McMaster University walks out on its staff

McMaster is in bargaining with its union of TAs. It’s pretty sad when you look at what the union is asking for: protection against large class sizes.

I’m hard pressed to think of a more banal and uncontroversial measure of quality of education than class sizes. Come on. Friggin class sizes. On a lexical ordering of the obviously important features of a quality education, “need for reasonable class sizes” ranks right below “need to not be continually punched in the neck by the smelly guy sitting next to you”.

If there’s a strike at Mac, the owness is on the Board of Governors and the broader community to figure out just what their priorities are. Does any reasonable person seriously think that we can rebuild our shattered and irrational economy with hastily trained and overworked professionals assisting the teaching of the workforce? Do students want fair and meaningful grading, or the ill-considered rubber stamp of a hurried grad student? Do citizens of Canada — and anyone who believes in the old-fashioned sense of a meritocracy — think that the vision of the university as a diploma factory, or elaborate intellectual hazing ritual, is even intelligible as a model of merit?

CUPE local 3903 executive dissolved

It lost its autonomy yesterday.

I don’t have anything coherent to say except that this is deeply upsetting.

Hitchens is an accommodationist!

…No, not really. But listen to this 2005 debate on blasphemy law between Stephen Fry and Chris Hitchens. A little over half the way through, Stephen Fry lays out a position he describes as accommodationist. Hitchens agrees, and refers to Fry’s oration as “beautiful”.

This reminded me instantly of the shenanigans from two weeks ago, when Dawkins stressed a point to the effect that not all religious people are cretins and it was interpreted as a softening of his rhetoric, strategy, and position.

Dawkins’s quotes were, of course, indications of none of these things. For, to the extent that “accommodationism” means anything at all, it refers to the set of people who are just plain against activist atheism, especially in debates over science. Keep your atheism in the closet, since we’re trying to sell evolution here. Dawkins, of course, hasn’t given atheism up: The God Delusion is still on bookshelves. Therefore he’s not an accommodationist. Dum de dum.

Nevertheless, if Dawkins were an accommodationist, then surely Hitchens must be one too, given what you hear on that recording. Of course, you’d have to ignore the first hour of debate to arrive at that conclusion (the hour can be summarized as “if you’re offended fuck you”) — but the entire point of ignoring something is ignoring inconvenient things, so I suppose all is operating as well as can be expected.

Vatican Says Marx was OK

Well that came out of nowhere:

Karl Marx, who famously described religion as “the opium of the people”, has joined Galileo, Charles Darwin and Oscar Wilde on a growing list of historical figures to have undergone an unlikely reappraisal by the Roman Catholic Church.

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

Help? Yes, they’ll help. They can’t help but help, that’s why Capital is considered a classic.

I don’t know if Marx would be especially keen on helping the Vatican, though. Or could it be that someone over in Popeland is actually thinking about real world issues and tangible human misery?

Bernstein Watches the Human Rights Watch (Watching Israel)

Oi!

Robert L. Bernstein in the NYT:
AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

On the one hand, if there were an imbalance of coverage by HWW as far as coverage of the role of Israel in middle eastern affairs were concerned, then it would be an interesting point worth investigating. But I have my doubts: a cursory glance at the past few months of HWW articles shows “Iran” and “Syria” show up regularly. It would be interesting to take a closer look, across a longer time span.

On the other hand, as far as Bernstein is concerned, this isn’t just about imbalance. It’s about priorities: namely, putting the vices of closed societies first on the docket for criticism and disdain, and then going after the vices of open societies. The very idea of a distinction between open and closed societies is taken for granted in much of the social and political philosophy of the 20th century; Rawls and Popper are two obvious names that spring right to mind. This distinction, in turn, presupposes that there’s some principled moral distinction to be drawn between the internal priorities of a nation with respect to domestic affairs, and its priorities with respect to foreign affairs.

Well, welcome to the 21st century, because there is no such distinction anymore. The difference between “foreign” and “domestic” was attractive in the bygone era of the Cold War, but thanks to globalization, we are a part of a global system of government. To say such things is not hyperbolic leftist rhetoric, it’s an obvious clichee that well salaried individuals out there once took as a point of pride.

There’s no distinction between “my society” versus yours (or at any rate not much of a distinction), at least so long as we’re talking about countries. It is not as if societies mysteriously map onto, determine, or exhaust what it means to be a society. If the idea that country equals society is abandoned, then it follows that there’s nothing of moral depth to say about foreign and domestic affairs, except as a shallow prelude to the real discussion. By “real discussion”, I mean: where we decide to behave like grown-ups and make a choice between what we want to talk about and who we want to talk about.

Suppose we want to talk about closed societies. The idea of a closed/open society depends on some part of the system’s treatment of its own affairs. But there is nothing interesting to say about open or closed societies so long as we take the parts of the system for granted; it’s something that we have to go out and observe in the world. And it is clear that in Gaza, there is a closed society. Why? Well, in no small part because Israel occupied it, bombs it, etc. The Israel-Palestine complex is a closed society. Hence when you see condemnations of Israel at HWW, you also see mentions of the Occupied Territories (Gaza, especially). There’s a reason for that.

Suppose we want to talk about only Palestine. It’s not an entity, some sui generis blob on the map. It’s a tiny compartment in the global economic system. Granted, if we abstract it from Israel as a society, and compare the two, then certainly it appears to be more closed. But this is only because we’ve made our worldview in such a way that it is tone-deaf to relevant ideas about what would make up a society: i.e., that the people of the occupied territories are who they are in large part because of the decisions that others in the region have made. So of course they’re interacting on the fly to others in their environment in understandable (but not necessarily commendable) ways.

Quine on Bryan McGee

Courtesy of Evolving Thoughts:

Ordinary Canadians don’t care about this kind of art

Stephen Harper sings a song about love and friendship in an attempt to find love and friends.

York University (Toronto) goes fishing

Well this is embarressing:

York University has won court orders requiring Google Inc. and Canada’s two largest telecommunications companies to reveal the identities of the anonymous authors of contentious emails that accused the school’s president of academic fraud.

The university took the extraordinary measures after an email was circulated alleging that president Mamdouh Shoukri “perpetrated an outrageous fraud” when publicly touting the appointment of a new dean.

In January, the school announced its hiring of Martin Singer as its inaugural dean of the new Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, said to be the largest faculty in the country. The announcement called Prof. Singer a “renowned scholar of Chinese history” and quoted the president as saying: “York University is fortunate to have attracted such a strong scholar and administrator.”

A week later, an email in the name of a group called York Faculty Concerned About the Future of York University was sent using a Google Gmail account to members of the York community challenging the statements regarding Prof. Singer’s scholarly output. “Lying about scholarly credentials is the gravest offence,” the email said before calling for the president’s resignation and a new search for a dean.

York obtained a court order in May compelling Google to turn over Internet Protocol addresses associated with the Gmail account. Google identified Bell Canada and Rogers Communications as the relevant Internet Service Providers.

Last month, York sought similar orders compelling Bell and Rogers to disclose the contact information of the customers who accessed the account, a motion that went unopposed by the telecom giants. This week, Justice George R. Strathy of Ontario Superior Court released his reasons for granting the orders, saying it was a reasonable balance between protecting freedom of speech and protection from libel.

David Noble, an outspoken professor at York, was listed in the email as a contact person. In an interview yesterday, he denounced York’s legal moves as “a fishing expedition” that was unnecessary since the allegations raised were shown to be correct by statements from both the president and the new dean. “I think they are trying to create a chill among faculty,” he said.

“They are spending enormous sums, for what? I think they are just desperate to find out who is involved.” He said his colleagues sought anonymity because they are “afraid of reprisals.”

Will McDowell, a lawyer for the university, defended the action. “Academics enjoy quite extensive latitude in what they say and what they write and what they research at Canadian universities but I would say this about any of us: The right of free speech is not unlimited,” he said.

“What was said is quite damaging to the institution.”

The school now has the identities of five or six people who allegedly had access to the Gmail account. Justice Strathy said the information is only to be used for the purpose of commencing litigation.

Neither Prof. Singer nor Prof. Dirlik could be reached for comment.

Yes. Damaging to the institution. Unlike misrepresentation of an incoming scholar’s credentials — that’s not damaging, it’s standard practice.

Oi. Oi. Oi oi oi oi oi oi.

Agent provocateurs caught in Quebec protest

Sigh.

The Incident is out

I think I just had an eargasm.