The Site Visit Report
Why Hasn’t the Philosophy Department
Strongly Criticized the Site Visit Report?
Many people in the Philosophy Department
believe, I think, that one should not criticize the Site Visit Report,
and this for a number of reasons. I have tried here to set out
those reasons in what I hope is an accurate fashion. I then go on
to describe my reasons for thinking that, on the contrary, members of
the Department should criticize the Report.
1. Five Reasons for Remaining Silent
1.1 The University Administration Will Be Angry, and Probably Retaliate
The Administration intervened very vigorously following the transmission of
the Site Visit Report to the Department of Philosophy, the Dean, and
the Provost, starting with the suspension of graduate admissions for at
least this year, followed by the replacement of Professor Graeme
Forbes, a person of great integrity, by an External Interim Chair,
Professor Andrew Cowell. In addition, however, the Dean and the
Provost threatened to close down the Department if we did not respond
in a satisfactory fashion to the Site Visit Report.
Those actions were predicated on the assumption that
the Site Visit Report is essentially a sound document. The
Administration, moreover, did not give the Philosophy Department any
opportunity to respond to, and to criticize, the Report. For
someone to argue that the Site Visit Report is unsound, then, raises
questions about the Administration’s actions, and given the threat to
close down the Philosophy Department, it is easy to understand why many
of my colleagues are very hesitant indeed to criticize the Site Visit
Report, at least in anything approaching a thoroughgoing way.
Some of my colleagues think it likely, then, that if
anyone criticizes the Site Visit Report in a comprehensive way, the
Administration will retaliate, not only against the person who advances
the criticisms, but also against the Department itself, by such
measures as reduced funding, or the suspension of graduate admissions
for a further year.
My own view is that this fear on the part of some of
my colleagues involves an unfair assessment of the character of Provost
Russell Moore and Dean Steven Leigh: it assumes that they are
vindictive individuals, and I am not convinced that their dealings with
the Philosophy Department supports that view.
Here is how I view the matter. University
administrators here and elsewhere in America are very much in a “post
Penn State environment,” in which they are keenly aware that if some
potentially serious problem exists in the university and one does
nothing, one may very wind up accused of covering up, and may face
serious criminal charges, as happened in the case of top administrators
at Penn State University. The Site Visit Report, however, certainly
suggested that there were some significant problems in the Philosophy
Department, so one can certainly understand the feeling on the part of
the Administration that serious action needed to be taken.
In acting upon the Site Visit Report, the
Administration was acting under the quite reasonable – but, as it turns
out, mistaken – assumption that the Site Visit Program is a program of
the American Philosophical Association itself – an assumption that the
Philosophy Department also initially made. The Report seemed to the
Administration, then, to be very authoritative.
Why
does this matter? Is it not just an issue of nomenclature? The answer
is that it matters because the American Philosophical Association does
not in any way oversee the site visit team's activities and reports,
and the APA repudiates any responsibility for the quality or fairness
of their reports. In other words, no institutional mechanisms
have been put in place at the APA to ensure that the Program satisfies
even minimal professional standards. What the site visit team
does and what it says in its report is entirely up to the members of
that site visit team.
Moreover,
had the Administration been aware of the fact that the Site Visit
Program, as a program of the Committee on the Status of Women, appears
to operate with the background assumption that there are, in philosophy
departments in general, climate problems that specifically involve the
treatment of women, I think that the Administration would have been
more open to the idea that the charges made in the Site Visit Report
need to be looked at rather carefully.
Many who have read the Site Visit Report have often
been struck by the fact that while very negative charges are plentiful
indeed, supporting facts are not much in evidence, and this is
something that should lead one to do a little investigating.
Members of the Administration could, for example, have done something
that the site visit team did not do – but which the External Interim
Chair, Professor Andy Cowell, wisely has been doing – namely, they
could have interviewed individual members of the Philosophy Department,
asking, for example, about whether uncivil behavior is a problem in the
Department. Or the Administration could have done something that I did,
namely, do Google searches to see whether there was evidence that, as
the site visit team claimed, the Philosophy Department has a national
and international reputation for hostility towards women. (If one
does such a search now, one will find many references, of course, to
the site visit team’s own claim. I did several searches, however,
before the Site Visit Report was made public, and every search drew a
blank.)
In short, the Administration could have done more
before it acted on the Site Visit Report. But given the post Penn State
environment that exists for university administrators in America, and
given the Administration’s natural, albeit mistaken belief about the
status of the Site Visit Program, I think it is easy to understand why
they felt the need to act vigorously, and without
hesitation.
1.2 Denial as Evidence of Guilt
Here is how one of my colleagues put this consideration:
There is a real danger that protesting too loudly that all the
men in the department are being victimized or that one's reputation is
being destroyed unjustly will backfire and cast more (not less)
suspicion on innocent men in the department. Indeed someone
actually asked me whether one of the men who has been protesting his
innocence vociferously is guilty! To paraphrase Shakespeare, he was
thinking that "The [gentleman] doth protest too much, methinks."
How widely shared is this thought? I think it
may be fairly widely shared, and my reason is this. First of all,
the office that deals with complaints of sexual harassment and
discrimination against faculty members is the Office of Discrimination
and Harassment. They have a record of all the complaints that
have ever been lodged against one, regardless of whether those
complaints were judged to be, prima facie, with or without merit.
Second, one can write to the director of that office, asking for a
letter, for example, stating whether there have ever been any
complaints lodged against one, and, if so, what the outcome was, and
the director will be happy to send one such a letter. (As I describe
elsewhere, in a document entitled “The Office of Discrimination and
Harassment,” there are obstacles that stand in the way of using that
letter, since the letter is described as “confidential.” But those
obstacles can be overcome.)
A colleague and I therefore proposed that members of
the Philosophy Department who are innocent could write to the director
of the Office of Discrimination and Harassment, requesting such a
letter, and those letters could then be posted. This idea has
not, however, been adopted, for what I think are three reasons.
The first is that if a large number of members of the Department were
to obtain, and post such letters, that would have the result of showing
that some central claims made in the Site Visit Report are not true,
and, as I have just indicated, there is a concern that the
Administration might not be happy about our doing that.
The second reason, and the one on which I am
focusing in this section, is the idea is that if one protests one’s
innocence too strongly, the result will be that people will become even
more suspicious that one is guilty. So the situation seems to be
this:
(1) If someone is charged with a crime and says nothing, that’s a good reason to think that the person is guilty.
(2) If someone is charged with a crime, and that person insists that he
or she is innocent, that’s also a good reason to think that the person
is guilty.
My response to this ‘dilemma’ is simply that
if one is in a situation where it has been suggested – as it was put in
a local newspaper report –that a department to which one belongs is one
where there is “pervasive sexual harassment,” and one has
evidence that no complaints of sexual harassment have been lodged
against one, then it is absurd to say that making that evidence
available to people is protesting one’s innocence too much.
There is a third reason why I think that the
Philosophy Department has not gone this route, and that is that many
people think that it would not be effective. Why so? The
reason is that some members of the Department think that if one were to
post such letters, the response would simply be, “So what if no
complaints have been lodged against you. That doesn’t show that
you haven’t been guilty of sexual harassment, since there are probably
many cases of sexual harassment that are never reported.”
It’s not easy to defend oneself against the charge that one may have
been guilty of unreported crimes. But what grounds are there are
for believing that there have been numerous unreported cases of sexual
harassment in the Philosophy Department? It seems to me that this is
just to assume that the Site Visit Report is a reliable document.
One also needs to keep in mind that any member of faculty at the
University of Colorado who witnessed a case of sexual harassment and
failed to report that incident would be exposing himself or herself to
a serious charge. Here is what the Sexual Assault and Sexual
Harassment Response Protocol for Faculty, Staff and Student
Employees says in a section entitled “Obligation to Report Sexual
Harassment and Sexual Assault”:
The system wide Administrative Policy Statement on "Sexual
Harassment Policy and Procedures," requires any supervisor who
experiences, witnesses or receives a written or oral report or
complaint of Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault or related retaliation
that occurs in a University program or activity, to promptly report it
to a campus discrimination and harassment officer.
A supervisor, moreover, is defined as follows:
Supervisor means everyone who has the authority to hire,
promote, discipline, evaluate, grade or direct faculty, staff or
students. This includes everyone who manages or supervises
others, including, but is not limited to faculty, teaching assistants,
resident advisors, coaches and anyone who leads, administers, advises
or directs University programs.
Finally, it is perhaps worth mentioning that I
recently encountered a variant on this “protestation of innocence”
consideration. It involves, so to speak, an indirect defense of
one’s innocence, in which one tries to undermine the grounds for
thinking that one is guilty, for example, of sexual harassment, by
criticizing the Site Visit Report. Here is how a colleague of
mine put it in a friendly note:
I wanted to let you know that, certainly contrary to your
intentions, a number of faculty around campus are wondering if you are
one of the bad guys in the department, even perhaps one of the
harassers. This is because you have been so visible (in the Daily
Camera recently) in criticizing the site visit. None of these are
people who know you - I think your friends and colleagues are well
aware of your true nature. But as I move about campus, those who do not
know you are saying to me something on the order of "what about that
Tooley guy? He really looks like part of the problem" and so forth. I
can assure you that I have always firmly replied that no, in fact you
are definitely one of the good guys in that you have forwarded me
information on possible misconduct, and have not engaged in any kind of
questionable behaviors yourself. Nevertheless I feel that I should let
you know, in a supportive way, that you are probably doing yourself
more harm than good at the moment through the engagement with the site
visit report. You're certainly free to continue with these documents,
and I don't deny there were some problematic issues in terms of how it
all got handled, but as a friend, I feel like I need to let you know
what the public, pragmatic effect of this is right now on campus, and
also likely in the larger community.
Here
let me simply quote the response by another friend to this
consideration: “It makes sense. I’ve been telling everyone that if
you’re against witch hunting, you must be a witch. I guess other
professors around campus have taken this to heart.”
1.3 “Quibbling” with the Report as a Refusal to Admit Responsibility
The
Administration has also attempted to discourage members of the
Philosophy Department from criticizing the Report itself,
characterizing such criticism as “quibbling” with the Report.
This led a colleague of mine to say,
We have been warned that to "quibble" with the findings of the
Report is simply to signal our guilt, and that to vigorously agree with
the report (which basically says that all of us – or at least all males
– are guilty of complicit enabling of violations even if not of
perpetrating violations ourselves), is the only way to signal
innocence. (Now that is one clever argument, and as a philosopher I
appreciate clever arguments.)
My response to this is, first of all, that if, as I claim, the Site
Visit Report is unsound, showing that it is unsound does not involve
any refusal to admit responsibility.
Second,
it is not a question of quibbling with the Report, nor is it a matter
of nuanced disagreement with the Report, as another administrator
suggested in a recent letter to me, in which he said, “I appreciate the
nuances of your issues with the report . . ..” Nuances in general are
not my forte, and my criticisms of the Site Visit Report are not a
matter of nuanced disagreements: my claim is that the site visit team,
in its Report, has produced an extremely inaccurate picture of the
Philosophy Department.
The
Administration, in using the word “quibble,” was attempting to
discourage legitimate critical responses to the Site Visit Report, and
they were doing so because, as noted earlier, such criticisms would
show that the Administration should really have both conducted some
independent inquiries, and also solicited the Department’s evaluation
of the Report before acting upon it.
But,
once again, in fairness to the Administration, it is possible that the
Administration would have taken a more skeptical view of the Report if
it had known either that the Site Visit Program was not a program of
the American Philosophical Association itself, or that the Program
appears to incorporate a highly controversial claim about the
widespread existence in philosophy departments of a climate problem
that is specific to women – though it must be added that these are
things that it would have become aware of if it had taken the time to
discuss the Report with the Philosophy Department.
1.4 Two Further Reasons: Some Philosophers Will Attack Us Fiercely, and One Will Harm the Gender Equity Movement
Next
I want to consider two arguments that are connected. To set out these
two arguments, let me begin by quoting from a letter – with names
removed – written by one of the members of the Department here:
Hi all,
I suppose many of us have been corresponding with folk outside CU about
our issues. I just received a piece of advice from X that I wanted to
share with everyone, because I think she has a perspective on this that
it's hard for us to have, and one that perhaps we don't fully
appreciate. Her parting words to me, in her last email, were these:
Now you guys need to make sure no one in the department publishes anything in a public forum that's super defensive!!
I'm sharing this in part because it seems like some of you are perhaps
contemplating circulating responses that would count as "defensive." By
that word, I think she means to include responses we might regard as
taking the offense, against the site visit report.
From the larger context of her email, it's clear that the worry is that
such a statement would lead others to jump into the fray against us, in
defense of the site visit program. People should understand that a lot
of folk in the discipline are deeply worried that this whole episode is
going to harm the broader gender equity movement in philosophy. So if
we attack the site visit, it's going to look to people like we are
attacking the site visit program itself, and more generally the
advances made in gender equity in recent years. Hence, if we do that,
people are going to punch back, aggressively. Their tacit purpose will
be to support that program, but the form it will take is yet further
attacks on Colorado. And I think we want to avoid that!
No doubt, you'll all do exactly as you like. But I do hope folk will be aware of this dynamic, before sticking their necks out.
There are two very different arguments here. The first is concerned with the reactions
of people to any criticism of the Site Visit Report, and was put above
as follows: “So if we attack the site visit, it's going to look to
people like we are attacking the site visit program itself, and more
generally the advances made in gender equity in recent years.”
Now
the first part of this is reasonable, because I do think that our own
site visit exhibits features that are likely to infect all site visits,
including such things as a small amount of time on campus trolling for
complaints and "perceptions" of problems such as sexual harassment, and
then reporting, falsely, that those problems are very widespread.
The second putative inference, however, is feeble. Why should an
attack on one highly controversial program be deemed an attack "more
generally” on “the advances made in gender equity in recent
years"? Why, if one thinks that the Site Visit Program is not at
all a good means to advancing the goal of gender equity, should it be
concluded that one is against the goal of advancing gender equity?
The second argument is concerned, not with the reactions of people to criticism of the Site Visit Program, but with the actual effects
of such criticism upon the movement towards gender equity: the claim is
that such criticism would harm the movement within the profession
towards gender equity. This second argument can be put as follows:
(1) If anyone criticizes the University of Colorado Site Visit Report,
that will lead people to have general doubts about the whole Site Visit
Program.
(2) Those doubts will have the result that fewer philosophy departments will request site visits.
(3) But site visits do a great deal both to improve the climate in
philosophy departments for women, and to move the profession as a whole
in the direction of gender equality.
(4) Consequently, one should not criticize the University of Colorado
Site Visit Report since that will slow down progress with regard to
both (a) improving the climate for women in philosophy departments, and
(b) the achievement of gender equality within the philosophy profession.
What
is one to say about this reason for not responding to the Site Visit
Report? First of all, I think that the idea that site visits can
move the profession significantly in the direction of gender equity is
based upon a mistaken hypothesis about the explanation of the
underrepresentation of women in the profession. Second, site
visits of the sort involved in the Site Visit Program created by the
APA Committee on the Status of Women are, I believe, methodologically
unsound. Third, I also believe that there is, at the heart of the Site
Visit Program, a highly controversial belief concerning the existence
of ‘climate problems’ in philosophy departments.
1.4.1 The Methodological Unsoundness of the Site Visit Program
Let me start with the second of these points. What
would a methodologically sound site visit be like? First, the
site visit team would determine what problems there in fact are in the
department they were visiting, and how extensive those problems
were. Second, having done that, they would propose ways in which
the department might effectively deal with those problems. Third,
they would do a draft of their report, and seek feedback, suggestions,
and criticisms from the department before presenting their final report.
How can one determine what problems there are in a
department? One has to ask the right questions and this requires
that the questions be constructed, or at least vetted, by people with
the relevant training – arguably someone with extensive training in a
discipline such as sociology. But waiving that point, it is clear
that one thing that one certainly needs to do is to conduct interviews
with individuals on their own, since one needs to ask each individual
whether he or she has personally suffered sexual harassment, or
bullying, and so on, and, if so, what the nature of the incident was,
and who was involved. A site visit team could then assess whether
the incident really was, for example, a case of sexual harassment, and,
if so, how serious a case it was. Those interviews with
individuals would then allow one to determine how prevalent sexual
harassment or bullying was in a department, and how many guilty parties
were involved.
Is this done in site visits of the sort involved in
the Site Visit Program created by the APA Committee on the Status of
Women? The answer is that it is not, and it cannot be done, since
the site visits are far too short. In our own case, the site
visit lasted a day and a half, with only three hours given over to
scheduled discussions with faculty. But when one meets with a
group of individuals, one cannot ask people to talk about the sexual
harassment or the bullying that they themselves have experienced.
One has to ask instead, for example, whether people are concerned about
sexual harassment or bullying, and the answers to that type of question
give one no useful statistical data at all, since many people may be
concerned about a certain type of behavior, but there might be only one
person in the department who is guilty of the behavior in question.
What form could a report then take? If it were
an honest report, it would have to say that while many people expressed
concerns of a certain sort, the site visit team, because it did not
have the time to interview individuals on their own, and in depth,
cannot really say how many people in the department have been guilty of
the behavior in question, or how serious the behavior in question was.
Anyone who reads the Site Visit Report concerning
the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado will see that
the site visit team did nothing of the sort. What one gets instead are
general statements about such things as sexual harassment and bullying
that are more or less completely non-quantitative, but that taken
together create the totally false impression that the Department is one
where there is, in the words of one reporter, “pervasive sexual
harassment.”
Why did the individuals in the site visit team
produce a report that created such a wildly inaccurate account of the
Department? It is hard not to conclude that the explanation is
that the site visit team, rather than coming to the Department with an
open mind about what problems they would find, came with a certain
shared view, to the effect that philosophy departments suffer from a
certain sort of climate problem, namely, that of a climate that is
hostile towards women, and where women are sexually harassed and
bullied, and that it is the existence of such hostile climates in
philosophy departments that are to blame for the underrepresentation of
women in the profession.
If, as seems very plausible to me, the members of
the site visit team do share something along the lines of this belief,
the method that they employ – which, rather than collecting any hard
data on how common, for example, sexual harassment is, or how many
individuals are involved, consists simply of soliciting expressions of
concern about the type of behavior in question – makes it a simple task
for the site visit team to arrive at conclusions that match the views
that they brought with them to the site visit.
But does the Site Visit Program involve the view
that hostile climates in philosophy departments are to blame for the
underrepresentation of women in the profession? It seems clear
that it does, for here is quote from the webpage for the Site Visit
Program of the Committee on the Status of Women:
Specific goals of the APA-CSW-sponsored site visits include:
• Gaining information in a systematic way about the
range and variety of women’s and minorities’ experiences in Philosophy
that contribute to the ongoing underrepresentation of women and
minorities in the field.
It is held, then, that the way in which women and minorities are
treated in philosophy departments or philosophy classes or both
explains, at least in part, the current underrepresentation of women
and minorities in philosophy.
In response to my claim that the site visit team’s
investigation of the Philosophy Department at the University of
Colorado at Boulder was methodologically unsound, it might be said
that, although the methods that the site visit team employs are in
general unsound, in the specific case of their visit to the University
of Colorado they had the benefit of other information, since the Office
of Discrimination and Harassment gave the site visit team access to the
confidential personnel files in that office, and that this would have
put them in a better position than members of the Department are in to
ascertain how serious certain problems are.
To judge the merit of this argument, consider the
following question: Of the 15 complaints lodged with the Office of
Discrimination and Harassment since 2007, how many members of the
Philosophy Department have been found guilty of sexual
harassment? The picture painted by the site visit team in its
Report is of a department where, as just noted, there is “pervasive
sexual harassment.” Conversations that I have had, however, with
people who do have access to the relevant information all confirm the
view that only one member of the tenure/tenure-track faculty in the
Philosophy Department has been found guilty of sexual harassment during
that time period, and that person was vigorously punished. The
conclusion, accordingly, is that while the site visit team did have
access to additional information, it clearly did not use the
information to which it had access to present an accurate picture of
the Department. On the contrary, it chose not to use crucial
information that did not fit well with its general view that philosophy
departments suffer from climate problems, rather than just from isolated unwelcome occurrences.
1.4.2 Does the Site Visit Program Involve a Highly Controversial Belief Concerning ‘Climate Problems’?
As
is clear from my correspondence with Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director
of the American Philosophical Association, which is posted on this
website, the Site Visit Program is not a program of the American
Philosophical Association itself; it is instead a program of the
Committee on the Status of Women. That naturally gives rise to the
question of whether that committee may not have certain views that
shape the approach of the site visit committee.
The
answer, as is clear from a passage that I have just quoted, is that
this is the case. The same conclusion emerges as well from the
following passage at the very beginning of the website for the Site
Visit Program:
The APA has a clear interest in and responsibility for improving
the climate for women in Philosophy departments. Moreover, working to
improve the climate for women, improves the climate for everyone.
Good climate makes a difference for job satisfaction and productivity.
For why would one speak specifically of “a clear interest in and
responsibility for improving the climate for women in Philosophy
departments,” rather than, say, “a clear interest in and responsibility
for improving the climate for everyone, both men and women, in
Philosophy departments”? The answer, clearly, is that the
Committee on the Status of Women must believe that the climate for
women in philosophy departments is somehow problematic in some way, or
to some extent, in which the climate for men is not.
I have been in half a dozen philosophy departments
over the course of my career, and it does not seem to me that female
members of those departments were treated differently in any way than
male members. I did not, for example, see any differences
between, on the one hand, the way in which male philosophers interacted
with female philosophers and, on the other, the way in which they
interacted with each other. Nor did I see any prejudice against women
faculty when it came to decisions to hire, to tenure, or to promote, or
against female students when it came to admission to graduate school.
Indeed, in recent years, I have seen cases involving bias in the
opposite direction, both as regards hiring, and with respect to
graduate admissions.
Moreover, in my observations of classes taught by my
colleagues, I never saw any differences between the ways in which
female students were treated when they asked questions, or put forward
arguments or objections, and the ways in which male students were
treated.
Now it may be that I am not a sufficiently sensitive
observer. My point here, however, is simply that the claim that there
is some climate problem for women in philosophy departments that is not
just a general climate problem is a controversial claim that one might
very well think is false, and thus that one might very well not want to
have a site visit carried out by a team that assumes, on the contrary,
that philosophy departments involve a climate problem that specifically
affects women.
A colleague of mine, Chris Heathwood, responded very helpfully to my discussion here as follows:
I would bet good money that a strong majority of female
philosophers think that there is a climate problem for women in
philosophy. My own experience in philosophy is more like yours; I
have never observed such problems. But if an impartial genderless
observer from Mars were to come down and try to figure out the truth of
the matter by doing some polling, maybe the Martian should put more
stock in the opinions of women when it comes to this question.
Also, probably one important reason why many people are persuaded that
there is a climate problem for women in philosophy is this blog:
http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com
Women write in with troublesome experiences they’ve had in our
profession. Obviously, it’s all just anecdotal, but there’s quite
a lot of it there. I doubt we could gather a comparable amount of
anecdotal evidence pertaining to the experience of men. What do
you make of this?
This is certainly a good question, and there
are various things to be said. First of all, the blog doesn’t enable us
to figure out how many women have negative experiences, as compared to
the number who have no negative experiences, and for whom everything is
fine. The blog selects for negative experiences, because if nothing
unusual has happened to you having to do with your being a woman in
philosophy, then you wouldn’t post on that blog.
In
addition, the blog also doesn’t enable us to tell how many women in
philosophy have negative experiences, as compared with women in any
other walk of life, or in other academic fields, such as physics or
psychology.
The main point that I want to make, however, involves distinguishing, to borrow two terms that my colleague Alison
Jaggar employed in a recent panel discussion, between the ‘weather’ and
the ‘climate’ – though I may be drawing the distinction in a slightly
different way than she did. Very briefly, the point is
this. In society, many more men than women are guilty of such
things as sexual assault and sexual harassment. One would expect,
then, that the situation would be similar in the case of university
faculty, although one would also expect the frequency to be less, given
the negative correlations between crime and socio-economic
status. Can one conclude, then, that the ‘climate’ is worse
for women than for men in university departments, including philosophy
departments?
If
one is using the term ‘climate’ just to refer to how the ‘weather’ is
in general, then one certainly can. But I think that many people
use the term ‘climate’ in a different way, in which one is referring
not just to such things as incidents of sexual harassment, but to
attitudes and behavior on the part of non-harassers that nevertheless
make harassment more likely to occur.
The key concept, when the term ‘climate’ is used in
that way, is the idea of complicity, and to say that the climate is bad
for women is then to say, for example, that even if most men are not
themselves guilty of sexual harassment, they are generally guilty of
being complicit.
My view, then, is that while women have certainly
had troublesome experiences, and have had more of those than men have
had, I do not believe either that the ‘climate’ in the sense I have
just explained is worse for women than it is for men, or that male
philosophers are hostile to women philosophers. But I am certainly
prepared to be convinced otherwise.
One type of support that is sometimes offered for
the view that there must be a climate problem for women is that women
are underrepresented in the profession, in graduate school, and in
upper division philosophy courses. The idea is that these facts
are to be explained in terms of something about the environment in
philosophy departments and in philosophy classrooms.
4.3 Why Are Women Underrepresented in the Profession?
This
brings me, then, to my final point, to the effect that the idea that
site visits can move the profession significantly in the direction of
gender equity is based upon a mistaken hypothesis about the
underrepresentation of women in the profession.
Why are women underrepresented in the profession? There are a
variety of answers that have been given to this question, but I want to
focus on two answers, both environmental. The one is that at
least one very important cause of the underrepresentation of women in
the profession involves the university environment, with women being
treated differently in classrooms than men, or with many male
philosophers being hostile to female philosophers, or both.
If
this hypothesis is right, then one has reason to think that site visits
have the potential for doing a world of good in pointing out to members
of a department the unhealthy climate for women that exists in that
department, and then by both strongly encouraging the department to
change that climate, and providing it with ways of doing so.
But
I am not convinced that this first explanation of the
underrepresentation of women in our discipline is right. First of all,
philosophy is not alone with regard to the underrepresentation of
women. Consider the following figures from a National Science
Foundation “Survey of Earned Doctorates” for the year 2012:
Subject Percentage of Doctorates Earned by Women
Mathematics: 28.3
Philosophy:
26.8
Physics:
19.4
The question to which these figures give rise is
whether the underrepresentation of women in mathematics and physics is
to be explained in the same way as in the case of philosophy, or in a
different way. The idea that different explanations are to be
given strikes me as quite implausible. But if one offers the same
explanation, and if it is the explanation just mentioned, then one is
thereby committed to the view that one very important cause of the
underrepresentation of women in mathematics involves the university
environment, with women being treated differently in mathematics
classrooms than men are treated, or with many male mathematicians being
hostile to female mathematicians, or both, and similarly in the case of
physics. Is this at all plausible?
If one does think that this is plausible, consider the following figures from the same document:
Subject Percentage of Doctorates Earned by Women
Psychology: 71.0
Anthropology: 65.9
If
hostile attitudes and harassing behavior on the part of men explain the
low percentage of doctorates earned by women in mathematics,
philosophy, and physics, why don't the same hostile attitudes and
harassing behavior on the part of men also generate a low percentage of
doctorates earned by women in psychology and anthropology, just as they
supposedly do in the case of philosophy?
Moreover,
if one thinks that the underrepresentation of women in philosophy is to
be explained in terms of a bad climate for women, would one also accept
the idea that the nearly comparable underrepresentation of men in
psychology is to be explained in terms of a bad climate for men?
Are
we to conclude, then, that there must be a very hostile climate for men
in these disciplines, one that needs to be addressed by a vigorous
program of investigative site visits? In fact no one is
suggesting this. And yet the argument for this appears to be just
as good as the argument that the gender imbalance in philosophy is the
result of a hostile climate towards women.
The
basic point here is that there are many possible alternative
explanations of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy. I
myself favor a different environmental explanation, one that focuses on
both interests and traits of character. As regards the first, one
has only to wander through a toy store to see the very different toys
that are marketed to boys and girls, and then to think a bit about the
quite different interests that will be fostered by those different
toys. Accordingly, it seems to me that it may very well be the
case that the interests that boys typically develop as a result of this
socialization process are ones that help to make mathematics, physics,
and philosophy more interesting, and more appealing to boys than to
girls. If so, that explains, at least in part, why fewer women that men
pursue a major in philosophy.
Second,
I think that it is also the case that certain traits of character are
crucial to success in the most challenging intellectual disciplines,
and that the different ways in which boys and girls are socialized, and
perhaps also the different ways in which they may be treated in
elementary and secondary schools, makes it unfortunately less likely
that women will come to possess those traits of character that make for
success in the more difficult, and more abstract, disciplines.
In
short, I think it is quite plausible that the different ways in which
boys and girls are raised and socialized tends to foster the
development of quite different interests and traits of character, and
that this provides a much more plausible explanation of the
underrepresentation of women in philosophy, mathematics, and physics
than any hypothesis that appeals to hostility towards women or to a bad
climate for women in the relevant disciplines
Here is some anecdotal evidence in support of the
effect of one’s early environment upon one’s later success in certain
very demanding and challenging fields. When we lived in Australia, my
wife, Sylvia, had a friend named Cheryl Praeger, who was doing a Ph.D.
in mathematics. Cheryl mentioned, one time, that she hadn’t
initially excelled in mathematics in elementary school until her
parents shifted her out of a coeducational school into an all-girls
school, at which point she took off. After completing her Ph.D.,
Cheryl became only the second woman ever to have become a full
professor of mathematics in Australia, and she has had an
extraordinarily distinguished career.
Here is another story. One of my close
philosophical friends in Australia was also very strong chess
player. We were talking one time about the great chess players of
the past, and the question came up as to why there had been virtually
no great women players, with Vera Menchik being the only one that came
to mind at the time. My friend thought that the explanation was
genetic; I claimed it was environmental. But I was not really able to
offer much in the way of strong support for my view.
That,
however, was before the advent of the three Polgár sisters – Susan,
Sofia, and Judit. Their father, László Polgár , believed
that geniuses were made, not born, and so he home educated all three of
his daughters, concentrating on chess. All three became
grandmasters, with the youngest, Judit, becoming a grandmaster at the
age of fifteen years and four months – the youngest person, at that
time, ever to achieve that status. I think that my friend would now
concede that, on this matter, I was right, though it could be contended
– albeit not, in my opinion, with much plausibility – that given that
they were sisters, they just happened to share great genes for chess!
In
short, I’m not convinced that the underrepresentation of women in our
profession is to be explained by some sort of negative climate for
women in philosophy departments. I believe that a much more
plausible explanation is in terms of much earlier environmental
factors, and ones that also explain the underrepresentation of women in
other areas, such as mathematics, physics, and chess. (It was for
that reason, incidentally, that my wife and I chose to home educate our
own two daughters.)
2. My Reasons for Speaking Out
As will be clear from the above, I am unconvinced by
the reasons that some of my colleagues have offered for refraining from
criticizing the Site Visit Report. I have therefore decided that
I am going to release my criticisms of the Report, and this for two
reasons. First, the Report has caused, and will continue to
cause, very significant harm, damaging the reputations of innocent
people, and inflicting suffering upon their families. Imagine
that the department that you belonged to were subjected to the charges
that the site visit team has leveled against the Philosophy Department
here. Think about the effects this would have upon your spouse,
your children, your parents, and think about how it would affect your
relationships with friends and neighbors, and with philosophers
elsewhere.
The impact, moreover, is especially great in
the case of untenured members of the Department. Here, with
identities concealed, is what one of my colleagues recently said in an
email:
Yesterday, I talked to one of my male colleagues, X, who is just
distraught, wretched about it, as is another male colleague, Y – they
feel like their teaching and research careers are over. X tells someone
that he is a philosophy professor, and the person says, "Shame on you!"
Y feels that shame keenly, and it doesn't make any difference that we
all know that he's just the most upstanding guy ever.
I
then received an email from X, who talked about being publicly shamed
though he is blameless, about being suspected of wrongdoing even by
those who know him, and about the effects this has had upon him. I also
had a conversation with Y, who told me about being in a coffee shop,
where two people were talking about sexual harassment at the University
of Colorado, with one of them remarking, “They must all be doing it.”
The public release of the Site Visit Report has also
had a devastating effect both upon our current graduate students and
also on our recent Ph.D. graduates who are currently on the job market,
both male and female. Many current graduate students have decided
that the damage done by the report to the Department's reputation, the
placing of the Department in quasi-receivership, the suspension of
graduate recruiting, have materially damaged their chances of a
successful career if they graduate from the University of Colorado, and
so are looking to go to other programs. This is a huge cost to
them both financially and emotionally. Those who are too advanced
in their graduate studies to move have become depressed and
demoralized, as have those students who graduated from the Program
recently. In the light of the report the Department has been
characterized as maintaining a climate involving "pervasive sexual
harassment,” and where even those who have never engaged in sexual
harassment themselves are accused of being complicit. Male graduates
are afraid that they will be suspected of being part of the
problem. Even some of the female graduates have expressed the
fear that they will be somehow implicated, since with letters of
recommendation from a philosophy department that is supposedly
characterized by “inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior,”
might not someone on a selection committee wonder whether some of one’s
especially glowing letters of recommendation aren’t based in some cases
on something beyond one’s academic achievements?
It is my belief, then, that one cannot remain silent
in the face of such things, in the face of harm to graduates students
and recent graduates, to innocent members of the Department, and to the
families of both.
Finally, though, it is not just my colleagues, our
current graduate students, our recent Ph.D. graduates, and all of our
families who are being harmed by this. For here is a quote that
follows on immediately from the one just above: “If it's any comfort, I
believe that the blot is on philosophers in general, not just Colorado
philosophers. I bet that after that Slate article, male philosophers
everywhere are getting that.”
The
Site Visit Report, then, is a goldmine for people, such as Rebecca
Schuman, who will use the Report as a platform from which to draw a
general conclusion about male members of philosophy departments in
general. In Schuman’s case, this goal is announced in the very title of
her piece: “Nasty and Brutish – A scandal in Colorado reveals that
bullying bros still plague university philosophy
departments.”
This
totally unjustified harm to innocent philosophers everywhere, then, is
another reason why I feel that those of us in the Philosophy Department
here at the University of Colorado cannot, with a clear conscience,
continue to remain silent. It seems to me that if we stand by and
say nothing, lying low and hoping that the storm will pass, then we
really will have good reason to be ashamed of ourselves.