Administrative Interlude

But you can’t do it in a vacuum. And although academics would be reluctant to admit it, the conditions that make what they do possible are established and maintained by administrators. When I was a dean, the question I was most often asked by faculty members was, “Why do administrators make so much more money than we do?” The answer I gave was simple: administrators work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it. At the end of my tenure as dean, I spoke to some administrators who had been on the job for a short enough time to be able still to remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they did now. One said that she had come to realize how narcissistic academics are: an academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and selfregarding eye. As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead; as an administrator, you’re trying “to make things happen for other people”; you’re “not advancing your own profile, but advancing the institution, and you’re more service oriented.” A second new administrator reported that he finds faculty members “unbelievably parochial, selfish, and selfindulgent.” They believe that their time is their own even when someone else is paying for it. They say things like “I don’t get paid for the summer.” They believe that they deserve everything and that if they are ever denied anything, it could only be because an evil administrator has committed a great injustice. Although they are employees of the university (and in public universities, of the state), they consider themselves independent contractors engaged fitfully in free-lance piecework. They have no idea of how comfortable a life they lead. Neither, said a third administrator recently up from the ranks, do they have any idea of how the university operates. They seem proud of their parochialism and boast of their inability to access the many systems that hold the enterprise together.

The Task of Higher Education

Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ball-park, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias, bad character, discrimination, intolerance, environmental pollution, rampant capitalism, American imperialism, and the hegemony of Wal-Mart; and of course the list could be much longer. Wesleyan University starts well by pledging to “cultivate a campus environment where students think critically, participate in constructive dialogue and engage in meaningful contemplation” (although I’m not sure what meaningful contemplation is); but then we read of the intention to “foster awareness, respect, and appreciation for a diversity of experiences, interests, beliefs and identities.” Awareness is okay; it’s important to know what’s out there. But why should students be taught to “respect” a diversity of interests, beliefs, and identities in advance of assessing them and taking their measure? The missing word here is “evaluate.” That’s what intellectual work is all about, the evaluation, not the celebration, of interests, beliefs, and identities; after all, interests can be base, beliefs can be wrong, and identities are often irrelevant to an inquiry. Yale College’s statement also starts well by promising to seek students “of all backgrounds” and “to educate them through mental discipline,” but then mental discipline turns out to be instrumental to something even more valuable, the development of students’ “moral, civic and creative capacities to the fullest.” I’m all for moral, civic, and creative capacities, but I’m not sure that there is much I or anyone else could do as a teacher to develop them. Moral capacities (or their absence) have no relationship whatsoever to the reading of novels, or the running of statistical programs, or the execution of laboratory procedures, all of which can produce certain skills, but not moral states.

Introduction

Not long ago, there was a time when I was responsible for a college with close to 30 departments and units, a budget of between 50 and 55 million dollars, 400 tenure-track faculty members, 700 staff, 10,000 undergraduate students, 2,000 graduate students, and 17 buildings. On any given day, I had to deal with disciplinary proceedings, tenure and promotion cases, faculty searches, chair searches, enrollment problems, fundraising, community outreach, alumni relations, public relations, curriculum reform, counteroffers, technology failures, space allocation, information systems, chair meetings, advisory committee meetings, deans council meetings, meetings with the provost, student complaints, faculty complaints, parent complaints, and taxpayer complaints. Office hours were 8:30 a.m. to whenever and often extended into the evenings and weekends. Vacations were few and far between. The pressure never relaxed. When I left the job after slightly more than five years, I felt that I had all the time (well, not quite all ) in the world at my disposal, and for a while, spent it by trying to improve everyone I met, whether or not those I ministered to welcomed my efforts. I took my opportunities wherever I found them. While I still lived in Chicago, but after I stepped down as dean, the building next door to mine was bought by a developer. For a long time, no development occurred, and the lawn and bushes were allowed to grow wild. The developer, however, had made the mistake of putting his telephone number on an overlarge sign, and as a reward he received a series of dyspeptic phone calls from me accusing him of being a bad neighbor, an irresponsible landlord, and an all-around no-goodnik. During the same period, I would go into a store or stand in a ticket line and was often greeted by someone who asked, “And how are you today, young man?” That is my least favorite salutation, and I quickly delivered a lecture and, I trust, a bit of improvement: “When you call someone who is obviously not young ‘young man,’ what you are doing is calling attention to his age and making him feel even older than he is; don’t do it again!” I delivered an even longer lecture to the blameless fastfood workers who routinely handed me a bagel along with a small container of cream cheese and a plastic knife that couldn’t cut butter.

A Conclusion and Two Voices from the Other Side

In conclusion, let me summarize my argument and the entailments it implies. The grounding proposition is that both the coherence and the value of a task depend on its being distinctive. Beginning with that proposition, I ask: What is the distinctive task college and university professors are trained and paid to perform? What can they legitimately (as opposed to presumptuously) claim to be able to do? My answer is that college and university professors can introduce students to bodies of material new to them and equip those same students with the appropriate (to the discipline) analytical and research skills. From this professional competence follow both obligations and prohibitions. The obligations are the usual pedagogical ones—setting up a course, preparing a syllabus, devising exams, assigning papers or experiments, giving feedback, holding office hours, etc. The prohibitions are that an instructor should do neither less nor more. Doing less would mean not showing up to class or showing up unprepared, not being alert to the newest approaches and models in the field, failing to give back papers or to comment on them in helpful ways, etc. Doing more would be to take on tasks that belong properly to other agents—to preachers, political leaders, therapists, and gurus. The lure of these other (some would say larger or more noble) tasks is that they enhance, or at least seem to enhance, the significance of what a teacher does. But in fact, I argue, agendas imported into the classroom from foreign venues do not enrich the pedagogical task, but overwhelm it and erode its constitutive distinctiveness. Once you start preaching or urging a political agenda or engaging your students in discussions designed to produce action in the world, you are surely doing something, but it is not academic, even if you give it that name.

Higher Education under Attack

So I return in the end to my one-note song: if academics did only the job they are trained and paid to do— introduce students to disciplinary materials and equip them with the necessary analytic skills—criticism of the kind Maloney mounts would have no object, and the various watch-dog groups headed by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and others would have to close shop. But even if this day were to arrive, the academy would not be home free because there would still be the problem I have alluded to but not fully addressed—the problem of money. Who is going to pay for the purified academic enterprise I celebrate in these pages? The unhappy fact is that the more my fellow academics obey the imperative always to academicize, the less they will have a claim to a skeptical public’s support. How do you sell to legislators, governors, trustees, donors, newspapers, etc., an academy that marches to its own drummer, an academy that asks of the subjects that petition for entry only that they be interesting, an academy unconcerned with the public yield of its activities, an academy that puts at the center of its operations the asking of questions for their own sake? How, that is, do you justify the enterprise? As I have already pointed out, you can’t, in part because the demand for justification never comes from the inside. The person who asks you to justify what you do is not saying, “tell me why you value the activity,” but “convince me that I should,” and if you respond in the spirit of that request, you will have exchanged your values for those of your inquisitor. It may seem paradoxical to say so, but any justification of the academy is always a denigration of it. The only honest thing to do when someone from the outside asks, “what use is this venture anyway?” is to answer “none whatsoever,” if by “use” is meant (as it always will be) of use to those with no investment in the obsessions internal to the profession.

Don’t Let Anyone Else Do Your Job

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who will step in to do your job if you default on it. The corporate world looks to the university for its workforce. Parents want the university to pick up the baton they may have dropped. Students demand that the university support the political cause of the moment. Conservatives believe that the university should refurbish and preserve the traditions of the past. Liberals and progressives would like to see those same traditions dismantled and replaced by what they take to be better ones. Alumni wonder why the athletics teams aren’t winning more. Politicians and trustees wonder why the professors aren’t teaching more. Whether it is state legislators who want a say in hiring and course content, or donors who want to tell colleges how to spend the funds they provide, or parents who are disturbed when Dick and Jane bring home books about cross-dressing and gender change, or corporations that want new departments opened and others closed, or activist faculty who urge the administration to declare a position on the war in Iraq, there is no end of interests intent on deflecting the university from its search for truth and setting it on another path. Each of these lobbies has its point, but it is not the university’s point, which is, as I have said over and over again, to produce and disseminate (through teaching and publication) academic knowledge and to train those who will take up that task in the future. But can the university defend the autonomy it claims (or should claim) from public pressures? Is that claim even coherent? Mark Taylor would say no. In a key sentence in the final chapter of his book The Moment of Complexity (2001), Taylor declares that “the university is not autonomous but is a thoroughly parasitic institution, which continually depends on the generosity of the host so many academics claim to reject.” He continues: “The critical activities of the humanities, arts, and sciences are only possible if they are supported by the very economic interests their criticism so often calls into question.”

Don’t Try to Do Someone Else’s Job

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their students’ character or turn them into exemplary citizens. I can’t speak for every academic, but I am not trained to do these things, although I am aware of people who are: preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, inspirational speakers. Teachers, as I have said repeatedly, teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. Of course a teacher might produce some of these effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. The question that administrators often ask, “What practices provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?” is not a bad question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college or university course. No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults, but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching. Once we cross the line that separates academic work from these other kinds, we are guilty both of practicing without a license and of defaulting on our professional responsibilities. But isn’t it our responsibility both as teachers and as citizens to instill democratic values in our students? Derek Bok thinks so and invokes studies that claim to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between a college education and an active participation in the country’s political life: “researchers have shown that college graduates are much more active civically and politically than those who have not attended college” (Our Underachieving Colleges). But this statistic proves nothing except what everyone knows: college graduates have more access to influential circles than do those without a college education.

Do Your Job

So back to the basic question. What exactly is the job of someone who teaches in a college or a university? My answer is simple and follows from legal theorist Ernest Weinrib’s account of what is required if an activity is to have its own proper shape. It must present itself “as a this and not a that.” As I have already said, the job of someone who teaches in a college or a university is to (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know much about before; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research should they choose to do so. Job performance should be assessed on the basis of academic virtue, not virtue in general. Teachers should show up for their classes, prepare lesson plans, teach what has been advertised, be current in the literature of the field, promptly correct assignments and papers, hold regular office hours, and give academic (not political or moral) advice. Researchers should not falsify their credentials, or make things up, or fudge the evidence, or ignore data that tells against their preferred conclusions. Those who publish should acknowledge predecessors and contributors, provide citations to their sources, and strive always to give an accurate account of the materials they present. That’s it, there’s nothing else, and nothing more. But this is no small list of professional obligations, and faculty members who are faithful to its imperatives will have little time to look around for causes and agendas to champion. A faculty committee report submitted long ago to the president of the University of Chicago declares that the university exists “only for the limited . . . purposes of teaching and research” and reasons that “since the university is a community only for those limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness” ( Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, November 11, 1967).