New website

It seems pretty unlikely that any of the 33 people who still subscribe to this blog via RSS are need to know this, or that if they need to, they don't already (am I FB friends will all 33 of you?), but it seems like proper online ettiquette to post this: I have a new website at http://jacobtlevy.com. I'm finally giving up on the frames-based one that has kept the same basic structure, look, and base HTML code (which I wrote myself) since late 1996. At some point, even I recognize that unselfconscious retro becomes kitsch becomes the suspicion that I'm doing the equivalent of putting my CV on a geocities page. This 2002-era blog will stick around for occasional use, though.

Political theory (and related) journals impact factors, 2014

This is one of those things I put here some years and not others, depending on whether it occurs to me. Folding together information from the poli sci, ethics, and law Journal Citation Reports (TM) from Thomson-Reuters Web of Science, on the journals that regularly publish theory, so that it's all available in one place for theorists. Note that Impact Factors have been shown by the Scholar General to be hazardous to your intellectual health. Use in moderation and with caution. Impact Factors can be useful to have on hand for reporting to various administrative bodies, but they are certainly overused and misused in a variety of ways. I mean to make the former easier, not to endorse the latter. This is not a substitute for a substantive assessment of quality, and this ranking has very close to no correlation with my own ranking of quality. Also note that, as always, a number of important journals including The Review of Politics and History of Political Thought are missing from these rankings altogether. American Political Science Review: 3.688, 2nd in Political Science
American Journal of Political Science: 3.269, 4th in PS
Annual Review of Political Science: 3.140, 5th in PS
Journal of Politics: 2.255, 9th in PS
Perspectives on Politics: 2.132, 11th in PS
British Journal of Political Science: 1.987, 15th in PS
Philosophy & Public Affairs: 1.273, 40th in PS, 10th in Ethics
Political Research Quarterly: 1.149, 47th in PS
Ethics: 1.140, 13th in Ethics
International Theory: 1.051, 52nd in PS
Political Studies: 0.939, 59th in PS
Journal of Political Philosophy, 0.870, 67th in PS, 21st in Ethics
Polity, 0.642, 92nd in PS
Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 0.641, 72nd in Law
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 0.588, 30th in Ethics
Political Theory, 0.576, 99th in PS
Law & Philosophy, 0.469, 34th in Ethics, 90th in Law
Ethics & International Affairs, 0.453, 110th in PS, 37th in Ethics
Contemporary Political Theory, 0.367, 124th in PS
Critical Review, 0.320, 130th in PS
Journal of Moral Philosophy, 0.275, 43rd in Ethics
Social Philosophy & Policy, 0.255, 44th in Ethics
Politics Philosophy & Economics, 0.214, 139th in PS, 47th in Ethics
Journal of Social Philosophy, 0.190, 49th in Ethics

Freedom of, or in, universities watch

Whither Goes Free Speech at Harvard?

Ivy League Cracks Down as Students Spiral Out of Control

Note the different framings, even though there are speech cases mixed in with the other examples in the second article.

It's not the case that residential colleges and universities face a choice between in loco parentis and internal rulelessness, standardlessness, normlessness.  Universities are associations; associations normally have the right to set domestic rules of conduct.  There are standards of liberty within universities that are different from, and more demanding than, the standards that govern the civil state: "academic freedom" is not the same as constitutional freedom of speech.  But associational freedom means that universities-- like churches, like the Boy Scouts-- have the authority to set rules of membership, and that the norms of constitutional law are not only legally but conceptually somewhat out of place in evaluating them.

And associational freedom is part of freedom.  Those choosing which residential college or university to attend are free to choose one whose domestic rules suit their tastes, values, and norms, from Brigham Young to Notre Dame to Reed.  Internal norms of behavior are an important part of how one collegiate experience differs from another; and it's no violation of liberty to offer the choice of a college life that expects civility and decency in recreational speech, or that limits or prohibits Greek life.

I would also note, though, that lurid stories about alcoholic excesses on college campuses should always be accompanied with an explanation of how the 21-year drinking age encourages concentrated binge drinking.

Does it count as beating a dead horse if the horse won?

I've written up my final reflections on tuition and the student boycott at Academic Matters magazine.  My colleague Daniel Weinstock argues for the other side.

Tuition and language politics

Maybe all of the following is obvious and widely-known; I haven't seen it discussed, though.

The "distinct society" portion of the tuition conversation has been mostly about the transfer of authority over higher education from the Catholic Church to the Quebec state in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, and the conscious commitment to work toward a social-democratic model of tuition-free higher education. But it seems to me that there's also a strong relationship with language-population politics.

The Quebec higher education system has several relevant distinct features:

1. CEGEP/ college education going to grade 13
2. Following directly from that, a 3-year university BA
3. A differentiation between tuition for in-province and out-of-province Canadian students-- standard in the US but, I believe, unique in Canada Update: not unique, I'm told in comments, but I'm having trouble coming up with general information. So far it looks to me as if Ontario, BC, Alberta, and Calgary all have uniform Canadian tuition rates, without provincial differentiation. More information, please!)
4. Very, very low in-province tuition-- not 0, but much closer to 0 than to tuition in Ontario or California.
5. Unusually high provincial levels of taxation

I treat (5) as part of higher education policy because defenders of low tuition insist that students aren't trying to avoid paying for their educations; they'll just pay for them later through taxes rather than up-front through tuition; and that this moreover prevents low tuition from being a regressive subsidy to the middle- and upper-class students who are most likely to attend university. And of course it's importantly connected to (4).

Now, the first thought I had in looking at all of this was, "anomalously low tuition and anomalously high taxes to pay for it can go together in a closed society where the same people spend their whole life cycle in the same tax-and-spend system, and the closed society is a convenient assumption for some social democratic modeling, but its empirical falseness means that the micro-level fairness story fails. You'll get people getting their cheap educations and then leaving, while others who have paid full price for a university education elsewhere, or even out-of-province tuition here, migrate here and then pay again through the tax system." Now, one unattractive feature about that from my perspective is that it creates a possible sense that people are doing something wrong, shirking their fair share of the burden for their own education, by out-migrating; I think that's an illiberal norm to run a society on. But on its face it also looks fiscally unsustainable: everyone's incentive is to get the education and then get out. And then I thought to myself, "discouraging out-migration is an important part of the preservation of The french Fact. So I'm missing something."

Separate the population into three groups, and look at how the system works for each.

1) Out-of-province students have roughly neutral incentives to come to university here, but a disincentive to come to university and stay. Out-of-province tuition is roughly comparable to tuition elsewhere in the country (though still lower than Ontario), and out-of-province students get the standard 4-year degree since they didn't go to CEGEP, so if they just come get a BA and leave again they're neither getting any special discount nor paying any special price. But if they come and stay, then they've paid 4 years of normal tuition rather than 3 years of cheap tuition, and then they spend the rest of their lives paying taxes as if they had benefitted from the discount rate. (The same is true-but-moreso for international students.)

2. In-province anglophones have an incentive to do what I described above: get a BA on the cheap by paying three years of low tuition, then migrate out to anywhere else in North America where their taxes will be lower. The incentive to stay local for the BA is very steep.

3. In-province francophones face the same financial incentives as in-province anglophones: a huge incentive to stay local for the BA, since the three-year low tuition degree is vastly cheaper than a four-year normal-tuition degree elsewhere. Then-- here's the part that puzzled me-- they have an incentive at the margin to leave when the high taxes kick in.

But exit in post-collegiate early adulthood is a lot easier for anglophones. They've got, roughly, the whole Canadian and American college-educated labor market open to them, and they enter it on an equal footing with those whose educations were anywhere else in North America.

If English is neither your first language nor the language of your university education, it's a lot harder to suddenly jump into the educated-labor market of anglophone North America at age 22 or 25. You're starting at a disadvantage in that market that doesn't apply if you stay close to home. If, by contrast, you had left home for an English-language four-year education, you'd be a lot more likely to, as it were, defect, and take advantage of the economic opportunities open to anglophone university graduates in other parts of the continent.

So the system as a whole acts as a financial disincentive to permanent in-migration from the rest of North America (and NB that French citizens pay in-province tuition rates, not international tuition rates) and as a marginal incentive to out-migration for anglophones once they've gotten their college educations. But for francophones from Quebec, it acts as a strong incentive to stay at home for university education, a moment when there might otherwise be an especially high risk of permanent out-migration, and a marginal reduction in their ability to out-migrate later.

In other words, even if some number of high-earning francophones leave (and therefore never "pay back" the cheap university educations they receive) the system broadly tends toward making francophone Quebec a more self-contained economic world in which people do spend their whole life cycles, while simultaneously subtly encouraging anglophone out-migration and discouraging anglophone in-migration.

This, perhaps oddly, makes me slightly more sympathetic to the system than I would otherwise be. (It also, of course, makes it more sustainable than it would otherwise be; it significantly retards the get-your-cheap-degree-then-get-out dynamic.) Francophone Quebec does need to be a partly self-contained economic world to be sustainable; a large steady outflow of 18-year olds who never came back could be the beginning of a downward spiral in the viability of the French Fact. (Note, too that a bloated civil service is often a part of this kind of system in postcolonial societies; it provides jobs for a surplus of locally-highly-educated workers.) Of all the possible policies to sustain the French Fact on a population basis, this tax-and-subsidize policy is on the low-coercion side. (It might, probably does, depress the overall prosperity of Quebec, and that has to go into the calculations too; in the long term, la survivance will depend on an economy that is successful, competitive, and attractive, not just one that is self-contained enough to discourage emigration.)

But-- if I'm right about all this-- I do think it's worth acknowledging the uncomfortable truths that the system operates to diminish the mobility of local francophones, indeed depends on doing so, while simultaneously greasing the slide out of town for local anglophones.

This is all back-of-the-envelope modeling, and I'm entirely open to correction and instruction in the comments. See also: Kymlicka and Patten, eds., Language Rights and Political Theory; and an article of mine defending the compatibility of ethnocultural federalism geared with an emphasis on preserving the national minority's culture with liberalism.

Banana republicanism

‎"Special law" is every bit the contradiction in terms that "student strike" is. Emergency decrees and bills of attainder aren't laws, and I won't be referring to Bill 78 as a law except in scare quotes.

On the other hand, my patience for playing along with the phrase "student strike" ran out as of the UQAM protests this week, when the protesters prevented students and professors from meeting together for educational purposes, screaming "scab" at the students who wanted to attend class. Calling it a strike means calling the students who want to attend class scabs, and calling their attempts to attend class illegitimate, so I won't be doing that either.

So, that said, some first impressions of the proposed decree.

1. Section III is entirely illegitimate. I don't know whether it passes Charter review; I am not a Canadian lawyer. But it is an absurdly draconian violation of freedom of assembly and indeed freedom of movement. It's police state stuff, unworthy of a free society.

2. Section V.29 multiplies the reach of every other punitive and prohibitionist part of the act, so much so that it renders Sections III IV, and V as wholes illegitimate. It amounts to the category of conspiracy-by-omission. It means that not only anyone who talks to student protesters or protest leaders over the next several months is vulnerable to prosecution, but that even avoiding them won't keep you safe. Again, police state stuff.

3. If one were to detach V.29, Section IV and the rest of Section V start to look more complicated. They skirt awfully close to the line of being a bill of attainder; they're certainly not a normal case of lawful governance. But the boycott has created a legally strange situation. The boycotters, calling what they're doing a "strike," assert a collective democratic right to prevent students and professors from carrying on classes. But the concept of a student strike is unknown to Quebec law. That doesn't mean that it's illegal; it's not prohibited, and in a a free society that which is not prohibited is allowed. But striking is not only a refusal to do something; it is also an assertion of the authority to prevent others-- "scabs"-- from doing it. That makes it less like "assembly" and "speech" and more like "contract" or "will," come the moment when the beneficiary of a contract or a will seeks to take possession. In order to maintain peace and keep clear on what everyone's rights are, we normally rule out self-help and don't treat "contract" or "will" as things that one can just be left alone to do. They're powers partly constituted by law, exercisable in ways described and prescribed by law.

If I say that you and I had a contract, but it was oral and unwitnessed, and I try to seize the goods to which our supposed contract entitled me, you call the police to protect yourself and your goods. To that, it is insufficient on my part to say "unwitnessed oral contracts aren't prohibited." What I say is true, but it's also true that an unwitnessed oral promise does not rise to the level of "contract" that legitimizes coerced performance. Your right to carry on unmolested by me is something about which the law can't just be agnostic.

In a strike-as-constituted-by-the-labour-code, employers and would-be replacement workers have their freedom of action limited. The strike isn't just an action by the workers; it's an authorized limitation on others. The student unions, purporting to strike, have tried to self-help their way into that same ability to limit the actions of others. The law can't just be agnostic about whether students who don't wish to boycott may attend class unmolested, whether universities may protect their classrooms from disruption and protect access to them. And since this is not a legally-constituted strike, the legal answer is that those who wish to carry on with their educational activities are free to do so. Injunctions to protect their access, like legal action to prevent me from carrying off your stuff that I say you promised me, look aggressive but are legally defensive, defending the legal freedom of those the protesters want to characterize as "scabs" but who are not in a legal position like the would-be replacement workers during a labour strike.

The injunctions have been flouted; and protesters have repeatedly created situations where police have to choose between not protecting the rights of universities, professors, and dissenting students or trying to coerce large determined crowds of protesters. When they opt for the latter, they use the ugly and abusive tools of riot control against people who were not rioting but who were obstructing the legal rights of others, en masse. There is no peaceful way to move hundreds or thousands of people who do not wish to be moved. And there is also no rule that whatever hundreds or thousands of people together want to do must be legitimate. This has been the paradoxical situation of the last several weeks in particular. The police have been first to use violence, at least large-scale violence, over and over again; but that doesn't mean that the injunction-flouting protests were legitimate.

I don't know enough about Canadian civil procedure to know why contempt of court proceedings couldn't be used to do what Section IV of the emergency decree tries to do: coerce the unions through crippling financial penalties in order to try to stop having to violently coerce the bodies of protesters. That would be preferable to this kind of legislative action. But some attempt to hold unions responsible for protests that flout injunctions and disrupt the legal freedom of others does seem legitimate, and preferable to constant situations that can be resolved only through police violence or through abandoning the freedom of third parties to the whims of the protesters. The unions are creatures of Quebec law, with power granted by law to compel dues payment from students; but they have helped themselves to an authority that isn't granted by the law that creates them, and when others have ignored that supposed authority have freely encouraged lawless response. It's awfully late in the day for their leaders to discover that "social peace" is at risk. Their attitude toward injunctions and toward the rights of universities, professors, and dissenting students has been one of "contempt for the rule of law," as Bernard Amyot, former president of the Canadian Bar Association put it. That doesn't excuse the government from blame for its own abandonment of the rule of law in the new emergency decree.

As with the ban on masks, illegitimate behavior by the protesters is going to met by an illegitimate response, deeply restricting what should be protected freedom of expression. Section III and Section V.29, like the ban on masks, are opportunistic expansions of state and police power far beyond what is needed, or what is compatible with liberal freedom. And Section V.29's multiplier effect on the rest of the act pushes all of Sections IV and V into that category. But for the student unions to suddenly appeal to the rule of law and freedom of assembly when they've scorned those for everyone else is a bit much. The upshot is a lot of damage all around to Quebec's ability to function as a free society.

Update: While I was writing this post, the Montreal city council unsurprisingly passed the awful ban on masks. Kafka-esque question-begging of the day:

The leader of one of the city's opposition parties, Louise Harel, asked for clarification on whether scarves or bandanas worn by protesters protecting themselves against chemical irritants or tear gas would be included in the ban.

A lawyer for the police insisted those scarves are considered masks under the bylaw. The reasoning is, according to the lawyer, that if tear gas is being deployed, the demonstration has already been declared illegal.

Freedom of complex associations watch

Complex associations are associations-- "intermediate" or "civil society" or "enterprise" in Oakeshott's use of that word-- that themselves contain associations or systems of associations. Examples are the Catholic Church, with its internal orders of many kinds from Opus Dei to Benedictine monasteries to the Jesuits, and universities, with their internal systems of student clubs. Complex associations must decide how wide to set the boundaries of freedom of association for their own internal groups; and their freedom to set terms for their own internal groups is itself part of their own associational freedom. Sometimes there are tricky, nested problems here; sometimes there could be complicated and subtle solutions. And then there's Tennessee.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Lawmakers have given final approval to a bill seeking to rescind Vanderbilt University's "all-comers" policy, which requires school groups to allow any interested students to join and run for office. The Senate approved its version of the bill sponsored by Republican Judiciary Chairwoman Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet on a 19-12 vote on Monday. The House later followed suit on a 61-22 vote. Voting yes were 57 Republicans and three Democrats and one independent. Voting no were 21 Democrats and one Republican. Thirteen members abstained. Christian student leaders have been vocal in opposition, saying their groups shouldn't be forced to admit members, and possibly leaders, who do not share their beliefs. Under the proposal, which is headed to the governor for his consideration, "a religious student organization may determine that the organization's religious mission requires that only persons professing the faith of the group ... qualify to serve as members or leaders. "No state higher education institution may deny recognition or any privilege or benefit to a student organization or group that exercises such rights," according to the proposal.

This is to place the associational freedom of subordinate religious clubs categorically above the freedom of association of the university.

Political bias in academia, revisited yet again

Lots of people who should know better seem to be excited about this silly John Tierney article on this Jonathan Haidt presentation about political bias in the academy.

Haidt has taken things that surely by now everyone knows about politics and the academy-- e.g. that the professoriate leans left compared to the American populace as a whole-- and dressed them up in various bits of metaphor and jargon. Some of the metaphors are good ones; I like the magnet image. But they're metaphors, not evidence. Throw in what on usenet we once would have called ObLarrysummers, and the cute fact that it's social psychologists in the audience-- people who think of thesmelves as good at analyzing patterns of bias!-- and we're done. We have a just-so story about the evolution of taboos around topics having to do with race and gender straight out of the political correctness wars circa 1992, retold in a way that emphasizes what's supposed to be clear as soon as one says "taboo"-- that there's something magical and superstitious rather than rational about it.

But here's what we don't have:
1) Any meaningful new evidence about the political imbalance in the academy.
2) Any meaningful evidence at all of bias.
3) Any attempt whatsoever to sort out the competing explanations for the political imbalance that are the heart of any serious conversation on the topic.

Stipulating that the academy skews left compared with a random population sample (which is what Haidt's facially meaningless phrase "statistically impossible lack of diversity" actually means), we are always faced with the question of why. Random population samples are, after all, not something one usually comes across in daily life; even professional opinion pollsters trying to get such samples have real trouble doing so, because, e.g., the people who own landline phones, as opposed to no phones or only cell phones, aren't a random population draw, and if you survey using the phone book you'll get a skewed sample.

The common explanations:

1) Initial self-selection. Different careers reflect different mindsets and values, and the sorting into those careers early in means that there's no reason to expect them to look like random population draws. No one is surprised when the military skews right or the Peace Corps skews left. There's probably some sorting as between, say, those who go into business or finance of various kinds out of college and those who pursue PhDs. This point can be put in a value-neutral way, or said with whatever sanctimonious inflection one likes. "Conservatives are practical, and practical people go into business, while head-in-the-cloud unrealistic people want to go into an ivory tower." "Liberals believe in critical thought and reasoning, so they are naturally attracted to careers that value it; conservatives don't like having their assumptions questioned, so they naturally turn away from intellectual careers." Note that one has to go through another round of this in order to think about why any one discipline is politically skewed: economists, engineers, philosophers, and literary theorists are plausibly different groups of people to begin with, and they sort themselves out accordingly.

2) Selection and screening mechanisms. The favorite sanctimonious left-wing explanation for why there aren't conservatives in the academy is that the academy's various hurdles, from grad school admission onward, screen for intelligence, and conservatives are less intelligent people.

3) Change over time. The second-favorite sanctimonious left-wing explanation is that academics, who might start out with no real political views at all, are influenced by evidence and argument, and these favor movement toward the left, or at least toward a point farther left than the American median. Sometimes this is distinctively about the post-2001 years, but sometimes not. Common symptoms of this argument are the mindless repetition of John Stuart Mill's comments about conservatives being stupid or Lionel Trilling's "irritable mental gestures." Equally uninteresting is something like this: university professors, with their tenure and their taxpayer-funded salaries become left-wing because they resent their dependence on hard-working productive people who have real jobs; they spend their whole lives cut off from and failing to learn about markets, competition, and business, so what do you expect?

4) Bias-- whether unintended (the hostile environment "locker room talk" Haidt discusses) or intended ("don't tenure him, he's a Republican."). These are meaningfully different from each other, but both are problematic.

Sorting these out requires hard longitudinal work. When, in the decades from freshman year of college to tenure, does the political skew get introduced? Are conservatives disinclined to enter a given discipline at all, maybe just because they're disproportionately more interested in other things? Trying to enter the discipline but failing because they're not smart enough? Entering the discipline but becoming more left-wing over time? Trying to enter but dropping out because they're discouraged by groupthink? Or trying to enter but being kept out by overt bias? The answer may be "some of each," of course, and the dynamics may feed on each other-- but that's a hypothesis in its own right.

A slice-of-time show of hands at an academic conference in response to the question "who here is a conservative?" does absolutely nothing to sort any of this out. Neither does a google search on the phrases "liberal social psychologist" and "conservative social psychologist." Those two data only show what we already knew: the professoriate skews left. The two solicited anonymous e-mails complaining about uncomfortable environments provide anecdotal support for "unintended bias," but, well, not very much. And the cute fact that the presentation is being offered to social psychologists who study the emergence of bias in groups has some nice rhetorical effect in the room, but still doesn't add any insight.

I freely admit that sorting these questions of causation out is extremely hard. But anyone who claims to be talking about this subject and doesn't even acknowledge them, to say nothing of trying to solve them, hasn't added to our knowledge, and certainly hasn't provided any reason for supporters of the bias hypotheses to run around claiming vindication. The fact that the presentation (note: not an article, not a paper, a power point presentation at a conference) got a NYT write-up from a sympathetic columnist doesn't make it any more of a contribution to our knowledge.

Compare and contrast

Does Canada lack global ambition?

"We don’t have enough time on task, we don’t have enough days in the year, we don’t have enough hours in the day. We don’t have enough emphasis on science and math. We don’t have a high enough standard for literacy, an encouragement for people to be literate and numerate when they graduate. The people [teachers] who perform the most precious job in our society and economy are not rewarded for success nor punished for failure.

So mediocrity is protected and excellence is not rewarded. At the university level, I think we have high quality institutions but again I would say that we tend to be very constrained by collective agreements. Fewer and fewer days in the year are actually spent teaching."

University considers cutting semesters from 13 weeks to 12
SSMU VP Abaki pushes for the change, arguing that McGill students work harder than their peers

The McGill administration is currently considering a number of changes to the university's academic calendar, including a proposal to shorten the lengths of the fall and winter semesters by reducing the number of hours students are in contact with their professors.

Standard McGill classes currently give students three hours of contact with instructors per week for 13 weeks, for a total of 39 hours per semester. The proposal, which is being considered by the Working Group on Calendars and Dates, a subgroup of McGill Senate's Committee on Enrolment and Student Affairs, would reduce the required number of contact hours to 36 per semester.

Students' Society Vice-President University Affairs Joshua Abaki has pushed for the changes, arguing that McGill students must work harder than their peers at other universities. According to Abaki, McGill is the only member of the G-13—a group of research-focused universities in Canada—that requires 39 hours.

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It may be of interest here to note that McGill's faculties are not unionized.

Concerning the astonishing student complaint that they are getting too much teaching for their dollar, it is perhaps also worth noting that in-province tuition for Quebec universities is far lower than equivalent tuition is at other G13 universities.

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value." Thomas Paine.

Not an Onion study

"Many Faculty-Senate Leaders at Doctoral Institutions Lack Clout, Survey Finds"

Once again, higher education has managed to be the study of something that sounds like it should be, but is not, from
the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as Study finds working at work improves productivity, New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.

The pamphlet

I think this has the potential to be very big news in our little corner of the world, though it won't feel like it until the first uptake from a university press. From the press release:

Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century--works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the "heft" required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated--whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event.

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch "Kindle Singles"--Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today's announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

For academics in the liberal arts, the options have been more like "less than 10,000 or more than 70,000"-- monographs don't typically weigh in at 50,000 words. But everyone knows that what Henry Farrell says is true: many of those 80,000 word books would have been better as 25,000 word extra-sized articles.

Presumably, the reason we don't have physical pamphlets published is because they don't make economic sense, and presumably that will continue to be the case.

But imagine what happens the first time a university press says it will publish-- "direct to digital," as it were-- peer-reviewed contributions in that 10-30,000 word range.

Departments, disciplines, and universities that draw very sharp distinctions between articles and books ("one book for tenure, two for full")

Robert Paul Wolff on writing a dissertation

Here. I endorse almost every part of this, and of course especially this:

In Philosophy, a dissertation is The Defense of a Thesis. [That is why a dissertation is referred to familiarly as a thesis.]

What is a thesis? It is a proposition, expressed in a declarative sentence. Here are some examples of theses:

Contrary to popular opinion, David Hume and Immanuel Kant have almost identical views on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge. [This is the thesis of my doctoral dissertation]

God is dead.

God is not dead; he has just been on vacation.

In all situations, I am morally obliged to choose the act that will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Here are some examples of things that are not theses:

Kant and Hume on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge

Nietzsche's view of religion

Act utilitarianism

Each of these is a topic, not a thesis. You cannot write a dissertation defending a topic.

I take exception to the boldfaced portion of this:

In order to write a dissertation, you must be prepared to defend a thesis. If you cannot state the thesis of your dissertation in a single declarative sentence, you are not ready to write. Do not make the mistake of thinking that if you begin writing, your thesis will become clear eventually. That way lies disaster. You ought to be able to begin your dissertation with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." You should then be able to conclude your dissertation with this sentence: "Thus we see that p."

The beginning and end of that paragraph are certainly right. The middle is right only

"If you are like me, and work in your head,"

Some people can work through an article-length idea in their heads. It has become clear in reading Wolff's memoirs that he really can work through a book-length idea in his head. But most of us can't.

What is true is that until you know your thesis, you cannot write your introduction or conclusion. What is probably true is that if you do not know your thesis, much of what you are writing won't end up in your final dissertation. But the last thing graduate students need to think is "you are not ready to write," full stop. Write. Try an idea out. See where it goes. Maybe you have a thesis for one chapter that you're pretty sure about; write that. Or maybe you have an objection to a standard view in the literature that you're pretty sure about. Write that. (A literature review per se isn't writing, but it does get you in the habit of putting words onto paper, and it sometimes leaves you with a more useful resource than scattered notes.)

Wolff is absolutely right to emphasize the importance of slow-but-steady writing-- a page or two a day, every day, of new writing, not revising. But I doubt that any but a handful of students are well-served by telling them to : Start on Page 1, with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." This is all of a piece with my concerns above. Almost every successful dissertation I've seen written was written from the inside out, not from the beginning to the end. If you're going to write from page 1, you have have to know your thesis cold before you start writing. If you wait until you know your thesis cold before you start writing, you'll wait far too long.

When you write from the inside out, you should make every effort to write a beginning and end that make it look as if you've written from beginning to end! And that will require some revision of the middle chapters. By the time you're writing your introduction, you know your story, and you'll want to adjust the middle portions to make them fit more cleanly together and more cleanly into the story.

Wolff's absolutel right on what a dissertation is, and in large part right about writing. But I fear that parts of his advice encourage too much delay. Start writing.

What I've Been Reading: Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem

I mean to start doing more book-blogging here, along the lines that Tyler Cowen does it-- my thoughts and reactions to what I read, rather than worked-out reviews. These'll sometimes be opaque to those who haven't read the books, but might at least stimulate interest in them. What follows is rather longer than I expect these posts will usually be.

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This is a superb book by two outstanding scholars, demonstrating a terrific fusion of rigorous philosophical argument and formal/ economic reasoning, in the service of an argument that modern economics is radically incomplete. Against the invisible hand of the marketplace that relies on interest, and the iron hand of regulation that relies on punishment, they set an intangible hand relying on the quest for esteem. In the heart of the book, they walk through one type of setting after another and one type of problem after another, showing in an abstract and powerful way what the tradeoffs and dynamics are within the pursuit of esteem, what social institutions and individual choices look like when thought of in esteem-seeking terms.

It’s also, to my mind, a sometimes strange and frustrating book. I may not be its target audience, for much of it seems designed to refute the null hypothesis that esteem-seeking is irrelevant or powerless, and that only interest-seeking matters. I suppose that it ought to be persuasive to anyone subscribing to that hypothesis. But then again someone holding it has disregarded a great deal of evidence and argument already, and won’t necessarily cease to do so just because the argument Is presented in terms he or she finds cognitively familiar.

As a result, Brennan and Pettit often—not always, but often—talk about the desire for esteem as an unusual feature of human life, something that has its primary effects in the domain of civil society set apart from the market and the state. But it is pervasive; it pervades and intertwines with the pursuits of wealth and power. It is indeed more pervasive than they are, no matter how powerfully they shape our macro-social institutions. The desire to avoid disesteem and humiliation , and the willingness to follow norms the breaking of which is shameful, surrounds us and shapes us, all the time.

Another oddity of emphasis, that is I think connected. The authors are conscientious about regularly noting perverse cases—“intangible backhand” problems in which the desire for esteem results in misaligned incentives or undesirable behaviors. But these are always treated as exceptional, as interestingly quirky—kind of the way that economists present Giffen goods. The language of “esteem” and “estimable” encourages this.

But there are plenty of other words and concepts that might be used, but that barely register in the book: Pride. Glory, vanity, or their traditional hybrid vainglory. Egotism (as distinct from the egoism of homo economus). Above all, as far as I’m concerned: status. Many of the dynamics that are presented in such successful abstraction seem likely to be beneficial so long as we think of them as esteem-seeking—and immediately take on a more baleful aspect when we think of them as status-seeking.

The book notes that sometimes the economy of esteem is blocked from its best operation by a systematic disesteem for whole groups of people, e.g. racial prejudice. And its treatment of what happens within the subordinated group as a result are very interesting. But the superordinate group isn't mentioned, and I kept thinking that some whiteness studies would have done some good here. The authors are interested in the disincentive to performance among the subordinate group who can't receive full-- or, sometimes, any-- esteem rewards for excellence. But the counterpart is the unearned status boost for even the least estimable members of the superordinate group. Jim Crow was economically destructive, but represented a categorical increase in status for lower-class whites; they gained a status floor beneath which they could not normally fall, just in virtue of not being black. And so they became dogged supporters and enforcers of Jim Crow, to protect and maintain their own otherwise-precarious status gains.

The often-positive-sum esteem settings the authors focus on are important and interesting. But they are not the whole of the economy of esteem, and are probably not the most important ways that esteem and status affect social institutions, the market, and politics.

A final complaint, minor in fact though it bothered me a great deal. Brennan and Pettit do make occasional reference to the historical importance of the view that esteem-seeking was a primary motivation. But their desire to contrast the intangible and invisible hands means that Adam Smith almost always appears as a synecdoche for the economistic worldview—and doesn’t appear often in any case. But Smith’s greatest work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments—mentioned here primarily as a source for the invisible hand metaphor!—is a work that’s centrally about the relationship between esteem-seeking and moral psychology, between the desire for praise and the desire for praiseworthiness, between human motivation and the good opinion of others; in short, about the core material of this book. And the book omits altogether the great critic of esteem-seeking behavior, Smith’s contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The book in fact contains many good answers to traditional critiques of esteem-seeking, draws credible connections between the pursuit of esteem and the attainment of excellence, and greatly adds to our understanding. And I want to emphasize again how admirable its combination of economic and philosophical reasoning is. This may be the finest manifestation I know of the intellectual atmosphere that existed at the Australian National University’s Research School of the Social Sciences (where the authors were longtime colleagues) for many years, and that’s high praise. But the book by its own admission is meant to be research-agenda-opening, not primarily question-answering. Much work remains to be done in thinking about status, power, and interest-based motivations alongside each other, sometimes rivalrous, sometimes reinforcing, always interacting—and about what follows for the methodologies of the social sciences.

With respect to institutional reforms, the authors are very concerned to make the point that professionals should be treated like professionals, and rewarded with esteem for excellence, rather that either micromanaged in a punitive regulatory fashion or "incentivized" (as the ugly word goes) with constant payments for performance. This is persuasive and important-- and indeed helps to make sense of how and why many professions are organized the way that they are. But it's a lesson that operates within boundaries, too. Professions as sectors, and firms of professionals like law firms, face market discipline, even when professionals as individual workers are not paid by commission. I think the authors are concerned to show that, e.g., civil servants and public school teachers also ought to be treated as professionals, with their time use regulated by the intangible hand and not the invisible or the iron hand. No doubt there's something to that; but it needs to be paired with an understanding of what will take the place of the market boundaries faced by private-sector professions. And there's something slightly underwhelming about "treat schoolteachers better" as the institutional takeaway from a book that, on its face, is attempting a major overhaul in how social science is done.

(At least, a major overhaul in how economics is done. Sociology, it must be said, has never been blind to the importance of status. But economists-- even, apparently, very fine and professionally-interdisciplinary economists-- sometimes have trouble acknowledging that sociology has gone somewhere before they have.)

The best part of the book by far is Part II, "Within the Economics of Esteem," that formalizes and analyzes many features of esteem-seeking behavior, and casts light on lots of situations. (Not accidentally, many of these are set in universities and among academics; I've maintained several times on this blog that academic life is more usefully modeled as status-seeking than as interest-seeking.) Readers of these chapters need to be brave enough not to be frightened away by the mere appearance of a diagram or an equation, but these are no more difficult than what appears in an introductory microeconomics class and in any case their ideas and intuitions are clearly explained in the accompanying prose. But pause to appreciate the models if you can. They're pitched at a very well-chosen level. They simplify and abstract, as models do... but they don't simplify into straight lines or monotonic curves. Brennan and Pettit have thought carefully about discontinuities, asymmetries, sharp angles, and indeterminate zones, and they simplify just enough to highlight them, rather than simplifying them away-- and many of the best ideas of the book are found in the discussions and justifications of those discontinuities, asymmetries, and so on.

we have dozens of institutions trying to be identical miniature, for instance, McGills.

A very interesting and challenging article on tuition, incentives, and teaching. It includes this crucial bit of wisdom that echoes something that's come up in this space before:

Now, if you think of universities not as revenue-maximizing institutions but as prestige-maximizing institutions, it all starts to fall into place.

Now, I don't share Usher's attitude to the pursuit of star researchers as a university-building strategy. But the point about tuition, incentives, and institutional convergence is clearly right.

Robert Paul Wolff's memoirs

Via Brian Leiter, the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff is blogging his memoirs, and it's amazingly entertaining stuff. Three excerpts (but read the whole thing):
first installment:

It was also Arno [Mayer] who unintentionally taught me a pedagogical lesson that has stood me in good stead for forty-five years. His first lecture dealt with the waves of invasions by Germanic tribes that brought the Roman Empire to its knees. Arno had the brilliant idea of relating these invasions to the major battles that had been fought by Germany and the Allies in World War II. The terrain was of course the same, and inasmuch as the rivers and valleys had not moved in the intervening fifteen hundred years, the two made a lovely fit. The five of us sat in the last row of the lecture hall and marveled at the brilliance of Arno's presentation. But when we next met our individual classes, we discovered to our dismay that the students had been massively underwhelmed. The problem was simple. It was nineteen fifty-eight, and our students were eighteen years old, which meant that they had been four when most of those battles were fought. The Second World War was ancient history to them, something their parents did. They had never heard of the Battle of the Bulge.
Sad to say, this experience has been repeated endlessly over the decades. The Freshmen I now encounter were born during the Clinton Administration and probably came to some degree of awareness of the larger world during George W. Bush's second term. Anything before that might as well be ancient Rome. For many years, I compensated for this absence of historical memory by extracting my philosophical examples from Star Trek, but even that draws blank stares now, and as I do not get HBO, I cannot substitute The Sopranos. There is nothing that makes you feel older faster than teaching undergraduates.

second installment:

The next summer, my advisee invited me to dinner at his apartment, where he had taken up light housekeeping with a lovely Radcliffe girl. Saul [Kripke] was there as well. Saul's father was a Conservative Rabbi, and Saul had had a serious Jewish upbringing. As he talked, he davaned, which is to say he rocked back and forth vigorously. As he talked and davaned he ate, gesturing spastically, and as he talked and davaned and ate and gestured, his food scattered all over the table, as if to illustrate the law of entropy. With gentle understanding, the young Radcliffe student patiently swept the peas up from the table top and put them back on Saul's plate, where they stayed for a bit before being restrewn.
I have often wondered whether Saul, brilliant though he undoubtedly was, ever understood how much slack everyone was cutting him, from Quine on down. Somehow, I think not.

Followed immediately by:

For the most part, I went my own way in the department. Harvard professors don't really advance much beyond what is called in child development books "parallel play." No one attends anyone else's lectures, of course, and there is precious little socializing. When they encounter one another on campus, they resemble the dukes and counts at the medieval court of Burgundy, glorious and richly appointed and very formal. Each full professor proceeds in stately fashion, preceded like Cyrano's nose by his vita, and trailing in his wake several Assistant Professors who exhibit the appropriate submissive body language.

This story is the crowning achievement of the memoirs so far, but it demands to be read not excerpted-- go have a look.

Update: The posts are still coming, one a day. See here for the birth of Social Studies and for life with "Barry" (!) Moore and "Herbie" (!!!) Marcuse.

Is...?

This entertaining Gawker post (via Jonathan Chait) about frequent google searches for celebrities-- and the constant recurrence of one in particular-- prompted a few minutes of fooling around to come up with the following about prominent academics.

First of all, I think it's noteworthy what google gives you when you just type in the word "is" . Try it and see.

But on with the show. Google's suggested questions:

Is Cass Sunstein
Jewish

Is Cornel West
married
wife white
married to a white woman
a Christian

Is Larry Summers
Jewish

Is Milton Friedman
still alive

Is Henry Louis Gates
married
married to a white woman

Is Paul Krugman
a liberal
Jewish
a democrat
married

Is Rawls
a utilitarian

Is Tyler Cowen
autistic

Is Weber
a functionalist
a jewish name

Is Michael Ignatieff
Jewish

Is Michael Sandel
Jewish

and, best of all:

Is John Mearsheimer
Jewish

I've been known to complain...

I've been known to complain about Phi Beta Cons, the uninteresting National Review blog about higher education. I can easily imagine a place for a website filled with smart and well-informed conservative commentary on the academy, and I think it'd be a useful thing. But it would have to not consist of endless complaints about all forms of affirmative action save for alumni preferences and football admits; whines that Very Serious Studies by National Review freelancers aren't making it onto college curricula; jokes about political correctness that were the state of the comedic are in 1990 or so; and griping that the kids these days are having the sex.

There's lots of talk about the student-loan reform at PBC right now, little of it enlightening in the slightest. But at least it's not PBC, but rather The Corner, that came up with this gem. Republican Senator Lamar Alexander issues a bunch of dull talking points about the reform, and how it turns everything over to the government. He predicts that it will lead to something

more like a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything. In most of those countries, they’ve been falling over themselves to reject their state-controlled authoritarian universities, which are much worse than ours, and move toward the American model which emphasizes choice, competition, and peer-reviewed research. In that sense, we’re now stepping back from our choice-competition culture, which has given us not just some of the best universities in the world, but almost all of them.

So: "Soviet-style" is clearly in there for polemical value. But The Corner headlines the post "Alexander: Obama's 'Soviet-Style' Takeover of Student Loans." Alexander's comparing the predicted system of higher education to the Soviet system. But the headline makes "Soviet-style" into a description of the "takeover"-- i.e. a violent nationalization without compensation.

Notice that banks would be free to continue to make student loans. And they're not having their existing assets taken. All they're losing is the ability to make publicly subsidized student loans in the future. A comparison with Soviet nationalization is just nuts. And it's not even what Alexander said.

Anyway, the headline-post gap wasn't what first struck me about this. Neither was the surrender of National Review to being the microphone handed to current Republican office-holders. Rather, it was this:

Back in the days of the Savings and Loan crisis, and again in the days of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we saw lots of commentary from the right that the problems couldn't be blamed on the free market. After all, in both cases massive moral hazard had been created by federal guarantees underwriting the debts, eliminating market discipline. Pains were taken to piously distinguish the free market from corporatism and corporate welfare (a distinction I take very seriously, I might add).

In the last two weeks, I haven't seen any Republican official or Republican-leaning intellectual make the slightest reference to the problems with a system in which private lenders make risk-free profits by lending on the back of a federal guarantee. The indictment of corporate welfare has been nowhere to be found. The view that there's something distinctively unproblematic about private lenders with public guarantees has been completely lost. And the (misleading) headline, the reference to a Soviet-style takeover, crystallized this for me. Since there's been no crisis in student lending, no collapse of the system, the status quo ante has been naturalized; there are people on the right who think that the subsidized revenue streams to which lenders had become accustomed were a kind of property that has now been seized. The ex post commentaries on FSLIC and Franny and Freddie have been forgotten.

Update I missed this post from the estimable and independent-minded Reihan Salam.

Grad school

Those trying to decide among graduate schools should read this Brian Leiter post and follow its advice: talk to current students.

I'd add as secondary advice: beware of thinking that you can avoid the problems in a problematic department. Academia is in many ways a very solitary life, but grad students and faculty alike really are very enmeshed in the worlds made up by their departments and universities. All the problems he lists out there can poison a whole department. Be worried and careful if you find yourself explaining to yourself that the problematic professors/factions aren't in your part of the department and so won't affect your life as a grad student. It ain't necessarily so.

An open letter to students

Some space on campus, like your dorm, can be safely assumed to be student-only. Other space, like the library, cannot. The old guy next to you in line at the library cafe just might be, say, a professor. Might even be the professor of the friend whose fraudulent excuse for skipping a scheduled exam you were describing in detail (though in this case wasn't that particular professor); in any case, might be a professor, who won't be entertained by such stories, or by the tales of your own past similar fraudulent feats of derring-do.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. (That's an in-joke aimed at other old people; don't worry about it.)

An actual news story from a real newspaper

Pedagogy a poor second in promotions
10 December 2009
By Rebecca Attwood

Study finds 'hypocritical' sector fails to practise what it preaches. Rebecca Attwood reports

Universities stand accused of hypocrisy this week over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy.

Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester's "Genie" Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities.

It states that the use of teaching criteria is inconsistent, often absent and not always applied even if included.[...]

George MacDonald Ross, senior adviser to the HEA's Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre, said: "Considering how long official inquiries and policy documents have been saying that teaching and research ought to have equal status, it is quite shocking that so many older universities still fail to recognise leadership in teaching for promotion purposes, particularly at the professorial level.

"It is hypocritical for certain universities to say in their mission statements and strategies that they give equal weight to teaching and research, and not to practise this in their promotion procedures."[...]

One academic, speaking anonymously, said that while teaching and learning criteria were included in their university's promotion policies, they were not aware of anyone promoted on that basis.

As I've said once before about a riveting study of higher education: That, surprisingly enough, is not from the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.