Wednesday, November 09, 2011

I'm puzzled.

I'm also unsympathetic, but I mean to keep that separate from this puzzle.

Some Arts undergraduates are "striking" tomorrow to demand the abolition of tuition.

They are also mass-emailing professors asking the professors to cancel classes in support of the strike.

But if the professors cancel classes, in what way are the students on strike? The professors are then on strike for a day. Students-- if we continue to use the labor law language that doesn't really make sense in this context anyways-- are then being subjected to a lockout. But their refusal to show up becomes irrelevant, because there's nothing to show up to.

Conceptually, wouldn't faculty compliance with this request abolish the student strike and just turn it into a faculty strike?
Political philosophy rankings

The top 20 programs in political philosophy, from the new round of Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report

Group 1 (1): rounded mean of 4.5 (median, mode)
University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)

Group 2 (2-9): rounded mean of 4.0 (median, mode)
Brown University (4, 4)
Duke University (4, 4)
Harvard University (4.25, 5)
New York University (4.5, 4.5)
Oxford University (4, 5)
Princeton University (4, 4)
Stanford University (4, 4)
Yale University (4, 4)

Group 3 (10-20): rounded mean of 3.5 (median, mode)
Australian National University (3.5, 4)
Queen’s University (Canada) (3.5, 4)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.5, 3.75)
University College London (3.5, 3.5)
University of California, San Diego (4, 4)
University of Chicago (3.5, 3.5)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (4, 4)
University of Pennsylvania (3.5, 3.5)
University of Toronto (3.5, 4)
University of Virginia (4, 4)

JTL: I have friends and colleagues who've been involved in the serious pushes and investments Arizona, Brown, and Duke in particular have made in political philosophy in the past several years, and am very pleased to see their excellence and progress recognized.