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Aspasia100

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  • Application Season
    2014 Fall

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  1. I'm leaving this here for Vineyard: http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/some-thoughts-on-epistemic-responsibility-2/
  2. I actually think how the chair reacts could be a useful gauge for how things are in the department. Even if all of the students are generally pretty wonderful on this front, it's important to have faculty (especially faculty in positions of power within the department) who take these issues seriously. Particularly because so much can change from year to year in a department depending on graduate student cohorts.
  3. The email addresses for graduate students are often posted on department websites--go ahead and email students. But, it's best to have these conversations over the phone because students might be hesitant to be honest if it requires putting their thoughts or experiences in writing, so you might want to email to request a chat via phone. This isn't a strange thing to do at all. Prospective students do it all the time. What I would email the chair to ask, though, is whether there are any demographic differences in attrition and completion rates, if any women have dropped out (and if they have, does the department have contact information for them so that you can talk to them about why? Sometimes the reasons are totally innocuous, but sometimes they aren't). What are the demographics of the faculty? Who do they invite to campus for talks? It's worth talking to students from other social groups in the program too (do they care about equity issues? A program can be mostly male and still be quite friendly to women). If people are hesitant to talk about gender issues, race issues, etc., that's a red flag.
  4. I will engage with you one more time under the presumption that you just genuinely haven't thought through this fully and are still thinking through the relevant consequences, effects, etc., but I don't want to have an argument about this (particularly since my point was about not turning down programs simply because they are lower ranked than others) and so this will be my last reply. I never said the accusations were *necessarily* true nor that Ludlow is a terrible person. I said that the university found the accusations to be credible is reason enough for me to stay away from a department that he is in irrespective of any other factor. The overwhelming majority of sexual assaults are never reported to anyone--university officials nor legal officials. When they are, given the nature of the crime, there is usually not enough evidence to substantiate even a Title IX violation which uses the weaker standard of 'preponderance of the evidence' rather than the criminal standard of 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' That the complaint was both brought forward, found to be credible, and partially constitutes a legal complaint against the university post-hoc to the university's determination lends a significant amount of justification in my view to belief that the allegations are in fact true. However, *whether or not they are true* no one at Rutgers is in the position to be certain of their falsity. If the department is willing to place its students at risk in light of this news by hiring him on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, that indifference for equity and justice for its students is not characteristic of a department I would or could tolerate. University departments are not legal systems. They are not condemning a philosopher to jail when they refuse to hire them. Being hired is a privilege and not a right. Departments are justified in refusing to hire philosophers when doing so poses a risk to the standards of the department and the community members therein. If they don't take those risks seriously enough to avoid hiring someone who has been credibly accused of sexual assault, I don't want to be a member of that community.
  5. The case was never taken to court (have you read the articles about this?), as is extremely common with sexual assault cases in general but especially ones involving alcohol. That Northwestern University found the allegation to be credible is enough for me to turn down really any financial offer from any school if accepting would mean being in the same department as him. Particularly since sustaining doubt until we can have certainty is what has allowed folks like McGinn to continue for years in the profession under suspicion and rumors, and perpetuated environments like that at Colorado. I'm surprised that you find this surprising.
  6. This. So far I've been accepted to Vanderbilt, Sheffield, and Northwestern. I applied to Rutgers (and it's the highest PGR ranked school I applied to), but now, even if I were accepted there, given a $1M per year fellowship and 100% course reduction, I wouldn't accept an offer of admission from them unless they rescinded his offer of employment in no uncertain terms. (Created an account just to weigh in on this--this is exactly why you should not turn down offers of admission from lower ranked schools when you get into higher ranked ones. Talk to students. Visit. Try to learn as much as you can about a place. Getting into a prestigious program is no good at all if the environment is miserable enough to interfere with your productivity or your happiness no matter how career-driven you are; ultimately, these things mess with your career, among other things.)
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