The Scandal of Closed Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

On January 21, Timothy Gowers of Cambridge announced he would no longer publish papers in Elsevier’s journals or serve as a referee or editor for them. This boycott has now been joined by thousands of other researchers. (I don’t referee any more for Elsevier, though I have in the past, and I certainly won’t be sending any papers there.) Thanks to the furore created by three Fields Medal winners–Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, Wendelin Werner–participating in the boycott, many now know what academics have known for a very long time: academic publishing is a scandal. Indeed, it is more than a scandal; it is a racket which is nothing short of criminal. Before we go any further, here is a number to chew on: in 2010, ‘Elsevier reported a 36 percent profit on revenues of $3.2 billion.’

How does this system work? Consider this. Elsevier, or for that matter, any journal publishing house, publishes ‘content.’ Academic content, the results of research conducted by university academics the world over; much of this research is funded by taxpayer money. This research is written up in papers, and sent to journal editorial boards for review. These boards are staffed by unpaid academics, who, after preliminary review, send out papers to be reviewed by other unpaid academics. (When I say ‘unpaid,’ I mean they are not compensated by the journals for their work.) The paper, if accepted by the referee and the editor, is then sent back to the authors who typesets it, prepares a camera-ready copy, and sends it back for publishing. The publishing house, after making authors sign forms handing over copyright to them, then prints the article in the latest issue of the relevant journal, and sells subscriptions to that journal for thousands of dollars per year to libraries at the same universities where their editorial board and reviewing staff work.

So, this material is not open-access any more; it is closed behind a ‘pay-wall.’ If you don’t have a paid subscription, you don’t get to view the published research. If your library, at say, a public university like the City University of New York, is experiencing budget problems, and library funding suffers cutbacks, well, tough tits. You don’t get to view the published research. If you, as a professor, or graduate student, decided to freely distribute the papers, you may be embroiled in copyright infringement disputes. If you are a taxpayer that funded this research, but cannot afford the journal subscription, well, tough tits again. Go rustle up the bucks. Knowledge should be open and available to all, you say? Talk to my accountant; because the face, it ain’t listening.

This is a gigantic rip-off, a racket, a robbery. It is exploitation–primarily of the academic promotion and tenure process and taxpayer money–on a scale that beggars belief. The stench from this should make every thinking person hold his or her nose. And act to make sure this cannot persist.

Right now, the US House and Senate are considering the Federal Research Public Access Act; this will bring about ‘pervasive open access,’ especially to articles reporting on research paid for by taxpayers.  For your own sake and for the sake of researchers, students, teachers, doctors, and the like everywhere, please support it.  A ‘We the People’ petition is up and available for signing at whitehouse.gov. Please sign, spread the word, and end this racket.

A Friendly Amendent to Nina Strohminger’s McGinn Review

Nina Strohminger–a post-doctoral fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics–recently wrote a scathing review of Colin McGinn‘s book The Meaning of Disgust. Thanks to Strohminger’s flamboyant cuffing of McGinn around the ears, her review earned her some well-deserved ‘net fame. I have not read the book so I cannot comment on it but the review does make for quite an entertaining read. I say that as someone who has mixed feelings about such ‘takedowns’ in the academic context; I have no such compunctions when it comes to bad movies (see below). Still, McGinn has dished out plenty in the past, so he should be used to this sort of jousting. (An interesting subtext: Strohminger is a newly minted Ph.D from the University of Michigan’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program; McGinn is a senior professor in a related field. Let’s hope McGinn has the grace to retaliate only in print.)

Strohminger’s review begins:

In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. Colin McGinn’s book belongs to the latter category.

From there it moves on to:

McGinn’s view of disgust is insistently mysterian: not merely ignorant or unenlightening but obfuscatory. Baroque, eye-catching explanations are given precedence over parsimony, evidence, or even common sense….Another property of the book, of which potential readers should be aware, is its unintentional hilarity. The humor derives less from the unblushing content than from the unblushing purpleness of his prose.

And so on. You get the picture. There is however, a missed opportunity in the review, and it occurs when Strominger catches McGinn being sloppy and sexist:

McGinn suggests that inorganic items—a list which includes cars, houses, and, apparently, fine silks—lack the ambivalence of human companions, so we can love them wholeheartedly, unencumbered by the physical disgust that attends our love for children and romantic partners. Diamonds, being forever, do not remind us of death. He muses: “Is this why women tend to love jewelry so—because of a relatively high level of bodily self-disgust? Just asking.” Is Colin McGinn a sexist, penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking!

Strohminger’s retort to the line she quotes is good, but I think it could have been better. By placing an exclamation mark at the end of the ‘Just asking’ Strohminger defuses her counter-volley’s rhetorical impact significantly. With that punctuation, Strohminger’s retort looks a little hurried and nervous, one quickly made, and then withdrawn. McGinn’s ‘Just asking’ ends with a period; its offensiveness is a function of the baldness of its statement. It is the period that makes clear his ‘just’ asking is insincere.

Consider now:

Is Colin McGinn a sexist, penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking.

This, I think, is the right mirror to McGinn’s line. I do not know if reviews ever appear in revised editions; but if they ever do, then Strohminger should take the opportunity to ditch the exclamation mark, replace it with a period, and email McGinn and myself a copy. (Come to think of it, I don’t think Strohminger’s review has been published yet; time yet to revise!)

Note: Thanks to reading around the McGinn review, I stumbled on Anthony Lane’s hilarious review of George Lucas’ disastrous Star Wars episode 3. The review is genuinely funny and Lucas deserves every single word in there.

The Question Asked, Inquiry Begins

Classes for the 2012 spring semester ended last week. And with that, I completed ten years of teaching at Brooklyn College. (I’m well aware that I have yet to complete grading for this semester but for now, I’m trying to put that thought out of my mind.) When I first started, in the 2002 fall semester, I taught in both the computer science and philosophy departments. Since January 2010, it has been all philosophy, all the time. In these ten years, I think I’ve learned a great deal from my students. (I’ll let them tell me if they think I have contributed in any way to their learning.)

I’ve learned, most importantly,  that almost any question asked by a student is gold: a chance to elaborate, embroider, embellish, and expand a philosophical theme. The question is not an interruption, one to be dispensed with efficiently and quickly, before I get back to the business of teaching; answering it is the main act. The question is a clear and visible sign that thought has been provoked; it deserves attention, care, and thoughtful nurturing. In answering a question, further avenues for exploration open up; new thoughts are prompted, which might in turn provoke more questions, more interaction. (In a teaching observation conducted this past semester, I advised one of our adjunct instructors, who had shown some signs of haste in his answers to student questions, that he needn’t worry that the class was being ‘held up.’ Rather, he’d do better to exploit the opportunity to slow down, and examine the issue at hand in greater detail. The student had not thrown a spanner in the works; the student had, instead, kickstarted the engine.)

So nothing quite improves my classroom experience like the answering of a question: I find my knowledge of the material tested; I discover that I can be creative in the construction of examples that will aid my explanation. This latter aspect is especially valuable. Teaching can often be physically, emotionally and intellectually draining work; the spur to creativity that a question provides is a bracing tonic. I find nothing quite as exhilarating in teaching as finding out that in answering a student’s question, I myself have acquired a deeper understanding of the material. (A stellar example of this came during a Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence class some eight years ago; as I answered a student’s question about how a proposition was to be expressed in predicate logic, I suddenly realized that I understood WVO Quine‘s classic paper ‘On What There Is‘ just a little better. My sense of pleasure in this enhanced comprehension was so pronounced that I almost broke off mid-sentence to try to digest it.)  In particular, questions that are directed at passages in the assigned reading invariably enrich my encounter with a text previously considered familiar; I was stunned by the depths I discovered in David Hume‘s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion every time I was asked for clarification by the students in my Spring 2010 Philosophy of Religion class.

None of the observations above should be surprising; after all, all inquiry is the attempt to answer questions.

Freud, Goethe and Burke on Happiness, Pleasure, and Satiation

Defining ‘happiness’ is hard; how are we to know what to do to be happy, if we don’t have a good handle on what happiness is? And thus, the persistent efforts through the ages, of philosophical minds–and more recently, grimly determined social scientists and psychologists alike–to provide some delineation of the concept. (Even David Brooks thinks he has something to contribute to this discussion and thus, often deigns to provide–from his Op-Ed perch–disquisitions on moral psychology.)

One recurring suspicion has been that happiness might not be all it’s cracked up to be; that happiness may only be transient, not a sustainable state, that to seek recurrence of a pleasurable state might be to commit oneself to a foolishly deluded pursuit of rapidly diminishing value, that satiation is likely to result all too soon on the attainment of a pleasurable state, leaving one again, discontent and unhappy. (The phenomenon, noted by many over the years, of how seeking the re-creation of a pleasurable event like a particularly successful vacation or family reunion, never, ever works, is related to this suspicion as are the drug addict’s vain attempts to re-experience the first really great high.)

At the heart of this suspicion is the notion that novelty and contrast play too great a role in our understanding of happiness and pleasure. This has often been articulated, and quite well too.

For instance, in that masterpiece of modern pessimism, Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud notes in Chapter II,

What is called happiness in its narrowest sense comes from the satisfaction——most often instantaneous——of pent-up needs  which have reached great intensity, and by its very nature can only be a transitory experience. When any condition desired by the pleasure-principle is protracted [link added], it results in a feeling only of mild comfort; we are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts, much less intensely states in themselves. [footnote 8]

Footnote 8 reads:

Goethe even warns us that ““nothing is so hard to bear as a train of happy days. ““ [Freud then adds: ‘This may be an exaggeration all the same.’]

And of course, Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in ‘The Difference Between Pain and Pleasure’ famously noted,

[I]t is very evident that pleasure, when it has run its career, sets us down very nearly where it found us. Pleasure of every kind quickly satisfies; and when it is over, we relapse into indifference

So there is resonance, when it comes to talking about happiness and pleasure, between ambitious psychoanalytic speculation which references the insight of the poet–always great diagnosers of the human condition–and philosophical attempts to analyze aesthetic sensibility. (These suggestions show too, that nothing is quite as much a downer as talking about happiness.)

More seriously, what lends these commentaries their particular gravity is that securing novelty and contrast is hard work, requiring constant reinvention, at the end of which awaits, not a serenely quiescent state, but further disappointment. Thus too, the particularly irony of the pursuit of happiness: it marks the beginning of a journey, which is always a return to the state which prompted its commencement.

Against Commencement Cermonies

I have never sat through a commencement address; I have never managed to finish watching a recommended one on YouTube; and I certainly have not ever read one to the end. (The other day, in a bookstore, I noticed a little book containing an apparently famous one delivered by David Foster Wallace; I couldn’t finish that either, and that’s saying something because I’ve been given to understand that it bucks a trend I note below.) I’m not sure from whence stems my antipathy to this form of oratory. Perhaps because I find the very idea incredibly pompous and suffused with a ludicrous self-importance: hundreds of young men and women sitting, patiently, listening to some ‘inspirational speaker’, providing advice, reminding them of the importance of their accomplishment, and providing a road-map ‘for what lies ahead.’ Some of the content of the commencement speeches is witty–but too much seems like second-rate witticisms–and perhaps some of it is sage advice, but too often it is redolent with bromides and clichés. I’ve come now to suspect, in perhaps excessively cantankerous fashion, that the commencement ceremony is a gigantic rip-off, a modern-day opportunity to make money for cap-n-gown manufacturers and photographers. And for extremely self-satisfied college administrators to preen and strut.

My  personal history of graduation ceremony attendance is quite dismal. I did not attend my undergraduate graduation ceremony because I had already left for the US; I attended my master’s because my mother was keen to see photos (I described this as providing proof that I had attended classes while away from home); lastly, I did not attend my doctoral commencement because I was away, working on my post-doctoral fellowship in Australia. At Brooklyn College, when called upon to do so twice in my capacity as a professor, I have been out-of-town on one occasion, and on the second, attended for as long as I could before leaving. In my own case, my absences were convenient but I would not have attended anyway; I knew I would find the ceremonies tedious in the extreme. (When I finished my Ph.D, I knew I had no intention of attending my commencement; the graduation ceremony would have felt like an interruption; the course of study completed, work lay ahead; to finish the doctoral degree was to complete the proverbial jump from the frying pan to the fire; I did not need to attend my commencement for my PhD to experience closure, that had already been achieved in far more satisfying fashion by my doctoral defense, where my thesis advisors had tested me in the presence of my peers.)

At the heart of this antipathy, I suspect, lies a dislike for such a curiously non-egalitarian setting, one redolent of political rallies and propaganda-and-ideology-dispensation.The students sit in the audience, they are made to file in, in order, and to be seated; administrators and other sundry big-guns take the stage; the only student to speak is the valedictorian (just a reminder folks, that grades are really the most important thing!), and then, the commencement speaker, whose ‘success’ in life more often than not, meets well-accepted societal norms. (Will we have one chosen from Occupy Wall Street in this graduation season?) The standard commencement ceremony reeks of temples and stadiums, of priests and kings and their subjects. I’d rather celebrate educational accomplishment some other way.

Note: I’m well aware that many students find these ceremonies extremely important for a variety of reasons; on which, more anon.

David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas’ Provenance: Good Writers are Good Magpies

David Mitchell‘s bestselling 2004 novel Cloud Atlas sold millions of copies, and garnered ample critical praise (I have mixed feelings about it). What I found most interesting about the novel was Mitchell’s recounting of its genesis:

The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel…For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas….Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby….Frobisher’s language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood….Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President’s Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me….The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes fromOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a young man’s fear of senescence….Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster…are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan…. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by…those interviews you get in Hello! magazine

Note that Mitchell does not say the ideas, characters and language for Cloud Atlas sprang fully formed from his mind, and in a sudden burst of primal creativity–that owed no debts to any cultural formations around him–transformed themselves into the written word on a blank page. He does not make himself out to be a writer that is a creative singularity or a fount of originality; he is, in short, not suggesting he is that creature so beloved of ‘intellectual property’ defenders the world over. Rather Mitchell is simply acknowledging what every honest writer knows is the case: to write is to borrow; the more you read works written by others, the more you draw upon them in your writing to enrich it; no one is truly ‘original’ or ‘creative’ in the primitive, fantastical, magical sense imagined by deluded artists and IP lawyers. Mitchell has lifted plots, or characters, or language with varying degrees of directness; his writing bears the impress of his reading, his cultural immersion. His skill as an author, acknowledged by many of his readers, and some of his critics, lies in his expert transformation of that material into something simultaneously distinctive and revelatory of its provenance.

What is remarkable about the excerpt above is that Mitchell is able to articulate some of the influences on his writing quite clearly; most artists cannot do so quite distinctly and thus are able to convince themselves of their ‘originality.’ It is a fair bet Mitchell would admit there are numerous other literary and cultural inferences–not so clearly noted–that have also found their way into his writing.

A good writer is a good magpie, building his nest from materials brought home from afar.

Crossfit and Strong Women

A singularly positive aspect about being in a Crossfit space–like the one at Crossfit South Brooklyn, which, in point of fact, is the only one I’ve ever spent any time in–is the many opportunities that arise to see strong women in action. Women can deadlift, squat, clean and jerk, run fast, do muscle-ups, pull-ups–you name it, they can do it. Many women lifters at my gym are among the most technically proficient in the major lifts; to watch them execute these lifts properly is a genuinely aesthetic and awe-inspiring experience. (I wonder if there is something interesting to be said here about the seemingly greater ability of women to internalize coaching cues about technical lifts. Do men, perhaps, resist coaching cues more, convinced that they can figure it out by themselves?)

So Crossfit, whatever its merits as a fitness training program–and debates about that have provoked some wonderfully informative discussions–has at least ensured the creation of a space where stereotypes about women being weak go to die. Anyone that spends sufficient time at Crossfit South Brooklyn will see women indulge in feats of athletic ability that are wonderfully disruptive to any reductive,  long-held opinions about the athletic incompetence of women. But stereotypes of ‘women can’t lift’ are not just held by men, they are very frequently entertained by women themselves. So witnessing ‘Crossfit women’ may provide  a salutary lesson to women too that dominant, culturally transmitted and reinforced, conceptions of what you might be capable of are very often mistaken.

Here on the gym floor, the lifting platform, under the pull-up bar, too, are spaces thus, where men can learn valuable lessons in humility and in assessing how confident they may be about their  masculinity. After all, if women around you are faster, stronger, more limber than you, then what kind of man are you? Are you–to deploy a particularly ugly word sometimes thrown around by men in gyms–just a ‘pussy’? An educational moment for a male Crossfitter presents itself when he looks at the specifications–or prescription–for the assigned workout of the day, and realizes he can ‘only’ do a weight that is just above or sometimes even below the prescribed weight for women. I have had many moments like these, and it was a little galling, so well had I internalized the spoon-fed mantra of reassurance, “At least I’m stronger than any girl out there!” But often, that simply does not happen. There are women, constantly, around me, that, shall we say, kick my ass. And to have to deal with that is a wonderfully educative experience.

But there is an opportunity here to be seized, if one insists on making comparisons. As my friend Malcolm said to me as I agonized over what weight to choose for a workout, secretly not wanting to dip below the ‘ladies prescribed weight’: “Remember, if you can do what a strong woman does, you’re pretty damn fit!”

So there you have it, guys, this is what I really want to be: a strong woman.

A Bad Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage

I would have scarcely believed it possible, but a few short hours after teaching the naturalistic fallacy in my Philosophy of Biology class, I was exposed to an argument–from a professional philosopher–that, roughly, same-sex marriage is problematic because a) marriage is all about procreation and the raising of children and because b) evolution tell us that reproductive success is important, therefore: Gay marriage should be frowned upon. This resistance then, has nothing to do with religion, God, or the divine sanctification. Rather, it is the scientific thing to do: resist gay marriage because it is against evolutionary demands made on us as a species. This means that active disapproval of homosexuality–societal and legal discrimination for instance–is an expression of a biological instinct and should not be condemned as a moral failing.

The outlines of this argument should be familiar to most folks. It has been made time and again and despite having been spectacularly debunked, it rises again and again, like a zombie, or your favorite refusing-to-die cinematic ghoul.

What this argument attempts–and fails–to do is derive a proposition with normative import from a set of propositions that are purely descriptive. This–as David Hume pointed out a long time ago in his A Treatise of Human Nature—is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy, an attempt to bridge the is-ought gap:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

This fallacy manifests itself in the current situation as follows. There are biological facts about us: We reproduce, we pass on our genes, various reproductive strategies are adopted, some work better than the others (in securing more offspring to whom we can pass on our genes). This much can be ascertained by observation and measurement. But what should  we do on noting these observations? The proponent of the argument noted above, wants to derive the following: Those reproductive strategies that work ‘better’ are ‘good’, and therefore should be encouraged, should be praised. The rest should be condemned. (Marriage, it will be noted, has been admitted as a successful reproductive strategy; this is a matter of empirical assessment and could well turn out to be false.)

But whence ‘better’, whence ‘good’? Why is ‘reproductive success’ a moral good to be sought? What is the source of that valuation and why is it allowed to override other values in the derivation above? Might we be allowed to admit other values in arriving at an alternative conclusion? Like, for instance, a more tolerant society is a ‘better’ society than one that isn’t? But then, we would be opening up a debate–conducted within some broad ethical and moral frameworks–on valuation, which is precisely what our protagonist didn’t want. He merely wanted the straightforward elevation of reproductive success to the preeminent moral value without further debate.

The tireless proponents of the so-called evolutionary arguments against same-sex marriage forget that efforts to read normative judgments off the historical workings out of the evolutionary process have as much difficulty in bridging the is-ought gap as any other species of argument. Calling upon biology here is not the scientifically sophisticated thing to do; it is merely to reveal one’s ignorance of the limitations of evolutionary explanation.

Vale Jonathan E. Adler (1949-2012)

On Saturday, along with many others, I attended a simple–yet intensely emotionally moving–memorial service for Jonathan Adler, formerly Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Jon and I had been colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center; before that Jon had served on two of my graduate committees: first, for my oral exam and then, for my dissertation defense.

During the summer and fall of 1997, I had struggled to schedule my oral exam and to constitute its committee; Jon helped on both counts and ensured my reading list was both comprehensive and reasonably sized. I soon learned that Jon–while genial in his personal interactions–could be a formidable examiner; he would not tolerate any sloppiness or philosophical clumsiness in responses to his questions. When the oral exam began, he asked the first question–on Dorothy Edgington’s “Conditionals’; I thought I had hit it out of the park; only when Jon asked his follow-up did I realize I hadn’t. (Earning a passing grade with distinction on the orals meant a great deal with Jon on the examining committee!)

Later, while serving on my dissertation committee, Jon ensured that my thesis, which was ostensibly a work in mathematical logic, paid its dues to the normative and prescriptive epistemology that lay at its core. He read the entire work carefully, and despite disagreeing with me at many points–‘I’m not sure what you are calling beliefs are in fact, beliefs to begin with’–offered many useful critical comments that helped me sharpen its arguments.

Jon did philosophy the right way. He read a lot, wrote a lot, thought a great deal about what he read and wrote about, talked with his students and colleagues, and remained unfailingly courteous throughout. He attended many philosophy colloquia, and his mannerisms in asking his invariably-acute questions became familiar: he would remove his glasses, before carefully phrasing his query. He was never rude or abrasive, thankfully disdaining the philosophy-as-contact-sport model so beloved of too many in its academic community. When I worked on a knowledge attribution analysis for my work on the legal theory of autonomous artificial agents, I made sure I ran it by him, trusting that if there were fatal errors in its framing, Jon would be sure to point them out to me. Knowing that Jon was sympathetic to the intuitions expressed in the analysis was critical to my confidence that it would work as intended.

The memorial service on Saturday concluded with a beautiful slideshow that showed us a set of wonderful photographs from Jon’s life, accompanied by Van Morrison’s Philosopher’s Stone. As I watched the photos flash by, set to Morrison’s distinctive voice, encapsulating in their frames Jon’s powerful and vivid personality, I realized again what we lose in a friend’s passing: a very particular world come to an end, taking with it all its experiences. Jon inhabited the world he lived in in his own unique way, bringing a little bit of himself into each life he came into contact with, enriching its world by his wisdom and humanity.

Letter to Brooklyn College President Karen Gould: Get Security off Students’ Backs!

The Executive Committee of the Brooklyn College Chapter of the Professional Staff Congress – CUNY (PSC-CUNY) has written to the President of Brooklyn College, Karen Gould, regarding the assaults on, and arrests of, CUNY students by CUNY Security at Brooklyn College on May 2nd. Please take the time to read the letter–reproduced below–in its entirety and help spread the word.

(For background, including links to videos, President Gould’s response, student letters, petition links please consult the Reclaim Brooklyn blog. As I’ve noted before on this blog, this kind of response by campus security is a classic piece of intimidation that always, without fail, succeeds in creating a hostile, combative, threatening atmosphere, and almost invariably results in students getting hurt. And as noted here before as well, the police continue to harass and abuse those that are ‘on their side.)