Who is/was Alec Klein

Alec Klein, a professor at Northwestern University, resigned recently after 22 women accused him of inappropriate behavior, including sexual harassment and bullying. He denied the accusations, and after the first of them were publicized (in February of this year) he took a leave of absence but apparently with the expectation the coast would in time clear, the storm would blow over, and he could return to his post.

In August, though, he resigned, full stop.

Who was he? Why was he important enough for the case to attract national attention? That's the tack I often take when these matters come to light. There are lots of jerks -- even lots of criminals -- whose jerkiness and/or crimes never become big news stories. Sometimes when an event like this happens, some of us are left wondering: why does THIS one merit especially keen attention?

Org-chart stuff gives us a clue. The Medill School of Journalism is part of Northwestern U., and the Medill Justice Project is part of THAT -- and Alec Klein was the director of the Medill Justice Project. The MJP was originally known as the Medill Innocence Project. Its mission has been looking into the cases of convicts who may have been convicted wrongly, especially of murder, to make a determination, and if appropriate to seek to secure a release. MIP/MJP has so far brought about the release of 11 innocent men.

http://www.medilljusticeproject.org/2017/09/03/dna-tests-in-wisconsin-murder-raise-questions-amid-alleged-evidence-tampering/

My personal guess -- and I say this without any thought of mitigating the disdain with which one ought to view sexual harassment -- is that Klein is probably still on the plus side of the scales of karma, not the minus side.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog