academic freedom doesn't mean very much if it doesn't extend to stuff we don't like

I belong to a perhaps dwindling group of academics who self-identify as liberal but also believe that it is a sad day whenever a fellow academic loses a job for saying something out loud that they genuinely believe. I was proud when UW-Madison went to the mat on behalf of an adjunct professor who believes that the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy. I was sad when Ward Churchill was fired for plagiarism charges that never would have been pursued had he not made an abhorrent comparison between 9/11 victims and lackeys of the Nazi regime. So, no, I'm not prancing with joy around my office because James Watson has been suspended from his administrative responsibilities at Cold Springs National Laboratory--although that's better than his being suspended from his affiliation there entirely, which was the initial report I read.* (It remains to be seen whether there will be a push to rename the school named after him.)

Part of the media coverage on the Watson episode has included bringing up past statements of his as evidence of some putatively larger pattern of despicable speech. I'm intrigued by the very first example that CNN's stories keep using:

In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.

Obviously, I believe that women should not choose to abort a fetus because of some indication that the child was otherwise going to grow up to be gay. But, I thought the whole point of bumper stickers like "Keep Your Laws Off Of My Body" and "If You Don't Like Abortion Don't Have One," is that my belief about what a woman should choose, at least in the first trimester, is irrelevant for whether a woman should be allowed to choose for herself whether to have an abortion or not. It's not exactly the same to say that women should have the right to choose, except for a couple of reasons that we have decided are morally abhorrent, in which case she should be compelled to carry the child.

How exactly would we enforce that, anyway? I take it as obviously infeasible to give women information but prevent them from acting upon it, yet still allow them otherwise to choose to abort their fetus for unspecified other reasons. "It's not because he has the gay gene, honest! I just changed my mind, is all." So presumably what would need to be done is to outlaw the screening test, at least until whatever gestational point women no longer have an unrestricted right to an abortion. Even if the screening test was relatively straightforward and involved genetic information really only relevant to sexual orientation, I'm unsure how I would feel about saying the mother has no right to this information, but given the multiple effects of genetics and how whatever genetic information implication in sexual orientation might also be relevant for other traits, it seems even more suspect to me to endorse withholding this information.

Incidentally, I don't actually think there would be much of a market for aborting fetuses because they have some elevated risk of being gay, or even if there was some combination of genes that for sure would lead a child to be gay (note that the possiblility that genetic configuration X results in a gay adult is not equivalent to saying all gay adults have genetic configuration X). Abortion based on the sex of the child, meanwhile, may be a different matter.

* The idea that academic freedom does not extend to retaining leadership posts is the only way I can feel comfortable with what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard.

carpe podium

WSJ article on "Last Lecture Series," in which professors are asked to deliver a lecture as if hypothetically it was the last one they would ever give, with a story about a public lecture by a professor for whom the Last Lecture was not hypothetical [HT:RPS].

breaches

Northwestern's policy makes it technically breach of contract if faculty members discover an incident of academic misconduct and try to handle it themselves rather than refer it immediately to the Dean's office. I like this idea so much more than Wisconsin's policy, which required you first to meet one-on-one with the student and only pass it forward if you intended to implement any punishment. An interesting twist is that if a lecturer or junior faculty member at Northwestern and tried to handle it The Wisconsin Way, the student could turn around and try to blackmail the teacher for their misconduct-misconduct.

First incident of undergraduate plagiarism that I had at Wisconsin involved a class where the TA caught the student. I don't remember if this was the case where the undergrad's reference to their "35 years of experience in the field" was the giveaway that perhaps the student had not written the text in question, or the one whose paper included "(see map on page 537)." Anyway, the TA was convinced this was an anomalous experience. "Good student; sociology major" he said, more than once.* I had to meet with her and she had a story for how some emergency had happened and she was scared about turning in the assignment late and so took something quick off the Internet. I believed her. After all, she looked really remoseful and scared. But there was another assignment out and ten seconds of Googling revealed that one to be plagiarized as well. Turns out, she had even been lying about being a sociology major.**

* No, I didn't really understand why the idea of her being a sociology major was supposed to make her less like to commit misconduct, either.

** All that evidence that people in positions of authority aren't any better at detecting when people are lying, but they do believe that they are: you don't believe it applies to you until confronted with the fact that it does.

overheard plus

This one was actually submitted by JFW premium subscriber from Dwarfamor, ME:

"I really think I want to do something to make a difference this year."
"Me, too. The difference I am committed to making is that I'm going to go to my classes."

Another friend e-mailed me to say that her department has decided that this fall they will have a retreat. The idea being to talk about some larger and weightier issues about structure and collegiality. Northwestern sociology had a retreat this summer, although it was held in a conference room and was not that different from how you'd imagine a seven-hour faculty meeting. In the case of my friend's retreat, they are having a professional moderator--intriguing occupation, that--and they are talking about going to a lodge. As my friend was telling me about all this, I just kept thinking one thing: this is the best premise for an academic murder mystery novel that I have ever heard in my life. Sort of like Straight Man meets And Then There Were None.

(ongoing series) things i used to have disdain for but now do without remorse

3,657. Gratuitous self-citation.

when i get tenure, i will...

Sure, every assistant professor has their fantasies about what they are going to do when they get tenure. Fabio says it's the time to start striving for teaching awards.

Jessica Burstein, on the faculty of English at the University of Washington, thinks getting tenure is finally the time to write that article for the Chronicle on "Sex at the Conference." The article includes observations on disciplinary differences in how scholars hook up at professional events, including that "Sociologists loiter in the parking lot" (So that's where she went!) and "Ethnographers are fine with exiting while necking" (In my observational experience from conference hotel bars, that one is plausible.). The article ends with the bio statement announcing her promotion as: "Oddly, she has just been granted tenure."

I'm going to confess feeling like if one is going to write an article about one's promiscuity with colleagues from elsewhere at conferences, and if one feels compelled to announce one's having been tenured at the end of it, one might want to have more listed on one's faculty webpage under "selected publications" than a single article from 1997. Or at least, don't then end one's bio with: Oddly, she has just been granted tenure.

sooners

Carleton has posted a sociology job ad with a deadline of July 13, with the idea of conducting preliminary interviews at ASA. Is this unusually early, or is my understanding and recollection of sociology job deadlines wrong? I guess the ad doesn't ask for letters of recommendation, just references. I've never been asked to write a letter of recommendation for a position with a July deadline, but I don't know if that says more about my experience as a letter writer or about the rarity of July deadlines for positions open to new Ph.D.'s. Anyone?

(Part of me asking is that everyone in sociology seems to be complaining about how the job deadlines are getting earlier and earlier. If ASA kept records of their application ads over the years, this could actually be an interesting thing to study, especially in terms of how the sequence has gone of places moving up their deadlines. I don't think there would be any rule against ASA trying to impose some kind of guidelines to set the timing of the market, but that would require the ASA leadership to show leadership, and I'm not naïve enough to stand on the platform waiting for that train.)

overheard

"So long as one has a resolution to the issue of feeling like one has meaning and purpose to life, a faculty gig at a research university is the best job in the world. I continue to be amazed that there are people with this job who have a sense of entitlement inflated enough to complain they are underpaid."
"I know a professor who regularly complains about being underpaid to her department's secretaries."
"She will be among the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
"Which will be especially surprising to her since she sees herself as on the side of the revolution."