Slogans and Sound Bites
by Deborah Tannen
A sad aspect of this election is what it has shown about our public discourse and electoral process.
During the campaign I was asked repeatedly to comment on the language of polarization: How can we move beyond mutual name-calling and rancor to start talking to each other again? My reaction was to ask, “What do you mean, mutual?” For example, a journalist asked me to comment on the candidates’ use of “labels and slogans.” He gave me these examples: “Bush calls Kerry a ‘tax and spend liberal from Massachusetts’ and Kerry calls Bush ‘a friend of the corporations and the upper class.’ I responded that only one of these collocations is a slogan or label: “tax and spend liberal from Massachusetts.” Then I commented that in the search for “balance,” the press often creates the impression of equivalence where there is none. After giving this reply, I e-mailed a question: “Did these two exemplary slogans jump out at you or did you have to root around in various speeches/web sites etc. to come up with them?” The journalist replied, “It’s interesting you asked, and supports the point you made over the phone. I really had to root and peck around to find examples of Kerry using slogans to dismiss Bush. But examples of Bush reducing Kerry to slogans were easy to obtain.”
Republican pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz wrote in a memo to Republican members of Congress, “Fear is a very salable commodity.” This advice is scary. In recommending the selling of fear, Luntz assumes that a political campaign rests on marketing, and a candidate can be sold like any other commodity. What’s really scary is that the election results show that the sloganeering, the labeling and the selling of fear all worked. Despite round-the-clock media coverage of the campaign, most of what we heard was either horse-race handicapping (Who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Will this or that event help Kerry or Bush?) or sound-bite distillation of a tiny number of issues (Were jobs created or lost? Was the war in Iraq misconceived and mishandled or do we need to stay the course?). Very few of the innumerable policy issues on which the candidates differed, and which will deeply affect every citizen’s life, were mentioned at all, let alone discussed in detail.
One good thing is that the election exposed the chaotic and unfair underbelly of our electoral system. Now everyone knows that voting equipment is often unreliable; the computers that tally votes and compile results are potentially vulnerable to hacking; counties handle voting and vote-counting in wildly disparate ways; and, unconscionably, voters in poorer districts face longer lines and a greater chance of having their votes tossed out. Everyone knows that when fair elections in Afghanistan and Iraq are being looked to as a barometer of democracy, the United States cannot afford to have its own election process open to accusations of unfairness, error and even fraud. So there is more hope now that our electoral system will be repaired.
Deborah Tannen is a professor in the Department of Linguistics.
Keep your chin up
by Dan Porterfield
As a Georgetown student from 1979 and 1983, I’d envisioned working for social justice by serving in the administration of a President for whom I’d voted.
It wasn’t until January 1993 that I got that chance, when incoming Health and Human Service Secretary Donna E. Shalala gave me the opportunity to join her team as chief speechwriter.
We came in with high ideals and a bold agenda for change: a strong focus on AIDS, immunizations for all children, Head Start expansion, health care reform, better child care for the poor, new priorities for biomedical research. And that was just at HHS.
The first 18 months of the Clinton Administration were rocky and full of setbacks. Many were self-inflicted. As a result, the Democrats suffered an historic setback in the 1994 midterm elections, losing control of the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.
I watched the Nov. 8, 1994 landslide unfold on TV. A group of us had gathered at Secretary Shalala’s house for the returns. As icon after icon went down-Speaker of the House Tom Foley, Texas Governor Ann Richards, New York Governor Mario Cuomo- we all felt the crushing weight not simply of defeat, but of epic failure. We had lost the Congress.
That night, while many of us sat stunned or moping, the legendary childrens’ rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman told us to keep our chins up. Our responsibility, she said, was to come back the next day re-engaged to do the best job we could for the American people. Yes, we were now the minority party. Yes, it would be more challenging, but also more important. Children’s futures were still at stake. We couldn’t give up now.
The next two years brought struggle and turmoil. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government attempting to impose an extremist anti-government agenda for which he had no real mandate. The Clinton Administration and the Congressional Democrats fought back, articulating a continuing focused role for government as a protector of opportunity, rights and security. During those two years we stopped a number of extremist proposals and worked in bi-partisan ways to realize many of the goals we’d brought to government.
As a result, in 1996 the American people reelected President Clinton on the basis of good work done with no legislative power. I learned an important lesson from Marian Wright Edelman: Election nights are a beginning and not an end. In victory or defeat, we have to become more engaged. That’s especially true for students and all young people, because your tomorrows are being shaped by decisions our leaders make today. Stay engaged in the political life of this country. Our democracy depends on it.
Dan Porterfield is Vice President for Public Affairs and Strategic Development.
Hope and truth
by Emil Totonchi
I never believed Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. His possession of WMD and the speed at which the Bush Administration rushed to war are irreconcilable: If Hussein had possessed WMD, wouldn’t he have used them against the coalition and its allies in the Middle East if his power was threatened by regime change? The Bush Administration knew there were no WMD, otherwise it wouldn’t have rushed to war in such a manner. Common sense led me to this conclusion and the Bush Administration’s lack of common sense-at least in the public eye-has led it to pursue frightening policies.
When I arrived to Georgetown as a first-year, I expected to find a large, organized opposition to the Bush Administration’s reactionary policies that I could join. What I found was silence. This silence was due to typical student apathy about the world outside of college, students’ unquestioning faith in the Bush administration or their own selfish but valid fears that criticizing Bush would impede their future political careers. This latter fear had the same effect on most elected Democrats until summer 2003. In the midst of two years of unquestioning allegiance, the Republicans managed to use 9/11 to change this country in ways previously thought impossible. Democrats and some Georgetown students are now questioning: How could the Republicans have gotten away with this? They forget that it is our duty-not simply a right or privilege-to call attention, and yes criticize, the acts of our government that wreak havoc on lives domestically and internationally.
Bush’s war has killed (not liberated) upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians according to the Washington Post. In 1.5 years of occupation, the U.S. and its coalition have killed a third of the number of Iraqis that Saddam Hussein killed over 30 years. The president claims that America is safer, which demonstrates his refusal to acknowledge daily attacks on American soldiers-1,126 of which have been killed and tens of thousands who have suffered casualties that will torment them for the rest of their lives-not to mention beheadings of civilians and terrorist attacks on allies’ embassies and cities. In his bid for re-election, Bush claimed that 75 percent of all al-Qaeda members had been caught, but failed to mention that this reflected the number that were caught before 9/11 according to FactCheck.org. Bush’s offensive and with-us-or-against-us ideology has strengthened America’s foes, and has made both the U.S. and the world less safe. With the results of the election, Bush has received a rubber stamp to continue with the mandate of relentless war as well as reactionary policies at home.
The election results have made it clear that a majority of Americans favor a tough, hard-liner president. As progressives, we must come together to save this country. To all those Kerry supporters who were initially silent after 9/11: Don’t give up now, for our work has just begun. We reclaimed democracy in the last few months while working to beat Bush. This effort has given me hope that we will be giving Bush hell for the next four years, while beginning to build a better world.
Emil Totonchi (SFS ‘06) is the founder of Georgetown University Peace Action
Faith in Obama
by Nazareth Haysbert
This election left me drained, embittered by a bewildering mixture of fear and hope. While I was excited that so many people voted, I evaluated the competitors and found them sadly lacking. The America that had witnessed a bloodless but virtual coup d’etat in 2000 showed yet again that we were unable, with our incredible resources, to choose an able leader. Is it not remarkable that our leaders are mediocre when we esteem ourselves so highly? If you are just tuning in to this past Presidential election, we were forced-no, we forced ourselves-to choose between two exceptionally well-educated, exceptionally wealthy but wholly unexceptional candidates in terms of their ideas for this country. It prompts me to ask: What in the name of heaven have we done to our politicians? They are no longer the statesmen of yesterday who pushed aside partisan rhetoric, understood that special interests have their time and place and were united behind the vision of a better and stronger America. We are witnessing the triumph of a new kind of political animal: one who couches the issues as right or wrong, good or evil, black or white, with me or against me, my way or no way … and it is working. This election became more about morals and values than about Iraq or terrorism. America became a theocracy on election day because many voters refused to frame the issues that were supposed to be important, like Social Security and the economy. Possibly those issues were too complex, forcing people to think too much or maybe we do live in a new political era where it is important for politicians to run on faith rather than results.
However hard it is for me to say this, I still believe in America. I truly believe we witnessed the arrival of a political force with the election of Barak Obama as a Democratic Senator from Illinois. This example is one where America got it right. This man is a true political leader, a throwback to the days when politicians actually were for the American people. They respected leaders who worked across party lines, and were statesmen that promoted public good. In Obama, America may have found someone who can help heal a nation that remains sharply divided. I sincerely hope both Republicans and Democrats welcome him warmly.
Nazareth Haysbert (CAS ‘05) is a former GUSA representative.
The ethics of Jesusland
by Gerald Mara
I don’t study presidential politics or voting behavior professionally, so I respond in part simply as a citizen who cast one vote. However, the 2004 election also resonates with someone who studies classical political philosophy, particularly the works of Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. The compelling issues are the relation between politics and ethics and the character of public speech in a democracy.
Exit polls and subsequent surveys suggested that many 2004 voters, in numbers extending beyond the Christian evangelicals, cast ballots on the basis of their “values,” reminding us that politics and ethics are connected in ways that Plato and Aristotle would recognize. However, these same classical authors also tell us that affirmations of any civic moral identity need to be carefully examined by reflective citizens. Mostly, the focus on morality within this campaign, primarily, though not exclusively, in the rhetoric of the Republicans, frustrated that possibility. In the Platonic dialogue, Gorgias, Socrates distinguishes between a political speech that improves and one that flatters, where flattery means intensifying dominant social passions, including such emotions as fear and anger.
Though serious discussions of moral questions can contribute to civic health, much of the moral language in this campaign, including the religious language, would have to be called flattery, reinforcing prejudice and intensifying fear and anger. When political speech flatters, national priorities are not scrutinized from a thoughtful moral vantage point; they are moralized by a rhetoric implying that all questions of ethical purpose have been satisfactorily answered. Stifling reflective criticism of political purposes is particularly dangerous for a powerful society facing collective stress in times of prideful confidence, a condition that describes Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and that is disquietingly familiar now.
Socrates’ response, however, is to interrogate senses of public purpose more resolutely. We can be guided by his example. Many see the results of the election as signaling massive political cultural change in our democracy. The President speaks of his historic mandate. A less sanguine Internet image showed the top two-thirds of North America divided into the “United States of Canada” and a place called “Jesusland.” The reality is more complicated. For example, though my vantage point is secular, it is encouraging that so many religious voices are insisting that a serious concern for morality must confront the ways we use force or create growing social inequalities. Such critical voices speak in ways that are Socratic or Aristotelian, exhibiting a commitment to what one of my colleagues calls the work of the citizen. A society that is still more like Athens (troubling flaws, inspiring possibilities) than it is like Jesusland enables and deserves this.
Gerald Mara is an executive associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Racism in the South (Dakota)
by Tim Fernholz
Just before the election, John Thune, the Republican challenging Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, sent out a direct mailing to voters in white, Republican counties around the state. Superimposed over a picture of prairie dogs was the caption “the dogs are lining up to vote for Tom Daschle.”
That caption was an obvious racial code-phrase in a state where signs that once hung in stores read ‘no Indians or dogs allowed,’ and accusations of voter fraud on Indian reservations flew after the last election. I heard of one young native man who saw the mailing and burst into tears, asking “Why are they doing this to us?”
I spent the last days of the 2004 election working in Indian Country for now-ousted Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. While the race garnered national attention – Daschle was the first Senate leader to lose his race for reelection since 1952 – not many people paid attention to the human drama among South Dakota’s most desperate citizens.
The Yankton-Sioux reservation in the south-east corner of the state is home to just under 7,000 natives, out of a population of 10,000. The natives live in mostly ramshackle, overcrowded housing, often 20 people in the same house. Their existence is troubled and transient, and jobs are hard to come by in the area. At the same time, many natives cannot afford to leave. There is palpable racial tension between the white and native populations – Other white campaign workers and I were the targets of dirty looks when local whites saw us eating with natives in a Subway.
Natives are reliable Democrats, both because they’ve seen Democrats work as strong advocates for Native rights, and they are mostly ignored by Republicans. Most the campaign work was getting out the vote: ensuring that Natives arrived at the polls and were protected from intimidation – the campaign’s most critical job. While Thune didn’t bother to maintain any kind of voter outreach in the area, he did make sure to have lawyers the polling place to harass native voters. During early voting, the Republican lawyers ostentatiously wrote down the license plate numbers of arriving voters, followed them out of the County office and joked loudly about other “Indians” being arrested for voter fraud. (hypecloth.com)
On the last day of early voting, the Daschle campaign stationed two Democratic lawyers at the polling place to observe the Republicans’ tactics. At the end of the day, they drove four hours to Sioux Falls to file a lawsuit against Thune’s campaign. At two in the morning of November 2, a judge issued an injunction to prevent voter intimidation.
This lawsuit would seem our biggest victory after Daschle lost the election by 4,535 votes statewide, due mostly to heavy turnout in the Presidential election and Georgetown’s own Stephanie Herseth, a Democrat elected to Congress in South Dakota after endorsing President Bush and the Federal Marriage Amendment. There was some personal consolation for those of use who worked on the reservation. We won the county by ten percentage points, due to our efforts and in larger part the efforts of two Native American get-out-the-vote groups. Natives were adamant about voting and ensuring that their friends and families voted – even after regularly needing sue the government to regain jurisdiction over their land or seeing local towns gerrymander their borders to keep Natives out of local government.
Wednesday morning we regrouped in the campaign office. Phil, one of our Native canvassers, looked up and said, “I guess our boat is just about sunk now, isn’t it?”
This election was climactic for those, like me, who maintain a liberal philosophy and value the equality of all of this nation’s citizens. The American Indian community in the United States could be helped by progressive government intervention and a dose of affirmative action more than any other, and now they stand little chance of getting it. The cause must endure – to keep the hope for American Indian, and all our nation, alive.
Tim Fernholz (CAS ‘08) is assistant news editor for The Georgetown Voice
Hope springs eternal
by Maurice Jackson
Before we formally begin the day’s lessons in my Black History and Culture class, I usually bring in a few tidbits relating to the intersection of culture and history in the African-American struggle for equality and social progress. Recently we briefly discussed the efforts to get out the youth vote, especially those of P. Diddy and the “Boss” Bruce Springsteen. I told the students that I had never voted for a Republican in the Presidential elections: no surprise there. I reminded them of what Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) had said when I was a delegate to the D.C. Statehood Constitutional Convention in 1981. He reminded all that D.C. deserved statehood status as it had a greater population than several states, had sent more young men to wars proportionately and paid infinitely more taxes per person than any area in the nation. But he doubted statehood would come to pass, because D.C. had the four “too’s”: “Too liberal and progressive, too urban, too poor and too black.”
Fitting solidly in the four “too’s”, I also told my students that I had never voted for a Democrat in the Presidential elections either. Since I have lived in D.C. every year since I was old enough to vote, I had always voted for outsiders and independents. It did not matter, I figured since a Democratic candidate always wins in D.C. I wanted to launch a protest against politics as usual. I had voted for John Anderson, Angela Davis, the satirist Dick Gregory and once wrote in Dizzy Gillespie, the great jazz legend, who once ran on the United Nations ticket. But in this election, I just had to vote against George W. Bush more directly and that meant voting for John Kerry. I could not vote for a man who sends boys to war-as was done in my generation to Vietnam, with no clear purpose-notwithstanding George Tenet’s assertions that the case was a “slam dunk” and WMDs were evident. The fact is that Mr. Tenet’s assertion did not even hit the rim. More than 1,000 American soldiers have died and close to 8,000 are seriously wounded, and estimates of well over 100,000, and some say perhaps up to 300,000, Iraqi people have lost their lives. I could not vote for a man whose economic policies have caused millions to lose their jobs and health insurance, a man whose polices have led to an onslaught against affirmative action, the right for women to choose and civility in American life.
In a Nov. 8 piece in the New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert cited a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. According to the poll cited by Herbert, “nearly 70 percent of President Bush’s supporters believe the U.S. has come up with ‘clear evidence’ that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president’s supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S. led invasions.” Then Herbert concluded, “This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.” But I am an African-American, who grew up poor in the Jim Crow south and is grateful to have a job, and in fact to be alive, so how could I be expected to think any differently?
On Election Day, I felt good. I usually vote very early, but on that Tuesday, I planned to pick up our oldest child, an SFS sophomore, from the campus so she could vote in her first election. I was such a proud Dad. I cast my first vote against Richard Nixon in 1972; we had even more in common. But she was ready and willing like so many other young people. She is so full of optimism and the spirit of giving to help create a better life for our world. In fact, last year when I suggested that she was doing too much with community service, she told me, “I am just behaving the way you and Mom raised me. Would you expect anything less?” What could I say?
And that is why I am so perplexed by the attacks the media has made on the youth vote. In fact, I asked one of my classes what they thought about P. Diddy and the “Vote or Die” message. I was not quite ready for some of the cynicism I heard or for some of the things I had read in the media. How could young people be mad at P. Diddy for going on MTV or their perceived notion that young people did not do their jobs at the voting booth?
I went home and asked our 16-year-old son what he thought about the MTV ads that had been shown. Did he think they were self-serving? It seems that P. Diddy had taken up too much time from regular MTV viewing for some. My son told me about a program that he really liked. There was P. Diddy in Harlem, speaking with Black youth, and there was Trick Daddy in Florida speaking to a Black and jobless teenager. There was David Banner, in the Delta in Mississippi. And there was his favorite, a fellow named Xzibit, in Southern California. And I remembered the non-partisan ads by NBA superstar Baron Davis. So why the negativity towards those who had fought to bring out the youth vote? I could only blame the media, and the pollsters who have skewed the figures.
In fact, voting rates for 18- to 29-year-olds have increased from 1992 to 2004. In 1992, the group numbered 19.1 million voters; in 1996, 14.5 million voters; in 2000, 16.3 million voters and in 2004, 21.0 million voters. That translates to 47.9 percent of youth voting in 1992, 34.9 percent in 1996, 42.3 percent in 2000 and 51.6 percent in 2004. Democratic candidate John Kerry carried that vote, but it goes farther than that. He did better with the 18-to-29-year old voter than any candidate since 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote in 1972. He won 54 percent of the youth vote for just over 11 million votes. In approximate raw numbers, the 18-to-29-year old age bracket accounted for 20.4 million votes. Kerry won 54 percent of that group. But here is the crux of the matter and the way the spin masters have distorted the true meaning of this historic vote. The significance of the scale of the increase in the youth vote is buried by the dramatic increase in turnout, which jumped by more than 15 million votes. In other words, the youth vote increased numerically but remained the same percentage of the turnout because of the increase in the overall turnout. Yes, it is true that Mr. Bush won more votes than any other candidate in history, but then again so did John Kerry. In response to some who questioned the participation and motives of the youth, Russell Simmons pointed out that 26 youth summits were convened, with entertainers such as Kanye West and 50 Cent. He affirmed that an “estimated 10,000 kids” attended these summits. And he forcefully stated that, “We made an effort to turn around what had been a trend for young people not to be a part of the process. The act is we reversed the trend.”
Just a word about the Black vote. A few weeks ago my wife and I were having dinner with friends. Several of them were going off to various states to campaign for Sen. Kerry. The topic of the vote came up and one asked what was wrong with the electorate, with people in Ohio and battleground states. Why would they support Bush? He was a white fellow, and I gently prodded that it was not all Americans as I saw it but white Americans, and this time men and women. Not being able to see the depth of my answer he retorted “if only your people would vote.” That is the other big myth. In the 1996 election about 59 percent of whites voted. For Black it was about 57 percent. But no one ever blamed the whites, as a group, for not voting. In regard to the Black vote this year, David Bositis, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, reported that 10.5 million Blacks voted in 2000, while 13.2 million did this time. That is a 2.7 million jump in votes and a 25 percent increase in Black voter turnout. Moreover the increase came from Black voters under the age of 30. Not only that, 18- to -29-year-old African Americans cast their votes in larger numbers for the Democratic ticket than did “older generations.” This reversed a trend that had been evident in the past few presidential elections.
So the myth of the lost youth vote and the absent Black vote is blown out of the water when one looks at the facts. P. Diddy and all those young people who urged us to vote are not the problem. Blacks favored the Democrats 88 percent to 11 percent for Mr. Bush. Jewish people voted 74 percent for Kerry and 24 percent for Bush. Among Hispanic voters, 56 percent voted for Kerry and 43 percent for Bush. Catholics voted for Bush by a margin of 52 percent to 47 percent. But I do not see anyone blaming all Catholics for Bush’s election or for being complacent or of voting as certain Bishops decreed. And then there are white people in general: 41 percent for Mr. Kerry and 58 percent for Mr. Bush. On the bright side, 61 percent of union members voted for Kerry and 38 percent for Bush. Yet 54 percent of non-union members voted for Bush and 45 percent for Kerry. And I do not see anyone blaming the “Boss” for how white people voted. He did a remarkable job just as Russell Simmons, Puff Daddy and Outkast did.
No, I am positive that the youth vote and the Black vote were the votes of hope in this election cycle. They voted for their interest and for the interest of the nation, I believe. To paraphrase the words of two 19th century German philosophers. “Young people unite, you have nothing to lose but your future, you have the world to gain.”
Maurice Jackson is an assistant professor of History
No more excuses
by Mark Lance
Through all the betrayals of the Clinton years, many were quiet lest Republicans take charge. Since then, some hoped for opposition from Congress or redemption in 2004. But Democrats rolled over on the war, the Patriot Act, military budgets and tax cuts, and emerged weaker than ever. They left us with a regime owned by multinational corporations, with tax cuts for the rich, deficits, unemployment, militarism and environmental crisis, with a climate of chauvinistic patriotism, populist scapegoating of minorities and crippled civil liberties. They left us at the mercy of a regime which accounts for half the world? military expenditures and arms trade, bases troops around the globe, shows contempt for international law, occupies Iraq and hints at more invasions on the way.
Corporatism, militarism and nationalistic populism? Is that Christian? Conservative? Or does it call to mind something darker? And if it does, do we banish the thought since, of course things are not the same, or do we force ourselves to ask instead if things are different enough? Is Patriot II different enough from the Law of Reconstruction? Are wars for a New Middle East different enough from European wars for Lebensraum? Will the rhetoric of ?amily values?and ?omeland security?lead us in a different enough direction from that of ?od and fatherland? Most importantly, will real Americans be different enough from Good Germans?
Even in this time of jingoistic patriotism, I believe in the American people, a people who form a tradition of resistance, a tradition of grassroots organizing. Our ancestors are William Penn, Elihu Burrit, David Thoreau, John Brown, Crazy Horse, Alice Paul, Emma Goldman, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Megar Evers, Albert and Lucy Parsons and Joe Hill. No election or benevolent leader ever gave us an eight-hour workday, suffrage or civil rights. Americans fought, labored and organized for these, just as they fought at Haymarket, Wounded Knee, Homestead, Kent State and Stonewall. Ordinary Americans, working together built co-ops, collectives, alternative schools, gay and feminist culture, jazz, punk, alt country and Indy media.
Let? be clear. The U.S. is not yet fascist. We still have (diminished) civil liberties, (constrained and corrupted) courts, (militaristic) civilian governments and most importantly oppositional culture and a tradition of democratic resistance.
Nearly half the country voted against Bush. Millions protested the rape of Iraq. Progressive organizations are enjoying record membership increases. But we cannot give in to hopelessness. History has dealt harshly with others who were complacent, who minimized the danger, or gave in to fear and hopelessness. This is not Germany in 1940, or even 1935. But 1932? 1930? That, my friends, is up to us.
Growing up means doing it ourselves, facing the worst that can happen if we don? and embracing those all over the world ready to work with us. It means joining Georgetown Solidarity Committee, GU PeaceAction, Greenpeace, ACLU or something richer and better than all these. It means reclaiming our world, which was always our task.
It? just easier to see at the moment.
Mark Lance is a professor of Philosophy