16
May

The Problem with Plagiarism

By Craig McFarlane|Teaching, University|Be the first to comment!

Every year the university I teach at prepares a report on academic integrity investigations. One year, out of morbid fascination, I read the report and determined that although I was only teaching about a hundred and fifty discrete students in my faculty (a year long first year seminar and two lecture courses with about sixty students each), I was catching at least one third of the documented cases of plagiarism. I have not dared to read the report again, but the most recent report available is for 2011.

While reading the report, three possibilities stood out:

  1. based upon the rate at which I was catching students in violation of the academic integrity policy, the rate at which plagiarism was being officially caught was surprisingly low.
  2. this means that there were significant numbers of missing cases which, if being caught, they were dealt with “locally” either through failing the student on the assignment or merely assigning a poor grade that the student would grudgingly accept.
  3. due to the over-reliance on teaching assistants (including upper year undergraduate students, who are paid roughly one-half of what graduate student teaching assistants are paid) and contract instructors (over sixty percent of undergraduate credits offered were taught by contract instructors in the department in question), significant amounts of plagiarism were not being detected at all in the first place.

It seems likely that a number of different factors are coming together causally to create this situation. On the one hand, we as instructors know what works in terms of pedagogy: reading interesting texts, having discussions about those texts, letting the discussions flow naturally in unexpected directions, and then writing frequently and intensively about the issues that have been discussed. We also know that students prefer classrooms that are organized in this way rather than the alternatives. On the other hand, classrooms are getting larger every year, there is an increased reliance on underpaid and overworked contract instructors who, in turn, have to depend upon unprepared but well-meaning teaching assistants to mark on their behalf. But, as classes get larger and teaching assistants cannot keep up with grading written assignments (they have their own courses to stay on top of), instructors increasingly turn to exams, especially those that can be marked automatically by computers. Instead of having skilled humans read written student work, universities turn to algorithms to preemptively catch plagiarism (such as “Turn It In”) or outsource marking to mysterious firms in India.

A further, largely unrecognized, problem is also at play: the bureaucratic way in which plagiarism is dealt with administratively. (It turns out there is a manual for instructors that I have never seen that runs a full forty-one pages on how to catch plagiarists.) To the credit of my institution, algorithms that presume guilt and steal the intellectual property of our students have not been adopted. And, as far as I know, grading has not been outsourced any further than undergraduate teaching assistants marking their peers. The problem is that the process is excessively onerous on instructors. To properly document plagiarism, instructors are required to reconstruct the steps that students took in “writing” their essays. We must identify suspect passages, find the sources that were plagiarized, and demonstrate that this was not merely an error on the part of the student. On average, in my experience and I admit I might be especially fastidious in this regard, it took me about five hours to properly document each accusation. When contract instructors, such as myself, are only paid for 225 hours of work per semester long course and when we are dealing with multiple cases of plagiarism, it is in our best interest to just shut up and find a way to deal with the problem locally: give the student a bad mark, threaten them (“Accept this D- or I will report it to the Dean!”), or just ignore it.

However, if we put in the effort to prepare the report, the student is usually found guilty of the accusation (again, at least in my experience) and some sort of penalty is assigned, ranging from re-writing the assignment, failing the assignment, or failing the course. I don’t know what happens in cases of repeated plagiarism, but given that all of the students I have caught were “first time offenders,” my suspicion is that students are rarely caught a second or third time.

Recognizing that this system was unsustainable and as I was lucky enough to be able to teach two full credit first year seminars, I began to re-evaluate how I assessed my students. My first impression was that when I discuss plagiarism with my students, they are shocked to find out that students do plagiarize, that it is fairly easy for an experienced instructor to catch, and that the penalties are very severe. The students ask how I know when I’m reading a plagiarized assignment and I’ll answer honestly that if the tone suddenly changes mid-sentence, or if the sort of words being used suddenly changes, or if it is written in the style of Wikipedia, or—worst case scenario—if the student forgets to change the typeface and font size after copying and pasting. Outwardly, at least, the students agree that it is unfair to them that I have to “bank time” for dealing with plagiarism when I could be spending that time preparing classes, interacting with them, or providing them with more detailed feedback.

My solution to the problem of plagiarism is to enroll them in the policing of plagiarism by having their final assignment be a long (roughly twelve to fifteen pages; a significant length for first year students in a public university) essay written as a group. The students understand that not only must they select a topic, agree to an analysis or interpretation of that topic, and outline an argument to develop that analysis, but that they must also divide up the tasks in order to complete the assignment. Once they agree what they are going to do, they must each write their own sections and, once that is done, they must re-integrate all these parts into a whole. As a result, they become collectively responsible for the final project. One group; one essay. If one cheats, they all go down. This has worked. I have gone from having one of the highest rates of detected plagiarism (at least among the colleagues I know who are willing to discuss this) to not having a plagiarism problem at all. By convincing students to invest themselves in the final product, they have taken responsibility for it and have met their obligation to be honest.

Unfortunately, this system was bound to break down. For the first time in my five years of doing this final group project, I had my first case of plagiarism. It was a group of three students who wrote—ironically enough given the means of surveillance that the internet has opened up—on George Orwell’s 1984. It was clear upon reading the essay that each student wrote one third and that they made an attempt to connect the parts together. It wasn’t an excellent essay, but it was decent, except with one proviso: it was obvious that the final third was plagiarized. It was plagiarized in the style of Cliff Notes. That is, it was written at a “high school level” rather than a “Wikipedia level.” I dutifully did my research, documented the plagiarism, submitted my report to the Chair who in turn submitted it to the Dean, a meeting was scheduled for all of the students. One student took responsibility for the plagiarism (to their credit) and the other were (as is appropriate) let off the hook without punishment.

We now get to the point where the plagiarism system really starts to break down. As I mentioned above, penalties range from re-writing the assignment, to failing the assignment, to failing the course, to worse. Because this is a first year course, the general policy is that a student shouldn’t fail the course on account of one plagiarized assignment. Normally, the student is told to re-submit the assignment or is assigned a failing grade on the assignment.

This wasn’t the result of the investigation, although it was the one I was expecting. The student in question was penalized thus: the assignment as a whole would be re-marked, I would “pretend” that the plagiarized part was not plagiarized (“pretend to insert quotation marks and footnotes”), and a collective grade would be assigned. The penalty was that the guilty student would lose 12.5 grades or half the value of the assignment. In all the plagiarism investigations I have been involved with, this was the first time I was angry with the result.

The assignment was worth 25% of the final grade, so, in effect, the student was being penalized 12.5% points (or the equivalent of roughly three and a half grade points). Insofar as the guilty student is concerned, it is a penalty, but not as severe as I had expected. I am willing to live with this if the student learns their lesson and does not plagiarize again. The problem was the position I was put in: either I had to penalize the innocent students or I had to reward the guilty student. This was unacceptable to me.

Per my instructions, I had to mark the assignment as a whole. The problem was that the plagiarized section, even if I pretended it wasn’t plagiarized, was still terrible. It would bring down the grade for the other two students if I weighed it equally (for instance, seventeen out of twenty-five each for the first two sections and zero out of twenty-five for the final section, with the final result of (17 + 17 + 0)/75 = 11.3/25; in other words, the two innocent students fail the assignment for doing nothing wrong, although the guilty student would end up with the improbable grade of -1.2/25) or I ignore the plagiarized part thereby rewarding the guilty student (for instance, 17/25 for the innocent students and 4.5/25 for the guilty student). Neither solution was acceptable to me and it shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone, except, apparently, the Dean who in effect told me that there is a policy and nothing they can do (other than, of course, assign appropriate penalties).

My point in all of this is the bureaucratic logic we rely upon in dealing with the appropriate penalty for plagiarism is impractical and unjust. In an ideal world, all courses would be seminars and they would all be taught by tenure-track or tenured professors and all students would be competent, intelligent, and eager. Plagiarism would be rare and Deans would have the authority to tailor punishments to the infraction. Instead, we have a world where courses increase in size every year, students are not required to do written work and when they finally get to upper year courses where they have to write essays they have not acquired the requisite skills to do so, and where bureaucratic, formally and ostensibly fair procedures produce absurd consequences that penalize innocent students for having made the poor decision to form a group with an unreliable friend of theirs. Surely there is some middle ground between the utopian liberal arts and the bureaucratic dystopia of the contemporary public university (that does not depend upon algorithms, outsourcing, or MOOCs). We are good at denouncing violations of academic integrity, but we are not good at dealing with them.

30
Apr

Why Things Matter to People

By Craig McFarlane|Ethics, Sociology

The other day, in my post on some problems in (critical) animal studies, one of the things I suggested was a problem was how we understand the process of ethical change. Moving from a speciesist, anthropocentric and humanist view of the world to an anti-speciesist, non-anthropocentric, and post-humanist view of the world involves considerable change. (This is why I’m resistant to Francione’s mantra, “Go vegan: it’s easy and the right thing to do.” It’s the right thing to do, but it isn’t easy.) It is little surprise that there are more “former vegans” than vegans and more “former vegetarians” than vegetarians and, of course, more vegetarians than vegans. We live in a world that is, cross-culturally, one that is anti-animal in that speciesism appears to be a universal characteristic of all known human cultures. I suggested it is necessary that we understand how people go from a world in which “vegan” is a scary and unfamiliar word to one in which vegan is the norm and, of course, how people “lapse” and revert to old ways.

The dominant explanation of the move from non-vegan to vegan appears to be a highly rational one: people read a book like Animal Liberation (the so-called “Bible of the animal rights movement”) or they are given a pamphlet on slaughterhouses and factory farms or they are concerned by a Francione-ite and “debated” into changing their mind. Animal rights activists assume that the better argument will win and that convincing people is a mere matter of argumentation. It is little surprise that most animal rights activists are white, middle or upper middle class, from an educated (and likely professional) family, and are themselves highly educated. In other words, animal rights activists engage in activism, they suffer from what Pierre Bourdieu has called the scholastic fallacy: because we live in and operate in (and, hence, develop a “habitus” for) a discursive, linguistically dense world, we assume that everyone else does too. This, simply, is not the case. We assume—because we are—that everyone is a philosopher, scientist, or lawyer. Thus we expect that people will be convinced by the better argument (they aren’t) and that they will change their behaviour (they won’t) and that this change is easy (it isn’t) and that failed efforts to become vegan/vegetarian are due to a lack of will-power on the part of the individual (it isn’t).

Now, it is true: there are literally no good or even half-way decent arguments to support a speciesist position, an anthropocentric view of the world or, even, a general vague humanism. And it is also true that the general outline of the animal rights argument is correct and, increasingly, undergoing significant elaboration thereby ironing out all possible counter-arguments. This is good and important work, but insofar as we assume that this work is sufficient, we will never win.

The background assumption animal rights activists have is to the effect of, “There are facts which support a normative view and once people are acquainted with the facts and the argument, they will adopt a new normative view and change their lives.” This is completely and absolutely false. (Fortunately it is also false for idiotic displays like the abortion holocaust display, but, sadly, it is also false for any anti-sexist, anti-racist, etc movement as well.) Even among professional ethicists who (and surveys have pointed this out a few times) agree that a variety of positions (including pro-animal positions) are “likely” or “certainly” correct, they do not themselves change their behaviours even though they know their behaviours are wrong. This is important: even for those who are committed professionally to the view that the best moral argument will carry the day and that the best argument should compel individual and social change cannot bring themselves to change the way they live. (One survey suggested that ethicists are less-likely than other philosophical specialties to, for instance, pay annual fees to the APA even though those ethicists agree that paying said things is ethically incumbent upon professional philosophers.) Jonathan Haidt, the moral psychologist, has said he agrees there are no good reasons to eat animals (i.e., in effect, that the moral argument for veganism is correct), but he still can’t bring himself to stop eating meat. Chances are Haidt has an explanation from moral psychology for this.

The point here is that we have—like most people and including many sociologists—an “under-socialized” view of human social being. Part of this is due to the background of liberalism that most people (in the west, at least) subscribe to: there are individuals, they are the primary constituent element of social/economic/political/cultural being, they are rational, and that individuals are endowed with an autonomous will to guide their lives as they see fit. Ideologically, it is a nice story, but there is no psychological or sociological evidence to support it.

It is thus with great interest that I recently read Andrew Sayer’s Why Things Matter to People (my extensive notes). In this book, Sayer attempts to address a problem in contemporary sociological theory and practice: that we, as moderns, tend to imagine the world as being constituted by normative and descriptive statements. For sociology to be deemed a proper science, it is necessary that we purge normative or evaluative statements. The problem, however, is that this means sociology is unable to address the “actually existing” ethics practiced by people (because “actually existing” or “everyday” ethics falls between the normative and the descriptive because it is a “practical” form of reason). This is bad because it “ignores this relation and hence fails to acknowledge what is most important to people” (2) and, from a different perspective, it nullifies the critical potential of social science. (He quotes Barry Barnes approvingly on this point, “the ever-so-slightly critical theory of today” (219).)

Briefly, sociology has approached the issue of “values” from two directions, both misleading: either values are properties of individuals (which results in an “under-socialized” conception of social being) or individuals are cultural dupes who acquire norms imposed upon them by an anonymous social structure (which results in an “over-socialized” conception of social being). The problem here is that the traditional sociological accounts are anti-sociological because it either assumes that values are private matters closed to questioning by others (and are therefore noisy variables to be controlled for) or values are a function of power (and therefore cynical). Both of these views are theoretically dubious and empirically false. How, then, can the problem of “actually existing” values be addressed sociologically?

In order to recover values for sociology, we must turn away from abstract reasoning (which leads to either the under- or over-socialized conceptions of social being), and concentrate on practical reasoning. (Without getting too sidetracked, Sayer is a critical realist and more or less subscribes to the social ontology developed by Margaret Archer, which is deemed to be adequately socialized in that human social being is neither voluntaristic (methodological individualism), nor determinist (structuralism), or co-deterministic (structuration). Critical realists advocate an “analytical dualism” in the study of social relations such that “agency” and “structure” can be analyzed independently of one another, are causally efficacious relative to one another, and where the “structural moment” is an emergent property of sustained social interaction such that structure is produced by social interaction while at the same time constraining social action. It’s a mouthful, but along with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, it is the best general theory we have at the moment.) However, this itself runs into a problem: practical reasoning is often understood as instrumental reason; that is, concerned with means–ends calculations. The problem with limiting practical reasoning to this means–ends form is that it doesn’t address how people normatively relate to the world. Rather, we need to study those forms of practical reasoning that “concerned with ends rather than means, and particulars rather than universals.” That are “concrete and embedded rather than abstract and disembedded” and “they often take a tacit rather than discursive form, involving know-how rather than propositional knowledge” (61-2). Hence, we need to be attentive to “wisdom” rather than “rationality.”

The problem, however, with practical reason is that it isn’t rational narrowly-construed: it is difficult to put into rule or propositional form, it occurs to us when we least expect it, we have trouble explaining it, we do it automatically, and it tends to be resistant to rational argumentation. Sayer thus quotes (78-9) Nomy Arpaly’s Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Moral Agency approvingly (and this is a passage that gets to one of the problems for animal studies):

Dawning processes are perhaps the main way in which people change their minds, especially concerning subjects they regard as important—the very subjects regarding which an attempt to argue with them and talk them out of the error of their ways is likely to encounter the sternest irrational resistance. Very few people who give up racist prejudices, for example, give them up in a process of deliberation. More often, the irrationality of their prejudice dawns on them after spending long enough with people of the relevant race and realizing, bit by bit, that they are very similar to themselves. (Arpaly, 2003, 55-6)

Sayer elaborates on this,

Even if we do come to see that something we have believed is wrong through encountering a convincing argument and decide that now we should act differently, this in itself is unlikely to be sufficient to change our ways of thinking and acting completely. For example, even if the white racist omes to renounce her racism on the basis of argument, she may still find herself unintentionally making racist assumptions in everyday life—assuming that the new doctor will be white, that a black child cannot be academically gifted, and so on. Having become consciously and sincerely anti-racist she may feel ashamed about the persistence of these unreformed reflexes, but it can take many years of repeated experience and practice to re-shape these completely. The process involves not just acknowledging errors of thought and action, but becoming a different person with different embodied habits of thought.

This discussion of racism, including former racists, directly parallels the problem of former speciesists, including not only the limited role that rationality and argumentation plays in the “conversion,” but also how hard the process of “conversion” is.

The implication here is that humans are, by their nature, the sort of beings who are constituted by “caring” about things or for whom “things matter.” Caring and mattering are clearly normative orientations that people have, however, they are not the sort of normative orientations that moral philosophers (with few exceptions) take up. Furthermore, caring and mattering also seem to operate at a level that is not merely automatic but, at the same time, not discursively elaborated with rational principles: you don’t elaborate a “rule” for why you care about your cat or why your job “matters” to you and, because there is no elaborated rule, you do not follow a rule when you exercise caring or mattering. On top of this, when we are asked “Why do you care about your cat?” it is assumed that a reasonable (albeit incomplete) answer is “Because I do.” But, at the same time, this caring or mattering is not purely automatic: there are millions of cats in the world, but you don’t care for all of them (even if you don’t wish them harm). Again, we see that caring and mattering fall between purely normative statements and purely descriptive statements; these are real social relations that violate the clean separate between facts and values.

As a result, Sayer spends a lot of time defending feminist care ethics as a properly sociological theory of ethics and, interestingly, he connects this caring to an idea of flourishing, which is best analyzed in Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s idea of the “capabilities approach.” Significantly—and here we come back to animal studies and animal rights—he rejects deontological and utilitarian accounts of ethics as being inadequate to sociological reality. This sounds right to me.

The book is an important first step in developing a “sociological ethics” or “moral sociology” that can challenge the established views in moral philosophy and also undercut the tendency in “moral psychology” towards individualist accounts (and, worse, evolutionary psychological accounts).

25
Apr

#CommitSociology 24/7/365

By Craig McFarlane|Sociology

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “I think though, this is not a time to commit sociology.” He said this in reference to the recent arrests for a terrorist plot to derail a VIA train and, presumably, also with reference to the students from a London, Ontario high school involved in terrorism in Algeria and, of course, the recent bombings in Boston. This comment has been mocked (and rightly so) on Twitter. There are a few issues worth addressing here, but I’ll limit myself to two of them.

First, the comment must be interpreted in light of what the Prime Minister advocates as the opposite of sociology. For Harper, the opposite of sociology is the continued imposition of a “security regime,” both at home and abroad. In effect, this entails the erosion of civil and political liberties at home (for instance, the bill just passed) along with, not only the destruction of human rights abroad, but widespread death and misery to innocents; for instance, through American drone campaigns, continued reliance on Guantanamo Bay prison (and, presumably, other sites, in addition to collaborating with regimes who are known to use torture as an investigative tactic) as well as more overt activities such as military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what the Prime Minister means when he says, “Our security agencies work with each other and with others around the globe to track people who are threats to Canada and to watch threats that may evolve.”

If “committing sociology” means abstaining from drones, torture, special forces operations, military invasions, constant surveillance, the erosion of constitutional rights and international human rights standards then, yes, we must “commit sociology” 24/7/365. Significantly, the Prime Minister recognizes this on some level when he continues, “and through our activities to do everything we can to prevent and counter it.” By definition, “everything” includes “everything” which necessarily means sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, history, economics, law, and the other social sciences and humanities disciplines. A JTF2 soldier can stop a person, but only with a bullet, who has already decided to become a terrorist, but that soldier cannot prevent the decision to become a terrorist in a first place nor can that soldier contribute to our understanding of why people find it necessary to strap bombs to themselves in order to kill other humans. The social sciences can tell us that; police, armies, secret operatives, and intelligence officers cannot and will not.

Second, the comment must be interpreted in light of a general Conservative “war on science.” The Prime Minister’s comment is not simply a soundbite aimed to attack Justin Trudeau’s call for understanding the “root causes” of terrorism. It is this, that is, cynical, manipulative, unprincipled and, of course, dumb, but it also much more than this. The Prime Minister’s comment falls in line with a general policy of restricting scientists. We should not forget that, alone of all the major industrialized countries of the world, Canada is the only country whose Minister responsible for the science portfolio is a creationist. The Prime Minister is the head of the same government that cancelled the long form census on dubious “privacy” grounds (all the while passing security legislation that did, in fact, erode privacy and other civil liberties). This is the same Prime Minister who has gagged natural scientists and forced policies that will prevent archivists from speaking to local genealogical societies without political clearance (including a “snitch line”). This is the same Prime Minister who shuttered the Experimental Lakes Area because the research facility seemed to be producing data that had broad environmental implications, including the much-maligned tar sands in Alberta, the source of the Prime Minister’s social power.

The Prime Minister said something stupid and is being rightfully mocked for saying something stupid, but what he said wasn’t accidental. For Stephen Harper, there will never be a right time to “commit sociology.” This is why must commit sociology.

22
Apr

Structure

By Craig McFarlane|Sociology

Related to my previous post regarding the sociological impossibility of the abolitionist approach to animal rights, I’ve been reading some rather dry sociological theory, largely about the so-called “agency/structure” debate, which some say is constitutive of sociology as a discipline. In short, this “debate” concerns the relation between the actions of individual people and the overall shape of society. Thus, agency refers to the capacities of individuals to engage with other individuals be it rationally or irrationally, purposefully or without purpose, intentionally or not. Structure, in turn, refers to those elements which organize individuals and their agency, such as class, state, gender, race, and the like. Interestingly, at no point in this debate does a concern for “the environment” of the social system ever enter into the picture. (The reason for this is that sociologists are very keen on refusing a reduction of “social facts” to “psychological facts,” “biological facts,” “genetic facts” and the like.) There are, in effect, people and the things people create. Thus, animals, plants, and all other sorts of natural conditions are excluded from the discussion except insofar as they are culturalized as resources for individual people and which are distributed in the social system.

In effect, there are only a few logical positions in this debate; viz.,

  1. agency, no structure (i.e., methodological individualism);
  2. structure, no agency (i.e., structuralism);
  3. structure and agency are co-constitutive (i.e., Bourdieu’s fields or Giddens’s structuration);
  4. structure is an emergent (constraining and enabling) property of agency (i.e., Archer’s “morphogenetic approach”).

Regardless of where we insert those other things (animals, plants, mountains, etc) in this picture and regardless of how we think of those other thing (as static or dynamic, of acting or not, etc) we are still left with these basic positions, it is only the picture that changes. It seems reasonable to me that both positions (1) and (2) are false for the simple reason that individuals experience structures as real. Individual women are both constrained and enabled by the fact of being gendered woman. Thus, we need to speak of both structure and agency; the question is the relation between the two and the scope of either category.

Archer argues in a number of places that to refute the concept of structure, it is necessary to refute three elements of the concept:

i. structures are autonomous (in that they do not depend on all individuals); ii. structures pre-exist any given instance of agency (in that structures present at T derive from T-1); iii. structures have causal efficacy (in that they constrain and enable agency while also being subject to transformation by agency).

Anthony King in his article “Against Structure” notes that (i) and (ii) collapse into one another because to pre-exist means that they are autonomous in the sense that they cannot be dependent upon something they pre-exist. Granted. King wants to argue, in effect, that (1) is correct: there is agency, but there is no structure. This view, however, I take to be incorrect and I won’t concern myself with the remainder of King’s argument.

But, King’s point draws our attention to a logical problem in Archer’s argument: if structures pre-exist agency and are autonomous from agency, but that structures are the emergent properties of agency, can a non-metaphysical account of structures be given? The problem here is that structures, as real existent properties of the world, had to come into existence at some point. To avoid a metaphysical account, it must be the case that structures emerge from social interaction. However, per Archer’s argument, social interaction is impossible without pre-existent structures.

Under normal conditions, we have something as follows: T1 (“structural conditioning”), T2<=>T3 (“social interaction”), T4 (“structural elaboration”). In the next cycle, T4 becomes T1 and ad infinitum. The problem is that at some point there was T0, which is to say, there was social interaction from which structures emerged which then went on to constrain and enable subsequent social interaction. However, Archer has defined the problem such that structures always pre-exist social interaction such that social interaction does not directly produce social structure (this would, in effect, result in (1) which has been ruled out). That is, cannot be social interaction that is not structured. But, there must have been at some point social interaction that was not structured. Either this means, in Archer’s formulation, that (1) is correct or that social structure is metaphysical, neither of which are theoretically acceptable conclusions.

19
Apr

Three Problems for Animal Studies

By Craig McFarlane|Animals

There are some problems in “animal studies” (so-called “critical” or otherwise) that either have not received attention at all or have only received tangential treatment. These, I think, are major problems—practical, empirical, and theoretical—that need to not only be recognized, but seriously addressed.

  1. The dominant approach to rights within the animal rights literature (abolitionism) suffers from two connected theoretical problems. The first problem is that its conception of rights rests upon an anthropocentric (humanist) framework while at the same time claiming to be anti-anthropocentric in its analysis. The second problem is that abolitionism, taken to its logical conclusion, demands a complete and absolute separation between homo sapiens and all other non-human animal species. The problem here is that this consequence is sociologically impossible insofar as non-human and human species cannot be rigorously separated. The only way to realize this goal is through the extinction of the human species—a conclusion I am not opposed to (as such), but one which most animal rights advocates, including abolitionists, are unlikely to endorse.

  2. There is no clear understanding of the precise ways in which individual humans convert from the norm (i.e., speciesism, carnism, etc) and adopt a mode of living congruent with animal rights. It is assumed (again, in the abolitionist literature) that the primary mechanism of change is education, including the ever popular activist “demo.” This assumes a social ontology whereby ideas are causally efficacious; i.e., a form of social idealism. However, such a view has little or no credibility in sociology as such. The other standard explanation is through recourse to a conversion moment to the effect of “I realized that there were no real differences between my pet and the animal I was eating. I wouldn’t eat my pet, why do I eat animals?” The issue here is not one of ideas (“I was told x…” or “I read x…”), but through the recognition of a lived contradiction. (As an aside, this is how we came to the position we have; it is only after experiencing this contradiction that we became interested in animal rights as an intellectual doctrine.) If the goal of animal rights as a political/social/ethical project is to convert others to the cause, then it is necessary to understand the causal mechanisms of conversion. This requires research in three areas: (1) how people who are vegan (or hold other strong pro-animal views) understand how they came to this position; (2) how people de-convert from this position and come back to their prior speciesist/carnist position (the so-called “former” or “ex” or “lapsed” vegetarian) and (3) how animal rights conversions are similar to and different from other conversions (for instance, from communist to neo-conservative, from Christian to atheist, from passive Christian to evangelical, from Christian to Muslim, and the like).

  3. The third problem is a sort of cultural double-standard and not dissimilar to the double-standard long-ago identified by feminists: that women have to work twice as hard to receive half as much recognition. With respect to those working in (or around) the university on animal issues, our work has to be twice as good in order to be taken half as seriously. Sadly, in part because of a strong anti-intellectualist strain in so-called “critical animal studies” (incarnated in, respectively, Steve Best and his acolytes and Gary Francione and his acolytes), the average piece of critical animal scholarship is weaker, on average, than work produced in any other substantive area of investigation. Unfortunately, in order to be taken seriously as scholars, we have to produce work that is more than better than average, but this demand is undercut by the fact that our scholarship rests upon concepts that we haven’t been able to form. Witness, for instance, David Nibert’s Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression (my notes), about which an ethically sympathetic reviewer wrote “I do not think I would have finished reading the book if I had not agreed to review it.” I didn’t write a review of the book, but only finished it out of a sort of morbid fascination. Nibert, writing in 2002, relied upon standard sociological concepts—that is, humanist, anthropocentric, speciesist—and produced a truly terrible book. Kay Peggs’ Animals and Sociology (my notes), published in 2012, did not do much better (but she didn’t adopt the “infantile leftism” of Nibert; small victory). This isn’t a problem limited to sociologists (my own discipline), but is also plainly on display in political theory, such as with Kimberly Smith’s Governing Animals (my notes). The point here is that not only is it difficult to write on animals in the established disciplines given political animosity to the topic, but it is also hard to do so because of a lack of conceptual development. Many animal scholars seem to believe that, in effect, adding “and animals” to a definition renders it anti-anthropocentric, anti-speciesist, and the like. This is simply false.

    The cultural analog to this—and, in many ways, the most important one—is found in food. While the vast majority of non-vegan food is hardly recognizable as such (i.e., nutritionally, in substance, and in taste), because of speciesism and carnism, terrible non-vegan food passes as food. Terrible vegan food does not pass as food. In order to pass as food, our food cannot be pitched at the level of McDonalds or Tim Hortons; it has to be pitched at the level of quality, artisanal foods. This isn’t fair, of course, but it is a reality.

There are other problems, obviously, such as securing graduate scholarship and post-doctoral funding through organizations like SSHRC (in Canada) for those who want to explicitly work on pro-animal subjects, securing tenure lines in departments for positions that are explicitly pro-animal, having regular course offerings in animal studies (not just in law/philosophy departments, but as a key component of undergraduate education in the social sciences and humanities in general). But, none of these will happen on any scale (if the era of tenure-track and tenured professors isn’t already over) if the first three problems are not addressed.

13
Apr

Ethical Murder

By Craig McFarlane|Animals, Ethics, Food, Violence

Only a few words have been changed.

Ethical killing: The new urban hunters

The sustainable food movement helps reverse a 30-year decline in
popularity

“It looks all flabby and grey and not at all appealing,” she says. As
a Buddhist-raised, recovering vegetarian, the grisly reality of
parking lots, malls and the shrink-wrapped denial represented by the
neatly packaged human in her grocery store weighs on her soul.

So Nagata — a 22-year-old filmmaker — is learning to murder. So is her
brother, Kai. Both are in their 20s, raised a stone’s throw from
Commercial Drive.

“We were vegetarian growing up, so murder was never really on the
radar when we were kids,” she said. “My parents were trying to make a
choice about minimizing evil, both nutritional and ethical.”

Not a lot of the human protein available met their standard. The
environmental impact of what she calls “industrial meat” is enough to
put Nagata off her feed.

“I want my humans to be grass-finished, and killed as ethically as
possible,” she said. “As much as I firmly believe in the necessity of
human protein and saturated fats, the commercial stuff is all toxic.”

B.C. is experiencing a murder resurgence, fuelled in part by interest
from young urbanites like Nagata and her brother, according to
murdering instructor Dylan Eyers of Vancouver-based Eat Humans BC.

“I’ve done courses for years for friends and colleagues,” said Eyers,
who is also a police officer.

“For the past few years, I’ve been concentrating on urban folks from
Vancouver who want to explore murder.”

Eyers’ Vancouver classes attract a startling variety of people — from
young men hoping to reclaim a family murdering tradition to urban
farmers, vegetable gardeners, hipsters, artists, musicians and foodies
looking for a sustainable and ethical way to feed themselves.

“A few people roll up in monster trucks, but others ride over on their
bikes,” he laughed. “That seems to be a new thing.”

Growth in the number of graduates from the Conservation Outdoor
Recreation Education course required for murderers in B.C. and annual
murdering licence sales over the past eight years are beginning to
reverse a 31-year decline in murdering’s popularity between 1982 and
2003.

Western Canada’s murdering and conservation magazine, Outdoor Edge, is
full of readers’ snapshots of murderers displaying their prey. But
sprinkled among the bearded bushmen and camo-clad weekend warriors are
rifle-wielding women and teen girls.

The number of women graduating each year from CORE has been rising
steadily — to 1,725 in 2012 from 791 in 2004 — faster even than the
number of men.

“We are seeing a lot more women get into murder,” said Jesse Zeman,
vice chairman of the B.C. Human Federation. “The image of murder is
really changing.”

Nagata completed CORE last summer, and was on a crew filming a murder
workshop near Cache Creek, both run by Eyers. About 40 per cent of the
people who attend Eat Human BC murder training are women, he said.

“My CORE class was mostly women and two teenagers, one was a girl just
graduating high school,” Nagata said.

For many young murderers, Eyers is a bridge, supplying guidance that
was traditionally passed from one generation to the next.

“There’s definitely been a break in that connection,” he said, adding
that having an experienced mentor is essential for beginners.

Eyers starts every CORE class with a meet and greet, where students
talk about their motives for taking up murder.

“I’d say 70 per cent of them talk about being more aware of where
their food comes from, and they have concerns about the humans they
are buying and they want to be responsible for how those humans are
treated,” he said. “People are gardening more, they want to eat
organic, and I think murder is an extension of that.”

Folksinger Ben Rogers faced a steep learning curve after taking murder
training last year with Eyers.

Although his great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all
murderers, Rogers’ father quit murdering when the family moved to
North Vancouver. Ben, now 28, never had the benefit of his father’s
experience in the field.

And it showed, at first.

“I got skunked during toddler season,” he said. “It was a trial. I
went in blind and didn’t know what to do — didn’t know how to call
toddlers, didn’t know where to go to get them. I was learning
everything from scratch.”

Adolescent season was kinder and, with the benefit of instruction from
experienced murderers, Rogers filled his freezer.

“There’s a lot to learn if you want to be successful. Murdering takes
a lot of knowledge and skill,” he said.

Like a lot of murderers, Rogers likes to share his kills, preparing
elaborate meals for his friends.

“That’s the reason I do it,” he said.

“It makes sense to murder for food from the abundance we have,
especially humans that have lived their lives in the slums.”

Leung Man completed his murdering class last year at the age of 38 as
a logical extension of his passion for vegetable gardening, canning,
fishing and foraging. Born and raised in Vancouver, he had no family
murdering tradition, but felt like something was missing.

He has taken up the sport with two friends around his age who share
his passion for food.

“I have started doing things I used to do as a kid, eating from the
garden, fishing and foraging for mushrooms, and my friend who is
Italian started making salami,” said Man, who is also learning to
butcher whole humans. “Murdering makes sense as part of a DIY foodie
lifestyle. There’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from being able to
grow or prepare your own food, and you end up with something that
tastes great and I know it’s a lot better for me.”

Man confesses he was “blown away” by the flavour of the granny stew
Eyers served at his murdering field skills workshop.

“I think the way that we raise food humans is unhealthy, and it’s a
really industrialized process,” he said. “A human that lives in the
suburbs has a fuller, more natural life and diet.”

On their first murdering trip, the friends bagged and ate their first
toddler. It was an epiphany.

“We skinned the toddler and we were about to put it on the grill, and
I took a whiff and it had the most incredible aroma. It smelled really
herbal and kind of nutty,” he said. “You can’t get anything like that
at the store. It wasn’t gamey, it wasn’t tough. It had a really full
flavour. It was fantastic.”

Nagata’s first murdering experience opened her eyes to the depth of
knowledge and skill required to harvest wild humans.

“There was a realization of how many layers there are to it,” she
said. “Even walking through the streets with the intention of
murdering changes the landscape — you just notice everything. It
really changed the suburbs for me. I have always loved the suburbs,
but I never liked public transportation.”

Stalking children switched on a previously unused part of Nagata’s
brain.

“I realized this is how I want to be in the suburbs,” she said. “It
was like something had been missing.”

Most new murderers worry they won’t have the resolve to skin and gut a
large human in the suburbs, but before you can even try you have to
find your prey. To find your prey usually requires an intimate
knowledge of the terrain, the movements of humans in that environment,
their feeding habits and other tendencies.

To hunt lawyers, you also have to be able to identify the species, its
gender and the number of pins on its lapels — in the worst case —
through binoculars, in the alleys, in poor light, at a distance of 200
metres or more.

Only then can you pull the trigger.

Killing a human is another big psychological hurdle.

“I’m a people person, so I know it’s going to be hard no matter what,”
Nagata said. “But I really want to get the skills and knowledge to do
this properly and not be totally traumatized by it.”

Nagata, her brother and two close friends — all inexperienced
murderers — saw four lawyers on their first trip, but none that were
legal to shoot.

“We were nowhere close to being able to kill anything,” she admitted.
“I guess I’m still just a poser.”

Nagata aspires to take a lawyer or a middle manager, when her skills
allow it.

“After eating murdered suburban humans, even the best refugee camp
victim tastes like garbage,” she said. “When people ask, I tell them
that lawyers taste like meat and everything else tastes like it is
trying to be a lawyer. I could live very happily eating middle
managers and receptionists.”

Hunting for wild humans is an essential element in Nagata’s vision for
living lightly upon the earth, which includes sustainably harvested
humans, wild pink collar workers and homegrown vegetables. She
recently moved to a farm in Langley.

“Given the state of the world, I think it’s really important to learn
to do these things properly,” she said. “My whole family is
hilariously apocalyptic. A lot of our lifestyle choices and
justifications for things hinge on peak oil or disaster. You never
know.”

Even if the apocalypse never comes, Nagata is eager to opt out of
human civilization as it is currently practised, especially the
industrial-scale food business.

Optics and ethics

Murder is an endeavour that comes with baggage, and it suffers at
times from its duality. Dreams of splendid meals built around healthy,
sustainably harvested human protein — the goal of the vast majority of
murderers — are a sharp contrast to widely circulated, jarring images
of blood-soaked trophy kills, humans brought down simply for sport, a
skin lampshade or scalps.

Occasional porn actor Luka Magnotta ignited a vitriolic public debate
last year when he published videos of his kill — an Asian student that
was lured to the kill site — on social media.

Eyers, by contrast, integrates murder training with gourmet wildhuman
dinners and sausage-making workshops to keep the conversation about
murdering firmly focused on food.

“I never want to be in a position of having to defend a Luka Magnotta,
because that’s not what I’m about,” he said. “What he does is a
completely different thing.”

Based on the sales of species permits issued by the government, the
number of murderers who shoot trophy humans is dwarfed by the group
that murder for food — lawyers, middle managers, carpenters and school
bus drivers.

The CORE course, although required of all who would murder, is not
focused on murdering, but rather on conservation, suburban safety,
ethics, the idea of fair chase, and, especially, accurate occupational
identification.

There is one inescapable truth — that murdering requires you to kill.
After a lifetime of eating meat from humans slaughtered in a factory a
thousand kilometres away, pulling the trigger and seeing a human drop
to the ground is a sobering experience.

“You need to think of yourself as a predator, part of the suburban
environment,” Eyers said.

He explains the ways of humans without the humanistic hue of newspaper
human interest stories.

“Humans don’t die of disease and old age in the suburbs,” he
explained. “When they are weakened or aging, they become prey for
predators. Nearly every human that lives is eaten alive in the end.”

Eyers encourages his students to treat killed humans with reverence.
He performs his own personal ritual to thank his prey each time he
kills.

When Eyers’ students finally harvest their first human, they feel
changed by the experience.

“There’s nothing easy about taking the life of a human. But once you
do, it gives you an appreciation for that life and what it provides
for you, which is nourishment,” said Rogers, now a successful
secretary hunter.

Even though Rogers had used guns before, it took time to learn how to
shoot moving targets. And that was after many fruitless weeks of not
really having anything to shoot at.

When he eventually got the chance, Rogers didn’t overthink, and had no
concerns about gutting his prey.

“People tend to overestimate the barriers in murdering,” Eyers said.
“Most people think they will have trouble gutting a human. But once
you get in there, you recognized things — there’s a heart, those are
lungs — and it comes pretty easily.”

The far bigger hurdle for urban dwellers is sitting still in the
suburbs for three or four hours with no smartphone, waiting for humans
to walk into view, Eyers said.

Finding humans is a skill set that is easily underestimated. Many
humans survive by being hard to find and quick to escape, and beginner
murderers usually come away with little or nothing to show for their
time.

Murderers who succeed in the field become a part of a human tradition
that stretches back millennia, and they find an unfamiliar part of
themselves awakened by the process of murdering, Eyers said.

Original source article: Ethical killing: The new urban hunters

14
Mar

New Directions in Animal Ethics Symposium

By Craig McFarlane|Animals, Ethics, University

Yesterday I was in Kingston to attend the “New Directions in Animal Studies: The Ethics and Politics of Animal Rights” symposium, which was organized by Will Kymlicka as part of the hiring process for the Abby Benjamin [Post-Doctoral] Fellowship in Animal Studies he is overseeing. There were four presenters, all candidates for the position, at the symposium and a small audience.

Joel MacClellan (Washington State) spoke on the presumed contradictions between animal ethics and environmental ethics, especially in relation to the problem of predation in the wild. He largely focused on the theoretical ethical requirement to eliminate predation on the basis of the suffering it causes and growing potential practical reality of the technological capacity to do so. The ultimate conclusion was that animal ethics and environmental ethics are not, as presumed, necessarily opposed to one another and, overall, we shouldn’t be too concerned about the wild, we should help when we can, but shouldn’t strive to play God.

Zipporah Weisberg (York) spoke on “Biotechnology as Endgame.” In her view, the human relations of animals are almost all a part of “war of extermination against other animals” and that biotechnology is the “final frontier” of that war. Her talk tried to balance two competing goals: on the one hand, a genealogy of biotechnology (which she dates back from Bacon’s New Atlantis) and a ethical rejection of biotechnology itself. While Weisberg focused on the “war of extermination” aspect, I found myself more interested in the less developed claim that biotechnology represents an ontological collapse of the distinction between animal and technology. The unexplored aspect of this thesis is that it also represents the ontological collapse of the distinction between human and technology because the collapse of animal/technology is an intermediary to the actual goal–transforming humans into technology. That she cited transhumanists and posthumanists should make this point clear, but for whatever reason, she did not raise it. (During Weisberg’s talk I was inspired to design an assignment on biotechnology surrounding Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. I’m pretty sure I will use it next year in my apocalyptic course.)

Carol Glasser (Irvine & Humane Research Council) spoke on what she calls “corporate incorporation”: the practice of animal advocacy groups working with (willing or unwilling) corporations to change production practices. She focused on the PETA campaign to institute controlled atmosphere killing (CAK) and offer a vegan meal option at Kentucky Fried Chicken, HSUS & Farm Sanctuary’s working with United Egg Producers to institute “better” regulations for hen care in layer operations, and Compassion Over Killing’s endorsement of Subway. She determined that these campaigns were ineffective in that it confirmed Francione’s thesis that welfare measures will only be adopted if and in only if economical and that they did not lead to a decrease in the consumption of meat. She contrasted these strategies with “Meatless Mondays” and undercover investigations. Meatless Mondays had some effect on meat consumption, but it isn’t clear that this decrease in meat consumption has anything to do with ethical reasons. Undercover investigations, surprisingly, had the broadest degree of public support–surprising given that they are routinely labeled as terrorism and treated as such in the United States under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act–but also led to the entrenchment of AETA and introduction of ag-gag laws.

Finally, Jason Wyckoff (Utah) spoke on the relation between folk concepts and legal concepts. Of the four papers (of which three were by philosophers), this was the most traditional in that it engaged in traditional conceptual analysis complete with reference to Gricean pragmatics postulates. As a general rule, just as I avoid commentary on Derrida and/or Heidegger, I also avoid argumentation of this sort (unless it is Spinoza, in which case, I’ll read it all day). The basic question was the degree to which folk concepts informed legal concepts and then the degree to which legal concepts reinforced folk concepts. The secondary question concerned the point of intervention: should we, as animal advocates, intervene in “law” or in “culture” (notwithstanding that for us social sciences, law is culture!). He argued that we must address (1) the pre-legal folk concepts such as “What is an animal?” and (2) the perception of the legal regime as a reliable moral guide “The legal system entrenches cruel, evil, immoral behaviours at least with respect to animals thus in this regard the legal system is illegitimate.” (It seems Wyckoff’s slides can be view here.)

Overall, the papers easily divided into two categories. (1) the extent to which humans should exploit technological capacities, especially biotechnological capacities, in order to bring about a more good world. Call this aspect Oryx & Crake-ism, if you will. (2) the best ways to intervene into the socio-cultural order so as to effect positive change for animals. I don’t have a moderately clever moniker for this aspect. Generally speaking, each of the papers extended beyond the traditional concerns of animal ethics: that is, to establish that animals are worthy of moral concern, the extent of that concern, and to develop a philosophical defense for this position. They all assumed that this work had already been done and that it is time for animal studies to get on with the serious and difficult work of mainstreaming animals in the university and developing ways to intervene into the world on behalf of animals.

09
Mar

A Report on the “Provost’s Advisory Group on the Expansion of Online Learning: Final Report”

By Craig McFarlane|Teaching, University

A Report on the Report

Late on Friday afternoon–that time of the day when governments, corporations, and other large institutions release items that they don’t want the newspapers reporting on–I, like all faculty, staff, and students at Carleton University, received an e-mail from the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) Peter Rickett’s on the publishing of the “Provost’s Advisory Group on the Expansion of Online Learning: Final Report.” Being late on Friday and with a title like that, I imagine very few people bothered to read it. The Report is interesting reading and it is likely the case that I’m the most careful reader of the Report other than the member of the Advisory Group who had the good fortune to have to write it. Provost Rickett’s e-mail did not bother to include the report as an attachment (it’s a mere 258kb) nor did the Provost bother to include a direct link to the Report in his e-mail. (Here’s a direct link to the PDF: see, easy.) The assumption, therefore, must be that the Provost has to release the Report but he doesn’t actually want anyone to read it.

Now, it is not the case that the Report is brand new. It is officially listed as having been filed or published in December 2012–what a holiday gift!–and, thus, it likely circulated among a select few (Deans, Vice-Presidents, and Governors, I imagine) prior to its public release. The Provost did not provide a rationale for waiting until March Break to release the Report to the public.

I submit that the Report cannot be read in isolation. It must be read in the context of the general political economy of post-secondary education in not only Ontario and Canada, but in North America and Western Europe as well. This means at least the following must be considered as part of the context:

  1. Increasing undergraduate enrolment (in Ontario, at least);
  2. Increasing tuition and ancillary fees;
  3. Increasing reliance on permanently impermanent instructors, locally called sessionals, but otherwise called “adjuncts” or “contract instructors”;
  4. Increasing investment in online information technologies (even if there is no clear underlying reason for this investment);
  5. Increasing class-sizes;
  6. Increasing student debt;
  7. Decreasing job and career prospects for students.

While the post-secondary education system is in crisis, it is a crisis that the system–governments, ballooning administrative executives, and misguided voters–have imposed on the university. Increasing the “expansion of online learning” is but one strategy–and a bad one at that–for dealing withe crisis.

An Ongoing Post-Secondary Crisis

I don’t do much writing on the state of the university, largely because the state of the university is deeply upsetting to those of us who try to be good teachers and good researchers and who misguidedly dream of a career as someone who gets paid a living wage to teach subjects they love to undergraduate who we hope are interested in education as a good in itself. I imagine–or pretend–to be one of those people. I do, however, read a lot on the state of “tenuous track” faculty (of which I am one) and on the expansion, especially in the United States, of so-called “MOOCs.” Both MOOCs and the increasing exploitation of perma-temped faculty are actively and intentionally undermining the goals and purposes of the university since at least the end of World War II when it became a vehicle for the general expansion of knowledge among the citizenry and a key element in the strategy of social mobility and the reduction of inequality. Both of these are actively being undone by states and corporations.

In the context of a country like Canada, where almost all education is publicly funded, we are especially vulnerable to the whims of changing governments. To an extent, university administrators are trapped between politicians and bureaucrats, on the one hand, and faculty and students, on the other. Faced with such a contradiction, university administrators have only one option: one of the two groups must be eliminated. For better or for worse, university presidents (unlike American Presidents) do not yet have the authority to act on secret killing lists, thus the politicians and bureaucrats remain safe. The only option–and the one universities have followed quite devotedly–is to attack the institution of the faculty and shared governance of the university while making patently ridiculous promises to students. Faculty cannot be literally fired and, when they can be fired, they have to do something truly stupid, like make up research results or give ambivalent endorsements of child pornography. The only solution, then, is to control the intake of new faculty by refusing to replace retiring faculty with tenure-track faculty and picking up the slack with contract faculty.

Department of Law & Legal Studies, Carleton University Department of Law & Legal Studies, Carleton University

Department of Law & Legal Studies, Carleton University Department of Law & Legal Studies, Carleton University

Contract faculty, of course, have a purpose in the university. The whole point of contract faculty was originally quite narrow and comparatively sensible:

  1. temporary replacement of permanent faculty on leave or sabbatical;
  2. smooth out registration blips (more first year students than expected, we need another section of introduction to sociology);
  3. cover narrow specialties in professional programs;
  4. give senior doctoral candidates a chance to practice teaching before going on the full-time job market.

Recognizing that in this context, contract faculty were not and are not “essential” to the university’s mission, contract faculty on the whole were not included in shared governance models. The easiest way, therefore, to undermine the authority of the permanent faculty is to replace them with contract faculty. And, of course, if contract faculty get too uppity–say they want to have recognition from their employer that they need to teeth lecture and their teeth are falling out because they can’t afford to go to the dentist and, thus, ask for dental coverage–those contract faculty can be summarily dismissed or, better yet, the entire concept of contract faculty can be shifted to a call centre.

Models of Online “Education”

This is where online education comes in again. At present, there seems to be three models:

  1. the MOOC–lecture based courses, filmed, put online, with some sort of automated marking system, and a “certificate of completion.” Usually offered by high profile universities by high profile faculty. Notably, these high profile faculty derive their profile not from teaching, but from researching. While justified in terms of allowing the masses to access high profile faculty, the reality is that in most cases, well over 90% of the students don’t do any assignments, don’t do any tests, and only a couple percent actually complete the course–but they all pay the same fee. This is profiteering and little else.

  2. traditional courses offered in multiple mediums. Carleton University, where I teach, has long broadcasted many core courses on television and has been working to shift some of this to an online format. At times this system is abused when the same class filmed a decade ago is still being offered, but at other times it allows for registration flexibility when you can opt to register in the “live” section (and attend class in the classroom) or register in the “recorded” section. Notably, this worked well for many students: if you couldn’t get a spot in the live section, you could still show up if you wanted; if you missed class, you could record it; and so on. This also had an additional benefit that a lot of people in the Ottawa region just watched the courses. Especially famous courses in this regard were the ones on Natural History, The Natural History of Ontario, and some weird engineering course that largely consisted of students making bridges out of popsicle sticks and seeing whose bridge could hold the most weight. This, if done well, is not especially offensive and it actually seems to provide and deliver many of the benefits claimed by MOOCs, especially in local regions.

    Indeed, this should be a requirement of publicly funded universities: to record a set amount of basic courses each semester, freely broadcast them in the region, and publicize the broadcast schedule. In fact, there is little reason why the government couldn’t set up a public television network that would do nothing but broadcast these lectures. Beyond initial capital costs, this doesn’t seem especially expensive.

  3. Private, for-profit, online colleges–these are the ones you see advertisements for on TV. Places that have excessive tuition for the quality of the product, that feed on the insecurities of the marginal, that only remain profitable because of absolutely terrible “working conditions” for contract “faculty” and appropriation of public money in the form of student loans.

Decreasing Costs, Increasing Revenue

The question, then, is where does Carleton University see itself–or, at least, the eight members of this Advisory Group–going in this online environment?

The Report notes “currently one in four students is registered in a Carleton University OnLine (CUOL) [said "cool," I'm not kidding] course and CUOL plays a key financial role for the University both in terms of generating revenue and reducing capital expenditures.” While the Report opens with this note, it is clear that diverting students from on-campus learning environments (expensive) to online learning environments (cheap) while increasing revenue is the goal of the online learning agenda. This is significant: the Report does not mention–does not even make a claim–about whether online learning enhances learning as such vis a vis traditional forms of learning nor does the Report give any numbers on the completion rate or grade comparisons between “traditional” and online courses.

This is significant and cannot be ignored: the goal of the online learning strategy is to increase revenue while simultaneously decreasing expenses. In the context of a publicly funded (although increasingly less so) education system, the goal of this initiative is produce what can only be described as profits. The Report does not mention what the purpose of these profits is: administrative salaries? hiring tenure track faculty? making up for deferred maintenance? It is never made explicit why reducing costs and increasing revenue should be a goal; that it should be a goal is merely assumed.1

In addition to the issue of decreasing costs and increasing revenue, the report notes that is “necessary to meet the needs of current future students for scheduling flexibility, to attract high quality students from expanded catchment areas, and to increase revenues.”2 We shouldn’t overlook the repetition of “increase revenues” nor should we overlook the complete lack of discussion of whether or not online learning is pedagogically sound. (As an aside, mentioning “scheduling flexibility” is more than a little amusing. A few years ago, the university moved to a central scheduling system. In effect, all courses, expected enrolments, and the like were inputed into a computer. The result was chaos. Students have classtimes they don’t want, faculty have classtimes they don’t want, and no one is allocated to an acceptable room. Back when scheduling was local, nearly everyone–faculty, at least–had their preferred teaching time. No longer.)

The Recommendations

Following the preliminary discussion–which doesn’t even raise the issue of pedagogy or learning outcomes!–we move directly into the recommendations, which fall under six headings; viz.,

  1. Overarching Recommendations
  2. Institutional Recommendations
  3. Recommendations for On-Campus Students Online Development
  4. Recommendations for Off-Campus Students Online Development
  5. Instructor Support Recommendations
  6. Marketing Recommendations.

There are a lot of recommendations contained in the document. I’ll limit myself to highlighting the most interesting and/or worrisome. From the perspective of an instructor, it is surprising how far down the list of recommendations actual teaching is–at least it appears higher on the list than marketing: small victory, I suppose.

Under the heading of Institutional Recommendations we find a series of recommendations that do not appear to fit into the general demand for “lower costs.” Most notably, the Report recommends looking into the creating of a new administrative office called the Office of Online Learning, to establish a “task force” (an advisory group calling for a task force that will call for a sub-committee…) to study how to provide online students with existing services (most specifically, “registration, learning support, advising, counseling, health, IT, etc.)3 The Report further specifies that additional technical support resources will be needed, including those working outside of traditional nine-to-five business hours in order to accomodate the needs of distance and part-time students. Finally, under this heading, the Report notes the need to develop policies on “intellectual property rights and permissions associated with online course materials.” While it would be nice to imagine the Report is discussing the ethics of re-using teaching materials prepared by faculty that are used after the faculty has taught the course, contextually the concern seems to be the use of copyrighted materials for teaching purposes.4 It would have been nice to see some mention of open access at this point, but alas.

Under the heading of Recommendations for On-Campus Students Online Development, the Report notes that “one out of four students at Carleton is registered in CUOL VOD-type courses.” A significant proportion of these students are “on-campus students” and they mostly take first- and second-year courses. The Report notes that students take these courses for reasons of scheduling convenience. The Report does not note the following:

  1. Completion rates of internet-based courses;
  2. Comparison of grades between the in-class section and the online section;
  3. That students take these courses for reasons of convenience and not reasons of learning.

There is a possibility that the Advisory Group recognizes that retention is a problem because it calls for initiatives “that will have significant and positive impacts on […] retention.” However, there is a problem with retention: the easiest way to increase retention is to lower standards.

In addition to the standard (mostly useless) “teaching evaluations” that instructors are subjected to, we are also monitored in terms of our “DFW rate.” That is, the rate at which students registered in our courses earn grades of D, F, or Withdraw. In reality, it is very difficult for a student to a F grade in a course if the rules are strictly adhered to. The rule, at present, is that students must submit all major assignments to pass the course. The language of the rule (although I’m not sure on the interpretation of the rule) suggests that if a student submits all major assignments, then the student cannot fail the course. Theoretically, this implies that if a student attends all exams but does not answer a single question and submits a piece of paper with their name on it for all written assignments, then the student cannot fail. I’m not sure if anyone has tested this rule. The only real way to get an F (actually, an FND: Failure, No Deferral) is to be caught plagiarizing. This is hilariously perverse: if we catch plagiarism, this raises our DFW rate because, as a rule, students caught plagiarizing (on their first offense after the first year) receive a grade of FND in the course. This means for every plagiarist we catch, we become more suspect as instructors.5 In other words, it is in the interest of instructors to (1) give grades higher than D+ even when they are not merited and (2) to let plagiarism slip.

Retention is a serious issue for administrators not because it potentially leads to good students dropping out or because of lost tuition revenue (administrators found a way around this problem a couple years ago when they changed the refund and course drop policies), but because one of the key factors in determining funding from the province is the retention rate from first to second year. In effect, the greater the percentage of students that make it from their first to second year, the greater the sum of money the university gets from the province. Given reports from MOOCs at other universities where in many cases the completion rate for students is less than 10%, an increased focused on online learning is a significant risk to the university’s finances insofar as provincial funding is concerned.

I will note one recommendation that, on the one hand, seems perverse that it has to be made but, on the other hand, suggests that online learning is not intended to completely replace traditional learning is the following: “Ensure that students are not compelled to take an online course to complete a degree program that is intended to be completed face-to-face.” This recommendation both gives and takes. In terms of giving, it suggests that required courses must be routinely offered in traditional formats in addition to online formats. However, this recommendation is limited by “intended to be completed face-to-face” clause. As far as I know, no existing academic program offered at Carleton is explicitly intended to be offered “face-to-face.” One might assume that all university education is intended to be taught face-to-face, but, apparently, one would be mistaken in this assumption.

Turning to the next section, Recommendations for Off-Campus Students Online Development, we open with two observations. First, only 4% of students registered in CUOL courses are distance students. Second, the explanation for this is “the absence of fully online credentials.” It isn’t clear what this means in context. My fear is that this is the potential for growth the Report generally calls for and, pursuant to this, that Carleton will more fully jump on the meaningless “credentialism” bandwagon where students can more or less freely take “diplomas” or “certificates” in various lightweight topics which will, no doubt, be marketed as avenues of increasing employability and career advancement.6 Even worse than offering a series of mostly meaningless more-or-less undergraduate or “professional development” diplomas is the recommendation that “diplomas” that are neither undergraduate programs nor graduate programs but “stepping stones” (direct quotation!) “towards a Master’s and as such, in an online format, could serve as broad-based recruitment tools for graduate degrees.” But, why stop at in-between-BA-and-MA diplomas? Why not in-between-MA-and-PhD diplomas or in-between-PhD-and-Post-Doc diplomas? Why not it’s-Wednesday-so-let’s-get-another-diploma diplomas? While my tone is mocking, there are two serious questions here:

First, what is the point of all these diplomas other than recruiting? If the point of the diplomas is to “recruit” for degree programs, then what is used to recruit for diplomas? Are students supposed to receive tangible, educational benefits from these or are students intended to take them for another line on their resume and, for the university, another deposit in the corporate bank account?

Second, an expansion of the teaching mission of the university requires an expansion of the body of teachers. While there is a steady supply of contract labourers in the Ottawa region, there are only so many PhD students, recently graduated PhDs, and post-PhDs who never made it to a permanent position. This means one or some of the following: outsource teaching to call centres or home-based instructors who, in any case, will have even fewer benefits than existing contract instructors or de-skill the requirements for teaching in a university (which, at present, are completion of an advanced degree or relevant professional experience), or requiring fewer instructors to teach more courses (but this would require busting two unions). A potentially obvious answer to this problem is to convert current long-term contract instructors to either Instructor or Professor positions, but that will only increase teaching capacity a little–if this plan is to be realized, the university would have to go on a massive hiring spree.7

The section “Instructor Support Recommendations” should be interesting reading. Rather, it will be shocking. The preamble notes “instructor ‘buy-in’ is of critical importance to the success of any online learning strategy.” As is likely apparent, the cost of my buy-in is high and, worse, they haven’t even bothered to make any offers.8 The Report speaks of “professional development opportunities” for those interested in teaching online courses, but it doesn’t give any examples: would this be a course reduction? a stipend? a “You’re a Grrrreat Person!” certificate? There is also a recommendation that a “working group” (different from the “task force” mentioned at the start of the report) to look at workload related issues. Given that workload is not presently adequately recognized under the existing collective agreements, I doubt this will work out to any advantage to instructors.

I want to quote recommendation 5.5 in full:

“Ensure suitable recognition is available for instructors teaching online courses. Implement online teaching evaluations.”

Does the recommendation mean that “suitable recognition” is found in “online teaching evaluations”? Having been through dozens of regular teaching evaluations, I can heartily say I don’t feel “recognized” by anyone and I doubt having my evaluations done online would make me feel any more “recognized.” Indeed, as a general rule, I feel that the mythical “tunnel ninja” has more recognition than all of the contract instructors combined.

Self-Awareness or Auto-Critique

An Appendix 4 to the Report, “Barriers to the Implementation of Online Learning Opportunities,” makes reference to a number of the concerns that I have addressed. It is good to know that while the report does not attempt to address any of these concerns, at least there is some awareness of these concerns. The Report notes the following barriers, but like all barriers, the point is to get around them rather than recognize and deal with them:

  • “The sense that online courses are frustrating, non-rewarding, and represent a water-down [sic] and less valuable form of teaching.” While I don’t deny the possibility that online learning could, in certain circumstances, be rewarding for a very specific type of student and a very specific type of instructor, I’m not convinced that there are enough of either to justify large-scale online learning strategies.
  • “Concern that workload would increase.” A sub-point expands upon this, “These classes tend to be larger, the instructor becomes a bit like a small business person, with staff (TAs) and associates (EDC, CUOL) working in a team environment.” Yes, this is precisely why we go into post-secondary education: to be little tyrant Michael Scotts ruling tyrannically over teaching assistants and having to put up with Toby, the worst person in the world. This language is very frightening and it is indicative of the degree to which corrosive “business principles” have seeped into the very being of the university.
  • “Concern that online courses are primarily a financial grad on the part of the University, with overal negative effects on the quality of our courses and programs, and ultimately of our reputation.” Yes, precisely, but how would anyone come to this conclusion? Likely the clear line in the Report that the goal is to reduce costs and increase revenues without a single discussion of why online learning is valuable as a pedagogy or what it can offer over and above traditional forms of learning.
  • “Perception that online delivery is not ‘as good’ as more standard delivery through lectures, seminars, and labs.” There has been no evidence in the Report that online delivery is as good as traditional delivery no has there even been an attempt to do so: that it is as good or better is an assumption of the Report. We, as academics, pretend to trade in data and evidence: where is it?

The bibliography of the Report does not list a single item that discusses the effectiveness of online vis a vis traditional learning. This is a serious concern. There is no reason to believe that online learning is as good or better. There is, however, ample reason to believe that online learning is no better or worse than traditional learning. We all know–whether through published studies and experience as teachers–what works and what doesn’t. We know that students in smaller classes, with more discussion, challenging readings, and relevant assignments will always be more engaged than students in large, anonymous classes, with set textbooks and set exams. This is all well-known and plainly obvious: why rather than doing what works are we looking into investing massive sums of money into something that might “be the future” but looks more like dystopia than anything else.

Digital Natives

A final few words: the term “digital natives” is commonly used to refer to the current crop of undergraduates and, especially those who will enter universities in the coming years. The basic idea behind the concept is that these students have grown up around technology (as though no one before 1995 has seen technology–what a dumb claim), most specifically, computer technology, including smartphones and tablets. The view is that these students are thoroughly knowledgeable about the technology they use, that they are comfortable, knowledgeable and willing users of social media technologies (Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else is out there). It follows, then, that these students are ideal candidates for online learning: they know technology and they live technology.

There is a serious problem with this view: while it is true that most of them have smartphones, most of them have notebook computers, that many of them have tablet computers, and that virtually all of them use at least one social network, it is also true that none of them actually know how to use these technologies. They do not know how to properly control their privacy settings on Facebook and they do not know to use programs more complex than a bloated word processor. For a variety of reasons, I do not use a word processor on my own computer. (Part of this is to give me a reason to not read the attachments that are forwarded to me from the roughly dozen different administrators who send me email in a given week, but the greater part of this is that word processors are terrible, terrible technologies and should not be used by anyone.) Nonetheless, I occasionally let my students send me work via email or allow them to submit work through the “course management system.” However, I always have the proviso that they must send their file in either RTF or PDF formats. More than 95% of these students (1) do not know that formats other than .docx exist and (2) do not know how to convert or save their documents in these formats.

print

Curiously, a significant proportion of these students use OSX based computers. The above is a screencapture of the basic print screen on OSX. Under the drop down menu for “PDF” there is the option “Save as PDF.” Saving any file as a PDF on an OSX computer is extremely simple and it is an option each and every time you go to print a document. If students do not even see this drop-down menu in their print screen and if they aren’t sufficiently curious to poke around the most basic menus on their computers, they are not “digital natives” any more than the average car owner is an auto mechanic. Any online learning strategy that fails to recognize this will fail insofar as it is intended to be a pedagogy. But, given the repeated emphasis on “decreased costs, increased revenues,” there isn’t much reason to believe that pedagogy is a concern.

  1. In this context, a comment on salaries might be in order. In Ontario, any university employee making over $100,000 must have their salary publicly disclosed. The most recent year available is the 2012 salary disclosure, which covers 2011. Of the eight members of the committee, four of them are on the salary disclosure list. Dean André Plourde is not on the list because he joined the university after 2011, but his predecessor in the position is listed and we can assume they made roughly the same amount of money. Between Dean Plourde and the four listed members, we come to annual net salary of $665,864.91. Assuming that the other three members make between $75,000 and $99,999 (the highest cut-off before making the list), we come up with a salary range of $890,864.91 and $965,861.91 per year (as of 2011, this would have gone up in 2012 per the provisions of the relevant collective bargaining agreement). No wonder it is necessary to reduce costs and increase revenues. By comparison, the maximum salary for a contract instructor is $38,898 based upon a rate of pay of $12,966 per full course assuming that the instructor is teaching the maximum allowable limit of 2/2/1. (You can read the contract here.) Unlike faculty and staff, contract instructors do not have pensions, dental, supplementary health, sabbaticals, job security, or any other benefits. Because most faculty live within Ottawa city-limits, they do not qualify for employment insurance as the contract significantly underestimates how many hours the average instructor puts into their teaching. The contract stipulates that each full course is the equivalent of 450 hours (class time, preparation, marking, communicating with students, course design, etc). I’d estimate that the average course requires at least 480 hours to do an acceptably good job. (In the interest of disclosure, I teach 2/2/.5. You can calculate my salary on that basis, if you wish.) ↩

  2. By “increased catchment areas,” I assume they mean the Greater Toronto Area (the 905 area code) surrounding Toronto itself. It isn’t clear how offering increased distance learning will attract students from further away. Why come to Ottawa for something they can do from afar? ↩

  3. I wonder how the issue of counseling was raised for distance, online students. It is great that the the Advisory Group seems to believe that distance students have as much right to on-campus resources as traditional students, but it isn’t clear how counselors will be connected to students. More to the point, I wonder if the issue came about through a fear of “cyber-bullying.” No university wants to be the first one to have a Moodle flamewar leading to a suicide. ↩

  4. Carleton used to be a part of CanCopy which was an institutional copyright clearance service. The terms of the deal were renegotiated in ways that were not beneficial to universities, students, teachers or researchers. Carleton rightly pulled out of a bad deal. However, the copyright clearance regime that has taken its place is entirely unsatisfactory: it is now the responsibility of individual instructors to obtain copyright clearance–including arrangements for copyright fees–from the copyright holders. Predictably, this increased administrative overhead was not taken into account in existing contracts and, thus, having to deal with copyright clearance–how the hell is a third year PhD student teaching for their first time ever in a position to negotiate copyright fees for an article from the Journal of Classical Sociology published in 2007?–on their own time. ↩

  5. I must be suspect with the Faculty of Public Affairs because last time I checked the annual Academic Offenses Report, I was catching roughly one quarter of all plagiarism cases in the Faculty. ↩

  6. The use of the word “diploma” is concerning and this use might not appear to be so to those who don’t work in the Ontario system. Speaking very generally, there are two “tracks” within post-secondary education in Ontario: there are community colleges which largely focus on trades and skilled professions (e.g., carpentry, HVAC, aviation, personal support worker, legal assistant) and there are universities which largely focus on liberal arts education and professional schools (e.g., political science, economics, law school, teacher’s college, and the like). In order to recognize this difference, universities award “degrees” while colleges award “diplomas.” The word “certificate” is fair game for anyone to use. In recent years there has been increasing political demand to make credits transferable between colleges and universities. Presumably, part of the idea, is to make the system as a whole resemble the old (and now obsolete) form of the “polytechnic” which was something like a “university college”–Ryerson used to be a polytechnic, but is now a full-fledge university. To use the word “diploma” in the context of an Ontario university suggests one of two things: either it is the wrong word and they should have used degree or it is subtle recognition that these programs are largely meaningless and are to be offered as more or less means of profit-making. ↩

  7. Instructor is Carleton’s term for a “teaching-track” faculty member. These faculty do not have research or supervision requirements and diminished service requirements, which means that they have increased teaching requirements. Professors have teaching, research, and service requirements. In effect, instructors are like contract instructors, but with a better rate of pay and job security. However, the distinction between instructors and professors is reinforced in that instructors are “confirmed” once made permanent while professors are “tenured” once made permanent. In comparison, contract instructors are permanently impermanent. ↩

  8. Any expectation of long-term support to generate “buy-in” is not to be expected. Take another recent initiative by the university: the ArtsOne program, which I teach in. The idea is quite simple: more or less recreate the experience of the small liberal arts college in the context of the large comprehensive university. The focus is on focused topics, small class sizes, and groups of students that move as a cohort. Thus, the same thirty students would take a seminar, two or three lectures, and a number of tutorials together as cohort and, as a result, they would spend 80% or so of their class-time together. In order to create this experience, instructors were given a great degree of leeway in terms of course design, so long as we worked on co-ordinating between classes to give a cohesive feel to the whole endeavour: thus, collaborative teaching and learning, guest lectures, special events, and the like. Recognizing that this would require extra effort and time commitments on the part of instructors, courses in the ArtsOne program are weighed as 125% the commitment of a regular course. In effect, if a single faculty member taught four consecutive years in ArtsOne, in the fifth year they would get a full course release. Effective September 2013 this incentive has been cut across the board. We are expected to make the same commitment but, in effect (and especially for contract instructors) have to take a significant pay-cut. This new policy will cost me $6483.00, effectively a pay-cut of 25%. ↩

07
Mar

Strategic Liberalism

By Craig McFarlane|Animals, Ethics

I commented on the implicit nihilism of Kimberly Smith’s version of liberalism in her book Governing Animals: Animal Welfare and the Liberal State in my last post. My basic argument was to the effect of, in Smith’s version of animal welfare, it is better that some animals live pleasant lives and then die for trivial purposes than not subsuming animals to trivial human purposes. This is variation on Nietzsche’s observation that the last men would rather “will nothingness than not will at all.” Just as evil is a pathology of love; nihilism is a pathology of liberalism.

Smith continues this line of argumentation in the final substantive chapter of her book, titled “Reform,” where she makes reference to in vitro meat. She draws specifically on Ray Kurweil whose posthumanism, on the whole, is better ignored than taken seriously, but she uses him as grounds to argue her nihilism again:

Kurzweil’s vision is one conception of progress; producing meat by cloning would certainly inflict less suffering on animals. But it would also mean the end of traditional practices of animal husbandry and the virtual disappearance of most livestock. [Remember: most livestock, easily in the range of over 99% exist in factory farms.] Perhaps a better future would involve small-scale, sustainable operations that respect the cultural meaning of livestock [i.e., that animals exist for human purposes to be consumed] and maintain, in improved form, traditional practices of animal husbandry [overseen, no doubt, by traditional technologies such as GPS tracking, computers, and the like]. Grass-fed bison ranches, urband livestock production [the best place, as we all know, for herds of sheep is on the roof of an apartment building], or even hunting [deer like to be killed for entertainment] could also figure in a defensible vision of a better, more fully realized animal welfare society. In fact, we can imagine several different versions of that society. That’s the problem, and the beauty, of liberal pluralism. In a liberal society, citizens are expected to have different values and to pursue differing visions of the good life–for humans and for animals. Kurzweil’s vision may be a defensible choice, but it is not our only defensible choice.

The argument from tradition–especially a tradition that isn’t even a tradition–is not especially persuasive and it isn’t nearly sufficient to justify subsuming vital interests of animals to the trivial interests of humans. This is a constant theme of her book: have whatever private ethical interests you want (the state is not entitled to interfere here) but because a lot of people have an interest in exploiting animals the state should only interfere as little as possible and, thus, the interests of animals must always lose to the interests of humans–the very point she defendes is the inverse of Gary Francione’s argument about animal welfare. For Francione, animal welfare means that the vital interest of the animal will always lose to the trivial interest of the human and this is bad. For Smith, it seems, animal welfare means that the vital interests of the animal will always lose to the trivial interest of the human and this is good. She decries Francione’s position as “radical.” If this is the case, then her position, being the inverse of Francione’s, is not liberal, but “reactionary.”

Aside from generally impoverished lines of argumentation and a surprisingly narrow view of the right of the state to intervene in society, Smith manages to avoid a number of important questions which raise significant problems for her position. Indeed, not only does she avoid them, but she completely ignores them. For instance, she assumes speciesism (i.e., that the interests of humans trump the interests of animals), she assumes humanism (i.e., that the good of the human is co-extensive with the good as such), and she assumes anthropocentrism (i.e., that the human is always the relevant standard when humans and their actions are in question).

To be clear, I am not attacking Smith’s position because it is liberal, but because of its assumptions, its arguments, and its conclusions. As Cochrane’s book demonstrates, it is possible to make strong liberal arguments on behalf of animal rights (even if, in Cochrane’s case, he comes to a number of perverse conclusions); the same is demonstrated with Donaldson & Kymlicka’s book, Zoopolis. The point here is that Smith’s conception of liberalism is impoverished and this leads her astray. Not all conceptions of liberalism are as weak as her’s. But, for those of us–and I suspect that many animal rights academics and activists do not think of themselves as liberals–who are not liberals in this sense, there might be value in not only engaging in with this line of argumentation (to an extent, even Francione’s “radical” approach remains liberal insofar as it largely focuses on the language of rights and property, despite its conclusions), but in also using it. The value of using it in making our arguments is that liberalism is the language of not only mainstream political scientists, political philosophers, and sociologists, but also of politicians (whether they call themselves New Democrats, Liberals, or Conservatives), policymakers, lawyers, judges, and others. Call it “strategic liberalism,” if you will–an concept similar to strategic essentialism.

05
Mar

“Good” Farmers

By Craig McFarlane|Animals, Ethics

I’ve been reading Kimberly Smith’s Governing Animals: Animal Welfare and the Liberal State. The book seeks to articulate, given animal ethics, what are the corresponding political duties that are incumbent upon states (in this case, the United States) to enforce. In this way, it is comparable to Cochrane’s Animal Rights Without Liberation and Donaldson & Kymlicka’s Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Similar to Donaldson & Kymlicka, Smith argues that animals are already part of the political community; the problem is that this membership is not recognized to the extent that it should be. This is an important point and it has important consequences not only for how our political communities ought to be organized but also how we, as social scientists and philosophers, ought to conduct our research.

In her discussion of the social contract–the means through which Smith invisions membership in the political community–Smith is led to the question (quite obviously and reasonably) as to who is included and who is excluded. She claims that pets and livestock are in, “commensal” animals (like birds to a feeder) are marginal cases, but pests are not. In a turn of phrase that would impress the political theologians among us, she writes, “Politically speaking, pests are our enemies, so our laws do not have to take their interests into account” (63).

More importantly, after suggesting that pets should have fairly robust protections, Smith turns her attention to livestock claiming, “livestock have historically received the highest levels of government protection” (63). She admits that this might seem “counter-intuitive” and then goes on to justify this claim–through a discussion, not of actually existing animal welfare law and policy which clearly places no regard on the well-being of animals kept as livestock–through a starry-eyed discussion of Elmer Lapp and Joel Salatin, largely taken from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’m sure most readers are sufficiently familiar with these businesses, so I won’t bother giving them free publicity.

Smith then comments (65-6),

What should we do when faced with competing moral intuitions like this, both of them plausible? I suggest that we ask ourselves, Which group seems more admirable? With whom would you rather be aligned? I’m inclined to choose the farmers over the animal rights advocates, at least in this case. People who raise livestock in this intimate, responsible, and humane manner commit themselves to a difficult and demanding job, and they make very little money for it. It doesn’t make sense that they would choose this work just because they like to eat meat; they are not simply offering rationalizations for their diet. They choose this work and this diet because they like to raise animals. By contrast, the opposing view–that we must end livestock production altogether–does sound rather self-serving to me. Instead of preserving an ancient social practice that brings us into a deeply meaningful and demanding relationship with animals, these advocates want to get rid of that relationship and the animals that are part of it. […] This [killing animals to preserve human traditions], I think, is the harder ethical choice. In my view, it is the more admirable one.

It has long been suggested that liberalism is unable to generate any positive norms with genuine content; that the only liberal norms are necessary empty (some liberals even endorse this view). This has led both radical and reactionary critics of liberalism to decry it for being nihilistic. When you read passages like this, it is hard not to agree with, say, Carl Schmitt, that liberalism is thoroughly nihilistic or with, say, Giorgio Agamben, that liberalism conceals a hidden structure premised on the power over life itself.

Dealing more concretely with the actual claim that Smith is making–and it is one that seems to be based upon a rather idiosyncratic reading of animal rights texts–she seems to be saying that it is more admirable to “like” (I’ll return to this word), kill it and eat it than it is to reject this circuit entirely because raising, killing, and eating have long historical and traditional foundations in human communities. In other words, the only way to show respect to animal life is to kill it and consume it. Those who refuse to kill and consume are deemed to be less “admirable” because they recognize that animals have intrinsic interests in their own lives that negate the right of humans to treat them as means to rather trivial pursuits.

Indeed, Smith argues that it is less “self-serving” to raise an animal for your purposes, to kill an animal for your purposes, and consume an animal for your purposes than it is to selflessly forego any of these. That is, being selfish is “selfless” and being selfless is “self-serving.” Smith provides a standardly (bad) argument in favour of this conclusion: if not for humans wanting to kill and eat animals, these animals would not exist in the first place. Thus, animal rights adherents argue that these animals should not exist because, clearly, living a life subsumed to the interests of another is preferable than no life at all. But this is absurd.

A being that does not come into existence is not harmed by not coming into existence. Only an existent being can be harmed. Even if animal rights entails the extinction of domesticated animal species (which it does not necessarily entail), this does not imply that cows or chickens have been harmed for the simple reason that, being extinct, there is no one who can be harmed. On the other hand, being brought into existence in order to be killed and consumed necessarily entails the violation of these animals: whether killed in a backyard or in a slaughterhouse, the animal dies in fear, in its own shit and piss, and among the blood of its fallen brethren. Indeed, the counter-intuitive conclusion is that giving animals a “good” life and then taking that life away on account of having given it a “good” life (this is the reciprocity argument you get in these situations) is worse than the normal way of doing things: raise billions of animals, kill half of them at birth (the males), make them suffer intolerably for a few weeks (hens), to a few months (pigs), to a couple years (cows), and then kill them in the exact same way as the “well-treated” animals are killed.

This gets me back to the word “like.” I assume that Smith is using the word “like” for a specific reason: it avoids being challenged in terms of “care” or “love.” But it is clear that Smith is using the word as a synonym for “love” and it is clear that her “good farmers” are doing the same. An argument that I’ve been increasingly been interested in is the idea of evil. Normally, evil is imagined as the metaphysical counter-part to “good” (hence, “a battle between good and evil” that gives the world a dramatic, Manichean flavour). However, a better way to think of evil in non-metaphysical terms is to think of evil as a perversion of love. Evil is love gone wrong. Evil is when you literally love something or someone to death. In this case, people like Joel Salatin are not “good farmers,” but “evil farmers.”