"Which ultimately does more good — an article or monograph that is read by 20 or 30 people in a very narrow field..."

"... or a blog post on a topic of interest to many (such as grading standards or tenure requirements) that is read by 200,000?"

What if the post spurs hundreds of comments, is debated publicly in faculty lounges and classrooms, and gets picked up by newspapers and Web sites across the country—in other words, it helps to shape the national debate over some hot-button issue? What is it worth then?

These are 2 extremes, with the emphasis on numbers. Blog posts can also get lost in the endless flood of new words onto the internet. What is the value of any of these writings? The thing about a blog post is that you've got pressure to write clearly and to get it out quickly. Some material fits that form well and some does not.

Form and function. Think about it.

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"There is absolutely nothing worse than the stereotypical old fart in the cluttered office telling people 'It’s all crap!!!'—while pulling down, year after year, a handsome if static salary..."

"... and I’m perilously close to that. In classical Chinese philosophy there is an oft-repeated motif of the sage who writes a book and then departs beyond the frontiers, never to be seen again. Perhaps 7DS is that [non-]book."

So writes 62-year-old Philip Schrodt, who retiring from his tenured prof job at Penn State and setting up shop as an independent consultant.

7DS = "Seven Deadly Sins of Quantitative Political Analysis/The Web Site."

(I got to Schrodt's screed via Paul Caron.)

I'm 62, by the way, and last night I had a dream about someone trying to talk me into retiring, so it's odd running into this today. If you read between the lines chez Schrodt, you'll see he's energized about keeping more of the money he brings in. (I don't think he says anything about the pension he's going to collect, but that has to be part of the economic analysis upon which he's run the numbers.) He's also tired of what he's calling the "authoritarian" governance at his university and it's Sandusky-sullied reputation. And he's sick of academic journals:

I’d like to think I’m still doing research that is interesting, but once the work is written, it is out there on the web where anyone can find it, so why go through the agony of dumbing down the work for a major journal which will then hide it behind a paywall?

It's best to set up your work life so that the efforts you expend create the motivation to do more. If there's pointless drudgery and you don't have to do it, it's lazy not to change. You may imagine that laziness feels good, but slogging along doing things you don't value is deadly, and if you don't need to do it for the money, especially if the alternative is intrinsically energizing and more lucrative... honey, how come you don't move?

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"Many workplace set ups undermine introverted employees by failing to accommodate their personalities and productivity styles..."

"... over-stimulation and excessive meetings can easily stunt their full brain power. One study showed that when introverts and extroverts are given math problems to solve with various levels of background noise playing, introverts do best when the noise is lower, while extroverts perform better with louder noise...."

How about all the classrooms and test rooms? If it's really true that performance is affected, then introverts are systematically discriminated against in getting into schools and onto career paths. But to view this as a condition deserving accommodation would be awfully expensive or — if you let people work from computers in their home space — vulnerable to cheating.

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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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"He blamed his mother for chewing her food too loudly and his sister’s bad accent as part of a plan to drive him mad."

Said the teenager, who killed his parents and sister 46 years ago. He spent 6 years in a mental institution, then changed his last name, studied psychology, and became a professor.

The pony-tailed professor, Dr. James St. James — the head of Millikin University’s psychology department — was outed by a Texas reporter with the Georgetown Advocate, a newspaper based in the town where St. James fatally shot his parents and 17-year-old sister on Aug. 4, 1967.

One student said: "He really is a good guy. I have really fond memories, and I feel sorry for him, because now his life is all turned upside down."

ADDED: More here.

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"The Burka Avenger wears a flowing black veil — only her brown eyes are visible..."

"... as she fights corrupt politicians and religious zealots. Her weapons of choice: pens and books."

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"Attorneys for Christian parents who fled Germany in order to home school their children but have been denied U.S. asylum..."

"... said they are preparing to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case and were working with Congress to try to change asylum law."

In May, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals said the family did not meet the criteria for asylum, finding that Germany does not single out religious minorities for persecution. The court found that Germany treats all truants the same regardless of the reason, religious or not. Earlier this month, the court declined to revisit the issue.

ADDED: Why do they need to come to the United States? Germany is in the European Union, so they have a legal right to relocate to other EU countries, including Ireland, which has a right to home-school. 

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"I didn’t go to Thailand, but the summer that I took the bar I did all my studying by the pool."

Writes Instapundit:

I was set to clerk afterward at the Sixth Circut [sic] with a friend from law school who was black, and my goal was to be darker than her when I started. I succeeded — and that was the last really serious tan I had. Subsequent summers in law practice weren’t congenial to tanning; I couldn’t do all that work beside the pool...

He's commenting on a NYT article about the law school graduates who study for the bar and simultaneously vacation.

After all the money spent going to law school and all the pressure in the job market, who can take a vacation? I understand how grads who are going to clerk have a time slot when they can relocate, but where does the money come from? Instapundit frequently writes about "the law school bubble," but that's eclipsed here for a story about racial healing and premarital friendship. The NYT loves to urge its readers to angst over the struggles of the less-than-affluent, but that alternates with stories about privileged persons engaging in some activity that can be perceived as trendy or at least a trend.

I've had far too many free summers to feel envious of those who managed to combine summer vacationing and studying for the bar, but I do vividly remember my time studying in the summer of 1981. I wouldn't have wanted to read those bar review outline books out in the sun. Even if the sunblock available at the time were as good as it is today — and it was not — I've never liked reading in the glaring sunlight, perhaps precisely because getting a tan was never something I could possibly do, unless you count the broken-up tan called freckles.

And quite beyond that, I'd had a baby, my first, in March of that year, and the bodily imperative was not tanning/freckling, but breastfeeding. I enjoyed the post-law-school calm of memorizing the black-letter law that was confidently outlined in those bar-review books. It was so refreshingly different from the complexities of the law-school classroom, and everything was different with a baby. It was nice to get away from the apartment — we lived here — for a few hours to attend the lectures — which were shown in videotape in some big classroom somewhere on the NYU campus. There was no swimming pool, but I self-drenched with milk. There was always that pressure — do you know how it feels? — to get back home, to my baby and to my husband, who had the baby but not the breasts.

Oh! The strange rigors of the summer of 1981.

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Amanda Hess advises the NYT on how it should have done that big article the "hookup culture" in colleges.

She's got tips like: "Look outside the Ivies." Look outside the Ivies? The NYT is widening the perspective when it looks outside of Harvard. They went to the University of Pennsylvania. Isn't that enough?

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"I guarantee, if you home school your kids for eight hours a day every day, they’ll be in college at age 12, too."

So says a mother, presenting a conundrum: I'd be inclined to say that you can't make such a huge inference based on the experience within your own family, since you don't know what part of the achievement is based on the teaching method and what part is the skill of the parent and the inherited ability of these children. And yet if the skill of the parent and inherited ability are an important part of the daughters' achievement, why does the mother lapse into this huge inference and make a grossly unsupported guarantee?

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"The University of California... regents opted for a political hack of no academic merit whatsoever."

"Their pick, Janet Napolitano, has presided over one disaster after another at the Department of Homeland Security."

There's every reason to think Napolitano would bring what was once considered the world's finest public university system to a new low. Her record at Homeland Security was a series of failures, stemming from a slavish devotion to her boss in the White House and an adherence to political correctness.

And they could have had Condoleezza Rice.

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"Ball State already has a serious issue with creationism being taught as science by an astronomy professor, Hedin."

"Now they've hired another astronomy professor and creationist to teach science at their university, Gonzalez," says a Freedom From Religion Foundation lawyer.

Professor Gonzalez responds:

"As I communicated to members of the department during my interviews, I plan to continue my research on astrobiology and stellar astrophysics. I will not be discussing intelligent design (ID) in my classes (I didn't discuss ID at ISU either).... In my opinion, the controversy surrounding my hire is artificial -- largely generated by one activist blogger who is not an astronomer... Lastly, I need to reiterate that I was denied tenure at ISU not because of poor academics on my part, but for ideological and political reasons."

I'd say Gonzalez has the better side of this argument. Otherwise you'd be disqualifying even the most ordinary, mainstream religious believers from teaching science, creating fear of expressing the belief in God lest you become unemployable in your field.

(Notice that the FFR lawyer uses the term "creationism," and Gonzalez says "intelligent design.")

AND: Here's an old Slate article: "Creationism vs. Intelligent Design: Is there a difference?"

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"Big Sis: Bye."

Says Drudge, deploying an old nickname which he may never find reason to use again, as Janet Napolitano resigns her post as Secretary of Homeland Security to become president of the University of California system. Why do they want her out there for that?

[Napolitano is] an unusual choice that brings a national-level politician to a position usually held by an academic, the Times has learned. Her appointment also means the 10-campus system will be headed by a woman for the first time in its 145-year history.

It's not as though there aren't women among the academics, if the idea is Must. Have. Woman.

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