Sexual harassment in academia: It depends on what the distinction between "logical implication and conversational implicature" is.

"There was no propositioning," said the philosopher. "Remember that I am a philosopher trying to teach a budding philosopher important logical distinctions."

That sounds like something from a brilliant novel that I would love to read, but unfortunately, it's a real professor, who's had to resign. Colin McGinn, according to the above-linked NYT article, was "a star philosopher at the University of Miami," and he has "agreed to leave his tenured post after allegations of sexual harassment brought by a graduate student."

“People are thinking, ‘Wow, he had to resign, and we know about it,’ ” said Jennifer Saul, the chairwoman of the philosophy department at the University of Sheffield in England and the editor of the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?

Wow, he had to resign, and we know about it...  note the implication (implicature?!!) that things like this occur all the time, perhaps even to the point that some tenured professor is subtly ousted, but what's extraordinary is to hear about it. Another amazing thing is that the star prof is also a blogger, and he put serious effort into blog-bullshitting his way out of the jam he found himself in. He put "the cryptic language of analytic philosophy" out there to defend himself. He gave other bloggers text. That's a risk. But maybe that's what star philosophers do, take risks, verbal risks.

The top post at his blog right now:

I treated the student I was mentoring at UM with complete respect, as an equal, and with continuous encouragement and support....

As to the New York Times article, the devil is in the details. Read between the lines. Don’t be taken in by spin and exaggeration. Look closely at the language.

That's professorly — an invitation to examine the language of the NYT. So he's not giving us text now. He's saying look at their text. Look at what they say and what they do not say. So let's do that.

The article, by Jennifer Schuessler, begins and ends with the general idea that women have it "tough"  in philosophy. There's "bias and outright sexual harassment" throughout the field, or so "many" say. And the McGinn story is presented a shining "what some see as a healthy dose of sunlight." Does one individual's story really work to shine light on a problem in the whole field? There's one story that gets attention — because McGinn is famous — and then people who have been wanting to forefront a more generalized set of issues seize the opportunity. "Some" think that's healthy, but it exploits the individual for the sake of a preexisting agenda. I'm reminded of the use of George Zimmerman to forefront racial issues. You could say that Zimmerman's case shone a healthy light on problems of racism, but it makes more sense to say the problems of racism threw an unhealthy shadow on the specific details of Zimmerman's individual case.

Schuessler concedes we're "short on undisputed facts." Schuessler interviewed McGinn and, in the middle of the article, tells us his version of the story:

It was “a warm, consensual, collaborative relationship,” an “intellectual romance” that never became sexual but was full of “bantering”.... The terms of his agreement with the university, he said, prevented him from saying much more. But “banter referring to sexual matters,” he added, isn’t always “sexual banter.”

The student would not talk to the NYT. Her boyfriend described email and text messages he saw, full of "unwanted innuendo and propositions from Mr. McGinn."

Mr. McGinn said...“There was no propositioning”...  Properly understanding another e-mail to the student that included the crude term for masturbation, he added later via e-mail, depended on a distinction between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”

I had to look up "implicature." The (unlinkable OED) says:

The act or an instance of (intentionally) implying a meaning which can be inferred from an utterance in conjunction with its conversational or semantic context, but is neither explicitly expressed nor logically entailed by the statement itself; a meaning that is implied contextually, but is neither entailed logically nor stated explicitly. Esp. in conversational implicature.

Without seeing the email, it's hard to know what that's supposed to mean. I don't see how I can read between the lines. That's totally opaque. If only we knew the context, there would be subtleties of meaning. But not only do we not know the complexities of the context, we don't even have the explicit text. The whole thing is covered up. Where's the healthful sunlight? It's all thrown into shadow by McGinn's resignation. I wish it had gone to trial. But apparently both parties to the communication preferred to wrap the whole matter up into darkness. There are reputations and careers to be preserved, and a deal was reached. McGinn signed an agreement, and now he can't go any further defending himself, and the woman doesn't want to talk at all. Her career needs are cited by intermediaries. A boyfriend — was he jealous? — tells the silent woman's story.

So it falls to those who want to forefront the general issue to keep exploiting the occasion. Hence Schuessler transitions to the final chunk of her piece:

Whatever the facts of the case, many philosophers say that the accusations of misbehavior against Mr. McGinn are the edge of a much bigger problem, one that women have long been unwilling to discuss publicly, lest it harm their careers.

Many say...

Many credit the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?, which in 2010 began posting anonymous stories of harassment, with helping to highlight the issue.

Many credit.... Many many.... Forget McGinn, a known individual about whom we know only some of the facts. Let's go on to talk about all the unknown victims/accusers and perpetrators/accuseds. We're told the culture of philosophy may be changing, as "several graduate students" are "considering filing complaints," and there's an idea of trying to make philosophy "more woman-friendly," but "no one can agree on the root cause of that unfriendliness."

Is it straight-up sexual discrimination? The lack of female mentors? The highly technical nature of much contemporary Anglo-American philosophy? The field’s notoriously rough-and-tumble style of argument?...

“Many people have called philosophy the combat sport of academia,” [said Louise Antony, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst]. “But if you can’t have those conversations, you’re at a disadvantage.”

There's some talk of adopting "an informal 'be nice' rule" to help women philosophers, even though that itself sounds patronizing. But that's a completely different issue from sexual harassment. If there's a very aggressive style of argument where you have to be a bully and an asshole to get ahead, then maybe there's reason to say men have structured the environment to serve the interests of men, and if they want women represented in the field, they need to figure out how to make it a place that doesn't repel women. Even to state that problem is to deploy stereotypes, a good subject for a whole other conversation, one that has virtually nothing to do with what we can see about the McGinn case, which is about seeking to have sex with someone who doesn't want it.

I began this post making fun of McGuinn's self-serving hair-splitting, but I end this reading overwhelmed by the lumping together of a big, multi-faceted feminist agenda. Where is the sharp thinking that makes proper distinctions and puts things together that belong together? Philosophers should be better at this sort of thing.

McGinn said — about the NYT article — "Read between the lines... Look closely at the language." If I had to sum up what I see in that semi-darkness, I'd say: A man took an offer that he thought served his interests and he agreed to shut up, and a lot of women are using the occasion to promote an agenda they've had for a long time about what will advance the careers of women.

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$700,000 to $800,000 spent to erase a quote that was displayed out of context.

Martin Luther King said "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness," which we will remember, even through it's now off the memorial. It's off the memorial because, in the "drum major" speech, there were some other words around it — as is always the case with snappy lines in speeches — and Maya Angelou and others felt some shades of subtlety were lost, making the man sound arrogant. Deeper grooves will be carved all over the memorial to disguise the wordlessness where there were once words, words that are etched more deeply into our memory as we read this news story and see, once again, "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."

Ironically, the news story doesn't include the context. So I'll tell you the context: The context is abysmal phony outrage, toadying obeisance to Angelou, and an atrocious waste of money.

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At long last audiotape: Monica Lewinsky micromanages Bill Clinton's next blowjob.

National Enquire seems to have a cassette that was supposed to have been destroyed long ago. On it, we hear Monica handling the sexual logistics:

"Since I know you will be alone tomorrow evening, I have two proposals for you, neither of which is you not seeing me... Now the first thing that has to happen is that you need to pre-plan with Betty..."

Betty Currie was Bill's secretary.

"... that you will leave the office at, I don't know, at 7, 7:30 so that everyone else who hates me that causes me lots of trouble goes home... Then you quickly sneak back and then in the meantime I quickly sneak over and then we can have a nice little visit for, you know, 15 minutes or half an hour. Whatever you want."...

“Maybe we could go over and watch a movie together and just have kind of, I don't know, boxed dinners or something like that... And then that way we don’t have to deal with the problem of me… of there being a record of me going upstairs and we can spend some time together and see a good movie. So I don’t know, those are two proposals and you can’t refuse me because I’m too cute and adorable and soon I won’t be here anymore to pop over."

Ah, those were the days. When relationships had context. It was more dinner and a movie, an elegant trajectory of feeling, not merely those phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness we hear so much of these days.

"I’m hoping you will hear this and you will choose which one you want to do and go tell Betty and then she can call me and let me know so I don't have to stress out all day and I don't have to call her every two hours and bug her because, I know you will find this very hard to believe, but I can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I’m very persistent, but um… I really want to see you."

How feminism has regressed since that golden era! Back then, a girl knew how to demand what she wanted and to get it.

ADDED: How blinded by sex do you need to be not to hear your future nemesis in her words?  I have two proposals for you, neither of which is you not seeing me... I can be a pain in the ass...  I’m very persistent, but um... But um, indeed! Think about how these  personality quirks will play out when you cut off her access. If you can. I bet you can't.

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"As a feminist, I find it infinitely sad to imagine a vibrant young woman sitting alone at her computer..."

"... and turning herself into a sex object for a man... she does not know — even if she is also turning him into a sex object. Twentieth-century feminism always linked the social progress of women with an expanding sense of self-worth — in the sexual as well as intellectual and professional spheres. A willingness to engage in Internet sex with strangers, however, expresses not sexual empowerment but its opposite — a loneliness and low opinion of oneself that leads to the conclusion that any sexual contact is better than no contact at all."

So writes Susan Jacoby, in the context of the Anthony Weiner story. I suspect that Jacoby was sitting alone at her computer when she wrote that. And I'm sitting alone at my computer writing this now. Is anything infinitely sad about writing at the computer? Is it sadder when you expect someone is waiting to read what you write and you expect them to write back? These days I choose, for each post, whether I want to allow comments or not, and for this one I haven't chosen yet. Is the sadness of what I'm doing right now dependent on whether I allow comments?

Or is this infinite sadness dependent on whether you are writing about sex, which I kind of am, or writing about sex while hoping that your reader finds you sexy?

As a feminist, she finds it infinitely sad, so perhaps you have to be a feminist to feel what's so terribly sad about a woman sitting at a computer, writing sexily to someone she expects will write back sexily. And perhaps the woman at the computer needs to be vibrant and young for it to be extremely sad for her to chose bodily solitude and sex in written form. Those are the words of the self-identified feminist, feeling sad about women writing alone and sexily at computers. Jacoby is 68 years old. Is she like Paul's grandfather in "Hard Day's Night," scoffing at Ringo for reading — "tormenting your eyes with that rubbish" — instead of "gettin' out there and living... Parading the streets!"?

That's not about sexting. It's timeless advice from the old to the young. Perhaps the elders in Jane Austen's life pressured her to quit writing about love relationships and get out there and fall in love.

But Jacoby seems most concerned with context:

Sex with strangers online amounts to a diminution, close to an absolute negation, of the context that gives human interaction genuine content. Erotic play without context becomes just a form of one-on-one pornography....

Deep down, what does a man really think of himself when he must feed his ego with phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness? What does a woman think of herself in the same arid zone of sex without sensuality?

Sex without context is pornography (to Jacoby). It's arid and fake. Even the man's orgasm is fake: "phony gasps." Even the man must lack self-esteem. That's the wrong kind of equality, with the woman straying out into the "arid zone" where meager men satisfy themselves. That's "not the sort of equality envisioned by feminism," she says in the end.  Women should shun this "lowest common denominator" sexuality that "debases the passion and reason of both men and women." Jacoby claims this end for feminism, but it's the oldest task in the world for women: channeling male sexuality, taming them, civilizing them, lifting them up, pumping the phallic lever for the elevation of us all.

(I'll put the comments on to make this more sad.)

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