The Leigh Johnson Mystery

Here’s the thing everyone needs to understand before s/he starts picking a fight: you can only back people into a corner so far before they come out swinging. UChicago law professor Brian Leiter has decided to pick a fight with me in a comment thread on his blog here. There, in a moderated thread allegedly addressing “issues in the profession,” Leiter published a comment by one “AnonUntenured” who wanted an explanation of what he called “the Leigh Johnson mystery.” Specifically, AnonUntenured wanted to know how in the world I could possibly have secured not one, but TWO, academic appointments in my time as a professional philosopher. Leiter almost immediately received pushback from his readers for posting AnonUntenured’s comment, and subsequently defended his decision to do so by claiming that I was a “very public and rather noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace.”  I should say for the benefit of the uninitiated that a lot of people in professional philosophy opt out of engaging Leiter when he starts in on these #DrunkUncle-ish tirades because Leiter has a tendency to hide behind his gigantic bully pulpit blog, refuse to engage his critics, cry “defamation!” and threaten lawsuits whenever he’s called to account.

I am not one of those people.  I actually enjoy a good fight. Srsly, come at me, bros.

For whatever its worth, as regular readers of this blog already know, I spent a good deal of time and effort documenting what I called the Archive of the Meltdown in our profession last year, which (unfortunately for him) assembled together in one place a lot of bad press about Leiter.  I considered it a service to the profession, which I think it was, judging by the over 25 THOUSAND hits it has received to date.  I mention this because I suspect my Archive is the root of Leiter’s otherwise inexplicable antipathy towards me.  I have no idea who AnonUntenured is, so I cannot explain or even hazard a guess at the cause for his antipathy, which remains as genuinely mysterious to me as the fact that he used the phrase “the Leigh Johnson mystery.”

[Leigh Johnson is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a mystery.  AnonUntenured, allow me to introduce you to Google.]

What follows is my counterpunch.  I’m breaking it up into parts because I doubt everyone has the time or interest to read all the way through.  Part One is for those of you with just a generic curiosity about why I haven’t responded to Leiter’s provocations.  Part Two is for those of you who are concerned about how Brian Leiter is hurting the profession of Philosophy. Part Three is for those who are just gluttons for punishment.

Part One: My Unpublished-by-Leiter Reply
Below, I’m copying the full text of my reply to AnonUntenured and Brian Leiter, which I posted last night to Leiter’s blog and which he has refused to publish,  Leiter’s blog is “moderated,” which means that he has the option to publish or refuse to publish comments submitted there.  Here is my comment that he refused to publish:

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@AnonUntenured: Hi there, I’m Leigh Johnson, one of the more public and, as a consequence, probably one of the LEAST “mysterious” philosophers on the Internet. You’ll notice that I’m posting under my real name here, as I do everywhere else. I’d be happy to chat with you about how I moved from my previous position to my current (NTT) position if you are genuinely that stymied by the mystery of my employment. (By the way, you should really check with people before speculating publicly and/or inaccurately about their employment status. Especially someone as easy to reach and non-mysterious as me!) You’re already familiar with my blog and Twitter feed, I see, so here’s my email: [email protected]. You could also speak to people who know me, who attended graduate school with me, who have worked with me or currently work with me, if you want corroborating accounts of how and why I am employed. I promise you, it’s not all that mysterious.

What you really meant to ask, I suspect, is how did SHE get a job (nay, TWO JOBS) that I didn’t get? Here’s the thing, I don’t know anything about you because you’re commenting anonymously. Maybe your work isn’t very good, maybe you’re a terrible teacher, maybe you’re not collegial. I’ll assume none of those are true, partially because I have no idea who you are, but more so because I know there is a FAR greater statistical likelihood that if you’re in Philosophy and find yourself un- or underemployed, you’re guilty of nothing other than just not having the stars align in exactly the right way yet. Academia is not a meritocracy. 

It may be worthwhile to spend less time and effort obsessing over so-called “mysteries” like me or engaging in anonymous, thinly-veiled attempts to impugn other (non-Anon)untenured philosophers, and rather more time and effort *actually talking* to the literally hundreds of other philosophers who, like me and like you, are trying to make our way in this profession against considerable odds. 

@Brian Leiter: It looks like your readership has already beat me to the punch in the comment feed above, and you’ve tacitly conceded your own bad judgment here, so let me just echo the chorus confirming that you really are making a mockery of your own site by letting comments like AnonUntenured’s go through without some considered moderation. For whatever it’s worth, I’m not particularly bothered by AnonUntenured’s comment, though I do find his anonymity and willful ignorance exasperating. Everyone makes bad judgments, of course, but your (Brian’s) pattern seems to be to double-down on bad judgments when you’re called out on them, unfortunately. 

Since you’ve pushed in, though, what *exactly* is your evidence for designating me a “particularly noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace”? While you’re manufacturing evidence to support that claim, here are some examples of your own “particularly noxious” behaviors in Philosophy cyberspace that you might use as a gauge: 

1. Regularly and repeatedly maligning professional philosophers on your blog, usually sans evidence and almost always including an incredibly juvenile selection of invectives. 

2. Targeting junior and/or underrepresented groups in our profession, especially women, for the treatment above. 

3. Refusing to engage those who you bait, goad, insult, denigrate or (yes, I’ll say it) defame and, instead of participating in productive conversation, retreating to the safety of your blog to hold court, almost entirely uncontested by a host of (mostly anonymous) sycophants and sock-puppets. 

4. Perpetuating what, at this point, can only be described as a *willfully ignorant* myth of our profession as meritocratic.  

I’m not sure which of my activities in Philosophy cyberspace have motivated your denigration of me as a “particularly noxious presence” but, let’s be honest, I suspect it is chiefly motivated my archiving of your meltdown over the course of this last year on my blog. I am generally inclined to believe that most people are fundamentally decent people—an inclination which I can only assume, from the activities of your public persona, that you do not share—and for that reason I will grant you the benefit of the doubt in this case and trust that you have not voluntarily and reflectively chosen to (1) publish a comment questioning the legitimacy of a junior, female, untenured philosopher without any supporting evidence on your very public blog and (2) redoubled that error by name-calling the very same junior, female, untenured philosopher without any supporting evidence of her, in fact, being a “noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace.” 

As you no doubt already know, the hardest thing about having a public digital presence that one occupies under one’s own name is this: one cannot hide. Pace AnonUntenured, I am not a mystery. I do not censor or block others from engaging me (as you do on Twitter), I do not delete non-spam comments on my own blog (as you do, and probably will with this comment), I never write or speak anonymously, I do not engage in sock-puppetry and I do not take disagreement, as a matter of course, to be prima facie threatening or unproductive. 

For whatever its worth, Brian, you’ve created a space in which serious philosophers of good conscience are constitutionally disinclined to engage honestly and critically with you… mostly because the environment you’ve (I think, intentionally) cultivated on this blog is puerile, needlessly aggressive, partisan in the meanest way and, worst of all, IRRELEVANT in the grand scheme of things. No one takes your bait anymore, either because they are afraid of you or (much more often) because, like arguing with a toddler, it really isn’t worth their effort. 

You’ll be happy to hear that I’ve been advised not to respond to you and this thread, almost as happy, I suspect, that I disregarded that advice. But I want to go on the record here as avowing that I am not afraid of and, in fact, very much enjoy, a good philosophical fight. 

You baited me, Brian Leiter. I’m biting. Let’s have it out.

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