Rebecca Kukla: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you’re an economist and you stay out of scandal, you can perhaps earn more money than a philosopher could. That’s actually a great point. The incentive structure has been very messed up about all of this. I don’t know if it’s that we have more of it, or it’s that the culture around reporting it and gossiping about it is more. But in a way, it doesn’t matter, right? Because we have a lot of it, which is really your point. So the comparative doesn’t matter. Why do we have a lot of it? Philosophy is a dramatically less gender-balanced field than any of the other social sciences or humanities, and then most of the STEM fields. The numbers in philosophy are pretty dire. But what’s most interesting about them is that, as feminist philosophy has been on the rise, and as consciousness about gender issues in the academy has been on the rise, our numbers haven’t changed all that much, if you go back and look, like, 30 years, or 50 years even. The percentage of women who make full professor, for instance, is not that different than it’s ever been. There are more female graduate students now, but how that translates into changing the discipline is unclear. I think part of it is just the very boring fact that it’s a male-dominated field, and male-dominated fields are likely to have more sexual harassment, it seems to me, because there’s more of that male culture that’s unchecked. I want to say publicly that not all departments are like this, and my department at Georgetown is very much not like this. I don’t want this to be heard as about my department. But I do think, in many departments in philosophy, there’s a kind of a guru culture that goes on, where there are people at the top of the field, the big stars of the department, who are usually male, statistically — for the reasons I said — who have more power than they even understand that they have. Everybody feels a very deep need to please them and do what they say and so on. So the whole power setup is just ripe for exploitation. There was just a case that I’m sure you heard about, that was not in philosophy — despite the fact that it keeps being reported as if it was in philosophy — where it was a woman who had that star status, Avital Ronell. She was the one who was grotesquely harassing her students and using her status as the kind of guru star of the department to do it. I don’t even think that it’s just men who exploit that position. But I do think that in philosophy, it’s mostly men who are in a position to do that, to start with. Ultimately, I don’t have a really deep explanation for why we have so many scandals, but it is depressing. I’ve found out, again and again, that even departments that I thought were functional, when you really start talking to people — and especially when you really start talking to graduate students who are not men — you find out more and more depressing stories about just how willing people are to exploit their positions in the department. In departments that have graduate students, it’s just a weird relationship already, right? It’s an adult supervising another adult. how willing people are to exploit their positions in the department. In departments that have graduate students, it’s just a weird relationship already, right? It’s an adult supervising another adult. The second adult tends to be younger, but they’re an adult. The graduate students who are around for years — they’re in these intense working relationships with the professors. It’s easy, if you’re a professor, to feel like that relationship is a socially equal one because you’re just hanging out with another adult who’s interested in your field, whereas the graduate student is hyperaware of the fact that you can make or break their lives and that it’s not an equal relationship. A lot of those power differentials get hidden from the person wielding the power. I just think it’s an extremely easy position to exploit. We’ve got thousands of years of this idea of the wise old professor being this erotic figure that gets pulled into all of these dynamics. But it’s been a really toxic, difficult time over the last, I don’t know, 10 years in philosophy. I hope it’s getting better from all of this.…

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