a public panel discussion on: “When Free Speech Collides with Impermissible Speech: A Civil Discourse.” It will take place at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s Student Union on Wednesday (27th September) at 10:30 (11:30 EST). If you’re so inclined, you can watch a ‘live stream’ via the link above.

Also taking part will be: Chris Ott (ACLU Wisconsin), Rick Esenberg (Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty), Dr. Michele Bria (Journey House of Wisconsin), and 3 UWM students. Moderating the discussion will be Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, whom I remember from his regular appearances on the PBS political discussion show, The McLaughlin Group.

Frankly, I'm a bit nervous about this, as the topic is rather broad and vague, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say about it (“say what you want, but be nice about it?”). I do hope to be able to criticize Wisconsin Republicans’ ongoing assault on academic freedom.

(Here is the UWM Philosophy Department’s announcement.)

UWM Philosophy Department condemns Trump's Muslim Ban

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee opposes Trump's Executive Order:

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 

I'm proud that this decision was unanimous. I have great colleagues!

Wisconsin Republicans' assault on academic freedom continues

This is getting tiresome, I know, but Republican legislators in Wisconsin seem to have a surfeit of enthusiasm when it comes to attacking the University of Wisconsin system, and especially the UW's commitment to academic freedom.

The most recent bit of nonsense is an inchoate proposal to somehow tie public funds for the UW system to more 'adequate' representation of right-wing ideas on UW campuses, irrespective of their intellectual or scientific merit, in the name of an ill-defined desire for greater 'intellectual diversity'. (I doubt that Republicans' concern for 'intellectual diversity' extends to the lack of leftish scholars and ideas at business schools...)

Helpfully, today's New York Times has a piece by Donald P. Moynihan (professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) -- "Who’s Really Placing Limits on Free Speech?" -- that does an excellent job in explaining what is happening in Wisconsin. Moynihan discusses the various policies that Republican legislators and Governor Scott Walker have used in the recent past (e.g., the evisceration of tenure), and in the future may use (e.g., the monitoring of course offerings at UW, allowing guns into classrooms), in order to stifle academic freedom. Worries about 'political correctness' (an 'issue' that I never have encountered during my 8+ years at UW-Milwaukee) are manifestly trivial in comparison to these real threats to free scholarship and intellectual liberty.

A creative way to address the prospect of guns in the classroom

In 2017 it looks like some Wisconsin GOP legislators will be pushing (yet again) for a law that would permit people to bring concealed firearms into campus buildings within the University of Wisconsin system. This is a terrible idea that just won't die (at least not while Republicans remain the enthusiastic thralls of the National Rifle Association).

Professor Larry Shapiro (UW-Madison), however, is planning on pursuing a rather innovative strategy for dealing with this problem (should the proposed bill eventually become law). He's preparing two syllabi for his "Introduction to Philosophy" course. The first syllabus includes a wide variety of topics, among them things like whether God exists, the moral permissibility or impermissibility of abortion, and conceptions of social justice. The second syllabus eliminates those topics and replaces them with philosophical debates less likely to provoke strong reactions in students.

Why the two syllabi? Prof. Shapiro explains:

The reason for the second syllabus is this. The topics on the first syllabus that get my students so excited are also the topics that arouse the most passion. And, if some of our state legislators have their way, passion is the last thing I’ll want to provoke in my students. You see, my campus may soon become a concealed carry campus. This means that while I am presenting an argument in favor of a right to abortion, or against the existence of God, or in favor of tax policies that would strip these students of their inheritances (I also present arguments on the other side of these issues), I will at the same time be worrying that a depressed or disturbed or drunk or high college student is in the audience, armed, and fed up with what I or fellow students are advocating. 

It’s of course obvious that gun violence in my classroom is far more probable given the legal presence of guns than not, and even if the danger remains remote, why should I bother to keep on my syllabus those issues that promise most likely to incite gun violence? Why teach topics that increase the probability, however small, of provoking an unstable but legally carrying shooter? 

So, my plan is this. On the first day of the semester I will explain to my students that I have prepared two syllabi for the course. One they’ll find much more interesting than the other, but we’ll adopt it only if I receive a promise from the students that they will not carry weapons into my classroom.

(Read the whole piece by Prof. Shapiro here. [Hat tip to the Daily Nous.])

I formulated a less creative strategy to deal with this problem when the idea was proposed last time (during autumn 2015): (a) switch all my lower-level undergraduate courses to online only; (b) hold my office hours in an off-campus coffee shop with a 'no guns' policy; and (c) request all students in my seminars (mainly graduate students and 4th-year undergraduates) not bring guns to our meetings (I would trust that students that mature would honour this request). But perhaps I'll adapt a version of Prof. Shapiro's strategy as well.

(In an earlier post at this blog, I explained why the possession of firearms actually renders everyone within American society less free.)

The AAUP defends academic freedom in Wisconsin

The American Association of University Professors has issued a reply to the threat to academic freedom posed by GOP legislators in Wisconsin (as mentioned in my previous post). 

Here is a part of the AAUP's statement:

[T]hreats to the university by government officials related to instructors offering specific courses stifles the free exploration of ideas...
Further, by calling on UW-Madison to fire Professor Sajnani for his public comments, these legislators ignore one of our most fundamental rights as U.S. citizens: the right to speak freely, as guaranteed by the First Amendment. ...
This is not merely an issue of freedom for academics, but an issue of freedom for all citizens.

Read the full statement here (pdf).

More Republican contempt for academic freedom in Wisconsin

Yet again Wisconsin Republicans display contempt for the principle of academic freedom. Two fascistic legislators in particular want to exercise domination over the university, ensuring that it comply with their ideological preferences.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Two leading state Republican lawmakers are threatening the University of Wisconsin System that if it doesn't remove a course called "The Problem of Whiteness" from UW-Madison's spring semester offerings, the UW's requests for more state funding and a bump in tuition may be denied during budget deliberations next year. 

One of the lawmakers, Rep. Dave Murphy of Greenville, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that he also has directed his staff to look further into UW-Madison's course offerings to make sure "they're legit."
…
UW-Madison must drop the class, Murphy said. "If UW-Madison stands with this professor, I don’t know how the University can expect the taxpayers to stand with UW-Madison.”
…
Asked what exactly he would be looking for, Murphy did not elaborate. He said his staff would not need to look at many disciplines such as chemistry and business, but "we'll be looking at the humanities."
…
This is the second time in less than six months that a legislator has threatened UW System funding over course offerings at the state's flagship university. 

In July, Sen. Steve Nass, the vice-chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges and a frequent UW critic, warned in a letter to UW leaders and regents that UW-Madison lecturer Jason Nolen's decision to assign an "offensive" essay on gay men's sexual preferences in a sociology class could have budget ramifications.  

Not content to destroy the University of Wisconsin system through underfunding and the elimination of tenure, these malevolent ignoramuses want to conduct a witch-hunt to expunge anyone who dares to deviate from what they think universities ‘ought’ to teach.

It is clear that we should now speak of ‘freedom’ in Wisconsin in the past tense.

Wisconsin's assault on academic freedom

Over at Slate, Rebecca Schuman does a solid job of summarizing the current assault on academic freedom within the University of Wisconsin system in her piece, "The End of Research in Wisconsin."

Some especially important bits:

“This past June, American academia went into an uproar over Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget in Wisconsin, which not only cut $250 million from higher education, but also severely weakened shared faculty governance and effectively destroyed professor tenure at state universities.”

“[T]he situation in Wisconsin is worse than your garden-variety corporatization. […] Academics, whether they have it or not, want some form of tenure to exist to protect the integrity of the knowledge that is produced, preserved, and disseminated.”

“Wisconsin professors simply do not want research limited by the whims of 18 people appointed by a governor with an openly stated anti-education agenda. And you shouldn’t, either. Think university research doesn’t affect you? You’re wrong. Hundreds of technological and social advances that you depend upon have been made thanks to the research of some brainiac at some university somewhere: what kind of cities to plan; how (and where) to alleviate poverty and hunger; what kind of diseases to treat; what kind of drugs to invent (or make obsolete); what kind of bridges and roads to build (and where). If professors are not protected from disagreeing with the agenda of their ‘bosses’—whether that be Dow Chemical, Gov. Walker, or President Trump—the consequences will go far beyond one person’s paycheck.”

“What’s happening in Wisconsin is a worst-case scenario come to life, and $9 million will do nothing to stop the demise of the integrity of research produced there—and everywhere else, too, if we don’t start electing lawmakers who actually value research.”

Unsurprisingly, morale at the place where I work, the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, has been horrifically low this academic year.  

Unfreedom in Wisconsin

I always feel a certain dread when I have to return to Wisconsin after a break in Canada.  It’s not about the teaching (usually), but rather my sense that some further horrible decision will be made by the state government that will make life there even more unnecessarily unpleasant than it already is.

A New York Times piece from a week ago, “The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin” by Dan Kaufman, does a good job in summarizing the transformation of Wisconsin over the past five years under Governor Scott Walker and his henchmen within the Republican-controlled state legislature; the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) also is discussed.  (ALEC is one of my bêtes noires.)

Individual freedom is a central concern of mine, both politically and in my philosophical work.  So I find it fascinating, and at the same time deeply depressing, to see the ways in which pro-plutocracy organizations like ALEC, and the politicians that implement ALEC’s ‘model legislation,’ deploy the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ to justify their policies.  So-called ‘right-to-work’ laws are a perfect example of this: such laws, of course, do not ensure anything like a ‘right to work.’  Moreover, they do not remove a restriction on employment.  People always are free to accept or decline a job at a unionized firm.  Nobody is every ‘forced’ to join a union.  What ‘right-to-work’ laws do is restrict freedom of contract, encourage freeriding, and coercively (through the force of law) undermine the viability unions.  It’s an Orwellian term.

Having smashed the unions of Wisconsin – and thereby undermined the freedom of workers there – Walker and his minions have turned their sights on the state’s civil service.  Kaufman explains:

By adding the Civil Service bill [to previous ‘right-to-work’ legislation], Mr. Walker brings Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal “at-will employment.” Unlike union workers or state employees, whose collective bargaining agreements or Civil Service rules generally require employers to demonstrate “just cause” for them to be fired, at-will employees can be terminated at any time for any reason. At-will employment is promoted by the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which disseminates model bills to state legislators benefiting its corporate members and conservative private backers.

The ‘libertarian right,’ of course, interprets a law that permits ‘at-will employment’ as one that is ‘freedom enhancing’ in nature.  And at-will employment does increase freedom – but only the freedom of those individuals who already enjoy considerable wealth and power, namely, employers.  It increases their freedom to dominate others, by entitling employers to fire arbitrarily – and thus to threaten more generally – their employees.  The flipside of this kind of freedom for the powerful, of course, is unfreedom or subjugation for employees.   Employees are rendered even more vulnerable to the will of their employers under an ‘at-will employment’ regime. 

The less that employees are subject to arbitrary firing – and subject to ongoing threats of arbitrary firing – the more they enjoy what some political philosophers who write on liberty call ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘republican liberty.’  (The reference to ‘republican liberty’ by political philosophers such as Philip Pettit, it should be stressed, refers to the Roman Republic, where a freeman enjoyed a certain status under the law, and obviously is not a reference to the contemporary American Republican Party, which generally opposes republican freedom for most citizens.)  In contrast, the more that employees are subject to arbitrary firing – and thus subject to ongoing threats of arbitrary firing – the more they are subject to domination, and thus the more they are unfree.  

So while the libertarian right, and the contemporary Republican Party more generally, portrays itself as championing individual freedom through such policies, it in fact is championing only the freedom of the already powerful, whilst further restricting and undermining the freedom of most citizens. 

Professors such as myself hardly have been exempt from the Republicans’ assault on liberty within Wisconsin.  After all, the recent attack on tenure is precisely about undermining academic freedom and rendering academics more vulnerable to the will of the politically powerful. 

Sadly, the dark days in Wisconsin do not look to be ending any time soon… 

The Logic of Estrangement by Julius Sensat

The new book by my friend and colleague, Julius Sensat, is now out. It's entitled The Logic of Estrangement: Reason in an Unreasonable Form, and is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Here is the abstract:

The Logic of Estrangement conceives of estrangement as an irrational or unreasonable embodiment of reason in the social world, rather than as a self-alienation of the human essence, its more usual characterization. It undertakes a unified historical and systematic investigation of the idea of estrangement and its significance for the social role of philosophy and critical theory. It traces the development of the idea in major works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and it explores the idea's significance for a critical understanding of John Rawls's political philosophy. In so doing it provides a way of understanding Kant and Rawls as part of a tradition they are not usually associated with, and it thereby offers new insight into their thought. It also puts forward a generalized reconstruction of the idea of estrangement, using concepts from game theory and decision theory. This analysis enables an extension of the idea to applications beyond its usual domain as well as a deeper understanding of the works of the above philosophers.

I've read drafts of -- and been quite impressed by -- the material on Kant, Hegel, and Rawls. Now I look forward to reading the whole thing!

AAUP statement against campus carry laws

The American Association of University Professors has come out with a very strong statement opposing 'campus carry' laws (such as the one currently being considered in Wisconsin, which I mentioned in my previous post).

The statement emphasizes this key point:

Colleges and universities … regard the presence of weapons as incompatible with their educational missions. College campuses are marketplaces of ideas, and a rigorous academic exchange of ideas may be chilled by the presence of weapons. Students and faculty members will not be comfortable discussing controversial subjects if they think there might be a gun in the room.

For the full statement go here.

An armed society is an unfree society

[Image from here.]

Having decided that they haven’t quite ruined the University the Wisconsin system enough yet, the Republicans in Madison are now are considering a bill that would allow students (if they have ‘conceal and carry’ permits) to bring guns into campus buildings.  Students sitting in classrooms during lectures and seminars, or in offices meeting with professors, may soon be packing heat.

This is a horrible idea, one manifestly harmful to the educational mission of universities, including especially the free and vigorous exchange of controversial ideas and views.  Moreover, it is premised on false beliefs about the role of guns in reducing violent crime, and a misguided conception of the relation between guns and freedom in society.

It sometimes is claimed by American gun advocates (including the two legislators pushing this bill) that the presence of guns reduce violent crimes.  The reasoning seems to be that guns act as deterrents to criminals and/or can be used by ‘good guys’ to stop ‘bad guys’ (to use some technical terms favoured by the NRA) in the process of harming or killing innocent people.

That this claim is false should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look at other liberal democratic societies.  The United States has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and over fifteen times as many as Australia and New Zealand.  The reason for this is clear: “The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.”  An American gun advocate might acknowledge this fact, but claim that guns nonetheless reduce the overall homicide rate.  That is, perhaps once homicides not caused by firearms are taken into account, it turns out that the United States has a lower homicide rate than, say, Canada thanks to the deterrent effect of all those guns.  But this is not the case either.  The homicide rate of the United States is three times that of Canada.  Again, this should be no surprise.  It’s a lot easier to kill people with guns than with hockey sticks.  Simply put, the idea that citizens legally permitted to carry concealed firearms are an effective force in reducing homicides is a myth.

Guns are inherently threatening.  If students are allowed to bring guns into classrooms, many other students will feel less safe.  It already is quite difficult to help students feel comfortable enough to discuss freely – and disagree openly with each other over – contentious issues like race, gender, and economic inequality, or the moral permissibility or impermissibility of abortion and euthanasia.  The presence of guns lurking in the background of future such discussions invariably will make them even more difficult.

The debate over gun control, at least within the United States, often is cast as a conflict between the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘welfare’ (or security).  Even defenders of robust gun control frequently characterize the debate in this way.  This is a mistake.  The debate instead should be construed as one concerning the distribution of freedom.  Should the freedom of gun owners take priority over the freedom of citizens in general?

The science fiction author Robert Heinlein once famously declared, “An armed society is a polite society.” But the reason such a society is ‘polite,’ of course, is fear.  (The second sentence of the Heinlein quote is: “Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”)  The reality is that an armed society is an unfree society.

The threat of gun violence is coercive.  While easy access to firearms may expand the scope of (what the political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously called) the ‘negative liberty’ of those who like to carry around guns (such citizens can do something that they could not do, or not do as easily, in a society in which access to firearms was restricted), it restricts the scope of all citizens’ negative liberty.  It does so by introducing a coercive threat into all citizens’ public interactions.

To connect my discussion here with my previous post, a society in which guns are widely available is one that more closely resembles Thomas Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’ than do societies in which guns are rare.*  That is, making guns readily available creates a more miserable and insecure condition, one in which everyone becomes a potential threat to everyone else.  Such a society is less free overall; its citizens face a greater range of interferences (potential threats) than citizens in unarmed societies.

Of the four countries that I’ve lived in as an adult – Canada (where I’m from), England, Ireland, and the United States – I’ve felt the least free within the U.S., despite its self-conception as ‘the land of the free.’  And the prevalence of guns in the U.S. is one of the main reasons for this.  In Canada, if an argument breaks out in a coffee shop, a pub, or on a street, I think: “Ugh – How annoying.”  In the U.S., when the same sort of thing happens, I think: “Bloody hell! What if one of those idiots has a gun?!”  And I flee.

Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioural medicine at Stanford University, describes precisely this phenomenon: “In the U.S., whenever there is a angry argument, whether over a traffic accident, someone being fired from their job, or for that matter over nothing of any consequence, it always lurks in one’s mind that someone could have a gun and could start shooting.”  He describes this as “the oppressive psychological weight of America’s gun violence,” and explains how (perversely) this psychological weight “is part of what makes some gun owners scared of gun control (If I don’t have a gun, how will I defend myself against those who do?).”  (Notice the paradigmatically Hobbesian reasoning of the gun owner described by Humphreys.)

And now some Wisconsin legislators want to allow guns into university buildings, including classrooms.  Classrooms in which controversial ideas are debated, and feelings can become intense.  Classrooms in which professors sometimes have to give students bad grades.

Well, at least explaining Hobbes's version of the state of nature will be a bit easier in my political philosophy courses if the legislators who cravenly are doing the bidding of the NRA in Madison get their way…

[* Allow me address a potential nitpick for any Hobbes scholars who might be reading this.  The state of nature, according to Hobbes, is a state of complete freedom, as there is no political authority to establish and impose laws upon persons.  But if we employ Berlin’s notion of negative liberty – according to which, roughly, interferences to potential courses of action count as restrictions on one’s freedom, irrespective of whether they are brought about by the state or by non-state agents – then people are quite unfree within the state of nature, as they face all kinds of interferences on what they can do, namely, continual threats from others.  It is this fear of others that compels rational individuals within the state of nature to act in certain ways (namely, to take pre-emptive actions against others whenever possible).  This is why within the state of nature there is “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  If we employ something like Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, then, the Hobbesian state of nature is a radically unfree condition.]

New department website

I mentioned a few weeks ago that my department was constructing a new website.  Well, it's now active, and I think that it looks pretty good (even the part for which I was partially responsible).  I previously did not think that such a change was necessary, but I must concede that the new site definitely is an improvement from the earlier one.

APA statement on the erosion of tenure within the University of Wisconsin system

Kudos to the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association for its criticism of the recent (entirely spiteful and politically-motivated) undermining of tenure by the Wisconsin State Senate, Assembly, and Governor:

Tenure is the most important safeguard of academic freedom, and academic freedom is a bedrock principle of philosophical inquiry. The Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association deplores the assault on academic freedom in Wisconsin, whether it affects the flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or any other universities in the UW System, and we deplore the precedent it sets. We call on legislators, regents and other campus administrators to work towards restoring recognized standards of tenure in Wisconsin.

Read the full statement here.

What has been happening in Wisconsin since Scott Walker's election as Governor and the seizure of control of the State Assembly and Senate by the Republican Party in 2010 -- especially, from my perspective as a professor, the evisceration of a once-excellent public university system -- has been incredibly depressing. Morale at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, where I teach, is at an all-time low. I'm dreading returning to Milwaukee next week...