truth and falsehood or consequences for philosophy

I’m reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, a text not often discussed in Hegel literature, perhaps because it’s obscure, even for Hegel, and contains gross errors regarding scientifically explained phenomena—including mistakes about the science of Hegel’s day. Now, I adore Hegel for some perverse reason, and his errors are embarrassing.

That’s only a minor problem compared to Hegel’s racist and sexist comments, and those occur in texts that are taken seriously not just by Hegel scholars. For instance, his account of women in marriage as the material moment through which the ethical relation becomes manifest takes up a significant if small part of the Phenomenology of Spirit (the most-read book by Hegel in the English speaking philosophy world). Sexism and racism appear in the Philosophy of Right as well (probably second most-read).

I recently had a brief chat at a conference about this basic problem in the canon of philosophical writing. The woman I was talking to summed things up well by saying that if she stopped reading any philosopher who wrote something outrageous about women or that was racist, she’d have to give up reading philosophy just about altogether.

Since almost no one but academic philosophers reads books from the tradition of philosophy, this may seem like a picayune problem. People don’t seem to quit reading novels by racist authors, or stop looking at paintings by sexist painters. If there is a difference, it could be that unlike literature or art, philosophy is supposed to reveal the truth. Since we have rejected the notion that the truth could be racist or sexist, racism or sexism in philosophical writing could seem to undermine its status as philosophy altogether.

I don’t know if I believe that, in part, ironically enough, because of the influence of Hegel on my thinking about philosophy. Hegel’s concept of the truth as “the whole,” which would include “moments” of would-be truths that turn out to be false—indeed, which at times Hegel writes includes the false. If racism and sexism are false, they nevertheless are moments in the development of truth, in the same way that an immediate sensation of something, while not taking in the “whole” of it and thus false, must still be part of knowing that something. Put another way: philosophical texts that involve racism and sexism are necessary for the articulation of philosophical truth because we (philosophers, people) have been and are racist and sexist. That means that racism and sexism must be uttered, but not left simply posited. The positions of racism and sexism must be posited in order to be thought through, in the “labor of the negative” (Hegel’s so-called dialectic), to recover and bring forward what is true in racism and sexism. And that could turn out to be that the opposite of racism and sexism is the truth of racism and sexism.

That’s not to defend Hegel’s racism and sexism, because, at least as I read him, he posits racist and sexist ideas and leaves them standing. To refer to his own language, Hegel commits falsehood whenever he fails to undermine these positions. In as much as the truth and the revelation of the truth would require that negation, Hegel’s books do not tell the truth.

All that is preface to the question of the day, which is what the relationship is between philosophy and truth. Is that a strange question? Anyway, I have two ideas in mind.

First is whether philosophy or philosophers should tell the truth. I think that by reputation, philosophy and philosophers are very much concerned with truth, even dedicated to it. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to prefer the truth to everything, even life itself. (Everything except for hot guys, that is. In the dialogues, Socrates unfailingly prefers hot guys to the truth.) All the same, Socrates lies, a lot. Plus, if philosophy and philosophers should follow Socrates’ lead in the practice of recognizing our own ignorance, philosophy  and philosophers should be reluctant, even reticent, to posit anything as true. (Hegel was hip to this, and as much as said that every position is untrue, just because no position can propose or state the whole that is the truth.)

Second is whether philosophy or philosophers should be held to a standard of truth or truth-telling. Here I mean something like whether philosophy or philosophers that cannot tell the truth should be ejected from the canon. For instance, if a philosopher’s work was based on patently false premises and obviously faulty reasoning, should that disqualify that philosopher from the traditional canon? By analogy with sciences like physics or biology, in which theories are not taught that have been demonstrated to be false, should philosophical works also be excluded? If not, then should those works not be presented as falsehoods, in the manner in which one might tell a biology class about Lamarck’s surmise about evolution? Perhaps no one should read Hegel, given his works’ repetition of bad (or evil, depending on your point of view) ideas. Or perhaps, like a joke in the old Monty Python’s Flying Circus series, we could read it, provided we understand that he was wrong. In that case, what does the tradition of philosophical texts amount to? I hate to think that it is nothing but a special form of literature, having as its differentia specifica that these are texts that pretend to the truth—or are just very badly plotted novels.

pain and language

What I’m reading about pain keeps coming back to the inexpressibility of pain. This is not to say we lack words to describe pain, but that none of them can, that there is always a remainder, a (somewhat) unsharable, incommunicable something that is only subjectively undergone. I don’t know whether I agree with that as such, but taking it up for now, why should this only be true for experiences of pain? Why is it particularly problematic for experiences of pain?

Of course, pain is often urgent and problematic, and that brings about situations in which the expression of pain is at issue. For instance, when the ER nurse asks you to rate your chest pain on a 1 to 10 scale, this obviously crude device produces data for medical interpretation—reporting 10 will be taken to indicate heart attack and the need for certain types of intervention, but a 3 or 4 is ambiguous. The reason why they don’t ask for more description is that it would be still more ambiguous and would require time, attention, empathy, communication, interpretation, and understanding that cannot be afforded.

But why wouldn’t the same basic problem exist for feelings of pleasure? Imagine being asked at some appropriate moment (or inappropriate, depending on how you feel about it) to rate your pleasure from 1 to 10. Anyway, we like more florid language evoking pleasure, and take our time with it, because we can usually afford to, and because we like it. Nonetheless, the remainder remains, I would say, and there is no language sufficient to express to you just how I undergo pleasure. (It’s peach season!)

David Biro suggests that we express pain by way of metaphor because there is no other, more direct, literal language for it. That is, the linguistic expression of pain is catachresis: terms are used that are somehow out of context, or fit together in ways that aren’t “right.” (The Merriam-Webster online dictionary offers as an example: “blind mouths.”) Merleau-Ponty says, “A language which only sought to reproduce things themselves would exhaust its power to teach in factual statements. On the contrary, a language which gives our perspectives on things and cuts out relief in them opens up a discussion which does not end with the language and itself invites further investigation.” (“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 77)

What makes pain unique (if pain is unique) is not its confounding of language. All experience confounds language.

"Whatever," says an exasperated and quite dead Wittgenstein, because the problem of how language expresses experience is not a problem, since language doesn't do that in the first place. The linguistic expression of pain, like the number scale, expresses pain because we take it to express pain. How do we know it works? Because it makes people do things like give patients nitroglycerin, or give philosophers peaches. And as the punchline to the joke goes...

the my-body problem

Most often, I believe, the conceptualization of one’s body as “my body” is objectifying and extrinsic. There are ethical, economic, political contexts in which “my body” and the mineness of a body make a great deal of difference, and these concepts inform how we interpret embodiment on an ongoing, everyday basis. We don’t often refer to “my body” outside of very particular, often evaluative contexts: “my body” is “athletic” or “sore” or “breaking down” or whatever. We don’t say “my body got up at 7:30 this morning,” although, no doubt, if I did, so did my body.

The notion of a body as “mine” is perplexing to me in part because of the way these typical ways of talking objectify and externalize body, as though my body were a possession. I don’t experience a possessive ownership relation to my body, under typical circumstances. Only rarely is it helpful to clarify which item in a pile of things is my body, in contradistinction to other things or other bodies. (In those kinds of circumstances, identifying which item is my body is sometimes not chiefly on my mind.)

If I consider the phenomenology of how my being embodied presents itself, I’m at a loss to identify something like “mine-ness.” Typically we move, we sit, we sip tea, we listen to Desprez motets, or whatever else we do, not by way of taking hold of something like a “my body” and moving “it.” Thus the holism of a lot of phenomenological accounts: I am my body, rather than have it. Even in this language, there’s that “my body” that I can’t account for from my own phenomenological assay.

What I find is what I shall call for the time being “tensile coalescing (the) all surrounding, to here.” This is unwieldy, I know.

I sat down at my keyboard, in the midst of puzzling about the “my body” problem, and did a little phenomenology of what turned up when I tried deliberately to set aside any notion that I knew what it might mean to say “my body”—or even “body.” (I think that’s a clue: it’s damned hard to set aside the ordinary posit of “my” without also setting aside “body” as well.) Some surprising stuff showed up.

What showed up was distant and nearby locales of encounter with surroundings. I was sitting in poor posture with the heel of one foot resting on the top of the other. Eventually that hurt, but the feeling of pain was located far away, though not so far as to be outside somewhere. The Desprez motets and the hum of the HVAC fan struck and surrounded. The floor vibrated throughout me. Suddenly the teeming of surrounding became vividly apparent, in a moment of allowing much more of the surrounding to go unfiltered. That teemingness prompts the word all.

There was a centrality to all this, but not a mere point: an ongoing bringing together of these surroundings (read that as a present participle as well as a gerund), hence “coalescing.” When I sat up I noticed better the way this coalescing presented itself as having a sort of tension built into it. This is not “tension” in the way we use it to name unpleasant stress, but tension in the sense of having potential energy to it (which I know I’m using improperly in the technical sense; it’s evocative). What showed up was both kinetic coalescing and potential for moving.

This had a focal point, but not in the sense of something fixed, pregiven, preordained. It was a point toward which the coalescing was happening: to here. Here just means that point—an asymptote, really (again in a nontechnical sense).

So: a tensile coalescing (the) all surrounding, to here.

(BTW, I think I'm gonna keep the name "the my-body problem" for this little venture, as a joke on the old saw, the mind-body problem.)

error types

I don't know why Type I errors and Type II errors are called that. (Type I is incorrectly denying a null hypothesis that is true; Type II is incorrectly affirming a false null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the opposite of what you believe is true. They are also called false positive and false negative. In either case, these errors involve believing something despite the evidence.) There have been various proposals for a Type III error -- for instance, cooking the evidence by setting up a trial that leads to a preordained conclusion, or misrepresenting the problem.

I can't keep them straight. I never have. "Type I" doesn't mean anything to me. Herewith, then, I propose an alternative error typology.

Dickhead Error. A Dickhead Error occurs when one continues to affirm a hypothesis that has been demonstrated to be false, often with increasing loudness. (The loudness can be vocal, but can also be expressed through revving a truck or SUV engine.)

Shithead Error. A Shithead Error occurs when one ignores all evidence contrary to a particular hypothesis, or contrary to any hypothesis whatsoever.

Asshole Error. An Asshole Error occurs when one formulates a hypothesis that serves to re-affirm the incorrigible certainty of one's perceptions, attitudes, orientations, goals, and even mood.

Fuckhead Error. A Fuckhead Error occurs when one ignores all perceptions, attitudes, orientations, goals, and even mood that are not one's own. (Fuckhead Error is often expressed loudly either vocally or through revving a truck or SUV engine.)

Making Shit Up Error. A Making Shit Up Error occurs when one invents, imagines, or indulges in fantasy of evidence. (Making Shit Up Error is often coincident with Shithead Error or Asshole Error.)

Wile E. Coyote Error. A Wile E. Coyote Error occurs when one formulates a hypothesis beyond one's capacity to test without causing oneself injury.

Oh, Right Error. An Oh, Right Error occurs when the probative evidence for or against a hypothesis is ignored until pointed out. (Often repeated ad nauseam.)

This error typology could have wide application, beyond scientific fields. For instance, during political debates, it's likely to come across instances of Dickhead, Shithead, Asshole, Making Shit Up, and even Fuckhead Error. Some political ideologies are composed of nothing else. I believe the typology could be handy in organizational governance meetings as well. How often have you observed your boss making an Asshole Error? With the proper terminology, you can clearly indicate the kind of error your boss has made, when you are in a job interview, answering a question about why you were fired.

The Wile E. Coyote type error is particularly useful for describing faulty reasoning by cats and skiers. Oh, Right Error, though ubiquitous, is still good to ascribe, in hopes that the faulty reasoning does not devolve into Shithead Error.

I'd like to see some publications adopting my improved error typology in the next few months, so get on it.

care

From the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, the ethics of care was a predominant theme in feminist ethics. Based ultimately on an essentialist view of femininity, the ethics of care focused on human relationship, need, and care responses, as an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition's rights and law based approaches.

It might be expected that, raised masculine in a patriarchal society, I would think about ethical responsibility in terms of my autonomy and authority, and I do. But for me, this is not entirely a matter of gender. I was raised also to think of care as an alarmed response to an abnormal situation, rather than an ongoing, basic response to the ordinary human condition of need and interdependence. Seeking care, that is, admitting need, initiated a conflict or crisis, and the response was to that immediate emergency. Once resolved, the moment passed, both need and the care response were considered settled and finished.

While this may be underlying the patriarchal masculine notion of autonomy and independence, I also know that my own upbringing was profoundly lacking in ordinary and ongoing care. It was always better to remain in need than to ask for care. Admitting need is, for me, admitting pathology and vulnerability. Need exposes me to harm, terror, and chaos. Metaphorically speaking, sirens would blare, everything would need to come to a halt, until the care was provided.

My response to need is similar. Although I am better at caring than being cared for, my caring is still based on sensing the situation as abnormal. I worry over making sure I have provided the proper care for the particular need of the moment. I am driven to reach the point when care is done.

Of course, the feminist ethics of care tells us that care is never done, because care and need are ordinary, everyday, and fundamental to the human condition. It took reading Susan Wendell's chapter on care and disability in The Rejected Body for me to realize this about myself, and about what I had not really understood about the ethics of care.

It's really awfully sad, isn't it? Oh well.

(By the way, The Rejected Body is very good, and although the care discussion makes it rather dated, I plan to use it in Bioethics next year. My undergrad students won't have read any feminist ethics, so it won't be dated for them.)

lifestyle vs. academic freedom

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have fired chosen not to rehire a contingent faculty member named Kilgore, following a local newspaper story revealing that Kilgore had been a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army and had been jailed. Kilgore had informed university officials about his past. As Christopher Kennedy, board chair, explained:

"But our general position is clear. We want to be respectful of the fact that we operate on taxpayer's money and tuition ... and people paying tuition who have will have concerns about underwriting this lifestyle." Kennedy also said that because Kilgore is an adjunct, there are not academic freedom issues at stake. "We're not reacting to public pressure. If this was an issue of academic freedom, we would stand up for it. This is an hourly employee who doesn't have tenure. It's completely different," he said. And Kennedy said he has been "very clear" in sharing his views about the issue with university administrators.

We can tell more or less precisely when the board gained this clarity about how to act on their devotion to the Great Taxpayers of the Great State of Illinois, based on the facts presented in the Inside Higher Ed piece. It was after the news story publicized Kilgore's past.

We can also tell to whom the board is willing to extend whatever they might understand by "academic freedom": tenured faculty.

Frankly, I'm willing to take their word on that. As this starts to become a topic of email conversation among contingent faculty across the country, the lack of academic freedom for an "hourly employee" is the focal point. For good reason, contingent academic labor are insulted by this avowal that they are sub-citizens. But I believe Kennedy and the Illinois board are telling the truth about their understanding of the role of contingent faculty and the extension of "academic freedom." That may be the only thing they are telling the truth about, in fact.

Kennedy's assertions that the board is "not reacting to public pressure" is flatly contradicted by his statement that the decision was based on the concerns of the Great Taxpayers of the Great State of Illinois regarding Kilgore's "lifestyle." (I'm delighted by the conceptual mush implied by the use of lifestyle in this context. Is being a member of an anarchist terrorist group a lifestyle? It's easy to imagine Kennedy explaining the equivocal meaning of the word is.)

Anyway, no, this isn't an academic freedom case, but not because Kilgore doesn't have the right to academic freedom (which he doesn't, because the board says so). It's a lifestyle case. The board has asserted that, at least for contingent faculty, public "concern" about a faculty member's "lifestyle" can be valid grounds for not renewing the contract, even one who is supposedly very good at the job. There's no currently prevailing concept of academic freedom that I'm aware of that pertains to lifestyle or even mentions it.

Why, after all, should the Great Taxpayers support the lifestyle of a faculty member about which they have concerns?

So, in the interest of being completely above board and candid, and so the Great Taxpayers of the Great State of California can decide whether or not they have concerns, some details of my lifestyle follow.

• I am 45 years old. (I don't have concerns about this, myself, but I do have objections.)
• I live in a 1472 square foot house on the edge of town. 
• I live across the street from cows.
• My spouse and I are intentionally childless. 
• We intentionally have two cats, and unintentionally have one more, and a stray turtle.
• I used to be a member of the Philosophers' Drinking Club, as an undergraduate at UNC-Charlotte.
• I serially violate stop signs while riding my bicycle.
• I own a dozen guitars.

academic despair

A study of "academics" in the UK revealed what should come as no surprise to my friends in academia: lots of "academics" have mental health problems. The story tells us that "academics" have heavy workloads, pressures to publish, and are isolated; many face tenuousness as an everyday condition of employment. The story also tells us that, in the UK, 0.2% of people working as college faculty disclosed mental health problems to their employers. Now, why do you suppose that is?

I've written rather dismissively about faculty mental health in this space before. Today, I happen to be prepping for my last Intro to Philosophy classes for the semester, reading Sartre's essay "Existentialism is a Humanism." Under Sartre's influence, I am thinking that, although the mental health issues of faculty are not surprising, they should be understood also in terms of the way academic life is structured, not organizationally by management hell-bent on exploitation, but situationally by faculty themselves/ourselves.

From this perspective, a key factor is isolation. Marxist and quasi-Marxist criticism of industrialized labor aside, that is, without the presupposition of class division and alienation of labor, the isolation in which most faculty work is a situation created by the workers themselves.

In an ordinary workday, I come across maybe 10 other faculty on campus -- a campus of more than 400 faculty. "Come across" is the right description for these encounters, since they generally amount to passing by one another, on our way to our own offices, our own classes, our own "work," and, as the UK report would have it, our own mental illnesses. Of course, institution and discipline of academia promotes or generates this normalized sense of ownership, and that sense of ownership makes faculty good targets for exploitation. I don't mean to deny that. But inasmuch as this situation is experienced as isolation, I think an existentialist would want to ask some critical questions.

Let's say, following Sartre, that because there is no a priori law dictating how we should act, how we should work, or what meaning this situation should have, we choose what to do, how to work, and what it means. When we retreat to our offices (those of us who have offices), what choice are we making in regard to work and the intersubjective world of work? What values are expressed in this choice?

Isolation is a denial of the intersubjectivity of the world. It expresses excessive consideration of oneself, inflation of subjectivity to royal status, and denial of the situatedness of freedom -- as though only in isolation, only in my own research and my own classes do I have freedom. It is as if, in isolation from others, mental illness will set us free.

An existentialist interpretation of academic freedom, which I haven't come across yet, would center on the concept that freedom implies and requires the freedom of others, and is fundamentally intersubjective. It would remind us that freedom cannot be one's own at the expense of others or without regard to others. It would focus not on one's own research, etc., but on jointly shared responsibility for and determination of the situation of work.

academic freedom vs. freedom

 “This much understood term refers to the set of practices such as tenure and faculty governance that allow academics to generate new knowledge in an unfettered manner and to disseminate that knowledge using pedagogic practices that inspire critical thinking among students. With this freedom comes responsibility: scholars must conform to the mores of their disciplines, and their behavior is monitored through a network of institutions that enforce such professional conduct.”
     -- Ashley Dawson, in “Columbia versus America” in Dangerous Professors, p. 227.

Wow.

A very strange turn on academic freedom would be to consider freedom in Foucault’s sense. Freedom would be the “recalcitrance” and “intransigence” of the one to whom power is applied by various forms of governmentality. Freedom subsists in the shape of resistance to subjection, to the disciplinary regimes of social institutions/knowledges. For instance, freedom could describe the dubiousness of a person who avoids complying with a doctor’s firm advice to get a blood test, on the basis that this person is not eager to have the result, and not eager to be subjected to a regimen of treatment based on the result. Freedom could also describe the condition of incomplete or imperfect discipline of a person who has undergone schooling but resists proper performances of mandatory school tasks. Freedom is also the name of the condition of possibility of being disciplined through one or another regime of power. It is prior to discipline and power, and Foucault suggests that freedom is expressed by the choice of which regime to become subject to.

Freedom in this sense is certainly at odds with a demand of conformity to mores of a discipline — academic or otherwise. Dawson’s account suggests a freedom of means rather than ends, in as much as the “academics” will adhere to standards and practices of generating and disseminating knowledge. Obviously, the monitoring of behavior is subjection to surveillance in Foucault’s sense. So the situation Dawson calls academic freedom would be anything but. It would be academic autonomy, but not freedom.

Academic freedom, taking freedom in Foucault’s sense, might mean resistance to those very forms of discipline, responsibility, and moral normalization — not necessarily rejecting them, but treating them with recalcitrance.

I’m not sure where, if anywhere, to take this. I don't know if it makes sense to modify freedom with academic (or anything else).

some skeptical doubts about tenure as protection of academic freedom

I started in earnest reading about academic freedom a couple months ago. I'm quite perplexed. Lemme try to sort out a couple perplexities.

Historically, in the US, academic freedom and tenure have been intricately linked. Tenure's key legitimating purpose, it is said, is to protect academic freedom: a tenured professor cannot be fired without due process, so that professor cannot be eliminated by a university administration merely for unpopular, controversial, or critical utterances. (If true, this would mean that non-tenured faculty and all contingent faculty have no de jure right to academic freedom.) An immediate question that arises is: what kinds of utterance? Critical of the university administration? Critical of colleagues? Unpopular in one's disciplinary field of research? Unpopular politically according to dominant ideologies in the US? Controversial regarding electoral politics or political issues? Or regarding sexual mores, or the high cost of gasoline?

In significant and well-known cases of tenured professors being fired, typically what has led to the firing are comments that are rather outrageous, from the standpoint of dominant political ideology in the US. For instance, Ward Churchill called the dead from the World Trade Center terrorist attack "little Eichmanns," which was nasty of him.

It is not clear that due process is routinely followed in these cases. Instead, an administration abruptly fires a professor, and legal and quasi-legal proceedings ensue. AAUP is called in to investigate, lawsuits are filed, all hell breaks loose. But it isn't tenure that protects this professor from being fired.

The cases in which tenure does protect a professor are probably not well-known, precisely because the effort to fire a professor that runs afoul of academic freedom fails because due process is followed and protects the professor. Because we don't hear about the case (no doubt the process would be confidential), such cases don't present evidence that tenure protects academic freedom.

My skeptical assessment of this situation is that one would take tenure to protect academic freedom basically on faith. One would also take on faith what kinds of utterance would be protected.

Thus my first perplexity: whether tenure, viewed as a process, is something that can protect academic freedom. Not if tenure works the way Marc Bousquet describes the process in How the University Works. My own take on it is maybe slightly less trenchant than the always delightfully trenchant (to me anyway; he rubs a whole lotta people the wrong way) Bousquet.

When I've heard or talked to tenure-track professors, candidates for tenure, about their work lives, academic freedom does not come up. Workload is about all they can talk about, and they barely have time to talk about that. They are desperate to publish as much as they can, to teach whatever they are told to teach, and to do whatever mundane committee work they are told they have to do, in order to satisfy and overwhelmingly exceed stated requirements for tenure. If academic freedom is supposed to cover unpopular, controversial, or critical utterances, tenure candidates do not have academic freedom, because they would never go anywhere near such utterances before reaching tenure. Plus, everyone they talk to tells them this.

So, once tenured, professors have academic freedom, and let that criticism flow forth, yes? No. Once tenured, professors seek promotion to full professor status, and they do so by continuing the work they did as tenure candidates. Although they may acknowledge that tenure protects them from dismissal, they know it doesn't protect them from not being promoted.

Besides their own pecuniary interests, tenured professors who are more obliging would be prudent to consider what consequences their critical comments might bring upon their academic departments, colleagues, research funding, and other benefits bestowed by administration. Very nice tenured, full professors are extremely cautious to avoid critical intramural utterance because they believe that administration will punish their criticism by denying tenure to their colleagues, or by denying their departments a much-needed tenure-track employment "line," or by cutting their budgets outright.

This leads me to a second perplexity, for another day: Perhaps academic freedom is not supposed to protect intramural utterance? Or is only meant to protect utterance within an academic discipline?

Hegel's super-skepticism

At the end of the preliminary, critical section of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel notes that what has just transpired -- to wit, a thoroughgoing criticism of the history of philosophy of logic and ontology in 100 pages -- could have been achieved through skepticism about all presuppositions. In other words, instead of the detailed work Hegel has done, he could have begun by saying something like "hey, kids, you know what? Everything you thought you knew about logic is wrong. Now let's start over."

Why not just make that quick move? There's a pretty strong history of throwing out presuppositions and re-starting ontology. It's a move that allegedly permits foundational certainty, that means our knowing will be complete, real, 100% knowing, not only organic but also pesticide free and shade-grown, etc. Presuppositions, you see, are the genetically modified organisms of ontology. You're never entirely certain what they're made of or that they're going to work out the way you planned, and by the time you realize it, they've already irreparably mutated and cross-bred with everything you're growing. The skeptical move in ontology is the insistence that we start with virgin soil, virgin seeds, the pure sun, and water from untainted mountain sources. Start over again, you see, after razing what had been there before.

Hegel says doing so would be "sad," but more to the point, redundant, because the approach he's going to take to systematically construct ontology will do that work along the way. There's a constant negation of half-thought half-logic, abstraction and incompletion in Hegel's system. It picks up every single philosophical idea and perspective, both historically and systematically, and subjects each one of them to this negation. I can try to explain this basic move in Hegel's thought with the example of "immediate knowing."

Hegel says that one position on knowing is that we immediately know: this knowing cannot be justified in terms of what else we know, or in terms of our evidence, or anything. It is exactly like faith. This form of knowing isn't unfamiliar. Take this: "I know that this dog is speaking to me with the voice of god." Now, a claim like that cannot be given evidence. It cannot be justified in terms of other things the speaker knows (you can't say, "... and I know this because..."). This idea can only be asserted as true, and this assertion can only rest on itself. Immediate knowing, as a position about knowing, says that knowing cannot be tested or proven.

The skeptical move here would be to say that we shouldn't believe anything merely asserted, because it presupposes that the speaker isn't crazy, that a dog could possibly speak, that there is a god who could and would speak through a dog, etc. etc., and thus debunk the claim to know.

Hegel's claim is this: not only can't there be evidence either for or against a claim to immediate knowledge, but the claim to immediate knowledge can't be immediate. If "I know this dog speaks to me with the voice of god" can only be asserted as immediate knowing without any justification, that assertion, to have the content that it has, to have the meaning that it has, cannot be asserted immediately. "I know that this dog is speaking to me with the voice of god" requires that the proposition itself, to have any meaning at all, says something that even the speaker must be able to evaluate the truth or falsity of -- or else it is not a claim to know, at all. In other words, it can't be immediate, because it is in relation to something else that would be able to tell us whether the sentence is well-formed, says something predicable, etc.

What I think this means, about Hegel's view of philosophical positions about knowing, is that every positive stance about knowing that commits the error of being one-sided is not merely false (which they are, because they are one-sided), but that none of them can be meant as they are meant. Every philosophical position-taking is hypocritical.

Every philosophical position-taking is hypocritical.

"Except Hegel's?" you're asking. Or your dog is asking.

Yes, except Hegel's... insofar as Hegel doesn't take a position. The truth is the whole, if played out consistently, means that he can't take a position (or, technically, that if and when he does, he then undermines it).

So, skepticism isn't skeptical enough, because it's only skeptical that positions are true, or that any position could be true. Hegel's skepticism is that the position isn't what it is, and the position-taker can't take the position.

Far frickin out.

academic freedom, an introduction

I suppose most people who teach in one of America's Colleges and Universities™think about academic freedom once in a while. I've been thinking about it lately in relation to the stuff I've done on faculty ethical responsibilities and what they could mean for faculty who work in precarious employment situations. At times, I have asserted that academic freedom does not exist for a lot of us, but that something similar applies for some of us, because of institutional neglect and ignorance of our roles and even existence. I call this similar thing academic license, to distinguish it from an ethically and politically bounded concept like academic freedom. Academic license would be the condition of one's work, opinions, research conclusions, and public statements not mattering enough to be subject to surveillance or limitation. It would be, undoubtedly, totally precarious. Under academic license, what I do and say would not matter at all up until the very instant that, for whatever reason, or for no reason, it leads to my dismissal. Since this is the condition of precarious academic employment in general, the idea of academic license merely provides a way to emphasize that, institutionally, the content of what precarious faculty do never matters.

I'm starting some deeper research on academic freedom. My early feeling is that most of what's discussed as academic freedom is missing a major point. A great deal of the discussion of academic freedom concerns political ideology, faction, public statements by professors met by official responses, and efforts by what we call neoconservatives to target academics and academic programs that they find offensive.

Here's the thing: when I read about Horowitz and Campus Watch and all those people trying to stop academics from criticizing US imperialism or the symbolic violence of compulsory heteronormativity, I think about my own ideas about such issues. They make up the idea of campus radicals in order to rile their mobs to attack socially critical academics. But I'm at least as radical as most of their prominent targets. Why don't they target me?

(I suppose this reveals that I'm a little envious of the Certified Academic Big Shots who are famous enough to matter to crazy people. Most of them make a lot more money than me.)

They don't target me because I don't exist. They don't target me because my stupid university barely exists. (As I've said before, I love my stupid university.) It's not the ideas that matter to them, it's the publicity, obviously, because they operate the same way terrorist groups do. The vast number of America's Colleges and Universities™are like my stupid university, in that we're like the water supply. If they wanted to kill the ideas, they'd attack the water supply. But they want to scare, so they attack the big buildings, which here is metaphorical for Certified Academic Big Shots.

Much much more on this to follow, I expect. For now, here's another idea about my own condition of academic license.

I am not starting this as a "research project." I have no "research projects," because my research does not exist: it has no meaning at my stupid university, and I have no place of prominence in my academic field, largely because of my non-ranking employment status. I have no measure for tenure or promotion to meet, because I am ineligible for either. Publishing an article or book on this research is not a goal. I don't have a goal, other than to scramble my ideas of academic freedom a bit, think strange thoughts, and write strange sentences. That's not a "research project," because, as people who know me can testify, that's pretty much just my way of life.

I'm working on academic freedom basically for the same reason I started reading Hegel again (heavens help me), which is the same reason I start anything at all: to flirt.

"an observer's attitude"

Susan Wendell, in her article "Feminism, Disability, and the Transcendence of the Body," discusses her strategies for living with chronic pain. "Living with" is already saying something about her experiences and strategies that may not fit. Somewhat contrary to what I wrote about embodiment and non-ownership, she says she adopts a stance of treating her pain as "a physical phenomenon to be endured until it is over and not taken seriously," which suggests a form of embodiment that induces a relation, a regard, and thus a separation of the living, conscious ego from one's body.

Wendell says her mood is improved when she can say to herself, "My body is painful (or nauseated, exhausted, etc.), but I'm happy." Her illness and pain lead to depression, for which she has a similar strategy. She says she enhances the quality of her life when she can say to herself, "My brain is badly affected right now, so I'm depressed, but I'm fine and my life is going well." Leaving aside the need to develop a fuller account of depression (not her task in the article), this suggests a state of mind and a form of experience in which one's own mood is separable from oneself, or at least from what she continues to call her "life." ("Life" may or may not mean "lived experience" in a phenomenological way.)

In sum, she says, most surprisingly, "I am learning not to identify myself with my body, and this helps me to live a good life with a debilitating chronic illness." This is surprising given the trajectory toward holistic embodiment models of consciousness and life in "continental" philosophy (which would appear to be Wendell's intellectual home turf).

This seems almost like a return to dualism, of the kind that allegedly dogged Husserl's first attempts toward transcendental phenomenological philosophy. That contintental philosophers keep returning to this theme suggests to me that there is a lot yet unthought about the basic move of transcendental egoism, and perhaps also still about Descartes' dualism. (I always wear my Hegel glasses when I think about this stuff: all dichotomies are false, and the truth is the whole.)

Wendell's strategies also complicate further the notion of one's "own" body or consciousness. I am totally unsure what to make of the way she displaces depression. This could be for personal reasons, namely that I experience depression as existential mood, and find it difficult to displace, and especially to say to myself, "I am depressed, but my life is good." To me, the phrase that follows naturally from "I am depressed" is "and therefore my objectively good life is crappy."

ownership

I suppose most people have had the experience of a word losing meaning after incessant repetition. Sometimes philosophy feels like deliberately inducing this experience.

One concept I struggle to understand is ownership, especially in relation to two related philosophical discussions: ownership of our bodies, and ownership of consciousness. (This has come up because I've just read an article with my Bioethics class about end-of-life decision making that raises the question whether we own our bodies.)

In everyday life, things do appear to me as mine. What I experience as most mine is what I pick up most often, what I touch, and what figures into my doing and dealing with the world. The nearer and more constant this touch, the more my own these things seem. Things are more or less mine. Almost nothing is more mine than the computers and keyboards I touch daily. Oddly, the guitar I touch daily is less mine. This is because it resists in ways the computers don't. The more mine something is, the more accessible it is to my touch, and the more I take it up into an overall movement, without resistance. The same thing can be more or less mine over a brief time span. My bicycle, most mine as I crank at high speed and blow through stop signs, can instantly be less mine when the brakes fail to respond or the gear slips.

I experience ownership of these things, through their intimacy, but also through their difference from me. As familiar as it is, the keyboard still is not my fingertips, but belongs to my fingertips. As fluidly as playing the guitar sometimes is, the guitar is always present in relation to my fingers and ears and eyes, etc. (Unlike Merleau-Ponty's famous blind-man's stick, these things I own are not extensions of my body, not appropriated into embodiment.)

So, owning my body strikes me as strangely distancing. Even when I touch my body, I don't touch my body the same way I touch things, and it is not, for me, accessible, near, nor even intimate. There is a divisibility of time and space in the relation of ownership that is not present in my embodiment. This may be a badly strained analogy, but I'll go with it anyway: if ownership is like time, embodiment is like eternality. (And for now I'll sidestep the question of embodiment sub specie aeternitatis.)

Even when my body is objectified and obtrusive, in pain or disability, I say "mine" about my body metaphorically or by extension from the way I say the guitar is mine. I say "my feet hurt," but my feet are not in relation to me the way my bicycle is. I don't feel that I approach the world through my feet or my hands, or walk or touch with them. They are my walking or touching, and in condition of pain or disability, they are the pain-and-walking or the unable-and-touching.

Still stranger to me is the notion of consciousness as ownership. In Husserl's account of the phenomenological reduction, the Ego appears, and with it, the Ego's "own" experience. When I first read this, I was stumped by it, and I still am. Husserl seems to need the Ego and its experience to coexist in this little copula, "own," in order to find a way toward a transcendental ego. Many phenomenological philosophers would be gravely concerned by the notion that the transcendental ego just is experience, and I'm not sure I would advance that proposition (at least, in public), but that would be the parallel construction to the above notion of being the body.

the mission of the university

I've written some things about university education that could seem fairly cold-hearted, critical, or even cynical. I have wanted to write a paper to submit to an upcoming conference that would take the form of a prospectus for potential shareholders in a university based on the principles of advertising and information analyzed by Jean Baudrillard. I'm out of time to write it in a way consistent with my long-term health and well-being.

I'm grading papers and attending meetings about curriculum, instead. What I learned from one recent meeting is that, no matter how cynical the tone in my satires, I could never hope to match the cynicism of some actual university administrators. Quoting liberally from their universities' mission statements, some actual university administrators manage to bankrupt all meaning from any concept pertaining to the work universities do, while speaking of the pursuit of various metrics of this same work as the key value universities ought to have. (I should note in passing that interpreting some of what actual university administrators say about university education as cynical ought to strain us, because parsimony demands the simpler explanation that some actual university administrators are unable to comprehend what it is universities do. Calling it cynical suggests that these administrators are people who know that they are paid to say that they care about education.)

Gentle reader, you may be relieved to find that this post is not at all cynical.

Today, after another meeting about curriculum, and after a woman in a red Cadillac tried three times to run into me and my bike at the same intersection on the way home, I was thinking about how something like the university's mission is reflected in my actual, you know, work.

I graded four papers from a class of 30 just before the meeting. One of them was good, followed the prompt, and generally explained the ethical problem and the two articles I asked the class to write about. It was a B. One of them was fair, said what the two articles were about, but didn't really address the prompt or the ethical problem. It was a C. Two of them were basically incomprehensible because of poor English grammar, mechanics, syntax, word choice, and poor comprehension of course material, and failure to follow instructions. The proper score for each of these two papers would be F-. The students in the class are juniors or seniors, meaning they have already supposedly successfully completed two years of college work.

This tells me something about our university's mission. We have students who are functionally illiterate in at least the English language, and we have students who are capable of what I consider college-level work. In most of my classes, the ratio is one student who cannot do college work for every three who can. Our university's mission is to serve these students, all of them, because all of them meet admission standards at this public four-year comprehensive university, being among the top third of their graduating classes or having met admissions requirements for community college transfers.

We most often speak and think about the university's mission in terms of imparting knowledge, preparing students for careers, and for life, but with the narrow and fixated focus on particular outcomes -- graduation being the most important, and most commonly cited. It's a discourse obsessed with winning and losing -- with the university winning and losing -- and each student is one more ball game in the never ending season.

Now, that really is cynical, keeping score by counting students who graduate and "succeed." When I grade papers with a mindset like that, I get more frustrated and angry with every paper that's hopelessly off-topic, ungrammatical, and incoherent, because every paper like that is another loss in my record.

What I think I want to know about the university's mission, and about my students, is what good we can do for these people who come here and take our classes. Win or lose.

of termites, reputation, and character

We have drywood termites.

We called in the pest company that wrote the certification prior to our buying this house. The inspector came back out, identified the termites, said he was sorry to bear bad news, and that there had been no visible evidence of them during his earlier inspection, so we'd have to pay to fumigate. He offered a deal to us to fumigate at cost.

I said we didn't feel like this was our problem, since we relied on a certification his company wrote. We didn't buy termites. He said that in his opinion, we wouldn't be able to demonstrate in court that there had been evidence that was ignored, and anyway, that it would have made no sense for him to fail to note the termites, since he would make money on reporting them.

We contacted our realtor, who made some inquiries. The next day she called to tell us the seller and the pest inspector would cover the cost of fumigation. She opined that they wanted to protect their very good reputations. Indeed, when my Loveliest reported the termites to some friends, they immediately asked who the inspection company was, and were impressed to hear they had agreed to cover the cost.

The inspector and seller will have thus preserved their reputations. We won't have to pay for fumigation, but we will have to move out for two days, with our cats and turtle, and move all our food out of the house.

I am a suspicious person, so I did not trust anything but the offer of free fumigation (and only really barely trust that, in fact). Knowing the history of philosophy also makes me inclined to focus on the difference between reputation and character. Reading Plato will do that to ya. And I have just been reading the Apology with my intro class.

Around here, in my experience, businesspeople's (well, really, businessmen's) reputations are built on their stated commitment to Christian values. In my experience, too, this is pretty cheap talk -- never mind that a reputation for being a Christian property investor or Christian pest inspector makes as much sense as a reputation for being a Buddhist journalist or Shinto mechanic.

Have either the seller or the inspector demonstrated anything about their characters? This is a basic problem in the way Plato wrote about this issue. Someone concerned entirely about reputation, who does not give a damn in his or her soul of souls, could still be powerfully motivated to do what looks objectively to be the right thing, for reasons having nothing at all to do with ethics.

Don't get me wrong: I'll take the fumigation. I'll even report on service review websites that they provided it. I don't think I'll say anything about their characters.

philosophical habits of mind

A grad school professor of ours used to compare himself to an extraordinarily widely published friend of his, by way of Isaiah Berlin's distinction of intellectual foxes and hedgehogs. "Joe's a fox," he would tell us, "and I'm a hedgehog." The fox had a quick wit, and always seemed to grasp intuitively and immediately the scope and significance of any philosophical discussion. He responded brilliantly to questions. The hedgehog was plodding and specialist in a small area of philosophy to which he devoted years of study, ultimately to formulate one or two nearly dogmatic assertions.

I always thought our professor implied that the more properly philosophical approach was his -- the hedgehog's. What he told me about philosophical study over the years perpetually returned to the theme of focused study on one area, or at most three great philosophers. About these, the hedgehog admonished us to read practically everything published. He was a model of constancy and determination.

But I admired the fox and had a natural affinity for him. (The fox had charm that the hedgehog lacked, and was also nicer.) He seemed to be aware of every trend in academic philosophy, as well as being in the vanguard of a few. He entered any debate with goodwill and heart, and apparently without a shibboleth he felt the need to protect. I have a vague memory of him at an academic conference, mid-debate with an adamant, opposed interlocutor, suddenly shrugging and saying, "oh, yes, you're right, and I'm completely wrong about that."

In fact, I thought that the fox was more truly philosophical. The hedgehog was a scholar, practically a monk. He seemed not only to think more slowly, less broadly, but less freely. This could also make the hedgehog appear less intelligent, certainly less bright.

I know, therefore, that my bias regarding the necessity of philosophical intelligence is that it model the fox's quickness and brightness, rather than the hedgehog's diligence and tenacity.

what are the requirements of being a philosopher?

[No comment on my lengthy sabbatical from writing in this space.]

About a month ago, I started to ask myself whether someone has to be "smart" to be a philosopher. The canon of the history of western philosophy is peopled entirely by smart people (okay, except for Kant). But a philosopher is not just a smart person, obviously, and the kinds of smartness philosophers exhibit seem like they have a particularity to them that you don't necessarily find among other people, smart or not.

I know lots of really smart people, lots of people with doctoral degrees who do scientific research or academic scholarship, and teach at universities. The way philosophers are smart seems different to me than the way other people are smart. Others notice this too, or seem to, whenever they raise eyebrows at the kinds of questions philosophers raise. How much of this is the smartness, and how much if it is the particularly forms of reflection philosophers are prone to?

Here's a first hypothesis. There are pretty obvious cultural and ethnic attributes exhibited by philosophers trained in the western canonical tradition, and those both favor and contribute to the development of a certain kind of smartness. So, the relation between smartness and philosophy is at least partly culture-bound, and not necessarily essential to philosophy as such.

If we strip away the culture-bound aspects, would there still be a smartness pertinent to philosophy as such?

morality, justice, and suffering

I'm reading Martha Nussbaum's book Frontiers of Justice, which is pretty good. She criticizes the worthy and prominent theory of justice of John Rawls, which draws from a long tradition in philosophy of looking at justice as if societies were formed through contractual agreements. The basic idea is that we can understand justice by imagining that societies are supposed to be mutually beneficial to all who would choose to join them. Rawls' theory of justice is probably the most robust and interesting version of the social contract, as Nussbaum argues, because it includes a moral concept: we would have to consider these contractual agreements under a "veil of ignorance" preventing us from knowing how to rig the contract to our own personal advantage. So, the terms of the deal would have to be such that anyone could be benefitted, not just oneself. Egoism is not possible in this scheme.

Cool, but not cool enough, Nussbaum says, because it has a limited view of human life, and a limited view of how the social contract would affect those who don't get to negotiate its terms because they aren't "normal" in their capacities for reason. Nussbaum goes a different way, saying that the contractarian idea has to be thought of in terms of human capabilities that are basic to human dignity. In other words, instead of self-interested negotiation, we should think about social justice by asking whether a society provides for each and every member the means and opportunity to live decent, dignified human lives. She lists 10 capabilities that are essential to dignified lives, and gives very general definitions of each. (I'm not going to go into these. My favorite is the capability to play.)

Very cool, but I'm not convinced by one thing Nussbaum does. She makes the case well for using capabilities instead of rights as a way to think about justice. She also argues against using suffering as a way to think about justice. She does so, in part, because capabilities are more fully representative of human dignity, but I think also because it's more positive. She also says that suffering is too minimal a standard, and reduces suffering to sentience, meaning something like the capacity to be aware of harm, injury and harmful, injurious conditions.

Through roundabout associations as I was reading this morning (arguments about the moral wrongness of lying, leading to considering how odd it is that lying is rejected not only tout court but tout suite by principlist moral philosophy, considering its such a fundamental kind of behavior, leading to considering a statement made by an erstwhile pal of mine that he would much rather be lied to compassionately than told the truth righteously), I started to consider whether suffering could be the basis for a theory of morality or justice. I don't think suffering is taken very seriously in Western philosophy, neither in general, nor as a basis for understanding morality and justice. But maybe it should.

First of all, suffering is universal, and I think it could be argued that it is more universal than rights or capabilities. A suffering-based theory would not have to justify why "human dignity" is the right standard, nor define dignity, though it would have to articulate and justify the standard of suffering itself (i.e., how much is acceptable, maybe also from what, etc.)

One reason suffering isn't taken seriously, ironically enough, is that it is universal: our intuition is that animals too suffer, and a suffering approach, some might say, begs the question whether animal suffering ought to be important, or whether human life, morality, and justice ought to be weighed in terms of something that non-humans are also subject to. Nussbaum wouldn't want to accept these claims, really, since she's also interested in understanding our relation to non-human animals in terms of justice. But it is clear that Nussbaum's dismissal of suffering is too quick. I say she reduces it to sentience, to mere sentience, and that this ignores the dimension and texture of suffering. Though universal, suffering happens to us in every way we connect to the world, and in the same depth. Suffering is different for different beings, varying in one way because we have different learned capacities for connecting to the world: some of us can suffer aesthetically in ways others of us don't, or at least not as much.

I'm pretty sure a phenomenology of embodiment would provide some key insights for an account of morality or justice on the basis of suffering -- in fact, I know a few people have worked on this. There's also some obvious, if superficial, analogies to Buddhist ideas. In any case, it's a thought I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, and reading Nussbaum has helped me see more clearly why it's appealing to me.

faculty moral responsibility for education fraud

Between 1999 and 2011, student loan debt increased 511%. College graduate unemployment is a little under 9%. The largest single employment sector in the US economy is retail sales. The largest sector of employment growth in the last two years is in temporary, low-skilled work.

The knowledge-based and expertise-based legitimations of college education are long dead. College degrees as credentials for entry into information-processing jobs are nearly dead. There is some reason to think college education provides relevant training that can be useful in various careers -- largely indirectly, through the development of "hidden curriculum" skills and attributes like perseverance, rule-following, mastering encrypted forms of communication like academic prose, etc. But these careers have lost a lot of their prestige and power, and are losing stability and security rapidly.

Under these conditions, getting a college education has to appear much less like a shrewd investment, and more like an expensive gamble. The basic economic function of colleges and universities -- non-profit and "public" as well as private and for-profit -- is to transfer wealth from poor laboring classes to rich capitalists who leech from the system at every pore. (Contemporary capitalism is called by several colorful names: disaster capitalism, predatory capitalism, casino capitalism. I think I like parasite capitalism.)

At some point, I imagine, the economic behavior of people will change to reflect this, and people will stop going to college. I fantasize how people might hold higher education to account for this economic arrangement, and for what could be called fraud.

What is my moral responsibility for this, as a college faculty member, given that I benefit (though modestly, especially compared to parasite capitalists)? Should I discourage people from going to college, despite the potential ramifications to my gainful employment? Should I try to show this perspective to current students, despite the potential ramifications to the teacher-student relationship? Can I "teach" a class, without excessive irony, after I have exposed this arrangement?

Let's see.

what legitimates shared governance?

In most colleges and universities there is a structure called shared governance. Through this structure, the institution sets policy and makes certain decisions about academic programs, personnel, and other closely related matters. Beyond that very general overview, really nothing can be said about shared governance that applies to all colleges and universities. Shared governance apparatus and the capacity of those apparatus to foster genuinely shared genuine governance range widely.

From the perspective of faculty, shared governance ought to serve the faculty in shaping and recommending policy to the administration. Many statements about shared governance emphasize this by saying that the administration should follow policy recommendations duly approved by academic senates, and give compelling reasons when they do not.

Why should faculty have this authority? One answer, with a long tradition, is that faculty are experts in their fields, and therefore have the legitimate claim over directing the academic policies of their institutions. This is a claim about professional knowledge, judgment, and status, and is a common feature of every profession's assertion of self-regulatory authority. Since only medical doctors can make knowledgeable judgments of the work of medical doctors, medical doctors should have that authority; since only chemists can determine whether chemists are doing their work properly, chemists should regulate their own work.

Over the last 40 years or so, this authority has eroded, for every profession, as corporatization, privatization, and bureaucratization have taken over in formerly public-serving fields. Shared governance is a slow process; predatory capitalism can't abide this.*

The question is, what would make it seem reasonable to deny that doctors should have the authority and responsibility to determine what doctors should do? Why on earth would the regulation of doctors fall to people with financial spreadsheets? Similarly, why would the determination of academic policy fall to such people, many of whom are absolutely unable to talk about academic policy in any terms other than cash?

I am certain this is partly the result of the delegitimation of claims to expert knowledge. The authority of doctors, chemists, philosophers, or anyone else have become suspect. Expertise is now the function of computer programs, and the reduction of all values to money is an unquestionable ideology.

Under those real conditions, what could legitimate shared governance? My answer comes from the underclass of the academic profession, the permanently temporary, "contingent," or, as I prefer, the tenuous-track faculty. This super-majority of faculty (more than 75% of all college and university faculty) have been excluded from shared governance all along, and are only now getting some voice.§ The tenuous-track faculty's claim to a part of shared governance does not primarily rely on expert knowledge, in my opinion. Our expertise is doubted by many faculty, and almost all administrators, so such a claim would fail. Instead, we rely on a simpler, earthier, and more fundamental set of claims.

1. Labor. Tenuous-track faculty do the majority -- the vast majority -- of teaching work; therefore, tenuous-track faculty deserve a share in governance. The principle of justice here is a kind of proportionality: those who do most work have most at stake.

2. Civil and human rights. Tenuous-track faculty are people, actual real human beings, and as people deserve a share in governance. This is a liberal-democratic claim, that individual human beings have the right to self-determination and participation in social institutions.

3. Expertise. And by the way, yes, we are experts, thank you. We may lack full credentials in some cases, and we lack privilege and prestige, but we still have expert knowledge. There is a subtext to this: if shared governance is denied to those who do the work that recognized experts do, then the institutional power of recognized experts looks much more like mere privilege.



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* Allegedly because of "competition," but of course the real reason all institutional change has to be rapid and dramatic is to perpetuate crisis, stun people, and create opportunities for seizing still more power).

§ I don't think it's an accident that this comes when shared governance is losing clout.