Before responding
to Dave, let me say that this post contains a lot of references to, and
ultimately critiques of, Dave?s thoughts. That?s really only because he?s one of the
few people to engage the broader issue of the Scholastica diversity widget
under his own name, and at length, and he?s almost the only one (to date) to
have responded to the particular (in)consistency challenge I?ve raised. So I
hope that neither he nor anyone else will read this as an attack on him in any
way. At least one other person, AnonProf, from Dave's original CoOps thread, also holds the view that differences between speaking and publication opportunities justify a different role for diversity in selection, and I'm sure AnonProf and Dave speak for many others.
Right then. I
certainly agree with Dave that if two scholarly activities have
different purposes, then AA might be appropriate in one of them but not (or
less so) in another.? As I?d said
in my initial post, those who organize a group of scholars in order to develop
a consensus statement, for instance, may be well advised to consider how
representative that group is. But I?m still not convinced of anything approaching
a categorical difference in purpose between
scholarly writing and speaking opportunities, and certainly not one that
justifies vastly different selection criteria.
Dave says that
the purpose of law reviews is ?to disseminate ideas,? while the purpose of
symposia (and other speaking opportunities?) is ?to organize people.? I?m not
exactly sure what he means by the latter purpose (and it?s possible that
everything I say below misses the mark as a result). I?ll grant that a
necessary aspect of speaking activities is that they bring people together and
organize them into panels and whatnot. But is that really the end (as in
?telos?) of scholarly speaking activities, or at least all or even most of
them? Surely we care about the deliverables that result from that organization
of people, and generally don?t those deliverables involve knowledge production
and dissemination? Dave objected in an earlier post to ?picking
people, not papers,? but has no objection to ?picking people? for speaking
opportunities. Indeed, in his most recent post he says that ?It
would be crazy ? indeed, nonsensical ? to imagine blind review of symposia
pieces given their current function.? That is, Dave seems to be making the
opposite claim that when it comes to speaking opportunities, it would be crazy
to pick presentations, not people.
Now seems as
good a time and place as any to ?fess up about my own experience organizing a
workshop. And let me cut to the chase: the participants are white as the driven
snow (I think: I haven?t met a couple of them in person), and almost all are men
(of the 18ish participants, only 2 are women; one is a junior scholar and the
other is senior and has been given an elevated role in the workshop akin to a
keynote speaker; in addition, I?m the organizer, and if, as I hope, an edited
volume will come out of it, I?ll be the editor, so we?re 3 for 19 in the gender
count).
So how did
this happen? The workshop is a bit idiosyncratic, in that it?s not a broad,
general ?Contemporary Approaches to Contract Theory? or ?Your Thoughts on the
ACA? kind of event. Rather, I?m trying to pull together two ongoing, very
specific, but as-yet separate conversations about evidence-based practice (one
in legal academia and one in bioethics and health policy). There are only a few
participants on record in each conversation, and it?s very difficult to get people
who haven?t already done so to turn their attention, in a serious way, to a new
topic (especially when the person doing the asking is a junior scholar like
me). So, in my defense, I?ll say that there wasn?t nearly as large a pool of
potential invitees to choose from as there often is in other speaking events.
I?ll say, too, that I unsuccessfully tried to get two additional women to
participate; when they were both unavailable, I replaced them, at their
suggestion, with their more junior, male colleague (who I?m nonetheless
thrilled to have, in case he?s reading!).
(Although I've tried to give readers the gist of the workshop here, including how white and male it is, lest you think I'm trolling for SSRN downloads. But, if you like, you can further
judge for yourself whether this particular workshop is really idiosyncratic or
whether this is post-hoc rationalization on my part; it?s the first thing like
this that I?m organizing, so it may, in fact, be entirely typical. This short forthcoming piece, ?From
Evidence-Based Medicine to Evidence-Based Practice,? provides the rationale
for the workshop, and ?Legal
Experimentation: Legal and Ethical Challenges to Evidence-Based Practice in Law, Medicine and Policymaking? is a draft prospectus for the workshop, and includes a close-to-current list of participants. [I
think I lost two white men since posting this version of the prospectus.])
The truth
is that it never occurred to me to select people on any basis other than
?merit? ? that is, people from a range of disciplinary backgrounds who were
working on this very particular set of issues, who I thought would be willing
to engage with other participants, and who are well-positioned to implement in
the real world any results of the workshop. That is, it never occurred to me
until, some months ago -- well after the participant list had been set -- I
came across a discussion of the Gendered
Conference Campaign. There, Feminist Philosophers decry ?all-male
conferences (and volumes, and summer schools)? and list offenders. I mentally scrolled through my
list of participants, sat bolt upright, and said ,?Oh &%$.? (Ask my
husband.) I had been feeling vaguely guilty about this ever since, when
L?Affaire Scholastica came up this past week and I began trying to reconcile
the two sets of norms and intuitions. Hence my query to Dave and others
thinking and writing about Scholastica.
In the case of
my workshop, at least, I can say that ?organizing people,? including breaking
down academic silos and forcing people from different disciplines to talk to
each other, is only a means to my end of facilitating a process whereby many
heads, with many different (disciplinary) perspectives, are better than one in
trying to solve some important but thorny legal and ethical questions, and then
to ?disseminate? the results of those intellectual exchanges via an edited
volume? -- exactly the purpose Dave
ascribes to article selection.
My thinking is
evolving on this, but here?s my current view: A much more
important criterion for judging the appropriateness of AA in distributing
scholarly activities than any distinction between writing and speaking
activities is how selections would be made if diversity were not deliberately
taken into account. In a given case, for example, is the alternative to AA blind
review (whether by students or peers) of papers or abstracts, selection via CV,
or something in between? Dave himself alludes to this criterion when he says: ?Given [the
?organizing people? purpose of symposia], and given what we know about
old-boy-networks and other forms of social capital, diversity based symposia
selection seems warranted.? My only tweak is that I don?t think we should put
much, if any, weight on the first clause ? i.e., any supposed categorical
difference in purpose between symposia and articles.
Not that the norms within philosophy are authoritative, but
they seem to mesh with this hypothesis. As far as I can tell surfing around at
the various petitions to ensure gender representativeness in philosophy, the
concern is with ensuring that diversity is affirmatively considered when distributing opportunities ? for both speaking and publication (e.g., conferences and conference
volumes) ? in which
participants are selected in an unblinded way. The dearth of women publishing in peer review philosophy journals is also an issue, but in that case, the only suggestion I?ve seen is for increasing blind selection (by
having not only peer reviewers but also editors blinded to the gender of the
author), not for direct consideration of diversity in the selection process. (That suggestion comes from a paper by Jennifer Saul, ?Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat and
Women in Philosophy,? available in the sidebar of this page.)
As Kaimi suggests in his most
recent post, some structural bias may remain even under conditions of blind
review. But blind review, where possible, sure ought to go a long way towards
addressing both letterhead bias and explicit and implicit bias towards members
of minority/non-privileged groups. If so, then I?m not sure that those who
organize conferences, symposia and the like and who use blind selection
criteria should feel badly about doing so rather than using diversity criteria.
(I do think, as I believe Sam Bagenstos has suggested somewhere, that tracking the
diversity or lack thereof of the resulting selection could be useful in
alerting us to structural biases.) Nor do I think using blind methods is
?crazy? or ?nonsensical? in the context of speaking opportunities. I don?t know
why it would undermine the purpose of symposia and conferences for participants
to be selected through blind review after a call for abstracts, and as Kaimi
notes (see his discussions of the famous blind symphony auditions), there is
some evidence that blind selection processes can increase selection of diverse
people. Indeed, some speaking opportunities in legal academia are already
distributed via blind selection processes, to no apparent ill result as far as
I can see. Participants in the ASLME-SLU health law scholar?s workshop, for
instance, are selected through blind review of abstracts by senior health law
faculty at various schools (per the brochure downloadable here).
Conversely, where the baseline selection process involves
looking at people?s CVs (and some unknown amount of article ?walk-downs? and
referrals from friends), and especially where this is coupled with very, very
limited time and ability of student editors to make selections that are
merit-based, considering whether an article was written by a woman, a person of
color, or an economically disadvantaged person (or, perhaps, a veteran or a
person with a disability or a member of the LGBTQ community or someone from a
particular geographic region, etc.) before deciding whether to publish it may
not be nearly as absurd as, frankly, it seemed to me at first glance, as judged
against what I now realize is the wrong backdrop of my experience outside of
legal academia with blind, peer review. If I were tsarina of the legal academic
universe, I would require that most legal scholarship be selected through blind
peer review (and not just the pseudo ?blind? review that some law reviews
tout), with students continuing to line edit and Bluebook, if they want, and
maybe to help select symposia pieces (where diversity criteria would probably
be perfectly reasonable to use along with other criteria).
The way my workshop came about falls somewhere between the way
most of us thought (pre-L?Affaire Scholastica) that law review articles were
generally selected and the way peer reviewed journal articles are selected. On
one hand, I didn?t use a blind selection process. (This is somewhat ironic,
since the workshop is partly about using double-blind randomized controlled
trials to achieve high quality and evidence-based practice.) That is, I ?picked
people? rather than (blinded) presentation abstracts. But in this case, I doubt
that I could have done otherwise. Given the specific workshop and book I have
in mind, I knew immediately that several people really needed to be part of the
conversation, if they were willing. But most of them are superstars, and it?s
very unlikely that any of them would have agreed to submit an abstract to me for
my blind review, nor would those abstracts in most cases really be
deidentifiable (which can also be a problem for real blind peer review).
On the other hand, although I ?picked people,? I think it?s
fair to say that I have significantly more expertise on the particular topic of
my workshop than the average 2L or 3L (including myself, when I was on law
review) has in selecting articles about random topics in law. I would hope
that, as a result, my selections were less subject to pernicious biases than might
have been the case had law review editors been making the selections. But
still, I?m human -- and, indeed, my IAT ?data suggest a strong association of
FEMALE with WARMTH and MALE with COMPETENCE compared to MALE with WARMTH and
FEMALE with COMPETENCE.? But if the workshop results in a book, I?ll probably
need to fill it out with some contributions from those who weren?t at the
workshop, and if that?s the case, I expect that I?ll affirmatively reach out to
more diverse scholars.
Source: http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2013/02/distributing-scholarly-speaking-and-publication-opportunities-through-blind-and-other-processes.html
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