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Codifying Civility and Collegiality

An Experiment in the (Re)Distribution of Grades: UPDATE (2026)

September 5, 2026 Leigh M. Johnson Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Blog, Capitalism, citizenship, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, critical thinking, Democracy, ERG, Ethics, Internet, Marx, Media, Open Source Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Social Media, Teaching Comments Off on An Experiment in the (Re)Distribution of Grades: UPDATE (2026)

Do “grades” even matter anymore?

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An Experiment in the (Re)distribution of Grades (Part 3)

September 5, 2026 Leigh M. Johnson Blog, citizenship, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, ERG, Ethics, Justice, Labor Issues, Pedagogy, Politics, Professional Academy, Public Philosophy Comments Off on An Experiment in the (Re)distribution of Grades (Part 3)

Why don’t we give students space to critically reflect upon the way they are assessed?

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An Experiment in the (Re)Distribution of Grades (Part 2)

September 4, 2026 Leigh M. Johnson Blog, Capitalism, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, ERG, Ethics, Justice, Public Philosophy Comments Off on An Experiment in the (Re)Distribution of Grades (Part 2)

Pearl clutch! Turns out Gen Z is socialist!

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This Is Not A Retraction

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, LGBTQ, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, SCOTUS, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on This Is Not A Retraction

I’ve received a fair amount of pushback (mostly on Facebook and Twitter, but also in the comments section here) regarding my post on Saturday critical of the Supreme Court’s Ogerbefell decision. I may have been a little quick on the draw with my criticism, which I posted only one day after SCOTUS’ decision and while…

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The Academy Doesn’t Need a Civility Code. It Needs a Hostility Code.

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on The Academy Doesn’t Need a Civility Code. It Needs a Hostility Code.

Fair warning: what follows will assume the arguments I’ve already made against the advisability of “civility/collegiality” codes in academia here and here. Read those first.  Second fair warning:  there’s a lot to read herein before you get to my advocacy of a “hostility code.” Be patient, grasshoppers. My general blogging habit inclines me toward what…

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Why They Run

July 3, 2018 Leigh M. Johnson Capitalism, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, Ethics, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive Comments Off on Why They Run

There’s an old dad-joke that goes something like this: A bear jumps out of the woods, in a rage, and starts chasing two hikers. They both start running for their lives, but then one of them stops to put on his running shoes. “What are you doing?!,” the other hiker exclaims, “You can’t outrun a…

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Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the APA’s “Code of Conduct”

October 29, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Professional Academy, Public Philosophy, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the APA’s “Code of Conduct”

by Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which…

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Sick Of This Sh*t: On Professional Philosophy’s Boiling Frogs

October 8, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Leiter, PGR, Philosophy, Politics, Professional Academy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on Sick Of This Sh*t: On Professional Philosophy’s Boiling Frogs

There’s an old anecdote about boiling frogs that is often employed by philosophers to explain the sorites paradox. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, the story goes, it will immediately sense the heat and the danger, jump out of the pot, and be spared its life.  But if you put…

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Well Actually, This Is How Erasure and Appropriation Happens

July 1, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Philosophy, Politics, Professional Academy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 3 Comments

Women’s voices, ideas, engagements, and critiques are constantly being erased and/or appropriated– in academia, on the internet, at workplaces of every ilk– sometimes through slick and malicious moves, but much more often as a consequence of careless inattention. Also, water is wet. I was just recently “disappeared” in an essay by my friend Joshua Miller…

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Campuses Are Not Sovereign Nation-States

April 10, 2016 Leigh M. Johnson Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, Ethics, Politics, Professional Academy, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 11 Comments

The photo to your left is of a sock-monkey, hung by a noose from one of the windows on the campus of Rhodes College this week. It should go without saying, I hope, that not only is the sock-monkey itself a manifestly racist symbol (echoing the colonialist project of comparing blacks to apes in order to justify their…

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