https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opini...aming.html
EXCERPT: As an openly bisexual woman who did not have a single female professor throughout my college and postgraduate education in any subject, and who faced harassment and abuse, as well as downright sabotage in graduate school, I am sympathetic to efforts on campuses to give voice and equal power to groups that have been historically excluded and silenced.
Now, as a philosophy professor, I am part of perhaps the most male-dominated (and arguably least feminist-friendly) discipline in the humanities, and have dedicated much of my career to mentoring women and students of color. I understand that injustice and inequality remain firmly in place, and in order to eliminate it, much more work remains to be done.
So it is with some trepidation that I admit that the current political climate in academia confuses me. The more I read about trigger warnings, safe spaces and petitions to retract scholarly articles, the more my head spins. On top of that confusion, I harbor a fear of expressing views that will offend other progressives, scholars and teachers who may also be fighting oppression. And I fear being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail (I still am, after my response in May to the controversy over Rebecca Tuvel’s article in the journal Hypatia). In short, I find myself in an educational environment in which outrage, censoring and public shaming has begun to replace critique, disagreement and debate.
Public shaming always has a purpose, whether it comes from the left or right, from progressives or conservatives, activists or armchair philosophers. It may be an effective way to close down discussion, or deter others from taking certain unwanted political positions. It may also be a way to circumvent the status quo in the academy and challenge the standards of academic publishing and career advancement.
But the problematic effects of public shaming are many — among them, silencing “allies,” blaming individuals rather than examining social context, fostering intolerance and divisiveness, creating a “with-us-or-against-us” ethos, and reducing identity politics to a version of “oppression Olympics.” In cases where pain and suffering are equated with moral authority, calling out injustice can operate as a form of signaling virtue.
Let’s face it, outrage sells. That’s why social media and mainstream news outlets are invested in promoting it; they can both fuel and produce desires by tailoring their content to suit individual tastes. The red and blue newsfeeds and the “click bait” that proliferate on them produce profits, but they have also helped to make our time one of deep divisions and reactionary hatred, with a radicalization of both sides in a culture war that risks deepening into a civil war, with militarized armies of fascists and anti-fascists fighting in the streets.
In a culture that increasingly values raw emotions uncontaminated by scholarly analysis, the uncritical legitimation of feelings as the basis for moral authority becomes a form of political leveling. If unexamined outrage is the new truth, then we are moving dangerously close to a form of reactionary politics that closes down difficult discussions and prevents us from distinguishing between sexism or racism and critical discussions of them....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opini...aming.html
EXCERPT: As an openly bisexual woman who did not have a single female professor throughout my college and postgraduate education in any subject, and who faced harassment and abuse, as well as downright sabotage in graduate school, I am sympathetic to efforts on campuses to give voice and equal power to groups that have been historically excluded and silenced.
Now, as a philosophy professor, I am part of perhaps the most male-dominated (and arguably least feminist-friendly) discipline in the humanities, and have dedicated much of my career to mentoring women and students of color. I understand that injustice and inequality remain firmly in place, and in order to eliminate it, much more work remains to be done.
So it is with some trepidation that I admit that the current political climate in academia confuses me. The more I read about trigger warnings, safe spaces and petitions to retract scholarly articles, the more my head spins. On top of that confusion, I harbor a fear of expressing views that will offend other progressives, scholars and teachers who may also be fighting oppression. And I fear being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail (I still am, after my response in May to the controversy over Rebecca Tuvel’s article in the journal Hypatia). In short, I find myself in an educational environment in which outrage, censoring and public shaming has begun to replace critique, disagreement and debate.
Public shaming always has a purpose, whether it comes from the left or right, from progressives or conservatives, activists or armchair philosophers. It may be an effective way to close down discussion, or deter others from taking certain unwanted political positions. It may also be a way to circumvent the status quo in the academy and challenge the standards of academic publishing and career advancement.
But the problematic effects of public shaming are many — among them, silencing “allies,” blaming individuals rather than examining social context, fostering intolerance and divisiveness, creating a “with-us-or-against-us” ethos, and reducing identity politics to a version of “oppression Olympics.” In cases where pain and suffering are equated with moral authority, calling out injustice can operate as a form of signaling virtue.
Let’s face it, outrage sells. That’s why social media and mainstream news outlets are invested in promoting it; they can both fuel and produce desires by tailoring their content to suit individual tastes. The red and blue newsfeeds and the “click bait” that proliferate on them produce profits, but they have also helped to make our time one of deep divisions and reactionary hatred, with a radicalization of both sides in a culture war that risks deepening into a civil war, with militarized armies of fascists and anti-fascists fighting in the streets.
In a culture that increasingly values raw emotions uncontaminated by scholarly analysis, the uncritical legitimation of feelings as the basis for moral authority becomes a form of political leveling. If unexamined outrage is the new truth, then we are moving dangerously close to a form of reactionary politics that closes down difficult discussions and prevents us from distinguishing between sexism or racism and critical discussions of them....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opini...aming.html