A “Rape on Campus”? Radical Feminism & the Rolling Stone Fiasco

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Steven Yates

[Note: I’d planned on doing a piece entitled “What Is a Liberal Arts Education For?” But the culmination of the events described here, and their implication for the sorry state of both higher education and popular journalism today, seemed more urgent, so I will post the Liberal Arts Education piece next week.]

“A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” the lurid account of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity party unleased on the world late last year by Rolling Stone (Nov. 19), is now completely discredited. Rolling Stone has taken the article down, replacing it with a scathing review penned at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (CUGSJ, report published April 5) which outlines Rolling Stone‘s multiple blunders.

In retrospect, what went wrong in the largest sense was that “A Rape on Campus” ever made it into print. I mean this in all seriousness, even though any radical feminists who happen to wander in here will probably stop reading at this point. (I doubt there are many academic radicals reading my material, anyway.)

The Rolling Stone article is down, but fortunately I archived it before Rolling Stone had time to make it disappear. Here, in the words of writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, is what supposedly happened at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at University of Virginia on the night of September 28, 2012:

Sipping from a plastic cup, Jackie grimaced, then discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor. The University of Virginia freshman wasn’t a drinker, but she didn’t want to seem like a goody-goody at her very first frat party – and she especially wanted to impress her date, the handsome Phi Kappa Psi brother who’d brought her here. Jackie was sober but giddy with discovery as she looked around the room crammed with rowdy strangers guzzling beer and dancing to loud music. She smiled at her date, whom we’ll call Drew, a good-looking junior – or in UVA parlance, a third-year – and he smiled enticingly back.

“Want to go upstairs, where it’s quieter?” Drew shouted into her ear, and Jackie’s heart quickened. She took his hand as he threaded them out of the crowded room and up a staircase….

…. Drew ushered Jackie into a bedroom, shutting the door behind them. The room was pitch-black inside. Jackie blindly turned toward Drew, uttering his name. At that same moment, she says, she detected movement in the room – and felt someone bump into her. Jackie began to scream.

“Shut up,” she heard a man’s voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn’t some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they’d return to the party.

“Grab its [sic.] m*****king leg,” she heard a voice say. And that’s when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

She remembers every moment of the next three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her, while two more – her date, Drew, and another man – gave instruction and encouragement. She remembers how the spectators swigged beers, and how they called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket. She remembers the men’s heft and their sour reek of alcohol mixed with the pungency of marijuana. Most of all, Jackie remembers the pain and the pounding that went on and on.

As the last man sank onto her, Jackie was startled to recognize him: He attended her tiny anthropology discussion group. He looked like he was going to cry or puke as he told the crowd he couldn’t get it up. “Pussy!” the other men jeered. “What, she’s not hot enough for you?” Then they egged him on: “Don’t you want to be a brother?” “We all had to do it, so you do, too.” Someone handed her classmate a beer bottle. Jackie stared at the young man, silently begging him not to go through with it. And as he shoved the bottle into her, Jackie fell into a stupor, mentally untethering from the brutal tableau, her mind leaving behind the bleeding body under assault on the floor.

When Jackie came to, she was alone. It was after 3 a.m. She painfully rose from the floor and ran shoeless from the room. She emerged to discover the Phi Psi party still surreally under way, but if anyone noticed the barefoot, disheveled girl hurrying down a side staircase, face beaten, dress spattered with blood, they said nothing. Disoriented, Jackie burst out a side door, realized she was lost, and dialed a friend, screaming, “Something bad happened. I need you to come and find me!” Minutes later, her three best friends on campus – two boys and a girl (whose names are changed) – arrived to find Jackie on a nearby street corner, shaking. “What did they do to you? What did they make you do?” Jackie recalls her friend Randall demanding. Jackie shook her head and began to cry. The group looked at one another in a panic. They all knew about Jackie’s date; the Phi Kappa Psi house loomed behind them. “We have to get her to the hospital,” Randall said.

Their other two friends, however, weren’t convinced. “Is that such a good idea?” she recalls Cindy asking. “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.”

Time out. Set your emotions aside. I ask you, in all honesty: does what you just read make an ounce of damn sense?

Let’s look at it. Here’s this somewhat naïve freshman (oops, I mean first-year) girl (oops, I mean woman) at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party with her date, Drew, identified as a member — whom she’d met at the campus’s Aquatic and Recreation Center where they both worked as lifeguards. She goes upstairs with him, lets him lead her into a totally dark (“pitch black”) room where she encounters another guy behind her and screams. It isn’t clear why she screams at this point, but then the two of them crash through a glass table and…

Okay, hold the bus. Are we really to believe that “Jackie” and these guys were rolling around in broken glass for three hours?

She and “Drew” had gone upstairs because it was “quieter,” and screamed when she realized they weren’t alone. What was this, a soundproof room?

Did no one enter or leave during all that time?

She is able to count seven guys, and recognize the last one as being from her anthropology discussion group, even though the room is “pitch black.”

“Jackie” says she finally got up hours later, found herself alone, barefoot and bloodied, and made her way out of the fraternity house where she called her friends telling them something terrible had happened. When “Jackie” meets up with her friends, instead of breaking every speed limit getting her to the nearest emergency room, they debate the future of their social lives on campus. Or so Rolling Stone said (read it above; see below).

Had “Jackie’s” story any veracity, she would have been covered with still-bloody cuts from broken glass, with severe trauma to her pelvic region. Emergency room personnel would doubtless have contacted city police immediately. Assuming the police were on the ball (admittedly an assumption), they would have gone to the fraternity house. This was more than a mere university matter; it was a major felony. They would probably been able to nail “Drew” and his cohorts in a matter of hours.

For there should have been blood easily identifiable as “Jackie’s” on the floor (or carpet) and on the shards of broken glass from the table. “Jackie’s” blood should have been elsewhere in the house: on the doorknob to the room, on the floor, on the stairs she went down, on the handrail. What happened to her shoes? Were they still in the room? What of the red dress she claimed she’d worn. Where was it? Was it still bloodstained?

None of these matters were investigated, of course, because no one went to the authorities immediately. “Jackie” never filed a formal complaint against the fraternity or any of its members.

“A Rape on Campus” appeared on Nov. 19 and hit the Charlottesville campus like an earthquake. There were immediate protests, acts of vandalism including bricks thrown through first-floor windows of the Phi Kappa Psi house, and even death threats. A group of women faculty led a protest in front of the house. Phi Kappa Psi members, fearing for their safety, fled the house and left campus. The university closed down the fraternity system pending further investigation, punishing thousands of students who’d had no involvement in this case. What was there to investigate, though, after over two years? Charlottesville police investigated “Jackie’s” story as best they could and came up empty. “No substantive basis” was a phrase they used.

Over the next couple of weeks, doubts quickly developed about elements of “Jackie’s” story. Imagine that, given the number of things about her story that a rational mind would have questioned right off the bat. Consider the supposed conversation with her soon-to-be-former friends, which reminds me of people who have ruined their brains with reality TV. T. Rees Shapiro had followed up for the Washington Post and tried to get clarification on what happened during that meet-up. Her friends related a quite different account. They stated that “Jackie” had had a date that night and called them at 1 am, crying. She told them she’d been forced to perform oral sex on five guys. They did not recall any visible injuries, or her being barefoot. They told Shapiro — insisting on the same pseudonyms used in the Rolling Stone story — that it was “Jackie” who insisted on being taken back to her dorm room when they wanted to go to the police.

They also said Rolling Stone had not contacted them for their stories — an unbelievable lapse of judgment — much less attempted to identify any of “Jackie’s” attackers. It was unclear she’d even specified Phi Kappa Psi as the scene of the crime, or any other fraternity, for that matter. There were discrepancies of place and time. While “Jackie” had told Erdely she’d met her friends outside the fraternity house at past 3 am, they recalled meeting her at least a mile from there, and that it was closer to 1 am.

“Jackie” had gone to sexual assault counselors and university officials who could take no action, given the lack of forensic evidence that obviously would have need to be collected immediately for any criminal prosecution. Among those she spoke with was a rape survivor named Emily Renda, originally contacted by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who also reported that “Jackie” had told her of “five” men who had forced her to have oral sex with them, only to learn from Rolling Stone that the number of attackers had increased to “seven,” excluding “Drew” and one other guy “coaching.” The Rolling Stone account had no mention of oral sex.

In fairness, Erdely began to have doubts of her own before the story went to press, beginning when “Jackie” steadfastly refused to identify the ringleader of the attack. She was still afraid of him, she insisted. “Jackie” had described quitting her job at the Aquatic and Fitness Center so as not to see “Drew” who she alleged still worked there. Erdely could not find evidence of any such person. Phi Kappa Psi chapter records indicated that none of its members worked there that semester. Finally, after assurance it would not be published, “Jackie” supplied a name. It is unclear from the public accounts whether the name she supplied is the same name that came from her three friends as someone she had met in a chemistry class: Haven Monahan. She’d supposedly had a date with this person at the time of the incident. The problem was, searches of University of Virginia enrollment records failed to turn up any such student.

Matters soon got worse. A photograph “Jackie” had supplied of “Haven Monahan” turned out to be of a former high school classmate now in another state. “Jackie” supplied a second name. This person was indeed a student at the University of Virginia and worked at the recreational facility, but when questioned, claimed he barely knew “Jackie,” had not been on a date with her, was not a Phi Kappa Psi member, and was not named “Haven Monahan.” Finally Rolling Stone mistakenly gave up its pursuit of the truth about “Drew.”

Clearly, Erdely erred in not putting more pressure on “Jackie.” She never spoke to the three now-former friends to get their perspective; she only relied on “Jackie’s” accounts which included an alleged conversation during which one of them, whose real name is Ryan Duffin, had refused angrily to talk to Erdely, citing his loyalty to the fraternity system at UVA. Duffin denied making any such refusal. The conversation had never happened, he said. What was exceedingly strange was an email Duffin claims to have received five days after the supposed attack from this “Haven Monahan” in which Jackie gushes over him … using material that turned out to have been partially plagiarized from a couple of TV series, Dawson’s Creek and Scrubs. The email account turned out to have been deactivated. Other numbers “Haven Monahan” had used to chat with Jackie’s then friends turned out to be Internet phone numbers enabling a user to send a text message from a computer or iPad that looks like it came from an actual phone. “Jackie” could have sent the messages herself.

“A Rape on Campus” was an utter disaster, however one looks at it. Almost nothing about her story, which was riddled with inconsistencies and a few outright absurdities, could be verified. “Jackie’s” date, “Drew,” appears to have never existed. The dress she said she’d worn that night had disappeared. “Jackie” said her mother had thrown it away. One thinks of that line about the dog eating your homework.

As if to put icing on the cake, Phi Kappa Psi records indicated the fraternity had not held an event on the night of Sept. 28, when the gang rape was supposed to have occurred.

Rolling Stone had little choice except to issue its infamous December 5 partial retraction and try to do damage control. The damage control wasn’t sufficient.

There are no provable matters of fact here, just allegations that, taken on their own terms, make little sense. Feminist-friendly mainstream media had already run with them, however.

Among these allegations is that “one in five university women will be raped, or sexually assaulted” when in college. This seems to have become part of radical feminist sacred writ. But do such numbers make any sense? Do the math: on a campus where, let us say, there are 28,000 students, 15,000 of them will be women. The one-in-five number implies that of this 15,000, 3,000 will be raped or sexually assaulted during their years on campus. Although it is true that many students these days fail to finish college in the traditional four years, we’ll take four years as the baseline (the number is easily adjusted). This implies that in a one-year period, there will be 750 rapes or sexual assaults on this campus.

Keep in mind, too, that the majority of students are away from campus during the three summer months. That means the majority of these 750 rapes will occur during the nine month academic year. This comes out to an average of between two and three rapes or sexual assaults per day during the academic year!

Adjust the numbers for any actual campus. Does anyone in his right mind believe there are this many rapes or sexual assaults occurring on American campuses, especially in this era of radical feminism (yes, folks, there are radical feminists on the more traditional Southern campuses of which the University of Virginia is the most prestigious, because all colleges and universities are required by federal law to have affirmative action programs that get radical feminists hired).

What might actual numbers say, even given the likelihood that some rapes go unreported? University of Michigan Ann Arbor economist Mark Perry ran some numbers for his campus based on reported sexual assaults on his campus for 2012: 32. His calculations yielded the figure that a woman on his campus had had a 1 in 155 chance of being sexually assaulted that year. Perry has called for more accurate use of statistics on campuses. (See Mark Perry, “A renewed call for accurate government reporting of statistics,” American Enterprise Institute, 23 January 2014).

There is little reason to think those pushing an ideology — now the norm on college and university campuses — are interested in facts or data, however. We see little evidence of such interest in the above case. What we see is a seasoned reporter looking for and seizing upon an opportunity to portray a somewhat traditional university campus in the worst light possible.

Radical feminist ideology may be targeting men as a group, but there is no reason to think it is helping women. With visible cases such as this one being exposed as probable hoaxes — which may seem a rash judgment, but given the absence of factual, forensic evidence what are we supposed to think? — actual victims will indeed be more, not less, reluctant to come forward. Yes, there are actual victims of rape or sexual assault on college and university campuses; nothing I’ve said should be read as denying this. But Can she be believed? is clearly more a valid question now than it was before “A Rape on Campus.”

The truth is, we have no way of knowing what actually happened that night, even if we assume the incident wasn’t fabricated. Ryan Duffin remained convinced that something had happened. Maybe something did. We don’t know, and probably never will. One thing we do know is that psychological certainty is not evidence — evidence of the sort necessary to put rapists in prison! The Rolling Stone article received over 2.7 million hits prior to its removal. A college’s reputation has been sullied as has Phi Kappa Psi fraternity which was turned upside down for no good reason. Lives have been affected by what one administrator reasonably called “drive-by journalism,” based on what may turn out to be the work of a pathological liar. Some women, after all, are very good actresses, and lies have a way of unraveling when enough people put them under a microscope. Am I being overly harsh? Remember, “Jackie” dragged innocent others into this thing. Aside from those at the fraternity, she produced a picture of a former classmate, and then ID’d a guy, clearly innocent, who worked at the campus rec center. Those others were confronted and questioned.

Now for all I know, there might be people reading who will wonder, What’s your stake in all this? Do you have a dog in this fight? If not, why are you involving yourself at all?* As an outsider who lost academic positions to less-qualified women courtesy of the favoritism towards women in academia, Yes, indirectly, I do have a dog in this fight. As an outsider, I believe I have insights that are lost on the majority of established academics (and established journalists) who cannot see the forest for the trees. The leftist mindset that dominates academic faculties and, in a slightly more modest form, major media, predisposes its readers to take lurid stories like “Jackie’s” at face value, despite major lapses in judgment and basic common sense, the biggest lapse at Rolling Stone being its reliance on a single source despite multiple red flags about that source’s credibility.

I have met academic radicals. I wouldn’t turn my back on one. I especially wouldn’t turn my back on those characters who label themselves “male feminists”! One such person I chanced to have a hostile exchange of letters in the Letters to the Editor column back in the early 1990s in the American Philosophical Association’s flagship publication clearly had a few loose screws.

It is clear to me when a writer approaches a theme with an agenda, not a desire for truth and justice. That was the case with “A Rape on Campus.” One wonders how many alleged rape cases Sabrina Rubin Erdely passed over before she found one she could portray as sufficiently lurid to make her case that universities are “rape cultures” with administrations that do not respond properly to allegations of sexual assault.

Academic leftists just don’t get it. Judgments about truth and falsity, guilt or innocence, need to be based on factual evidence and logic, not ideology and emotion. Academic leftists do not understand the world of those of us who insist on evidence and logic. They see these as “constructions” evidencing “male domination,” which has the silly implication that women can’t really think logically or make deductions based on evidence. To the extent they get special favors, academic leftists create and perpetuate an environment where truth and justice take a back seat to ideological beliefs, and where propositions (e.g., university campuses are part of a “rape culture”) become true, a fortiori, because a politically favored group says so.

Radical feminists’ commitment to their ideology is as fervent is that of any religious fundamentalist. They are intent on “sticking it” to the “patriarchy,” and if they see a chance to damage reputations associated with that (e.g., fraternities), they will take it. If innocents get harmed along the way, well, just as in times of war, that’s just collateral damage. Few religious fundamentalists have tenure, teaching undergraduates at major universities. They are not in a position to cover up or sometimes invent facts instead of revealing them, citing trendy rationalizations about factual evidence being a “social construction” and “gendered.” Let’s use common sense: if a rape occurs, is it a “social construction”? Again, and finally, lest there be any confusion: I am not saying campus rapes do not occur. There is just no good evidence that this one did.

According to the CUGSJ report, “Jackie” declined to be interviewed for its writers. She’s retained an attorney who commented, “It is in her best interest to remain silent at this time.” No surprises there, with the UVA Phi Kappi Psi chapter preparing what will doubtless be a whopping lawsuit against Rolling Stone. Why would they not? They were lynched in a media environment far more concerned with political correctness and sensationalism than getting to the bottom of what really happened, if anything did.

Some (e.g., at CNN) expressed surprise that no one at Rolling Stone has been disciplined, much less fired. Insiders always land on their feet. Always.

Is it any wonder that the closest thing to a bestseller academia has seen in over 30 years is Harry Frankfurt’s infamous On Bullshit (2005)?

 
*It might be worth noting that I have no association whatsoever with the University of Virginia, and have relied exclusively on publicly available accounts of this story.

 

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How Higher Education in the U.S. Has Slowly Self-Destructed

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Steven Yates

There can be little doubt that at one time, the U.S. had the best higher education system in the world — rivaled only by, perhaps, by institutions in Great Britain such as Oxford and Cambridge. It still lives on that reputation, as people still come from all over the world to study at major U.S. universities. For a period probably lasting around 65 years now, however, American colleges and universities have been going downhill. The process has been long and arduous, and was far from obvious for a long time, but over the past couple of decades, the problems are manifest and have been accelerating. What has happened is a long story, obviously; many lengthy books have been written about the decay of higher education from numerous perspectives. I can only share a small part of mine.

If one looks at higher education in the 1950s — the era in which my generation was born — one doesn’t get the sense of an enterprise that would one day head for a cliff. While things were not perfect, there is a sense in which colleges and universities seemed to enjoy a golden age that began around 1950. Universities opened their doors to World War II Veterans attending on the GI Bill, for one thing, and the student population skyrocketed. My father, a World War II veteran, went to an Illinois university on the GI Bill and earned two degrees in chemistry (a B.S. and an M.S.). Many Veterans were the first in their families to go to college which, at the time, was very affordable!

Academic disciplines like mine also enjoyed their golden ages during this period — especially if you were an analytic philosopher (those who took their cues from, e.g., Heidegger, might feel differently). There was a general sense of accomplishment and enthusiasm. W.V. Quine, of Harvard, published his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” paper in 1951, and it was immediately clear that an event of the first importance had just taken place. Two years later, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations appeared, bringing Wittgenstein’s later philosophy together in one important volume. Dozens of dissertations and hundreds of journal articles discussed the implications of Quine’s criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction, his shift towards pragmatism, his naturalized epistemology which blurred the boundaries between analytic philosophy and natural science. Wittgenstein’s natural language approach, too, rocked the discipline. Wittgensteinian expressions like language game crept into its official lexicon. The influence of the later Wittgenstein was soon felt in philosophy of science, manifesting itself in the major works of Stephen Toulmin, Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others many of whom had made close enough studies of the later Wittgenstein’s ideas to see how they applied to the special languages of the sciences and how these changed over time and with discovery and scientific revolution.

Its intellectual life aside, there were jobs in academia! Universities were expanding to satisfy student demand, and this meant hiring more faculty in every field, philosophy included. It mattered little that many of the new students were more vocationally oriented as opposed to those moved by intellectual curiosity. For there was plenty of state money being lavished on these institutions, and it only increased when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 and caused a sense of panic that we Americans were falling behind! Whatever conflicts of educational philosophy arose could be minimized.

American society in the late 1950s had its dark side. On the one hand, the economy was roaring. We were in the middle of the longest and largest genuine expansion in history. New technologies had been appearing for decades, ending with the newest of the new: television. The largest middle class in history was rising in stature. On the other hand, this was the era of the conformist “organization man.” Also that of the “status seekers,” the “people shapers,” the incipient “power elite,” the Beat Generation, and so on — indications that all was not well. The civil rights revolution was on the horizon, as decades of America’s shabby treatment of its minorities caught up with her.

A cultural myth had arisen surrounding higher education: Everyone Should Go To College. It was a foolish myth, of course, and still is. There were then, and still are, many good vocations one can pursue that do not require a four-year university degree. At most, they might require an apprenticeship of perhaps two years or even less. One does not need a university degree to sell real estate or insurance, or repair televisions or other equipment. These were jobs that needed doing.

Sadly, however, employers bought the myth. They held the purse strings. So people went to college who weren’t comfortable there, and would rather have been out earning their livings instead of sitting in classrooms memorizing material to spit back on tests. They continued to attend due to parental and social pressures as well as employer expectations. One of the consequences is that the value of a college degree started to drop over time. Supply and demand is real, after all. The greater the supply of anything, the less the value of any single unit. The same would eventually be true of university faculty.

While I tend towards the view that my field experienced a few golden years during the 1950s and 1960s, it is happens to be the case that a lot of mediocre people made their way into tenured positions during this period of relative abundance. Many of these people might have published a chapter from their dissertations, if that much — or a book review or two — and then do nothing productive for the rest of their careers. Some didn’t do that much. Many who were somewhat more productive produced what came to be known as “secondary literature” which ran the gamut from good to mediocre, although occasionally, it fell in quality to downright abysmal. In fairness, many of those hired during this period excelled in the classroom; that was their vocation. Some, however, did not. I encountered my share of the latter in my journey through American academia, first as a student and then as an aspiring academic.

We all know what happened in the 1960s. There is no means of summarizing that complex era — which really began with the Kennedy assassination — in one blog post; again, it’s been done elsewhere. Like most such events, it had its pluses and its negatives. The aftermath, however, was a changed view of the universities by America’s ruling elites. Higher education, having been ground zero of the late 1960s disruptions, was no longer trusted. The ruling class realized that an independent middle class, pampering its children and allowing them to turn into intellectual idealists who would criticize the system (especially its wars), was in fact dangerous to their privileges as well as their goals. A subtle attack on universities began in 1971 with the Powell Memorandum, which was widely circulated through the elite business community via the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and recommended business take a stronger hand in shaping universities from the top. Some of its readers made their way onto university boards of trustees, and sometimes into administration. Such moves dovetailed nicely with the mid-1970s job market collapse that ended the golden years.

The Powell Memorandum named names, among them neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, then at the University of California at San Diego. Marcuse’s thinking derived from the combination of Marx and Freud developed at the Frankfurt School, brought from Frankfurt, Germany, to the New School of Social Research in New York City, a hotbed of the New Left. Marcuse, who had become the New Left’s most respected philosopher, had a substantial following. The Marcusans, one might call them, would play a definite role in the decline of humanities and social sciences that actually became useful to the ruling elites later, although the former get madder than wet hornets if you point this out to them.
Marcuse’s most influential tract for these purposes was not his books Eros and Civilization (1955) or One-Dimensional Man (1964), but rather the short essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). This essay, which promoted the idea that equal opportunity was not enough, that mere anti-discrimination laws were not enough, as in the absence of actual institution of repressive measures against the white majority they would only preserve the latter’s advantages all throughout society. The gradual institution of the new repression to allow blacks and soon women to thrive, began to influence the humanities where it took such forms as identity politics, critical race theory, and so on. It would help demonize the white male as modern history’s biggest villain through a process of highly selective pseudo-scholarship. It would push special studies aimed at women and minorities (“women’s studies,” “gender studies”) in increasingly extreme directions when the results did not magically materialize across the board, and we began to hear about systemic as opposed to systematic discrimination. The radicals wanted to place white men (eventually straight white men) at a disadvantage, although no one was supposed to say that! That was offensive, the sign of a closet Klansman! That was how the new “repressive tolerance” was to work. It was selective tolerance. It tolerated some at the expense of others, as those with political agendas always do.

In the universities, the extreme lack of jobs made conformism an imperative. People visibly not acceding to new views were simply not interviewed for the few positions that became available. Even for the rest, networking, positioning, “people skills,” etc., became far more important as survival skills than the sort of accomplishment that produced a Quine or a Wittgenstein, or their highest quality commentators and protégés. This was the environment in which lost generation philosophers such as myself went to school, and it was the environment in which we hit the job market in the 1980s or later.

What we didn’t see immediately — or, at least, I didn’t — was the corporatization of the universities that was occurring in accordance with the Powell Memorandum, mainly because it was occurring in the upper-echelon administrative level, not in departments where we were. The Powell Memorandum had implied a need to place a more business-oriented mindset in charge. Administrators began to rise to the occasion (with equivalent new “subjects” like “educational administration”), and the universities began to adopt the values of the larger culture that were apparent during the it’s-morning-in-America Reagan years: mass consumption, commodification of everything and everyone, and a latent anti-intellectualism perhaps expressed in Ronald Reagan’s doubts, years before when he was governor of California, that (to paraphrase) we “shouldn’t be subsidizing intellectual curiosity.”

This was the rise of neoliberalism, whose godfathers were the economists Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. While long in the making, neoliberalism came of age in the 1980s and became the dominant philosophy of higher education administration (along with much else!) in the 1990s. Its supposed philosophy: let the free market decide everything!

Today, of course, the full corporatization of higher education at the hands of the neoliberal mindset is sufficiently well-documented that I can probably assume it here. The move towards hiring part-time faculty and phasing out tenure is one aspect of this mindset; the view of students as consumers is another. The new consumers continued to attend college in huge numbers despite gradually skyrocketing tuition. This was made possible by readily available federally-guaranteed student loans. So much for the free market deciding everything. Student loans, which guaranteed that institutions would make money, made it possible to continue raising tuition to levels that would support the lavish salaries being paid to top administrators, the new buildings and campus beautification projects to make campuses appear more glitzy and business-friendly, the instructional technology, and so on. To be sure, less money for administration would have made it possible to pay more full-time faculty, but that is water under the bridge now; one could plausibly argue that the continued production of Ph.D.s as if the golden age of the pre-1975 era still existed, or would come back with the projected “wave of retirements,” was foolish. Supply and demand again: increase the supply of x beyond all reason, and certainly beyond the actual demand for x, and the price x’s can command drops like a rock.

But we should be wary of mechanical appeals to supply and demand. As this scathing blog post notes, once an entire endeavor (such as higher education) has embraced the business, profit-maximization model, it will automatically move towards replacing the more expensive with the less expensive, whether we are talking technology or human labor. Working conditions will deteriorate across the board. With the rise of MOOCS (massive open online courses) and similar moves towards Internet-based education which can be offered at very low cost, if students begin to choose these as preferable to tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, this could begin wiping out tenured faculties all across the country! Tenured faculty appealing to supply and demand as their best defense against the shabby treatment of adjuncts by universities should beware of where these appeals actually point, that they, too, could become expendable faster than they think! Among the things we should be thinking about is if certain ideas, or practices, should be exempt altogether from the whimsy of the marketplace, if only because the functionality of the marketplace depends on them. But that is another post.

The real tragedy here is the talent lost to academia via a kind of brain drain, as the best minds refuse to be treated like crap simply because they had the misfortune of finishing their Ph.D.s after 1975. Corporatized higher education is actually a very wasteful system. I recently noted this squandering of talent on a comments section on Brian Leiter’s philosophy blog — on a thread generated by a poll assessing the correctness of Harry Frankfurt’s comment on academic philosophy being in the “doldrums” that inspired my second post here. It is interesting that of those who responded to the poll, 48% said Yes, philosophy is in the doldrums; 36% said No; and 16% were not sure.

I observed again the near-absence of significant figures not in their 60s and 70s, at least in the U.S. Timothy Williamson, in his late 50s, is British; David John Chalmers, in his late 40s, is Australian. To be sure, assessing the long-term stature of a philosopher is not necessarily easy; but let’s ask again, when Quine published “Two Dogmas” was there really any doubt that something important had happened? When was the last time we saw something like that? Probably when Chalmers first introduced his “hard problem of consciousness.” That was in the 1990s. Nothing of that magnitude has happened since. Possibly I’ve just missed it, from having been an outsider. I don’t think so, however. If someone reads this and thinks I am wrong, feel free to post a comment drawing attention to the landmark event in professional philosophy I have missed.

The hollowing out of the discipline caused in part by the job market collapse of the 1970s, taken further by the political correctness revolution led by the Marcusans beginning in the 1980s and triumphing in the 1990s, and finally the corporatization of universities also beginning in the 1980ss and beyond, all led to the “doldrums” Frankfurt spoke of.

These happened in tandem with the changing technology of the 1990s. Some have retorted, in response to National Adjunct Walkout Day (Wednesday, February 25, 2015) that those who don’t like the labor situation in academia ought to do the obvious thing and find another line of work. I submit that many potentially promising philosophers have done just that! There is no way of knowing how many, but they’ve probably been doing it quietly for at least 20 years now, mentally gauging the hostility of academia and deciding they’d rather be elsewhere! New technology opened a lot of doors, after all, and as every thinking person knows, many of the analytic skills that make a person good at philosophy are adaptable to computer programming, website development, design, and assorted other information technology fields. As someone who walked away from an adjunct position (in a manner of speaking), if I’m ever asked, “Where are your generation’s Wittgensteins, Quines, etc.?” I’ll tell them, “Probably working for Google, or involving themselves in tech start-ups.”

Do I need to point out that this is talent permanently lost to professional philosophy, whoever we decide deserves the blame?

My comment got an interesting response, from someone wondering where today’s imposing figures are in other academic disciplines as well. This poster suggested plausibly that philosophy is not alone in its “doldrums,” that academia is in dire straits generally.

To begin summing up, disciplines such as philosophy, history, literature, foreign languages, and so on, were once not just the core of liberal arts learning, some mastery of them was at the center of what it meant to be an educated person. Today they have been largely replaced by STEM subjects, these being the subjects employers want, as “education” becomes essentially job training. Students attend unabashedly to get job skills, intelligent enough to know they will graduate as debt slaves. As Napoleon observed, the borrower is always the slave of the lender.

Higher education faces that sort of problem at the student end. At the administrative end are the misplaced priorities created by top-heavy administrations which keep getting top-heavier, empowered by the neoliberal mindset which speaks of free markets. Given today’s structural realities, this means freedom for the point-one-percent to do as they please and rationalize it with free market language, while forcing servitude on the rest of us — for if we haven’t devoted our lives to lining our pockets, then so much the worse for us. With its present priorities, is it any wonder that the higher education is slowly self-destructing, and that the overall educational level of the public is plummeting?

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Leopold Kohr: Unsung Hero of Twentieth Century Social Philosophy for the Twenty First Century

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Steven Yates

As an outsider, I’ve tended to gravitate towards other outsiders … not because they are outsiders but because very often they have something to say, something which got past the gatekeepers of their time and survived because it was important. Such a person was the economist and social philosopher Leopold Kohr (1909 – 1994).

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve penned what I hope will prove to be a definitive essay on Kohr’s work and life. You can read it here:  Leopold Kohr: Prophet of a Coming Decentralization. I have a very slightly different version here (I fixed a couple of typos and minor verbal mishaps): 06 LEOPOLD KOHR PROPHET OF DECENTRALIZATION definitive version.

Kohr illustrates a point made in last week’s post: the fundamental unsolved problem of political philosophy, practical as well as theoretical, is the containment of power, i.e., the containment of those who are fascinated with power and measure all value and worth in its exercise. Kohr’s work is somewhat depressing in his contention, for which there is abundant evidence, that in this fallen world, it is lack of opportunity rather than any commitment to ethical principle or a moral view of the universe that limits power. The only means of limiting power is to keep our organizations small, be they governments or corporations. Of course, for us, it is too late. But clearly both governments and corporations are unsustainably large, and heading for eventual decomposition. So Kohr’s work is encouraging in that it means that even if the “new world order” feared across the political spectrum gets built, it won’t last for long. Its continued existence would depend on something it could not maintain: institutional loyalty.

Its decomposition would be incredibly messy, however. As will likely be the decomposition of the governmental and economic arrangements we have now.

Kohr was a prophet (sort of) of the small political unit, but he had trouble telling us how best to get there. One of his side projects was advising both secessionist groups and urban planners. Today he would probably be advising secessionist groups and preppers, hoping for the right level of organization and noting that we have something of a choice of where we want to end up. We could end up in a neo-medieval world run by networks of landowning warlords who would control everything by controlling access to whatever technology survived the collapse. Or we could end up with a network of small units of governance, one might call them. The former could well be the result of an unplanned decomposition of our present order. The latter would require extensive planning based on conversations we need to be having now: conversations about what works (autonomous, local free markets) versus what history is proving does not work (a financialized money system based on debt and ultimately, therefore, on control). The question before us: are we ready to have that conversation?

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The Fundamental Unsolved Problem in Political Philosophy

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Steven Yates

Political philosophy I define as the philosophical study of social governance. Note, I did not say government, as there are political philosophies (anarchism is the obvious example) which urge us to do away with specific institutions devoted exclusively to governance (the state). Many philosophers have seen the chief goal of political philosophy as developing a theory of the ideal society, with or without a state. Plato was the first example. There were many others. Plato’s was a proposal that came down to “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” Read his Republic. To make a long story short: the “philosopher-king” ruled. Only when kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings will we have the ideal society, wisely ruled over. How could such a state of affairs be arranged? Plato’s Socrates expends great energy trying to lay out how the “philosopher-king” is to be educated for his station in life, and also how his “Guardians” are to perform their roles as a kind of police force that would never grow abusive. Unfortunately, I know of no kings who became philosophers, although a few philosophers would have become kings given the chance. Their rule would have been anything but wise!

I would like to propose a different goal for political philosophy. It is based on something we can observe from history that appears to be true for all large societies: they are afflicted by a minority (probably no more than 4%) who are fascinated with power, and drawn to institutions that wield power. This goal for political philosophy would be to solve its unsolved problem. As a first approximation: how does society contain or constrain power?

This is too simple, of course. Contain and constrain are power words, after all. And who is society? Taking these in reverse order, let’s consider: society is made up of different layers of its citizenry. There is the minority fascinated with power. There is, I submit, another minority that is equally fascinated with liberty and its possibilities. The sort of philosophyt appropriate for them merits close study. Then there is the majority that doesn’t much care, so long as their lives are immersed in familiarity and most of their expectations are met. The masses, this majority is generally called. The word doesn’t have to be derogatory. It just means, the common people as opposed to that small fraction who lead, whether for better or for worse.

The fundamental unsolved problem of political philosophy therefore devolves to: how does the minority that wants to be free (is fascinated with liberty and its possibilities) place checks on those who are drawn to power (don’t want people to be free—freedom, after all, is too chaotic and unpredictable)? Put this way, the problem is a good bit more formidable than How to build the Ideal State, is it not? It may even suggest that there neither is nor can be an “ideal state,” since the deep motivations of one group (those who want liberty) are invariably at odds with, and are bound to come into conflict with, another (those driven to assume power and command).

There seem to be a couple of employable strategies for containing power. One way to contain power would be with a greater power. But this isn’t a strategy at all. It just pushes the problem back a step. For then the question is, How is that greater power to be constrained once it gets out of hand, as it inevitably will?

The other strategy is to obligate power to control itself, through the appeal to a higher set of principles. This was the strategy employed in the English-speaking world. The very existence of the Magna Carta implied that the King, despite his position, couldn’t rightly do as he pleased (and there was much that King John was doing that displeased his noble countrymen). Unfortunately, efforts to check the King’s power didn’t take right away, and it took several more movements, with names like the Diggers and the Levellers (who lived around the time of the English Civil War), to bring the throne to heel. Arguably, England’s Constitutional Monarchy did not succeed at this until well after the American War for Independence (or Revolutionary War, if you prefer) against King George III.

The Declaration of Independence articulated the crimes of the British Monarchy as justifying severing ties with George; within a year, the fledgling U.S. was at war with Great Britain, under the Articles of Confederation which created a weak central government that could not lay taxes or raise its own army. The new leadership class of Americans, those who had led the struggle against the British and formed a new government, saw that government as too weak. They set about to create a stronger one. They feared that under the Articles, the U.S. would slowly pull itself apart. So in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they closed the doors, set aside their official mandate (to revise the Articles of Confederation), and over the next four months, penned a new document, the Constitution of the United States of America, which they then presented to the 13 States for ratification. Its own rules stated that nine states had to ratify it.

The first major conversation over the nature of power proceeded apace. Those history calls the Antifederalists argued against ratification. The new Constitution, they argued, was full of loopholes through which those who wanted power would eventually climb. The authors of The Federalist Papers defended ratification on the grounds that although any document penned by human hands would be imperfect, the Constitution was likely the best we would be able to do. James Madison presented the challenge in Federalist 52:

“But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the greatest difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Madison understood the problem of power.

But as subsequent years showed, this wasn’t enough. The Constitution, as we all know, was ratified in 1791, and the first president under the new regime, George Washington, crushed the Whiskey Rebels (who were protesting an excise tax) and allowed Alexander Hamilton to create the First Bank of the United States over the express objections of Thomas Jefferson (and possibly in violation of Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution which mandates to Congress responsibility for coining money and regulating its value, without a clause allowing for delegation).

Subsequent decades, one by one, indicated that the Antifederalist view was probably the correct one. Government has grown progressively larger, and has grown vulnerable to control by those holding the purse strings (often corporations). What conclusions can we draw from this now? That the problem of how to contain power is still the major unsolved practical problem in political philosophy, however we cash it out or rationalize it. Contending that we might solve the problem by embracing one ideology or another, perhaps of the “right” or of the “left,” is clearly a dead end, if only because both of these have produced cruel, totalitarian regimes. Ours has arguably slouched towards plutocratic oligarchy, which may turn out to be the most stable form of political economy for a civilization at our present stage of development in the West. Sadly, efforts to “restore the Constitution” led, e.g., by former Texas Senator Ron Paul, haven’t succeeded despite having generated a large following.

Plutocratic oligarchy has many features that bespeak of lack of accountability, irresponsibility, and a failure to attend to long-term planning (where long term here means further than the next annual report or election). Thus how and whether civilization will move forward is equally a problem. In future posts, we will consider the various issues raised here and explore more specifics, as well as a few proposed solutions.

One of the solutions I take the most seriously was originally developed by renegade economist and political philosopher Leopold Kohr (1909 – 1994), author of an important work entitled The Breakdown of Nations (1957). Kohr’s thesis, which I have discussed at length in a separate essay (link to be supplied next week), is that the best way of containing those who want power is to shrink our governments and corporations in size, shrinking their reach and capacity to do harm.

The second best solution, as Kohr would have it, is for smaller and largely self-contained groups to separate themselves from larger and out-of-control ones: secede, in other word. Separations have occurred, and proven successful, in numerous places (e.g., Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, or Slovenia and others from the former Yugoslavia). Whether we will see a period of globalization-in-reverse, one might call it, as a solution to the increasing dominance of the globe by a global one percent, remains to be seen, but the prospects for and dynamics of such a process merit being thought about carefully.

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Scholarship “In the Doldrums” as Elderly Generation Dies Out and Is Not Replaced

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Steven Yates

Our point of departure for this week’s article will be a remark by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, best known as having authored the colorful little tract On Bullshit (2005) which, significantly, may be the only work by a professional philosopher to stand out during that entire decade. Certainly it sold the best, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? Frankfurt recently commented on the current state of the art regarding scholarship in academic philosophy:

I believe that there is, at least in this country, a more or less general agreement among philosophers and other scholars that our  subject is currently in the doldrums.  Until not very long ago, there were powerful creative impulses moving energetically through the field.  There was the work in England of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and of Gilbert Ryle, Paul Grice, and Herbert Hart, as well as the work of various logicial positivsts.  In the United States, even after interest in William James and John Dewey had receded, there was lively attention to contributions by Willard Quine and Donald Davidson, John Rawls and Saul Kripke.  In addition, some philosophers were powerfully moved by the gigantic speculative edifice of Whitehead.  Heidegger was having a massive impact on European philosophy, as well as on other disciplines–and not only in Europe, but here as well.  And, of course, there was everywhere a vigorously appreciative and productive response to the work of Wittgenstein.

The lively impact of these impressive figures has faded.  We are no longer busily preoccupied with responding to them.  Except for a few contributors of somewhat less general scope, such as Habermas, no one has replaced the imposingly great figures of the recent past in providing  us with contagiously inspiring direction.  Nowadays, there are really no conspicuously fresh, bold, and intellectually exciting new challenges or innovations.  For the most part, the field is quiet.  We seem, more or less, to be marking time.  (Steven Cahn, ed., Portraits of American Philosophy [2013], pp. 125-126; quoted on Brian Leiter’s blog)

A number of major figures made philosophy worth studying during the twentieth century. We can find first rate intellects in both of the major traditions, that of the analytic tradition that dominated the English-speaking world and that of the existential-phenomenological tradition that dominated on Continental Europe. The names of the first generation are well known: G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein (both “Wittgensteins”), A.J.  Ayer, Karl Popper, others; later, we saw Nelson Goodman, Wilfred Sellars, W.V. Quine, John Rawls; a bit later, John Searle and obviously Saul Kripke. On the Continent were imposing figures beginning with Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre obviously; later, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, and more.

Meanwhile, “historicist” philosophy of science, born of the idea of paying more attention to actual science as opposed to logical reconstructions in the wake of the breakdown of logical empiricism, gave us Stephen Toulmin, Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and more. As the discipline moved into the final quarter of the twentieth century we saw major writings by additional giants such as Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. These are just the names I can think of off the top of my head. This list is not exhaustive; nor is it intended to be. Rorty might be seen as possibly the last truly imposing figure in twentieth century philosophy, whose work ironically left us with the sense that the primary work of the analytic tradition was over; with such discoveries as the lack of a need for a “theory” about truth once we’ve rejected Platonism, there is actually little left for such a tradition to do that is interesting or novel.

This was all after the job market in philosophy collapsed, of course. All of a sudden, younger philosophers were too busy trying to survive in the field to rise in stature.

Today, of course, with the exception of Searle and a handful of others, these figures have passed to their eternal reward whatever it may be. The youngest philosophers of stature in academic philosophy today are in their 70s (Searle is in his 80s); a handful are in their 60s. There are almost no younger voices, especially in the U.S. One thinks of Timothy Williamson who is British and David John Chalmers who is Australian. The former is in his late 50s; the latter, in his late 40s.

Among 30-somethings and younger: no one. Ayer wrote Language, Truth & Logic when he was in his 20s. Can anyone imagine a feat like that today?

As a direct consequence of the long-term collapse which began in the 1970s, the field really is “in the doldrums” and “marking time.” One can ask of U.S. philosophy today, Where are its Russells, Quines, Rawlses, or Kripkes? One can only guess, but many are probably writing computer software or designing apps for hand-held gadgets. After all, most of the skills that make a person a good analytic philosopher are transferable to other fields and occupations, computer science and cognate technologies being the obvious example. Whatever philosophical talents such individuals might have developed and brought to the field have been lost. Assuming they were interested in philosophy at one time, they may have kept the subject as a hobby. Hobbyists don’t tend to become the next generation’s movers and shakers in an academic discipline, however. Assuming they have the time make any contributions at all, with no academic affiliation they are simply ignored.

Academia is not a meritocracy. This is a primary fact of its political economy: that it has its one-percenters just as the larger economy has its one-percenters. Does anyone really believe admission to this club is solely a matter of accomplishment? There are, in fact, good philosophers out there in the tenured class not on my list because they did not graduate from a “ranked” Ph.D. program, and thus despite sometimes long lists of publications, the best they could hope for was a job at Podunksville State Community College instead of Harvard or Penn State or Princeton. Since no one reads the work of philosophers from Podunksville State Community College, their work may impress their wives but otherwise sits on library shelves unread.

What some have begun to call the neoliberal attack on higher education bears a large part of the responsibility for this situation. This attack has its roots in the 1970s response to the campus disruptions of the previous decade, and involves increasing corporate influence on universities and an increasingly corporate mindset within them. The university president becomes a glorified fundraiser; layers of administration expand; faculty are paid progressively less as they suffer “adjunctification” in the name of “cost cutting” (this while plush new buildings go up and expensive campus beautification projects are undertaken). Students, of course, are treated as consumers in this model, even as they go massively into debt: perfect preparation for a precarious life in the mass consumption culture of the near future, which everything will be commodified and leveraged to the hilt.

Where will this end? We get a suggestion from the final paragraph of this recent article on the demise of the legal profession. While society may well have too many lawyers, the author’s final paragraph is telling.

At this point, it is probably no more risky to pursue even a Ph.D in political philosophy or “regular philosophy” or history or whatever. Typically talented and accomplished students have to borrow little to nothing–at least if they don’t have a family and are very frugal–to flourish in said programs. The career prospects in a world where liberal education is disappearing, tenure has no future,  political correctness and techno-vocationalism are crowding out everything else, might not be all that much worse than that for most law students today.  That is, pretty bleepin’ bad.

Yes, a few intelligent and determined folks can pursue such programs without borrowing money if they live frugally. But then what? At present, they can look forward to “careers” working for starvation wages under the thumbs of ridiculously overpaid administrations. Their students will suffer from the relative unavailability of their professors as the latter commute to other jobs on other campuses. From lack of time, they will do no scholarly research. Whatever research skills they had developed enabling them to write theses and dissertations will wither from nonuse; eventually their interest in their subject will wear down as their patience with their work conditions wears thin. Some will eventually quit and learn to write software.

We should see here, in a nutshell, why there are no more Russells or Quines or Kripkes … why scholarship is dying in the U.S.

It is, of course, worth asking what subjects like philosophy contribute, whether to the economy or the culture. When taught properly, what they contribute to the lives of their students is an ability, on the part of the people, to think. To examine, to evaluate, to assess, as individuals instead of mindless followers. There are, among the one-percenters (and those above them), some who manifestly do not want a population with a troublesome critical mass of independent-minded thinkers. Such people are problems for authority.

That, obviously, is a much longer story.

Whatever else we can say at the moment, at present this is not likely to end well!

Posted in Where Is Philosophy Going? | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Welcome to this Blog

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Steven Yates

Hello. I’ve had this WordPress title for quite a while, but have only recently decided to use it. To those who have found their way here: welcome.

What’s this all about? I am a Lost Generation Philosopher. What’s a Lost Generation Philosopher? A member of the generation, a few of them full-time academics, many of them part-time academics, some of them would-have-been academics, who were granted their doctorates after the collapse of the academic job market in the 1970s. Mine was granted in 1987; I bounced from school to school to school despite publishing regularly, then took a lengthy break from teaching from 1995 until 2005 (not counting a tiny handful of courses, a couple in 1997, one in 1999, and one in 2004, at glorified business schools). I returned to “regular” teaching in 2005, but it was part-time adjunct teaching. Soon I had a second adjunct teaching job that went to two different campuses (that’s three campuses in all), and was commuting perhaps 150 miles per week. I stopped the second job after my elderly parents’ health went into terminal decline. With just one very small raise at the school I’d been at since 2005 and an inheritance, I walked away in May, 2012, and moved to Santiago, Chile, where I have been ever since … getting married to a chilena, establishing a new career, living a new life … but without real closure on the old one.

Hence some of this material. I am no longer an academic philosopher in any ordinary sense, but I am still a Lost Generation Philosopher who got caught up in the adjunct mess before it began to get publicity, which began in 2013 with the sad death of Margaret Mary Vojtko from a stress-induced heart attack on her front lawn that August. She had taught French at Duquesne University for over a quarter century, been kicked to the curb when health issues made it difficult for her to continue meeting with classes, given no severance pay, and forced to spend nights in a coffee shop because the electricity had been turned off in her increasingly unlivable house (in need of repairs she couldn’t afford). She died broke, literally. Her death shamed Duquesne University, a private Catholic institution.

The raising of consciousness about the plight of adjuncts back in the U.S. on National Adjunct Walkout Day last Wednesday brought all this back; hence one of the reasons (not the only reason) for blogging here. It explains my belaboring the issue in my first post. Adjuncts are teaching for poverty wages (averaging around $2,700 per course), often needing multiple jobs to survive, often on semester contracts without job security, without benefits, without office space to meet with students, and sometimes without decent places to sleep at night. Yes, there are cases of adjuncts living in their automobiles, while they collect food stamps. This harms students who are often unable to locate an instructor who is probably on one of his or her other campuses. Adjuncts often do not find out if they are going to have any work until a few days before the semester is to start, making it difficult for them to prepare a course properly. Naturally, they are expected to be stars in the classroom! Otherwise they don’t have a job the following semester!

Some see this as “the market at work.” Supply and demand, after all. An oversupply of Ph.D.s … or an undersupply of jobs, in an environment others of us see as an abomination, at institutions which pay their top administrators six figures (sometimes even more), pay the head football coach still more, can hire layers upon layers of administrators who are paid very well, and can spend millions on new buildings and campus beautification projects. I have argued at length on my Facebook page that the problem is not lack of money, it is lack of any sense of priority in allocating it, especially to those doing the real work of a college or university, which is educating the students who apply, are accepted, and nowadays pay tuition rates that have also gone beyond absurd! The majority of students can no longer afford college without going massively into debt. That’s a different but related crisis … and yes, it is a crisis when outstanding student loan debt has reached $1.3 trillion! With the relative lack of good paying jobs in the U.S. outside a few very narrow occupations, much of this debt will turn out to be unpayable.

I am one of the people who got fed up with this system and left. But: (1) philosophical problems continue to interest me a great deal on their own terms, along with their application to the problems of living; (2) I cannot forget where I came from, or that others were not as fortunate as I was in being handed an escape route; and (3) I am still on track in one respect, working on a long term project about which I will write here in due course: an intended legacy. Being an outsider, I don’t know if anyone will read it even assuming it gets finished and published, but if I can get the word out at all, I will go to my grave with a sense that my books are at least partially balanced.

I’ll say a little about my interests, and what will give this blog whatever semblance of focus it has, and then sign off. I grew interested in the history and philosophy of science when I was an undergraduate. The trigger for this interest probably reveals a contrarian streak in my personality and outlook I carried around with me even then: anomalies, with respect to scientific theories, what they implied about the relations between theory, observation, and reality, and what to do with them (if anything). Anomalies are reasonably well verified facts that do not fit into, or are not predicted by, a dominant or prevailing theory. In a future post, we’ll consider some examples. I pursued history and philosophy of science at length by studying at length works like Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Ed. (1970) and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975), leaders of the historicist movement. Eventually, ideas developed by these authors went into both my M.A. thesis (1983) and my doctoral dissertation (1987). Then I hit the hostile job market, lost my focus as the above-described bouncing around took place, and never finished that book on Feyerabend’s philosophy I’d left graduate school intending to write. (No, you cannot sustain a quality academic research program while spending 30-40 hours a week looking for your next teaching job. I was not helped by having graduated from a department which did next to nothing to sell its graduates on the job market.)

As time passed I developed interests in political philosophy and political economy, both to teach about the former, and to understand my own plight and the plight of my generation. I did write a book, but I’ll write about that in another post. I also encountered systems theory, The Matrix, and cultural studies, and more scales fell from my eyes. A longstanding interest in Brian Eno’s music and ideas about culture had opened my mind to a number of vistas that probably would not have appeared interesting otherwise.

In any event, I am now doubtless too much of a generalist for today’s philosophy job market, which although I keep an eye on it, I am no longer using to seek employment. So what am I doing to survive now? I have an investment (money that originated with my inheritance) and teach a couple of classes in Critical Thinking at a local university, Universidad Nacionale Andrés Bello in English. I may have another inheritance coming. There is interest there in broadening the number of General Education courses taught in English, and I happened to be available to step in.

So welcome to this blog. Will not be posting again for a few days, as a death in my extended family is taking me back to the U.S. for the remainder of this week and the start of next week. But never worry; we’ll talk more. If you’ve found your way in here, I hope you found this of some interest, or at least a source of mild curiosity about what will come next. I have more going on than what I listed above. There are some surprises ahead. You can trust me. I am not a politician, and I am not going to try to sell you anything. That’s a promise.

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