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How can we get people to do the right thing?

Over at Feminist Philosophers, an anonymous grad student writes,

I’m a young graduate student, and I don’t understand much about the professional politics of philosophy. So, I don’t have many suggestions. But I do want to write about what things look like from this young graduate student’s view.

I’m at a department with no lack of prestige. Many of our tenured faculty will quietly assert their support for under-represented groups in philosophy. But the people I see going under their real names and publicly and openly supporting real change and supporting victims are almost entirely vulnerable graduate students, with still nascent professional networks and no guarantee of a future job.

From my view, I’m just confused why this is happening. Our senior faculty has job security and incredibly rich professional networks and a heck of a lot more power than the students have. Why don’t they do more, or say something more?…

If graduate students are willing to potentially throw it all away in order to do the right thing, I think it’s just unconscionable that so many tenured faculty members…seem to do nothing out of fear of rocking the boat or because they just want to keep their heads down and do their work, or whatever…Why are female graduate students carrying so much of the burden for change? Why don’t senior philosophers actually DO something?

Another anonymous grad student then added:

I’m also a young graduate student, and the push to change the climate in my department has been primarily lead by female graduate students. It took a long time to convince faculty (even sympathetic ones) that such change was necessary. So thank you for expressing how frustrating this is.

I cannot help but wonder how many people currently find themselves in similar situations, and what can be done to help. I have personally known multiple individuals in different departments at different universities who have expressed to me similar experiences: inaction [or worse] by the members of their department in response to bad actor[s] in their program.

What can/should be done to get people to do the right thing?

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4 responses to “How can we get people to do the right thing?”

  1. Ambrose

    Uh, I don’t mean to be too cynical here, but I suspect that the “graduate students” who are “willing to potentially throw it all away” (or leading the “push to change the climate”) are mostly “female graduate students” (as your second commenter notes). So, if this is right, the supposedly radical change that these people are demanding consists in more of the very same kind of thing that’s already been happening for decades, and from which they would be most likely to benefit: more affirmative action for women, or more aggressive forms of this. It’s not really all that mysterious, then, why female graduate students would be asking for this; they just happen to be the beneficiaries of the policies they’re arguing for. Nor is it likely that daring to ask for this would be risky for them. Since all universities have been officially committed to AA for decades, and make ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘diversity’ official goals and values, these people are just asking their institutions to do more of what the institutions have long been committed to — and very loudly and proudly advertise as goals of the system.
    In reality, the person who would run a serious risk of being shut out of the profession nowadays is not the female grad student asking for more AA but, of course, the grad student who questions the need for AA or the moral justification for it. (Which is one reason why grad students almost never publicly do these things.) I’ve been in philosophy for almost twenty years, and I have NEVER heard a single person — grad student, tenured prof, whatever — publicly argue that AA is simply wrong. I’ll be told the reason is that it so obviously is not wrong. But in a profession where people publicly argue that there are worlds where donkeys talk, for example, or that bachelors could be married, I find it hard to believe that on this one issue the court of reason has decisively ruled.
    It does seem, though, that some male grad students are just as enthusiastic about this stuff. I find it a little puzzling. If one of them had a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a real job, as any chance at a real job often will be in this market, would they really feel no sense of indignation if they were turned down simply because a ‘comparable’ candidate was female? I suspect that some of them might rethink the issue once their ability to feed their kids depends on it. Maybe the explanation is that, being kind of young and new to this, they just assume that they are so gifted that it won’t be a problem for them.
    Perhaps a more interesting question is why no one seems to be much interested in the very real and obvious disadvantages suffered by the one “under-represented” group that has no official standing: the poor, many of whom are men (and white even), and many of whom will be subjected to AA discrimination if they ever manage to make it to grad school. It’s pretty easy to measure this kind of thing. For example, are you the first person in your whole family to attend university? If so, chances are that you faced very real obstacles that wealthier people did not — even if those wealthier people are, for example, daughters of philosophy professors who will be assumed to face ongoing (if largely invisible) ‘systemic’ discrimination and officially privileged over you in the system. But there seems to be no systematic effort to address this obvious form of ‘privilege’ and inequality.
    The truth is that AA is generally used to confer special, extra privilege on a class of people who tend already to be among the most privileged people on the planet. And often this is done at the expense of others who — because they are really and truly oppressed — have no official identity and can’t afford to speak out on their own behalf.

    Reply
  2. Marcus Arvan

    Ambrose: I allowed your comment even though, in my view, it is off-topic. This is not a post about affirmative action–nor do I see its relevance to the issue in the original post. Harrassment and climate issues have to do with [A] bad actors in departments, and [B] failures of individuals/departments/institutions to take sufficient preventive or remedial action.
    If you’d like to address these issues directly, please do feel free. But I do not see what your comment has to do with [A] or [B]–the issues, again, of this post.

    Reply
  3. Ambrose

    Hi Marcus,
    I didn’t realize the post was (only) about harassment or “climate”. I took the first commenter’s point about “support for under-represented groups” to mean something like “supporting them in their aim of getting ‘representation’”.
    But I think these issues are closely related anyway. When people complain of “bad climate”, they are often also complaining about “under-representation”. Often the “under-representation” is taken to contribute to the “bad climate”, or, often enough, it is taken to partly constitute the “bad climate”. When people want “remedial action”, this will almost invariable take the form of AA, among other things. (If the “climate” is bad in part because Xs are “under-represented”, and/or they are “under-represented” because the “climate” is bad, it makes sense to impose measures that will result in the supposedly correct degree of “representation” of Xs.) Indeed, I can think of a few specific cases where the university or some professional body explicitly recommends more/more aggressive AA as a means of addressing “climate” issues. And in my experience it’s common for people to say that the “climate” is less than ideal simply in virtue of the fact that its inhabitants are not “representative” (of the human race? of North Americans? of something, anyway).

    Reply
  4. Carrie

    While it seems to me that the lack of women in philosophy can contribute to climate issues, it seems to contribute in exactly the way the initial grad student was pointing out: people who are not directly affected by the climate issues do not recognize them or do not care to do anything about them, and so they go unaddressed. But while I think it is regrettable that women and minorities are underrepresented in philosophy and this fact may allow bad climates to continue longer, underrepresentation by itself doesn’t make a bad climate by itself. It seems to entirely to miss the point to complain about AA when the actual complaint is that faculty with power don’t stop the sexual harassment and climate issues happening in their own departments and within their own networks.
    Speaking as a female grad student in a department that has both a pretty good climate and is heavily white and male, I think many faculty members really don’t see these instances, or the think these instances are isolated. I don’t know why they can’t see it, except to say that being in the majority means you miss all the ways people in the minority may be ignored or treated differently. Or it’s not a priority (this seems to be the case with my seemingly sympathetic male advisor). This doesn’t explain the obvious, gross refusal to do anything about sexual harassment, and I have no explanation for this.

    Reply

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