Leiter on Thought Crimes Watch
Brian Leiter has two posts on the monstering of Rebecca Tuvel. The first is nicely titled Thought crimes watch: comparing trans-racialism to transgenderism verboten!
A majority of the editorial board of an allegedly scholarly journal apologizes for publishing an article (which presumably went through whatever passes for peer review there) called “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College. Here’s the abstract for the thought crime article:
Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.
Apparently the “harm” to Prof. Tuvel of a public apology by the majority of the editorial board of the journal that published her article was outweighed by the “harm” of her thought crime to transgender people. (Addendum: no thought crime is complete without a public letter of protest. What is chilling about this is that instead of this campaign of vilification of a junior faculty member and demand for “retraction” of her article, someone could have written a response piece and sent it to the same journal. But this is obviously not a scholarly community, but a political one. Those familiar with the history of 20th-century Marxist movements will recognize what’s going on here, and it isn’t a happy sight.)
It’s ugly. Ugly ugly ugly.
The second is even harsher (I don’t say that disapprovingly – I think harshness is well deserved here): The defamation of Rebecca Tuvel by the Board of Associate Editors of Hypatia and the authors of the Open Letter.
I just want to flag something else about the remarkable “apology” issued by the Associate Editors of Hypatia, which a couple of readers flagged for me. It contains the following:
It is our position that the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article could and should have been prevented by a more effective review process. We are deeply troubled by this and are taking this opportunity to seriously reconsider our review policies and practices. While nothing can change the fact that the article was published, we are dedicated to doing what we can to make things right. Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process. In addition to the harms listed above imposed upon trans people and people of color, publishing the article risked exposing its author to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable. A better review process would have both anticipated the criticisms that quickly followed the publication, and required that revisions be made to improve the argument in light of those criticisms.
The “open letter” is even more explicit that Prof. Tuvel is not, in the view of the signatories, a competent professional scholar, stating that, “Many published articles include some minor defects of scholarship; however, together the problems with this article are glaring,” so much so that they demand retraction.
I confess I’ve never seen anything like this in academic philosophy (admittedly most signatories to the “open letter” are not academic philosophers, but some are). A tenure-track assistant professor submits her article to a journal, it passes peer review, it is published, others take offense, and the Associate Editors of the journal declare that “Clearly, the article should not have been published” and that the abuse to which the author is being subjected is “both predictable and justifiable.”
Yes. It’s horrible. It’s familiar but it’s none the less horrible for that.
I hope that Prof. Tuvel consults a lawyer about this defamation; and while it looks to me like defamation per se (i.e., damages are presumed since the critics are impugning her competence in her profession), I would imagine showing damage would not be hard. How can Prof. Tuvel, for example, now use this repudiated but allegedly peer-reviewed article as part of her tenure process? Indeed, how can her department or college support her for tenure when she has been so vilified as a scholar and professional by people who work in her fields? I wonder did any of those professing solidarity with those who specialize in taking offense consider the very tangible harm they are doing to the author of this article?
I really doubt it. I think they were too busy frotting their imaginations over the imaginary harm Tuvel’s article would cause to imagined victims.
Ok, I can’t help it. Someone Is Wrong On the Internet:
Or, for fuck’s sakes, Leiter. It’s not defamation. The criticism of Tuvel falls pretty clearly in the category of opinion: either pure opinion, or opinion based on disclosed facts. Leiter ought to know better, considering that over the years he’s impugned the professional abilities of many people he doesn’t like. (I’m not saying he’s wrong, just that he’s got a reputation for getting into vicious flamewars.) FSM save me from Internet Lawyers who look up “defamation per se” and think it means “if somebody says something bad about my professional abilities, I win the lawsuit! It says PER SE!” The “per se” bit just refers to whether the plaintiff has to plead and prove damages, which is usually only one of many flaws when somebody starts claiming that a particular public argument should be resolved through litigation…..
Digression over. Just because it isn’t defamation doesn’t mean it isn’t shitty behavior. Hell, the journal doesn’t even need to defend the author; it would be fine to just say “we don’t endorse the conclusions of this or any other article we publish. We publish all views that meet our academic standards — if you want to submit a response, we’d be happy to consider that, too.” But throwing the author under the bus, absent cases of actual fraud (falsifying of test results, plagiarism), is pretty lousy.
Now I see what the so-called deadnaming charge is about. It is the author’s use of a forbidden name: Bruce. I think Caitlyn Jenner knows what her name used to be. And (in the above excerpt, at least) the author didn’t use that name in a sneering, contemptuous way. She mentioned it to provide clarification. If it caused Jenner offense, that’s not pleasant. I don’t like being offended either. But as an example of a forbidden practice that all decent people must condemn, mentioning Jenner’s birth name doesn’t seem too… harmful.
The paper uses the construction “Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner.” Tuvell is not dead-naming Caitlyn Jenner by using her birth name. Dead-naming is using someone’s birth name when they’ve asked you not to. Tuvell’s mentioning that Caitlyn Jenner was once known as Bruce in a discussion that takes trans people’s right to transition and to be acknowledged as members of their preferred gender as a core premise. Philosophers, of all people, should be capable of differentiating between use and mention.
It seems to me that this dispute can’t be understood without the background: Transgender issues have brought about something of a schism within academic feminism; the side that favors more extensively accommodating transgender politics within academic feminism has clearly “won” and has mostly succeeded in ostracizing and delegitimizing their (academic) opponents.
Tuvel and her critics are all on the same “side” on issues of gender (as far as I know neither side in the Hypatia dispute actually opposes transgenderism-within-feminism ideology). But her ideas (extrapolating “trans” concepts from gender to race) threatens to split the academic antiracism movement in the same way that transgender issues split feminism, except worse in that the “appropriation” narrative has much stronger resonance against transracialism than it did against transgenderism.
A civil war within the critical race theory movement over transracialism could have two outcomes, both of them extremely ugly from the perspective of Tuvel’s critics:
(a) Tuvel’s critics understand intuitively that their colleagues and students of color are disproportionately unwilling to accept transracial ideology into their movement. Allowing Tuvel’s ideas to be discussed in a non-dismissive way could get very messy, and could poison the entire field of critical race theory in the eyes of its natural constituency, students/faculty/activists of color.
(b) On the other hand, if the broader field came to accept transracialist ideas in the same way that transgender ideas won out inside academic feminism, Tuvel’s critics could find themselves ostracized from their movement in the same way that academic feminists who questioned the wholesale incorporation of transgenderism into feminism have been ostracized. For anyone working in a field where politics and ideology are absolute, the risk of that kind of ostracism is dreadful to contemplate.
By attacking Tuvel’s work so aggressively, her critics hope to stop this line of discussion early before it can cause this kind of split within the field of critical race theory. From that perspective, the more vicious and frightening and absolutist their public statements are, the better — they don’t just want to push back against Tuvel herself, they want to deter any other young faculty who might consider going in the same direction. “Nice pre-tenure record you’re building there, shame if anything happened to it.” I think we can all agree that what’s happening to Tuvel would make others shy away from publishing a similar argument.
But they can’t make that argument explicitly, so they attack Tuvel for being insufficiently supportive of transfolk, even though Tuvel in fact is supportive of transfolk. It gives them a way to suppress the dangerous ideas indirectly, while staying on the safe ground of gender ideology rather than race ideology.
That’s how it seems to me. Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher nor a critical race theorist.
To follow up on my comment in the earlier thread, retracting a paper editorially is supposed to be reserved for papers that are either fraudulent or plagiarized in some way, or else otherwise are egregiously below the accepted standards of the field. If that was the case for this paper, where were the editors? One reason I won’t agree to be on any more editorial boards is that it’s a time suck, and it’s a time suck because I read the papers I get before sending them out.
If this paper was really so awful that it merits retraction, that should have been evident from reading. It would seem that the editor in question either unthinkingly relied on the outside reviewers without glancing at the manuscript they were handling, or else thought it was acceptable but changed their tune in order to direct the ire of a bunch of twitterites away from themselves and onto the author. Each of those scenarios is damning in its own way, and neither one speaks very well of the editorial standards and practices at this particular journal.
Also, in the thread at the Daily Nous it was mentioned that this paper was selected for a talk at the APA meeting, which makes the “egregiously below the accepted standards of the field” charge rather difficult to maintain.
Screechy – Leiter is not an Internet Lawyer – law is his field.
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/leiter/
I know about the flame wars. He’s flamed friends of mine; that’s why I mostly avoid his blog these days. But I think his indignation is well placed in this instance.
Thank you, Salalia – great comment. That’s how it looks to me; having it all spelled out is very useful.
Indeed it does. Funny how that works, isn’t it. Funny how it’s just fine to tell women to move over and stfu, but not fine at all to tell black people that.
Ophelia — Leiter’s indignation is well-placed, and I agree with it. Which is why I don’t understand why he felt the need to drag defamation law into it, other than a sort of knee-jerk “if something’s REALLY bad, then it must be something you can sue for!” reaction. The fact that he has a background in legal education (and I acknowledge my error on that point) just makes it worse. I note that there’s no indication in his bio that he’s ever actually practiced law of any kind, and none of his listed publications are in this area, other than possibly the intriguingly-title “The Case Against Free Speech”.
And yet he’s on the faculty of the law school…the University of Chicago one, which has a pretty good reputation. (The understatement is deliberate.) I think calling that “a background in legal education” is a tad belittling. By all means say you think he’s wrong about defamation, but do it without the belittling.
[…] a comment by Salalia on Leiter on Thought Crimes […]
Thanks. It’s an honor to have one’s words considered post-worthy.
Not only is Leiter a law faculty member, he is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and: “joined the faculty in the academic year 2008-09, simultaneously founding the Law School’s Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. Prior to that, he taught for thirteen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was (at the time) the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale University and the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and University College London.” (from his UChicago page). Additionally, he is “one of the most influential legal philosophers of our time”. (Furthermore, but unrelatedly – I just enjoy this part of his scholarship immensely – he is one of the world’s leading Nietzsche scholars. His book Nietzsche on Morality has been called “arguably the most important book on Nietzsche’s philosophy in the past twenty years”.)
In an online interview, Leiter says that after taking his law degree, he “took a job with a law firm in New York, with an eye to learning about real-life lawyering and saving some money to return to graduate school… My time in law practice was very fruitful—I learned that the Legal Realists were right about courts, and that the mainstream Anglophone tradition in legal philosophy badly misunderstood their insights.”
So there may be something to be said for the unity of theory and practice.
http://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/brian-leiter/
I don’t know the US definitions of defamation but in the UK something is defamatory if it would lower someone in the eyes of right-thinking people. There are plenty of defences to defamation but they don’t stop it being defamatory, they just mean that the victim cannot successfully sue.
People often think that calling something defamatory means that it is legally actionable but this is not strictly true. If I call a convicted thief a thief, it is certainly defamatory but the defamation is justified so the thief has no action against me. I often read in reputable publications that you cannot defame the dead. You can, that’s the point. Even in Britain, where libel laws are harsh, you can defame the dead all you like because they cannot bring an action against you and no-one may do so on their behalf.
So, I have no idea whether Leiter thinks that Tuvel has a case against the authors of this letter but he may be using the word “defamation” in a more general sense that would make perfect sense to legal theorists and libel lawyers, if no-one else.
The Wiki entry on defamation law in the US is pretty solid. In short, truth is an absolute defense against charges of defamation (e.g. slander or libel), so the US is much better in this regard than the UK/Europe (at least, in my opinion).
This is what Wiki has to say about Defamation Per Se: “All states except Arizona, Missouri, and Tennessee recognize that some categories of false statements are so innately harmful that they are considered to be defamatory per se. In the common law tradition, damages for such false statements are presumed and do not have to be proven.” (emphasis mine)
Myrhinne,
Given that Leiter mentioned in his post the possibility of helping to fund legal action, I didn’t think he was using “defamation” in a general sense.
TDD,
Right. As the Wiki entry says, defamation “per se” just means that the plaintiff doesn’t have to prove specifically that he or she has suffered damages. (Though, if you actually want to recover damages for, e.g. loss of income, it’s kind of a good idea to introduce evidence of it.) It doesn’t relieve a plaintiff of the obligation to prove the other elements of the tort, or deprive the defendant of any other defenses.
In the context of Tuvel, saying that she is a terrible scholar (or words to that effect) does disparage her in her profession, but it’s almost certainly a matter of opinion. Whether someone is “good” or “bad” at their profession generally involves subjective assessments of what makes a scholar/doctor/bricklayer/whatever “good” or “bad,” whether the defendant meets those categories or not, etc. For example, this case held that calling a teacher “a babbler” and “the worst teacher at [his high school]” were protected statements of opinion rather than facts:
Of course it would be possible to defame a scholar through criticism of his or her work. If you said that “Professor So-and-so plagiarized,” that would likely be interpreted as a statement of fact. But saying that Tuvel, or Charles Murray, or that professor who gave you a shitty grade in your senior year, is a bad/lousy/sloppy scholar or teacher, is almost certainly not.
I say “almost certainly” because sure, it’s possible that a court could find an actionable statement of fact in Tuvel’s hypothetical case. Especially at the trial court level — the judge in the Hulk Hogan/Gawker case made some, ahem, rather surprising rulings. And I’m sure one could construct an argument for it. No doubt Leiter, who I agree is an impressively credentialed and accomplished guy, could come up with such an argument. But that’s the major point that has to be addressed. Harping on the damages element by invoking “defamation per se” is kind of missing the issue. It’s like saying that “O.J. Simpson definitely committed murder. Look, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are is indisputably dead” — the statement is true, and the accusation may be correct, but you haven’t addressed the actual points of contention, i.e. whether Simpson is the guy who caused them to be dead.