The shift within our universities, as I've explained in
preceding posts, is from neutrality to advocacy, or, from a teleological view,
from knowledge to goodness. The
enablers, as I will explain here, are Germans, scholars who were so expert and
thorough that they captured the imagination of every young American scholar who
in the nineteenth century came to them — and then, models of expertise and
thoroughness, went home and captured the imagination of everybody building or
expanding an American university.
In universities formed on that model the standard is
competence within a field, with fields represented by departments — which, with
the primacy of competence, might as well have been called compartments. Examining, hiring, tenuring, promoting,
and judging publications were pretty well walled off from the rest of the
university. If they weren't, there
was constant pressure on administrators to treat them as if they were.
That compartmentalization, for all that it furthered the advancement
of knowledge and the reputation of the university, hindered the solution of a
recurring problem: bad department behavior — departments "getting away
with things," as members of other departments might put it.
The correction of bad behavior depended, in the end,
on the ability of the dean to break in and give orders. Cease and desist. That was never going to be easy, but
when a department had a couple of Nobel winners, and had given the university a
worldwide reputation, and enabled the university president to enjoy that
reputation when he (male in those days) sat with other presidents, and
solicited gifts from alumni, it was extremely hard. So universities generally went along with the Germanic tide.
Now we have departments sliding into advocacy of
good causes — racial justice, gender equality, ethnic pride. That's good behavior. Good
behavior out in the world, that is.
In a university it is bad, and we can't let any department get away with
it.
So how do we deal with a famously good department? With difficulty. Its goodness is, in our Germanic
university, sheltered behind the walls of expertise. Who are you, inexpert dean, to tell us to change the way we
teach?
Suppose the dean calls on a faculty council, maybe the faculty senate, for
backup. Have a debate, get this
out in the open, lay the weight of its conclusion on the offending department.
I wish such a dean luck. In the Germanic university the members of any university council will be too eager to get back to their
research, the way you get ahead in a place like this, to give such a debate the
time and energy it takes. Besides,
back the dean in this case and pretty soon he'll be on yours. If he (or she) wants to spend time stiffing
departments let him go after the ones hogging the budget and the grants.
If you remember a lingering pre-Germanic university the
ease of correcting sheltered error there will occur to you. It went with the ease of college-wide or
university-wide debate. Before my
university became a research university it regularly held general-interest
debates, with broad attendance and lively post mortems. In the early days faculty preparation
for them was so important that the library provided special rooms for it, the
Philomathean and the Athenian. It
was the way you got ahead in a place like that. It was also the way you, forced to defend your position, got
tested and exposed.
Well, that would be one way to deal with our walled
domains, going back to the grand debates of Greece and Rome that would force
their lords to come out and defend themselves. "Question: Is fiat lux the only acceptable fiat in a college of liberal arts? Moderated by the chair of the philosophy department. Open to audience participation." A wonderful way, this Roman way, to solve our problem. But we can't take it. We're stuck in old,
expert Germany and all we can do is find a way around, or through, the walls it
built for us.
And there's a limit to the time we have. If goodness advances very far into the
upper administration knowledge will never have the defender it needs most, a clever
and strong dean willing to fight for it. Cleverness as seen maybe in a proposal to just have little
debates, with a dean's agent sitting on promotion and tenure committees, on
publication review panels, inside oral examinations, asking the old Socratic questions. Strength as seen in backup by the
provost and president.
The agents of the dean will have to be clever and
strong too. Clever enough to see
that goodness never shows itself in universities in outright declaration but in
tendencies, selection of subjects of study, questions asked, shadings of
vocabulary. Members of
goodness-oriented departments can't be counted on to detect these things, or if
they do, sound an alarm.
Further, the agents will have to be clever enough to
see through internal debate, and reject it, however lively it is, as a check on
parochial standards. There's nothing
to prevent whole departments, even whole disciplines, from going wrong (that
is, going good). The frame for
their debates will be wrong.
That's worth picturing, though those in closer touch
will have to tell me how accurate the picture is. I see in it a test of deans' agents beyond anything you'll find in the movies. The agents come in politely. They see debate, all the way up
to the highest journals. They see
peer review. They see a
flourishing program, with graduates finding jobs, and newcomers demanding more
courses, promising better jobs.
And right away they face a curtain of language. "These unfamiliar words are needed
in our special study. It's a technical
vocabulary," says their guide.
To a casual or unclever agent the department will be off the hook. Nobody in a Germanic university can
object to a technical vocabulary.
It's the mark of special competence.
But to the conscientious agent from Greece it will
be a challenge. "Maybe so,
but let's look into it." She
(we can make the agent female now) digs into the vocabulary in the way of
Socrates — or Ockham or a linguistic philosopher or an Oxford tutor. She may return to the dean saying,
"Yes, it's technical."
But she may return saying, "No, it's not technical; it's a
tendentious jargon that conceals failure to examine assumptions and first
principles."
I
obviously see a high probability of the latter but those closer may not. Though the reader will have to trust his
or her own eyesight here, everybody should see that there's nothing in the
Germanic university to keep departments from going this far. If they do their internal debate, no matter how high it goes, loses weight. As does peer review.
Reviewers question only inside their own frame, which itself has gone
untested. The great
frame-questioner is Socrates, who questions anything, recognizes no walls, and
requires answers in plain language.
No jargon-answers, as from sophists, will do. Peer reviewers here are
not peers of Socrates.
If the Socratic model is too distant for us we Americans
may look to Emerson. His ideal, Man Thinking, is exactly the
Socratic inquirer. The whole
world of thought is his province.
Try to wall him off and you're just a "thinker." No matter how great a German you are,
how expert and thorough, you, you mere thinker, must bow to Man Thinking, and
submit to his questions.
So there she is, the dean's agent, clever and brave,
appearing in your committees, listening in on your oral examinations, going
through your publications, sniffing out goodness. A perfect example of a thought policeman. But only to the inattentive. She's a freedom-of-thought
policeman. If you're not curbing
thought, requiring that it be correct in your own good way, you have nothing to
fear. Open your publications to general
criticism, take on destructive critics, place yourselves in the larger arena,
prepare your graduate students to fight there, and you have nothing to fear.
But
what, then, will happen to goodness?
Nothing, if it is known.
And only open test and trial will let us know it, the goodness that can defend itself. "I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees
her adversary," said Milton, famously. "That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what
is contrary."
Translate that classic of the academic enterprise
— and of Western parliaments, and courts, and science — into advice for today's
lovers of the good and you get, I think, something like this: "Knowledge
comes first. Here it's knowledge
of the good. First you make sure you know the good. If you believe that it can't defend itself you get out in the world and defend it, standing on the
most reliable ground you can find, that determined by disinterested inquiry in
universities."
You can see what will spoil this advice: professors, having assumed success in gaining knowledge of the good, pursuing it in universities. That reduces their reliability and
weakens the fight for good in the world.
