The Site Visit Report
The Laughing Philosopher: The Colorado
Report: Beyond the Cheerleading
The Colorado report: beyond the cheerleading
As I presume everyone has heard by now, the American Philosophical
Association’s Committee for the Status of Women was recently invited to
send a site visit team to the University of Colorado-Boulder’s
philosophy department. The committee’s intensely negative report
(http://www.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/attached-files/APA%20Report%20document.pdf),
containing some fairly radical recommendations, was handed to the UC administration following the site visit.
Shortly thereafter, the administration released the full report to the
media, announcing it was immediately instituting most of the report’s
recommendations, including the ousting of the chair and his replacement
by a hand-picked non-member of the department. (If you’d like to enjoy
a pleasant moment of cheerleading for the committee members before
thinking critically about the implications of the report, Jon Cogburn
of NewAPPS has provided a happy song for the occasion here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/02/what-eric-said-plus-this-song.html)
We’ve since learned that the report’s scathing description of the
departmental culture in Colorado may bear little resemblance to the
reality: http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/a-post-from-colorado-climate-committee-co-chairs/
I applaud the move to end sexual harassment seriously in the
discipline. However, there are many ways in which the APA committee’s
report seems extremely problematic. While I don’t know the nature of
the alleged harassment or alleged inappropriate sexualization at
Colorado, I find it very hard to believe that many of the report’s
recommendations are necessary to prevent such behavior even if the
report were factually accurate. Following those recommendations will,
however, almost certainly damage the department and put it under the
control of the administration in precisely the way Benjamin Ginsberg
has warned us about in his must-read book, _The Fall of the Faculty_..
In particular:
1. The report is overtly hostile to the dialectical/democractic model
and demands that it be replaced with blatant dictatorship. The
department is told to “[d]issolve all departmental listservs. Emails
should be used for announcements only, as one-way, purely
informational, communication. Any replies need to be made in person”
(p.6). Since the department chair has now been ousted and replaced at
the administration’s discretion for an indefinite period with no
apparent opportunity for review at any point in the future (as urged by
the report), this effectively cedes all departmental autonomy, in
perpetuity, to the administration. There will be no clear avenues for
discussion or dissent, and the restrictions on department members
meeting outside of working hours helps to limit the ability of any
faculty or students in the department to formulate dissenting views
together: they may not meet to do so in the evenings or on weekends,
and they may not do so via email. Moreover, the very act of
reasoning or deliberating about policy is taken by the report as a sign
of inappropriate resistance, according to the anti-philosophical views
of the report (“Their faculty discussions… spend too much time
articulating (or trying to articulate) the line between acceptable and
unacceptable behavior… they spend significant time debating footnotes
and “what if” scenarios…” – p.7)
2. The report uses terms like ‘family friendly’ in bizarre ways to
restrict productive and innocuous department activities whose
elimination would significantly harm collegiality, departmental morale
and the learning experience of graduate students. In a ‘Special Note’
on p.12, the report discusses and prohibits the department’s planned
spring retreat. This retreat was to involve a combination of
philosophical talks and ‘unscheduled time’ in a scenic mountain area
over a weekend. It is difficult for me at least to imagine an event I
would more like to bring my children to — what family wouldn’t love
some unscheduled time outdoors in a beautiful natural area? But
bizarrely enough, the very fact that this event was to take place on
the weekend makes it “an examplar for a family-unfriendly event,”
according to the report. The justification for this absurd claim is
that “Under no circumstances should this department (or any other) be
organizing the social calendars of its members.”
3. The report claims that no philosophy department should, under any
circumstances, ask its members to attend events outside of the hours of
9-5, Monday to Friday. On p.12 of the report, we are told that “If
there are going to be social events, then they need to be managed such
that members of the department can opt out easily and without any
penalty. (Please note that best practices for family-friendly speaker
events include taking the speaker out to lunch instead of dinner so
that participants may have their evenings free to attend to other
obligations)”. In particular, we are told that “all events, including
retreats, need to be held during business hours (9-5) and on campus or
near campus in public venues.” Please try to imagine what departmental
life would be like under such a rule.
4. The report categorically prohibits all critical discussion of
feminist philosophy by all members of the department, even in a
private, off-campus conversation between two graduate or undergraduate
students. ”Realize that there is plurality in the discipline. If
some department members have a problem with people doing non-¬‐feminist
philosophy or doing feminist philosophy (or being engaged in any other
sort of intellectual or other type of pursuit), they should gain more
appreciation of and tolerance for plurality in the discipline.
Even if they are unable to reach a level of appreciation for other
approaches to the discipline, it is totally unacceptable for them to
denigrate these approaches in front of faculty, graduate or
undergraduate students, in formal or informal settings on or off
campus.”
5. The report relies in part on clearly biased survey findings. On
p.15, for instance, we find that subjects were asked whether they agree
or disagree with the following statement: “I am confident that if I
were to raise a complaint about sexual harassment or discrimination,
the judicial process at my university would be fair.” 38% of
respondents felt confident about this, which seems very high for any
department! Most members of most departments would have no good grounds
for confidence either way. Why doesn’t the survey ask instead whether
subjects are confident that the process would be unfair? More
tellingly, why doesn’t it simply ask whether subjects agree or disagree
with the statement, “If I were to raise a complaint about sexual
harassment or discrimination, the judicial process would be fair,” and
allow the responses ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’ and ‘Not sure’? Particularly
among philosophers, ‘confident’ entails a very high epistemic standard.
While it isn’t clear whether the committee intended to skew the results
by asking such questions or whether they simply didn’t take care to
prepare a fair survey, the survey is misleading at best and politically
motivated at worst.
6. The report mentions, and then completely ignores, very serious
graduate student concerns about damage to the department’s reputation;
and in the process, it reduces the likelihood of future reporting of
sexual harassment. “They [some graduate students] are worried that they
will be tainted by the national reputation of the department as being
hostile to women.” (pp.3-4). As a result of this, it was essential for
the report to take steps to ensure that word about the department’s
problems be carefully managed while steps are taken to eliminate the
problem. At the very least, the report needed to ensure that the
release of the report not be made into a worldwide media event.
However, the report contains nothing of the sort and, as a result, the
worst fears of the graduate students have now been realized (I, for
one, had never heard a single negative thing about this department).
This merits serious attention: if the price of reporting sexual
harrassment is the destruction of one’s department’s reputation
worldwide and the blackening of one’s own name by association with it,
how many departmental members (student or faculty) would ever take the
suicidal step of reporting it? By mindlessly neglecting these concerns,
the committee’s report has surely had a dampening effect on reports of
sexual harassment in departments around the world.
7. The report’s standards of ‘family friendliness’, while tangentially
connected with sexual harassment, show a complete lack of understanding
of philosophical work and culture. On p.6 of the report, the
committee’s view on best practices is expanded upon: we are told that
“[e]vents should be held during normal business hours (9-5) and should
be such that you would feel comfortable with your children or parents
being present.” Indeed, as we are told on p.12, children should be
positively welcome at departmental events. I’m not concerned here with
the disruptions that would be caused by young children at colloquia,
but rather with how this might affect the content of philosophical
talks. I, for one, would not feel comfortable discussing abortion,
circumcision, sexual harassment and rape, cruelty to animals,
pornography, torture, or the existence of God in front of someone
else’s children. Should it follow from this that I should not present a
colloquium paper on such a topic? What if my philosophical work deals
entirely with such issues: should I never present my philosophical work
in an open forum?
While we should all applaud genuine, careful and viable efforts to
eliminate sexual harassment, my view (unless persuaded otherwise) is
that we should certainly not endorse the actions of this committee.
Instead, I think, we should quickly work out ways to prevent this from
ever happening again. But I anticipate disagreement and would love to
hear and engage opposing reasons.
Addendum: My position here has been attacked on a couple of blogs due
to a misreading of 3 — some readers mistakenly think that I am opposed
to the restrictions on non-business hours activities because they are
too harsh a punishment for the harassers. But that’s not my objection
at all. I agree that sexual harassment, which we know has been
substantiated in at least two cases at Colorado, should be dealt with
seriously. But the restrictions advocated by the report don’t seem to
be intended punitively. They appear to be intended as a preventative
measure.
Now, I don’t deny that having such restrictions in place might work.
And that would be a good thing. But there are also other, surer ways of
preventing sexual harassment. Here’s a fairly sure-fire one: members of
the department may only communicate in person, during official classes
or meetings or office hours. All these events must be attended by
trained anti-harassment officers, and all communication must be done
through them (you have to whisper your words to the officers and, if
they’re appropriate, they report them to your audience). All students
and faculty are prohibited on pain of expulsion/automatic firing from
coming within 20 yards of all other department members outside of
class, and this is monitored by temporarily bio-implanted GPS devices.
And so on.
I would agree that such extreme measures would be very effective in
curbing sexual harassment. And no doubt, the case might convincingly be
made that good philosophical work could be done under those conditions.
But I would nevertheless be opposed to them, and not just for reasons
of expense.
I take a similar view to the much less extreme measures recommended by
the report (I emphasize this to ensure that no sincere reader will
think I am saying that the report is as extreme as the counterfactual
scenario I’m using to illustrate my point). Yes, they would probably
prevent some potential harassment; yes, it might still be possible to
do philosophy within those confines (and some department members might
even like it). And I can vaguely imagine some extraordinary conditions
in which I might even advocate what the report recommends. But from the
picture I’m getting, it’s difficult to imagine that the measures are
warranted as a professional measure. I invite the chance to stand
corrected if I’m wrong about this.
Posted: February 5, with a new addendum on February 7
Original Internet Location:
http://laughingphilosopherblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/the-colorado-report-beyond-the-cheerleading/