It has come to pass. As I noted last year, "three of the five academic [authors]--Rebecca Kennison, Yannik Thiem, and Adriel Trott--were signatories to the open letter defaming Prof. Tuvel and calling on Hypatia to retract her article. That's right, the majority of this committee supported unethical and unprofessional conduct by Hypatia." And for good measure, they've added an Advisory Board that is a "who's who" of bad behavior and contempt for academic freedom in the profession, including Linda Alcoff, Lisa Guenther (seriously?), and Rebecca Kukla. You have to dig into the details to see the mischief that is afoot in this "white paper." (UPDATE: see this assessment.) It is open for comment, for anyone who wants to be bothered.

UPDATE: A philosopher elsewhere points out that Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association, is also involved as a co-author; as this philosopher wrote: "It’s shocking that a non-philosopher, who is moreover a paid executive of the APA, is allowed to be involved in these partisan, highly inflammatory ventures."

ANOTHER: Bioethicist Laurence McCullough writes:

The research team conducted focus groups and group interviews. Both are accepted forms of qualitative research in the qualitative social sciences. I have conducted such research with colleagues trained in qualitative social science and published the results in peer-reviewed journals. Both of these forms of qualitative research have accepted methods for preparing accurate and anonymized transcripts for analysis and then analyzing transcripts, e.g., inductive, deductive, mixed methods. The methodology section describes only the methods for obtaining qualitative data. There is no description of how the transcripts were prepared or how qualitative analysis of the data in the transcripts (the natural languages responses of subjects to questions posed) was performed. The results that they report from the focus groups and interviews therefore have no scientific value.

Laurence B. McCullough, Ph.D., Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.

ONE MORE: For amusement: Justin Weinberg tries to suppress discussion of the bad behavior of the authors of this "white paper," only to be demolished by David Wallace in two separate comments (scroll through). (Weinberg also admits to removing other comments on this subject: feel free to send them to me, I'll publish any amusing or especially relevant ones.)

