Towards the Virtuous University: The Moral Bases of Academic Practice (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Towards the Virtuous University Key Issues in Higher Education Series Series Editors: Gill Nicholls and Ron Barnett B...

Author: Jon Nixon

11 downloads 644 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Towards the Virtuous University

Key Issues in Higher Education Series Series Editors: Gill Nicholls and Ron Barnett Books published in this series include:

Citizenship and Higher Education The role of universities in communities and society Edited by James Arthur with Karen Bohlin The Challenge to Scholarship Rethinking learning, teaching and research Gill Nicholls Understanding Teaching Excellence in Higher Education Towards a critical approach Alan Skelton

The Academic Citizen The virtue of service in university life Bruce Macfarlane Changing Identities in Higher Education: Voicing Perspectives Robert Barnett and Roberto Di Napoli Towards the Virtuous University: The Moral Bases of Academic Practice Jon Nixon

Towards the Virtuous University The Moral Bases of Academic Practice

Jon Nixon

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nixon, Jon. Towards the virtuous university : the moral bases of academic practice / Jon Nixon. p. cm. — (Key issues in higher education series) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Education, Higher—Social aspects. 2. Education, Higher—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Education—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. LC189.N56 2008 370’.014—dc22 2007045924 ISBN 0-203-41597-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-33533-7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-41597-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-33533-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-41597-9 (ebk)

For Hannah, Benjamin and Isaac

CONTENTS

List of Figures

ix

Preface and Acknowledgements

xi

Chapter 1

Universities and Civil Society

1

Chapter 2

Universities as Places of Learning

16

Chapter 3

Universities as Deliberative Spaces

32

Chapter 4

Truthfulness: Accuracy and Sincerity

47

Chapter 5

Respect: Attentiveness and Honesty

66

Chapter 6

Authenticity: Courage and Compassion

81

Chapter 7

Magnanimity: Autonomy and Care

95

Chapter 8

Relationships of Virtue

111

Chapter 9

Virtuous Institutions

129

References

146

Index

155

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

3.1: The changing culture of academic professionalism: residual and emergent elements 4.1: The virtuous ‘mean’: the gravitational pull of deficiency and excess 7.1: The relational aspects of academic practice 8.1: A typology of friendship: pleasure, utility, virtue

ix

45 54 110 116

PREFACE

This book sets out to define the moral bases of academic professionalism. It is addressed to all academic practitioners, and to those with a more general interest in higher education policy and practice, professional identity and development, and civic leadership. The first three chapters develop an argument regarding the changing culture of academic professionalism, and focus on three inter-related themes: academic professionalism as a changing profession, a learning profession, and a profession of values. Chapters 4–7 focus on the goods of academic practice as defining characteristics of academic professionalism: truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity. These four central chapters develop an argument regarding the virtuous dispositions associated with these particular goods. The final two chapters are concerned with the relational and institutional conditions necessary for the development of academic professionalism as elaborated in the previous chapters. There are sizeable literatures on the ethical aspects of the various activities that comprise academic practice: teaching, research and scholarship, and collegial relations. This book is, as far as I know, unique in treating these various activities as parts of a unified whole. Together, it is argued, these activities form a moral unity which is the defining feature of academic practice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Fred Inglis and Ernald Nixon for commenting on an earlier draft of this book. Thanks, also, to Sue Clegg, Paul Greenxi

xii • Preface

bank and Suzy Harris for discussing with me some of the ideas elaborated in the following pages. Regular, if all too infrequent, meetings with Jean Barr, Morwenna Griffiths and Melanie Walker also sustained me during the early period of draft ing and redrafting. Stewart Ranson, as so often in the past, has encouraged me throughout this project; and Stephen Rowland has offered innumerable insights in the course of our intermittent conversations. I am grateful for their friendship and support. Ronald Barnett has been a remarkably supportive Series Editor who has encouraged, mediated and cajoled with unfailing sensitivity and wisdom. Without his timely interventions this book would not have seen the light of day. Much of the book was drafted while I was Head of the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. The secretarial and administrative support I received during this period was exemplary. Without the support of Judi Duffield, in particular, it would have been impossible to carve out the time and mental space to go on writing and thinking about what it means to be an academic. Chris Gaffney, Mary Lou Hughes and Colleen Woodward also helped create a context within which it was sometimes possible to stop and think. The book was completed during a period of sabbatical leave generously provided by the University of Sheffield following my period as Head of the School of Education. I would like to thank Peter Hannon, who as the incoming Head of School supported my application for study leave, and all those colleagues who covered for me in my absence. My doctoral students are an unfailing source of inspiration to me. Many are working on topics relating to higher education and academic practice, and I learn continually from our regular exchanges. I would like, in particular, to thank Ansgar Allen, Hamad AlYahmadi, Maha Bali, Jennifer Creek, William Fisher, John Galvin, Janet Goepel, Marian Fitmaurice, Daniel O’Neill, Lesley Rollason, and Victoria Sparkes for the ongoing dialogue on many of the themes relating to this book. I first conceived the idea of developing an argument about the moral bases of academic professionalism in conversation with Elizabeth O’Brien. I value the memory of those conversations. I am deeply grateful to Pauline Robinson — for the room with the splendid view and for so much else; and to Judith Ashman for her continuing care and understanding. I keep on learning, in the most unexpected ways, from my children — Hannah, Benjamin and Isaac — to whom I dedicate this book. Finally, I acknowledge, with thanks, the support of those editors (and peer reviewers) in whose journals I have previously published work and developed some of the ideas included in the following pages:

Preface • xiii Nixon, J. (2006) Relationships of virtue: rethinking the goods of civil association, Ethics and Education, 1-2. 149–161. Nixon, J. (2004) Education for the good society: the integrity of academic practice, London Review of Education. [Special Issue: D. Halpin, J. Nixon, S. Ranson and T. Seddon (eds.) ‘Renewing Education for Civic Society’.] 2, 3. 245–252. Nixon, J. (2001) Not without dust and heat: the moral bases of the new academic professionalism, British Journal of Educational Studies, 49, 2. 173–186.

1 UNIVERSITIES AND CIVIL SOCIETY

This book is centrally concerned with the moral bases of academic professionalism. Those bases are, as Aristotle reminds us, what and how we practice. Practice, however, is always historically and sociologically grounded: the traditions and conditions we inherit fi x our moral horizons. Of course, we can unfi x them, which is one of the purposes of this book. But in order to do so, we have to call them to account: the historical and institutional bases of academic practice cannot simply be spirited away. This opening chapter sets about that task. It introduces the major themes of the book: the problem of social dislocation, the need for civic engagement, the role of the university in providing civic leadership, and the emergence of a new academic professionalism. Universities are potentially civic spaces within which individuals can gain the resources necessary for civic leadership. Whether or not they realise that potential will depend to a large extent on whether academic practitioners are able to square up to the challenge of developing for themselves a morally grounded and democratically alert professionalism.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK There is no shortage of writing on the ethics of teaching, research ethics, and the ethics of organisational management. This book does not aim to contribute to these specific literatures as such. Indeed, my starting point is that in order to grasp what is morally purposeful about academic practice, we have to see it as all of a piece and understand how the various activities that comprise it hang together. The book argues that the relation between teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality 1

2 • Towards the Virtuous University

is not merely contingent, but necessary, since these activities comprise a moral unity based on their shared goods. A consequence of the position I have adopted is that the discussion contained in the following pages is necessarily wide ranging and inclusive. I am well aware of the attendant risks — readers with a specific interest in one or other of the core activities comprising academic practice may well feel short changed. I trust that the underlying argument regarding the integrity of academic practice provides adequate compensation. Chapters 1–3 argue for a re-positioning of the university in respect of its moral ends and purposes. The university, it is argued, has a responsibility for civic leadership which must be exercised within a context of global uncertainty — a world in runaway mode. What role might the university play in such a world? What are its moral precepts? And, crucially, what part can academic workers play in re-positioning the university as a civic space within which a discussion regarding those ends and purposes might be privileged? This opening chapter (Chapter 1) is primarily concerned with locating the university as a key site within civil society; Chapter 2 looks more closely at the institutional culture of the university and asks what universities might look like if they were seen as places of learning; Chapter 3 focuses on the university as a deliberative space in which people otherwise at cross purposes might work towards a common purpose. In addition to providing different contextual and discursive frames within which to locate the university, these three chapters also develop an argument about academic identity and academic professionalism. Chapters 4–7 focus on the goods of academic practice and the virtuous dispositions associated with these goods. Those dispositions, it is argued, can only be acquired through practice; but, equally, academic practice is only sustainable though the continuing refinement and reapplication of those dispositions. Thus, academic practice is not only developmental, but also dialectical. It is constantly re-applying itself. Chapter 4 focuses on truthfulness — and the virtues of accuracy and sincerity; Chapter 5 on respect — and the virtues of attentiveness and honesty; Chapter 6 on authenticity — and the virtues of courage and compassion; and Chapter 7 on magnanimity —and the virtues of autonomy and care. These central chapters do not claim to be exhaustive in their coverage. They are intended as illustrative studies of alternative ways of thinking about and explaining ‘goodness’ and ‘excellence’ in relation to academic practice. An argument advanced throughout Chapters 4–7 is that the virtues associated with academic practice possess a duality of structure, inflecting inward to the self-as-agent and outward to the self-as-other.

Universities and Civil Society • 3

They are, in other words, centrally concerned with persons in relation. Chapters 8 and 9, which explore the relational and institutional conditions for professional learning, are premised upon this idea. Chapter 8 seeks to imagine what professional relationships (including relationships between students and teachers) might look like if they were conceived as relationships of virtue. The Aristotelian notion of virtuous friendship is touched on at this point as a means of distinguishing the moral ends and purposes of different kinds of professional relationship. Chapter 9 turns to the broader institutional conditions necessary for sustaining the goods of academic practice. Such an institution, were it to exist, might be characterised as a virtuous institution. One of the challenges in drafting and redrafting this book has been to mediate between the generality of its argument and the instantiation of that argument for a diversely situated readership. I have addressed this potential problem in part by inserting into the text at key points a number of questions (‘pointers’) that are invitations to the reader to stop and think — to relate the argument to her or his own situation. They can, of course, be ignored; alternatively, readers may wish to pose their own questions as a way of relating the argument to their own practice and experience. This book is written primarily for colleagues working in universities and is intended, among other things, to prompt some serious discussion of how we might think and talk about what we are doing as academic practitioners. It is important, therefore, that readers engage with the argument and substance of the book on their own terms and with reference to their own institutional settings.

TROUBLED TIMES Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended. (Hall, 1995, p. 27) If the latter part of the 20th century was characterised by the slogan ‘new times’, the 21st century certainly ushered in troubled times. When the old walls and boundaries of the long, forty-year Cold War began to crumble and fall so dramatically in 1989, the world was turned upside down. The old dichotomous verities of Left and Right, East and West were rendered strangely redundant. With the abandonment of those verities came the re-discovery of agency, of political will, of what was seen as the victory of political resolution over force and coercion. Some grasped the moment in certainty, declaring these new times to be the end of history and the final vindication of capitalist democracy as the cradle of trust. Some retreated into post-modernist nihilism. A few


simply clung on to whatever beliefs they had previously held. Others found themselves becoming reluctant apostates: reluctant because they could not fully understand the new loyalties —and the new cosmopolitics of difference — required of them; apostates because they knew deep down that the old loyalties — and the old solidarity politics — no longer held. (See, for example, Zizek and Daly, 2004, pp. 139–166.) In spite of the uncertainties, there was, as Beck (2007) puts it, a growing realisation that ‘the idea of having roots and wings at the same time could replace the worn out ideas of communism, socialism, neoliberalism and old Labour’. The ensuing debate has focused over the last twenty years on the relation between education and democracy — and the renewal of that relation through the practice of deliberative and participative modes of democratic engagement. That relation has, of course, always been a preoccupation of a long line of philosophers, historians and political theorists. Throughout the last decade of the last century, however, it became a major preoccupation within educational studies. It drew together significant strands of both New Right and New Left thinking, many of which were then reconfigured, within the UK, by New Labour. ‘Citizenship’, ‘partnership’, ‘participation, ‘community’ became key terms (the buzz words) in the lexicon of educational policy makers, practitioners and theorists. A new zeitgeist — a new spirit of the age, mood of the times — had been conceived. The term ‘civil society’ became established as the key organising concept of this new zeitgeist. It is probably, as Dunn (2002) has suggested, better understood as a slogan whereby those who feel that history is on their side seek to align themselves with the forces of progressivism. But for the purposes of these deliberations it serves a useful rhetorical purpose in highlighting the need for a new emancipatory space — a civic space — between the two great fundamentalisms of the 20th century: totalitarianism and individualism. The notion of civil society, for all its inherent fuzziness and chequered history, highlights the need for a revitalisation and re-democratisation of institutional life; for increased participation by what Williams (1989) called the ‘ordinary’ members of society in the great civil institutions of society; and for a re-structuring of those institutions around the need for such participation. The problem with slogans is that they can blind us to the very problems we seek to address: the problems on our own door-step of economic and social exclusion and of cultural alienation. Most people still exist on the margins of, or in the interstices of, what we in the West term civil society. They fall between whatever brave new prospect is afforded by our vision of institutional revitalisation and the harsh social reality of a world structured, still, around multiple inequalities. Moreover, from


a global perspective, civil society is not a solution, but simply a restatement of the problem of how we are to live together in a world of difference: the question of what constitutes ‘civility’, ‘duty’, ‘responsibility’, ‘belongingness’, ‘membership’ remains in spite of the sloganeering. Yet the notion of civil society does, for all its fuzziness, focus our response to these troubled times on the potential of our civic institutions: their capacity for participation and engagement, inclusivity and accountability, recognition and difference. It focuses our response, also, on how those institutions are to be led and by whom they are to be led. We crave to be led and hang on to the belief that somewhere out there are individuals who possess the necessary qualities to lead us through our present troubles. But perhaps we have given too little thought to what constitutes leadership and to the notion of leadership as a common inheritance. How may we pool our resources of hope? How may we move forward in common endeavour, notwithstanding our incommensurable differences? How can we learn to live together? We can only address these questions for ourselves — and in relation with one another. There was a time when society cohered. People were born into membership of that society with a tacit knowledge of their pre-ordained station within its hierarchies, the orderliness of which was an unquestioned assumption. What one was deemed to be capable of, and what one deemed oneself to be capable of, was to a large extent framed by one’s position within the social order. Some limited movement and repositioning was permissible on the margins, but in the main the tacit knowledge with which one was born was all there was to know. A kind of permanence, of security, was the trade-off for what we would now see as the gross inequalities of opportunity that characterised such a society. The tacit knowledge with which the children of today’s society are born is very different. Theirs is a time of social fracture and, indeed, atomisation, but a time, also, of unlimited opportunity; a time in which what one deems oneself to be capable of, and what one is deemed by others to be capable of, is a matter of one’s own making. Social position is not what one is born to, but what one makes of oneself; what, in a world supposedly without boundaries, one aspires to and achieves. Deep ontological insecurity is the trade-off for what we would claim to be the equalising tendencies that characterise current society (see Bauman, 1992; 1993). In one sense, then, the times would seem to have changed utterly. In another sense, for the vast majority of people the world over, the experience of living is much as it always was: the experience, that is, of multiple inequalities, of chronic insecurity, of emotional fracture, of


alienation from the sources of power. (‘This world of ours it has to be confessed/Is not so sturdy as it was of old,’ as Chaucer put it in the late 14th century.) Perhaps the best that can be said is that, for the privileged few, the human crisis can now in the 21st century be identified as a social crisis: a crisis in our ways of thinking about how best we can live together in a world of inequality, contingency and difference and in our ways of coming to terms with the price that must inevitably be paid for this new, barely envisaged, accommodation. Ours is emphatically not a brave new world, but the same old world in which bravery and courage — and their attendant virtues — must be reconceived and put to new uses. Nevertheless, the stakes are arguably higher than ever before. Our failure to address the question of how to live together in difference carries a higher penalty than ever before. The democratic impulse that, in the 18th century, occasioned a redefinition of legal rights and that, in the 19th century, helped reconfigure our conception of political rights, is now, as Marshall (1950) foresaw, a matter principally of social rights. It is in the closing act of this grand narrative that we find ourselves and in which unprecedented risks are to be run. There is urgency in the task which must not, however, betray the deliberative endeavour required of those who would seek to accomplish it. Hall was right to assert, in 1995, that civil society needed to be extended. It did, and it still does. Ten years later, however, the need to deepen, as well as extend, civil society seems equally urgent. Engagement, membership and participation comprise the depth dimension of civil society. I focus in this book on the bits of civil society that I know about. I point to failures, missed opportunities; but I point, also, to new beginnings, to alternative positions, to what I believe is a new sense of civic and institutional flourishing. Against the still dominant Platonic idea of leadership as the preserve of the philosopher-king, I posit the Aristotelian idea of leadership as a mode of inclusive, deliberative thought; and I make the claim that it is the responsibility of the university to uphold that idea and to fulfil that responsibility. The task is to reclaim a viable and workable notion of a good society, the goodness of which lies in part in the virtues of our academic institutions and the academic practice they sustain. What constitutes those virtues is the object of this enquiry. Indeed, the ends and purpose of the university might be defined in terms of just such an enquiry: the one place where we can, indeed must, ask awkward questions about why we do what we do. In answer to the question ‘what are universities for?’, we might answer, as MacIntyre (1990, p. 22) does, that they are institutions the legitimacy of which rests upon the possibility of formulating


and addressing precisely that kind of question in what he calls ‘the best rationally defensible way’.

CIVIC SPACES, CIVIC LEADERSHIP Take Socrates for instance! In those days one sophist after another came forward and showed that the misfortune was the lack of sufficient knowledge, more and more research was necessary, the evil was ignorance — and then along came old father Socrates saying: no, it is precisely ignorance which is our salvation. (Soren Kierkegaard, 1958, p. 183) Kierkegaard (writing in his journal in 1850) was half right. Socrates did not claim to possess knowledge, even less to impart it. But the Socratic method, whereby individuals are led to confront their own false or muddled notions, is far from a celebration of ignorance. On the contrary, Socrates held that such a method is the first step on the way towards acquiring knowledge as the necessary and sufficient condition of all the virtues. Far from dismantling the relation between knowledge and goodness, or between ignorance and wrongdoing, Socrates affirmed it. But he did so in such a way as to remind us of how difficult a task it is to disentangle knowledge from systems of false belief and sets of incompatible presuppositions. That is one line of continuity between ‘old father Socrates’ and a man who was born in the decade after Socrates’ death: a death that was to become emblematic within the tradition of Western philosophical thought. Aristotle, who had come up through Plato’s Academy, founded in later life his own Lyceum where he lectured on the then entire field of human knowledge: logic, metaphysics, theology, history, politics, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, anatomy, biology, zoology, botany, astronomy, meteorology, and the ancient equivalents of physics and chemistry. After his death in 322 bc, his son Nicomachus (presumably with the assistance of Aristotle’s successor, Theophrastus) reworked Aristotle’s lecture notes on ethics for wider circulation within the scholarly community. These have come down to us as the Nicomachean Ethics. That text concludes with a section which is clearly intended to connect with Aristotle’s extensive theorising of politics. He works through to the question of how his ethical theory can be put into practice. The link to his political thought lies in his response to that question. Education in goodness, he argues, is best undertaken by the state and, in the absence of adequate state provision, by the family. It is a matter of


public concern. Goodness in other words relies upon a civic framework which, in turn, is sustained by the civic virtues of those whom it inducts into the good life. It cannot be achieved in isolation, but only in one’s relation to others. Goodness is a virtuous circle. Aristotle’s was a deeply unequal society. The model of participative democracy it upheld was, by contemporary standards, exclusive and unjust. It excluded slaves, women, migrant workers. It was not only male dominated, but exclusively male and exclusive also in its definition of male citizenship. Our aspiration towards a more egalitarian and inclusive public sphere is a much more difficult affair, for it poses the supremely important but awkward question of how we are to live together in a world of multiple difference. The metaphors of the assembly and the agora, as the formal and informal forums of public exchange, are now of course hopelessly anachronistic. We live in a world of public and private pluralities, within which the distinction between the private and the public still holds, but is globally dispersed. Worldwide news coverage brings the public forum into my own intimate space, while intimate documentaries allow me to enter the private space of other lives and other households. Public space is increasingly characterised by what Berger (2001, p. 210) calls ‘a kind of spatial delirium’. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s point, as I take it, still holds: goodness requires civic spaces within which to flourish, and civic spaces can only exist if those who inhabit them possess certain moral dispositions and share a sense of moral purposefulness. The question facing the democratic world is how, having raised the stakes in terms of participation and engagement, it can sustain civic spaces that are able to accommodate our incommensurable and often incomprehensible differences: how are we to live and learn together in difference? Civic spaces are spaces within which isolated subjects become citizens and in which citizens have an opportunity and indeed obligation to express their citizenship in terms of mutual recognition. There is now a vast literature to suggest that such spaces are becoming increasingly scarce and at risk. Traditional forms of association and commonality have become fragmented, while new forms of association and belongingness cling to a cultural politics of difference. The new cultural politics is important because it forces us to recognise difference, but it does not in itself resolve the problem of how to speak across our differences. Nor does globalisation provide a solution, since what globalisation invariably means in practice is that we carry our encapsulated differences around with us from airport to airport and from website to website. Globalisation simply means that, for all our increased geo-


graphical and virtual mobility, there is less and less space for civic association. Globalisation, too, is part of the problem, not (as yet at least) part of the solution. It is not just that we have to confront difference as never before, but that the differences relate fundamentally to our understanding of ends and purposes and, crucially, to our understanding of how we should attain those ends and purposes. Incommensurable differences cling to both sets of understandings. We all act, however bizarre and barbaric our acts may appear to the other, in the conviction that our ends and purposes are righteous and that the means by which we choose to attain those ends and purposes are morally justified. In a world of incommensurable difference, unparalleled brutality, and exceptional self-sacrifice, we all believe ourselves to be on the side of the angels: my terrorist is your martyr and vice versa (notwithstanding the fact that terrorism and martyrdom differ crucially in terms of their moral ends and purposes). But my point is that goodness can be, and often is, a vicious as well as a virtuous circle. The university is, of course, implicated in the paradox whereby, in becoming progressively more global, the world regresses, through the best of intentions, into increasing fragmentation regarding its ends and purposes. It, too, is perhaps part of the problem. But the university is potentially — and the potential is huge — a civic space within which the problem can be confronted and addressed; a space, that is, within which (to return to MacIntyre) the question of ‘what are x’s for?’ and ‘what peculiar goods do y’s serve?’ can be formulated and answered ‘in the best rationally defensible way’. If, as I suggest, the key problem is not that posed by the juxtaposition of good and evil, but rather the problem of incommensurable goods, then the impartiality provided by that ‘best rationally defensible way’ is of supreme importance. The university thus provides, potentially, a unique civic space within which to address questions of moral purpose. The university should be, and occasionally is, the forum in which such questions may be addressed. Its track record, however, is not good. It cannot draw from its history an unsullied record of moral deliberation: witness the acquiescence of the German universities during the rise of the Third Reich; or, nearer home, the failure of all but a few vociferous academics to speak out against the flimsiness of the evidence gathered to support the government’s argument for an illegal war being waged against Iraq. Witness also, however, the intellectual courage of outstanding intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, against all the odds, signposted the ‘best rationally defensible way’ forward. The courage displayed by these intellectuals was neither


a principle nor a rule; it was an ingrained disposition — which is precisely why it held up under intense strain. The half that Kierkegaard runs the risk of getting wrong is of supreme importance. Socratic ignorance is only our ‘salvation’, as Kierkegaard puts it, when and if it leads to new forms of self-understanding and understanding of the world. As an end in itself, ignorance is a dead end. There is hubris of ignorance, just as there is false pride in the misplaced belief that we can know it all. Knowledge and ignorance require one another and feed off one another. Of course, Kierkegaard was, in part at least, inveighing against the received wisdom of his time; a wisdom that expressed itself in the urge towards systematic theory and the unquestioning belief that knowledge is somehow independent of our troubled engagement with its tenets. For Kierkegaard (1958, p. 183), ‘Socrates … did not believe merely in the strength of the proofs and then live: no, his life is the proof, and only with his martyr’s death is the proof complete’. Socratic ignorance is, from this perspective, the side wind by which individuals sail to the goal of enlarged understanding. Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were in their time the institutional contexts within which serious thinkers sought to hold in tension this troubled relation between ignorance and understanding. These institutions were founded on the idea that knowledge is not an accomplishment, but an unending quest. That big idea is the golden thread leading from the via negativa of medieval Christian thought, through that great intellectual flourishing that in hindsight we refer to as ‘the Renaissance’, to these late modern times in which perplexity and insight are so precariously balanced. The contemporary university, in its most radical yearnings and leanings, exists to affirm that big idea. Therein lies the university’s capacity for civic leadership: not as a repository of knowledge, but as a space within which people of very different persuasions, beliefs and backgrounds come together to seek to understand the extent of their own ignorance and, crucially, to learn from one another. Other spaces may sometimes fulfil this function, but the university is unique as an institution in having this as its prime purpose: if our human being were such that there were no anxiety surrounding ignorance, no urge to think beyond the boundaries of our partial knowing, then we would have no need for universities. But that is not the case. This notion of the university as a place of universal learning, within which difference is recognised and even celebrated, has been sorely tested by the laudable attempts to increase participation in higher education. It is relatively easy to uphold the idea of civic leadership when the citizenry is restricted to people who share a common set of expecta-


tions. It is not all that difficult or challenging to share one’s ignorance with one’s own kind. But in a world where citizenship is highly contested, the notion of a civic space — a space, that is, which privileges difference and whose inhabitants claim civic leadership through their capacity to recognise and confront difference — becomes supremely difficult. Under such circumstances the temptation is to pull up the drawbridge and protect the ivory tower or to redefine purposefulness in terms of managerial efficiency. Governments across the Western world are quite rightly resisting the first of these two reactions. They are, however, encouraging the second of these easy options: managerial efficiency is the order of the day. Within the university sector there has developed a new cadre of managers who dominate the senior and middle management rungs of the institutional ladder and who are undoubtedly redefining what intellectual leadership means and how leadership relates to the wider interests of society. Their gaze is focused on performance outcomes and their discourse is largely restricted to the language of cost effectiveness, institutional efficiency, and managerial competence. Universities have become increasingly dominated by a language which fails to recognise the rich unpredictability of learning: a language of cost-efficiency, value for money, productivity, effectiveness, outcome-delivery, target-setting, and auditing. The language of inputs and outputs, of clients and products, of delivery and measurement, of providers and users, is not just a different way of talking about the same thing. It radically alters what we are talking about. It constitutes a new way of thinking about teaching and learning. Ultimately, it affects how we teach and how we learn. It has designs upon us and upon what we understand by academic practice. Universities need to restore a public language of education and learning which has the capacity to affirm and construct an educated citizenry. The language that currently dominates universities and education generally is emphatically not directed towards such ends and purposes. For all its insistence on ‘user relevance’, it is an exclusive language of technocrats and bureaucrats, the ideological purpose of which is to endorse technocratic and bureaucratic ways of thinking about education — our students are now ‘clients’ (or even ‘customers’). ‘It is a language’, argues McKibbin (2006, p. 6), ‘which was first devised in business schools, then broke into government and now infests all institutions’. He continues: ‘it purports to be neutral: thus all procedures must be “transparent” and “robust”, everyone “accountable”. It is hardnosed but successful because the private sector on which it is based is hard-nosed and successful. It is efficient; it abhors waste; it provides all the answers.’


Against this ideologically loaded use of language, universities must find ways of opening up the public debate on the ends and purposes of education, expanding and rendering more inclusive its own civic spaces, and recognising the cosmopolitan plurality of values that now constitutes those spaces. That is the prime task of any university seeking to reclaim its civic leadership: to restore a public and inclusive language for deliberation and democratic engagement. At the very least, as Levinas (2006, p. 173) in remarks made in 1987 put it, ‘we shouldn’t let ourselves be overly impressed by the false maturity of the moderns who do not see a place for ethics — which they denounce as moralism — in reasonable discourse’.

ACADEMIC PROFESSIONALISM: A CHANGING PROFESSION Throughout the 1970s professionalism was something of a dirty word: a means by which certain occupational groups sought to hang on to, or acquire, differential status over other occupational groups. During the 1980s, however, as the public and non-profit making sectors had imposed upon them the values of the private sector, the term took on a different meaning: professionalism became the means by which the former resisted the ideological takeover of the latter through an insistence on the ethical, as opposed to status-oriented, values of the non-profit-making and public sectors. Professionals within these increasingly beleaguered sectors found themselves having to mount a serious defence. They did so in the name of professionalism itself: its values, its traditions, and its ethical orientation to the public sphere (see Nixon et al., 1997). This was an odd and unpredictable turnaround. The sociology of the professions which had for decades been a backwater of sociological thought found itself central to a burgeoning literature on the significance of the need to protect the public sphere against the incursions of an increasingly privatised and market-driven society. Perkin’s (1989) history of the rise of professional society provided the groundwork for this new sociology of the professions, which has helped frame recent and current thinking on professional practice in terms of a radical reorientation towards the relation between professionals and their publics. From being a dirty word, professionalism became one of the good words: part of the indispensable lexicon of those who would seek to consider, against the odds, the possibility of the good society. The challenges facing the new academic professionalism are ontological (with regard to the changing nature of professional identity),


epistemological (with regard to the changing nature of professional knowledge), and ethical (with regard to the changing ends and purposes of higher education): The changing relation of academic practitioners to their publics. The presenting issues facing the university are very clear: an emphasis on access and participation leading to an increased diversification of the student body; the requirement that research should have demonstrable user-relevance and thereby be seen to impact upon policy and practice; the need for higher education to support economic regeneration at local and national levels; the significance of global markets freed up by the new technologies and the technological apparatus of distance learning. These policy trends are having a profound influence on the ways in which universities conceive of themselves and the ways in which learning operates within the context of higher education. These policy trends also profoundly affect the ways in which academic workers construct their identity. The underlying issue that must be addressed concerns the moral foundations of the changing relation between academics and their publics. Unless that issue is addressed, then the policy changes are merely a cosmetic exercise: a kind of bureaucratic charade. Something very significant is happening in respect of the changing relation between universities and the public sphere. My point is that, not only should academic practitioners grasp the moral import of that changing relation; they should also track the shift that it occasions within their own professional identities. They must acknowledge the ontological dimensions of the challenge. The changing relation of academic practitioners to knowledge. But they should also acknowledge its epistemological dimensions. The map of human knowledge has always been re-drawn by those who seek to know. However, it now seems as if whatever map might be available is of little use. The epistemological certainties attached to the notion of ‘the disciplines’ is still nostalgically recalled in the notion of ‘inter-disciplinarity’, but becomes increasingly redundant with the emergence of new fields of study (that require their own methodological justifications) and with the demise of traditional fields of study (that calls into question the old methodological justifications). Much that was solid is melting into air. Across the fluid and increasingly provisional boundaries, academic workers seek new ways of thinking and of talking together thoughtfully — the new technologies are in this respect both part of the problem and part of the solution. They facilitate a speedy response to a communications explosion that would have been unthinkable without their technological intervention. In spite of what sometimes seems like an epistemological meltdown, the process of intellectual engagement


goes on. There lies the line of continuity — and the hope. The quest for knowledge lies in our seeking to understand what is not known. That has always been the unexceptional case, in spite of exceptional circumstances. Knowledge has always been acquired by those who are willing to admit that they do not know. The changing relation of academic practitioners to moral purposes. Ontological and epistemological uncertainties require a renewed sense of moral purposefulness. Universities have always been hierarchical, but they are now deeply stratified as never before: witness the ratio of part-time to full-time academic staff, the erosion of tenure, the deep inequalities of funding for research across the sector, and the lack of transparency regarding salaries for senior academic posts. Members of a highly differentiated workforce have to hammer out their sense of purposefulness within an institutional context which is morally fractured: a context, that is, within which the development of a shared understanding regarding moral ends and purposes is rendered virtually impossible. The leaders of our institutions have, with very few exceptions, deserted the field. They speak a language that would have been unthinkable not only in Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, but even twenty years ago in the sector of which they are now the inglorious stewards. Of course, Vice Chancellors and Principals, and their Deputies and Pro-Vice Chancellors, have to square up to a new agenda of participation and cost effectiveness. They put up their little fights on

• • •

•

Pointers What are the main changes impacting upon your own academic practice and your own professional identity? Is the impact of these changes deleterious or beneficial? Both or neither? To what extent have the actual and projected increases in student entry to higher education affected the way you organise your teaching and balance your own professional priorities? The new technologies have revolutionised the extent and pace of organisational communication over the last ten years. How has this affected your own pattern of working? How do you cope with the relentless inflow, and necessary outflow, of electronic communications? Change is multi-faceted: changes in organisational structure, changes in institutional systems, changes in professional mindset, and changes in academic practice. How would you prioritise these different aspects of the change process?


the minor matters — but their abdication of moral responsibility for the university sector as whole represents a serious failure of nerve.

CONCLUSION In a rapidly changing world, universities have a vital leadership role to play not only in gauging and mapping change, but also in grasping its full implications. Universities, however, are themselves part of that change. They are involved in seeking to understand, on behalf of society, upheavals that are shaking its own institutional foundations. Academic practitioners are central to this process and are also involved in reconceptualising their changing role — their changing relation to a globalised and diversified public, to new and emergent forms of knowledge, and to new ends and purposes. They constitute a changing profession — a profession on the move in a world of shifting horizons. Change is not a linear, one-way process from government policy, through sector-wide reorganisation and institutional restructuring, to professional realignment. It is a dynamic process in which professional regeneration connects with public interest, thereby playing back on the processes of policy formation at the levels of state, sector, and the individual institution. In the following chapter we look at this process of change in greater detail as it has impacted on universities as institutions and on academic practitioners as a professional grouping. In many ways that process has been badly mismanaged — to the detriment of the sector as a whole and of the academic practitioners who sustain it. Change needs to come from within and involve a renewed sense of professional purposefulness and commitment: change, that is, from the inside-out. For that to happen, however, academic practitioners need to constitute not only a changing profession, but also a learning profession.

2 UNIVERSITIES AS PLACES OF LEARNING

There is a vast literature on what are seen to be the multiple crises currently facing universities. Some of that literature locates those perceived crises within a wider context of fiscal policies (and their managerialist spin-offs) relating to the public and non-profit-making sectors and to the deep intertwining of these policies and the ever encroaching demands of the private sector. Occasionally, such informed discussion, when for example it focuses on issues of access and participation, touches on broader questions of inclusion and equity. Rarely, however, does the literature seek to trace the perceived crises of the university back to their roots in what I take to be the real crisis facing civil society: the crisis, that is, of democracy and of how the university may or may not find ways of (as Habermas, 1971, puts it) ‘asserting itself within the democratic process’. This chapter sets about that largely neglected but vitally important task.

STRATIFICATION, FRACTIONALISATION AND ATOMISATION Castes or classes are universal, and the measure of harmony that prevails within a society is everywhere dependent upon the degree to which stratification is sanctioned by its code of morality. (Young, 1961, p. 152) Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) employ the metaphor of a runaway world in their analysis of what they call ‘institutionalised individualism.’ The world is experienced as runaway, they argue, because of the 16

Universities as Places of Learning • 17

‘decline of narratives of given sociability’ in the face of ‘a non-linear, open-ended, highly ambivalent, ongoing process of individualization’ (p. xxii). Within such a world the social form of one’s own life ‘becomes filled with incompatibilities, the ruins of traditions, the junk of sideeffects’ (p. 23). It also becomes restless and migrant: ‘a travelling life, both literally and metaphorically, a nomadic life, a life spent in cars, aeroplanes and trains, on the telephone or the internet, supported by the mass media, a transnational life stretching across frontiers’ (p. 25). ‘Individualization,’ ‘detraditionalization’ and ‘globalization’ must, therefore, be analysed together as the conditions which determine emergent modes of institutional formation and association. Some decry what they see as the decline of cultural values implicit in these new conditions. They point to the breakdown of relationship and connectivity, the erosion of civic purposefulness and engagement, and the loss of boundary and identity, as inevitable consequences of the runaway world within which we find ourselves. Others are more likely to highlight the new freedoms — of identity, lifestyle, choice, orientation — that such a world would seem to open up: a world of infinite possibility within which any notion of limit is rendered off-limits. Yet others remind us of the dark side of this runaway world: its emergent underclass, its deep inequalities, its concentrations of multiple disadvantage. Each of these perspectives provides a very different value orientation to the processes of ‘detraditionalization’ and ‘globalization’ which is captured in the phrase ‘runaway world’. These different perspectives do, however, have in common two shared assumptions: that this runaway world is characterised by a rapid acceleration in the pace of individualisation and that this accelerating process highlights the importance of institutions while posing a severe threat to their continuity and integrity. Traditionally, our sense of institutional membership and belongingness has been structured around notions of commonality and sameness. The runaway world of accelerating individualisation renders those notions less secure and at the very least forces us at the level of practice and organisational structure to confront the ever increasing intrusions of cultural and ideological difference. Institutions that were founded on the assumption of homogeneity have to come to terms with the heterogeneity that now characterises our runaway world. In a world of increasing individualisation, de-traditionalisation and globalisation, institutions gain renewed significance within the emergent order. In spite of the new freedoms that (for some) justify this emergent order, its institutional consequences within the university sector have


(for most) been deleterious. The new freedoms have brought with them new hierarchies and new exclusion zones that, as recent research shows, have stratified, fractionalised, and atomised the higher education workplace. Gamson (1998, pp. 103–104), for example, highlights what she calls ‘tremendous inequalities in the academy on almost any measure we might want to use’. She points to the fact that, within the USA, ‘among four-year institutions, only eight percent of private colleges and universities and three percent of public universities are very selective. All the rest, both public and private, are less selective or totally unselective, with the largest percentage concentrated at the bottom.’ Within the small proportion of ‘very selective schools’ the average income of students ‘is three to four times that of students in the least selective schools’. Moreover, ‘faculty in private research universities earn almost twice as much as faculty in liberal arts colleges’: when total income, including consulting income, royalties, and other institutional income, is factored in, ‘faculty in private research universities are by far the highest paid, earning two and a half times more than liberal arts college faculty’. A similar ratio applies with regard to expenditure: ‘expenditures per student in private universities are more than twice those in liberal arts colleges and more than three times those in community colleges’. Within the UK the disparities are less pronounced, but the increasing demand by the older, elite universities to set their own fees is likely in the future to reproduce the multiple inequalities highlighted by Gamson. Moreover, the existing mechanisms whereby research funds are allocated through a rigorous selectivity exercise (such that medium and low ‘rated’ institutions receive little or no research funding) further increase the disparities between institutions. Kerr’s (2001) fift h edition of his classic text, The Uses of the University, contains a new chapter in which its author reflects upon the university of the 21st century. Less sure than in his original 1963 edition, in which he outlined the development of the American university in the second half of the 20th century, Kerr restricts himself to possible ‘scenarios’ and acknowledges his own uncertainties regarding the future: one such scenario — which he terms ‘the fractionalization of the academic guild’ — seems already to be shifting from possibility to actuality. The key characteristics of this scenario, he argues, are that ‘subject matter specialization increases, breaking knowledge into tinier and tinier topics’; that fractionalization also increases in the battle over academic merit versus social justice in treatment of students — ‘whether it should be treated as equality of opportunity or as equality of results’; and, finally, that ‘conflict may occur over models of the university itself’ (p. 26).


Writing from the UK context, Barnett (2000) paints a similar picture of what he terms ‘the Western University’ faced with ‘supercomplexity’, in which institutions risk fractionalisation as their frames of understanding, action and self-identity are continually challenged. Both Kerr (2001) and Barnett (2000) make the point that the university with its traditional moorings in philosophy has been cast adrift both morally and epistemologically. This moral and epistemological uncertainty, as Kerr (2001, p. 206) points out, drastically foreshortens the time horizon for planning: ‘in the 1960s we were confident of progress in higher education. We made plans for twenty, thirty, forty years ahead, certain of their realization. Now the time horizon for planning is three or five or ten years’. Fractionalisation is both synchronic and diachronic in its impact. Alongside the increasing stratification and fractionalisation of the university are profound changes in the conditions of academic work. As early as the mid-1990s a report sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) argued that ‘it is no longer sensible to speak of a single academic profession’ and that ‘a caste distinction is emerging between “have” and “have-not” groups’. The latter, it went on to argue, constitute ‘an underclass … with limited prospects for advancement or employment stability’. At the same time, increased differentials and tensions are apparent among what the report calls ‘top-level academics’ under pressure to produce high profile research and to develop and market new and appealing courses. (Kogan, Moses and El-Khawas, 1994, pp. 62–65.) Rhoades and Slaughter (1998, p. 36) argue a similar case for the situation within the USA, where, they claim, ‘the number of part-time faculty has increased to 43 percent of the total faculty workforce’. Moreover the percentages vary by subject, with those subjects (and subject-specific institutions) teaching the largest numbers of undergraduates having the highest percentages of part-time academic staff. ‘The inequalities in people’s material existence in higher education are’, they argue, ‘vast and expanding’. The result is an atomised profession which is not only increasingly part-time, but also increasingly managed by new cadres of administrators and non-academic managers. There is not much in this overall picture of systemic stratification, institutional fractionalisation and professional atomisation which would lead us to a sense of optimism regarding the primacy of choice, for either academics or students, within the higher education sector. Archer (2003, pp. 128–130) provides further evidence to support this bleak view in her discussion of the impact of what she calls the ‘hierarchy of universities’ on the choices and opportunities open to students. Students, accord-


ing to her analysis, are all too aware of how their choice of university involved adaptations to the contextual constraints operating upon them. Her respondents were also keenly aware of how those adaptations ‘would prejudice their later chances of getting a job’ (p. 130). The general message to be taken from the literature is that of the closing down of options and the increasing difficulty of achieving excellence across a highly divided, and divisive, system. As Considine (2006) argues, that closure has occasioned an emergency of both professional and institutional identity: From being places where one could think about anything, universities have evidently become sites where everyone must at some point think about everything… Scholarly domains are now infused with managerial values and goals, pedagogical actions are now dominated by organizational imperatives, and the life of the student is increasingly intersected by the priorities of work, finance, and future returns. The new ‘everything’ that must be included in academic thought is not simply the new forms of knowledge erupting inside and between disciplines; it is also expressed in multiple, non-intellectual projects… These include ways to raise national export earnings, metrics for status competition, avenues for the expression of personal or sociological identity, and methods for poaching and transporting Nobel Prize winners from one part of the globe to another. (p. 258) Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Readings (1996, p. 39) concluded, in his last words on the matter, that, within the North American context, ‘the appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has now lost all content’. He goes on to argue that ‘excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-reflection. All the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information’. Hartley (2006, p. 4) makes a similar point with regard to the UK context when he argues that ‘over the past ten years excellence, efficiency and effectiveness have been joined by equity to form the e-litany of contemporary education policy in England’. He continues: ‘the easy alliterative appeal of the terms gives the appearance of a seamless affinity among them. Excellence, efficiency and effectiveness are associated with the national need to compete globally’. So conceived, excellence becomes the new currency of the higher education market place. This is a bleak picture from which it is tempting to extract a highly pessimistic view of the societal changes that institutions in general, and


universities in particular, have to confront. However, we need to ask ourselves whether it is the changes themselves that are the problem or the dominant responses to these changes. At a pragmatic level, we need also to acknowledge that, while there is little we can do about these broader societal changes, there is a great deal we can do about our institutional and professional responses to them. In addressing this issue we need to explore the ideological roots of what has come to be known as the new public management of education and that has resulted in the widespread commercialisation of higher education.

MANAGEMENT, MONEY AND MARKETING … the three horsemen of the new apocalypse — management, money and marketing (Eyre, 2003) The new public management of education was driven by the resurgence of neo-liberal market ideologies that dominated the last quarter of the last century and continue to exert an influence on the way in which universities are managed. It was based on the assumption of a general breakdown of trust in the public and non-profit-making sectors and on the further assumption that public trust is best regained through systems of accountability that support competition across these sectors. If only the public and non-profit-making sectors could learn from, and behave as if they were a part of, the private sector, all would be well! From that forlorn hope unravelled the endless palaver of performativity — target setting, league tables, inspection regimes — that now characterises the university sector and dominates the working lives of those located within that sector. As O’Neill (2002) pointed out in her BBC Reith Lectures, this widely endorsed mode of institutional (mis)management is itself part of the problem, not part of the solution. Far from reinstating public trust in public institutions, it has encouraged what she calls a ‘culture of suspicion’ which is then used to justify the centralised control of those institutions: In theory the new culture of accountability and audit makes professionals and institutions more accountable to the public. This is supposedly done by publishing targets and levels of attainment in league tables, and by establishing complaint procedures by which members of the public can seek redress for any professional or institutional failures. But underlying this ostensible aim of accountability to the public the real requirements are for accountability


to regulators, to departments of government, to funders, to legal standards. The new forms of accountability impose forms of central control — quite often indeed a range of different and mutually inconsistent forms of central control. (pp. 52–53) This statement constitutes a serious indictment of the new public management of higher education. The charge against that management regime is its lack of both transparency and internal consistency. It fails, according to O’Neill, to declare its underlying purposes and to render those purposes coherent in organisational practice. It is a fudge: a muddle masquerading as a serious response to a problem it fails to address, let alone analyse. Far from encouraging institutions within the public and non-profitmaking sectors to engage with their publics, the new public management of higher education has served to render them defensive and inward looking: ‘we are heading towards defensive medicine, defensive teaching and defensive policing’ (p. 50). The moral trajectory of professional practice towards public service through the exercise of professional judgement brought to bear on highly complex, indeterminate problems has thereby been deflected. Both the professionals and their publics are thereby the poorer. The accountability regimes which characterise the new public management of education have scored an embarrassing ‘own goal’. In a bureaucratic effort to open up institutions, they have managed to close them in culturally. The increasing reliance on mechanisms of accountability and audit in the management of universities is complemented by the increasing reliance of universities, and indeed other institutions within the public and non-profit-making sectors, on commercial funding. Shumar (1997) refers to this same process in terms of ‘the commodification of higher education’; Slaughter and Leslie (1997) see it culminating in what they call ‘the entrepreneurial university’; while Aronowitz (2000) labels what he calls ‘the corporate university’ as ‘the knowledge factory’. Each of these writers provides different explanations for the rapid acceleration of the process of commercialisation, but they broadly agree on what is at stake: namely, that the academic practices associated with the university have ‘come to be valued in terms of their ability to be translated into cash or merchandise and not in other ways, such as aesthetic or recreational pleasure. Eventually the idea that there are other kinds of value are lost’ (Shumar, 1997, p. 5). That loss of all values other than the values of the marketplace further erodes public trust in the universities by restricting the notion of public concern to the narrow self-interests of the commercial sector.


Bok (2003) analyses this process of commercialisation from the perspective of a seasoned senior academic, and respected legal scholar, within American higher education. Pointing to the ‘rapid growth of money-making opportunities provided by a more technologically sophisticated, knowledge-based economy’ (p. 15), Bok cites as an example the fact that, in the USA, ‘corporations doubled and redoubled their share of total academic research support, increasing it from 2.3 percent in the early 1970s to almost 8 percent by the year 2000’ (p. 12). ‘Within a few short decades’, he maintains, ‘a brave new world had emerged filled with attractive possibilities for turning specialised knowledge into money’ (pp. 13–14). Williams (1995, p. 177) points to a similar trend within the UK. ‘The transformation has been dramatic’, he argues: ‘within ten years, students have been metamorphosed from apprentices to customers, and their teachers from master craftsmen to merchants’. The future to which such a process is likely to lead is, argues Bok (2003), a bleak one: One can imagine a university of the future tenuring professors because they bring in large amounts of patent royalties and industrial funding; paying high salaries to recruit ‘celebrity’ scholars who can attract favourable media coverage; admitting less than fully qualified students in return for handsome parental gifts; soliciting corporate advertising to underwrite popular executive programs; promoting Internet courses of inferior quality while cancelling worthy conventional offerings because they cannot cover their costs; encouraging professors to spend more time delivering routine research services to attract corporate clients, while providing a variety of symposia and ‘academic’ conferences planned by marketing experts in their development offices to lure potential donors to the campus. (pp. 200–201) At issue are the underlying purposes of professional practice and the capacity of professionals to reach out to a wide and diverse public. The choice, as Reid (1996) puts it, is between ‘higher education or education for hire’. The complex societal forces operating in the late-modern age require a radical reappraisal of those purposes and a radical redefinition of what we understand by the increasingly differentiated and stratified public sphere. However, the ways in which we have set about that reappraisal and that redefinition, through the mechanisms of new public management and a collapse into wholesale commercialism, presage an ideological dead-end. The endemic problem of the re-distribution of power across new force-fields of difference cannot be resolved through


piecemeal measures that seek to reconcile centralised control with an over-reliance on unmediated market forces. As Bok (2003, p. 208) concludes, ‘universities will find it difficult to rebuild the public’s trust … In exchange for ephemeral gains in the continuing struggle for progress and prestige, they will have sacrificed essential values that are all but impossible to restore’. A consequence of this Faustian exchange of ‘ephemeral gains’ for ‘essential values’ is, among other things, the low morale among academic practitioners: the sense of being under-valued and of having no effective input into the way in which universities are run or the direction in which they are heading. There is a German term (zugzwam) applied to chess when players find that any move they make will worsen their position, thereby reducing them to helplessness. Zugzwam is precisely the situation that many academic practitioners find themselves in within the current context of competing priorities and heightened accountability: no move is a good move; all moves make matters worse. The result all too often is a sense of professional inertia and torpor. However, if the loss of what Bok terms ‘essential values’ is part of the problem, then the restoration of those values must be part of the solution. Moreover, it is only practitioners who can achieve that restoration, since the values that have been lost are the values of academic practice. Any serious attempt at institutional change necessarily involves, therefore, a commitment to professional reconstruction. Without that commitment, institutional change (and, indeed, broader policy change) lacks all substance. What we need to do is turn the change mechanisms on their head; or, to shift metaphor, achieve change from the inside-out.

CHANGE FROM THE INSIDEOUT There are some signposts as to how we might move towards this kind of inside-out change. The metaphor of signposts takes us to precise points and specific sectors. Signposts are located, sometimes in difficult terrain, to enable travellers to find a way through. They point to specificities that then have to be located upon a larger map. What follows is not a worked-through alternative to the new public management of an increasingly commercialised higher education sector, but some reroutings that relate to our central theme of the moral bases of academic professionalism. The Centrality of Association Institutions are ways of organising association. The notion of association includes a wide range of relationships. Anthropologists remind us


that institutions can be distinguished in terms of the polarities around which their various discourses are organised (see, for example, Douglas, 1987). From that perspective, it is perhaps significant that professional relationships are often set in sharp distinction to intimate relationships, the implication being that intimacy and professionalism are at opposite ends of some hypothetical continuum. But what if, in the interests of deepening democracy and hollowing out the hegemony of professionalism, we were to rethink association in terms of it touching upon our deepest values and affiliations? Would not our professionalism, then, require of us a capacity for disciplined intimacy governed by wisdom, judgement and self-knowledge? And would not that capacity be the basis for a new kind of relationship between professionals and their publics? These are the kinds of questions upon which most finely tuned teaching and collegial relationships actually turn. Giddens (1993) pushes this line of questioning to its extreme in his notion of ‘intimacy as democracy’. He points to certain conditions implicit in the meaning of democracy in its orthodox sense and goes on to argue that these conditions now pertain within what have hitherto been dichotomised as the public and private spheres. Interpersonal relationship thereby becomes one of the key sites within which the struggle for democracy is played out. In particular, he argues that democracy means discussion: ‘the relationship is its own forum’ (p. 194). Deep relationships, like deep democracies, require a ‘rolling contract’ to which ‘appeal may be made by either partner when situations arise (which are) felt to be unfair or oppressive’ (p. 192). Strong relationships, like strong democracies, hold us to account. The public site, conceived as the privileged site of democratic participation, must now be inclusive of relationships that are both intimate and private. There is no hiding place from what Giddens terms ‘the reflexive project of self — the condition of relating to others in an egalitarian way’ (p. 189). This endless elaboration and proliferation of the public sphere (which is, arguably, becoming increasingly vacant and inaccessible) carries with it an intensification of anxiety and risk. There are fewer and fewer spaces within which we can set the ‘the reflexive project of self’ to one side and gain uncomplicated assurance. Intimacy is no longer a safe haven. The side effects of this aspect of our runaway world are all too apparent in the ingenious escapisms that such a world generates: through, for example, its subcultures of drug-dependency, addictive behaviour and criminality. These are, of course, very real problems that must be addressed. What must also be acknowledged, however, is that this runaway world of ours, for all its iniquitous fall-out, is driven by a kind of moral impetus. It is, in part at least, a consequence of the


deepening reflexivity of late modern society, from which there is no escape and with which we must all engage. The Centrality of Moral Agency Nevertheless, there is a deep, troubling ambivalence implicit in that engagement. ‘The moral act itself’, claims Bauman (1993, p. 181), ‘is endemically ambivalent, forever threading precariously the thin lines dividing care from domination and tolerance from indifference’. In the complex network of mutual dependencies, he argues, ‘no act, no matter how noble and unselfish and beneficial for some, can be truly insured against hurting those who may find themselves, inadvertently, on its receiving end’. Our actions, regardless of their moral frame, are bound to be ambivalent in their consequences. Agency necessarily carries with it ambivalent consequences. That is what it means to live in a runaway world: the experience, certainly, of chronic uncertainty, but the hope, also, of reconciling that uncertainty with a sense of moral purposefulness that necessitates an ongoing search for resolutions that recognise differences of outlook and belief, background and expectation, purpose and condition. Institutions are constructed around this ambivalence. While cultural pessimists bemoan and cultural optimists celebrate what each sees as the breakdown of traditional institutional structures, cultural realists (who must of necessity argue counter-factually, i.e. hopefully) point to the ambivalence of institutions: their capacity for meltdown and fracture, but the opportunities they afford, also, for realignment and reconfiguration around a morally purposeful agenda. The task is to stay with the problem and, in staying with it, to work towards an opening-up of the public sphere to new forms of institutional engagement and old forms of moral commitment. The ambivalence of moral agency does not detract from its salience. Action matters and the moral import of our actions matters supremely. The alienation of moral reasoning from the prevailing discourse of the new management of education has rendered us, at worst, not only reactive but also reactionary. It is, after all, easier to think within the given frameworks than to think, as Arendt (1970) put it, without banisters: to think without the prearranged handholds of common assent. Thought is always a matter of thinking within and against the grain; it is the form action takes at its moments of fragile and unpredictable reflexivity. The university exists in no small part to celebrate and protect those moments — and, sometimes, to hold them in frame and, in so doing, place them within the broader perspective of the public gaze.


The Centrality of Learning Against the prevailing neo-liberal market ideology, it is important to affirm that universities are a symbol of a particular kind of civic association: one grounded, that is, in argumentation and reason and the recognition of difference. The prime principle of the university is not (as is so frequently claimed) academic freedom, but academic duty: the duty of accuracy in respect of one’s beliefs, sincerity in respect of proclaiming those beliefs, authenticity in living according to the beliefs that one sincerely holds, and recognition of others’ rights to do likewise. The principle of academic freedom only makes sense in the context of a community that acknowledges these duties. Of course, we are sometimes inaccurate, insincere, inauthentic, and self-regarding, but the idea holds: universities exist in order that society might have an image of what associations based upon accuracy (in relation to belief), sincerity (in relation to the proclamation of belief), authenticity (in relation to the living-out of sincerely held belief), and the recognition of difference (in relation to the interpretation of each of the previous categories) might look like (see Williams, 2002). That almost impossibly difficult agenda is, of course, what we mean by learning. We start with the examination of received belief through the trial of accuracy: is what I believe true given the evidence available to me? We proceed through the trial of sincerity: can I put to the test my truly held views within whatever public forums are available to me? And, finally, the test of authenticity: can I live out my life according to the beliefs that I hold to be true? Such is the vocation of learning — and the tradition of scholarship — that have shaped our understanding of what universities aspire to and what academic leadership means. They are not arcane questions, but questions that are highly germane to the revivification of higher education and the regeneration of academic professionalism as a mode of magnanimous practice. The relation between belief, knowledge and truth is highly contested. The relation between belief and knowledge has, as all serious learners know, something to do with moving beyond wish-fulfi lment or the aggrandisement of our own predilections. We may be uneasy with the notion of ‘truth’, but as learners we acknowledge the need to ground our beliefs upon a firmer footing than prejudicial and selfinterested reasoning. Learning necessarily turns to the other. We cannot, as learners, avoid the ‘runaway world’ of which we are a part: its alien and disparate territories, it strangeness, its disparities.


ACADEMIC PROFESSIONALISM: A LEARNING PROFESSION The radical decentring of the self occasioned by the changing conditions of knowledge presents an enormous challenge to the traditional tenets of educational progressivism: the notion of the knowing self as the foundation of a unified and ordered life; of individuality unfolding within a community conversant with the continuity and complex overlappings of experience. It calls into question the very notion of a unified personality. At best, ‘it points to a more complex range of unities, syncretic blends and differentiations’ (Featherstone, 1995, p. 51); at worst, to ‘chaos and chronic indeterminacy, a territory subjected to rival and contradictory meaning-bestowing claims and hence perpetually ambivalent’ (Bauman, 1992, p. 193). Within this new cultural context, identity is never given; nor can it ever be achieved once and for all. It is always in-the-making, not-yet-finished: It has to be construed, yet no design for the construction can be taken as prescribed or foolproof. The construction of identity consists of successive trials and errors. It lacks a benchmark against which its progress could be measured, and so it cannot be meaningfully described as ‘progressing’. It is now the incessant (and non-linear) activity of self-constitution that makes the identity of the agent. In other words, the self-organisation of the agents in terms of life-project (a concept that assumes a long-term stability; a lasting identity of the habitat, in its duration transcending, or at least commensurate with, the longevity of human life) is displaced by the process of self-constitution. (Bauman, 1992, pp. 193–194) These changing conditions require a different kind of professional commitment: a commitment to learning as necessarily unpredictable and provisional, to the learner as self-organising agent and — crucially — to the professional as learner. Any attempt to develop an academic identity from that commitment must treat the learner as pivotal, since only through the agency of the learner can learning have any significance and coherence. From within such an academic identity, professionalism manifests itself as a particular value-orientation, together with the skills and understandings that are required by that orientation: the skills of enabling and empowering; the understanding of understanding itself and of the ways in which understandings can be shared. Those values, skills and understandings are conditional, however, upon professionals recognising their own needs as learners; and that recognition is, in turn, shaped by institutional factors. Professionals


not only excel in the goods of their own professional practice, but participate in a community that holds these goods to be of importance. MacIntyre (1985, p. 194) puts it this way: ‘every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationship to those people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practice’. Practices, however, are not to be confused with institutions: ‘chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions’ (p. 194). Institutions are concerned with external goods, which ‘are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards’; practices, although located within institutional settings, are concerned with internal goods, which ‘are indeed the outcome of competition to excel, but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice’ (p. 190). The relationship between institution and practice is, therefore, intimate and crucial: the practice cannot be sustained without the institution, but is always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness and competitiveness of the institution. Insofar as professionalism constitutes a commitment to the internal goods of learning, it provides a critical distance between the practitioner and the institutional contexts within which the practitioner operates. The practitioner lays claim to professionalism by virtue of that critical distance. Academic professionalism might, then, be defined in terms of a commitment to the intrinsic goods of learning and the maintenance of a critical distance between that practice and the extrinsic goods of institutional organisation. Indeed, academic workers might be seen as having a professional duty to adopt an explicitly oppositional stance to policies that prioritise the external goods of the institution or militate against the internal goods of learning; for example, policies that are aimed at increasing competition, generating acquisitiveness or reproducing inequality. Such a view of academic professionalism is at odds with the dominant view, implicit in the centralist assumptions of a system within which the academic practitioner is increasingly treated ‘as an operative rather than as a decision-maker, as someone whose role is merely to implement the judgements of others and not to act on his or her own’ (Kelly, 1989, p. 130). It is a view, however, that is central to the idea of a learning profession committed to the recognition of difference. In short, academic practitioners need to work through the organisational implications of their own commitment to academic practice; to


make explicit the moral bases of that commitment and the values that sustain it; and to practice those values across a wide range of forums and networks with which, as scholars, teachers and researchers, they connect. This, of course, requires new ways of thinking about, and operating within, the immediate complexities of organisational life — ways of thinking and operating that require practitioners to act intentionally within the unknowable and largely unpredictable. ‘It is’, as Shaw (2002, p. 20) puts it, ‘a way of thinking that invites us to stay in the movement of communicating, learning and organizing, to think from within our living participation in the evolution of forms of identity’. If it is difficult, it is so (she suggests) because of the general ‘difficulty we have in thinking from within, in thinking as participants, in thinking in process terms, above all, in thinking paradoxically’ (p. 20). (See, also, Stacey, 2001, and Stacey, Griffin and Shaw, 2000.) Academic professionalism is Janus-faced. It turns, in one direction, to self-interest, monopolistic thinking, and resistance to change; but, in another direction, it points to the possibilities inherent in a very different kind of professional outlook: one oriented towards public interest, shared understanding, and a willingness to confront the implications of social, economic and cultural change. It is the latter outlook that has been so badly let down by the new management of higher education

•

•

•

•

Pointers In what ways are you continuing to learn? Does your own learning feed into your teaching? Do you learn from your students? From your colleagues? When, in your current work setting, did you last learn from a colleague or a student? When last were you caught by surprise? What last provoked in you a sense of wonder? Are you able to feed the surprise and the wonder into your professional practice? How do you manage that? What part does trust play in learning? How do you help to create an atmosphere of trust within your own work setting? What happens when trust — for whatever reason — breaks down? What do you understand by trust? Learning’ is both a noun (the thing achieved) and a present participle (the ongoing process). Which of these two meanings do you relate most directly to your professional identity as an academic practitioner?


and that must be sustained and supported if the university is to engage fully with the public sphere and (to return to Habermas) thereby succeed in ‘asserting itself within the democratic process’.

CONCLUSION A learning profession, as discussed in this chapter, cannot run away from the runaway world within which it finds itself. Nor can it simply run with the tide. It must stand for something. It must be a profession of values — recognising, respecting, and critically engaging with the often conflicting values of a radically pluralist society. Universities must be seen, therefore, not only as civic spaces and as places of learning, but as deliberative spaces in which people work towards shared understandings, common purposes, and concerted action from a position of difference and divergence. To profess such values — of recognition, respect and critical engagement — is not to adopt yet another entrenched value position. Rather, it is to insist on the need for deliberative spaces within which people can learn to talk beyond their differences regardless of how radical and incommensurable such differences may seem to be. That, of course, is a very big claim, which the following chapter seeks both to examine and to defend.

3 UNIVERSITIES AS DELIBERATIVE SPACES

Thinking may not in itself be an action; but, to be purposeful, action requires sustained thoughtfulness. That is the premise upon which the university is based: thinking this or that through from a variety of perspectives, and drawing on the knowledge and insights available, one’s capability for right action is likely to be enhanced. That is the premise upon which the university stakes its moral claim. If that is the case, then academic practitioners are not only members of a changing profession (as suggested in Chapter 1) and a learning profession (as proposed in Chapter 2); they are also (as argued in this chapter) part of a profession of values. However, that is only the case if the premise holds and our human capacity for thoughtfulness is somehow wired-up to a predisposition towards altruism and the common good. If the premise does not hold — and being thoughtful is no defence whatsoever against the banality of evil — then the notion of academic practice as morally purposeful is unsustainable. In this chapter I argue that the latter position constitutes a failure of nerve — an understandable and sometimes intellectually respectable failure of nerve, perhaps — but a failure nevertheless. Universities exist to sustain the good society — and the freedom of all their citizens.

A FAILURE OF NERVE Gray’s (2002) highly acclaimed and challenging book, Straw Dogs, focuses on precisely that point. The notion of the thoughtful and examined life, argues Gray, is yet another instance of humanity’s capacity for self-deception. Life is framed, according to Gray, by genetic con32

Universities as Deliberative Spaces • 33

tingency. The idea of there being a self that can attain to self-consciousness, let alone self-examination, is merely fanciful. Humanity’s only distinguishing feature is its rapacity and its capacity for cruelty, self-deception and wanton disregard of the environment. The notion of moral agency, which I am proposing, is, argues Gray, a chimera: a false consolation which fatally defines the limits of our development as a species. Marquand (2002, p. 26), in reviewing Straw Dogs for The Times Literary Supplement, distinguished what he sees as its ‘three over-arching themes’: The first and most obvious is a mixture of revulsion and contempt for what Gray calls humanism — the belief, inherited from Christianity, that human beings differ qualitatively and radically from all other animals … Gray’s second theme is another matter. Straw Dogs is saturated with a Swiftian loathing for our species. Not only are human beings part of the animal kingdom, they have also been an exceptionally cruel, destructive and rapacious part of it: not Homo sapiens, but ‘homo rapiens’ … We are, in fact, a plague upon the earth. The only hope is a drastic culling of our species … This is where the third theme comes into the story … Gray offers a bleak salvation of his own. Human beings will cease to matter. The planet will be saved after all — not because there is the remotest chance that Homo rapiens will change his ways, but because Gaia is too strong for him. What holds these over-arching themes in tension is Gray’s belief that the Socratic notion of the thoughtful and examined life is itself a form of consolatory self-deception. Life, he argues, is not like that: it is not a unitary object capable of subjective self-scrutiny. Pre-Socratic notions of radical indeterminacy and contingency are more truthful ways of telling the story. The idea that consciousness — or, indeed, self-consciousness — governs anything is just a myth. It is our species’ capacity for coping, rather than for consciousness (or self-consciousness), that matters. That capacity, argues Gray, we share with the most basic forms of life: amoeba, bacteria, cells, etc. Humanity is at best a minor sub-plot in the enduring history of Gaia. It would be all too easy to dismiss Gray’s reflections as a crude mix of social Darwinism and new-ageism, but that would be to misinterpret his purpose and intent and to belittle his intellectual project. Gray’s reflections may be deemed crude but, in the instances that he cites, move beyond the familiar territory of social Darwinism and new ageism into the historical record of almost unimaginable human cruelty:


On Sunday afternoon, 23 April 1899, more than two thousand white Georgians, some of them arriving on a special excursion train, assembled near the town of Newman to witness the execution of Sam Hose, a black Georgian. Whole families turned up to watch. Parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children. Postcards were sent to those who could not attend the spectacle, and photographs were taken to preserve it in memory. After learning of the death of her husband at one such occasion, Mary Turner — a black woman in her eighth month of pregnancy — swore to find those responsible and have them punished. A mob assembled and determined to teach her a lesson. After tying her ankles together they hung her from a tree upside down. While she was still alive her abdomen was cut open with a knife. The infant fell from her womb and was crushed by a member of the crowd. Then, as hundreds of bullets were fired into her body, Mary Turner was killed. (Gray, 2002, pp. 96–97) The point of Gray’s doom-laden narrative is not just that cruelty is part of the human condition, but that as human beings we, the perpetrators of cruel acts, convince ourselves that in acting cruelly we are acting in the right. Both murders reported in the above account are presented as educative: in the case of Sam Hose the act of lynching is deemed educative for the children who are excused school to witness it; in the case of Mary Turner her own public torture and eventual murder is presented as a means of ‘teach[ing] her a lesson’. It is not only a propensity for cruelty that marks the human condition, but a capacity also for self-righteousness. Conscience, according to this reckoning, is far from a clear guide. ‘In fact’, argues Gray, ‘conscience blesses cruelty and injustice — so long as their victims can be quietly buried’ (p. 97). Would we not be better off, suggests Gray, without morality in whose name such sufferings are so often inflicted? Then, surely, we could just cope; huddling together in self-enclosed ‘kindness’ and awaiting Gray’s bleak salvation of extinction — and the endurance of Gaia beyond its tragic ‘plague of people’. (See Gray, 2007, for his most recent elaboration of this theme.)

RECLAIMING A SENSE OF PURPOSE Gray’s bleak vision cannot be answered by any recourse to the facts, which in the case he cites are indisputable. It can only be challenged counter-factually. We can only say that there may have been other outcomes, if only there had been in place, on Sunday afternoon, 23 April 1899, in Georgia, something to pit against the brute facts: a presenti-


ment, perhaps, of someone, somewhere, at some indeterminate point in the future, having a dream that would impinge on the future of Georgia and the world. Gray’s vision cannot admit the possibility of any fortuitous link between the murder of Mary Turner and, say, the moral agenda of Martin Luther King, for to do so would be to admit the possibility of moral progress. Nevertheless, within that crowd assembled near the town of Newman to witness the ‘execution’, there may have been some for whom that spectacle was experienced as revulsion. If so, it is not unreasonable to interpret that revulsion as a moral response, which kept alive the possibility of social justice. It is to that possibility that we must turn in any attempt to challenge the cultural pessimism that threatens both the moral bases of academic professionalism and the idea of the university as a place within which to attempt to live a thoughtful and examined life. Arendt (1968) defined that possibility in terms of what she called ‘representative thinking’. She saw ‘representative thinking’ as the form thinking takes when thinkers are attempting to relate thought to practice within the purposeful framework of an examined life. Thinking, for Arendt, is not a retreat from the world, but a way of engaging with the world; not the preserve of the privileged few, but a common resource: I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoint of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else and, hence, look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority, but of being and thinking in my identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have in mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinions. (Arendt, 1968, p. 241) Without this kind of inclusive thinking (inclusive, that is, of others), humanity is unsustainable. The human capacity to grasp, through thought, the otherness of (i.e. my radical difference from) other lives — other origins, other beginnings, other trajectories, other outcomes — is itself a defining feature of humanity. That, of course, is precisely the feature that Gray rejects, which is why for him humanity is unsustainable. What is at stake is the relation, that Arendt insists upon, between what


she calls ‘representative thinking’ and right action: if such a relation exists, then human beings might reasonably aspire to moral agency; if no such relation exists, then the notion of moral agency is meaningless. To argue that such a relation does indeed exist is to resist the erosive nihilism which, albeit with great authority, Gray recycles and perpetuates. Ultimately, for all its eloquence, Gray’s bleak vision expresses a failure of nerve that places at risk the historic mission of the university to uphold the values of the thoughtful, examined life. There are a number of reasons why we should give credence to Arendt’s insistence upon thoughtfulness as a necessary condition of moral agency. In the most extreme circumstances, through which we may be living, the idea of the thoughtful, examined life provides us with a means of exercising a veto on mechanistic acts of systematic brutality and injustice. The practice of examining our own lives in relation to the lives of others, and with reference to whatever records are available to us, constitutes the social space within which (in Arendt’s terms) we are able to ‘stop and think’. Thinking, in other words, may itself be an act of moral agency, whereby the drift into amorality is resisted: a way of resisting the expectations that others have of us. This is what Arendt (1965) had in mind when, in reporting on the Eichmann trials, she wrote controversially of ‘the banality of evil’. Eichmann, she argued, was just a cog in the wheel of fascism. It was his and others’ unquestioning acquiescence to the fascist regime that rendered the horrors of the holocaust possible. The passivity and banality of his actions, according to this analysis, highlight the moral necessity of thoughtful engagement. There are a depressing number of instances of universities failing in this respect. Martin Heidegger’s acquiescence to fascism has become an iconic instance of this failure. But against it must be set the thoughtful resistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in 1945 at the hands of a hangman in a Gestapo prison, and of his mentor Karl Barth, who survived the Third Reich, but with his integrity intact (see Bonhoeffer, 1953.) More recently, countless South African academics supported an international boycott of their institutions, at incalculable cost to their own academic careers, in their struggle against apartheid. In these instances, the individuals concerned saw both their academic duty and their moral obligations to society in terms of an injunction to ‘stop and think’. It is not the case, at least in the instances I have cited, that they stopped being academics and became activists. Their moral agency took the form of thoughtful resistance: a kind of active altruism. In the more mundane world of human injustice and unfairness, the notion of thoughtfulness as way of life provides us with a means of


applying the tests of sympathetic imagination: seeing the situation from the other’s point of view, grasping the alternative arguments, engaging with counter-intuitive positions. This is the groundswell of ‘representative thinking’ that, according to Arendt, sustains civil society and upholds the values of civic association. What is at issue here is not empathy, but recognition. I do not need to identify with your difference (from me) in order to recognise and respect it; but without that recognition and respect, we edge towards a definition of humanity which Gray so starkly delineates. Thoughtfulness is an indispensable aspect not only of our own moral agency, but of our capacity to recognise the moral agency and integrity of others. Bereft of that capacity the human world is, as Gray quite rightly points out, one of ‘dog eats dog’. A recourse to the notion of something like sympathetic imagination has become central to the way in which the arts and humanities, and to some extent the social sciences, justify their existence. But economists, such as Sen, have also grasped the importance of this perspective for their own theory-building; as, indeed, have the various scientific disciplines that support the study and analysis of public policy and policy-making (see, for example, Sen, 1999). The point, again, is not that academics leave their discipline behind at the point at which they adopt such a stance, but that such a stance is central to their practice of the discipline. The contexts in which understandings are generated exercise a decisive influence on the nature of those understandings. Academic activity is increasingly circumscribed by that hermeneutic circle. In our daily discourse the notion of the thoughtful, examined life opens up the possibility of authentic dialogue. Those who hold in common some notion of the thoughtful, examined life talk to one another on the assumption that trust is at least a possibility. That possibility is never unproblematic, since trust is never unconditional. However, one of its conditions is that we open up to one another; that we seek to tell it as we think it is. I may disagree with you, while at the same time trusting your commitment to engage honestly with whatever is at issue between us. In doing so, I am placing my trust in your commitment to the examined, thoughtful life: your willingness to question your own assumptions and intuitions, even if at the end of the day we find ourselves at loggerheads. Trust can exist in spite of radical disagreement, given a shared assumption that the thoughtful, examined life is a life worth living. Universities constitute a space within which people from widely different backgrounds and beliefs are able to insist upon thoughtfulness as a necessary condition of their own and others’ moral agency. Universities are not alone in providing such a space, but they sustain certain


practices and traditions that keep alive the relation between thoughtfulness and goodness. Research, scholarship and teaching, within the context of prescribed disciplines and fields of study, are among other things a means of preserving and elaborating that relation. They are, as we are so frequently reminded, market-driven; but they are also morally driven. They presuppose a sense of moral purposefulness, without which they would not be institutions. They would simply be a form of organised labour. That, of course, is how they often feel, precisely because universities have become increasingly alienated from the moral purposefulness that should constitute their organising principle. Institutions are, at best, microcosms of the good society; universities, at best, bring to the macrocosm, and nurture on its behalf, the virtues of the thoughtful, examined life — for all. At best, they offer freedom: the freedom to become oneself through the thoughtful, examined life and the deliberative spaces that they offer for communication and rational disagreement.

WHOSE FREEDOM? WHOSE SPACES? Democracy ... is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (Ranciere, 2006, p. 97) Universities exist in part to ensure that the Mary Turners of the world — the disenfranchised and the oppressed — have a voice. They exist, that is, to promote and sustain human freedom: a word that has particular resonance within universities. The moral bases of academic professionalism have traditionally been conceptualised in terms of the idea of academic freedom: the right of academics to teach and research as their particular interests demand (see Russell, 1993). A number of assumptions have unravelled from this idea; for example, the self-regulation of academics as an occupational group and the differential status of that group within society. As in the case of many other occupational groups, academic practitioners have sought to maintain their self-regulation and status as a bulwark against the perceived threat of de-professionalisation and of increasingly bureaucratic forms of accountability and state intervention. Even staunch defendants of academic freedom, however, now question its relevance and acknowledge its vulnerability: ‘Academic free-


dom’, as Hamilton (1998, p. 343) puts it, ‘is not a strong beacon that illuminates the entire university. It is rather a wavering flame of recent historical development’. This is probably all for the best. It is good that ‘academic freedom’ be seen for what it often is: an attempt to protect the interests of a particular occupational group. Of course, that group espouses and, at best, practices important values — intellectual honesty, scholastic rigour, self-examination, respect for divergent views, etc. — without which any democratic society would be greatly impoverished. However, the version of professionalism to which the notion of academic freedom so often lends credibility remains inward-looking and self-referential. We must, then, look beyond the traditional notion of academic freedom, as the specialist preserve of academics, towards a notion of freedom grounded in our common experience as human beings who have to learn to live together in difference. Academic freedom, Menand (1996) argues, has depended crucially upon the autonomy and integrity of the disciplines. ‘For it is the departments, and the disciplines to which they belong, that constitute the spaces in which rival scholarly and pedagogical positions are negotiated. Academic freedom not only protects sociology professors from the interface of trustees and public officials in the exercise of their jobs as teachers and scholars; it protects them from physics professors as well’ (p. 17). With what Menand calls ‘the meltdown of disciplinary boundaries’ (p. 18), these protective spaces are no longer available. The traditional sense of belonging to a disciplinary tradition is being replaced by a sense of belonging to an institution. The significance of ‘the meltdown’, insists Menand, is ‘not epistemological or political. It is, much more banally, administrative. Universities differ’ (p. 17). Moreover, the institutional conditions of academic work are so tightly hedged in by reward and accountability systems that academic freedom, although still evoked, is in practice increasingly difficult to exercise. A freedom that rebounds negatively upon those that try to exercise it is not particularly liberating. It may be a consolation under these circumstances for academics to tell themselves that they enjoy the right to academic freedom. In practice, however, that enjoyment is becoming increasingly illusory. ‘In such an environment,’ argues Barnett (1997, p. 53), ‘academic freedom is not taken away; rather, the opportunities for its realisation are reduced ’. Precisely because of the perceived erosion of the conditions necessary for academic freedom, suggests Rorty (1996), the notion is worth defending. For Rorty academic freedom is not a general principle, but a way of naming ‘some complicated local folkways that have developed in the course of the past century ... These customs and traditions insulate


colleges and universities from politics and from public opinion. In particular, they insulate teachers from pressure from the public bodies or private boards who pay their wages’ (p. 21). In the absence of ‘nice sharp distinctions between appropriate social utility and inappropriate politicisation’, he sees the notion of academic freedom as providing some ‘pretty fuzzy’ distinctions which may nevertheless be useful in ensuring that universities ‘remain healthy and free’: ‘fuzziness does not, and should not, make us treasure free and independent universities any the less’ (p. 28). For Haworth (1998), however, the crucial question is how different freedoms might be defended. If, for example, ‘a defence of free speech must treat the right of free speech as a public right — “public” in the sense that it can be exercised by any non-assignable member of the community — and not as exclusive to a subgroup or elite’ (p. 15), then any such defence would require a very different kind of rationale than that involved in defending academic freedom. The latter is evoked not as a public right conferred upon the whole people, but as a right conferred upon a particular group of people. Any justification of academic freedom must not only defend that exclusivity, but face the awkward task of defending it in the name of freedom. Therein lie the tensions and potential contradictions. Can a defence of academic freedom ever be anything other than a defence of professional self-interest? Dworkin (1996) believes it can and in the course of justifying his claim calls for ‘a new interpretation of academic freedom’. Like Rorty, he believes that ‘the conventional, instrumental defence of academic freedom is important, and at least in general valid,’ but unlike Rorty claims that ‘it is not enough’. He goes on to argue that ‘academic freedom plays an important ethical role not just in the lives of the few people it protects, but in the life of the community more generally. It is an important, structural part of the culture of independence that we need in order to lead the kind of lives that we should’. The protection of academic freedom, Dworkin seems to be saying, is symbolic of the protection of a more general freedom of which freedom of speech is a crucial component: ‘an invasion of academic freedom is insulting and harmful for some because it frustrates satisfying important responsibilities, and it is dangerous for everyone because it weakens the culture of independence and cheapens the ideal that culture protects’ (p. 187). Academic freedom, argues Dworkin, is if only indirectly freedom for all. Perhaps, suggests Dworkin, it is possible to reinterpret academic freedom in such a way that one is able to retain some of its residual value as ‘insulation’, while ethically realigning it with ‘a culture of independence’. Horn (1999, p. 354) makes a similar point in arguing that


‘professors owe it to themselves and their fellow citizens to use their freedom for the common good’. The idea of professors owing their freedom to others, rather than owning it for themselves, is a far cry from the traditional and still dominant defence of academic freedom. To owe freedom suggests that one has been granted it on the presupposition that one will repay it and see it as one’s duty to repay it; to own freedom presupposes the right of ownership and suggests no such obligation of repayment. The former (to owe freedom) presupposes the prime importance of a moral turn towards the public sphere; the latter (to own freedom), while not necessarily denying the desirability of some such turn, resists it through its privileging of professional self-interest. The crucial issue, as Horn neatly highlights, is whether or not professors are fellow citizens: whether, that is, academic freedom is seen as something that is owned or something that is owed. The virtues of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity, as elaborated in Chapters 4–7, predispose us towards a notion of academic freedom as a kind of indebtedness: something that is owed. They are the means by which the premium we place on truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity orientate us towards broader constituencies of interest. Our concern with accuracy finds moral fulfilment in our disposition towards sincerity; our attentiveness finds a moral outlet in honesty; and the sometimes lonely business of intellectual courage is complemented through compassion. The virtues implicit in academic practice require us to reach out and, in reaching out, share our ownership of academic freedom through the realisation of our own indebtedness to a society that makes this freedom possible. Academic professionalism so conceived necessarily predisposes us towards a notion of academic freedom as something other than just freedom for academics. Freire touched on this issue, in his discussions with colleagues at the National University of Mexico, when he spoke of ‘freedom domains’. He spoke of the paramount importance of ‘the widening of freedom domains in the university’, but insisted also ‘that freedom in the university does not exist by itself’. It is dependent on ‘freedom domains’ in other institutional and social contexts. Moreover, these ‘freedom domains’ overlap and potentially sustain one another. A prime task of academic professionals is to release that potential by resisting ‘the historical tradition according to which the academic domain is holier than any other educational subsystem’ and insisting on ‘the possibility of increasing, widening, or pushing the freedom domains to be debated in the academic ranks’. (See Escobar et al., 1994, p. 144.) It is only by means of that widening debate — the practice of deliberation — that the


academic domain ensures that academic freedom becomes freedom for others: the freedom that, as Ranciere (2006, p. 97) puts it, can ‘inspire courage, and hence joy’. That is the only freedom that really matters.

ACADEMIC PROFESSIONALISM: A PROFESSION OF VALUES When we try to extend the new understanding of life to the social domain, we immediately come up against a bewildering multitude of phenomena — rules of behaviour, values, intentions, goals, strategies, designs, power relations — that play no role in most of the non-human world but are essential to human social life. (Capra, 2003, p. 63) Practice can only be understood with reference to the meaning practitioners make of it — and the value they ascribe to it. Values saturate practice. At times they overwhelm and even confound it, creating crises of confidence and conscience. But without values practice becomes meaningless, devoid of agency and direction; and without practice, values lack legitimacy and moral grounding. Values provide what Capra (2003) calls the ‘hidden connections’ that constitute social reality as lived and experienced. Those ‘connections’, in turn, imbue life with a sense of purpose — which is often difficult to discern precisely because the connections are ‘hidden’. Purposes are beyond anticipated ends and are progressively modified in fulfilment. A sense of purpose is never easily gained, never simply granted. It is dependent upon a process of understanding whereby we seek to grasp the complex relation between the values we espouse and the values implicit in our actions. That relation has to be worked through and thought through. The devil, as one proverb puts it, is in the detail; or, as another proverb puts it, God is in the detail. Either way, it is through the detailed working out of our life choices that God or the devil (or whatever) emerges. The pattern is not and cannot be prefigured. It is always susceptible to unpredictable perturbations and windfalls. Our life choices shape whatever sense of moral purposefulness we define for ourselves. We cannot annul the consequences of those choices. They constitute what we are and what we become; our ‘forthcoming’ as Bourdieu (2003) puts it. They are our being and they shape our becoming. We are more than the sum of our myriad choices, but those choices nevertheless define our agency in the world. We may not choose to be taken on an excursion to witness a bloody atrocity; we may not choose our instinctive response to that atrocity. But choices nev-


ertheless ensue and right or wrong action follows from those choices. Our purposefulness is premised upon our capability to choose and our capability to act on those choices. It is also, however, circumscribed by the choices of others, which may be premised on values very different from our own. Some of those choices and underlying values may have more clout and wide reaching effect than our own; others less. Our own values and choices have to square up to these differences, some of which cut deep and threaten the stability of whatever settlement we have reached with ourselves and others. The values of others are routinely experienced as contingency: annoyance, irritation, anger even. This is precisely the point at which the capacity to listen, reason and persuade come into play. We have to learn to sustain the argument beyond the point of critical disagreement and, in so doing, hang on to the possibility of some shared understanding regarding, at the very least, the grounds of disagreement. Agreeing to differ may feel like a last resort, failure even, but can be a major achievement in terms of shared understanding and mutual recognition. A sense of purposefulness that fails to recognise the purposefulness of others is potentially dangerous. It empowers its own purposefulness at the expense of others. It assumes that its own purposes will win through and, in winning through, will be vindicated as right. It is the slippery slope at the bottom of which is the spectacle of unimaginable atrocity justified on the grounds of right action: Gray’s bleak vision of the depths to which humanity has sunk. The only means of countering that vision is to insist on the moral necessity for developing in ourselves and others dispositions and practices that enable us to recognise our equal worth, in spite of our incommensurable differences. Universities, at best, provide an institutional space within which that insistence gains credibility and legitimacy: a space within which potentially conflicting purposes (and their programmatic working through) can be examined — not dispassionately, but disinterestedly. The mode of association that is privileged by the idea of the university is a model of democratic association. Yet, since that idea is itself contested, universities are themselves part of the problem that the idea of the university — as a space for mutual recognition — seeks to resolve. What distinguishes the university is its focus on the question of why we do what we do. That question is subliminal within various institutional contexts, but is up-front (if not entirely explicit) within the institutional context of the university. Universities exist to allow, and indeed enable, that question, which is always a question about the ends and purposes of a human life. To that extent universities constitute, potentially, a moral


microcosm; a collaboratory for the examination of purpose and practice and of the relation between these intersecting axes. This ideal has to be measured against the appalling and historically accurate record of human atrocity and cruelty as evidenced in Gray’s bleak vision. The examination of purpose only matters — or matters primarily — because a false sense of moral purposefulness has so often, and with such tragic consequences, led humanity into a thicket. What needs disentangling is that duality whereby purposefulness and supremacy become inseparable. Universities, at best, are places where purposes, our own and those of others, are brought to critical account; and where purposefulness is twinned, within a very different duality, with thoughtfulness.

CONCLUSION This and the previous two chapters have provided some frames of reference within which to locate universities and to position academic practitioners in a profession-on-the-move. I have characterised that profession as a changing profession, a learning profession, and a pro-

•

•

•

•

Pointers Do you have a sense, when you are reading or writing, of the values that you are professing? Do you ever step back and think about what it is you are valuing and why? As you go about your professional business, do you consider your own values in relation to others? How do you manage value dissonance — situations within which your own deeply held values and beliefs clash with those of others? What pedagogical and collegial resources do you draw on to resolve such impasses? How, crucially, do you keep open the possibility of learning together? Valuing something is a way of ensuring its continuity — its legacy. What, in your own professional practice and ways of working, would you want to hand on? What would you see as your legacy? Does what you value relate to your overall sense of professional purposefulness? How do you ensure that what you really want to profess — what you came to say — relates to your profession as an academic professional?


fession of values. I have pointed to emergent trends and tendencies, to shifts of emphasis within an unpredictable context of change and instability, to reorientations and redirections. Change necessarily involves uncertainty. It is difficult sometimes to distinguish genuinely emergent elements that prefigure new beginnings (the emergent-as-new) from seemingly emergent elements that merely loop-back to the residual (the emergent-as-residual). That distinction is crucial in any attempt to understand the changing culture of academic professionalism, given the current premium placed on innovation for innovation’s sake (innovation without change). Figure 3.1 attempts to locate some of the genuinely emergent elements — the new beginnings — within the changing culture of academic professionalism and to distinguish these from the residual elements that continue to exert a powerful influence on academic practice. ‘It is the nature of beginning’, argues Arendt (1998, pp. 178–179), ‘that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins… The new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.’ New beginnings, notwithstanding their embroilment in our complex origins, remain a possibility.

residual

emergent a changing profession

teacher-led----------------------------teaching-----------------------------needs-led provider-focused---------------research/scholarship ------------------user-focused academic tribalism------------------collegiality-------------------inclusive cultures a learning profession knowledge-based---------------------teaching-------------------------inquiry-based imported theory--------------research/scholarship----------------grounded theory monologic---------------------------collegiality----------------------------discursive a profession of values sameness------------------------------teaching-----------------------------difference providing answers---------------research/scholarship-------------posing questions inward-looking------------------------collegiality----------------------outward-looking Figure 3.1 The changing culture of academic professionalism: residual and emergent elements


Natality, argues Benhabib (2000, p. 81), ‘is the condition through which we immerse ourselves into the world, at first through good will and solidarity of those who nurture us and subsequently through our own deeds and words’. Arendt’s notion of ‘natality’, as Brunkhorst (2000, p. 188) puts it, ‘is the existential condition of possibility of freedom’. As such, it ‘signifies the new beginning inherent in human life and human action, as well as the contingency (of time and place) in which life and action unfold’. ‘Natality’, as Brunkhorst goes on to argue, implies, therefore, ‘both activity and passivity: we can never choose the time, the place, or the circumstances of our birth and life; nevertheless, we must make our own decisions and lead our own lives. To do this, we must interpret the particular world within which we find ourselves …; otherwise we will not be able to act at all’. The actions necessary to ‘make our own decisions and lead our own lives’ are, in other words, premised upon our capacity to think about the world within which we exercise our agency. Without that capacity for thoughtfulness, action would be impossible. There would be merely the recycling of routine, inherited behaviours, without any possibility of new beginnings. The idea of new beginnings — natality — is particularly apt as we move into the central chapters of the book. Chapters 4–7 focus on the goods of academic practice. These are defined as truthfulness (Chapter 4), respect (Chapter 5), authenticity (Chapter 6), and magnanimity (Chapter 7). These goods, it is argued — while grounded in the traditional practices of teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality — have the capacity to generate new insights, understandings, and ways of working together. They provide a framework of virtuous dispensations within which individuals can act; and, through action, begin to move — unpredictably — beyond their current state of knowledge and understanding. Action, as Young-Bruehl (2006, p. 86) puts it, is ‘characterised by its unexpectedness or novelty, its unpredictability’; as such, ‘action reveals who a person is, as distinct from every other person but related to all, related, potentially, to all humankind’. The actions that comprise academic practice as mapped in the following four chapters are similarly revealing of who we are — and what, uniquely, we aspire to become.

4 TRUTHFULNESS Accuracy and Sincerity

truthful 1. Of a statement etc.: full of truth; sincere … 2. Of a person: disposed to tell, or habitually telling, the truth; free from deceitfulness … (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Volume 2, 1993) This and the following three chapters explore and elaborate alternative ways of talking and writing about academic practice as moral practice. Truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity have been chosen as key terms within the moral lexicon that these central chapters seek to develop. Each of the chapters within this section focuses upon one of those key terms. The present chapter, which focuses on the virtues of truthfulness, also provides a preliminary discussion of the virtues and why the Aristotelian notion of the virtues as dispositions is crucial in establishing a link between goodness and practice: why, that is, becoming good is a matter of doing good and what doing good might mean within the context of academic practice. In developing this line of argument, I seek to avoid what I see as the oversimplifications of some communitarian approaches to virtue ethics and of some postmodernist attempts to deny the efficacy of the moral sphere. The purpose in this and the following three chapters is neither to conduct a moral examination of specific instances of practice nor to propose a theory of moral practice. The central concepts explored in these chapters — truthfulness, respect and authenticity and magnanimity — are, as Margalit (1998, p. 290) puts it, all ‘terms of sensibility’; each term, that is, requires to be understood ‘as an expression conveying 47


a systematic association between sense and sensitivity’. ‘Such concepts’, he further claims, ‘are particularly difficult to use for constructing theories’. They do, however, provide the resources for thinking systematically about the moral bases of our actions and judgements as academic professionals and about how those actions and judgements play back upon our own and others’ sensitivities. So, what I am offering here is not a theory, but a story about academic practice — a story whose main protagonists are moral concepts. What such stories yield, according to Margalit (1998, p. 289), is ‘the picture … of a utopia through which to criticize reality’.

THE SOCRATIC LEGACY Villa’s (2001) gloss on Socrates’ defence (as reported in Plato’s The Apology) to the public charge, brought against him in 399 bc, of being a menace to society deserves careful consideration: Given the scorn Socrates heaps on the idea of grovelling to save one’s life, there seems little reason to suppose that he is lying when he emphasises his own ignorance of the correct definition of the virtues, of a positive account of moral truth. The sole form of wisdom he does claim is, famously, the awareness of his own lack of positive knowledge of the good: ‘I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small’. His radically imperfect ‘human wisdom’ consists in knowing what he does not know, in realizing that he does not possess anything like the moral expertise claimed by the sophists, politicians, and poets. It is this negative wisdom — the sense of one’s own relative ignorance of what virtue is and what the ‘best life’ looks like — which serves as the basis and goad of Socrates’ philosophical activity. (Villa, 2001, p. 18) According to Villa, Socrates does not deny ‘the good’, but asserts his incapacity to offer a positive account of what constitutes ‘the good’. Socrates’ claim to virtue is his unswerving commitment to questioning his own and others’ taken-for-granted assumptions regarding what goodness is and what virtue is. The good society, according to this reading, is a society which has the capacity to question its own account of moral truth and, in so doing, to rid itself of its own illusions. The basis of Socrates’ philosophical activity is ‘dis-illusionment’: not the Romantic notion of ‘disillusionment’ as loss of hope, but a notion of ‘dis-illusionment’ as the means whereby we strip away false assumptions. A key question for us, as indeed for Villa, is how the Socratic notion of ‘negative wisdom’ relates to a continuing tradition of Aristotelian

Truthfulness • 49

thought that places the moral emphasis on right action. This is a particularly urgent question, since the resurgence of neo-Aristotelian thought within the recent writings of communitarians and virtue theorists has emphasised the need for increased civic engagement and social commitment. According to these accounts, the only answer to the multiple ills of contemporary society — consumerism, social fragmentation, moral nihilism, voter apathy, etc. — is to be found in a renewed commitment to the shared principles and values that constitute the resources of social capital. From this benignly conservative perspective the Socratic emphasis on ‘dis-illusionment’, which would of course seek to question those principles and values, might well be seen as a lingering menace. If Socratic ‘negative wisdom’ is a stumbling block to the communitarians, it is a major obstacle to those who peddle the tired orthodoxies of post-modernism. As Nussbaum (1997) has remarked, it is fashionable ‘in progressive intellectual circles to say that rational argument is a male Western device, in its very nature subversive of the equality of women and minorities and non-Western people’ (pp. 18–19). However, Nussbaum goes on to argue, ‘in order to foster a democracy that genuinely takes thought for the common good, we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs. … To unmask prejudice and to secure justice, we need argument, an essential tool of civic freedom’ (p. 19). Far from being exclusive, the Socratic ‘method’ is potentially inclusive and deeply democratic. What is of overriding importance in the implementation of that ‘method’ is the acknowledgement of the universal capacity to think: ‘Socrates does not apply to the ignorant and recalcitrant many an expert knowledge available only to the few; rather, he attempts to open the philosophical vocation to everyone’. Villa goes on to argue: ‘This is not to say he harbours the unrealistic expectation that the majority will become philosophers. It is to say, however, that he thinks neither age nor civic status is a bar to the kind of self-examination he has in mind.’ What matters to Socrates, as conceived by Villa, is not class, status, education, gender, or even freedom — ‘but the capacity to think’. (Villa, 2001, pp. 28–29) Now, as always, the pursuit of ‘negative wisdom’ is beset by those who claim to know what moral truth is and those who deny its possibility. Aristotelianism is located at this symbolic crossroads. It does not deny ‘the virtues’, but seeks to redefine them as dispositions towards moral truth. We cannot assume we know what that truth is, but nor can we assume our human incapacity to grasp it. The virtuous life is the life that embraces that epistemological and moral tension. The virtues are not moral end-points but the practical means by which we orientate


ourselves towards ‘the good society’. They are the means by which we cultivate in ourselves those dispositions that enable us to live in association with others. In an increasingly pluralist world, a world shot through with difference, the notion of the virtuous life is of paramount importance. We may and indeed do differ radically in our notion of what constitutes moral truth or the facts upon which the claim to truth may be based. The key question is, can we live virtuously while entertaining those differences? Insofar as we believe that we can live virtuously while entertaining difference, we adopt what Arendt (1998) calls ‘care for the world’. Caring for the world means being of the world, and acknowledging that one is of the world, while maintaining one’s own critical distance from the world and recognising the right of others to do likewise. The capacity to ‘stop and think’, as Arendt puts it, is crucial. Without a willingness to act from that human capacity, citizenship becomes unthinking loyalty with no regard for the values that support it. All that stands between the loyal citizen and the ‘banality of evil’, according to Arendt in her dispatches from the Eichmann trial, is the possibility of that capacity being actualised. (See Arendt, 1965.) Dissidence, by this reckoning, is sometimes a necessary condition of citizenship — as, indeed, it was for Socrates. In the last of the three speeches (reported in Plato’s The Apology) to the 501 citizens of Athens before whom Socrates was arraigned, he refused to offer, as was his right, an alternative to the death penalty for himself. He did so on the grounds that he could deny neither his philosophical calling nor the authority of the Athenian constitution. His death thereby became the symbolic affirmation of the two absolutes that shaped his life and legacy: his belief in philosophy, as he understood and practised it, and his belief in the good society, as he inferred it from the Athenian way of life. Growing between these absolutes was his intuition that each was dependent upon the other: that the good society requires a deeply questioning citizenry and that the purposefulness of such a citizenry lies in the hope of building the good society. Aristotle’s elaboration of the virtues would have been impossible without this exemplary insight; without, that is, the death of Socrates with all the symbolic weight it has had to bear. The Aristotelian insistence on the virtues as dispositions that are developed as they are brought to bear on, and shaped by, human practice is fundamentally Socratic. Of course, Aristotle provided us with an ethical system for thinking about and distinguishing between the virtues, and elaborated that system in such a way as to develop a kind of typology of virtuous action, but the idea of the virtues as intrinsic to human practice, a way

Truthfulness • 51

of being and acting in a world of tragic unpredictability, carries many of the hallmarks of Socratic thought; not least of which is the belief that the virtuous life does not come ready made as a legacy of received wisdom. It requires the constant exercise of judgement with regard to right action in particular circumstances. Such a perspective allows us an opportunity to re-conceptualise the notion of moral purposefulness and to re-think both the moral bases and the relational conditions of learning.

THE VIRTUES IN PRACTICE Again, of all those faculties with which nature endows us we first acquire the potentialities, and only later effect their actualisation … But the virtues we do acquire by first exercising them, just as happens in the arts. Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarly we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 91–92) Given the unpredictability of human circumstance, the evaluation of any life must be both formative and summative. None can assume that goodness has been achieved until the final closure of the human life: the best can become the worst as unpredictability takes its toll. Nevertheless, to live ‘the examined life’ is to engage morally with that unpredictability and to increase the likelihood of benign closure. Whatever virtue there is, and whatever hope in virtue there may be, can only be achieved in the face of contingency, incommensurability, and the deep unpredictability of human existence. The fashioning of human life through right action, and through wise judgement regarding what constitutes right action, thereby becomes supremely important. The virtuous life cannot be read off from tradition, dogma, creed or community, although each of these may provide guidance. It can only be constructed through the living of it. The unity of the virtues does not spring, then, from their formal or schematic coherence, but from the coherence that each of us achieves in attempting to live a virtuous life: the choices we make from the options that are open to us. MacIntyre, who has the distinction of being claimed quite erroneously by both communitarians and post-modernists, analyses this coherence in terms of what he calls ‘the unity of a human life’. His interpretation of the virtues, and of the Aristotelian tradition, is


central to our argument and requires at this point in the development of that argument some elaboration. MacIntyre’s (1985) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory is a complex and densely argued text which defies easy summary. The particular line of argument which concerns us here, however, is his attempt to define the nature of the virtues. Before outlining this line of argument, it is important to acknowledge what many see as a deep strain of pessimism in this work: his insistence on the failure of the ‘Enlightenment project’. MacIntyre refuses to celebrate that failure, which he sees as both a moral and epistemological failure inherent in the breakdown of late modern society. Nevertheless, he reclaims for this ‘after-virtue’ society a notion of the virtues which survives his own pessimism and indeed provides resources for hope. MacIntyre makes three major moves in developing his argument regarding the nature of the virtues. First he offers a definition of the virtues which privileges the notion of practice: ‘a virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods’ (p. 191). A virtue, he insists, is a ‘quality’, or disposition, which is ‘acquired’ rather than given, the acquisition of which enables us to achieve certain ‘goods’ which he claims are ‘internal’ to certain kinds of practices. The achievement of those ‘goods’ requires particular qualities, or dispositions, which are in turn enhanced through that achievement. We become virtuous (acquire the necessary and appropriate dispositions) through the practice of virtue. Second, he argues that the actions that comprise practice are only intelligible if viewed in the context of what he calls ‘the unity of a human life’. Intentionality and purposefulness are what give our actions meaning and moral import. If we extract those actions from the contexts within which agents construct their intentions and purposes, then the actions become unintelligible and meaningless. The intentionality and purposefulness of the agent provide human life with its unity and ensure that the virtues cohere within that unity. Of course, the intentions and purposes are always fought out against the unpredictability and contingency of the human world, but without intentionality and purpose the virtues cannot cohere. They fall apart. We grow in virtue as we see our own lives, and those of others, in narrative form. Third, he argues that ‘the unity of a human life’ is dependent upon traditions of practice that provide continuity between past, present, and future. The intentions and purposes that guide action are part of the traditions within which we practice: health care or athletics, engineer-

Truthfulness • 53

ing or administration, pottery or hospitality. None of us — health care worker or athlete, engineer or administrator, potter or host — starts entirely from scratch. Each of us inherits a complex past and, through our present agency, contributes to the legacy of the future. We do so through traditions of practice that are handed down to us and that we hand on. We grow in virtue as we struggle with the continuities and discontinuities inherent in the tradition within which we practice. The virtues, then, are implicit in practices that are embedded historically in developing and sometimes contested traditions. Moreover, particular practices frame and necessitate particular kinds of virtues. Practices, in other words, are selective in their generation and nurturing of specific virtues. ‘There is’, as Raz (1998, p. 395) comments, ‘nothing to stop a person being both an ideal teacher and an ideal family person. But a person cannot normally lead the life of both action and contemplation, to use one of the traditionally recognized contrasts, nor can one person possess all the virtues of a nun and of a mother.’ We speak of persons as virtuous insofar as they possess the virtues necessary for and appropriate to whatever form of life they have chosen. There is no abstract unity of the virtues; only the unity determined by particular ways of life and the ends and purposes implicit in those ways of life. The virtues are dispositions: the orientations, attitudinal stances, and habitual responses associated with particular ways of life. As such they require the constant exercise of judgement in ensuring that, first, our dispositions are appropriate to the way of life we have chosen; and that, second, they are appropriately reflected in our actions. It is precisely because judgement is central to right action that Aristotle defined the virtues as ‘a mean’ constantly at risk of toppling, on the one hand, into deficit — and, on the other, into excess. In considering the dispositions appropriate to academic practice, we shall return throughout this and the following three chapters to the idea of right action as a complex balancing act, requiring judgement, circumspection, and the capacity to see oneself as another. Judgements of this kind are necessarily complex and indeterminate: we may share ‘a mean’, but the particular deficits and excesses associated with that mean will differ significantly for each of us. It is in that spirit that Figure 4.1 is presented as an exemplar of the ways in which truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity gravitate towards both their deficits and their excesses. (See, also, Macfarlane, 2004, p. 129, who provides a useful map of what he calls the ‘teaching virtues and their vices’ — the latter being the ‘defects’ or ‘excesses’ deviating from the virtuous ‘mean’. His sub-categories differ from my own, although we share a common Aristotelian frame as formulated in Book Two of the Nicomachean Ethics.)

54 • Towards the Virtuous University Defiency

Mean

Excess

Truthfulness Inaccuracy

Accuracy

Pedantry

Insincerity

Sincerity

Fanaticism

Inattentiveness

Attentiveness

Controlling

Dishonesty

Honesty

Indiscretion

Respect

Authenticity Cowardice

Courage

Rashness

Self-absorption

Compassion

Identification

Magnanimity Dependency

Autonomy

Over-assertiveness

Carelessness

Care

Possessiveness

Figure 4.1 The virtuous ‘mean’: the gravitational pull of deficiency and excess.

THE NOTION OF TRUTHFULNESS One family of virtues associated with the academic way of life — and its practice — relates to the notion of truthfulness. ‘Truth, and specifically the virtues of truth,’ argues Williams (2002, pp. 93–94), ‘are connected with trust. The connections are to be seen in the English language. The word “truth” and its ancestors in Early and Middle English originally meant fidelity, loyalty, or reliability … Truthfulness is a form of trustworthiness, that which relates in a particular way to speech’. It is this sense, rather than the Enlightenment notion of truth as moral law, that is closer to what I mean by truthfulness. To act truthfully is both to have cognisance of the criteria by which veracity may be assessed, and to act in accordance with the provisional and contestable norms of the community within which one is a moral agent. Truth, by this reckoning, is a condition of social sustainability; it has to be recognisable and comprehensible, amenable to understanding. There is, in other words, a communicative aspect to truth: ‘truth itself is communicative’, wrote Arendt (1970, p. 85), ‘it disappears and cannot be conceived outside communication’. Socrates knew this well. Hence, the rich tradition of rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, that flowed from this notion of truth as reliant upon truthfulness. Now, as then, truthfulness is highly vulnerable: vulnerable to the old charge of sophistry from absolutists and fundamentalists of all persuasions who choose to interpret its emphasis on communicative com-

Truthfulness • 55

petence as a necessarily corrupting influence; vulnerable, also, to the charge levelled against it by relativists of all persuasions who choose to interpret its emphasis on the possibility of achieving collective action based on shared belief as naïve or futile. Against these charges the idea of truthfulness that I am advancing holds its ground — the ground upon which troubled individuals seek to bring to some provisional accord their beliefs, their sense of the accuracy of these beliefs, and their determination to act sincerely on those beliefs within an increasingly differentiated world. This position is not dissimilar to that of Lakoff and Johnson (2003), who argue (against the common sense assumption that understanding is based on truth) that ‘truth is based on understanding’. They offer what they call an ‘experientialist account of truth’, whereby a statement is ‘true in a given situation when our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes’ (p. 179): I hold a statement to be true because it corresponds to my understanding of whatever that statement refers to and because my understanding renders it coherent. The beliefs we hold onto as being more rather than less true are the beliefs that best fit our experience of being together in the world — and, crucially, the understanding that we derive from that experience. Being truthful is conditional upon our capabilities of understanding. The activities of teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality are fundamental to the task of being true to our own understandings of the world. Academic practice is centrally concerned with making these activities more accessible. A large part of being an academic has to do with making truthfulness one of the available resources of hope; enabling ourselves and others to sift our beliefs, to negotiate those beliefs with the beliefs of others, and to begin to define a public space within which rational discourse becomes a possibility. It is that complex and sometimes anxiety-ridden process that the notion of ‘truthfulness’ — of being true to oneself and others — denotes. Seeking to engage with this process, Williams (2002) remarks upon the ‘significant difficulty’ inherent in ‘the tension between the pursuit of truthfulness and the doubt that there is (really) any truth to be found’ (p. 2). In seeking to reconcile this tension, Williams argues against both the ‘deniers’ of truth and the ‘commonsense’ of those who assume truth to be ‘fundamental’. He attempts, instead, to elaborate the virtues of truthfulness for a world within which the notion of truth can no longer be taken for granted. His starting points are questions which hold these dichotomies in tension: ‘If you do not really believe in the existence of truth, what is the passion for truth a passion for? Or — as we might


also put it — in pursuing truthfulness, what are you supposedly being true to?’ (p. 2). These questions, as he goes on to argue, point not just to abstract difficulties, but to urgent moral problems that affect the politics of social practice. In addressing these problems, he directs his discussion to what he calls the ‘virtues of truth’: the ‘qualities of people that are displayed in wanting to know the truth, in finding it out, and in telling it to other people’ (p. 7). Chief among those virtues are accuracy and sincerity: the former (accuracy) relates to the problem of ensuring that one’s beliefs are true; the latter (sincerity) to the problem of how one ensures that one’s assertions express what one actually believes. What is primarily at stake is our capacity for, and commitment to, truthfulness. In pursuing truth we are less concerned with the nature of truth and increasingly concerned with what it means to be truthful — to ourselves and others. Among the dispositions that will help us negotiate that shift, suggests Williams, are those of accuracy and sincerity. The Virtue of Accuracy Accuracy is one of the very few means moral agents have of ensuring that the beliefs they hold are true. That relation between what, in good faith, we hold to be true and what is in fact true is particularly at risk in a highly consumerist society, where persuasion is pitched at the lowest common denominators of wish fulfilment and instant gratification: ‘one component of the virtue of Accuracy — which, once again, is why it is a virtue and not merely a disposition of reliability — lies in the skills and attitudes that resist the pleasure principle, in all its forms, from a gross need to believe the agreeable, to mere laziness in checking one’s investigations’. Williams continues: ‘the virtues of Accuracy include, very importantly dispositions and strategies for sustaining the defences of belief against wish, and against one of the products of wish, self-deception’ (Williams, 2002, p. 125). The virtues of accuracy must also be defended, however, against the fetishising of accuracy: accuracy, that is, for its own sake or for some end other than that of truthfulness. This fetishising of accuracy is, for example, a key component of the new public management of education, whereby institutions are required to utilise notions of accuracy in the overriding interests of cost effectiveness and efficiency. Within this audit regime, accuracy is reduced to what Williams quite rightly refers to as ‘a disposition of reliability’: its purpose becomes that of reliability rather than truthfulness (or, more subtly, the reliability principle is prioritised above the truthfulness principle). What matters, however, in any consideration of accuracy as one of the virtues of truth

Truthfulness • 57

is the overriding priority given to its purposeful orientation towards truthfulness. Implicit in that orientation is an acknowledgement that those who are intent upon finding out the truth cannot in advance know exactly what is preventing them from doing so: ‘when I do not know how to answer a question, I do not know fully determinately what is stopping me doing so’ (Williams, 2002, pp. 133–134). In particular, one cannot know how one’s own deeply-ingrained, taken-for-granted assumptions, and one’s own deepest wishes, are complicating the process (even if, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, one knew what those assumptions and wishes were). One can, however, be sure that there is a fairly strong possibility that they are doing so. ‘This possibility’, as Williams (2002, p. 140) puts it, ‘is so significant that one of the two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy, aims to encourage resistance to subversion by the wish’. The virtue of accuracy includes, then, the kind of self-questioning and reflexivity associated with Socratic ‘negative wisdom’. Only by questioning our own assumptions and uncovering the biases inherent in our own urge towards wish-fulfilment can we hope to disentangle true belief from the myriad ‘belief-shaped things’, as Williams (2002, p. 88) puts it, that come into our heads. The virtue of accuracy encourages us to spend more time than we would otherwise have done in trying to find out the truth. It is not, of course, a virtue that is restricted to academic practice; medical practice, judicial enquiry, institutional administration (to name but three other areas of professional practice) are also highly dependent upon the virtue of accuracy. Nevertheless,

Pointers • In which of your professional activities is accuracy a crucial component? In which of these activities is it most difficult to defend accuracy against what you or others would wish to be the case — or against self-deception? • In which working situations is accuracy fetishised as an end in itself? In which of these situations do you feel the institutional requirements of accuracy risk overriding your own or your colleagues’ professional judgement? • How is accuracy embedded within your own teaching, research and scholarship, and collegial relationships? What are the main obstacles to the pursuit of accuracy within your own academic practice?


universities, as places of learning, remain a prime site within which that virtue is sustained, encouraged and, importantly, passed on from one generation to the next. The Virtue of Sincerity The second basic virtue of truth is that of sincerity: ‘Sincerity consists in a disposition to make sure that one’s assertion expresses what one actually believes’. The obvious enemy of sincerity is the lie: ‘an assertion, the content of which the speaker believes to be false, which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to the content’ (Williams, 2002, p. 96). However, as Williams goes on to argue, ‘trustworthiness is more than the avoidance of lying, and if we want Sincerity to be the virtue of trustworthiness in speech, there must be more to be said than that’ (p. 97). The reason for there being ‘more to be said’ is that sincerity also involves fine judgements regarding what beliefs, and indeed how much of one’s beliefs, one should declare in any given situation. Such judgements are not necessarily determined by the instinct of self-interest or even self-protection. They may also be governed by a regard for one’s interlocutors. One cannot usefully declare the totality of one’s belief system in every context. Intrinsic to the virtue of sincerity is sensitivity towards the needs, expectations, and horizons of those with whom one is conversing. Such sensitivity is, of course, crucial to the craft of writing and the practice of teaching: in both cases a fine balance has to be struck between the expressive and the communicative impulses (between, that is, the needs of the addressor and the needs of the addressee). The virtue of sincerity includes, then, an acknowledgement of the inferential unpredictability of human language: ‘hearers gather more from a speaker’s making a particular assertion than the content of that assertion … The speaker expresses one belief, but they acquire many’ (Williams, 2002, p. 100). As in the case of accuracy, sincerity should not be fetishised. Insofar as it helps orientate us towards truthful dealings with others, it requires the constant exercise of reflexivity with regard to our own use of language. The ethical impulse is towards a minimisation of ‘noise’, such that the impulse towards hearing what we want to hear (rather than listening to what is being sincerely stated) is stilled. The ‘great educator’, as Gusdorf (1965, p. 125) put it, spreads around herself ‘the meaning of the honor of language as a concern for integrity in the relations with others and oneself’. Sincerity becomes a virtuous disposition through that orientation of the addressor towards the addressee. It depends, crucially, upon the good faith of the addressor, but also upon that of the addressee.

Truthfulness • 59

Pointers • On what basis do you make judgements regarding your own and others’ sincerity? Under what circumstances would you judge it legitimate to withhold ‘the whole truth’? • In what kinds of working situations does sincerity become an issue? How, within your own institutional setting, are such issues resolved — if at all? • How is sincerity embedded within your own teaching, research and scholarship, and collegial relationships? What are the main obstacles to the pursuit of sincerity within your own academic practice? Although, as Williams (2002) puts it, ‘the intrinsic value that Sincerity bears makes it an unlovely idea to turn into a liar’ (p. 120), there may nevertheless be circumstances within which ‘a person … does not deserve the truth’ (p. 114). Sincerity is reciprocal. It requires, in other words, a context within which both addressor and addressee desire truthful engagement. Again, it should be emphasised that the academy is not alone in honouring that desire. Universities remain, however, a key institutional site for its sustenance and fulfilment.

THE INTEGRITY OF PRACTICE: TRUTHFULNESS The virtues of truth with which we have been concerned in the previous section do not come ready made. They are achieved through activities to which universities have traditionally provided hospitality: teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality. Within and across those different activities the virtues of truth hang together: good teaching requires both accuracy and sincerity; similarly, good research and scholarship; and so, too, with regard to good collegial relationships. In each case, accuracy presupposes sincerity, just as sincerity is premised on accuracy. There is, in other words a principle of inter-dependence in respect of the virtues of truth. There is also, however, a principle of adequacy in respect of the activities that sustain those virtues. In isolation, none of those activities — teaching, research and scholarship, or collegiality — is in itself adequate to the task of ensuring that the virtuous dispositions relating to accuracy and truth are exercised to full capacity. Those activities comprise a moral unity when, and only when, they mutually reinforce each other; a unity which is fractured when, for whatever reason, one or


other of those activities is treated as self-sufficient. Academic practice, in other words, is a moral unity comprising activities that are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustaining the virtues of truth. Much follows from these twin principles of inter-dependence (in respect of the virtues of truth) and adequacy (in respect of the moral unity of the activities comprising academic practice). The relation between teaching, scholarship and research, and collegiality, is frequently asserted. Rarely, however, is it argued on the grounds of moral coherence. That, however, is precisely the claim that I am here proposing; namely, that these activities share a necessary relation one to the other in respect of their reliance upon the virtues of truth. The integrity of academic practice is, in other words, premised upon the unity of particular virtuous dispositions that we are here referring to as ‘the virtues of truth’. Thus, although teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality are very different kinds of activities, each requires a dispositional orientation towards accuracy and sincerity. Moreover, that moral orientation is a defining feature of the field of academic practice within which these various activities are located. This is not to say that the activity of teaching, as an activity, is the same kind of thing as research and scholarship, or as collegiality. As activities, each is clearly very different and involves the agent in doing distinct kinds of things. However, as moral endeavours, these activities have much in common; and what they have in common is, in part at least, a sense of moral purposefulness in respect of the virtues of truth. Those involved in these different activities share what Pring (2003, p. 64) has called ‘the deep down feeling concerning how they ought to act’. That feeling is, however, becoming increasingly allusive. In the highly stratified system that now constitutes higher education, how one acts is largely dependent on where one is located within sharp divisions of labour and across complex institutional hierarchies. Academic workers are increasingly likely to define themselves, not in terms of the integrity of academic practice, but with reference to what they see as their prime specialist activity; moreover, the goods of those specialist activities are increasingly defined, not in terms of the intrinsic goods of learning, but with reference to such extrinsic ‘goods’ that are easily quantifiable and therefore amenable to measurement. It is not that these extrinsic goods are of no consequence, but that they squeeze out all other considerations. We are in danger of losing ‘the deep down feeling’ that guides right action and that constitutes the moral bases of academic practice. We may, then, be doing different kinds of things when we act as teachers, researchers and scholars, and colleagues, but we are also doing

Truthfulness • 61

the same thing: we are doing truthfulness. The structure of truthfulness does not alter as we cross from one sphere of activity to another. Accuracy and sincerity remain the same kind of thing whether we are teaching, engaging in research and scholarly activity, or simply trying to be good colleagues. Truthfulness is the deep structure underlying these various activities. In order to understand the moral import of these activities, we need, therefore, to understand something of the structure of the virtues of truth. We need to understand what, in practice, might constitute accuracy and sincerity in respect of the various activities that comprise academic practice. Truthfulness and Teaching Bourdieu and Passeron (1996) in their classic study of academic discourse argue that linguistic misunderstanding is a key component of what they call ‘professorial power’ within the French education system. There is, they argue, a ‘complicity in misunderstanding’ whereby teachers gained power by satisfying their students’ craving for charisma. Their gloss on this situation is that ‘pedagogy loses all meaning unless it reflects the intention to communicate rationally, and thus to completely rationalize the means of communication’ (p. 5). They go on to argue that ‘teaching is at its most effective not when it succeeds in transmitting the greatest quantity of information in the shortest time (and at the least cost), but rather when most of the information conveyed by the teacher is actually received’ (p. 5). They conclude that ‘any democratisation of recruitment to university will need to be matched by a deliberate effort to rationalize techniques of communication’ (p. 9). What is at stake in other words is accuracy in respect of the use of specialist terminology and sincerity in assuring that such terminology is clearly understood. According to this analysis, a large part of teaching is a matter of inducting students into specialist terminologies which may, within other contexts, have different or broader meanings. Part of the task of teaching within the university is to impart specialist meanings to terms which within common parlance have broader semantic boundaries. Students need help not only in ascertaining the specialist meanings, but in connecting those broader meanings to their common understandings. So, for example, students require help in distinguishing between their common sense usage of, say, ‘space’ and their more specialist usage of that term within the field or discipline within which they are studying. The point of teaching is to clarify these terms with reference to the relevant research and scholarly literature, while at the same time connecting them with, and distinguishing them from, common understandings of those terms.


Important equal opportunity issues have a bearing on this point. Indeed, Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s (1996) analysis has now become something of a commonplace: students from affluent or middle class backgrounds are more likely to traverse the boundaries between specialist and common sense notions of key terms than are their less affluent and working class counterparts. So accuracy and sincerity, with regard to the use of terminology, becomes a moral and political issue relating to access and agency. Students need not only the key words, but also a sense of what those words might mean and of how the various meanings are reasonably, and sometimes unreasonably, contested. Accuracy is a matter, not just of defining the key terms, but of defining what in relation to particular areas of study those terms are and how they relate to whatever common sense understandings students bring to their studies: it is a matter, also, of sincerity. That disposition towards accuracy and sincerity is part of what it means as a learner to become virtuous and part, also, of what it means as a teacher to nurture virtue in others. Truthfulness in Research and Scholarship University-based research and scholarship has become increasingly policy-oriented through its increased reliance on external sponsorship. Government departments, business and industry, charitable organisations, as well as the more or less independent research councils, now shape the research agenda across fields and disciplines. Sponsors and their independent referees require research to be relevant and user-oriented and to place a primary emphasis on inter-disciplinary research design as a means of delivering on these requirements. Research proposals are judged on the basis of their capacity to make a difference within specific areas of policy and practice. Conceptual focus, definition of problem, research methodology, and even the presentation of findings are increasingly a matter of negotiation. The skills and understandings necessary for such negotiation are now central to the task of research and scholarship. That, of course, is part of the opening-up of the academy, which in principle is to be applauded. However, it raises important moral questions which have been insufficiently aired. The crucial question is: who controls the parameters of what in any given study is deemed to be problematical? Sponsored research, operating according to the specifications of contractual agreement, may have difficulty in introducing insights that fall outside or on the margins of such an agreement. The classic case would be an instance in which the analysis of the evidence gathered leads to a radical reappraisal of the initial problem and therefore of the intervention being studied. The study would then incline

Truthfulness • 63

towards a principled critique of that intervention, rather than towards evidence-based advice as to how that intervention might function more effectively. For those involved in the reporting of such a study this situation would, in the terms of this argument, raise serious issues regarding the virtue of sincerity, since reportage restricted to the terms of the contractual agreement would fall short of the ideal of ensuring that one’s assertions express what one actually believes. I am not arguing against the current research culture, which is quite rightly seeking to realign academic, private and public interests within a broader and more complex set of funding mechanisms. Even less am I arguing for a return to the notion of academic autonomy as enshrined in certain notions of academic freedom. I am, on the other hand, arguing for a morally-grounded methodological debate regarding a principled response to this emergent culture. (See, for example, Sikes, Nixon and Carr, 2003.) Central to that debate is the notion of ‘truthfulness’ and the responsibility of researchers and scholars to report their analyses sincerely irrespective of how unpalatable or otherwise those analyses may be to their paymasters. The crucial point is that the argument has to be conducted in such a way that the moral bases of academic professionalism are given credence. Truthfulness and Collegiality How academic workers relate to one another is inevitably influenced by their institutional settings. Settings that mask the underlying power structure of the institution make it that much more difficult to distinguish between true beliefs and ‘belief-shaped things’. Lack of transparency — regarding, say, reward systems, the allocation of financial resources, or the locus of decision making — renders any attempt to ascertain accuracy in respect of belief extremely difficult. Similarly, settings that place a premium on performativity are less likely to encourage us to spend time on puzzling over the distinction between true beliefs and ‘belief-shaped things’. Whether beliefs are true becomes less important than whether they work; and whether or not they work depends on the extent to which they are commensurate with institutionally defined goals. Finally, settings that encourage and rely upon competitive practices whereby the majority lose out to the few big winners make it much more difficult for anyone to express what he or she actually believes. Indeed, within such settings the genuine attempt at sincerity may paradoxically engender mistrust, since it compromises the implicit rules of the zero-sum game that we are assumed to be playing. Within such settings collegiality can be little more than a matter of clinging together


•

• • •

Pointers How do the various activities of teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality relate to one another within your own academic practice? Are there tensions — and if so how do you seek to resolve these? How is your own conception of yourself as an academic practitioner affected by the balance of these various activities? Does your conception match that of others? Does the notion of truthfulness relate in any way to your work as an academic practitioner — teacher, researcher/scholar, and colleague? If so, how? Do you ever experience a mismatch, conflict even, between your own sense of truthfulness and the requirements of the institution within which you work?

within our various academic enclaves. Insofar as truthfulness impinges upon collegiality it does so through its impulse towards institutional transparency, its insistence on the need to discuss critically the ends and purposes of learning, and, perhaps most difficult of all, its potential resistance to competitive systems that undoubtedly serve to alienate individuals and isolate institutions. Complete transparency is, of course, a chimera. Trust requires, crucially, confidence in agreed confidentialities. Collegial relationships require the clear definition of boundaries and the constant renegotiation of the status of information in respect of confidentiality. Sincerity is not a matter of being open about everything, but a matter of being open about what one can and cannot be open about. Transparency, in other words, is always a matter of highly complex professional judgements. This is particularly true of disclosure within the context of relationships that, while aspiring to collegiality, are asymmetrical within the bureaucratic framework of the institution. Accuracy and sincerity require us as colleagues to be honest regarding these often hurtful and sometimes unjust asymmetries. Truthfulness and collegiality are necessarily in tension within the institutional settings within which we work together.

CONCLUSION We may recognise and know the truth, and may act sometimes according to our knowledge, but how can we do the truth? (Tillich, 1962, p. 118)

Truthfulness • 65

Doing truthfulness, I have argued, is a matter of cultivating a disposition towards accuracy in respect of the beliefs one holds and towards sincerity in respect of declaring those beliefs. Academic practice, I have further argued, is one of the means by which such dispositions may be cultivated in ourselves and others. To speak of the moral bases of academic practice is, in part at least, to affirm the intrinsic goods of such practice as these become manifest in the urge towards accuracy and sincerity. Not to take those goods seriously, or to treat them merely as instrumental means towards some other extrinsic end, is to deny the moral purposefulness of what we do as academic workers. To seek to become a good teacher, or a good researcher or scholar, or a good colleague, is a way of growing into goodness. The virtues of truth are extremely difficult dispositions to acquire and develop. That is why, in seeking to acquire and develop them, we need to loop back to the Socratic notion of ‘negative wisdom’ and to keep reminding ourselves that our knowledge is framed by contingency, unpredictability and incommensurability: by what we do not and cannot know. Accuracy and sincerity are, therefore, always highly contestable and open to challenge. It is for that reason that we need to look to other virtuous dispositions that place a premium on respect of the other and that, in so doing, keep us alert to the fragility of our own good intentions in respect of accuracy and sincerity. It is to one of those other virtuous dispositions that we turn in the following chapter.

5 RESPECT Attentiveness and Honesty

respect … due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights or traditions of others (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998) This chapter begins by unravelling some of the semantic strands associated with the notion of respect: status, prestige, recognition, honour, dignity, and the like. It draws a distinction between self-respect and mutual respect and argues that the notion of recognition is crucial in ensuring that self-respect is not achieved at the expense of mutual respect. With regard to the various activities associated with the field of academic practice, the recognition of equal worth involves a disposition towards attentiveness and honesty, which are discussed as two of the prime virtues of respect. As in the previous chapter, the argument concludes with the claim that the integrity of academic practice — the relation between teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality — is a matter of moral orientation: in this case an orientation, as teachers, researchers and scholars, and colleagues, towards the virtues of attentiveness and honesty.

THE NOTION OF RESPECT Sennett (2003a) reminds us of the many synonyms naming different aspects of respect. He specifies ‘status’, ‘prestige’, ‘recognition’, ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’ as requiring particular consideration and shows in his discussion of these key terms how each reflects different orientations towards ‘self-respect’ and ‘mutual respect’. While ‘status’ and ‘prestige’ 66

Respect • 67

inflect towards the former, ‘recognition’ privileges the latter, as does ‘honour’. However, whereas ‘recognition’ conveys the (Rawlsian) idea of ‘respecting the needs of those who are unequal’ and the (Habermasian) idea of ‘respecting the views of those whose interests lead them to disagree’ (p. 54), the affirmation of ‘honour’ within a group can lead to destructive behaviour toward those who lie beyond the group’s boundaries: ‘to affirm the honor of our group, we have to denigrate the honor of yours’ (p. 55). Thus, ‘the positives of recognition and the negatives of social honour define the poles of mutuality’ (p. 55). ‘Dignity’ might also be seen to offer the possibility of mutuality, but has historically been related to faith in God or the dignity of labour, both of which, in an age of inequality characterised by secularism and widespread unemployment, severely limit its potential as a ‘universal value’ (pp. 56–58). To speak of the virtues of respect is, therefore, highly problematic, since the various aspects of respect differ radically in their value orientation. However, argues Sennett, the prevailing orientation within Western, post-Enlightenment value systems has been ‘the liberal horror of adult dependency’ (p. 113). While this abhorrence ‘has served to challenge power which demands servility … (and) renders citizens spectators to their own needs’ (p. 113), it has also constructed a public realm within which ‘dependence appears shameful’ (p. 101). Dependence, insofar as it is tolerated at all, is banished to the private life of love, friendship and parenting; and even here dependence may be deemed to be morally questionable, as ‘being grown-up’ is increasingly equated with ‘being independent’. Moral maturity ‘emphasizes the sheer struggle for self control’ (p. 106), such that ‘of all those who have invoked the shame of dependency, it could justly be said that they have a horror of the primal maternal scene: the infant sucking at the mother’s breast’ (p. 107). The fear of those that invoke that shame is that ‘through force or desire, adult men will continue to suckle; the mother’s breast becomes the state. What’s distinctive about liberalism is its view of the man who disengages his lips; he becomes a citizen’ (p. 107). This arresting image is not developed by Sennett into a critical analysis of the deep patriarchal codes underlying the liberal abhorrence of dependency. Nevertheless, the gendering of that image does quite rightly point to the institutional sexism inherent in ‘the shame of dependency’ and highlights the ways in which such a culture of shame necessarily shapes notions of masculinity and femininity within the work place. The import of the image is clear: to be grown-up is to be like a certain sort of man. To become that sort of man involves a kind of moral separation from both one’s own childish dependency and one’s


dependence upon women. The model of moral maturity, of which the image is an implicit critique, is that of growth into manhood. Sennett does, however, draw from this image a critique of other aspects of institutional life. He notes, for example, how ‘the shame of dependency’ may lead people at work to the fear of asking for help. Referring to one high-tech firm he had studied, he remarks: ‘The employees feared appearing needy for good reason; their employers understandably didn’t like being asked to sort out messes, and they wanted employees they didn’t have to ‘mother’. But the fear of asking for help and so appearing needy meant that information flows in the organization dried up; problems became evident only after they had become, indeed, messes’ (p. 119). Such organisations are dysfunctional not because they are badly organised, but because those who manage them wrongly assume that the acknowledgement of dependency is itself dysfunctional. Yet to create an institutional climate within which needs can be acknowledged and addressed may be the prime means by which such institutions are able to anticipate and thereby avoid ‘messes’; the only means, that is, whereby they are able to function effectively. He also points to the tragic consequences of ‘the shame of dependency’, whereby in denying our needs all of us become implicated in an endless process whereby ‘invidious comparison takes the place of sheer neediness, and true shame begins’ (p. 117). Wherever we rank within fluid hierarchies of ‘prestige’ and ‘honour’, we cannot escape the compulsions of ‘invidious comparison’. We all experience ‘shame as an inner sense of incompleteness, whatever the hard evidence of achievement or gratification; the person who fails to achieve “fulfi lment” imagines there is something wrong with himself or herself … Someone else, somewhere, is achieving fulfilment’ (p. 116). We witness this deepseated anxiety not only in the downward spiralling self-esteem of the obviously disadvantaged, but also in the compulsive behaviours of the seeming high-fliers. We witness it also in the disengagement of those who no longer want to play the zero sum game of invidious comparison but have found no other game to play. What Sennett provides in these images and analyses is an example of different aspects of respect imploding into head-on collision: on the one hand, self-respect premised on ‘the shame of dependency’; on the other, mutual respect premised on the acknowledgement of need. Although Sennett does not employ an explicitly Aristotelian frame of reference, his historical elaboration of the key terms suggests that these different aspects of respect may operate as virtuous dispositions in different times and in different places. He is also clear, however, that, in the kind of world within which we now live, preserving a sense of personal dis-

Respect • 69

tinctiveness and acknowledging the needs of others is both supremely important and supremely difficult. One of the ways in which we might achieve this conjunction at least at the conceptual level is, he suggests, to draw a clearer distinction between the idea of ‘being independent’ and that of ‘being autonomous’. ‘Autonomy’ is a highly contested term. Sennett (2003a) favours an interpretation of autonomy ‘as the capacity to treat other people as different from oneself; understanding that separation gives both others and oneself autonomy’ (p. 120). Thus, ‘experiencing the autonomy of another person can be as basic as an infant running her fingers over a mother’s skin, sensing it is different … Autonomy builds on this connection, but changes its character. Your experience becomes like the child touching a mother’s skin; gradually I perceive how different the details of your experience are from mine, but I do not withdraw my mental hand’ (pp. 120–121). Sennett sees autonomy as a process: a ‘rhythm of identification and differentiation … among adults as among children, a process that has constantly to be renewed’ (pp. 121–122). What distinguishes autonomy is this ‘passing back and forth between people, a constant give and take, which produces the experience of distinction, the awareness of difference … subjective awareness which lasts only as long as the process of personal interaction continues’ (pp. 123–124). In Socratic vein, Sennett acknowledges ignorance as the supreme moral frame: ‘autonomy means accepting in the other what you do not understand’ (p. 122). Autonomy, by this reckoning, involves a recognition of the other as unknowable at precisely those points where the not knowing really matters: ‘we grant autonomy to teachers or doctors when we accept that they know what they are doing, even if we don’t understand it; the same autonomy ought to be granted to the pupil or the patient, because they know things about learning or being sick which the person teaching or treating them might not fathom’ (p. 122). Respect so conceived depends crucially upon trust. But trust, argues Sennett (2003b), is an evolving state: ‘it begins with transparency and explicitness, one person making clear to another what he or she proposes to do, showing rather than hiding. In time transparency matters less, responsiveness matters more. The people you trust long-term are people who care about you rather than people who continue to present themselves to you.’ In the fast, fluid world of late capitalism, this recourse to a notion of trust evolving over time within the context of long-term trusting relationships raises serious questions regarding the sustainability of the virtues of respect. Somehow we have to find ways of practising respect as the recognition of equal worth within the context


of relationships that are defined increasingly by transience, provisionality and difference.

RESPECT AS RECOGNITION The folly of the times is the wish to use consensus to cure the diseases of consensus. What we must do instead is repoliticize conflicts so that they can be addressed, restore names to the people and give politics back its former visibility in the handling of problems and resources. (Ranciere, 2007, p. 106) The notion of recognition, as theorised for example by Calhoun (1995), Honneth (1995), Phillips (1995) and Taylor (1994), in analyses developed in the mid-1990s, is central to the response by contemporary social theorists to the question of how we might set about this task. Developed in the aftermath of the Cold War, which in some quarters was being hailed euphorically as the end of history, this theorising of recognition, as Fraser (1997) pointed out, established a new moral and political agenda. Precisely what is at stake was neatly summed up in Touraine’s (2000) crucial question: ‘can we live together?’ In order to do so, argue these social theorists, we must undoubtedly learn, speak and think across our multiple differences and in recognition of our equal worth. The problem is not a problem that can be left to the state (although, as Westwood, 2002, reminds us, the state may be a significant component of particular ‘regimes of recognition’). It is, rather, one which, as I. M. Young (2000) reminds us, is central to the survival of a civil society that transcends state boundaries and national loyalties. It is a matter, ultimately, of how we can learn to live together, not necessarily in harmony but certainly in recognition of our differences. I. M. Young (2000) provides some useful pointers as to how we might begin to develop modes of recognition around the themes of plurality and participation. Participation is conditional upon a commitment to both the substantive and procedural aspects of deliberative discourse. As a participant, I should have both an interest in what is being talked about and a disinterested regard for what others think and say. Were I not to be interested in respect of the topic, or not to be disinterested in respect of others’ perspectives on that topic, then my participation might rightly be challenged. Of course, my interest, and capacity for disinterestedness, may well develop as the discourse develops. What is at stake is not my commonality or sameness, but my commitment to bring to the deliberative forum my differences as they bear upon our common problem of being able to live together in difference.

Respect • 71

That commitment, argues Young (2000), involves a further recognition of the ways in which participation finds form in different modes of public address. Deliberative discourse, particularly within the university setting, is associated with a particular tradition of rational argument and public oratory. However, communication and expression take many forms, almost all of which should arguably be part of the discursive plurality that constitutes such discourse. Story and anecdote are particularly rich resources. The hierarchy of rhetoric has been significantly flattened over the last fift y years, partly as a result within the UK of the tradition of public broadcasting. But the authenticity of the messy narrative (the story, the autobiography, the biography, the anecdote, etc.) needs still to be upheld against the presiding influence of the tidy syllogism. What is at stake is not the survival of a particular form of public language, but my capacity for expression and receptivity in respect of diverse forms of communication. Finally, I. M. Young (2001) reminds us that emotion and feeling are integral to reason. Recognition and deliberation require, and are conditional upon, an acknowledgement of emotional and affective attachments. We do not become reasonable by divorcing ourselves from these attachments; our reason, rather, depends upon these attachments for its commitment and focus. Insofar as we know about love, or compassion, or justice, we do so because we have loved, and grieved, and suffered. We cannot set these loves, griefs and sufferings to one side. They are integral to our thinking and to our rational discourse and must be admitted to that discourse. They constitute our authenticity and our integrity. What is at stake is my presence as a mindful and sentient being in the deliberative process. Implicit in this emphasis on the recognition of equal worth is a radical shift in the traditional justification for respecting people as human beings. Traditional (neo-Kantian) justifications of the requirement to treat all human beings with respect have tended to be premised on the identification of particular human ‘traits’ which render each human being worthy of such respect. The emphasis on recognition does not lend itself to such justifications; it provides, rather, what Margalit (1998, pp. 76–77) has termed a ‘sceptical solution’ to the problem of justifying respect for others: ‘In the sceptical solution the attitude of respect toward people has priority over any possible human trait due to which they may deserve this respect … Human beings have value because others value them, and not because of any prior characteristic that justifies such valuing’. This ‘sceptical solution’, he continues, ‘turns the relation on its head: it is not some human trait that justifies the attitude of respect for people as human beings, but the attitude of respect for


human beings that gives value to the trait of being human’. We move forward, as moral agents, in respect of others — or not at all.

ATTENTIVENESS AND HONESTY Embedded within academic practice are two dispositions which enable and facilitate the development of mutual respect. Two of these dispositions — attentiveness and honesty — correspond closely to the virtues of truthfulness as discussed in the previous chapter. Attentiveness to the needs and viewpoints of others is closely allied, as a disposition, to the regard for accuracy in matters of belief. Both require the capacity to identify but also move beyond identification to disinterested engagement. Similarly, honesty requires that we should be open and transparent in relation to the insights that attentiveness yields, just as sincerity requires that we should seek to maintain in public discourse the importance of accuracy in respect of belief. There is a way in which the virtues hang together. Just as, in the previous chapter, accuracy and sincerity were portrayed as hard won virtues, so neither attentiveness nor honesty come ‘naturally’. Indeed, both dispositions are the source of great anxiety in our professional relations with students, colleagues, and sponsors, and in the presentation of our professional selves to the wider public. Moreover, if the virtues of mutual respect require us to relax into the processes of informal trust, as Sennett (2003b) suggests, then late modern institutions are likely to generate particular anxieties with regard to the virtues of attentiveness and honesty. It is much easier, in an institutional context that privileges competitive performativity, to be less attentive to others than to one’s self; easier to take time out from the arduous business of honesty that attentiveness necessarily involves. There is, then, a very real danger of losing sight of these virtues within the increasingly formalised settings and bureaucratic structures of university life; losing sight, that is, of the virtues implicit in the practice of mutual respect. The increasingly complex accountability mechanisms of time management play against the fundamental insight that ‘trust follows a narrative line, taking root by becoming ever more informal’ (Sennett, 2003b). This is not to say that, at the level of institutional rhetoric, universities do not espouse the values of attentiveness and honesty, but that at the level of practice these dispositions are becoming marginal to the ways in which increasingly diversified groups and individuals routinely relate to one another. The problem is compounded by the fact that what is happening to universities as institutions is happening to institutional life generally.

Respect • 73

Time is not only in short supply; we are experiencing something like a time famine in every aspect of institutional life: family, work, recreation, and all the complex institutional spaces in between these traditional institutional settings. Very few students or colleagues arrive at the workplace ‘refreshed’: most arrive with a profound sense of incompleteness; of failure to measure up to their own needs and the needs of others. There is a deep neurosis at the heart of our privileged consumerist society that deeply affects our sense of well-being and our capacity to flourish as human beings — and, yes, as academic workers. ‘Rationalised time’, as Sennett (2006, p. 24) puts it, ‘cuts deep into subjective life’. The neurosis cannot be healed by individual intent alone. It requires also structural change and political will. Nevertheless, there are ways in which we as academic workers can work together to protect the virtues of mutual respect; ways in which we can be attentive to one another and our students and endeavour to be honest in our dealings one with another. However, we need to recognise that attentiveness and honesty are dispositions that require time to develop and grow into. We need, also, to reflect more fully on what is involved and what is at stake in that development and growth. The Virtue of Attentiveness To be attentive, in the sense in which I am here using the term, is in Berger’s (2007) phrase to ‘hold everything dear’: to be assiduous in the attention we give to what is distinctive or different in the other person. This disposition requires the acquired capacity to listen and to look and to interpret sympathetically what we hear and what we see. Where student-teacher or collegial relationships falter, the failure by one or other party to exercise this capacity is invariably a root cause. Even when being asked or called upon to give advice, it is important to pitch that advice in such a way that it relates to the other person’s point of view. This is as true of managing colleagues as of providing feedback on student assignments. Attentiveness so conceived is a matter of seeing persons as human; seeing them in their human aspect. Margalit (1998, pp. 94–95) explains how this mode of seeing involves a kind of intuitively interpretive disposition: ‘we see persons as human when we see their expressions in human terms: this person has a friendly or a thoughtful face, a worried or a happy expression’. He exemplifies this general point with reference to the way in which we see human faces: ‘When we see a human face we do not first notice that the lips are curved downward, that the eyebrows are lowered, that the head is sunk down on the chest, and


that the cheeks have a gray texture — and then ask ourselves how to interpret this. We see the face as sad just as we see the lips as curved downward: not as a result of hypothesis testing and deduction from evidence, but directly … I see human being in their human aspect not as an act of choice or decision, but because I cannot see otherwise.’ As Margalit goes on to argue: ‘it is exceptional to see human beings as nonhuman. Yet it is easy to avoid seeing a person at all … Overlooking human beings means, among other things, not paying attention to them: looking without seeing. Seeing humans as ground rather than figure is a way of ignoring them’ (p. 101). More recently, Margalit (2002, pp. 32–33) has sharpened the issue by arguing that ‘we need morality precisely because we do not care. That is, we usually lack an attentive concern for the well-being of most members of the human race. We usually care about our parents, children, spouses, lovers, friends, and by extension about some significant groups to which we belong. But by no means do we care about everyone. For most of humanity, most people most of the time are pretty much indifferent’. Margalit exemplifies his point with reference to what he calls ‘an Oxford worthy’ who was once asked, ‘How do you carry on?’ He replied: ‘By not caring’. Margalit’s gloss on the anecdotal interchange is that ‘most people most of the time carry on by not caring for most other people’. Universities increasingly predispose us as academic workers to overlook one another and indeed our students in the manner of Margalit’s Oxford worthy. Indeed, managerialism might be defined as a mechanism for ensuring that human beings are not seen in their human aspect, but in their technical capacity to deliver on bureaucratically defined performance measures. Of course, very few of us desire this state of affairs. Yet most of us find ourselves colluding with it in one way or another. One point of moral resistance, therefore, would be to practice attentiveness to one another and to our students and to insist Pointers • What do you see as the major obstacles to your own attentiveness (to students, colleagues, etc.) in your own place of work? • How do you balance competing priorities with regard to your own attentiveness? Do you set boundaries? Do you make these explicit? • How do you help your students and colleagues to become attentive learners with the capacity to listen and be receptive?

Respect • 75

within our institutions that such attentiveness is a major criterion of excellence in all aspects of academic practice. The Virtue of Honesty What we owe to others by virtue of their attentiveness towards us is honesty. Attentiveness must be met with honesty if either of these two dispositions is to flourish. My honesty presupposes your attentiveness; your attentiveness is an invitation to my honesty. Both are necessary components of the kind of long-term trust that Sennett argues is essential for the sustainability of mutual respect. There is a point of moral exhaustion at which attentiveness becomes ineffective unless met by some degree of honesty and at which honesty loses its social purposefulness unless met by some degree of attentiveness. Honesty so understood is more than just a matter of not telling lies. It is a disposition towards openness in our dealings with others, but one which is conditional upon their readiness to cope with our honesty. Except in the rarefied atmosphere of the courtroom, honesty is rarely a matter of telling ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ all of the time. Honesty is dependent upon trustful relationships without which it becomes unsustainable. The traditional notion of ‘intellectual honesty’, with its somewhat individualist overtones, misses the social dimension of this sense of becoming honest together; the idea of creating an institutional context within which honesty is something to which we might aspire across the range of our professional relationships. It also, perhaps, misses the emotional charge implicit in the notion of honesty as a shared project: its inherent riskiness, its reliance on contingent factors, its unpredictability of outcome. One-way honesty is of little value. Honesty of this sort, regardless of how it aggrandises our own self-respect, can be and often is used to brow-beat others into moral submission, as in the colloquial phrase ‘brutal honesty’. What is required is the kind of honesty that grows through mutual respect: two-way, three-way, multi-way honesty, with the capacity for growth and development. Honesty of this kind aspires to reciprocity. This is not to deny that at times ‘blunt honesty’ is admirable, but simply to insist that in the long-term we do have to find ways of being honest together — and to acknowledge that this is no easy task. We have to find ways of reaching agreement beyond our profound and seemingly incommensurate points of disagreement. There are also potentially awkward bureaucratic issues that come into play. The writing of confidential references is a case in point. Given that, by law, someone for whom we write a confidential references may now request sight of that reference at a later date, what we write in


confidence to a third party requires considerable circumspection. The problem cannot be sidestepped since universities are obliged to provide references on request for students and staff — and, of course, it falls on academic members to fulfil this task. Faced with a particularly difficult case, the author of such a reference is more than likely to be advised by the Human Resources Department of his or her university to say only what is strictly necessary, to avoid any explicitly negative comments, and to let the absence of commentary on specific areas of conduct speak for itself. Those who routinely read and make decisions on the basis of written references have had to develop a way of reading between the lines — inferring the whole truth from the truths that can be told without fear of future litigation. Those who write such references have had to define their notion of honesty accordingly.

Pointers • How, in your own professional dealings, do you balance your telling of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? In what kinds of situation would you tell the truth (and nothing but the truth), but not necessarily the whole truth? How do you square this with your own sense of professional honesty? • In what professional situations does being honest present difficulties? How do you seek to resolve these difficulties? Is there any institutional recognition of, and discussion of, these difficulties? • Are the problems inherent in being honest gender related and/ or status related? Is your institution sensitive to the difficulty that the less powerful may have in being honest to the more powerful — and the ease with which the more powerful may, in turn, parade their brutal honesty?

THE INTEGRITY OF PRACTICE: RESPECT As with the virtues of truth, the virtues of respect make of the various activities comprising academic practice a moral unity — in that teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality all require of practitioners a disposition towards attentiveness and honesty. These common dispositions bind these otherwise disparate activities together and render them mutually supportive; indeed, they make of these activities a practice. Those who are involved in these sorts of activities share these

Respect • 77

sorts of dispositions. They may disagree radically on a wide range of professional and personal matters; but they share an assumption that being attentive and being honest together will help them work their way through those disagreements. Respect and Teaching Traditionally, pedagogy has emphasised the importance of the pupil respecting the pedagogue. Increasingly, however, the need for mutual respect has been acknowledged as an essential component of the student-teacher relationship. Students need to be attentive to their teachers, but teachers also need to be attentive to their students’ educational well-being; and both need to share an attentive and honest commitment to the specified field of study. For the student this commitment may be provisional and temporary; for the teacher it is more likely to be a life-long commitment. However, students whose active interest in a particular specialist area has long waned may still carry through life insights derived from an albeit brief encounter with a teacher whose honesty expressed itself as care for them and care for what was being taught. Being attentive to students means recognising them as being of equal worth. It does not necessarily mean treating them all the same, since implicit in the recognition of equal worth is an acknowledgement of different educational needs and talents, different propensities and interests, different trajectories and life projects. Indeed, it may mean that under certain circumstances one has to treat people differently in order to treat them equally. Teaching that is premised upon the principle of the recognition of equal worth seeks to differentiate, not for the purposes of selection, but in order to ensure continuing equality of opportunity for the students involved. The purpose of differentiation, so conceived, is the progressive focussing of student options, rather than their premature foreclosure. What is at issue is the vexed distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Implicit in that distinction are two very different notions of equality: the idea of treating everybody the same and the idea of treating people differently according to their needs. (See Phillips, 1999.) Teaching necessarily impels us towards the latter conceptualisation of equality. We seek to differentiate: to define tasks and learning outcomes that are appropriate to the propensities and potentialities of our individual students. Moreover, we do so in order to equalise opportunity and to work towards the ultimate goal of equality of outcome. The goal is a fairer, more decent society: a better society within which difference is openly and honestly recognised.


Respect in Research and Scholarship Traditions of humanistic research and scholarship require us to be attentive to the subject: to take the subject seriously rather than to impose our own presuppositions upon it. This is particularly true of empirical research involving human and animal subjects, but is also true of forms of scholarship that focus on documentary evidence or philosophical argument. It is possible to misrepresent books, just as it is possible to misrepresent the subjective world of the interviewee or the anonymous respondent to a survey. In each case what is required is an attentive concern for the integrity of the subject and honesty in reporting both the method and results of our analyses. There are always fine, ethical judgements to be made by researchers and scholars as to how they use their sources of information. At the forefront of those judgements is the question of how they analyse and report those sources without either distorting them or manipulating them into an over-tidy framework of analysis. This is precisely the point at which, within the analytical process, the virtues of attentiveness and honesty meet in order to ensure that research and scholarship recognise the integrity of the subject. Brown (1998) frames these ethical considerations within a broader discussion regarding the democratisation of science and the development of what he calls ‘civic intelligence’ and modes of ‘civic communication’. Democratic scientific practice, he argues, creates ‘a link between ordinary citizens and the practice of scientific research’ (p. 211). Rather than seeing science ‘as a remote and specialised discourse driven by epistemological rules’, we should see ‘scientific enquiry as a collective, persuasive, and political activity in both its production and its use and, hence, as comprehensible within the narrative capacities of all citizens’ (p. 211). Such a ‘people’s science’, as he terms it, ensures that ‘members of the community are recognized as possessing expert knowledge about local conditions and as being capable of performing scientific research’; it ‘enables citizens to develop their own valid knowledge with their own resources’ (p. 211). It does not relinquish the notion of expertise, or indeed the value of experts, but seeks to ensure that ‘the scientific knowledge of the expert is subordinated to a larger civic intelligence of the polity’ (p. 212). A prime constraint operating on the development of the kind of democratic practice proposed by Brown is the pressure of externally imposed time-scales. Sponsors, funding councils, institutions, and public accountability systems increasingly require the rapid turn-around of data according to strict deadlines. This acceleration of the analytical process, while arguably enhancing the utility value of research and scholarship and therefore its marketability, undoubtedly dimin-

Respect • 79

ishes its capacity for methodological reflexivity. In that sense there is, as Paechter (2003) puts it, always a trade-off between ‘goodness and utility’. Publishable outcomes are what matter, in terms of professional advancement and institutional recognition. Complex argument, methodological sensitivity to the subject, and nuanced reportage are thereby put at risk. It is a sad reflection on the current research assessment regimes under which we currently labour that, had Einstein, Rawls and Wittgenstein been judged according to current performance measures, they would have been deemed ‘inactive’ in respect of their research output. Respect and Collegiality The quality of collegial relationships is highly dependent upon the virtues of attentiveness and honesty. Academic careers are shot through with difference: different priorities, different trajectories, different contracts, differences of status, different workloads, different prospects. The notion of ‘collegiality’ can, of course, serve to mask these differences, particularly the extent to which they are indicative of power differentials between academic workers. However, from the perspective of what Walker (2001) terms ‘critical professionalism’, the term could point in the direction of honestly acknowledging these differentials and, in doing so, creating a context in which their eventual eradication is no longer unthinkable. Such a context would depend crucially on our sustaining, within ourselves and for others, the dispositions of attentiveness and honesty. The acquisition and development of these dispositions requires the long haul of trustfulness: the willingness to listen, the courage to speak out, and the patience to achieve reciprocity. However, attentiveness and honesty in our professional dealings one with another are not simply matters of individual intent. They require structure: the political will to turn institutions around in such a way that they come to reflect these virtues in organisational structures that encourage mutual care and resist all forms of institutional humiliation. Such structures are in very short supply. Academic work is increasingly defined in terms of performativity and the requirements of the audit culture: ‘outcome’, ‘impact’, ‘delivery’, ‘target’ are the buzz words and the order of the day. The complex interplay of collegiality, which is itself morally valuable, is thereby seen as a means to some other end: the delivery of corporate efficiency, the achievement of performance targets, the attainment of institutional esteem. Only the virtues of attentiveness and honesty, worked through at the level of collegial practice and organisational structure, can resist this crude instrumentalism.


•

•

•

•

Pointers It would seem to be increasingly difficult for academic practitioners to feel a sense of self-worth — because of competing pressures and policy agendas and the impact of multiple accountability mechanisms. In what areas of your own professional practice do you most respect yourself? How do you show your respect for (and recognition of) others with whom you engage professionally — students, colleagues, and members of the wider public? How do you cope with what you perceive to be a lack of respect towards (and recognition of) yourself as a professional? What, for you, does respect mean with regard to your own scholarship and research? How does it impact upon your activities as a reviewer and/or referee (of books, research proposals, etc.)? What, for you, are the most significant institutional factors affecting your own and colleagues’ respect for yourselves and for one another?

CONCLUSION Doing respect is difficult within the current context, because, as Habermas (2003) puts it, ‘the all-pervasive language of the market puts all interpersonal relations under the constraints of an egocentric orientation towards one’s own preferences’ (p. 110). Habermas goes on to argue that, since ‘the social bond’ is made up of ‘mutual recognition’, it ‘cannot be spelled out in the concepts of contract, rational choice, and maximal benefit alone’ (p. 110) We have to find ways of claiming for the university a social bond based on mutual recognition of equal worth. I have argued throughout this chapter that the virtues of attentiveness and honesty that render that claim realizable are implicit in academic practice. What must be restated, and kept in mind, is that the language with which we talk and write about that practice helps make it what it is. Applied to academic practice the ‘all-pervasive language of the market’ is wholly inappropriate since it denies it any moral purposefulness. ‘Democratic common sense’, to quote from Habermas (2003) again, ‘must fear the media-induced indifference and the mindless conversational trivialization of all differences that make a difference’ (p. 114). In turning to the notion of ‘authenticity’, the insistence on developing a morally grounded language for explaining what it is that we are doing when we think we are doing it well remains at the forefront of our concerns.

6 AUTHENTICITY Courage and Compassion

authentic … relating to or denoting emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible modes of human life. (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998) The dispositions of truthfulness and respect, which we have explored in the previous two chapters, and of authenticity, which is the subject of this chapter, point towards both the self and the other. The particular virtues highlighted in respect of these dispositions are indicative of these distinct orientations: accuracy (with regard to truthfulness) and attentiveness (with regard to respect) inflect towards the self-as-agent; sincerity (with regard to truthfulness) and honesty (with regard to respect) inflect towards the other-as-agent. This chapter, which focuses on the disposition towards authenticity, is similarly oriented towards the self-as-agent, in respect of the virtue of courage, and towards the other-as-agent, in respect of the virtue of compassion. Courage and compassion, I argue, are key components of the disposition towards authenticity. An assumption underlying this set of claims is that I become virtuously disposed through my developing relationship with myself and others. These relationships, however, are temporal: they take time to develop. They are also spatial: increasingly they develop across spatial boundaries. What is at issue is the moral ontology of professional practice. It is precisely because morality is ontological — involved in my development as a moral agent — that the virtues of truth, respect and authenticity hang together: truthfulness is unrealisable without respect; 81


and truthfulness and respect rely, crucially, on the virtues of authenticity. Together these virtues gain coherence in and through the integrity of my developing practice: each is reliant upon the other; none is selfsufficient. The narrative order of the good life is deeply inter-layered in terms of the virtuous dispositions that we seek to acquire. Adorno’s (2003) magnificent diatribe against the ‘jargon of authenticity’, first published in Germany in 1964 and directed against what he saw as the mystifying tendencies implicit in the fashionable existentialism of his day, has become, forty years on, part of our collective wisdom. What, in particular, Adorno had against this particular jargon was its ascription of value to the satisfaction of immediate desire: the authentic as the here-and-now of lived experience as it washes over us. Its use, he argued, undermined the very appeal to meaning and liberation that it purported to authenticate. Few now would disagree. However, authenticity may be viewed and valued differently if we extract it from the particular frame within which Adorno located it, and re-position it within a framework constructed around recognition, deliberation and engagement. That, I shall argue, is a substantial but necessary work of retrieval.

THE NOTION OF AUTHENTICITY If authenticity is being true to ourselves … then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole. (Taylor, 1991, p. 91) Taylor (1991) in his elaboration of ‘the ethics of authenticity’ worries away at what he calls the ‘three malaises’ of modernity. Each of these ‘malaises’, he argues, is implicit in the modernist project of authenticity. The first ‘malaise’ is that of individualism interpreted as ‘self-determining freedom’ (p. 27), which taken to its extreme results in social models based on self-interest. However, without some such notion of self-determination, no social model could invest in the idea of human flourishing which relies crucially upon human agency. The second ‘malaise’ cited by Taylor is the primacy of instrumental reason, which, as he puts it ‘cannot but fortify atomism, because it induces us to see our communities, like so much else, in an instrumental perspective. But it also breeds anthropocentrism, in making us take an instrumental stance to all facets of our life and surroundings: to the past, to nature, as well as to social arrangements’ (p. 59). The third ‘malaise’, or ‘deviancy in the culture of authenticity’ (p. 59), is the way in which the structures and institutions of modernity have come to restrict choice: ‘the institutions of a

Authenticity • 83

technological society don’t ineluctably impose on us an ever-deepening hegemony of instrumental reason. But it is clear that left to themselves they have a tendency to push us in that direction’ (p. 109). It is ‘in that direction’, according to Taylor, that we are unthinkingly heading. These malaises are achievements of modernity, but they are achievements in relation to which we are deeply ambivalent in these late modern and now deeply troubled times. The task, Taylor argues, is not a jettisoning of the notion of authenticity, but ‘a work of retrieval’ (p. 23) through which we might achieve a reorientation towards recognition, deliberative modes of reasoning, and institutional engagement (see, also, Taylor, 1989). Paraphrasing what he takes to be Taylor’s and by implication his own notion of ‘authenticity’, Rorty (1992, p. 3) places a similar emphasis on its social dimensions: ‘we are what we are because of the people, real or imaginary, with whom we have talked … We are only individuals in so far as we are social. None of us has a self to be faithful to except the one that has been cobbled together in interchanges with parents and siblings, friends and enemies, churches and governments’. That, as he goes on to argue, is how authenticity impinges upon identity: ‘being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people’. The argument is compelling and in tune with the major themes advanced in the previous chapters. However, it raises serious difficulties which need to be addressed before we are in a position to undertake the kind of reorientation that Taylor himself proposes. If becoming authentic is a social process, then how does social structure impinge upon our capacity for authenticity? It is all very well to argue for recognition, deliberation and engagement, as aspects of a new orientation towards authenticity. But how are these ends and purposes to be achieved in a society structured around multiple inequalities? We may share an equal capacity for authenticity. But how can we ensure that each has the opportunities and resources necessary to fulfil that capacity? Taylor is undoubtedly aware of the importance of such questions, but somehow fails to connect with the historical reality of inequality: with what Honneth (1995) calls the sheer ‘struggle for recognition’ and what Bourdieu (2000, p. 215) characterises as a game ‘in which each player has the positive or negative score of all those who have preceded, that is, the cumulated scores of all his ancestors’. In order to engage with the moral project of authenticity, we have then to acknowledge its political dimensions. If authenticity is not to be seen as the privilege of the cultivated minority, then we need structures and practices that enable us to engage authentically with our commonalities


and differences. Such structures and practices depend crucially on the virtues of courage and compassion: the courage to become oneself and the compassion to enable others to do likewise. Courage and compassion are traditionally conceived as polarities: compassion picks up the pieces that courage leaves in its wake. Perhaps, however, courage and compassion might aspire to a different kind of complementarity, such that each sustains the other in maintaining the notion of ‘the good society’. Academic practice, at best, realises that complementarity through activities by which intellectual courage and disciplined compassion are exercised in the interests of our students, our colleagues, and our wider publics.

AUTHENTICITY AND THE EMOTIONS Before elaborating upon the virtues of authenticity as they relate to academic practice, we need to return to Taylor’s strictures regarding the primacy of instrumental reasoning in modern society. For it is precisely that mode of reasoning, and its restrictive assumptions as to what constitutes human rationality, that limits our capacity for recognition and deliberation and constrains our choices. Nussbaum (2001) reminds us that whatever else authenticity may be about, it involves a recognition of the emotions. She argues for what she terms a revised neoStoic theory of the emotions as intrinsic to intelligence. The emotions, she argues, are not alien forces to be tamed, endured or pacified, but highly discriminating responses to what is of value and significance to the agent experiencing those emotions. She traces what she terms ‘the intelligence of emotions’ to the need we all have in infancy to reconcile ourselves through recognition and reciprocity to the world of objective reality. Our emotional lives, she argues, are necessarily ambivalent because from infancy we are reconciling our own relative helplessness to a world of objects over which each of us has at best limited control. The complex process of practical reasoning through deliberation emerges from this shared experience of living our own lives together with others. It is a matter both of discovering our own authenticity and of connecting with the authenticity of others. As such it has its roots in those upheavals of thought that infants experience in terms of the contingencies of an outside world borne in upon their own helplessness. These upheavals, argues Nussbaum, are particularly significant in the development of the human infant, which is characterised by a relatively prolonged state of dependency coupled with a unique mental capacity. The emotions of the mature adult might be seen as the vestigial residue of those upheavals of thought. Thus, although we grow old, there is a

Authenticity • 85

sense in which we can never be said to have fully grown up. We are always to some extent, and in certain situations, drawn back through the emotions to those upheavals by which we first sought to reconcile ourselves to a world which we cannot fully control. In her preoccupation with the intelligence of emotions, Nussbaum is reminding us that the emotions are not blind or irrational, but, as she puts it, ‘involve judgements about important things, judgements in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own well-being, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control’ (p. 19). Grief, for example, involves judgements regarding the importance of what we have lost; we grieve because we judge the object of our grief ‘as salient for our own well-being’. Similarly, anger is to be understood, not as ‘an innate instinct of destruction’ (p. 192), but as involving judgements regarding our own life situation and the bearing of others’ actions and attitudes on that situation. To conceive of deliberation as some kind of rationalist pursuit divorced from our own emotional lives is to misconceive its relation to the way in which our life histories are shaped by the struggle for recognition: the struggle, that is, for recognition through authentic engagement.

COURAGE AND COMPASSION In considering the virtues that dispose us towards authenticity, we are necessarily focusing on dispositions that have a particularly close proximity to the intelligence of emotions. Courage, although not an emotion itself, is likely to involve strong emotional engagement; while compassion, although involving a cognitive element, might itself be defined as an emotion. Courage and compassion are related, in part at least, through their requirement that we take seriously the emotional dimension of human experience. Our prime concern is in exploring how these virtuous dispositions are implicit in our academic practice; how, in other words, that practice requires and sustains the virtues of authenticity. In conducting that exploration, however, it is important to remind ourselves that academic practice cannot be separated from our emotional lives. Insofar as it strives for authenticity it must connect vitally with the intelligence of emotions. The Virtue of Courage Courage can denote very different kinds of agency. Typically, perhaps, we associate it with acts of physical bravery whereby the agent becomes a kind of sacrificial object: the rebel, patriot or resistance fighter who


dies upon the barricades or on foreign soil protecting a homeland or an ideal. ‘Since’, as Tillich (1952, p. 5) puts it, ‘the greatest test of courage is the readiness to make the greatest sacrifice, the sacrifice of one’s life, and since the soldier is required by his profession to be always ready for this sacrifice, the soldier’s courage was, and somehow remained, the outstanding example of courage’. What such acts of courage transcend is the destiny of the victim, since victimhood lacks the will and resolution that courage requires. Physical bravery has come back to haunt us as a necessary aspect of security, community, belongingness. Mental courage is of the same order, in that it cannot be achieved simply by virtue of what happens to us. It is responsive, pro-active, and, crucially, dependent upon our dispositions. In that latter respect, courage is rather different from the other virtues we have reviewed. It is not a disposition in itself: I cannot set out to be courageous. I discover courage in myself at moments of crisis when I act spontaneously. Courage is a little like death, in that we can only prepare ourselves for the usually unforeseen moment at which courage is required. Conrad’s (1900) Lord Jim turns on precisely this point: the unpredictability of those moments at which courage is called for and the unpredictability of our response to such moments. Jim is an idealistic young man in love with the idea of heroism. Yet when his ship threatens to sink he takes what Conrad — and Jim — clearly considers the cowardly way out. He jumps clear. (The kernel of the story is based upon an actual incident widely reported in the London papers and raised in Parliament at the time. See Stape, 2007, pp. 39–40.) Jim’s idealism is not realised in action. None of us knows in advance whether, in retrospect, we shall turn out to have acted in a cowardly or a heroic fashion. We can only prepare for those unpredictable moments which call forth courage by encouraging in ourselves and others those dispositions which might dispose us towards courage. In that sense courage is a kind of subsidiary virtue. It is, nevertheless, a virtue. ‘To call an action courageous’, as Skinner (2003, Vol. 1, p. 162) puts it, ‘is not merely to describe it but to place it in a specific moral light’. Moreover, it is a virtue without which the notion of authenticity is unsustainable. Tillich (1952, pp. 4–5) defines the virtuous aspects of courage in terms of what he calls self-affirmation: ‘courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of “in spite of”. It includes the possible and, in some cases, the unavoidable sacrifice of elements which also belong to one’s being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching fulfi lment.’ This sacrifice, as Tillich goes on to argue, ‘may include pleasure, happiness, even

Authenticity • 87

Pointers • What do you understand by courage? How do you recognise it in others? How do you recognise it in your own actions and inter-actions? • For whatever reason I fail to support you in a meeting in which you require support on a contentious issue that is important to us both and on which we both broadly agree. How do you address the issue of what might be seen as my betrayal — my lack of courage? • Is courage, as you understand it, affirmed within the institutional contexts within which you work? Do you feel you work in an encouraging environment? one’s own existence … It is the beauty and goodness of courage that the good and the beautiful are actualised in it’. What is important in Tillich’s definition is not only that courage is defined through purposefulness, but that purposefulness can only be actualised in practice. That, as he puts it, is precisely ‘the beauty and goodness of courage’: it constitutes the imaginative bridge between purpose and action. For an act to be deemed courageous it must be both ‘voluntary’ and ‘heedfully’ undertaken (Skinner, 2003, Vol. 1, p. 161). Courage would be unthinkable in a world within which people did not act; but, equally, it would be unthinkable in a world within which actions were devoid of ends and purposes. It necessarily involves an element of moral agency — and of understanding. Aristotle was adamant on that last point. He defined courage as ‘the right attitude towards feelings of fear and confidence’, but also as the disposition which enables us to distinguish between ‘what we ought and ought not to fear’. By this definition, courage is not the same as fearlessness; indeed, the latter could (in Aristotle’s terms) be seen as a vice, insofar as it is one of the excesses into which courage can slip. Those who act in ignorance of what is to be feared may appear courageous, but lack the courageous capacity to act in the face of what is understood to be fearful and risk-laden. Courage is one of the dispositional resources available to human beings in identifying, acknowledging, and responding to fear (see Aristotle, 1955, pp. 127–134). The Virtue of Compassion Nussbaum (2001), developing and instantiating the theme of the intelligence of emotions discussed above, argues that compassion has three


‘cognitive elements’ or ‘cognitive requirements’ (p. 306). The first is ‘a belief or appraisal that the suffering is serious rather than trivial’ (p. 306). It involves ‘the recognition that the situation matters for the flourishing of the person in question’; it would be inappropriate to show compassion to ‘someone who has lost a toothbrush or a paper clip, or even an important item that is readily replaceable’. While what is deemed ‘trivial’ may vary according to circumstance, Nussbaum suggests that ‘there is remarkable unanimity about core instances across time and space’ (p. 307). The second ‘cognitive element’ is ‘the belief that the person does not deserve the suffering’ (p. 306). Again, the notion of just deserts is highly malleable. We often feel compassion for people whose suffering is arguably partly of their own making. Nevertheless, argues Nussbaum, ‘we are likely to feel compassion for a teenager who has been arrested for drunk driving, but not for one who has been arrested for the torture and killing of a dog. The latter does not seem to be a part of any kind of “bad fate”, even the bad fate of being sixteen’ (p. 314). The third ‘cognitive element’ is ‘the belief that the possibilities of the person who experiences the emotion are similar to those of the sufferer’ (p. 306): ‘the recognition of one’s own related vulnerability is … an important and frequently an indispensable epistemological requirement for compassion in human beings — the thing that makes the difference between viewing hungry peasants as beings whose sufferings matter and viewing them as distant objects whose experiences have nothing to do with one’s life’. Even when we feel compassion for animals, whom we know to be very different from ourselves, it is, argues Nussbaum, ‘on the basis of our common vulnerability to pain, hunger, and other types of suffering that we feel the emotion … We think, how horrible it would be to suffer pain in that way, and without hope of changing it’ (p. 319). It is this third ‘cognitive element’, in particular, which involves the development of a virtuous disposition over time. While on occasion compassion may seem to be drawn out of us ‘involuntarily’ or ‘spontaneously’, there is also a sense in which we become compassionate through the continuing exercise of our sympathetic imaginations. That capacity to imagine the plight of the other is very different from the process of identification, whereby I collapse into the identity of the other person, or empathy, which may on occasion be used egoistically without any regard for the other person’s good. With regard to the latter, Nussbaum (2001, p. 329) cites the instance of the torturer who ‘may be acutely aware of the suffering of the victim’, but who ‘believes that his purposes matter and that those of the victim do not’.

Authenticity • 89

Unlike either empathy or identification, compassion involves me in responding sympathetically to the plight of other persons by holding in emotional tension the difference between my situation and theirs. Compassion is a precondition of authenticity. It involves us in learning to connect with the sufferings of others: not to observe it dispassionately, nor to collapse into it in a state of chaotic self-surrender, but to recognise how it connects with our own actual and potential vulnerabilities and to sympathetically position ourselves in relation to it. Compassion can only be achieved through social interaction — and social interaction cannot afford to deny the depth dimension of emotional engagement.

Pointers • How do you use your own emotional intelligence to guide your relations with, and understanding of, colleagues and students? Do your emotions ever get in the way? • In what ways does your institution recognise, and support you in, the emotional work involved in academic practice? In what ways does it deny the significance of emotional engagement as a constitutive element of that practice? • How does the notion of compassion relate to your research and scholarly interests and your methods of inquiry? Is that relation of any significance?

THE INTEGRITY OF PRACTICE: AUTHENTICITY Through those virtues we acknowledge that what we share one with another is the need for recognition. We also learn to acknowledge, through the virtues, that each of us needs to be recognised, and thereby achieve authentic engagement, in different ways. The complexity of this process explains the apparent disunity of the virtues: through courage I assert my own claims, or those of my clan, to recognition (my self-asagent); through compassion I assert the right of others to recognition (the other-as-agent). Sometimes we have to choose, or have chosen for us, the appropriate virtues that would seem at the time to measure up to the moral requirements of the time or the circumstance. It is not the virtues that provide coherence, but our own moral purposefulness as agents in a world of incommensurable difference and unpredictable contingency.


This process of achieving agency and authenticity within the complex interconnectivities of social engagement is precisely what learning is all about. Learning is not what we do once we have achieved agency and authenticity; it is the means whereby such agency and authenticity is achieved in the first place. In turning to the world, I at once connect with the world as object and at the same time gain the measure of my own subjectivity as intrinsic to that world. I acknowledge, that is, not only my own capacity to learn and to go on learning, but the capacity of others to do likewise. Learning is the means by which I both flourish as an individual and connect as a social being. It is the means by which I contribute to the making of a society, the goodness of which depends not only upon my actions but also upon the virtuous dispositions that guide those actions. ‘In that way’, as Raz (1998, p. 387) puts it, ‘a person’s life is (in part) of his own making. It is a normative creation, a creation of new values and reasons. It is the way our past forms the reasons which apply to us at present.’ For the academic practitioner this process of self-creation is inextricably bound up with the activities of teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality — and, crucially, with how these various activities relate within their own academic practice. Part of the argument running through the central chapters of this book is that these activities hang together by virtue of their reliance upon, and nurturing of, a common set of dispositions. What Raz (1998, p. 396) calls a ‘maximal’ form of life can only be achieved within academic practice when these activities complement one another because only then can the academic practitioner become ‘a person whose life is of that kind [which] cannot improve ... by acquiring additional virtues’. There are other ways of living a good life, which require other virtuous dispositions and other kinds of activity, but for academic practitioners those dispositions are gained and sustained through the core activities that comprise their practice. Authenticity and Teaching Teaching is deeply rooted in the notion of authenticity. Students expect their teachers to teach from the authority of their own learning. Such teaching requires courage, since it involves not just the transmission of facts or the regurgitation of other people’s ideas, but the communication of the teacher’s own unique perspective on those facts and those ideas. At best, the teacher models courage in her communication of that perspective within a forum that is open to criticism from students and peers. Putting it rather differently, we might say that the courage of teaching lies in the capacity and willingness of the teacher to profess. Teaching cannot be reduced to facilitation, regardless of how important it is to ensure that our teaching does indeed facilitate learning.

Authenticity • 91

One of the ways in which teachers ensure that their teaching connects with learning is by encouraging their students in such a way that they achieve their own authority as learners: through argument and debate, synthesis and analysis, inference and critique, completion and acknowledged achievement. Teachers, of course, differ greatly in the pedagogical processes whereby they pursue these ends. Indeed, their achievement of pedagogical style might be seen as another aspect of their authenticity. What is crucial, however, is that the courage of the teacher is put at the disposal of the student, with a view to encouraging learning. That end can only be achieved, however, if teachers are compassionately disposed to the particular sufferings of their students. The sufferings of the learner are manifold: not trivial worries, but suffering relating to their developing identities as students and persons. This student suffers through his struggle with writing academic prose in a second language the conceptual configuration of which is radically different from his first language in which he knows himself to be adept and articulate. Can I, as a teacher, connect with that suffering? Another student is suffering from the dissonance between the rigid values instilled into her through her upbringing and the critical perspective required of her on the particular course she has undertaken. Again, can I connect? The point is that learning necessarily involves forms of genuine suffering (notwithstanding the great joy and happiness that learning brings) which teachers need not only to observe and record but to respond to with sympathy and imagination. The virtue of compassion is important not just as an end in itself, but because it enables us as teachers to recognise and focus on the specific learning needs of the student. It also enables us to understand how those needs relate to the student’s developing identity as a learner. Through the virtuous disposition of compassion we are able to resist easy instrumentalist responses to those needs and confirm the importance of deliberative modes of thoughtful engagement as the basis of teaching and learning. Teaching thereby becomes more demanding. It also becomes, however, a moral endeavour: a form of moral engagement whereby the achievements of learning, gained very often against the odds, are fully acknowledged. Teaching is not just a set of skills and competencies, although it necessarily involves these elements; teaching is nothing if not morally purposeful. Authenticity in Research and Scholarship Both research and scholarship require researchers and scholars to work their way through to a reasoned position in respect of what they are studying. They do this through the practice of weighing evidence, drawing inferences, developing arguments and analyses, providing


interpretations, drawing tentative conclusions, etc. Such activities require courage, since, notwithstanding the complementary requirement of constant self-questioning, they involve a kind of self-affirmation. That affirmation is achieved through the exercise of independent judgement, through inferential leaps, through originality of argument and analysis, through the development of interpretive frames, through summary and synthesis, etc. Self-affirmation is intrinsic to the practice of research and scholarship. That practice also, however, requires researchers and scholars to recognise the authenticity of the subjects of their research and scholarship and of their readers (or, to employ the popular parlance, their end-users). Research and scholarship that are ethically oriented ensure that such recognition is an intrinsic feature of the enquiry: the object of study incorporates not only the subjectivity of that which is studied, but also the subjectivities of those who are doing the studying. It involves, in other words, an acknowledgement that my own self-affirmation as researcher and scholar cannot be privileged above that of those for whom — and, in some cases, on whom — I am conducting my enquiry. The authentic voice of research and scholarship is just one among many such potentially authentic voices. Within the social sciences and humanities, but also increasingly within the natural sciences, this ethical orientation is now well established: research and scholarship are complicatedly embroiled in the world they seek to understand and interpret. Such understanding and interpretation must, therefore, be based upon an acknowledgement of multiple authenticities, in relation to which the particular authenticity of research and scholarship can only claim authority in respect of its orientation towards the courage and compassion implicit in thoughtful enquiry. Nussbaum (2001) argues that compassion is rooted in the individual’s early sense of wonder at the strangeness of the world; a sense, that is, of a world constantly confronting us with the problem of difference and connectivity. To wonder at things is not the same as showing compassion towards those things, but without wonder compassion would not be possible. Authenticity and Collegiality Our professional relationships as academics tend to be determined by positionality: status, prestige, salary scales, etc. Such factors determine, for example, who speaks to whom, under what circumstances, in what register, and to what ends. The virtues of courage and compassion, however, require us to set these relationships on a different footing: not to deny positional power, but, in acknowledging it, to reach out to what-

Authenticity • 93

ever reciprocity is possible. They require us, in other words, to recognise our own and others’ capacity for human agency, notwithstanding the power differentials that subvert such recognition. In so doing they require us to recognise one another as sentient beings actively engaged in the struggle to integrate the personal and the professional, the private and the public, the inward-looking and the outward-looking. Strong, collegial forms of institutional association measure up to these requirements. They acknowledge, not that we are all one, but that we are all very different and that these differences require of us both courage and compassion: the courage to maintain our differences and the compassion to look beyond those differences to a shared bedrock of experience. Good colleagues, I would maintain, are like that. They do not pretend to be in your position. However, they respect the position you are in and seek to listen to the difficulties your position brings with it; and they expect of you a likeminded disposition. This is the only way that, within a highly stratified institutional context, collegiality as an ideal can survive. It relies crucially, however, on senior staff within universities taking their collegial responsibilities seriously. Seniority carries with it not only the increased responsibilities of management and administration, but also the necessary responsibilities of nurturing a future generation of researchers, scholars and teachers (which requires friendship, institutional memory, continuity of generations, a shared idiom, etc.). Far too often the attainment of senior professorial status brings with it the assumption of a kind of god-given right to do one’s own thing on one’s

• • • •

Pointers Is your own academic practice a means whereby you achieve, or hope to achieve, authenticity? Does authenticity matter? (Does it count?) Is authenticity a key factor in all aspects of your professional life — teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality — or does it take a back seat in one, other, or all of these? How, for you, does authenticity relate to truthfulness and respect? Can I be authentic, as an academic practitioner, without being accurate and sincere, attentive and honest? Do courage and compassion figure in your sense of your own professional identity? Do you feel able to — or inhibited in — using such terms as courage and compassion in your routine discussions with colleagues?


own terms; it is seen, that is, in terms of rights rather than responsibilities. Genuine academic leadership, however, requires of its leaders that they take their collegial responsibilities seriously by supporting and encouraging the professional and, indeed, personal well-being of other colleagues. Professors are, of course, there to profess; but they are also there to enable others to profess.

CONCLUSION Authenticity is about becoming ourselves and, in so doing, enabling others to become themselves. It is central to what we have come to understand as learning: not the initiation into received wisdoms, but the engagement with knowing as a cumulative, public endeavour. It is through the shared practice of learning that we sustain our struggle towards authenticity. We can only do authenticity — or, indeed, truthfulness and respect — together. That is why the activities of academic practice, and the virtues that sustain them, are so important; and why, as academic workers, we exercise moral agency in and through the conduct of our research, scholarship and teaching. Agency is always about the development of our selves as agents in relation to the development of others as agents. Agency necessarily involves reciprocity. Magnanimity is perhaps the greatest expression of the Janus-faced nature of moral agency: its turning inward to the self-as-agent and outward to the other-as-agent. Etymologically, magnanimity means great of soul, which suggests a reaching out of the self to others. (Generosity has a similar etymological ambivalence — rooted in gens-gentis [‘tribe’] yet extra-tribal in its implicit notion of hospitality towards those outside the tribe.) That metaphor seems appropriate — reaching out to the world, to other people, to the cosmo-polis. In the following chapter the notion is linked to the idea of autonomy, on the one hand, and care on the other: ‘care for the world’. The latter phrase, quoted previously, is Hannah Arendt’s. It provides a necessary bridge between the moral and civic considerations that are both central to the argument.

7 MAGNANIMITY Autonomy and Care

magnanimity … ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from Latin magnanimus (from magnus ‘great’ + animus ‘soul’) + -ous (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998) A vital assumption underlying my argument is that some kind of restoration is required if universities are to fulfil their role of civic leadership within a good society. Another key assumption is that we, as academic workers, can contribute significantly to that restoration by reclaiming the moral bases of our academic professionalism. The idiom in which we now routinely speak of learning within the university has become devoid of moral content. Much of the literature on teaching and learning in higher education, for example, treats pedagogy as if it were a set of techniques, rather than a highly complex practice that relies upon the subtle interplay between the activities of teaching, research, scholarship and collegiality. (Rowland, 2000, is a notable exception; see his discussion of ‘love of learning’, pp. 74–84.) We need to restore an idiom — a way of speaking, writing and thinking about academic practice — that reinstates the moral dimension. A clearer articulation of the virtuous dispositions implicit in academic practice is one way of setting about that task — fundamental to which is the need to restore relationship, moral purposefulness and social connectedness as central to the notion of academic professionalism. These themes — of relationship, purpose and connectedness — have emerged as central to the analysis of the moral foundations of academic practice. Practice is relational; it is purposeful; it assumes social 95


connectivity. Similarly, the goods of practice predispose the practitioner towards the relational, the purposeful and the socially connective: inwards to the collected self, outwards to the collective good. We have seen, in the previous three chapters, how this duality of structure is reflected in the virtuous dispositions associated with truthfulness, respect and authenticity. In the present chapter, the argument turns to magnanimity; and, in so doing, it adds a further dimension to that duality: a cosmopolitan dimension. Relationship, purposefulness and connectedness are now, unmistakeably and irrefutably, located in a world of radical, pluralistic difference. It is, to borrow Sacks’ (2002) phrase, to ‘the dignity of difference’ that we now turn in considering the dispositions associated with the virtue of magnanimity.

THE NOTION OF MAGNANIMITY ... ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality (Derrida, 2002, p. 17) Magnanimity points to the generous, unselfish, kind and benevolent aspects of human nature. To describe practice as magnanimous suggests a similar reaching out by the practitioner in a spirit of generosity, altruism, kindness and benevolence. The moral endpoint of magnanimity, to borrow Berger’s (2007) phrase, is to ‘hold everything dear’. Academic practice necessarily involves this kind of reaching out: to new forms of understanding; to different points of view; to new students, colleagues and readerships; to new media and new ways of saying whatever it is one came to say. It is not just that magnanimity is a useful optional extra for the academic to acquire; but that it is central to whatever it means to be an academic. Without magnanimity one simply cannot teach, conduct worthwhile research and scholarship, or contribute to the collegiality of the workplace and broader field of practice. Magnanimity is a necessary plank in the moral foundations of academic practice. However, in order to be a generous, unselfish, kind and benevolent practitioner — in order to ‘hold everything dear’ — one needs to have a strong sense of professional identity: a sense of one’s professional self as collected and gathered, grounded and purposeful. In order to reach out, we need some firm ground to stand on and a sense of what we are trying to grasp and why. Of course, our reach invariably exceeds our grasp — we over-reach ourselves — but that is all part of what it means to be purposeful. ‘Today’s realism will appear tomorrow as short-sighted blundering. Today’s idealism is the realism of the future’ (A.J.P. Taylor, quoted in Foot, 1999, p. 218). The crucial point is that magnanimity,

Magnanimity • 97

which appears to be the most gregarious and extrovert of the virtues so far discussed in these central chapters, relies perhaps most heavily on a strong sense of professional identity and purpose: the point at which our recognition of other persons as agents confronts our recognition of the self as agent. One of the arguments advanced by the parliamentarians against the royal prerogative in the run-up to the English Civil War was that people cannot be good unless they are free. In order to be a good citizen and contribute to the wellbeing of the state, argued Milton and Winstanley, people must have the freedom to exercise their moral agency: without that freedom there can be no agency; without agency there can be no agents to contribute to the public good; and without a sense of the public good there can be no citizens — just subjects. Central to this line of republican argument, which resulted in the judicial execution of the then head of state, is the idea that in order to be part of a free world we must ourselves be free persons. (See Rickword, 1949.) This is a crucial idea within the moral framework suggested in this and the previous three chapters: we cannot be magnanimous in our recognition and promotion of other people’s agency and identity unless we have discovered — and are allowed to exercise — our own agency and identity. The moral structure of human practice is dualistic: it inflects inwards to the self as agent and outward to the other as agent. This duality is central to academic identity: we learn how to teach by first having learnt how to learn. We are able to foster in others a love of learning because we have ourselves learnt to love learning. The ‘doctorate’ is traditionally a licence to teach granted to those who have provided evidence of their own capacity for independent learning. Those who had no sense of themselves as capable and functioning learners could not possibly describe themselves as teachers. If they or others attempted to do so, we would be right in assuming that some gross and embarrassing category error had occurred — as if a water hog had been described as a vegetable or a geranium had been categorised as a mammal. Similarly, research and scholarship are deeply reflexive activities, in that the understandings and insights they generate about the human, material and social world inevitably involve an element of personal knowledge — a sense of commitment and engagement by those who are seeking to understand. The goods of academic practice derive from a process that is necessarily reciprocal, dialogical and deliberative. Magnanimity requires a soul (an animus) — a collected and gathered self — that is capable of being great (magnus) — big-hearted and outward looking — in its recognition of the animus inherent in others. The greater the differences


that have to be reconciled, the greater the magnanimity required. For example, teaching students whose backgrounds are very different from one’s own may be challenging and rewarding precisely because it demands greater reserves of magnanimity in reaching out to where those students are positioned as learners. Similarly, working in teaching or research contexts with colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds and with different presuppositions raises the stakes in terms of the degree of magnanimity required of each individual. It is relatively easy to reach out to what is familiar and safe; it is more difficult — and much riskier — to reach out to what is unfamiliar and strange. That reaching out, in magnanimity and hospitality, to what is unfamiliar and strange is what Derrida (2002, pp. 16–17) defines as the ‘ethic of understanding’: ‘hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality’. Derrida is here suggesting not only that there is a necessary relation between hospitality and understanding, but that implicit in that relation is an ethic: to open oneself to what is different or, in Derrida’s terms, ‘foreign’ is to open oneself to new understandings, new beginnings — and, in so doing, to adopt a moral stance to the world.

TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN MAGNANIMITY Egoism can be opposed only by plurality, which is a frame of mind in which the self, instead of being enwrapped in itself as if it were the whole world, regards itself as a citizen of the world. (Kant, quoted in Arendt, 2003, p. 141) What is unfamiliar and strange is increasingly being laid at the door of a supposedly new thing: globalisation. But, of course, globalisation is not a new thing. The East India Company was established by London’s merchant class in 1599 ‘for the honour of our native country and for the advancement of trade’ (as the petition to the then Queen put it). It was, as Shapiro (2006, p. 303) points out, ‘a seminal moment in the history of global capitalism’. It drew a line between the old chivalric values associated with an earlier era (of plunder and appropriation) and ushered in a new era of trade and commerce (of slavery and misappropriation). By 1599 the middle class, the social engine of global capitalism, was on the march. In the 21st century globalisation is no doubt a more complicated

Magnanimity • 99

affair. Information transfer is now virtually instantaneous; cash flow across countries and continents is constant; produce from all over the world is readily available at the local supermarket; holidaying abroad is no longer the priority of the privileged. The long march of the bourgeoisie seems sometimes to be ending, unthinkingly, on a crowded beach in the Canary Islands — or perhaps, for the haute bourgeoisie, in a village in Tuscany or Provence. But — and this is the crucial point — on that crowded beach, or in that global village, globalisation also means confronting and coming to terms with difference: becoming worldly; becoming the kind of person who belongs unconditionally to the world regardless of national and/or religious affiliations; becoming, in a word, cosmopolitan. That involves a Copernican shift of social mores and moral values. The sun is no longer revolving around our little earth. The relation between the self as agent and the other as agent has radically altered: the former is no longer the prime mover. Globalisation always, complicatedly, cuts both ways. Magnanimity within this changed cosmos involves reaching out to, and accommodating, what is unknown, strange and radically different. It denotes a new kind of openness or hospitality. It means, in practical terms, working with colleagues and students from very different cultural and geographical backgrounds from our own: it means working with students who may be operating in their second or even third language; it means working with people of very different religious beliefs and customs to one’s own. It means letting one’s imagination go walkabout; or, as Young-Bruehl (2006, p. 166) puts it, being ‘welltravelled; not isolated but connected; not provincial but cosmopolitan’. In order to operate in this way one has to be able to stand one’s own professional ground, while at the same time grasping imaginatively the cultural space and professional positioning of the other. That requires new kinds of skills and understandings; new forms of mediation and brokerage; new ways of reaching out with confidence. It adds a wholly new dimension to whatever it means to be magnanimous. Talking recently with a student regarding her work, I was reminded that the language (English) within which she was required to operate was at a tangent with the conceptual apparatus implicit in her own mother tongue. The challenge was not just linguistic, but conceptual and ontological. The terms within which our discussion was being conducted had to be carried across into a different way of thinking and configuring the world: a word such as ‘policy’, for example, had in translation a completely different set of connotations, associations and resonances. This is challenging stuff for both teachers and learners because it requires of both a meeting of minds shaped within very


different and sometimes opposing cultural and political climes. That, anyway, is the common ground upon which I and my students and colleagues, from diverse cultural, geographical and intellectual backgrounds, meet and converse — with, as Sacks (2002) might put it, ‘the dignity of difference’.

AUTONOMY AND CARE Globalisation means, among other things, that the unfamiliar and strange are everywhere: no longer a world apart, but part of our world of difference. The unfamiliar and strange is now local, next door, round the corner, on the street. It is everywhere: we are all becoming increasingly familiar with what is unfamiliar and strange. Within this world of difference magnanimity is of the utmost importance. As argued above, magnanimity, while outward looking, relies on a strong sense of selfhood: a sense, that is, of one’s own autonomy and capacity for selfdetermination. Only an autonomous person can care for the autonomy of others; without autonomy, care is likely to collapse into dependency. Similarly, only a caring person can ensure that autonomy is disposed towards magnanimity; without care, autonomy collapses into selfregard. Autonomy and care are the complementary and constitutive virtues comprising magnanimity. The Virtue of Autonomy Autonomy is valuable only if exercised in pursuit of the good. The ideal of autonomy requires only the availability of morally acceptable options. (Raz, 1998, p. 381) It may seem strange to categorise autonomy as a virtue. As mentioned above it, it can topple over into a self-centred view of the world and self-serving modes of behaviour — at which point, I would argue, it is no longer autonomy. Autonomy is not synonymous with self-interest. On the contrary, autonomy means having the capability to function as a free agent in the world of human affairs: precisely the capability that self-interest denies those who live exclusively self-interested lives. Nor, however, can individual autonomy be collapsed into collective autonomy, without risking its own integrity. As Todorov (2003, pp. 7–8), drawing on an historical (and historic) instance, argues, ‘in the wake of the French Revolution, liberal minds ... realized full well that the power that had passed from the king to the people’s representatives remained just as absolute (if not more so)’. He continues: ‘the revolutionaries believed they were breaking away from the ancien regime, but

Magnanimity • 101

in truth they were perpetuating one of its most damaging features’. The damaging feature in question was the denial of individual autonomy: ‘the individual aspires to autonomy no less than the collectivity, which can flourish only if the individual is protected not only from powers that lie outside his domain (such as the divine right of kings) but also from the people and its representatives’. The virtue of autonomy is, then, delicately and somewhat precariously poised between two opposing forces: that of self-interest and that of collective interest. (The reductio ad absurdum of the former is a kind of autism, and of the latter a kind of automaton-ism.) Autonomy is the virtuous ‘mean’ between these competing polarities — and, indeed, between other sets of polarities (such as dependency, on the one hand, and over-assertiveness on the other). Leaning too far either way, magnanimity risks losing that capability that is its defining feature: the capability, that is, of the individual to exercise her or his agency in the complex and pluralistic world of human action. To become autonomous is to become self-directed and self-motivated, purposeful and forward-looking, resourceful and self-reliant — and, crucially, to become increasingly alert to the fact that other people are becoming autonomous in similar sorts of ways. One cannot be autonomous entirely on one’s own; one requires a polity — the democratic rationale of which involves recognition of the autonomy of each of its members. Academic work necessarily involves becoming increasingly autonomous. Autonomy is not a right; nor is it a principle; nor a prerequisite. It is gained through the acquisition of dispositions that can be acquired only through engagement in, and commitment to, a particular practice. Self-direction, self-motivation, purposefulness, a sense of forward trajectory, resourcefulness and self-reliance do not come ready made — nor can they simply be granted as some kind of employment right or contractual principle. The sense of where we are going and why, of the resources available to us on the way, can be achieved only in the course of our development as scholars, teachers and researchers working with others who are similarly and variously engaged within their respective fields and institutions. Becoming autonomous is a complex process of social engagement: we learn from others’ successes and mistakes, their guidance and criticism, their example and legacy; we learn from the students we teach, the colleagues with whom we work, the books we read, and the evidence we gather and seek to interpret. We become autonomous together — or not at all. We do not, however, all become autonomous in the same way. As Raz (1998, pp. 398– 399) points out: ‘Excellence in the pursuit of goods involves possession of the appropriate virtues. Where the goods are varied in character, so


that they display varied merits or advantages, their successful pursuit requires different virtues’. There are necessarily more goods than can be chosen by one person — ‘more virtues than can be perfected by one person’. Some virtues, moreover, are incompatible — one good may have to be relinquished for the sake of another. In choosing the goods of academic practice one relinquishes one’s claim on the goods that might have been acquired had one made different choices. Autonomy, however, is a virtue shared by all those who, by whatever route, are acquiring the virtuous dispositions appropriate to, and necessary for, their practice. Soldiering and priesthood require very different virtuous dispositions, not all of which may be compatible, but they both offer autonomy to those who are committed to the choice they have made. Because becoming autonomous involves becoming increasingly aware of other people’s autonomy, it necessarily involves a heightened sense of the unpredictability of one’s own ends and purposes and requires an increased circumspection regarding the ends and purposes of others. Autonomy means being open to the unpredictable in one’s teaching, scholarship and research. To respond to the question posed (as opposed to the question one might have anticipated), to follow the unexpected lead (as opposed to anticipated lead), to reformulate the research question in the light of the evidence gathered (as opposed to sticking doggedly to the originally formulated question): these are the marks of the academic practitioner who is growing into her or his practice and, in so doing, achieving autonomy. Pointers • In what areas of your work are you most likely to experience a sense of autonomy and be in a position to exercise your autonomy? In what areas do you feel less able to act autonomously? What are the most important factors determining your autonomy as an academic practitioner? • Do you have a clear sense of intellectual focus regarding your work as an academic practitioner? Does this focus provide a sense of coherence and purposefulness across your various activities? Or is it a source of tension? • How do you cope with disagreements at the level of values and purposes? How do you react when you feel that your own autonomy is being challenged or even threatened? Does your notion of autonomy include the possibility of compromise?

Magnanimity • 103

The Virtue of Care In embracing goals and commitments, in coming to care about one thing or another, one progressively gives shape to one’s life, determines what would count as a successful life and what would be a failure. (Raz, 1998, p. 387) Care suggests a reaching out of the self to the other — the characteristic gesture of magnanimity. As discussed above, it presupposes a grounded, autonomous self from which to reach out, since it involves understanding the world from the other person’s point of view while continuing to understand it from one’s own. The teacher who, fully conversant with her subject, is able to understand why a particular student is not able to grasp some aspect of it is practising what I understand by care. Only by utilising her knowledge of the field as a whole is the teacher able to understand what exactly her student is failing to understand — and why. If the teacher were to identify entirely with the student’s ignorance, then she would be no help whatsoever to the student. In that sense ‘caring for’ is very different from ‘identifying with’. The reporting of applied research similarly requires care in understanding the needs of users and readers. The recent emphasis on the end users of research is sometimes viewed negatively as a potential infringement of academic freedom. However, there seems no point whatsoever in designing and/or reporting applied research in such a way that it fails to address in a comprehensible manner the concerns of those it is seeking to inform and/or challenge. Decisions regarding the focus, design, and dissemination of applied research require care for the contexts within which the research aims to have relevance. To have integrity the research must faithfully report its findings; but to have relevance it must also ensure that those findings address the concerns of the users and are couched in terms that are comprehensible to them. That does not, of course, preclude reportage that challenges the presuppositions and received wisdom of the users of research. But it does require care for their concerns and contexts and an understanding of the way in which they view those contexts. Care is also required in our collegial relationships, particularly in those areas of work where we may have specific leadership responsibilities. Employers have a legally binding duty of care towards employees and within universities this duty is delegated to faculty and department heads, course directors, principal investigators, etc. At the very least those in these kinds of leadership position need to express that duty of care in their professional relationships and in the organisational procedures for


which they have oversight. One is duty bound to take into account the point of view of the colleague who, for example, feels aggrieved, insufficiently well-informed, unfairly passed over for promotion, unduly stressed, or discriminated against. Too often this requirement is seen merely as a bureaucratic requirement. Strong leadership, however, seeks to inculcate care into the culture of the institution and thereby ensure that colleagues share and take seriously one another’s concerns. Care involves sympathetic imagination: the capacity to imagine what it might be like to view the world, and experience it, from a different position and perspective. That capacity is an essential component of judgement; as Young-Bruehl (2006, p. 166) puts it, ‘judging presupposes being able to see what the world is like from another’s perspective’. That, as she goes on to argue, ‘does not mean adopting another’s judgement or agreeing with another’s opinion, or even empathizing with another’s experience or reading his or her mind. It simply means using your imagination to see things from another’s standpoint’. In order to judge a piece of writing (whether a student assignment, a masters or doctoral thesis, an article submitted for publication, a book for scholarly review, or even a novel read purely for pleasure) I must first understand what its author is trying to do — and why. Even if my judgement of the particular perspective and standpoint adopted by the author is finally negative, I must first use my imagination to understand that perspective and see things from that authorial standpoint. Magnanimity is rooted in care because without it the magnanimous gesture would be just that — a gesture. Care renders that gesture meaningful and purposeful: it provides it with a moral endpoint. Magnanimity is not any old reaching-out. It is the kind of reaching-out exemplified Pointers • How would you characterise the ‘one thing or another’ that in your professional life you care about in such a way as to progressively give shape to your life and provide you with a guiding norm for judging success and failure? • How do you encourage your students to gain awareness of what they care about and derive motivation from? Do you think it is part of your own duty of care to take this kind of interest in the well-being of your students? • Has your own sense of what you care about changed significantly in the course of your academic career? Do you ever lose the sense of what you care about and why you care about it? And, if so, how do you attempt to regain it?

Magnanimity • 105

by those who in their ‘care about one thing or another’ progressively give ‘shape’ to their lives and thereby determine ‘what would count as a successful life and what would be a failure’ (Raz, 1998, p. 387). What Raz is saying is that we must judge ourselves, and one another, in terms of our continuing commitment to, and engagement in, what we have chosen to care about — and of our developing understanding of what that commitment and engagement mean in practice.

THE INTEGRITY OF PRACTICE: MAGNANIMITY Magnanimity is a major binding element across the various activities that comprise academic practice. Throughout this chapter I have used the metaphor of reaching out (in care to others from a position of autonomous selfhood) to capture what is distinctive about magnanimity. It is difficult to conceive of teaching (as opposed to training) that does not reach out to the learner; or of research and scholarship (as opposed fact finding) that does not reach out to what is as yet unclear or only partially understood; or of collegiality (as opposed to organisational management) that does not reach out to colleagues and to their particular professional concerns. Devoid of magnanimity, the activities of teaching, research and scholarship, and collegiality would not just be the poorer; they would be different kinds of things. We are not talking here about alternative perspectives on, or models of, these various activities, but about their irreducible core. A colleague once told me that a student of hers who was involved in a collaborative community-based research project had spoken excitedly about how she was ‘learning stuff I didn’t even know’. It was for my colleague an epiphany: a moment of breakthrough, of new understanding, of real joy. Her student was excited and motivated because she was, through learning, moving beyond herself, reaching out. The student was a school student, but she might have been an undergraduate or postgraduate student, a doctoral or post-doctoral student, a member of faculty. She had understood that research and scholarship are about moving from what you know, and are sure of, to what you do not know and are unsure about: the kind of reaching out that involves magnanimity. Magnanimity and Teaching During my first week as an undergraduate, I and my fellow undergraduates were addressed by a senior and somewhat lofty member of academic staff. We were informed that we were very fortunate to have gained a place in that particular institution, since it existed to advance the serious work of original research and scholarship. We were welcomed, and the person in question hoped we would have a good time and assured us that


we would be tolerated provided (as he put it) we kept our heads down and our noses to the grindstone. In the event, few of us managed to fulfil the conditions of his proviso. It was, after all, 1968 — not a time for keeping one’s head below the parapet. But the message was crystal clear: you must come to us on our terms, because we have no intention of reaching out to you (and, indeed, no conception of what that might mean). It is, hopefully, unthinkable that university entrants would be addressed in a similar manner today, although in a few institutions some students may receive subliminal messages to much the same effect. Teachers at every level of education have no doubt always grumbled about the quality of the material they have to work on: ‘they’re just not motivated’, ‘they lack the basic skills’, ‘they don’t know how to structure an argument’, etc. Increasingly this deficit view of learners seems to be creeping into universities. Such comments are no doubt understandable as off-the-cuff gripes in the middle of a hectic term’s teaching. However, they completely miss the point regarding what it is to be a teacher: teachers motivate, provide relevant skills, draw students into argument and debate; otherwise they cannot claim to be teachers. If teachers are not centrally concerned with reaching out to their students and meeting their educational needs, then whatever it is they are doing cannot be categorised as teaching. This is fundamental. There may, or may not, be an issue regarding the quality of student admissions to particular institutions. (This point is touched on further in the final chapter.) The responsibility of the academic to the student once he or she has registered is, however, incontrovertible. The raison d’être of academics, as teachers, is to encourage learning — just as that of the medical doctor or surgeon is to heal. Medical doctors cannot shuffle off their professional responsibilities by grumbling about the quality of the patients under their care. Similarly teachers, at whatever level, cannot retain a shred of academic professionalism if they persist in excusing themselves on the grounds that their students will not or cannot learn: the self-pleading betrays a woeful misconception regarding the ends and purposes of teaching. Teaching is about encouraging people to learn; and encouraging people to learn is about helping them find reasons for taking their own learning seriously; and helping them do that involves reaching out to them beyond our existing horizons. Teaching necessarily involves magnanimity. Magnanimity in Research and Scholarship Research and scholarship are centrally concerned with enhancing our knowledge and understanding of the world through interpretation, analysis and experiment. There are widely differing views as to how

Magnanimity • 107

research and scholarship should be conducted, and why: the methodological and disciplinary tribes clustering around the totemic slogans of qualitative, quantitative, positivist, post-modernist, experimental, interpretive (etc., etc., etc.) paradigms are countless. Few, however, would disagree that what we are trying to do through our research and scholarship is understand what we do not as yet understand — or gain a clearer understanding of what we as yet only partially understand. Research and scholarship are the supreme emblems of an autonomous self that is seeking to move beyond itself — reaching out in curiosity and a spirit of enquiry. They are inherently magnanimous. Magnanimity in the acknowledgement of the contributions made by particular individuals to the research process and its outcomes continues to be a vexatious question. Research contract workers (i.e., researchers employed to work on a particular project and funded through that project) may be obliged to move on to other contracts prior to the completion of the project and thereby miss out on joint authorship of materials relating to the research — and possibly on adequate acknowledgement of their contribution to the earlier phases of the project. The failure to acknowledge significant contributions to the research process is a recurring theme among doctoral and post-doctoral students, research fellows and research contract workers, and junior members of faculty. When and where it occurs, it represents a failure of magnanimity — and a diminution of the standards to which all research and scholarship should aspire. Most staff and student research activity is now governed by ethical guidelines regarding the duty of care towards animal and human research subjects. These guidelines may seem cumbersome and bureaucratic, especially when one is dealing with more than one authorising agency — each with different procedures, mechanisms and formalities regarding validation. They certainly generate an enormous amount of paperwork. However, they are of importance in ensuring that research and scholarship interconnect with the wider ethical interests and concerns of society. They are, as it were, the price one pays, in terms of duty of care, for the privilege of autonomy within one’s own field of enquiry. Magnanimity and Collegiality Collegiality means among other things understanding the professional concerns and aspirations of one’s colleagues. It involves listening to colleagues on matters relating to these concerns and aspirations: for example, reading the published work of colleagues and (if and when invited to do so) their work in progress. As academics we are, to a large extent, judged and financially rewarded on the quality and quantity of


our academic publications. It takes magnanimity, therefore, to commit time on a routine basis to reading critically and commenting positively on the work of colleagues with a view to enhancing the professional development and well-being of the other person. In many institutions and academic departments this is a much neglected area of academic leadership and support. Above all, magnanimity shows itself in the ways in which we recognise one another’s academic achievements and support one another in gaining wider recognition for those achievements. Given the highly and increasingly competitive contexts within which we operate, this is by no means easy. It is particularly difficult in matters relating to internal promotion, where the applicants may be considerable in number but the opportunities extremely limited. This is one of the points at which collegiality — and magnanimity — so often break down. It is also the point at which, for some academics, disappointment, bitterness, a prolonged sense of blockage and constraint can begin to set in. The reasons for this are largely structural and systemic and need to be confronted as such. Nevertheless, the mutual recognition by colleagues of one another’s achievements — the development of a culture of magnanimity — does serve to render the institution a little more benign. How we prioritise our time in relation to colleagues is all important; and, of course, how we prioritise such time is largely determined by the priorities of the institutions within which we work. It tends to be collegial gatherings (for example, seminars convened for the purpose of sharing ideas or talking about work in progress) that are sidelined in the interests of routine business meetings or meetings concerned with planning and with responses to whatever accountability exercise is looming up. Moreover, staff forums such as departmental and faculty meetings can become so preoccupied with decision-making — with the bureaucratisation of the decision-making process and the achievement at all costs of a consensus — that they further reduce the opportunities for deliberation and the sharing of ideas and differing viewpoints. In terms of the collegial well-being of any work setting, this drift towards the managerial can, over time, have deleterious consequences. It is the means by which, with the best of intentions, people come to conceive of themselves as little cogs in a big machine. That, as Arendt (1965) highlighted, is how banality works.

CONCLUSION Each of the virtues with which we have been preoccupied in this and the previous three chapters — the virtues of truthfulness, respect,

Magnanimity • 109

•

•

•

•

Pointers In what area of your own professional practice do you feel yourself to be most magnanimous? Are there particular areas in which magnanimity as discussed in this chapter seems irrelevant or of less importance? In the previous pages the image of ‘reaching out’ has been used to depict the impulse towards magnanimity. In what sense do you ‘reach out’ through your teaching, research and scholarship, and collegial relationships? Magnanimity suggests an extrovert disposition — an orientation towards the gregarious. Is this impulse at odds with the reflective and more introspective qualities that are also required of, and acquired through, many of the activities that comprise academic practice? Do you have any models of magnanimity — past or present colleagues, perhaps? Or former teachers? Students even? — that are, or have been, important to you in constructing your own professional identity?

authenticity and magnanimity — are centrally concerned with what MacMurray (1961) terms ‘persons in relation’. There are, of course, other virtues — and related dispositions — with similar concerns. This and the previous three chapters stand, therefore, as explorative studies in the development of a professional ethics of academic practice as social practice. Magnanimity, as we have seen, points inward to the self-as-agent and outward to the agent-as-other. Similarly, authenticity (as discussed in the previous chapter) is never just a matter of self-affirmation; rather, to be authentic self-affirmation is only possible, to evoke Rorty (1992), ‘because of the people, real or imaginary, with whom we have talked’. Similarly, respect (as discussed in Chapter 5) is best conceived as mutual respect; respect, that is, of each for the other, including, in Ricoeur’s (1994) phrase, ‘oneself as another’. Finally, the virtues of accuracy and sincerity (as discussed in Chapter 4) suggest that truthfulness is both a matter of being true to oneself and being true to others (see Figure 7.1.) It is this relational element which ensures that the virtues hang together. The virtues of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity, as analysed in this and the previous three chapters, face inwards, to the self, and outwards, towards the other. The dispositions associated with these virtues are oriented towards one or other

110 • Towards the Virtuous University Virtuous Dispositions

Truthfulness Respect Authenticity Magnanimity

Virtuous Orientations Self-as-Agent

Other-as-Agent

Accuracy Attentiveness Courage Autonomy

Sincerity Honesty Compassion Care

Figure 7.1 The relational aspects of academic practice

of these poles: accuracy, attentiveness, courage and autonomy, though impacting indirectly upon others, are self-reflexive; sincerity, honesty, compassion and care, though requiring self-awareness, impact more directly on the social, civic and public spheres. The edges are necessarily blurred and the boundaries fuzzy, but this polarisation highlights the relational aspects of being good at what one does. The virtues are not an abstract set of principles; nor are they a system of rules that can be universally applied. They are dispositions that can only be acquired through practice and over time. As such, they require the professional and institutional conditions necessary for their fulfilment. The argument now shifts emphasis from questions concerning the nature of academic practice (pursued throughout the last four chapters) to questions about the relational and institutional conditions necessary for academic practice to flourish. Both sets of questions involve moral considerations: academic practice involves the exercise of certain virtuous dispositions which can only be acquired and sustained in certain sorts of relational and institutional contexts. First and foremost among the inter-personal and institutional conditions that must be met is recognition of the value of those virtuous dispositions. Institutional change can never, therefore, be just a matter of organisational restructuring (however important that may sometimes be); it must also — always — involve changes in attitude and perception, values and purposes, relationships and well-being. Good practice is premised on what, in the following chapter, I term relationships of virtue, which are in turn premised upon what, in the final chapter, I term virtuous institutions. Truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity are as relevant to the discussion of inter-professional and institutional change as they are to the discussion of what constitutes good practice. The idea of the person-as-agent remains one of the organising and binding elements, but must now share centre stage with the idea of the person-in-relation.

8 RELATIONSHIPS OF VIRTUE

But everything that is going to be purified must first be corrupted; that is a principle of science and art. Everything that is to be put together must first be taken apart, everything that is to be made whole must first be broken into its constituent parts, its heat, its coldness, its dryness, its moisture… (Mantel, 1990, p. 79) Being good is difficult. The difficulty lies not just in the occasional lassitude of will towards goodness, but in contingent factors: the conditions underlying the well-being of the self, of the institutions of which we are members, and of wider society. The moral project is not one which we can undertake alone or in isolation. Because of the nature of goodness — its dependence upon dispositions that can only be acquired in and through practice — we can only grow into goodness through our relationships with others. When those relationships fall apart, or become fraught, our goodness diminishes. We live in a world within which the experience of disintegration — the experience of falling apart, of being fraught — is integral to living. Coping with ‘not being good’ is, in other words, part and parcel of whatever ‘becoming better’ might mean. This, as Mantel (1990, p. 79) puts it, is the opus contra naturem: ‘after separation, drying out, moistening, dissolving, coagulating, fermenting, comes purification, re-combination: the creation of substances that the world has until now never beheld’. By the same token, the idea of the good society relates not to an achieved state, but to a sense of hope regarding our ends and purposes. Always on this journey of hope we have to face the possibility that hope is itself unjustified; that the brute facts of contingency and 111


incommensurability are insurmountable. Hope is always ‘in spite of’, otherwise it would not be hope. Hope differs from wishful thinking in that it acknowledges the brute facts. It sets itself against a fatalistic view of human existence, not through naïve optimism but by positing a notion of the relation between self and society as a collaborative, deliberative endeavour: agonistic, but impelled by our virtuous consideration of the obligations attendant upon regard for self and regard for the other. The tragic impasses all too evident in these troubled times are undeniable. The question is how to use hope as a means of progressing beyond these tragic impasses; how to conceptualise the content of hope in such a way that transgression becomes a possibility. In responding to that question, we need to look to a re-conceptualisation of relationship and of institution. Re-conceptualisation alone, however, is insufficient. We need also to reconfigure the practice of relationship and institutional engagement. This and the following chapter set about this task, not by offering programmatic prescriptions, but by providing re-orientations and alternative perspectives: what would relationships and institutions look and feel like if they were governed by the virtuous dispositions of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity? In addressing this question, the focus of the argument necessarily shifts towards a consideration of the conditions necessary for achieving the moral bases of academic professionalism. How are we to integrate the virtues of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity, as explored in the previous four chapters, into patterns of inter-personal relationship, institutional engagement and social well-being? How are we to live and work together in a way that allows for the integrity of practice? How are we to make of our old origins a new beginning: an opus contra naturem?

THE SOCIAL CONTENT OF HOPE The dream becomes a need, a necessity. (Freire, 1998, p. 100) In order to address such questions, we have to learn not only how to hope, but how to imbue our individual hopes with a sense of social purposefulness; or, as Freire puts it, of ‘necessity’. Halpin (2003, p. 60) argues that the notion of ‘utopia’ is a useful conceptual tool in setting about this task, because as he puts it, utopianism ‘has the potential to enable the personal experience of hopefulness to be interpreted in explicitly social rather than just an individual way’. Utopianism provides us with the inter-personal, institutional and social content of hope. Utopian thought enables us to imagine interpersonal and institutional

Relationships of Virtue • 113

structures as they might be. It helps us realise what is, as yet, emergent or even pre-emergent. In doing so, it enables us to think against dominant and residual structures which constitute the blockage. ‘Utopia’, as Bauman (2002) reminds us, ‘refers to topos — a place’. Utopias were traditionally, as he puts it, ‘associated with, and confined to, a clearly defined territory’ (p. 223). The utopias with which we are here concerned have no such fi xity. They are imagined spaces which we have to reclaim and make together. Bauman is deeply pessimistic regarding the possibility of achieving utopia in this ‘no-place, no-land, no-territory’ of what he calls ‘liquid modernity’, within which newly emergent global elites pursue private and highly exclusive pathways to happiness (p. 234). Counter to that pessimistic strain, this and the following chapter argues not only that community is still imaginable, but that imagining new forms of working together for the achievement of a better society is a moral imperative. It renders our claim to academic professionalism trustworthy and credible. As academic professionals we have a duty to think beyond the status quo. Conceived in this way, utopianism is not a flight from reality, but a means of radical engagement with reality. ‘Hope alone’, as Moltmann (1967, p. 25) puts it, ‘is to be called “realistic”, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which reality is fraught. It does not take things as they happen to stand or lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change’. It is precisely because our experience of the world continually brings home to us the sheer contingency and unpredictability of human affairs that hope is essential: ‘only as long as the world and the people in it are in a fragmented and experimental state which is not yet resolved, is there any sense in earthly hopes’. Moltmann’s notion of hope was, of course, developed within the context of a broader discussion of Christian eschatology, which informed the then still emergent tradition of liberation theology (see, for example, Gutierrez, 1974). However, that notion has, I believe, profound implications for how within a post-metaphysical age we seek to sustain a sense of moral agency. There is, as MacMurray (1957) points out, a complex and crucial relation between our capacity to act in the world and our capacity to know that world; a sense in which, he argues, agency can only be exercised in a world that is unknowable: ‘in action we presuppose that we determine the world by our actions. The correlative of this freedom is that the world which we determine in action must be indeterminate, capable of being given a structure that it does not already possess. We can only know a determinate world; we can only act in an indeterminate world’. Thus, argues MacMurray, agency presupposes indeterminacy, contingency, and incommensurability: ‘if we really do


act, if our freedom of will is not an illusion, the world in which we act must be unknowable’ (p. 55). In his elaboration of this seeming paradox, in terms of ‘the self as agent’ and of ‘persons in relation’, MacMurray (1957; 1961) does not explicitly employ the concept of ‘hope’. Nevertheless, his argument implies that agency, the capacity to act in an indeterminate and therefore unknowable world, is always reliant upon some human capacity that is not dissimilar to what Moltmann (1967) understands by hope. Action, involving as it always does some element of incalculable risk, is an expression of our hope that the risk factors are not entirely insurmountable. To lose that hope is to lose our agency: either we give up on action, and thereby lose our agency through our inaction, or action gives up on us, in which case our agency dissolves into a generalised sense of fateful and doom-laden alienation. The crucial question, however, is what constitutes the utopian content of our hopefulness. This chapter focuses on the theme of relationships of virtue viewed from the utopian perspective of the Aristotelian notion of virtuous friendship. In the following chapter, the focus shifts to the theme of the virtuous institution. In both cases the argument is utopian in its attempt to define a set of precepts that can only be inferred from the ends and purposes that we set ourselves. Throughout, the virtues of truthfulness, respect, authenticity, and magnanimity are cited as the practical means of achieving the hoped for goal of a good — or at least decent — society.

THE NOTION OF VIRTUOUS RELATIONSHIPS What Aristotle seems to be saying is that if we understand the psychodynamics of friendship in the narrow sense, we thereby also understand the nature of other human associations. All human associations are forms of friendship, even if only imperfectly. (Hutter, 1978, p. 115) Human flourishing and well-being are always a matter of both structure and agency: structure without a notion of human agency topples over into determinism; agency without a notion of institutional structure teeters towards romantic voluntarism. In addressing the crucial question regarding the conditions necessary for learning, we require a conceptual focus that, in its acknowledgement of reciprocity and mutuality as the moral bases of learning, avoids the shortfalls of these dichotomous modes of thinking. The Aristotelian notion of friendship provides us with a means of achieving such a focus, by reasserting the


primacy of relationship as a key element of both institutional structure and moral agency. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle was clear that what he saw as the highest form of friendship is founded on the mutual recognition of equal worth. He also acknowledged, however, that friendships differ in kind and quality. ‘What we commonly call friends and friendship’, remarks Montaigne (1993, p. 97) in his renowned essay on friendship (first published in 1580), ‘are no more than acquaintanceships and familiarities, contracted either by chance or for advantage, which have brought our minds together’. Friendship may be tactical and therefore provisional and conditional: a kind of strategic alliance based upon the mutuality of either self-interest or pleasure. Friendship, in either of these two senses, is a matter of being part of the club, part of the enclave. Pahl (2000, p. 21) neatly summarises this set of distinctions in terms of ‘friends of utility, friends of pleasure and friends of virtue’. Much hinges on this set of distinctions, not least the notion of equality. ‘Friends of utility’ and ‘friends of pleasure’ are likely to be useful and pleasurable to one another precisely because of their economic and social commonalty: who has access to which influential networks; who can afford to dine out at which fashionable restaurants. However, ‘friends of virtue’, who may be diversely positioned in terms of their economic and social conditions, may still be useful and pleasurable to one another, since the friendship to which they aspire re-orientates ‘the useful’ and ‘the pleasurable’ towards ‘the good’: friendship, ‘which has virtue as its base and aim is also pleasant and useful. It combines all three aims, since the good in character, when friends, also find each other’s company pleasant and useful’ (Hutter, 1978, p. 108). Underlying these three forms of friendship is the familiar tripartite structure of love as understood by the ancient Greeks: eros constituting the pleasure principle that unites ‘friends of pleasure’; philia providing the filial bond of affection between ‘friends of utility’; and agape being the disinterested, selfless love between ‘friends of virtue’. These are, of course, ideal types. Friendship as experienced in everyday life tends to drift across these categories. ‘Friends of virtue’, in particular, are likely both to be useful to one another and to find pleasure in one another’s company. The categories are permeable and to some extent inter-dependent, but do highlight the different principles and purposes that operate at different times within different relationships. It should also be noted that, as illustrated in Figure 8.1, each of these ideal types embodies a notion of mutuality: none is entirely selfish; none entirely selfless. ‘Friends of virtue’, Aristotle maintained, value each other equally and have their own and each others’ best moral interests at heart. Such

116 • Towards the Virtuous University Form

Principle

Purpose

Eros

‘friends of pleasure’

companionship

mutuality of enjoyment

Philia

‘friends of utility’

congruent interests

mutuality of advancement

Agape

‘friends of virtue’

equal worth

mutual self-realisation

Figure 8.1 A typology of friendship: pleasure, utility, virtue.

friendship is neither provisional nor instrumental, but unconditional in terms of what is good for oneself and the other: it is both inwardlooking and outward-reaching. It is premised on the assumption that we become better people through the reciprocity afforded by our shared aspiration to help one another in doing so. That is why, as Pahl (2000, p. 79) puts it, ‘friends of virtue’ are also ‘friends of hope’ and ‘ultimately friends of communication’: ‘our friends who stimulate hope and invite change are concerned with deep understanding and knowing’. Such relationships are a precondition not only of the deliberative process whereby we ascertain what constitutes right action for ourselves and others; they are also the means by which such processes endure and enjoy some albeit fragile security. They inform our agency, while at the same time providing us with relational structures within which to recognise the agency of others. Thus, as Stern-Gillet (1995, p. 50) puts it, ‘friendship plays a unique and crucial role in the noetic actualisation of moral agents’. The key term here is ‘noetic’, as in ‘mindful’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘imbued with understanding’: virtuous friendship, as understood by Aristotle, is the means whereby we come to understand, and be mindful of, the full potentialities of our own and other’s moral agency. Aristotle’s understanding of friendship becomes, then, a means of rethinking what we aspire to in terms of our professional relationships. In large corporate and increasingly competitive organisations such as universities the kind of relationship envisaged by Aristotle is almost always an aspiration and very rarely an achieved state: what Hutter (1978, pp. 104–105) calls ‘a theoretical searchlight’ or ‘a guiding norm’. Searchlights and norms of this kind are hugely important, however, since they enable us both to critically evaluate our existing relationships and to recognise the emergent elements of social practice that have the potential for change and development. They provide us with the analytical toolkit necessary for hopefulness.


What Weil (2005, p. 287) wrote, on the day of her final departure from France in 1942, about friendship is true, also, of all virtuous relationships: ‘all friendship is impure if even a trace of the wish to please or the contrary desire to dominate is found in it. In a perfect friendship these two desires are completely absent. The two friends have fully consented to be two and not one, they respect the distance which the fact of being two distinct creatures places between them.’ Mutually caring relationships require a sense of autonomy, of selfhood. Whoever, as Weil put it, ‘consents to be enslaved cannot gain friendship’ (p. 287). Friendship is nothing if not ‘civic’ (Vernon, 2007, pp. 94–119).

INTERPERSONAL CONDITIONS FOR VIRTUOUS RELATIONSHIPS So, what would our professional relationships look like if they were viewed in this light? How would we routinely relate to one another and to our students if our relationships were guided by such a norm? What can academic practitioners do in order to ensure that their relationships with colleagues and with students aspire to relationships of virtue? What follows is an attempt to address these questions as a set of professional action points: a kind of ethical checklist covering those areas of professional activity for which academic professionals can themselves take responsibility and within which they can make a difference to the quality of life within the institutions where they work. Acknowledging the asymmetry of existing relationships. First, we need to acknowledge the deeply corrosive effects of current patterns of work and the unequal distribution of those effects across the workplace. Sennett (1999) shows how the steadily increasing insecurity experienced by workers is making it impossible for many of us to achieve a sense of moral agency. Moreover, he argues, it is those very elements of the postFordist working environment that are deemed to be worker friendly — flexibility, team work, specialisation — that are in fact creating the insecurities. They are doing so, he claims, through their re-engineering of time whereby there is an increasing reliance on, for example, worker mobility, part-time and casual contracts, and entrepreneurialism. Academic work places are subject to these same strains and pressures, which produce systemic inequalities between colleagues. Not to acknowledge that collegial relationships are shot though with inequality is in effect to deny the possibility of trusting relationships based on good faith; and in denying that possibility we deny the possibility of developing relationships of virtue. Honesty requires us to acknowledge


Pointers • What are the asymmetries — inequalities — within your own institution and work settings? To what extent are these inequalities acknowledged and addressed? • Are there, within your own work settings, ways in which collegial patterns of working mask these inequalities? Is asymmetry acknowledged as an issue within your institution? • Are issues relating to gender inequality acknowledged and discussed within your work setting? If so, in what forums are they discussed? these differences; and sincerity demands that we be explicit regarding their impact on the quality of our working lives. Honesty and sincerity in acknowledging how deeply un-collegial our collegiality actually is would be the very difficult first step in establishing new forms of professionality that have the capacity to engender relationships of virtue. Recognising differences of circumstance. Second, we need to be responsive to the differing circumstances of individuals — colleagues and students — that render the personal management of time difficult and sometimes chronically crisis-ridden. Pahl (1995) has shown how anxiety is invariably attendant upon success; but the successful very often have the option, or privilege, of living their lives in such a way that the contingent factors that engender anxiety are carefully managed through life style and life choices. The less successful may make other principled choices or simply not have the options open to them: other commitments impinge on the resources of time that the more successful choose — or feel themselves driven — to allocate to work. Relationships of virtue would, then, rely upon sensitivity to the complex and increasingly troubled interface between the personal and the professional. People do have to make choices and, of course, consequences inevitably follow from those choices, but what have to be respected in any attempt at relationships of virtue are the choices that the other person has made; and the impact of those choices on the other person’s life chances has to be attended to. We can rarely in our inter-personal relationships alter the consequences that flow from another person’s particular choices, but we can and should, insofar as we aspire to relationships of virtue, respect those choices — and thereby recognise the virtuous dispositions displayed by those making the sometimes difficult choices regarding their own moral careers and the balance between their personal and professional responsibilities.


Pointers • Are differences of personal circumstance (regarding, for example, child care responsibilities or care of elderly dependents) recognised within your own work setting? Do you think they should be recognised and, if so, how? • Does your institution provide flexible patterns of working that allow colleagues to balance professional and extra-professional responsibilities? Do you think such flexibility is desirable? • Is your working environment one of trust? Do you generally assume that colleagues are doing their best and telling the truth? Or is there a culture of suspicion? Accepting the responsibilities of positional power. Third, we should require of ourselves and others that we take responsibility for the positional power invested in us. The flatter organisational structures associated with post-Fordist work regimes render power more diff use and therefore more difficult to locate. One’s own power is thereby that much easier to deny. To deny one’s own positional power, however, is to dis-empower those over whom one ought rightly to be exercising authority. Teachers aspire to relationships of virtue with their students not by denying that authority, but by exercising it in the interests of truthfulness, respect and authenticity. Recognising the equal worth of the other is dependent upon our courage in discharging that academic duty; which, if rightly discharged, is also a duty of care and compassion. Relationships of virtue, in other words, would be equal relationships precisely because they would involve a shared understanding regarding Pointers • What is your understanding of academic leadership? How does that understanding translate into practice in those areas of your work where you exercise leadership? • In situations involving disagreement, how are status and seniority deployed? If someone is both the head of department and a member of a teaching team, how is that dual role managed in discussions regarding, say, course development? • How do status and seniority differentials impact on the social relations and informal culture of your work setting? Is that impact benign or corrosive?


power differentials and a shared dialogue regarding how those differentials might be put to good use. Their equality would reside in their capacity for recognition. Such relationships would necessarily be difficult, but they would be honest and truthful in respect of difference. In their search for shared understanding they would be agonistic in their deliberative modes of discourse, but not antagonistic. They would reach out to the kinds of inter-personal agreement that take full cognisance of how and why we differ. Respecting the boundaries of the other. Fourth, we should acknowledge that even, or perhaps especially, relationships that aspire to relationships of virtue must respect the competing priorities and pressures acting upon those involved in that relationship. As friends of virtue we would acknowledge and defend the agency of our friends. We would resist the urge to possess or take over the other, to impose our views on the other, or to make unreasonable claims on the other. With the best of intentions we can sometimes create a culture of dependency, or even oppression, through our failure to recognise and respect boundaries. Without that recognition and respect relationships cannot aspire to virtuous friendship. They remain locked in paternalistic modes of thinking and feeling. Of course, boundaries sometimes have to be negotiated and re-negotiated. This is particularly true of the boundaries we impose upon our own use of time. Should I be giving more or less time to that particular group? Should I require of that individual more of his or her time in the development of a particular project? Should we, together, re-think our use of time in relation to our complex and overlapping

Pointers • How important to you, as teacher and colleague, is listening? How much of your time do you spend in listening to students and colleagues? What do you think makes a good listener? • How do you respect other people’s physical space? Do they respect yours? How do you set your own boundaries — and show respect for the boundaries of others? • What do you do when someone with whom you work differs with you regarding boundary demarcation and maintenance — when, for example, they wish to talk about something that you feel it is inappropriate to discuss, or refuse to talk about something that you feel professionally obliged to raise as an issue?


activities? Sometimes such negotiations confront the hard realities of contractual obligations. Within the context of relationships that aspire to relationships of virtue, however, the crucial point is to acknowledge that each of us needs to set boundaries and that the boundaries we set, although negotiable, are vital to our well-being. Sustaining professional identity. Fift h, we need to acknowledge the diverse professional trajectories to which we are committed and to fi nd ways of sustaining one another in pursuing those diverse trajectories. The complex nature of academic practice means that as academic workers we are constantly negotiating a professional identity for ourselves in relation to our specific responsibilities for the conduct and administration of research, teaching and scholarship. Becoming a professional involves combining these activities in ways that play to our own strengths and that at the same time recognise the priorities of the particular institutions within which work. Professional identity does not come ready made. It involves the struggle for authenticity and, as such, has to be constructed. Virtuous friendship would involve us in a commitment to sustaining one another in this struggle. This commitment would, of course, take time, since we can only understand what that struggle means by listening to one another and talking with one another. The sheer crowdedness of academic life plays against this good intention. We spend our time teaching, researching, reading, writing, but rarely carve out the institutional space to discuss these activities in relation to our sense of what it means to be an academic. Yet, without this discursive space, we risk becoming isolated operatives. Virtuous friendship would require us to fi nd and privilege that space.

Pointers • What are the main obstacles to building and sustaining trust within your work settings? What are some of the opportunities for building and sustaining trust? • How do you contribute to the happiness and well-being of the colleagues with whom you work and the students for whom you are responsible? How do they contribute to your happiness and well-being? • How do you help less experienced colleagues to develop an academic identity and gain confidence within the wider academic community?


Developing explorative and responsive modes of professional interaction. Finally, we need to discover modes of professional interaction that are true to what we as practitioners understand to be the nature of academic practice. This is possibly the most important condition, since without such modes of interaction it is difficult to see how the other conditions outlined above could be met. In order to fulfil the previous requirements, we have to find ways of talking together that are non-coercive and that genuinely seek shared understanding on matters that may be divisive and highly contentious. This process of deliberation relies on the possibility of what Shaw (2002, p. 164) calls ‘free-flowing conversation’ — conversation that allows for the improvisatory and open-ended and for the expression of uncertainty and emotional ambivalence. Universities are not perhaps the first place many of us would look for conversations of this kind. Academic talk is traditionally succinct, incisive, evidence-based, argumentative, point scoring. To be listened to in the context of this kind of talk involves imposing yourself on it, seeking closure, aiming to have the last word. What Shaw is proposing is a very different kind of talk. It is important, she claims, because without it there can be no ‘common meaning’, no shared understanding, no real possibility of a meeting of minds: ‘the idea of a whole beneath, behind or beyond direct interaction as essential to an understanding of the patterning of that interaction ... Participation means partaking of common meaning or a common mind that arises between the individual and the collective, creating a whole that is constantly moving towards coherence’ (p. 164). Meaning is not just what I mean; nor is it just what you

Pointers • Are there any forums within your own institution where ‘freeflowing conversation’ (as understood by Shaw) is positively encouraged? Are there any forums within which it is not as yet but might in the future be encouraged or modelled? • Are the research or scholarly seminars you attend characterised by particular patterns of intervention and response? Do they allow for the exploration of ideas and the suspension of judgement? Do they encourage less experienced staff to contribute to the discussion? • How do you and/or your colleagues cope with senior staff who can’t — or won’t — listen to their colleagues — the one for whom the only contribution to collegial talk is the monologue?


mean. Meaning is what we discover together — and, as such, is always more than the sum of its constituent parts.

ACTUALISING RELATIONSHIPS OF VIRTUE The above points do not constitute a programme. They are action points — points, that is, at which we could, and sometimes do, affirm our moral agency as academic workers. The significance of a utopian concept such as relationships of virtue is that it licences us to imagine what our working relationships might look like if we were to create the conditions necessary for exercising that moral agency within our own institutional contexts. It helps us understand the creative potential inherent in our existing relationships: their capacity for moral engagement and human flourishing. How we actualise relationships of virtue — and recognise emergent capabilities and functions — is vitally important. The capabilities approach, as advanced by Nussbaum (2000) and Sen (1999) enables us to be more specific as to what constitutes the necessary core of relevant capabilities and as to how capability relates to function. It brings us a little closer, that is, to understanding how we might give back to utopia a place, a land, a territory, within the deeply stratified institutional contexts within which we work. Sen (1999) links the notion of ‘capability’ to that of ‘freedom’: the freedom to exercise agency. Freedom, as he puts it, provides ‘the expansion of the “capabilities” of persons to lead the kind of lives they value — and have reason to value’ (p. 18). Thus, he argues, while ‘income inequality and economic equality is important’ (p. 108), a broader perspective is required ‘on inequality and poverty in terms of capability deprivation’ (p. 109). Sen has unravelled from this premise a corpus of work focusing on economic development within relatively disadvantaged localities. His argument, however, also has implications for the ways in which we might conceive of capability at the level of individual and inter-personal development. Indeed, the potential inter-connectivity between the inter-personal and the systemic is one of Sen’s major themes. Nussbaum (2000) carries this line of argument forward in her elaboration of what she terms ‘functional capabilities’ (pp. 78–80). Among these ‘capabilities’, which Nussbaum sees as essential to human wellbeing, she privileges what she terms ‘practical reason’ and ‘affiliation’. These two capabilities, she argues, are fundamental to our functioning as human beings: ‘to plan in one’s own life without being able to do so in complex forms of discourse, concerns, and reciprocity with other human beings is … to behave in an incompletely human way.’ Citing work as an example, she goes on to argue that ‘work, to be a


truly human mode of functioning, must involve the availability of both practical reason and affiliation. It must involve being able to behave as a thinking being, not just a cog in a machine; and it must be capable of being done with and toward others in a way that involves mutual recognition of humanity’ (p. 82). Nussbaum’s emphasis on the ‘thinking being’ is close to Stern-Gillet’s (1995, p. 50) notion of the ‘noetic actualisation of moral agents’. To make of work something other that alienated labour requires, then, what Nussbaum terms the capabilities of ‘practical reason’ and ‘affiliation’. What does this entail? Nussbaum defines ‘practical reason’ as ‘being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life’ (p. 79). Work requires of the worker both a conception of the good and the capacity to apply that conception, through practical reasoning, to particular ends and purposes. So, for example, if I am a medical practitioner, I seek through practical reason to align my practice to the ends and purposes of healing; if I am a lawyer, I seek to align it to those of justice; if I am a teacher, to those of learning. Professional practice, insists Nussbaum, requires a sense of moral purposefulness on behalf of the practitioner. Practical reason is the means whereby the practitioner meets this moral requirement; the means, that is, whereby practice becomes morally purposeful and purposes are imbued with practical import. In defining ‘affiliation’ Nussbaum draws a distinction between, on the one hand, being ‘able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; to have the capability for justice and friendship’, and, on the other hand, of ‘being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others; … being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers’ (pp. 79–80). What emerges from this distinction is the importance of reciprocity: the way in which ‘the capability for justice and friendship’ is crucially dependent upon ‘being able to be treated as a dignified human being whose worth is equal to that of others’. My capability for justice and friendship towards others is, in other words, dependent upon the capability of others for justice and friendship towards me. The capability of ‘affiliation’, like that of ‘practical reason’, is fundamental because without it there is no way of ensuring that our other capabilities can become functional. The distinction between capability and function is central to both Nussbaum’s and Sen’s argument. Thus, for example, Sen (1999; 1987) argues that functioning is an achievement, whereas a capability is the ability to achieve. Functionings are more directly related to living con-


ditions, since they are different aspects of living conditions. Capabilities, in contrast, are notions of freedom, in the positive sense: what real opportunities one has regarding the life one may lead. In similar vein, Nussbaum (2000) claims that ‘functionings, not simply capabilities, are what render life fully human, in the sense that if there were no functionings of any kind in a life, we could hardly applaud it, no matter what opportunities it contained’ (p. 87). Nevertheless, she goes on to argue, citizens must be left to determine what they make of the capabilities that are granted them: ‘the person with plenty of food may always choose to fast, but there is a great difference between fasting and starving’ (p. 87). Capabilities are ‘opportunities for functioning’ (p. 88), but do not predetermine that functioning. Indeed, the predetermination of function runs the risk of denying the capability of which it purports to be an expression: ‘play is not play if it is enforced, love is not love if it is commanded’ (p. 88). Playing, loving and, we might add, learning rely unconditionally upon the agency of those who choose to play, love and learn. Relationships of virtue depend upon, and at the same time help sustain, the capabilities of practical reasoning and affiliation. They provide the social space within which we can think together about ends and purposes and about the practices and organisational structures that carry forward those ends and purposes. If relationships are to have these beneficial effects, however, they must not only foster capability but also ensure that capability leads to functioning; leads, that is, to actions that are benign in respect of the individual and of the institution. In such relationships neither party would assume that he or she knows what is best for the other. The purpose of such relationships would be to help the other make the hard choices as to how best to maximise opportunities for functioning and how best to translate those opportunities, or capabilities, into fully functioning, flourishing lives. Teaching is centrally concerned with the development of such relationships — relationships of virtue. It focuses upon the capabilities of the student and, at best, enables students to understand how their capabilities open up ‘opportunities for functioning’. It provides the capabilities necessary for students to become functioning agents. ‘Through (higher) education’ as Walker (2003, p. 177) puts it, ‘students should be enabled to develop their capabilities, especially those of practical reason and affiliation. But what they choose to do with these capacities, in other words how they act or function, cannot be pre-determined’. Too often teaching stalls at the second of these two requirements — that of practical reasoning. It fails, that is, to create a context within which students can deliberate upon the options newly acquired capabilities present and the life choices those options provide. It is an essential


responsibility of all teachers to think through with their students the implications of the knowledge and understanding their students have acquired. It is not enough that, as a teacher, I impart knowledge and understanding. I must also provide insights into, and pose questions regarding, the implications of gaining such knowledge and understanding. From such a perspective, ‘pedagogy would be directed at capability development and outcomes — practical reason and affiliation, bodily health, emotions, imagination, and so on. Functioning (not just outcome) would involve students choosing how then to be active in the world, and this cannot be predicted’ (Walker, 2003, p. 177). The unpredictability of the way in which capability works its way through into action or functioning is crucial. It means, for example, that teaching should never be conceived in narrowly ‘vocational’ terms. (Some of the best theology courses have produced some of the most committed atheists.) It implies, rather, that students and teachers have a responsibility to think about the moral implications, for themselves and others, of what they are learning: what kind of persons they want to become and what kind of society they wish to create. Teaching is a moral endeavour because, and insofar as, it takes that responsibility seriously. It provides students not only with an opportunity to learn, but with an opportunity to think about how they might best use their resources of learning: their capabilities and ‘opportunities for functioning’. But the outcomes of these deliberations, as Walker insists, are always unpredictable. The moral space — the space occupied by relationships of virtue — lies in the rough ground between knowing what we are capable of and understanding what we ought to do. The practice of research and scholarship is also located in that rough ground. Strong collaborative relationships within the field of research and scholarship are, in my experience, never wholly concerned with the production of knowledge. They are concerned also with the application of knowledge and with how newly acquired knowledge might connect with those who, in the jargon, are referred to as ‘end-users’: practitioners, policy-makers, sponsors, etc. The ‘end-users’, however, are not just ‘users’; they are agents who quite rightly speak back to the knowledge that we, as researchers and scholars, produce. Strong collaborative relationships become virtuous relationships by ensuring that issues relating to ‘usage’ enter into research and scholarship at the design stage. In effect that means that scholars and researchers work, from a principled position, towards a deliberative dialogue with those whose capability and functioning their work is aimed at enhancing. Again, it is important to emphasise that research and scholarship do


not thereby become merely instrumental in the development of previously sanctioned policy and practice. Rather, in engaging at the outset with policy and practice, they seek to relate more critically with the ends and purposes of policy-makers and practitioners. They seek to create relationships of virtue whereby ‘practical reason’ opens up crucial questions regarding ‘opportunities for functioning’: the opportunities for action and innovation that knowledge, understanding and insight reveal. The scholar engaged in producing an annotated edition of an obscure 18th century poet is, in my view, no different in this respect from the researcher enquiring into, say, pond-life: the one has the practice of readership in her sights and the other policies relating to, among other things, environmental policy. Relationships of virtue reach out to wider constituencies, but are grounded in our collegial relationships as academic professionals located within highly stratified institutional contexts. If collegiality means anything at all, it must mean sustaining one another in acquiring the capabilities necessary for professional fulfilment and for thinking through, and talking through, how those capabilities might best be put to good use. It is a commonplace that we are all leaders now; that within the ‘flatter’ organisational structures of our still deeply hierarchical institutions we must all assume ever-increasing responsibilities for the total quality management of those institutions. The contradictions inherent in this rhetoric invite cynicism. However, there is a truth to be reclaimed from the rhetoric. We are, indeed, responsible for one another’s well-being as academic workers and for ensuring that individual well-being relates positively to institutional purposefulness. Collegiality can all too easily be defined in terms of professional selfinterest. Collegiality conceived as a relationship of virtue is, however, outward looking and gregarious. It looks to the interests of those whom our collegiality is intended to serve: students, policy makers, practitioners across a wide range of occupational groups, local and regional communities, community activists and representatives, etc. Virtuous friendship may be a dizzy ideal, but it is an ideal implicit in those working relationships wherein we aspire to virtue through our shared academic practice. Given the divisive institutional conditions within which we work, the virtues implicit in academic practice are now just about all we have in common. Utopia — that ‘no-place, no-land, no-territory’, as Bauman (2002, p. 234) defines it — is the only viable option. We must locate it, in part at least, within the moral practice of our working relationships and within the moral spaces afforded through the practice of teaching and of research and scholarship.


CONCLUSION The task of remoulding and sustaining relationships of virtue is central to the project of hope. Such relationships, however, require structures of affiliation and association within which to develop and flourish. It is to the question of how we might imagine such institutional structures that we turn in the following chapter. In doing so, we address the question implicit in the preceding argument as to what constitutes the good society and what part institutions in general, and universities in particular, play in the constitution of such a society. What would the university conceived as a virtuous institution look like? What conditions would be required to sustain it? What notion of academic professionalism would it imply? In addressing these questions we carry forward three ideas which have been implicit in the argument so far. Each of these ideas relates to a particular aspect of personhood: (1) the idea of the person-as-agent is central to the argument advanced in the central chapters of the book regarding the dual structure of the virtues (inflecting both to self-asagent and other-as-agent); (2) the idea of the person-in-relation has been explored in this chapter with reference to the notion of relationships of virtue (building on the Aristotelian notions of perfect or virtuous friendship); (3) the idea of the person-not-yet-finished highlights the endless fragility of goodness as enacted in the narrative unpredictability of a human life. These three ideas are the triangulation points by which we have sought to identify the moral bases of academic practice as deliberative in its emphasis on practical reasoning and civic in its emphasis on civil association and affi liation. These three aspects of personhood have a particular bearing on the final chapter. If particular virtues are implicit in particular practices (involving persons-as-agents), and if those practices are socially constituted (through the involvement of persons-in-relation) and historically indeterminate (because we are all persons-not-yet-finished), then they require a civic framework within which to flourish. The institutions comprising that framework are entirely distinct, in their ends and purposes, from the practices that they sustain and support. A chess club, to return to one of MacIntyre’s favoured analogies, is not the same kind of thing as a game of chess. Nevertheless, the former is meaningless without the latter, and the latter may be unsustainable without the former. The crucial question is: what kind of chess club can best provide a context within which the qualities and dispositions required of a chess player can best flourish? Or, more to the point, what kind of university might best sustain and encourage the virtuous dispositions required of those (staff and students) who have chosen to pursue an academic way of life?

9 VIRTUOUS INSTITUTIONS

For better or worse, individuals really do share their thoughts and they do to some extent harmonize their preferences, and they have no other way to make the big decisions except within the scope of institutions they build. (Douglas, 1987, p. 128) Goodness is not just a matter of intentionality, although intention is an important factor in seeking to be good. Because goodness depends upon our acquiring or growing into particular dispositions, it is also a matter of circumstance; and, since circumstance always involves an element of unpredictability, luck is an unavoidable factor. We can of course seek to shape circumstance and thereby reduce the luck factor, but the tip of circumstance always dips beneath the horizon of our control. Under certain, possibly unforeseeable, circumstances it may be impossible either to develop or to sustain our virtuous dispositions. It is in recognition of such eventualities that, as Mary Douglas reminds us, individuals seek forms of institutional association which reduce the impact of unpredictability, indeterminacy and incommensurability on their lives and thereby increase the likelihood of well-being and human flourishing. Institutions, then, are the means by which we organise purposeful association; or, to employ Nussbaum’s terminology, purposeful ‘affiliation’. They constitute a kind of buffer zone between the crude forces of personal self-interest and the impersonal interests of the state. When nation states fall apart in the aftermath of war, economic disaster, or the ravages of pan-epidemics, then the regeneration of institutional life becomes a major and pressing priority. At such times, and in such places, 129


we glimpse the significance of the institutions that comprise ‘civil society’; their unique contribution to maintaining what Hall (1995, p. 6) refers to as the ‘complex balance of consensus and conflict, the valuation of as much difference as is compatible with the bare minimum of consensus necessary for settled existence’. We realise that without these institutions, which under other circumstances we tend to take for granted, we lack some of the essential capabilities to become fully human. Without institutional structures, ‘affiliation’ is at the mercy of chance encounter. It lacks the wherewithal for continuity and tradition. ‘Civil society’, to recall Hall’s (1995, p. 27) comment quoted in the opening chapter, ‘is fragile, and it needs to be extended’. We also know, however, that institutions can become deadening. Modernism, as an aesthetic impulse, was in part a reaction against the institutional structures it inherited; which is, perhaps, why exile and the cult of the outsider was such a prevalent theme in modernist art and literature. What emerges from that modernist critique is an emphasis on the alienating effects of institutions when they turn in on themselves and become mechanisms of social control rather than providing opportunities for civic engagement and participation. So, a pressing question is how we might re-invigorate the institutions of civil society in such a way that they encourage active engagement through participation and genuine functioning. That question is particularly pressing for universities, since they exist to develop the capabilities which provide the opportunities for functioning. In this final chapter we look at some of the conditions necessary for universities to set about that task; the conditions necessary, that is, for them to become virtuous institutions committed to creating and sustaining relationships based on the virtues of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity. The task is to re-connect the university with the idea of the good society. Virtuous institutions nurture their institutional practices and ensure the flourishing of those practices. They also make available those practices and encourage public engagement with the goods of those practices. They attain to virtue not just or even primarily through the preservation of those goods as forms of specialist or privileged expertise, but through their development as a public resource.

BEYOND DECENCY But is the notion of a good society, composed of virtuous institutions, really tenable? Ought we not, pragmatically, to pitch our sights a little lower? Perhaps, as Margalit (1998) suggests, we ought to aim at some-

Virtuous Institutions • 131

thing more like a decent society: what would be lost if, instead of reaching beyond our grasp, we aimed more modestly at what is within our reach? Margalit (1998) distinguishes between a decent society and a civilized one: within the former, the focus is primarily upon the decency of institutions; within the latter it is upon the civility of its citizens. In both cases, maintains Margalit, the concern is with non-humiliation: a decent society is one in which institutions do not humiliate their members, while a civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another. The touchstone within this analysis is the negative factor of non-humiliation — and the role of institutions in ensuring non-humiliation. One could, according to this set of distinctions, entertain the notion of a civilised society (in Margalit’s terminology), the institutions of which are far from decent (again, employing Margalit’s terminology). Similarly, one might imagine (within this terminological framework) a decent society, within which relationships between citizens remain far from civilized. ‘Thus, for example,’ as Margalit (1998, p. 1) puts it, ‘one might think of Communist Czechoslovakia as a nondecent but civilized society, while it is possible to imagine without any contradiction a Czech Republic which would be more decent but less civilized’. What interests Margalit above all is the possibility of achieving decency as a realisable goal of a civil society — a society, that is, within which institutions do not humiliate their members but seek to cement the civilizing bonds between them. A decent society, as elaborated by Margalit, is to be distinguished also from a just society, in which the goal of non-humiliation is deemed insufficient. Within a just society some redistribution of the goods of society is considered necessary in order to ensure some approximation to the notion of fairness. As Margalit quite rightly points out, just societies may involve, at the level of institutional process, some non-decent practices and, at the level of inter-personal relationship, some non-civilized practices. However, to imagine non-humiliating (i.e. civilized) relationships devoid of an infrastructure of non-humiliating institutions would make little sense. Equally, to imagine non-humiliating (i.e. decent) institutions without some broader notion of fairness or justice — something beyond Margalit’s negative goal of non-humiliation — is to put at risk the entire moral endeavour, since civility and decency can be sustained for only so long within unfair or unjust circumstances. A good society by this reckoning would aspire to be civilized, decent and just: civilized in its relationships between citizens; decent in its relations between institutions and their members; and just in its commitment to combat social and economic inequality. Institutions are


centrally placed within this programmatic formation. They are, as it were, the power house, the generator: the vital connection between potentially civilised individuals and a society that aspires to social justice. Within this nexus, universities could, and should, play a vital role — they are the means whereby society understands itself, questions its values, defines and squabbles over its ends and purposes, and accrues the knowledge, understandings, and insights necessary to inform its deliberations. Without something like a university, a good society would be unthinkable: a good society requires not only that its members should not be humiliated, but that they should actively engage in the creation of a society that is fair and just. This is not to say that the goals of civility and decency are meaningless — even within manifestly unjust societies. Indeed, the routine practice of non-humiliation at the levels of both inter-personal and institutional engagement can become powerful means of resistance to injustice and unfairness. One has only to recall, for example, the deep courtesy of Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment and at his release to be presented with a powerful exemplar of how civility can speak back to institutional corruption and social injustice. That same exemplar also powerfully suggests, however, that the goal of institutional non-humiliation is not enough. We need to pitch our sights at a good society that is civilized and decent in its inter-personal and institutional arrangements and that aspires to set those arrangements within a broader framework of social justice. The task, then, becomes not just a matter of creating more decent (i.e. non-humiliating) institutions, but the unashamedly utopian one of ensuring that such institutions reflect, in their strategic ends and purposes, the impulse towards social justice.

THE COST OF UTOPIA In setting the moral end-point beyond decency, the material cost of goodness must be acknowledged. Utopias don’t come cheap. We have to invest in the good society. We have to ask ourselves what it will cost and how, individually and together, we might foot the bill for an indeterminate but better future for all members of society regardless of their backgrounds. Goodness is never a cheap option. Indeed, the distinction between the decent society (based on a principle of non-humiliation) and the good society (based on a principle of social justice) is in large part an economic distinction. It is much more expensive, in terms of whatever funding mechanisms are employed, to sustain a just society than to maintain a decent one. Virtuous institutions that take seriously their stewardship of the good society are necessarily costly institutions.


A good society, in considering how those costs should be met — how, that is, its virtuous institutions are to be sustained — would need to ensure that its institutions had the capability to become virtuous institutions and that all its citizens had fair and equal access to such institutions. In the case of universities these requirements would entail, among other things, a recognition that the virtues of academic practice hang together through the constituent activities of that practice. The virtues of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity can only cohere in practice through the related activities of research and scholarship, teaching, and collegiality. The moral integrity of academic practice relies upon the complementarity and interdependence of these activities. Policies that seek to differentiate universities in terms of these various activities (by designating and, crucially, funding some as, say, teaching-led and others as research-led) may provisionally resolve problems associated with the desirable aim of increasing participation. However, such policies will in the long-term decrease the capability of universities by restricting the interplay between the constituent elements of academic practice. What such policies will undoubtedly do is erode the moral bases of academic practice as defined in the central chapters of this book. To some that may not matter (universities will, after all, be able to produce more graduates); but to those with a concern for the moral coherence of academic practice the deleterious effects of policies which promote institutional differentiation of this kind should matter profoundly. The argument for inclusive academic practice as advanced in this book is not a functional or pragmatic one; it is a moral argument that focuses upon the interdependence of the virtues implicit in the various activities that comprise that practice. The assumption that academic quality can be maintained only by channelling research resources into a few elite universities and starving other institutions of such resources must, therefore, be challenged. The idea of the university as a virtuous institution is only sustainable in circumstances within which research, scholarship and teaching are pursued with equal vigour. Depriving some institutions of the opportunity to do so is to change the very nature of academic practice (and, thereby, of academic professionalism) and to deprive students within those institutions of the intrinsic goods of higher learning. A notion of wider participation that involves the majority of students attending institutions that are denied, say, adequate research funding has no credence in a good society. We cannot widen participation without also widening, and funding, excellence. The university as virtuous institution refuses to compromise on either of these twin principles: it upholds excellence and it affirms the need for


widening participation. It seeks to maintain the integrity of academic practice while also seeking to widen access to the intrinsic goods of that practice; it seeks, in other words, to develop academic excellence as a common good. That impulse, as Scott (2003) points out, was the driving force behind an earlier phase of university expansion within the UK: ‘It was the expansion of the 1960s, and the creation of the so-called Shakespearian new universities, that transformed higher education from being still a semi-aristocratic preserve, with a few “scholarship boys” in tow, into a middle-class system with substantially greater opportunities for girls. And it was the growth of the former polytechnics that allowed inner-city and ethnic-minority students into higher education’. The prevailing assumption that academic excellence is somehow defined by its scarcity is evidence of a weakening of that impulse and illustrates the extent to which the dominant mindset has been shaped by the ideology of marketisation and commodification. Excellence is not a commodity the value of which is governed by the rules of supply and demand. Nor, to switch to another metaphor beloved by the ‘more means worse’ brigade, is it a kind of pure concentrate at constant risk of dilution. Academic excellence is precisely what must be democratised in any serious attempt at widening participation. Indeed, without that impulse towards democratisation, it runs the risk of stultification and ultimate irrelevance. The policy issue is crystal clear. If we want to widen participation, we must pay for it; if we are unwilling to pay for it, then widening participation is not an option. The attempt to widen participation through inadequate funding changes the very nature of participation for the vast majority of students. For, as Rees-Mogg (2002) rightly (if somewhat priggishly) points out, ‘a good degree from a first-class university can help in getting an interview; a modest degree from the average converted polytechnic is only too likely to go into the reject pile’. The problem lies in the development of policies, by successive governments, which have manifestly failed to resist, and sometimes actively sought to maintain, the deep and historic institutional inequalities that characterise the university system as a whole. Some kind of ‘basic income’ scheme is one of a raft of measures that Sennett (2006) proposes as a means of countering the increasing instability and lack of solidity of institutional bureaucracies. Such a scheme ‘would replace the welfare bureaucracies of northern Europe by a simpler system which gives everyone, rich and poor alike, the same basic income support to spend or misspend the individual wants’ (p. 186). According to this ‘basic income’ scheme (which Sennett sees as beginning to impact upon British legislation in the modified form of


‘basic capital’), ‘all individuals would be able to buy education, health care, and pensions on the open market; further, unemployment benefits would disappear, since everyone has the minimum annual income needed to support themselves’. Within such a scheme, as Sennett goes on to explain, ‘taxes support everyone at a minimum level of life quality, but the Nanny State disappears; if you misspend your income it’s your problem. Moreover, everyone gets this basic income whether they need it or not; means-testing disappears’. (pp. 186–187.) Such a scheme may have advantages over funding reforms based upon income related student loans, variants of which have been adopted in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA. Within the UK, tuition fees have been introduced for all students, but with bursaries available for the poorest and with all repayment charges tagged to future incomes. (See Chapman, 2006.) Notwithstanding these provisos, Callender (2006, p. 126) insists upon the contradictory nature of the UK government’s student funding policies, whereby the desire to widen participation to higher education is being potentially undermined by the very policies government introduced to further these aims: ‘the most disadvantaged students, and the very focus of widening participation policies, experience the greatest risks, hardship and financial pressures, all of which affect their chances of success and their ability to participate fully in university life’. Moreover, continues Callender, ‘many of the strategies they adopt to offset these risks, and their concerns and worries about debt — be it living at home or term-time employment — compound their disadvantage and increase existing inequalities among the student population’. This, Callender concludes, ‘helps explain the enduring class and ethnic differences both in the patterns of participation in higher education and in patterns of graduate employment’.

THE CONDITIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL FLOURISHING So, what are the conditions that need to be met in order for universities to be both excellent and inclusive? What are the conditions necessary for universities to be places in which learning and inquiry flourish? What do universities require in order to be sustainable institutions committed to the long-term well-being of students and staff ? Such questions matter, because the survival of the university relies upon the engagement of students, staff, and the wider public, to the idea of the university as central to the development of a democratic and deliberative society: a society, that is, with the resources necessary to reflect critically upon its own processes and purposes, principles and procedures, ends and means.


In addressing these kinds of questions, four conditions, or requirements, are of particular importance within the current policy context: those relating to (1) financial viability, (2) civic integration, (3) public recognition, and (4) academic leadership. Each of these conditions is the subject of widespread public debate, which it is not my intention to discuss or document in detail. The purpose is to outline the minimal conditions necessary for universities to flourish as virtuous institutions — and to offer some suggestions regarding the kinds of questions that we as academics might be posing, and addressing, within the context of the wider public debate. Universities Require Adequate Funding: The Need for Political Will ‘In business terms ’,as Rees-Mogg (2002) puts it, ‘British universities are over-trading and under-funded. Since the late 1970s the number of students has been dramatically increased from one in eight of the relevant age group to one in three, but the funding has not. As a result the Department for Education and Skills’ own index of public funding per student has fallen by a half’.Rees-Mogg, one of the cheerleaders of the ‘more means worse’ brigade, goes on to argue against any further widening participation, but his more general point still holds: universities within the UK are the victims of ‘the economics of idiocy’. The policy issue is crystal clear. If we want to widen participation, we must pay for it; if we are unwilling to pay for it, then widening participation is not an option. There is no third way. The attempt to widen participation through inadequate funding changes the very nature of participation for the vast majority of students — and, one might add, for ‘first generation’ students in particular (see Thomas and Quinn, 2007). The problem lies in the development of successive government policies that have manifestly failed to resist, and sometimes actively sought to maintain, the deep and historic institutional inequalities that characterise the university system as a whole. Of course, there is a serious debate to be had as to how adequate funding levels should be achieved. It is perhaps unrealistic, given the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the times, to expect any government to propose raising the necessary funds by imposing higher tax thresholds on the wealthier sections of society. We cannot, in a fiercely market-driven society, perform a backward somersault into a system of state welfare. The viable options would all seem to involve some combination of public and private funding. Nevertheless, whatever the means, the goods of widening participation coupled with excellence of provision must be paid for. Without adequate funding universities are unable to flourish.


Pointers • How, within your own institution, are the twin priorities of widening participation and teaching quality being reconciled? How do these priorities in turn relate to the research agenda of your institution and the increasing pressure to tap into third stream funding? • What do you see as the main implications of widening participation in higher education? How does it affect your own sense of professional identity and your working conditions? Has it impacted upon the way you teach — and, if so, how? • Do you feel that within your institution the distribution of funds and the accountability demands are fairly distributed across departments and faculties? Are there institution-wide forums within which such matters can be debated? Universities Require Strong Civic Links: The Need for Institutional Reorientation Economic sustainability, although a necessary condition of institutional flourishing, is not, however, in itself sufficient. Universities also require a strong civic base if they are to fulfil the requirements of a virtuous institution. They must reach out to other institutions and organisations, particularly those located within what remains of the public sector. Most universities are now acutely aware of the need to build strategic alliances with business and industry, but the role of the university in working alongside the non-profit-making service sector is equally important. In developing strong working relations with institutions within that sector, universities express their commitment to addressing the social problems that ‘the good society’ would seek to eradicate. Sacks (2000, p. 44) argues that such problems ‘are of their essence matters that lie somewhere between the individual and the state, between the individual who makes choices and the state which makes laws. That is why social problems are intimately related to moral institutions, because it is these which have traditionally mediated between the individual and the state’. ‘Virtuous institutions’ must share their resources of knowledge and understanding if they are to address these problems effectively. Through their research and teaching capacity, universities have tremendous resources of hope to bring to this shared endeavour. Cross-institutional links of this kind rely crucially on the willingness of the institutions


Pointers • How does your institution express its sense of purposefulness and civic leadership within the region, across the sector, and internationally? How is it seen — and judged — within the locality? • Does your institution see itself as competing against — or complementing — other institutions of higher education within the region? Insofar as there is competition, does this have any beneficial effects? • Does your own academic work relate to particular employment and learning needs within the locality and region? involved to develop deliberative modes of dialogue and communication. Shared understandings across institutions can only be achieved through recognition of the very real differences — of constraint, process, purpose, history, etc. — that characterise those institutions. Mutuality of respect regarding these differences is an indispensable resource. Without the virtues of attentiveness and honesty there can be no hope of universities developing a common (and commonly understood) set of purposes capable of sustaining strong cross-institutional collaboration; and without the magnanimity to reach out to the changing needs of the student population and changing demands of the regional economy there can be no hope of their providing civic leadership. Universities Require Positive Recognition: The Need for Public Trust and Confidence Partly because of the chronic under-funding referred to above, and partly perhaps because of the increasing diversification of the university sector, public perceptions of UK universities are not good. There is a general assumption among senior politicians that universities are, in the main, badly managed and a more commonly held assumption that they no longer have the capacity to compete with their North American counterparts. Rees-Mogg’s flippantly disparaging reference to ‘the average converted polytechnic’ (quoted above) is typical of the takenfor-granted cynicism routinely displayed in the national press and broadcasting outlets by critical commentators and pundits as well as by politicians and senior figures in government. Universities clearly have a responsibility to counter this prevailing cynicism and to argue their case. All too often, however, the case that senior university managers choose to defend is not that of the sector as a whole, but that of their


own institution or institutional bloc. In a highly competitive system to argue entirely for one’s own institutional interests is perforce to argue against the institutional interests of others. The public perception of a sector somehow disjointed or at odds with itself is thus reinforced by the spectacle of vice chancellors and principles engaged in a seemingly endless wrangle regarding their various institutional interests. Within the higher echelons of university management there are too many power brokers defending their own patch and two few statespersons with a care and concern for the sector as a whole. The responsibility of care and concern is also, however, a public responsibility. The well-being of society depends upon the trust and confidence that its members place in its institutions of education. The erosion of that trust and confidence puts at risk not only those institutions but the democratic ends to which they are committed. If universities are central to the good society, then all those who value the good society must seek to ensure public trust and confidence in these institutions. That can only be achieved through an open and honest debate as to how best to democratise excellence for the good of the university sector as a whole and in the interests of the good society. Pointers • How does your institution seek to maintain and/or restore public trust in higher education? How does it seek to maintain and enhance its own reputation as a provider of higher education? • How, other than through periodic graduation ceremonies, does your institution seek to involve and engage the families and friends of students — particularly, the families and friends of undergraduate students and overseas students? • Are there inclusive forums within your institution for free and open debate with, and between, key stakeholders regarding the ends and purposes of higher education? Universities Require Strong Academic Leadership: The Need for Cross-sector Planning Universities are now managed and administered, rather than led. The central administration of almost all universities now far outnumbers the professoriate, while traditional academic roles are increasingly being defined as managerial. For example, course management now comprises a significant cadre of the academic work force; while vicechancellors and pro vice-chancellors, although often eminent in their


own academic fields, are primarily concerned with strategically positioning and marketing their particular institution in an increasingly competitive system. Defenders of this newish dispensation argue, with some justification, that it is a necessary shift from supply to demand: universities need to re-think what they can supply in terms of what society needs; or, more bluntly, universities should stop assuming that they know what those needs are. The next step of this argument, however, is a little flakier. It goes something like this: in order to shift from supply-focussed thinking to demand-focussed thinking, universities must subject themselves and their goods to market forces. Markets are in themselves neutral. Exchange is central to human society, and the need to exchange goods necessarily entails some or other mechanism of exchange. (I’ll swop what you want and/or need and I own for what you own and I need and/or want.) In the past supply has tended to trump demand: that’s what’s on offer — take it or leave it. In a consumer, choice-driven society demand holds the trump card: I want a cauliflower and a cucumber — supply me with them (now) or I’ll go elsewhere. In education that particular mechanism doesn’t quite work, because really useful knowledge is not the same kind of thing as a cauliflower or a cucumber. What constitutes really useful knowledge is something that has to be understood from both the supply side and the demand side. It has to be mediated. Academic leadership is not centrally concerned with strategic positioning and niche marketing, but with understanding the educational needs of the 21st century and creating a deliberative context within which such matters can be discussed both passionately and disinterestedly. That would involve a new kind of Pointers • Do you, regardless of your location within your institution, have a clear sense of where your university is going and why? Do you feel that within your own sphere of responsibility you have a leadership role that relates to the wider leadership of the institution as a whole? • What, if any, are the forums within which you are able to express opinions, offer ideas, and contribute to the debate regarding the ends and purposes of the institution within which you work? • How is the vice chancellor or principal of your institution appointed? Is there, as far as you are aware, any consultation regarding the qualities required of a vice chancellor or principal prior to appointment?


lateral and cross-sector thinking and a new kind of collaborative crossinstitutional endeavour.

WORKING TOWARDS A GOOD SOCIETY It is, as Williams (1983, p. 268) reminds us, to our own energies and capacities that as academic workers we must look in seeking to build virtuous institutions: ‘It is not some unavoidable real world, with its laws of economy and laws of war, that is now blocking us. It is a set of identifiable processes of ‘realpolitik’ and ‘force majeure’, of nameable agencies of power and capital, distraction and disinformation, and all these interlocking with the embedded short-term pressures and the interwoven subordinations of an adaptive commonsense.’ Nor, he continues, is it ‘in staring at these blocks that there is any chance of movement past them. They have been named so often that they are not even, for most people, news. The dynamic moment is elsewhere, in the difficult business of gaining confidence in our own energies and capacities’. Academic practitioners can and should make a difference. Moreover, I have argued, it is the professional responsibility of academic workers to do just that — to make a difference. The choice is not, as sometimes portrayed, between a hopelessly compromised professionalism and the return to the grand old days of amateurism; the choice is between different versions of professionalism that represent different values and priorities. Indeed, the virtues of amateurism, as highlighted by Said (1994), constitute the kind of ethical shift that could be seen as a necessary condition for professional renewal: a professionalism ‘fuelled by care and affection rather than by profit, and selfish, narrow specialisation’ (p. 61); a professionalism based not on ‘doing what one is supposed to do’ but on asking ‘why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts’ (p. 62). Such values prefigure a professional reorientation which requires of its practitioners a willingness to re-conceive and radically readjust the relation between their own small world of professional interests and the wider public interests of the world out there. The small world of professional practice encounters the world out there through the students we teach and the wider constituencies that we address in our research and scholarly activity — and, crucially, through our writing. That encounter is framed by a shared concern with learning. The professional ideal (indisputable and incontestable, but nevertheless endlessly eroded) is that of the academic as virtuous scholar whose prime responsibility is to students, colleagues and the wider community: the world out there. The realisation of that ideal is


through the traditional practices of scholarship and teaching, research and writing; practices whereby the university remains open to difference: difference of opinion and outlook; difference of cultural background and expectation; difference of position and location. Without a respect for, and nurturing of, these practices as the means by which learning is embraced for its own sake, the university and those who work and study within it will be seriously diminished. The university must reach out on the basis of a clear recognition of its traditional strengths and responsibilities. The marketisation of university education has led to an increased emphasis on quality control. In an attempt to ensure quality, successive governments have actively encouraged certain kinds of research rather than others, have promoted innovation in teaching as an end in itself, and have failed to recognise or reward the kinds of routine scholarly activities that inform and characterise both teaching and research within the university sector. Moreover, they have done this by encouraging competition between and within institutions — in spite of an official emphasis on collaboration and collegiality. They have whittled away at the institutional fabric of the university sector and corralled the idea of academic leadership into narrow and divisive sectional interests. The need to re-connect the university sector as whole with a radical social justice agenda is pressing. Freedom relies on the continuing struggle for freedom. As Walker (1998, p. 293) argues, ‘the ethical turn must … also be a political turn framed by the society we would hope to build, a concern for oppressed and marginalised groups, and a reflexive recognition of the ways in which universities perpetuate relationships of power and domination, even while they challenge them’. Walker is right in maintaining that ‘universities have played a critical role in the construction of a consumer society, of monopoly capitalism, and the rise of the middle class’ and that universities ‘persist in a complicated positioning, which does not easily or comfortably map onto a radical agenda for education, in late capitalist society’. Nevertheless, the need to work through the institutions is of paramount importance. Academic practitioners need to look beyond their own professional and institutional interests, but must also take a long, critical look at those interests and at the moral and political assumptions that underpin them. They must be both oppositional and self-critical. The ‘commodification of higher education’, as Shumar (1997) has analysed it, has become part of academic culture and part of our professional discourse, to the extent that academics may not readily realise the extent to which they are implicated in its systemic working out. It works at least partly because we as academics ensure that it does so:


through, for example, the various mechanisms of peer review. Yet, we rarely reflect publicly (which is where the reflection would count) on the point at which and ways in which peer review, a fairly comfortable notion, may shade into the decidedly uncomfortable notion of peer surveillance. Halsey (1992, p. 305) has written that it was not until he had read hundreds of responses from academics to a survey of the changing conditions of higher education that he realised how ‘the rhetoric of business models and market relations — the language of customers, competition, efficiency gains, “value for money”, etc. — could be so totally substituted for relations of trust’. If this mindset is to be challenged, it must therefore be challenged reflexively; with a self-critical eye to the way in which our own values and practices are implicated in that which we are challenging. In the reflexivity lies the hope. As Nussbaum (1997, p. 14) argues, it is a hope that is structured into the traditions and practices of liberal education: ‘becoming an educated citizen means learning a lot of facts and mastering techniques of reasoning. But it means something more. It means learning how to be a human being capable of love and imagination.’ (Love and imagination are key terms in Nussbaum’s educational lexicon.) ‘We may continue to produce narrow citizens who have difficulty understanding people different from themselves, whose imaginations rarely venture beyond their local setting. It is all too easy for the moral imagination to become narrow in this way … But we have the opportunity to do better, and now we are beginning to seize that opportunity. That is not “political correctness”; that is the cultivation of humanity’. The hope lies in the associative and civil structures that render academic practice durable and sustainable and that define it historically and in terms of its moral ends and purposes.

CONCLUSION Goodness, that biddable creature, cannot be depended upon — I found that out. I have thrown myself into its sphere nevertheless. Goodness is respect that has been rarefied and taken to a higher level. It has emptied itself of vengeance, which has no voice at all. I’m afraid I don’t put that very clearly. I’m still sorting out the details. (Shields, 2002, p. 310) It is through the broad, inclusive traditions of scholastic endeavour that the idea of the university struggled for and found its precarious position within a secular, civil society: a tradition founded in the routines of the examined life, but increasingly carried forward, as Damrosch (1995)


reminds us, through ‘intellectual sociability’ (p. 186) and a principled rejection of the idea of the ‘the scholar as isolated individual’ (p. 188). The choice is not, as so often presented, between the alienation of the ivory tower and the managerialism of the bureaucratically accountable institution. There are other ways implicit in the practices and traditions of the university whereby academic workers, students and the communities of which they are a part can work together, think together, and talk together for the common good: ways of learning that reinstate the idea of the university as a ‘virtuous institution’ committed to the building of ‘the good society’. What needs to be renewed and sustained is a broad, inclusive tradition of academic excellence that privileges the notion of the examined life and that, as Said (1996, p. 228) remarks, is all important in becoming a good academic: ‘You will have other things to think about and enjoy than merely yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive, far more worthy of study and respect than selfadulation and uncritical self-appreciation. To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom’. Said takes us beyond a narrow and professionally self-interested view of academic freedom, as freedom for academics, towards a more generous and egalitarian notion of academic freedom as freedom for others. He reminds us that the quest for knowledge is a form of enjoyment precisely because it opens up the potential, in ourselves and others, for greater freedom. It is through the activities associated with academic practice that we are able to flourish as individuals and enable others to do likewise. Becoming a good academic is, above all else, a matter of relating to these wider interests and concerns. It is the way in which we show, to recall again Arendt’s great phrase, our ‘care for the world’. But it is also, given the duality of structure implicit in the moral fabric of academic practice, a matter of how we care for ourselves — and for one another. Truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity are ways of explaining what it is we are doing, as academics, when we think we are doing our best. That, after all, is the only way of doing it — doing it right and doing it well. Doing truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity is as good as it gets. I am left with many of the questions that prompted me to write this book in the first place — questions about the moral bases of my own academic practice. I pose them, as a kind of ethical self-audit — and, importantly, as a way of moving forward (and keeping the debate open), rather than summing up (and closing it down). They remain the allimportant but necessarily ‘not-yet-finished’ part of the intellectual and moral project that constitutes our academic identity.


• Are my students acquiring the dispositions necessary for lifelong learning? Do I encourage them to think about the ethical value of what they are doing when they are learning? • Are they developing their powers of practical reasoning? Do I encourage them to consider the ends and purposes when applying their knowledge and understanding to particular circumstances? • Are they encouraged to value one another as learners and to support one another in their learning? Do I encourage them to work collaboratively and in one another’s best interests? • Am I extending and deepening my knowledge and understanding within my particular area of expertise? Do I encourage in myself and others the dispositions necessary for that process of continuing professional development? • Am I relating my research, teaching and scholarship to my broader intellectual and moral trajectory? Do I encourage myself and others to explore the relation between intellectual project and moral purposefulness? • Am I building professional relationships that are mutually supportive and recognise the equal worth of those with whom I work? Do I value divergence and difference, even when my own professional interests and moral presuppositions are at stake? • Are my colleagues supported in their own professional development? Do I, in those areas where I have leadership responsibility, actively support the professional development of colleagues and seek recognition for their achievements? • Do I read my colleagues’ work and make an effort to understand their intellectual projects and preoccupations? Do I find opportunities to discuss their work with them? • As a teacher, do I work as a member of a team? Do I familiarise myself with what and how my colleagues are teaching? Do I prioritise team meetings relating to my own teaching area? • Am I finding opportunities to work creatively with other institutions and organisations in ways that are mutually beneficial — and beneficial to students and colleagues? • Are my research and scholarship meeting the specific needs of those located at precise points and within specific sectors? Are the outcomes of my research and scholarship useful? • Do I continue to pose myself the question: how do I explain to others what I am doing when I think I am doing it well?

R E F E R E NCE S

Adorno, T. (2003) The Jargon of Authenticity. (Trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will). London and New York: Routledge Classics. Archer, L. (2003) The ‘value’ of higher education, in L. Archer, M. Hutchings and A. Ross (eds.) Higher Education and Social Classs: Issues of Exclusion and Social Class. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Arendt, H. (2003) Responsibility and Judgment. (Ed. J. Kohn). New York: Schoken. Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1970) Men in Dark Times, London: Jonathan Cape. Arendt, H. (1968) Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, H. (1965) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press (revised and enlarged edition). Aristotle (1955) The Ethics of Aristotle: the Nicomachean Ethics. (Trans. J.A.K. Thompson; revised by H. Tredennick). London: Penguin Books. Aronowitz, S. (2000) The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating the Higher Learning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Barnett, R. (1997) Higher Education: A Critical Business. Buckingham: SRHE/ Open University Press. Barnett, R. (2000) Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Buckingham and Philadelphia: SRHE/Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (2002) Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London and New York: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Beck, U. (2007) In the new, anxious world, leaders must learn to think beyond borders. The Guardian (13 July) p. 31. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications. Benhabib, S. (2000) Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, in D. Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid: Cambridge University Press. 146

References • 147 Berger, J. (2007) Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. London and New York: Verso. Berger, J. (2001) The Shape of a Pocket. London: Bloomsbury. Bok, D. (2003) Universities in the Market Place: The Commercialisation of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. Bonhoeffer, D. (1953) Letters and Papers from Prison. London and Glasgow: S.C.M. Press. Bourdieu, P. (2003) Against objectivism: the reality of the social fiction, in P. Sikes, J. Nixon and W. Carr (eds.) The Moral Foundations of Educational Research: Knowledge, Inquiry and Values. Buckingham: Open University Press. Pp. 68–85. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. (First published in France, 1997). Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J-C (1996) Introduction: language and relationship to language in the teaching situation, in P. Bourdieu, J-C Passeron and M. de Saint Martin with contributions by C. Baudelot and G. Vincent, in Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Trans. R. Teese. Cambridge: Polity Press. (First published in France, 1965) . Brown, R. H. (1998) Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Brunkhorst, H. (2000) Equality and elitism in Arendt, in D. Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid: Cambridge University Press. Calhoun, C. (1995) Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Callender, C. (2006) Access to higher education in Britain: the impact of tuition fees and financial assistance, in P. N. Texeira, D. B. Johnstone, M. J. Rosa and H. Vossensteyn (eds.) Cost-sharing and Accessibility in Higher Education: A Fairer Deal? The Netherlands: Springer. Pp. 105–132. Capra, F. (2003) The Hidden Connections: a Science for Sustainable Living. London: Flamingo. Chapman, B. (2006) Income related student loans: concepts, international reforms and administrative challenges, in P. N. Texeira, D. B. Johnstone, M. J. Rosa and H. Vossensteyn (eds.) Cost-sharing and Accessibility in Higher Education: A Fairer Deal? The Netherlands: Springer. Pp. 79–103. Chaucer, G. (1951) The Canterbury Tales. Trans. N. Coghill. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Considine, M. (2006) Theorizing the university as a cultural system: distinctions, identities, emergencies, Educational Theory, 56, 3. Pp. 255–270. Damrosch, D. (1995) We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

148 • References Derrida, J. (2002) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. (Trans. M. Dooley and R. Kearney) London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group. Douglas, M. (1987) How Institutions Think. London: Routledge and Kogan Paul. Dunn, J. (2002) John Dunn searches for definition in the yearbook of civil society, The Times Higher (March 22), p. 7. Dworkin, R. (1996) We need a new interpretation of academic freedom, in L. Menand (ed.) The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Escobar, M., Fernandez, A. L. and Guevara-Niebla, G. with Freire, P. (1994) Paulo Freire on Higher Education: A Dialogue at the University of Mexico. Albany: State University of New York Press. Eyre, R. (2003) The BBC is one of the few things in Britain that works, The Guardian (27 September), p. 22. Featherstone, M. (1995) Undoing Culture: Globalisation, Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage. Foot, M. (1999) Dr Strangelove, I Presume. London: Victor Gollancz. Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postcolonialist’ Condition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. (With notes by A. M. A. Freire.) Trans. R. R. Barr. New York: Continuum. Gamson, Z. F. (1998) The stratification of the academy, in R. Martin (ed.) Chalk Lines: the Politics of Work in the Managed University. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Pp. 103–111. Giddens, A. (1993) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gray, J. (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Allen Lane. Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta Books. Gusdorf, G. (1965) Speaking (La Parole). Trans. P. T. Brockelman. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Gutierrez, G. (1974) A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Trans. C. Inda and J. Eagleson. London: SCM Press. Habermas, J. (2003) The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1971) Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Trans. J. J. Shapiro. London: Heinemann. Hall, J.A. (1995) In search of civil society, in J. A. Hall (ed.) Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pp. 1–31. Halpin, D. (2003) Hope and Education: the Role of the Utopian Imagination. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

References • 149 Halsey, A.H. (1992) The Decline of Donnish Dominion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, A.H. (1998) Zealotry and Academic Freedom: A Legal and Historical Perspective. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Hartley, D. (2006) Excellence and enjoyment: the logic of ‘contradiction’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 54: 3–14. Haworth, A. (1998) Free Speech. London: Routledge. Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Horn, M. (1999) Academic Freedom in Canada: A History. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Hutter, H. (1978) Politics as Friendship: The Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friendship. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Kelly, A. V. (1989) The Curriculum: Theory and Practice. London: Paul Chapman. (Third edition), p. 130. Kerr, C. (2001) The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. (Fift h edition) Kierkegaard, S. (1958) The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834–1854. Shortened version edited and translated by Alexander Dru. London: Collins (Fontana Books). First published by Oxford University Press, 1938. Kogan, M., Moses, I. and El-Khawas, E. (1994) Staffing Higher Education: Meeting New Challenges. London: Jessica Kingsley. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Levinas, E. (2006) Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-other. (Trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav). London and New York: Continuum. Macfarlane, B. (2004) Teaching with Integrity: the Ethics of Higher Education Practice. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer/Taylor and Francis Group. MacIntyre, A. (1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. (Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988). London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth.(Second edition). MacMurray, J. (1961) Persons in Relation. (Second volume of the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow, 1953–54). London: Faber and Faber Ltd. MacMurray, J. (1957) The Self as Agent. (First volume of the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow, 1953–54). London: Faber and Faber Ltd. Mantel, H. (1990) Fludd. London and New York: Penguin Books. Margalit, A. (1998) The Decent Society. (Trans. N. Goldblum). Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. (First published in 1996).

150 • References Margalit, A. (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marquand, D. (2002) Not for posterity, The Times Literary Supplement (22 November). P. 26. McKibbin, R. (2006) The destruction of the public sphere, London Review of Books, 28, 1. (5 January). Pp. 3–6. Menand, L. (1996) The limits of academic freedom, in L. Menand (ed.) The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Moltmann, J. (1967) Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of Christian Eschatology. Trans. J. W. Leitch. London: SCM Press Ltd. de Montaigne, M. (1993) Essays (Trans. J. M. Cohen). London: Penguin Books. Nixon, J. (2001) Not without dust and heat: the moral bases of the new academic professionalism, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22, 2. Pp. 227–244. Nixon, J., Martin, J., McKeown, P. and Ranson, S. (1997) Towards a learning profession: changing codes of occupational practice within the ‘new’ management of education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18, 1. Pp. 5–28. Nussbaum, M.C. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2000) Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997) Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. O’Neill, O. (2002) A Question of Trust (The BBC Reith Lectures). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paechter, C. (2003) On goodness and utility in educational research, in P. Sikes, J. Nixon and W. Carr (eds.) The Moral Foundations of Educational Research: Knowledge, Inquiry and Values. Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press/McGraw Hill Education, pp. 105–117. Pahl, R. (2000) On Friendship. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pahl, R. (1995) After Success: ‘Fin-de-Siecle’ Anxiety and Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Perkin, H. (1989) The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. London: Routledge. Phillips, A. (1999) Which Equalities Matter? Cambridge: Polity Press. Phillips, A. (1995) The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pring, R. (2003) The virtues and vices of an educational researcher, in P. Sikes, J. Nixon, and W. Carr (eds.). The Moral Foundations of Educational

References • 151 Research: Knowledge, Inquiry and Values. Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, pp. 52–67. Ranciere, J. (2007) On the Shores of Politics. (Trans. L. Heron). London and New York: Verso. Ranciere, J. (2006) Hatred of Democracy. (Trans. S. Corcoran). London and New York: Verso. Raz, J. (1998) The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Rees-Mogg, W. (2002) The economics of idiocy: a degree-level introduction. The Times (2 December) p. 18. Reid, I. (1996) Higher Education or Education for Hire? Language and Values in Australian Universities. Rockhampton, Queensland: Central Queensland University Press. Rhoades, G. and Slaughter, S. (1998) Academic capitalism, managed professionals, and supply-side higher education, in R. Martin (ed.) Chalk Lines: the Politics of Work in the Managed University. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pp. 33–68. Rickword, E. (1949) Milton: the revolutionary intellectual, in C. Hill (ed.) The English Revolution 1640: Three Essays. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. Ricoeur (1994) Oneself As Another. Trans K. Blamey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Rorty, R. (1996) Does academic freedom have philosophical presuppositions?, in L. Menand (ed.) The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Rorty, R. (1992) In a flattened world, London Review of Books (8 April), p. 3. Rowland, S. (2000) The Enquiring University Teacher. Buckingham: SRHE & Open University Press. Russell, C. (1993) Academic Freedom. London and New York: Routledge. Sacks, J. (2002) The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London and New York: Continuum. Sacks, J. (2000) The Politics of Hope. London: Vintage. Said, E. (1996) Identity, authority, and freedom: the potentate and the traveller, in L. Menand (ed.) The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual. (The 1993 Reith Lectures.) London: Vintage. Scott, P. (2003) Government must not lose sight of fair access in any revised participation policy. Guardian Education (14 January), p. 15. Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (1987) The Standard of Living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

152 • References Sennet, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (2003a) Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Sennett, R. (2003b) Mistaken on trust, The Guardian (July 12), p. 23. Sennett, R. (1999) The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. Shapiro, J. (2006) 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber. Shields, C. (2002) Unless. London: Fourth Estate. Shaw, P. (2002) Changing Conversations in Organisations: a Complexity Approach to Change. London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group. Shumar, W. (1997) College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education. London and Bristol, PA: The Falmer Press, Taylor and Francis. Sikes, P., Nixon, J. and Carr, W. (eds.) (2003) The Moral Foundations of Educational Research: Knowledge, Inquiry and Values. Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education. Skinner, Q. (2003) Visions of Politics. Volume 1: Regarding Method. Volume 2: Renaissance Virtues. Volume 3: Hobbes and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press. Stacey, R.D. (2001) Complex Responsive Processes in Organisations: Learning and Knowledge Creation. London: Routledge. Stacey, R.D., Griffin, D. and Shaw, P. (2000) Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking? London: Routledge. Stape, J. (2007) The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. London: William Heinemann. Stern-Gillet, S. (1995) Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship. Albany: State University of New York Press. Taylor, C. (1994) The politics of recognition, in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Second edition, pp. 25–73). (Lecture inaugurating the founding of Princeton’s University’s Center for Human Values, 1990. First published by Princeton University Press, 1992.) Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References • 153 Thomas, L. and Quinn, J. (2007) First Generation Entry into Higher Education: An International Study. Maidenhead: SRHE & Open University Press/ McGraw-Hill Education. Tillich, P. (1962) The Shaking of the Foundations. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tillich, P. (1952) The Courage To Be. London: Nisbet and Co., Ltd. Todorov, T. (2003) Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. (Trans D. Bellos) London: Atlantic Books. Touraine, A. (2000) Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference. (Trans. D. Macey) Cambridge: Polity Press. Vernon, M. (2007) The Philosophy of Friendship. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Villa, D. (2001) Socratic Citizenship. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Walker, M. (2003) Framing social justice in education: what does the ‘capabilities’ approach offer? British Journal of Educational Studies, 51, 2. Pp. 168–187. Walker, M. (2001) Mapping our higher education project, in M. Walker (ed.) Reconstructing Professionalism in University Teaching: Teachers and Learners in Action. Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, pp. 3–20. Walker, M. (1998) Response III: identities and contexts, in J. Nixon, M. Beattie, M. Challis and M. Walker, What does it mean to be an academic? A colloquium, Teaching in Higher Education, 3, 3. Pp. 277–298. Weil, S. (2005) Friendship, in S. Miles (ed.) Simone Weil: An Anthology. London: Penguin Books. Pp. 281–289. Westwood, S. (2002) Complex choreography: politics and regimes of recognition, in S. Lash and M. Featherstone (eds.) Recognition and Difference: Politics, Identity and Multiculture. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications. Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Williams, G. L. (1995) The ‘marketization’ of higher education: reforms and potentials in higher education finance, in D. D. Dill and B. Sporn (eds.) Emerging Patterns of Social Demand and University Reform: Though a Glass Darkly. Oxford, New York and Tokyo: Pergamon for The International Association of Universities Press. Williams, R. (1989) Resources of Hope: Culture Democracy, Socialism (Ed. R. Gable), London and New York: Verso. Williams, R. (1983) Towards 2000. London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press. Young, I. M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

154 • References Young, M. (1961) The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. Harmondswoth: Penguin Books. (First published 1958, Thames and Hudson). Young-Bruehl, E. (2006) Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Zizek, S. and Daly, G. (2004) Conversations with Zizek. Cambridge: Polity Press.

I N DE X Page numbers in italic refer to figures or tables. A Academic discourse, linguistic misunderstanding, 61–62 Academic duty, 27 Academic excellence, 133–135, 144 intellectual sociability, 143–144 participation, 133–135 Academic freedom, 27, 38 accountability, 39 assumptions, 38 culture of independence, relationship, 41–42 defense, 40–41 erosion, 39–40 history, 39–40 as indebtedness, 41 inward-looking, 39 new interpretation, 40–41 relevance, 38–39 reward, 39 self-referential, 39 shared ownership, 41 Academic guild, fractionalisation, 18 Academic leadership, 139–141 Academic practice, 144; see also Teaching authenticity, 109–110, 110 changes in conditions of academic work, 19 changing relation of academic practitioners to knowledge, 13–14 changing relation of academic practitioners to moral purposes, 14–15 changing relation of academic practitioners to their public, 13 developmental, 2 dialectical, 2 integrity, 134 magnanimity, 109–110, 110 moral bases, 1

persons in relation, 2–3 respect, 109–110, 110 stratification, 19 truthfulness, 109–110, 110 Academic professionalism, 28–31 changing profession, 12–15 defi ned, 29 identity, 30 Janus-faced, 30–31 as profession of values, 32, 42–44 Accountability, 21–22 academic freedom, 39 mechanisms, 22 Accuracy collegiality, 60 fetishing of, 54, 56–57 negative wisdom, 57–58 research and scholarship, 60 sincerity, 59 teaching, 60 truth, relationship, 56–58 virtue of, 56–58 Action, thinking, relationship, 32 Adequacy, 59–60 Affi liation, 123–125 institutions, 129–130 virtuous relationships, 125 Agency, 114; see also Specific type hope, 114 process of achieving, 90 reciprocity, 92–93 Agreeing to differ, 43 Ambivalence, 26, 28 Aristotle, 7–8 courage, 87 negative wisdom, 49–50 theorising of politics, 7–8 virtues, ethical system for thinking about, 50–51 virtuous friendship, 114–117

155

156 • Index Association centrality, 24–26 relationships, 24–25 Attentiveness, 72–73 collegiality, 79 honesty, relationship, 75 intuitively interpretive disposition, 73–74 universities, 74–75 virtue of, 54, 73–75 Authenticity, 54, 81–94 academic practice, 109–110, 110 authentic defi ned, 81 authentic dialogue, 37 collegiality, 92–94 courage, 86–87 deficit, 53, 54 emotion, 84–85 ethics of, 82 excess, 53, 54 identity, 83 integrity of practice, 89–94 jargon of authenticity, 82 mean, 53, 54 modernist project, 82 other-as-agent, 109–110, 110 political dimensions, 83–84 process of achieving, 90 relationships, 81–82 research and scholarship, 91–92 self-as-agent, 109–110, 110 social structure impinges, 83 teaching, 90–91 Autonomy, 100 acquiring, 101–102 collective interest, 101 disciplines, 39 ends and purposes, 102 individual autonomy, 100–101 respect, 69 self-interest, 101 unpredictability, 102 virtue of, 54, 100–102 vs. being independent, 69 B Banality of evil, 36 Basic income scheme, 134–135 Belief knowledge, relation, 27 truth, relation, 27 Belief-shaped things, 57, 63 Belonging, disciplines, 39

Boundaries, virtuous relationships, 120–121 C Capabilities, 124–125 teaching, 125 Care, 100 caring for the world, 50 collegiality, 103 imagination, 104 magnanimity, 104–105 reporting of applied research, 103 virtue of, 54, 103–105 Change, from inside out, 24–27 Choices, 42–43 of others, 43 restricted, 82–83 Circumstance, goodness, 129 luck, 129 Civic communication, 78 Civic intelligence, 78 Civic leadership, 1, 2, 5 civic spaces, 7–12 difference, 10–11 universities capacity for, 10 increased participation in higher education, 10–11 reclaiming moral bases, 95 restoration, 95 Civic spaces, 4 characterised by, 8 civic leadership, 7–12 goodness, 8 universities, 9 questions of moral purpose, 9 unique, 9 Civil society advantages, 4–5 characterized, 130–132 decent society, contrasted, 130–132 just society, contrasted, 131 key organising concept, 4 limitations, 4–5 new zeitgeist, 4 participation, 6 troubled times of, 3–7 universities academic leadership, 139–141 civic links, 137–138 cost of, 132–135 cross-sector planning, 139–141 excellence and participation, 133–134

Index • 157 institutional inequalities, 134 institutional reorientation, 137–138 maintaining academic quality, 133 necessary conditions, 130–145 public recognition, 138–139 reconnected, 130 relationship, 129–145 student inequalities, 135 working toward good society, 141–143 Cold War, end of, 3 Collective interest, autonomy, 101 Collegiality accuracy, 60 attentiveness, 79 authenticity, 92–94 care, 103 honesty, 79 magnanimity, 107–108 respect, 79 self-creation, 90 senior staff, 93–94 sincerity, 60 truthfulness, 60–61, 63–64 virtuous relationships, 127 Commercialisation, 22 faculty, 23 process, 23 Commodification of higher education, 22, 142–143 Communication civic communication, 78 communications explosion, 13–14 ideologically loaded use of language, 11–12 moral dimension, 95 postmodernism, 61–62 sincerity, 58 specialist terminologies, 61–62 inequality, 62 Communitarians, 49 vs. Socratic negative wisdom, 49 Compassion, 91 cognitive elements, 86–87 empathy, 88–89 identification, 88–89 other-as-agent, 81, 89 sympathetic imaginations, 87 virtue of, 54, 85, 87–89 Connectedness, 95–96 Courage Aristotle, 87 authenticity, 86–87 intellectual courage, 9–10

purposefulness, 87 self-as-agent, 81, 89 types, 85–87 virtue of, 54, 85–87 Cruelty, 32–34 Cultural values, 17 Culture of independence, academic freedom, relationship, 41–42 D Democracy as discussion, 25 education, relation between, 4 intimacy as, 25 Dependency, 67 sexism, 67–68 shame, 67–68 universities, 68 Dialogue, authentic dialogue, 37 Difference, civic leadership, 10–11 Dignity, 67 Disagreement, 43 Disciplines autonomy, 39 belonging, 39 integrity, 39 Diversity, magnanimity, 97–98, 99–100 E Education commodification of higher education, 22, 142–143 democracy, relation between, 4 new public management, 21–22 public debate on ends and purposes, 12 technocratic and bureaucratic ways of thinking about, 11 Egoism, 98 Emotion authenticity, 84–85 infants, 84–85 reasoning, 84–85 recognition, 71 Empathy, 37 compassion, 88–89 Equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, contrasted, 77 Equal worth, respect, 77 Ethical orientation, research and scholarship, 92 Excellence, meaning of, 20 External goods, institutions, 29

158 • Index F Faculty commercialisation, 23 income, 18 Feeling, recognition, 71 Fractionalisation knowledge, 18 universities, 18–19 moral and epistemological uncertainty, 19 Freedom, 38, 142 freedom domains, 41–42 moral agency, 97 Friendship, virtuous relationships, 115–117 distinguished, 115 friends of pleasure, 115–117, 116 friends of utility, 115–117, 116 friends of virtue, 115–117, 116 Functional capabilities, virtuous relationships, 123–125 Functionings, 124–125 teaching, 126 Funding, 22 external sponsorship, 62–63 reforms, 134–135, 136 political will, 136 research, 18 sponsored research, 62–63 student funding policies, 134–135 G Globalisation, 8–9, 98–99 Goodness, 143 circumstance, 129 luck, 129 civic spaces, 8 contingent factors, 111 difficulty of, 111 intentionality, 129 knowledge, 7 material cost of, 132–133, 135, 136 relying upon civic framework, 7–8 vicious and virtuous circle, 9 Goods of academic practice, 2, 3 H Hierarchy of universities, 19–20 Honesty, 72–73 attentiveness, relationship, 75 collegiality, 79 reciprocity, 75

references, 75–76 virtue of, 54, 75–76 Honour, 67 Hope, 111–112, 143 agency, 114 differs from wishful thinking, 112 moral agency, 113–114 social context, 112–114 Hospitality, 96, 98, 99 Humanism, 32–34 I Identification, compassion, 88–89 Identity, 17 academic professionalism, 30 authenticity, 83 Imagination, care, 104 Income, faculty, 18 Incommensurable goods, 9 Indeterminacy, 28 Individualisation, acceleration, 17 Individualism, 16–17, 82 Inequality, 4, 5, 6, 17, 18, 19 Infants, emotion, 84–85 Institionalised individualism, 16–17 Institutional management, 21–23 Institutions affi liation, 129–130 alienating effects of, 130 external goods, 29 reasons for, 129–130 runaway world, 17 assumption of homogeneity, 17 significance of, 130 Instrumental reason, primacy, 82, 84–85 Integrity, 36 academic practice, 134 authenticity, 89–94 disciplines, 39 magnanimity, 105–108 respect, 76–79 truthfulness, 59–64 Intellectual courage, 9–10 Intentionality, goodness, 129 Interdependence, 59–60 Interdisciplinarity, 13 Internal goods, practices, 29 Intimacy as democracy, 25 J Just society, civil society, contrasted, 131

Index • 159 K Knowledge, 13–14 accomplishment vs. unending quest, 10 belief, relation between, 27 fractionalisation, 18 goodness, 7 truth, relation between, 27 L Language, 99–100 Leadership academic leadership, 139–141 Aristotelian idea, 6 Platonic idea, 6 Learning, centrality, 27 Liberalism, abhorrence of dependency, 67–68 Liberation theology, 113 Linguistic misunderstanding, academic discourse, 61–62 Love, tripartite structure, 115 M Magnanimity, 54, 95–110 academic practice, 109–110, 110 care, 104–105 collegiality, 107–108 cosmopolitan magnanimity, 98–100 deficit, 53, 54 diversity, 97–98, 99–100 excess, 53, 54 integrity of practice, 105–108 mean, 53, 54 moral endpoint, 96 other-as-agent, 109–110, 110 professional identity, 96–97 purposefulness, 96–97 reaching out, 98, 99 research and scholarship, 105, 106–107 self-as-agent, 109–110, 110 teaching, 105–106 Managerial efficiency, universities, 11 Managerialism, 74, 139–141 Market forces, 140 Modernism, 130 Modernity, malaises of, 82–83 Moral agency ambivalent consequences, 26 centrality, 26 freedom, 97 hope, 113–114 thoughtfulness, 35–37, 37–38

Moral dimension, communication, 95 Morale, 24 Morality, ontological, 81 Moral purposefulness, 34–38, 42–43 Mutual respect, 68–69 N Negative wisdom accuracy, 57–58 Aristotelianism, 49–50 Socrates, 48 Neo-liberal market ideologies, 21 O Other-as-agent authenticity, 109–110, 110 compassion, 81, 89 magnanimity, 109–110, 110 respect, 109–110, 110 truthfulness, 109–110, 110 P Participation, 4 academic excellence, 133–135 civil society, 6 public address, 71 recognition, 70–71 Participative democracy, 8 Part-time faculty, 19 Peer review, 143 vs. peer surveillance, 143 Performativity, 21 Persons in relation, academic practice, 2–3 Plurality, 8, 98 recognition, 70–71 Positional power, 92–93 virtuous relationships, 119–120 Postmodernism communication, 61–62 vs. Socratic negative wisdom, 49 Practical reasoning, 123–125 teaching, 125–126 virtuous relationships, 125 Practices, internal goods, 29 Principle of adequacy, truthfulness, 59–60 Principle of interdependence, truthfulness, 59 Professional atomisation, 19–21 Professional commitment, 28–29 Professional identity, 13 learning to learn, 97

160 • Index Professional identity (continued) magnanimity, 96–97 virtuous relationships, 121 Professionalism, meaning, 12 Professional relationships different kinds, 3 as relationships of virtue, 3 Public address, participation, 71 Public space, characterised, 8 Public sphere, elaboration and proliferation, 25–26 Purpose, 95–96 Purposefulness, 34–38, 42 courage, 87 magnanimity, 96–97 of others, 43 R Reasoning emotion, 84–85 practical reasoning, 123–126 Reciprocity agency, 92–93 honesty, 75 Recognition, 37 emotion, 71 equal worth, 71–72 feeling, 71 participation, 70–71 plurality, 70–71 respect, relationship, 70–72 References, honesty, 75–76 Relationship, 95–96 Representative thinking, 35–36 Research and scholarship accuracy, 60 authenticity, 91–92 ethical orientation, 92 external sponsorship, 62–63 funding selectivity, 18 magnanimity, 105, 106–107 respect, 78–79 externally imposed time-scales, 78–79 self-creation, 90 sincerity, 60 truthfulness, 60–61, 62–63 virtuous relationships, 126–127 Respect, 54, 66–80 academic practice, 109–110, 110 aspects, 67 autonomy, 69 collegiality, 79

deficit, 53, 54 defi ned, 66 equal worth, 77 excess, 53, 54 integrity of practice, 76–79 justification, 71–72 mean, 53, 54 other-as-agent, 109–110, 110 prevailing orientation, 67 recognition, relationship, 70–72 research and scholarship, 78–79 externally imposed time-scales, 78–79 self-as-agent, 109–110, 110 self-respect vs. mutual respect, 68–69 synonyms, 66–67 teaching, 77 trust, 69 Reward, academic freedom, 39 Right action, 47, 48–49 Runaway world, 16–17 institutions, 17 assumption of homogeneity, 17 S Scholarly domains, 20 Scholarship; see Research and scholarship Self, 28 Self-as-agent authenticity, 109–110, 110 courage, 81, 89 magnanimity, 109–110, 110 respect, 109–110, 110 truthfulness, 109–110, 110 Self-constitution process, 28 Self-creation collegiality, 90 research and scholarship, 90 teaching, 90 Self-deception, 32–34 Self-determination, 82 Self-interest, autonomy, 101 Self-regulation, 38 Self-respect, 68–69 Senior staff, collegiality, 93–94 Sensitivity, sense, systematic association between, 47–48 Sexism, dependency, 67–68 Shame, dependency, 67–68 Sincerity accuracy, 59 collegiality, 60 communication, 58

Index • 161 inferential unpredictability of human language, 58 as reciprocal, 58–59 research and scholarship, 60 teaching, 60 truthfulness, relationship, 58–59 virtue of, 54, 58–59 Social class, 16 Social Darwinism, 33–34 Social justice, 142 Social order, 5 hierarchies, 5 Societal changes pessimistic view, 20–21 professional responses, 21 Sociology of the professions, 12 Socrates, 48–51 belief in good society, 50 belief in philosophy, 50 claim to virtue, 48 negative wisdom, 48 socratic ignorance, 10 socratic method, 7 Specialist terminologies, communication, 61–62 inequality, 62 Sponsored research, 62–63 Status, 38 Stratification, academic practice, 19 Structure, 114 Student funding policies, 134–135 Students authority as learners, 91 funding policies, 134–135 learning needs, 91 Suffering, 87 Sympathetic imagination, 37 T Teaching accuracy, 60 authenticity, 90–91 capabilities, 125 functionings, 126 magnanimity, 105–106 practical reasoning, 125–126 respect, 77 self-creation, 90 sincerity, 60 truthfulness, 60–62 virtuous relationships, 125–126 Thought, 35

acknowledgment of universal capacity, 49 action, relationship, 32 Thoughtfulness, moral agency, 35–37, 37–38 Time famine, 73 Traditions, virtues, 53 Transparency, 64 boundaries, 64 Trust respect, 69 truthfulness, 54 universities, 138–139 Truth accuracy, relationship, 56–58 belief, relation between, 27 existence questionable, 55–56 knowledge, relation between, 27 virtue of, 56 Truthful, defi ned, 47 Truthfulness, 54–65 academic practice, 109–110, 110 collegiality, 60–61, 63–64 complex and anxiety-ridden process, 55 criticisms, 54–55 deficit, 53, 54 excess, 53, 54 integrity of practice, 59–64 mean, 53, 54 other-as-agent, 109–110, 110 principle of adequacy, 59–60 principle of interdependence, 59 research and scholarship, 60–61, 62–63 self-as-agent, 109–110, 110 sincerity, relationship, 58–59 teaching, 60–62 trust, 54 understanding, relationship, 55 U Uncertainties, 3–4 Understanding, truthfulness, relationship, 55 Unity of a human life, 51–52 dependent upon traditions of practice, 52–53 virtues, 52 Universities atomisation, 18–21 attentiveness, 74–75 changing relation of academic practitioners to moral purposes civic leadership increased participation in higher education, 10–11

162 • Index Universities (continued) reclaiming moral bases, 95 restoration, 95 civic space, 9 questions of moral purpose, 9 unique, 9 civil society academic leadership, 139–141 civic links, 137–138 cost of, 132–135 cross-sector planning, 139–141 excellence and participation, 133–134 institutional inequalities, 134 institutional reorientation, 137–138 maintaining academic quality, 133 necessary conditions, 130–145 public recognition, 138–139 reconnected, 130 relationship, 129–145 student inequalities, 135 working toward good society, 141–143 commodification of higher education, 22, 142–143 conditions for institutional flourishing, 135–141 as deliberative spaces, 32–46 dependency, 68 disparities between, 18 expenditures per student, 18 fractionalisation, 18–19, 18–21 moral and epistemological uncertainty, 19 hierarchy of, 19–20 ideologically loaded use of language, 11–12 managerial efficiency, 11 as places of learning, 16–31 positive recognition for, 138–139 potentially confl icting purposes, 43 public confidence, 138–139 purpose, 6–7 responsibility for civic leadership, 2 stratification, 14, 18–21 trust, 138–139 Unpredictability, autonomy, 102 Utopianism, 112–113, 114

Virtues; see also Specific type Aristotle, 47 ethical system for thinking about, 50–51 defi nition, 52 as dispositions, 53 exercise of, 52 nature of, 52 no abstract unity, 53 in practice, 51–53, 54 traditions, 53 unity of a human life, 52 unity of virtues, 51–52 Virtue theorists, 49 Virtuous friendship, Aristotle, 114–117 Virtuous institutions, 129–145 civic links, 137–138 conditions for institutional flourishing, 135–141 institutional reorientation, 137–138 reasons for, 129 working toward good society, 141–143 Virtuous relationships, 111–128 actualising, 123–127 affi liation, 125 asymmetry of existing relationships, 117–118 boundaries, 120–121 capabilities approach, 123 collegiality, 127 developing modes of professional interaction, 121–122 differences of circumstance, 118 friendship, 115–117 distinguished, 115 friends of pleasure, 115–117, 116 friends of utility, 115–117, 116 friends of virtue, 115–117, 116 functional capabilities, 123–125 interpersonal conditions for, 117–122 positional power, 119–120 practical reasoning, 125 professional identity, 121 reconceptualisation, 112 research and scholarship, 126–127 teaching, 125–126

V Values, 42; see also Specific type connections, 42

Z Zugzwam, 24

Towards the Virtuous University: The Moral Bases of Academic Practice (Key Issues in Higher Education)

The Academic Citizen: The Virtue of Service in University life (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Non-University Higher Education in Europe (Higher Education Dynamics)

Key Issues in Secondary Education

Grading Student Achievement in Higher Education: Signals and shortcomings (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Changing Identities in Higher Education: Voicing Perspectives (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education

Key Issues for Education Researchers (Education Studies: Key Issues)

Towards Strategic Staff Development in Higher Education

Higher Education and Sustainable Development: Paradox and Possibility (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Citizenship and Higher Education: The Role of Universities in Community and Society (Key Issues in Higher Education)

The Language of Education in Africa: the Key Issues

Christianity and Moral Identity in Higher Education

Higher Education, Research, and Knowledge in the Asia-Pacific Region (Issues in Higher Education)

Higher Education, Research, and Knowledge in the Asia-Pacific Region (Issues in Higher Education)

Private Higher Education in Post-Communist Europe: In Search of Legitimacy (Issues in Higher Education)

The Challenge of Scholarship: Rethinking Learning, Teaching and Research (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Education in the Moral Domain

Education in the Moral Domain

Education in the Moral Domain

The Law of Higher Education

Higher Education and the Public Good: Imagining the University

Teaching Academic Writing in European Higher Education (Studies in Writing)

Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University

Teacher Supply: The Key Issues (Continuum Empirical Studies in Education)

The Practice of Moral Judgment

Higher education in Ukraine

Markets in Higher Education

The Finance of Higher Education: Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice

Markets in Higher Education

Higher Education in Greece

Towards the Virtuous University: The Moral Bases of Academic Practice (Key Issues in Higher Education)

The Academic Citizen: The Virtue of Service in University life (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Non-University Higher Education in Europe (Higher Education Dynamics)

Key Issues in Secondary Education

Grading Student Achievement in Higher Education: Signals and shortcomings (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Changing Identities in Higher Education: Voicing Perspectives (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education

Key Issues for Education Researchers (Education Studies: Key Issues)

Towards Strategic Staff Development in Higher Education

Higher Education and Sustainable Development: Paradox and Possibility (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Citizenship and Higher Education: The Role of Universities in Community and Society (Key Issues in Higher Education)

The Language of Education in Africa: the Key Issues

Christianity and Moral Identity in Higher Education

Higher Education, Research, and Knowledge in the Asia-Pacific Region (Issues in Higher Education)

Higher Education, Research, and Knowledge in the Asia-Pacific Region (Issues in Higher Education)

Private Higher Education in Post-Communist Europe: In Search of Legitimacy (Issues in Higher Education)

The Challenge of Scholarship: Rethinking Learning, Teaching and Research (Key Issues in Higher Education)

Education in the Moral Domain

Education in the Moral Domain

Education in the Moral Domain

The Law of Higher Education

Higher Education and the Public Good: Imagining the University

Teaching Academic Writing in European Higher Education (Studies in Writing)

Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University

Teacher Supply: The Key Issues (Continuum Empirical Studies in Education)

The Practice of Moral Judgment

Higher education in Ukraine

Markets in Higher Education

The Finance of Higher Education: Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice

Markets in Higher Education

Higher Education in Greece

Recommend Documents