The challenge:

If you were blogging in March 2003, what were you wrong about then?

This is meant to be a war question, and on the big question I was wrong to support the war, but in fact I didn't blog about it very much that month, and more generally restricted my blogging about it to questions about Kurds and federalism

March 2003 posts seem to have included praising the new aesthetics of Virginia Postrel's blog and congratulating Matt Yglesias on his Prospect gig. It included stuff I have no memory of writing, including several posts, starting with this one, on a puzzle Chris Bertram set about commodification. It also, in a bit of foreshadowing, included my complaint that the U.S. had been shockingly undiplomatic to Canada, part of my ongoing concern with the inability of the Bush administration to be a civil and friendly ally even to the United States' closest allies. (I included the deportation of Maher Arar to Syria on the list of unfriendly acts committed by the U.S., so that's something I was wrong about; that was done with the knowledge and agreement of the Canadian government, as far as I can now tell.) My March 2003 TNR column was certainly pro-war, but its question wasn't about the justifiability of the war or about its prospects for success. It was about the puzzle of how countries had lined up on the war-- why Britain and especially Australia had signed on for the fight, Canada and New Zealand not, etc.

Two real war posts that I could find, this, on Iraqi military casualties and whether the coalition had a duty to try to minimize them, which is fine, and this, on oil, federalism, and democracy, which is not. In the latter, I seem to have thought that the Kurds would rush for the secessionist exit faster than they in fact have. I said "In the first place, it will be a long time before Iraq is both a 'safe, pluralistic, federalist democracy' and a guaranteed bet to stay that way," which is all too true. But I also, crucially, said that "the concentration of oil in the south isn't a particular problem, since any even-loosely democratic Iraq will see Shiites in control of the central government," and therefore there'd be no conflict from a Shia perspective among federliam, democracy, and control of oil wealth. Kind of true as far as it goes, but it didn't take the Sunni minority seriously as a veto player; "no problem from a Shia perspective" =/= "no problem."

Adam Smith quote of the night

"Love is an agreeable; resentment, a disagreeable passion; and accordingly we are not half so anxious that our friends should adopt our friendships, as that they should enter into our resentments. We can forgive them though they seem to be little affected by the favours which we may have received, but lose all patience if they seem indifferent about the injuries which may have been done to us; nor are we half so angry with them for not entering into our gratitude, as for not sympathizing with our resentment."

TMS I.i.2.5

(My reading of Rousseau below has been inviting objections by e-mail; will try to respond tomorrow.)

Improve automatic translators...

with the wisdom of crowds. Worth a shot, anyways.

Right now in Montreal...

it's 11 below, Farenheit-- wind chill down to minus 36.

Puts me in the perfect mood to review the reading for today's class: Part Two of the Second Discourse, in which Rousseau bemoans humanity's foolish vanity in building houses. (Not exactly. But not exactly not, either.)

Noteworthy

From the Chronicle:

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presided over the inauguration last week of the Paris School of Economics, a new institution that its founders hope will eventually rival economics powerhouses like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The new institution was formed through the collaboration of six existing French universities and research institutions, including the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, or National Center for Scientific Research. All six partner institutions are public, but the new institution will be run by a newly created private foundation.

The school's semiprivate status is such a rarity in France that a special government decree was required to create the foundation to run it. The status will give the new institution more flexibility in hiring and firing, admissions, and day-to-day operations. Almost all French universities are public and therefore subject to the same regulations that govern other public-sector institutions. That model "makes it very cumbersome and gives universities a very low margin of maneuver," said Claudia Senik, a professor of economics at the Sorbonne who also teaches at the new institution. "It's very difficult to hire people, and is not very efficient."

[...]The Paris School's semiprivate status will also free it from some restrictions that public institutions find burdensome.[...] In another departure for a French university, the new institution will prioritize fund-raising from the outset. The government has given $26-million to start an endowment, but that capital will remain untouched, Ms. Senik said. Private donors, including the European insurance giant AXA, have also given a total of $5.3-million, and the institution hopes to raise an additional $53-million by 2010. "The idea is to build an important endowment so as to be able to function with the interest and to be sure that we can make long-term offers to people," Ms. Senik said.

The snark would be easy here; but I think it should be skipped. It's good news for France, French higher education, and French intellectual life. That a new commitment to the study of economics also corresponds with a discovery that private institutions have advantages, French regulations can be burdensome, etc., feels like it ought to be ironic but it's really not. Cheers for the PSE, and best wishes for its success.

Update:
Here is The Paris School of Economics website. Right away one notices a difference from other French institutions: The Paris School of Economics actually shows up on the top of the page as one of the institution's names, along with l'Ecole d'économie de Paris. The institution plans to develop programs in public policy, development, quantitative sociology, economic history, economic demography, and law and economics (I strongly suspect that one will be the first such in France).

But not everything changes. The statement from Villepin's office said "L’Ecole d’économie de Paris contribuera à l’élaboration d’une doctrine économique à part entière, dont l’objectif sera de mieux analyser le fonctionnement de la vie économique. Une plus grande place devra être donnée aux modèles de développement qui intègrent la protection de l’environnement, la justice sociale et le respect des identités. La France pourra ainsi davantage peser dans les grands débats économiques internationaux."

[The Paris School of Economics will contribute to the elaboration of a full-fledged economic doctrine, of which the objective will be to better analyze the functionning of economic life. A larger place must be given to models of development which incorporate the protection of the environment, social justice, and respect for identities*. In that fashion, France will be able to carry more weight in the great international economic debates.]

*To my ear, c'est bizarre to hear Villepin talking about respectiong identities as a central goal, since I think that's the language of multiculturalism and accommodation for internal cultural minorities, whether religious or linguistic-- the kind of thing that republican France is dead set against by both official constitutional law and deep political norms. But that's presumably not what he means by them'; rather, he means national level identity, such that all of France is a beleaguered minority in the face of the onslaught of American capitalism.

I liked these bits from the Figaro article:

« Si on ne fait rien, dans cinq ou dix ans, les seuls chercheurs qui viendront à Paris sont ceux qui auront une petite copine en France », plaisante Thomas Piketty.

"If we do nothing, in five or ten years, the only researchers who will come to Paris will be those who have a girlfriend in France," warned Thomas Picketty.

Apparently no economists have French boyfriends.

Tout le monde ne partage pas cet enthousiasme. Michel Lussault, vice-président de la Conférence des présidents d'université, voit mal « comment on va pouvoir boulversifier la recherche en économie » avec cette école. « Comparer l'EEP avec LSE, on est en plein fantasme ! Au mieux, on atteindra la taille d'un tout petit département de Harvard. » Même dans le monde universitaire, la nouveauté dérange..

Not everyone shares this enthusiasm. Michel Lussault, vice-president of the Conference of University Presidents, can't see "how one will be able transform research in economics" with the new institution. "To compare the EEP with LSE, one would have to be delusional. At best, one will reach the size of a very small Harvard department." Even in the university world, innovations disturb.

Even in the university world?

Not quite Herouxville, but...

Muslim girl ejected from [soccer] tournament for wearing hijab

Five young teams from across Canada walked out of a Quebec soccer tournament Sunday because a young Muslim girl was ejected for wearing a hijab.

Calling the rule banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women racist, four other teams followed Asmahan Mansour's team, the Nepean Selects from Ottawa, after she was thrown out for running afoul of a Quebec Soccer Association rule.

"The referee was staring and pointing. 'She can't play,'" said Asmahan, Asi to her friends. "I was like why? Why can't I play?"

Because of a safety rule, league spokesman Lyes Arfa said. He pointed out that the referee is Muslim himself, and that the ban on hijabs is to protect children from being accidentally strangled.

Ah. Well, that might be unfortunate but I guess I could see hwy there might be a safety issue there, and why a children's sports league would have to prioritize safety. There's a picture at the link, and, yes, I guess I could see the hijab she's wearing getting twisted around her neck.

And the league had told organizers about the rule — "The wearing of the Islamic veil or any other religious item is not permitted" — before the game.

Ah. Never mind.

Unless there's some perfect correlation of which I was previously unaware between "religious items" and "things that could accidentally strangle you," the safety rationale offered was pretextual. It's unrelated to the rule that was actually applied, which singles out religious items and particularly the "veil," which I doubt is being worn by any girls who are running around a soccer field exposing their limbs anyway. It's not a rule against items tied around the neck.

This will no doubt get spun as a "reasonable accommodations" dispute. As I've written before, issues of exemptions and reasonable accommodations arise when a generally neutral rule, such as a safety rule, incidentally impacts on cultural or religious activities. Then one has to figure out the importance of the rule, the importance of the activity, and so on. When the rule directly targets activities on the basis of their religious character, it's not a case calling for exemption; it's a case calling for repeal of an illiberal rule.

In a setting in which one may not wear any hat, or must wear prescribed headgear such as a helmet, the question of whether one may wear a hijab, turban, or yarmulke requires balancing and may but may not require an exemption. But if one is allowed to wear any hat except for a hijab, turba, or yarmulke, then what's at issue is simple discrimination against religion and violation of religious freedom.

Is the end...

in sight?

Update:

Yes. (Go ahead and click through all the strips between the two linked here. Mike's process of completing and submitting stands as an especially funny stretch of this always-good series.)

Sidebar updates

I've cleaned up the sidebar a bit, and updated some very out of date links; my homepage, bio, and cv links all now point to the correct (McGill) sites, not their old locations with old information.

Now available...

in print, or online for those with the appropriate institutional subscriptions:

Federalism and the Old and New Liberalisms, in Social Philosophy and Policy.


Update:

If the direct link doesn't work, try this link to browse the journal contents; pdf links should work from that page.

The Herouxville Saga: Taylor Speaks...

to Le Devoir. I'll work on translating some passages for future blogging tomorrow morning.

Update:
Translated highlights follow.

"Where is the key problem? Why is it that there are major divisions? It is that there are various visions of Québécois society, of what constitutes its identity, of the way in which this identity could be in danger: it is that which creates serious problems and deep uneasiness. And it is necessary to find a way to begin this debate and to discuss this."

There may also be some urgency in deescalating the debate. We can take comfort from some comparisons. Mr. Taylor has spent long periods in Europe in recent years and recalls that, as regards the management of diversity, "there are many worse situations than Quebec’s". It is enough to note the poisoned character of the debate in Germany and Denmark, for example, to remind ourselves of this. "I saw debates about social identity that were much more venomous than is ours in Quebec", he says, citing the examples like the “crisis” of the Danish cartoons and the suburban riots in France. But it is urgent, to avoid a descent into such a condition, for society to enter into to have a large-scale discussion: "One can slip towards a situation like the Danish one or, on the contrary, move some ways away from that outcome. And I said myself that, insofar as we have the any chance to influence the outcome, it is worth the effort to begin."

Diplomatically, Mr. Taylor suggests that there is enough blame to go around, and that all must try to take a step towards the others. Every side must resist the temptation "to remain in its corner while launching insults at the others". On the one hand, he suggests that Hérouxville’s position is dubious: "the lifestyle code conveyed absolutely dreadful stereotypes in connection with the Muslim situation. It was insulting. That is not how one begins a discussion", he says. On the other hand, there was something absurd about the reaction. "The charge of racism against the people of Hérouxville was excessive. I do not say that there is no racism in Quebec. But to use this term, it is also a way, in today’s world, to make it impossible to have a discussion, to completely delegitimize the adversary." Similarly, he finds excessive the identification of a politician like Mario Dumont as "the Québécois Jean-Marie Le Pen."

"That’s wrong. It should be known that Le Pen, he is about torture in Algeria, he is an anti-semite who specialized in the code words filled with sinister allusions, he is a man who wants to return the immigrants to their original countries." Thus, Charles Taylor, even if he says himself "not very impressed" by the reactions such as that of Hérouxville, believes that the effort should be made to understand that which lies beneath it. "We have the duty to understand where that comes from and not simply to attribute it to the most illegitimate motive, like those who charge racism do."

Still, for him, this is all something of a enigma. "I do not claim to understand this phenomenon myself. I am very montréalais, I always lived in Montreal, always lived with diversity within my family."

It's of course very appropriate of Taylor to begin his commission's work with a strong effort to appear open-minded and fair. Still, this seems to me like rather a lot of generosity to Herouxville.

I do appreciate Taylor's openness about the degree to which this is a distinctively intra-Quebec dispute about the society's identity. He's a leading champion of one vision of Quebec's character-- a very montréalais vision. As often happens with urban-rural divides, I think it's been easy for Montrealers to believe that their vision was shared more widely in the rest of society than it actually is. (And the Herouxville debate has, among other things, made explicit some anti-Montreal animus in the north.)

The comparison with Europe may lower the heat, and that's welcome, though I'd also like to hear what he thinks about the cartoon controversy.

And the indictment of the charge of racism just in virtue of its tendency to shut down debate has affinities with the last week's anti-Semitism debate at Open University (see here for the most recent entry)). In both cases, that's an indictment if what one is after is a discussion, at any price, but it's not a direct critique of the charge's truth. The same holds true for charges in the other direction, e.g. "apartheid," "stoning women." Such charges are incivil, and uncondusive to conversation. But it's not clear to me that that makes them impermissible; it certainly doesn't make them false.

C'est excellent.

The brilliant Bon Cop, Bad Cop has been named best Canadian movie of last year at last night's Genie Awards.

To my American friends who still think Strange Brew (or "Blame Canada," or worst of all Canadian Bacon) is the ultimate cinematic expression of Canadianness, I highy recommend that you put this onto your Netflix queues. It's the funniest movie about federalism you're likely to see; the best (and most violent) action movie about language and translation problems; and the most politically and socially engaged movie about hockey. It's a real gem that as far as I can tell no one in the U.S. has heard of at all.

Cheating

Nota bene.

Yet a recent University of Guelph study has discovered that more than half the student body in Canada is cheating its way through school. And there is no recall. There is not even a great sense of urgency around the problem. The value of a degree is being debased, and there is mounting evidence that a lack of integrity in the university system will have a far-reaching effect on our economy in the years to come.

The numbers on academic misconduct at both Canadian and American post-secondary institutions are startling. The Guelph report puts the percentage of Canadian students engaging in serious cheating on written work at 53 per cent. In the U.S., according to some studies, 70 per cent of students admit to cheating in one form or another.
[...]
Of all Canadian universities, perhaps McGill's policies are the most stringent. It instituted mandatory assigned or scrambled seating and differing test versions for all their final exams in 1990, largely to curb cheating on multiple-choice questions. All final-year multiple-choice exams are subsequently run through McGill's Exam Security Program, which analyzes wrong answers for telltale similarities. "The more identical wrong answers two or more exams have, the more it becomes suspect," says David Harpp, a McGill chemistry professor who helped pioneer the program. "McGill is actually being quite conservative in its parameters. We could probably catch more cheats, but we are only catching the real idiots." Despite the success of Harpp's method, he knows of no other university in Canada that has adopted it.

McGill has used turnitin.com, a Web-based essay authentication database effective in identifying cases of plagiarism, since 2004. Though use of such databases is widespread at Canadian universities, only McGill has written it into its policy. If suspected of cheating, a student must either have the paper checked against the database or choose another means of authentication, as some student groups had copyright-related complaints about the database. Smaller class sizes, where students have been shown to cheat less, as well as boned-up exam monitoring, are McGill's priorities. "The point isn't to catch people," says Morton Mendelson, deputy provost at McGill. "The point is to convince them that they'll be caught if they cheat."

Herouxville update

CBC reports:

The town council in Hérouxville amended its provocative immigrant code of conduct Monday night to remove certain rules.

Council adopted the changes, which include removing references to "no stoning of women in public" and "no female circumcision."

Councillors said the rules were open to misinterpretation by journalists who have flocked to the Mauricie town of 1,200 since it adopted the code of conduct in January.

The Herouxville saga, Part II
(See part I below.)

Part of what is offensive about the Herouxville norms is the way that they run together very different issues and blur distinctions-- as if there are some relevant (or even meaningful) similarities among burning widows (which, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't really been an endemic practice in Montreal), covering one's face on a day that's not Halloween, wishing to eat kosher or halal food, an questioning the prevalence of crosses and Christmas celebrations. It's offensive to imply that there are immigrants champing at the bit to burn widows; that's been the focus of a considerable amount of attention. But it's also offensive to take the ordinary stuff of cultural and religious practice (much of which doesn't require any formal 'reasonable accommodation' in law, just basic freedoms) and link them to widow-burning.

So to draw some distinctions, the Herouxville norms include:

1) some norms of fundamental nonviolence and the criminal law: no burning, no 'beating to death.' There are few of these, but they happen early and set the tone. They also allow a faux-naive "what could be wrong with what we said?" defense: "It's true that we have a norm against widow-burning, and we should, so what's the problem?"

Note that the English text refers to death by "beating" in public places and to burning, so it appears that the only specific practice being singled out is sati. But the French text, which is the more fundamental, refers to lapidation, that is, stoning, not "beating." "Stoning" calls up a much more culturally- and religiously-specific practice.

2) some highly contested issues of the accommodation of individual religious practice, including the wearing of kirpans and of headscarves or veils. These are settled by fiat, with no acknowledgement that "we" in Quebec (I don't include myself here, since I'm not a citizen) have disagreed about these questions, and that there is live democratic and legal debate about them. "We" don't wear real or symbolic weapons to school, "we" don't cover our faces except on Halloween.

3) some highly contested and difficult questions (also settled by fiat) about what we'll call, following Dworkin, external preferences: the preferences of some members of some religions governing the behavior of others, not necessarily of their religion. Men and women doctors, nursing home caregivers, and police officers may interact with you whether you're a man or a woman. Men and women, boys and girls, may be in the public swimming pool at the same time as you. People in commercial gyms may be dressed in ways that seem to you immodest, and on display in windows where you can see them. This last is a reference to a dispute that arose in Montreal this winter; some Orthodox Jewish men successfully petitioned a YMCA near their neighborhood to cover its windows so that they would not be subjected to the sight of women in exercise clothes.

This is where a great deal of the current lines of debate and dispute are. (Compare this post from Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber last week: "This morning a neighbour asked me whether I wouldn’t be interested in enrolling my son for such a [Dutch municipal] pre-playgroup. But, she added, it’s only for mothers, fathers are not allowed. Apparently the justification is that otherwise mothers from certain ethnic minorities, where gender segregation is an important issue, would not attend with their children." These questions aren't unique to Canada or Quebec.) And I think that we multiculturalists (that 'we' does include me) haven't done enough to talk or think about these questions, or even to acknowledge them. There is a difference between toleration of internal or individual religious norms (headscarves, say) and allowing them to be exported via external preferences. Religions may ban heresy-- that is, they may forbid heretics from remaining members of the religion-- but they may not legitimately seek its criminalization, or otherwise seek to alter the surrounding society such that it would be impossible for them ever to encounter heresy or to know that it exists. They may not export their internal rules of religious belief.

And yet, there are hard questions both of manners and of prudence about how hard a line to take. It's polite to go at least a bit out of one's way to accommodate the preferences of others; it's impolite to go out of one's way to offend them. (It would be impolite for me to dart my head around trying to force my eyes into the field of vision of an Orthodox Jewish woman trying to avoid eye contact with me.) And manners are a category of morals. Prudence: as I've written about here before, a hard line about making no accommodation in medical care for preferences for same-sex interactions may well have the result that, say, women in the most conservative religious groups are prevented from seeking medical care altogether.

But of course gender nondiscrimination in professional settings is a deeply important value, and becomes very hard to sustain if the frequency of people expressing such preferences rises dramatically. We know the analogy about catering to the external preferences of racist-- and, while many people think the analogy is obviously conclusive or obviously fallacious, I'm much more torn about it. There's something obviously right and something obviously wrong about it-- the rights of women in the workplace are at stake, yet in medical settings in particular the preferences at stake are about oneself as much as they are about the behavior of others, and it doesn't seem obviously bgoted to me for women to prefer women medical providers. If that's right, then it is bigoted to say, "It's all well and good for secular women to prefer women medical providers, but religious women may not have, or express, such a preference." And so on. It's impossible to stay off the slope of preferences regarding interactions with others, and impossible to roll the whole way down the hill because, in a diverse society, our preferences will vary and aren't compatible or compossible.

As I said, this stuff is hard. And I think its importance has been underacknowledged except by full-on critics of multiculturalism such as Okin and Barry. Some opposition to multicultural accommodation comes from a concern about freedom and equality in the larger society, and from a concern about the export of the cultural group's norms to that society. This was Pim Fortuyn's cause, and it's not going away.

4) A lot of autoexemptions. "You may not have religion, but we will have crosses and Christmases and what have you and will call them part of our history and culture and patrimony, and so they're not religious and you may not question them." I do especially love the 'no face-covering except on Halloween,' which can't help but make you wonder just what kind of principle is supposed to be governing.

5) And a fair number of declarations about cultural practices that don't require any special accommodation from the majority, but which are nonetheless presented as governing norms to which members of minorities will be expected to conform. We eat all kinds of meat, and don't care how it's butchered, and freely mix it with other foodstuffs.

So the list mixes together public norms which are obviously right (but which no one is challenging, and which it's offensive to treat as if they are under threat); purely private cultural norms which it's actually wrong to demand minorities to adopt; fiat resolution of a number of legitimately-disputed questions of public norms; and some overt hypocrisy about the way Catholicism will be treated.

Multiculturalists need to recognize these distinctions, too. It's not racist or bigoted or illegitimate to raise and worry about the stuff in category (3). It's not racist or bigoted or illegitimate to take a strong no-accommodation stance on that category, though I think it's wrong. The problem with (1) isn't its content but its implication about what immigrants are like; the problem with (5) isn't the implication (it really is the case that Jews and Muslims have norms about food that aren't typical Quebecois norms) but its content.

Running throughout-- and here I want to tread delicately-- there is a problematic 'we.' Cultural and religious accommodation are treated as a gift that we post-Catholic francophone Quebecois might, but probably will not, offer to you religious and cultural immigrants-- as if there had not been native-born Jews and Muslims in Quebec for generations, or as if they were not full members of the society; as if the question of Catholicism's status hadn't been an object of massive democratic dispute within Quebec for generations; as if there were uniformity and consensus where there has always already been disagreement and debate. That said, the question of the 'we' of Quebec is a tricky one, and one that-- as an Anglophone non-Canadian Montrealais-- I don't want to focus on. There is something pretty bad about the first-person plural pronouns in the Herouxville Norms, but I don't at all think that multiculturalism is incompatible with a recognition of the distinct and enduring character of Quebec as a society.

The Herouxville saga

Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest has asked sociologist Gerard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor to head a commission studying 'reasonable accommodation' of ethnic and religious minorities.

This is in response to the Herouxville norms, (see background here, and the raw nerves they've exposed.

I don't know much about Bouchard, but Taylor is clearly an inspired choice here-- not only one of the world's leading philosophers and a towering figure in Quebec intellectual life, but also simultaneously a partisan of Quebec identity and adefender of multicultural accommodation of minorities; and simultaneously a committed religious believer and a progressive. (He was also, of course, the dominant figure in the building of political theory in my department at McGill over the course of decades, though he's not here now and I've only met hi a couple of times.)

But Taylor's stature doesn't mean the commission will be able to finesse the gap that's been exposed between the expectations of some Quebecois and the expectations of some minority immigrants. I expect to blog about this a bit more soon, but carefully-- unlike Taylor, I'm very much a guest in Quebec. The desire to be a polite guest has prevented me from blogging about the story up until now, even though it got play in the worl dpress and lies squarely within my area of expertise. But I thought that the appointment of Taylor would be of interest to political theory and political philosophy blog-readers.

Come spend your sabbatical in beautfiul Montreal...

Call for applications: McGILL UNIVERSITY FULBRIGHT VISITING RESEARCH CHAIR IN THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF FEDERALISM, 2008-09

Grant Activity: Conduct research, develop collaborations and deliver
occasional lectures to graduate and/or undergraduate students; take
part in the university's intellectual life in existing workshop
series; and share work in a more focused way with the McGill Political
Science faculty who study federalism from their various methodological
and regional perspectives.

Specialization(s): Empirical comparative studies of federalism;
analytical or formal modeling of federal systems; normative research
on the justifiability and justifiable shape of federalism; the study
of the intellectual foundations of federalism.

Additional Qualifications: Senior or emergent scholars are encouraged
to apply. Applicants must be American citizens or permanent residents
not employed in Canada and not also holding Canadian citizenship or
permanent residence.

Location: Department of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.

Length of Grant: 4 months or 9 months

Starting Date: September 2008 or January 2009 for one-semester grants;
September 2008 for academic year grants

Stipend: Research Chair awards provide a fixed sum of U.S.$25,000.
Confirmation is pending for the stipends for 2008-09.

Comments: The McGill University Department of Political Science
carries on a long and pioneering tradition in the study of politics in
North America. Founded in 1901, the Department's distinguished
faculty is actively involved in a wide variety of ongoing research
projects, and is committed to achieving a high level of academic
excellence in research, graduate, and undergraduate education. This
is an internationally recognized Ph.D. granting department with 31
faculty members with interests spanning Canadian Politics, Comparative
Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory. A letter of
invitation is not required but applicants are encouraged to contact
the institution to discuss research interests. For more information
please contact Francois Carrier, director, Office of International
Relations, at francois.carrier@mcgill.ca; tel. 514.398.4197. The Web
site for the Department of Political Science is
www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience; information on the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chairs Program can be found at http://www.fulbright.ca/en/chairtext.asp.

Dark Days for The Kings of the Geeks

Peter Jackson off The Hobbit.

Kevin Smith hanging out with his buddy Jennifer Garner in what sounds like a truly pointless movie.

And now, Joss Whedon off Wonder Woman.

So, so, very...

beautiful..

(Warning: not safe for geek-free workplaces. HT: Henry.)

Here's my contribution:

6th level: Bigby's bureaucratic busywork

Caster may accurately complete any one set of forms, e.g. for grant applications. An administrator with Knowledge: nitpickery gets a saving throw against the spell to be able to identify errors; the DC is the caster level plus the caster's own ranks in Knowledge: nitpickery, if any.

Be sure to check out the comments on the thread, too. Samples:

The only problem, of course, is that some of us don't sleep often enough to regenerate used spells before we have to teach or grade again...

I'm holding out for the "Shield of Tenure" spell, which is permanent and effective against all academic monsters, and most political ones.

May be an important early indicator of something I'd rather not see happen

(Warning: inside baseball for poli sci folks.)

Have a look at the pretty pictures in APSA's latest job market survey.

We traditionally identify political science as made up of four core fiefdoms, ahem, subfields: American, comparative, IR, and theory. Then there's a lot of other stuff that some departments identify as available subfields or hiring priorities. Public law is the classic case, methods the obvious one in recent years.

By Figure 3, primary field for job listings, theory now looks like a member of the core four only as a matter of courtesy, and one doesn't place much stock in courtesy. The three other core subfields each had 180+ job listings. Theory at 62 is immediately followed by public law (60) and public admin (57, a surprisingly high number). It's a lot closer in magnitude to the trailing field, methods (28) than it is to any of the other three core fields.

Figure 4, tracking all fields listed in job ads (not just the primary fields) is even worse. After the big three, it's a big drop-off to... public policy, then public admin, then theory, with public law very near behind.

A few Oscar questions

1) What is the definition of 'adapted' such that Borat was an adapted screenplay? Yes, the character and shtick existed in another medium, but I wouldn't think that was sufficient. On the other hand, if one thinks that the movie was a complicated piece of performance art then maybe it was enough-- the shtick is the heart of the matter, whereas for most movies there needs to be a novel or a play with a plot and a number of characters before it's an adaptation.

2) I love Melissa Ethridge. But, good god, the song at the end of An Inconvenient Truth made me burst out laughing-- ridiculously over the top in its earnest preachiness, even with my standards for such things already having been battered by the movie I had just watched.

3) Ah, the wacky foreign language film rules and category. How entertaining is it that Water is the entry from Canada? Or that Best Picture nominee Iwo Jima can't be a foreign-language nominee because it doesn't have a non-US sponsoring country?

4) Surprised to see how little award business The Good Shepherd has done. I have the vague sense that The Departed, Blood Diamond, and The Good Shepherd were competing for the same oxygen, and that The Departed has ended up sucking most of it up. I wonder whether Matt Damon had a nominee's worth of votes, but they got split between Departed and Shepherd.

The unlicensed CV Doctor

Dear academic job applicants,

There are circumstances in which it's important to be able to specify the software packages which you can operate. Entry-level stats scholars, for example, often do specify whether they work in SAS, SPSS, etc.

Under no circumstances is "Microsoft Word" a skill worth listing on your C.V. Neither is Power Point or Excel.

Unless you're a certified sys admin, under no circumstances is any version of Windows or a Mac operating system a skill worth listing on your C.V.; it means "I know how to turn my computer on."

And-- really, truly-- under no circumstances is your ability to e-mail or to operate a web browser a skill worth listing on your C.V.

These things aren't just weighted at zero. They make you look ridiculous.

Some things end up weighted at zero-- if the OS you list is Unix or Linux, I don't actually care, but it shows enough tech cred that I understand why you want to list it. Similarly for LaTeX; at the end of the day it's your word processing software and I think it's silly to list, but it's not actively embarrassing. But why bother? Someone with higher tech standards than I might well view it as the equivalent of listing Word, and you'll do yourself damage.

JTL

Montreal winters and grad school

At the indispensible P.H.D.

(No, it's not really set in Montreal, but it could be.)

It's time for a holy war

I now have a heresy named after me. (See background here and here.)

But I see no reason to accept the designation, for the reasons I offer in that last link; it's the pagan DeLong who's proposing to do away with an obviously canonical text.Will no one rid me of this troublesome apostate? Where are my Fremen legions to fight my jihad?

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the following does count as a heresy on my part, and I won't pretend it's an orthodoxy. I finished readin Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? yesterday-- my first time to read it or any Phillip Dick. (Embarrassing, I know.) And: Blade Runner is almost incomparably better. Not only are the characters richer and deeper and better-developed; not only are every one of the major plot changes made by the movie clear improvements over the book; and not only is the mood and environment and sense of change over time better set with "blade runners" and "replicants" than with "bounty hunters" and "androids." But also the core Dickian themes of identity confusion, memory confusion, and not knowing which way reality lies are explored in a (I'm going to get attacked here) pretty tedious and plodding fashion in the book, whereas the movie (the Director's Cut, I mean) successfully spins the viewer around and brings him or her in to the characters' confusion and uncertainty.

I think it's worse than that. I think I just didn't like the book very much. It was only the search for glimmers of the movie's greatness that kept me going through it at all; on its own it was entirely flat. The couple of scenes of ostensible head-trippy confusion about identity just inspired in me a reaction of, "Oh, OK, I guess that's what's going on. Oh, no, that's what's going on. Ah."

I can't think of a time when I've thought a movie so outshone its source book; and I can't imagine how people saw such potential for a movie in such an ordinary story. It turns out the potential was there, but I think that most of what makes the movie interesting (e.g. Roy's and Rachel's struggles with their limitations, the pathos of J.F., the Deckard-Rachel dynamic, even the kind of future that's being inhabited) was not even incipient in the book. The accomplishment was that of Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher, Vangelis, and Syd Mead and David Steiner, much more than that of Phillip K. Dick.

All right, I'll now go peacefully to my burning.

Today's reading assignment

Simon Blackburn on Bernard Williams in TNR. Get ye hence.

Not sure what I can possibly add to this.

France proposed U.K. union, papers show

January 15, 2007
Associated Press

LONDON – Would France have been better off under the Queen?

The revelation that the French government proposed a union of Britain and France in 1956, even offering to accept the sovereignty of the British Queen, has left scholars on both sides of the Channel puzzled.

Newly discovered documents in Britain's National Archives show that former French prime minister Guy Mollet discussed the possibility of a merger between the two countries with then-British prime minister Sir Anthony Eden.

"I completely fell off my seat," said Richard Vinen, an expert in French history at King's College in London. "It's such a bizarre thing to propose."

Eden rejected the idea of a union but was more favourable to a French proposal to join the Commonwealth, according to the documents. One document added that Mollet "had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty (Queen Elizabeth II)."

While the two countries, separated by a thin body of water, have been bitter rivals since the Middle Ages, the two EU partners now concentrate on trading tourists rather than arrows. What animosity remains has been relegated to world culinary name-calling.

Proposals for Anglo-French unity are not necessarily new. English royalty claimed the title of "King (or Queen) of France" into the 19th century.

Winston Churchill, in a last-ditch attempt to keep France on the side of the Allies in Second World War, appealed for a full union of the two countries in June of 1940.

After the war, Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign secretary, also toyed with the idea of a "Western Union," a European and African bloc led by Britain and France.

The proposals all shared an element of desperation, said Kevin Ruane, a historian at Canterbury Christ Church University, England. ``It's so impracticable an idea that it has only been raised in extreme situations," he said.

Threatened by an Arab revolt in French Algeria and hobbled by instability at home, France was desperate to maintain its independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States, Ruane said. Eden, who fought in France during First World War and spoke the language fluently, might have seemed particularly approachable to Mollet, a former English teacher.

But even under the circumstances, the suggestion that France accept the British Queen struck historians as bizarre.

Mollet was a Socialist, and left-wing Frenchmen looked to the execution of French King Louis XVI as one of the crowning achievements of the French Revolution. They would have been unlikely to welcome a foreign monarch with open arms. "It must have been some kind of eccentric gesture," Vinen said.

The former French leader's memoirs showed nothing about the proposal, said Francois Lafon, a history professor at La Sorbonne in Paris and a Mollet biographer. Lafon suggested it was probably a political tactic to pressure the British to firm up their role for the imminent attack on Egypt.

A year after Britain turned down France's proposed merger, the French joined the Common Market, the European Union's predecessor. By the time Britain tried to join seven years later, the tables had turned.

Charles De Gaulle had brought a new order to French political life and largely revived its international standing, even as Britain's economy continued to stagnate. De Gaulle vetoed Britain's attempts to join the European Economic Community, twice.

"In retrospect, the irony of this was that the losers were the British," Vinen said. "Maybe we'd be in a better position being ruled by Charles de Gaulle in 1965 than Harold Wilson."

Not all Frenchmen were so sure.

"Can you imagine?" said Jose-Alain Fralon, author of "Help, the English are invading!" "What would the English tabloids do if they could no longer tell stories about the froggies, and what about those French who blame everything on the English?"

The British, he added, are "our most dear enemies" and "we would lose all of the saltiness in our relationship" had the two countries merged.

Still, he said, the two peoples complement each other marvelously.

"Roast beef and frogs don't go together in the same dish. But frogs legs as a starter and a good roast beef as the main dish – c'est merveilleux," he said.

The documents, which have been declassified for over twenty years, were found by a BBC producer late last month.