in texas education circles, the term “not rehired” carries the connotation of “terminated with extreme prejudice, under no circumstances should this person ever get another teaching job”. resigning ahead of being “not rehired” is often a race between the teacher and the school board.
edited to add-- it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that this person never works in ivy league academia again or even in a tier one school.
That’s not what this is though. Departments at research universities often have several of these kinds of people hanging around as “research fellows” or “post-docs” or “visiting assistant professors”. They are often paid out of research grants. There is frequently this idea that “maybe the university will like me so much that they will hire me for real” but that is almost never the case. Four years is about the outside that you would expect someone like this to stick around and it isn’t particularly looked at as a mark of shame that their contract isn’t renewed. Often the grant is up but also the faculty usually feels that after about four years the fellow/post-doc/visitor has likely gained as much career advancement as they will from a given department.
I suspect that most of those people are supervising therapy and clinical diagnosis. It’s not my field but I would guess that licensed psychologists have to have so many hours of one-on-one supervision by a licensed psychologist and that is what these people are doing.
I’m not sure if Bandy Lee falls in the first category or the second. I would think that most of the people in the second category are using it to add credibility as therapists, whereas Dr. Lee seems to be pursuing being an anti-Trump writer.
Salon.com for whatever reason seems to publish a lot of interviews with Brandy Lee doing her Goldwater rule schtick.
I assume the idea behind the policy is that throwing out assertions isn’t great for the profession. Being paid and promoted for those assertions is even worse.
In person (or via video) you can evaluate with a standard process in a controlled environment. What we’re talking about here is an assessment is made from whatever public footage is released.
Every once in awhile you see a news story about something like retinoblastoma found because of how a child’s eyes appear in a photograph. It would be unethical to make the diagnosis and start treatment based on a random photograph by itself. Instead they direct them to a medical professional to be evaluated based on the photo.
I don’t really see the distinction between physical and mental health here. I wish there was a better system for public figures. There’s a long history of Presidents lying about their health and I think it’s gross when their medical staff participate.
Not really
Does this mean that we should believe the article by Akerlof and Shiller or not?
Back last summer, when colleges and universities were in a muddle trying to figure out if they’d be able to open in the fall, Notre Dame came right and said that if they couldn’t offer in-person classes on campus, then there would be no fall sports. Notre Dame said this. So yeah, it absolutely is possible to have strong sports, but insist that academics come first. You just have to have administrators who stand by that.
It means you have to work out what Akerlof and Shiller mean by free market before you can decide.
Would laissez faire capitalism better capture the philosophy?
When I studied at George Mason, a lot of my professors seemed keen on the idea of self organizing systems. Whether this was strictly work related, or whether this was the kind of work encouraged by the various donors remains a mystery.
One of my profs did do a hitpiece on “social networks” and “climate science”.
I think the C4SS would say that is still wrong as they are neither laissez faire, nor do they aspire to be so. I would agree with them on that.
Neo-feudal capitalism may be closer to the truth, but it still has problems.
One of the troubles with neoliberalism is that it reminds people of liberalism-- which I suppose is perfectly understandable if you are a socialist keen on keeping those sorts of rifraff out of your turf. But, if you subscribe to democratic politics, people like milton friedman and robert bork and lewis powell are undermining the legal basis for any sort of regulation. To be identified with such people-- it’s infuriating.
That’s why I say it’s more squirrelly than “free-market principles”.
That is mostly a US problem. Liberalism is assumed to be social liberalism, but that is a creation of the 20th century. Before that you had Gladstonian liberalism and Manchester liberalism, ideas closer to modern day US Libertarianism than social liberalism. Neoliberalism is seen as a reinvention of those older ideas for the 21st century (Yes, I know it started in the 20th century), and they were surprisingly fast at taking control of some of the European social liberal parties (compare the UK Liberal Democrats under the leadership of Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg, and try to work out how they led the same party in the same decade.)
I’d say that the biggest problem is that liberalism and socialism are ideas that came from the Enlightenment, but some people who are labelled neoliberals reject the Enlightenment as a mistake to be corrected. This is why I suggested neo-feudalist capitalism.
A popular take these days is that the Enlightenment was built on slavery and empire and racism.
Those are the parts that the neo-feudalists want to keep.
here’s another example of actual “cancel culture”, i await glenn greenwald’s, bari weiss’s, or andrew sullivan’s hot take on this*–
*i know, i’ll be waiting a long, long time.
This is a bit of a hobby for Dershowitz, an inveterate Dershbag who famously interfered with Norman Finkelstein’s tenure case at DePaul and helped convince the University of Illinois to fire Steven Salaita. Both of these are probably worse than the current case, in that they were tenure-stream faculty (tenured in Salaita’s case) and serious scholars who lost their careers because of his interference.
That said, I blame Yale (and DePaul and UIUC), not Dershowitz. None of these schools had to listen to his complaint. While a private citizen has every right to react if someone publicly accuses them of having a “shared psychosis”, if you look at the full tweet thread in context there’s not much to Lee’s attack, and the school should have just filed AD’s complaint away with all the other loony letters a school like Yale must get.
I know you’re aware of this, but plenty of us who aren’t tenure track are serious scholars. So it doesn’t matter less when they lose their positions because of hacks like Dershowitz.
If tenure doesn’t actually grant protection from stuff like this, then there is no tenure track.
Yes of course, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. What made the Salaita and Finkelstein cases “worse” (in my opinion) was his interference with the tenure process, which is supposed to offer some protection against this kind of crap. I don’t know much about Bandy Lee, but from the stories I gather that she too is a serious academic. (For example, President of the WOrld Mental Health Coalition.)
My point is that just because someone isn’t tenure track (which is drying up in the humanities) doesn’t mean they’re not a “serious scholar”.
i’m having a really hard time parsing the reasoning behind labeling these as “worse” than what dershowitz has done here. given the steep decline in the number of tenured jobs in academia, it seems to me that his interference in this case is even worse than the others because he’s attacking someone at an even greater power disparity than in the case of the other two. i think a better phrasing would be that dershowitz has once again demonstrated that he’s a complete and total asshole who deserved to be roundly condemned and canceled himself.
