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Feb 10

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Drowning Bunnies, Retention Rates and Mindset Pedagogy

The President of Mount Saint Mary’s College in Maryland Simon Newman, tasked with the effort to improve retention rates, is following the strategy long employed in elementary and secondary schools trying to keep up their retention rates across the country: flush out the students who are going to fail out anyway.  Employing war metaphors used to describe what happens when innocent bystanders get killed in the course of war, he told professors, “there will be some collateral damage” as reported by The Washington Post.  He went on to say to professors that he realized “this is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t.  You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads.”

First, he told professors they couldn’t think of students as cuddly bunnies and proceeded to talk about students who might struggle in the beginning of their college career as bunnies that needed to be drowned.  Then he proceeded to make light of the growing problem of gun violence on college campuses by encouraging professors to think of struggling students as students they might shoot with a gun.  The ironies of a Catholic institution encouraging metaphorically killing students abound. Read more

Feb 8

Reflections on Stanley’s How Propaganda Works: Pt. 2, Ideals and Illusions

I finished reading How Propaganda Works over the weekend.  I think his analysis of ideology in terms of practice and social groups is fruitful.  And the argument that the content of ideology matters for how we value it in democracy shows how the analysis puts us in some relationship to truth and justice which I like for its way of binding epistemological analyses to political and ethical ones.  I’m particularly interested in how the focus on the ideal in contrast to critiques of ideals have divided analytic and continental political philosophy, thus questioning whether and how the ideals work in analytic philosophy opens up possibilities for conversations across the divide. Read more

Feb 2

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Reflections on Stanley’s How Propaganda Works: Pt. 1, Plato

I’ve had Jason Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works (Princeton 2015) sitting on my desk for a couple months and finally, this week, I read through most of it.  I think it’s an important book for a number of reasons, particularly because I think it addresses and attempts to remedy some of the issues and concerns about how analytic philosophers do political philosophy that have kept many continental philosophers from thinking that this work was worth engaging.  But it’s also interesting to me because I’ve been blogging a bit about the difficulties of changing people’s minds, a difficulty that I think Plato addresses in his dialogues.

In the Introduction, “The Problem of Propaganda,” Stanley maintains that (1) Plato is seeking to describe the ideal polity, which is an aristocracy of philosophers, (2) Plato is a fierce critic of democracy, and (3) Plato is concerned with how political systems will work in light of “actual social and psychological facts about humans” (9).  I want to suggest in what follows that while in the course of the dialogue Socrates says things that seem to lead to 1 and 2, it is not clear that either Socrates or Plato is propagating those views.  (I agree with (3) and I’ll discuss that in the next post.)  I maintain that Plato writes a dialogue full of unsupported and problematic claims that lead to a certain account of what political life would be like on the basis of those unsupported and problematic claims in order to prompt considered thinking in Socrates’ interlocutors and in Plato’s readers.  I believe that Plato thinks this willingness to challenge our most settled beliefs is central to avoiding the pitfalls of democracy which arise in the first book of his Republic – I think the efforts Plato depicts of Socrates to prompt thinking in reflection in political life in a number of different contexts is further evidence for this view. Read more

Feb 1

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Between a Rock and a Power Pose: Neoliberal Empowering of Women

I was just listening to the latest edition of Slate’s DoubleX podcast, which I’ve decided to start blogging about more because at least once in every episode, I’m listening as I run, and I start actually talking out loud about why whatever they are saying is just so wrong-headed.  I’m the chair of the Gender Studies Minor at Wabash, and so I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about how to encourage students to take more courses in gender studies and to minor.  Listening to three women whose jobs are to think and write about gender but who often have underdeveloped or undertheorized accounts of the roots of gender inequality or the assumptions that support their analysis of gender inequality and possible recourses convinces me that students who have just some gender studies under their belt are both needed and highly marketable.  I hate to sell things in terms of marketability, but sometimes I do. Read more