Sunday, August 28, 2005

So-Called Neighbor Saga.  . . . . in which my husband is insulted and I am called a liar. [iBeth] Posted mainly because it resonates with my own memories of Homeowner Association weirdness -- only from another pov. 6:29:46 PM    comment []

Reality Check: Universities are the Most Intellectually Diverse Institutions in American Society. People who should know better, or who have ulterior motives, are spreading the usual tiresome falsehoods about universities not being "intellectually diverse."  Some who spread these lies either aren't in universities or aren't serious scholars, so have no idea what really goes on in genuine intellectual disciplines.  Some have axes to grind because of their own bad experiences.  Some need excuses for their own professional failures.  Some are sufficiently parochial that they think the measure of diversity is exhausted by Democrats and Republicans.  (Everyone in academia knows libertarians who dont' vote for Republicans, because the Republicans have increasingly become the party of theocrats and anti-intellectualism.)  And some, of course, are just liars.  I will repost something I wrote on the last occasion this silliness was making the rounds: [U]niversities are the most intellectually diverse institutions in American society.  Although there are fairly homogeneous places like George Mason, they are the exception that prove the rule.  What other institution in American society is home to Marxists, democratic socialists, libertarians, and conservatives, as well as wishy-washy Democrats and Wall Street Republicans?  This is all the more striking in light of the fact that in the overwhelming majority of academic disciplines political identification barely matters, as compared to technical skill and ability.  Consider:  classics, philosophy, physical anthropology, chemistry, computer sciences, mathematics, archaeology, physics, astronomy, engineering, linguistics, biology, psychology, sociology, even (in large part) economics.  It is probably true that across all these fields, there are more "liberals" than "conservatives," but given the irrelevance, indeed invisibility, of political identification, the explanation can't be discrimination, conscious or unconscious.  Far more plausible, as we've remarked before, is that it is some combination of self-selection and the simple, and so far undisputed, fact that it's hard to be intelligent and informed and take seriously the world view of, e.g., Bill O'Reilly or Tom DeLay, not to mention the pathological David Horowitz.  Certainly the serious conservatives in the academy find this stuff embarrassing, yet what the political forces mounting an attack on the universities really want is precisely more of their kind of conservativism, as we've seen.  It is true enough, if sad, that some far right academics are consumed with Schadenfreude at the prospect of a political purge of the universities, and so have a vested interest in misrepresenting what actually goes on at institutions of higher education--but that they are forced to do so by joining cause with transparently anti-intellectual right-wing talk show hosts says more about the academics in question than about the actual situation in the universities.  American universities--with occasional exceptions like the law faculty at George Mason--feature an intellectual diversity not to be found in the mass media, in the leading law firms, in the halls of Congress, in the state legislatures, or any other central institution of American life. That, of course, is why they are under attack. There are, without doubt, both schools and disciplines where political bias is more prominent.  The University of San Diego School of Law, at least when I was there, had a fairly clear bias against certain candidates on the left; at my own institution (not in quite some time, I might add), I've had to argue against specious opposition, that struck me as politically motivated, to candidates on the libertarian right.  English is a more politicized discipline than, say, Philosophy, where the political views of candidates are invisible in almost all sub-fields of the discipline.  (Those who deny this just betray their astounding ignorance of the substance of the field:  how do you read politics off of a candidate's views about vagueness, mental causation, the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, contextualism in epistemology, Plato's moral psychology, or Frege's philosophy of mathematics?  Answer:  you can't.)  But the existence of some schools and some fields where politics loom large does not change the fact:  universities are the most intellectually diverse institutions in the United States. [Leiter Reports] 6:26:07 PM    comment []

A Tale of Vietnam. This week on Selected Shorts, the program is dedicated to a single story, JULY 69, read by William Hurt, a transcendent story that plumbs the horrors of Vietnam. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 6:24:46 PM    comment []

Architecture and Copyright: Order without law? (Wendy Seltzer). The New York Times runs an interesting piece on copying in architecture, Hi, Gorgeous. Haven't I Seen You Somewhere? While the article takes its cue from a recent lawsuit by an architecture student against the designer of the Freedom Tower, it calls that suit an anomaly. (See the Patry Copyright Blog for more on Shine v. Childs.) Most architects, apparently, don't sue, even when they see their work echoed by others. Are architects just nicer than other copyright holders? Unlikely. More probably, they've found alternatives to the legal protections copyright gives. Like artists everywhere, they copy from the masters. They also have other ways of protecting their authorship interests: Architecture clients need full buildings designed, not just pictures of facades; architects can complain publicly about others who fail to give credit for inspiration, lowering the reputation of someone who copyright law might say has only used an unprotectible idea [see Ellickson]; and the great designers aren't just re-selling their last-years' designs in any event. [Copyfight] 6:23:29 PM    comment []