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BEAST OR GOD? ARISTOTELIAN LESSONS FOR ACADEMICS
David
K. O'Connor
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
Man is by nature a political animal. ... One who is incapable of
community, or who needs nothing because he is self-sufficient,
is no part of a city, and so is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle, Politics 1.2
Our everyday lives are full of opportunities for
virtue and vice, yet in the last half century, hundreds, perhaps
thousands, more papers have appeared in philosophy journals
devoted to the ethics of nuclear deterrence, abortion, and
special topics in medicine, law, and business, than to marriage
and academic life. (I will be focusing on an American academic
world; I would love to discover what is different in the worlds
many of you inhabit.) For most of us, the moral tone of our life
will be set by our marriages. But today I want to focus on our
everyday life as academics.
The questions of liberty and law at the heart of
this conference are not merely for nations. We professors make
and destroy our own poleis, our cities of the mind. Yet we write
less about, say, using part-time teachers to give regular
faculty more research time, than about dismembering poor
patients before they are dead to transplant their organs into
rich or talented people whose lives we value more. We can find
more reflection on the rights of trees and our animal friends
than on the rights of our graduate students, and more about the
moral status of prodigious kittens than prodigious colleagues.
This is unfortunate, since our shared life within the community
of scholars is neither so transparent that moral reflection
would be unnecessary, nor so unimportant that it would be
trivial.
One reason for this curious neglect by ethicists of
our own profession may be that much standard contemporary
ethical theory gives us few resources for thinking about the
moral demands of the academic life we share with our colleagues.
Such theory is most at home where we confront each other with
competing individual interests, and where the primary moral
problem is how to mediate our claims in the face of this
competition. No doubt some episodes in academic life have the
structure of such a clash of individual interest, and the
standard theories help us to get some conceptual grip on them.
But many of our common interactions with colleagues and students
involve shared interests and projects, where the primary moral
issue is to find our proper role within a larger group effort
rather than to respect the independent interests of others. For
example, when we divide up the work load and leadership
positions in a departmental committee, we are distributing
burdens and opportunities within a shared project rather than
balancing competing individual interests. Our moral task in such
contexts is not to rein in our own egoistic interests to make
way for other people's egoistic interests, but rather to
coordinate our actions with those of colleagues who share with
us a common goal.
I want to explore some resources of an Aristotelian
approach to describing and evaluating this aspect of academic
life. Aristotle focused on communities held together by a shared
vision of the good, and had little independent interest in
"liberal" alliances of members pursuing private conceptions of
happiness. This focus on a common good is just what we need to
explore the shared life of colleagues. The tension between
liberty and law still exists in such a community, but we distort
the nature of the tension if we try to make it too much like the
tension in a liberal community of private interests.
I will consider three models of academic community,
which I will call synergy, symbiosis, and self-sufficiency. The
conceptual machinery for characterizing these models comes
pretty much straight out of Aristotle's ethical and political
philosophy (though I won't try here to document the details).
Think of these models as ideals we might try to live up to and
by which we might measure our academic success or failure. The
use of ideal models to describe and evaluate styles of community
is also characteristically Aristotelian; for example, Aristotle
uses such models in his discussions of friendship and political
constitutions. I should immediately point out that the sort of
ideal-type analysis I will be exploiting always runs the risk of
presenting the types as sealed off from each other, when in fact
in any real society or institution they mix and interpenetrate.
Separation is merely an analytic convenience. Aristotle is
sensitive to this problem, and treats "mixtures" at length; but
I will not discuss such complications.
Besides its focus on how to share interests (rather
than on how to pursue individual interests fairly) and its focus
on ideal models, my account has two other important Aristotelian
features. First, all three ideals are models primarily of
successful academic groups. The ideal for the group then informs
and regulates our judgments about the excellence and success of
individual scholars. I am assuming, then, a certain evaluative
priority of the group ideal over the ideal for an individual. We
will evaluate particular scholars in light of our general view
about the community of scholars. By assuming this evaluative
priority of the group ideal over the ideal for an individual, I
subscribe to Aristotle's view that man, even academic man, is
more a political than an individual animal.
Second, like Aristotle's account of happiness and
virtue, my account of academic success and excellence straddles
the distinction between moral and (merely) prudential concerns.
Within an Aristotelian framework, this distinction is neither
very sharp nor particularly important, since the constituents of
the happy life do not naturally divide up into these two
exclusive categories. This blurring of the line between the
moral and the prudential will give my discussion an air of
practical advice for successful living perhaps more typical of
self-help books and magazine articles than of most contemporary
ethical writing, but that is just what we would expect of an
authentically Aristotelian account.
To compare the three ideals of synergy, symbiosis,
and self-sufficiency, it will be helpful to take the view of a
provost or dean. You are trying to build up stronger academic
units within your university. This would include building strong
departments, but you may also be looking to build working groups
within or between departments. Given your Aristotelian
tendencies, your hiring, firing, and promotion decisions will be
guided by your conception of successful academic groups. Your
evaluation of the excellence of an individual scholar will be
heavily influenced by how that individual contributes to the
groups whose development you are trying to promote. The three
ideals set your standards for such evaluation.
I will consider three aspects of each of these
ideals of academic success and excellence. First, what standard
does the ideal ask us to live up to as colleagues, and what
expectations should a dean have for collegial interaction?
Second, what do the three ideals imply about scholarly writing
and publication? Will a dean evaluate the publication record of
individual scholars differently depending on which model of
group excellence he or she subscribes to? Third, how should the
physical space of the university be structured? The geography of
academe has a big influence on, and is influenced by, our
conceptions of successful academic activity. Though a vision of
good teaching is essential to any complete account of academic
success and excellence, I will abstract from the effect that
trying to live up to these ideals would have on relations
between faculty and students. Ideals of teaching open up too
many issues of their own.
1. The Ideal of Synergy
The first model of academic success and excellence
is the ideal of synergy. If you are a dean using this model, you
aim to build departments (or more realistically, groups within
or across departments) that work together on truly shared
projects. The emphasis here falls on the joint project pursued
rather than on the individual contributions of the pursuers. If
you are a synergist dean, you will think of yourself primarily
as promoting certain worthwhile projects rather than as directly
promoting talented individuals. Of course, one essential
consideration in promoting a given project is finding smart,
hard-working scholars interested in it. No synergy without
energy, we might say. But you will evaluate people primarily as
contributors to a common project rather than as independent
researchers. Some deans are loath to make judgments of this sort
about which projects are worth promoting. They prefer to limit
themselves to evaluating the efficiency of an individual
scholar's pursuit of his or her own research projects. But since
synergist deans measure an academic group's success by how it
promotes a shared project, they must make such judgments.
This ideal of group success has a corresponding
conception of individual excellence. The scholar who is an
excellent synergist flourishes in a working group where each
member understands more because he or she engages in the group's
activity. Such a scholar must have skills of partnership, and
will often need to be willing to be somewhat submerged in the
group effort.
Besides taking this perspective on scholarly
excellence in collegial interaction, you will also adapt your
expectations about publication to fit the synergistic ideal. For
example, the synergist dean will look benevolently rather than
suspiciously on joint authorship. I believe that many deans (at
least in the humanities) are uncomfortable with jointly authored
articles because it is hard to divide up credit for them. If I
publish two articles with one co-author and one with four
co-authors, am I equivalent to someone who has published three
articles on his or her own? Or do I get credit for two halves
and a fifth? Or do I get no credit at all under the assumption
that whatever else it may be, being responsible for a half
article (let alone a fifth of an article) is not an
accomplishment of the same type as publishing a whole article of
one's own? If you are judging by the ideal of synergy, these
questions will not be natural ones for you to ask. More
generally, the synergist might expect a scholar's written work
to be less original and more oriented to discussion and review
of other's work, so that discussion notes and book reviews would
go up in status. In these various ways, synergy should find
natural outlets in written as well as oral interaction.
Finally, the dean who adopts the ideal of synergy
will take a lively interest in the physical arrangement of the
university. Synergy demands a particular type of architecture to
make shared work convenient, or even possible. For example, you
as dean will insist on putting common rooms into new buildings,
especially faculty office buildings. On many campuses, the
synergist dean will also need to resist the constant pressure to
convert common rooms to other purposes when older buildings are
remodeled. Perhaps such a dean would even tear down partitions
that create individualized work spaces in order to create more
common space. This does not mean that you would do away with
private offices. But when hard decisions had to be made about
space allocation, you would give common rooms the priority of
research facilities rather than of mere social space. The
synergist dean would put common space in a category with study
carrels and computer rooms, rather than with faculty lounges and
snack bars.
2. The Ideal of Symbiosis
The second model of academic success and excellence is the ideal
of symbiosis, or mutual parasitism. Here the ideal does not
require a common project shared among scholars, but does expect
different individual projects to support and complement one
another. In your deanly guise, you will look to hire and retain
scholars with diverse enough fields of expertise to fill in gaps
in one another's knowledge. You will be concerned with coverage
across a discipline rather than with building working groups
within the discipline. Because projects would be definitely
conceived as belonging to particular individuals on this model
of academic community, it does not demand that individual
scholars submerge themselves in a group project to the extent
that the synergistic ideal does. In this respect, symbionts do
not need as much community spirit as synergists. But in another
respect, symbionts need more. For in a symbiotic academic
community, I am expected to contribute to projects that belong
to someone else; synergists need only work within a shared
project. The symbiotic ideal, then, holds up quite different
standards of partnership from the ideal of synergy. The
symbiotic dean would value scholars both for the quality of
their individual projects and for their value as hosts to their
parasitic colleagues.
This ideal of one scholar complementing another's
projects rather than sharing in them would also have an effect
on academic writing. The symbiotic dean would expect our
colleagues to appear in our articles not as co-authors, but as
helpers and editors. The footnotes in scholarly articles seem
often intended to document the feeding pattern of a particular
parasite as it ate its way through its friends. On this model,
it is important that the individual's ownership of a project not
be submerged, so that a clear line can be drawn between my
articles, written with your help, and your articles, written
with my help. The scholarly ritual of acknowledging debts to
others while exonerating them of any responsibility for the
finished product may also accord with the symbiotic model: we
acknowledge others for complementing or filling out our
projects, but steadfastly refuse the implication that the
project belongs to others as well as to ourselves. We can borrow
some sugar or flour from our neighbors, but it's still our cake
(good or bad).
Symbiotic deans should also promote a style of
architecture that suits their vision of academic community. In
the synergistic model, the paradigmatic form of collegial
interaction would be the working group, and so a premium would
be put on common space. In the symbiotic model, the paradigm
would be something more like the occasional visit, to clarify a
particular point or get some piece of information. From this
perspective, common rooms are not as important as they are for
synergism. But symbiont colleagues do need easy access to one
another. One typical physical realization of this ideal: a
faculty office building with each corridor reserved for a
particular department. With this arrangement, each scholar can
have his or her own sound-proofed office in which to pursue
individual projects, but still be within strolling distance of
his or her colleagues.
2. The Ideal of Self-sufficiency
The last model of academic excellence and success I want to
consider is the one Aristotle contrasts in our epigraph with a
political life, namely, the self-sufficient life of a beast or a
god. The Cyclops, with his one huge eye, his penchant for
cannibilism, and his solitary dwelling off in a cave of his own,
is Aristotle's example of such an apolitical being. If you are a
Cyclopean dean, what do you look for in an academic community?
Your requirements will be very minimal, since you discount the
importance of interaction among colleagues and focus on
individual status. You will try to assemble a set of academic
stars who will see themselves basically as independent
contractors. Your stars' collegial skills, whether of a
synergistic or symbiotic sort, will not be of much concern. If a
scholar has a big enough eye, the occasional colleague he
devours for lunch can easily be overlooked. The chronic
indifference of an academic Cyclops to his or her colleagues may
be taken by the dean who is guided by the ideal of
self-sufficiency as a symptom of divine transcendence rather
than dehumanizing incapacity. Scholars so gigantic need not
complement their colleagues in any way, let alone share any
projects with them.
Superficially, this ideal may appear to abandon the
evaluative priority of the group to the individual, reverting to
a "liberal" individualist ideal in which each scholar is
evaluated for his or her pursuit of an essentially private
project, more or less untrammeled by the demands of community.
But this is misleading. The individualist model presupposes that
scholars should be judged on the basis of their individual
projects, while the self-sufficiency model understands the
Cyclopean giants to merit their independence only because of
their transcendent capacities. The individualist ideal treats
all scholars as atoms, while the self-sufficiency ideal looks
only for scholars who are isolated stars.
The splendid isolation of the self-sufficient gods
and beasts of academe also has implications for writing and
publication. This ideal pushes the desirability of independent
ownership of academic projects much further than the symbiotic
ideal. The footnotes of scholars brought along in the Cyclopean
mode are not peopled by their complementary colleagues, but by
an endless citation of their own careers. Their favorite phrase
is "As I have argued elsewhere ... ". If you are a Cyclopean
dean, you will be more impressed by such self-generating
literary activity than by research of a synergistic or even
symbiotic kind, which by contrast seems dependent on other
people and enmeshed in their projects.
Finally, your Cyclopean scholars need suitably
Cyclopean architecture. Once you hire them, they will want to
scatter to their well-appointed caves and pursue their solitary
projects. You will want to see to it that faculty offices
reflect this need for privacy and dispersal. You may well locate
the offices more as hiding places than as work stations
accessible to colleagues (not to mention students). And if you
hire more scholars than you really have caves for, you divide up
the common space or convert meeting rooms to create more private
space.
These three ideals show that an Aristotelian
approach can bring into focus a number of important, concrete
issues relevant to assessing academic excellence. Four features
of the Aristotelian approach have been especially helpful for
getting this conceptual grip on life in academe: (1) the focus
on issues that arise in coordination within a shared project
rather than in competition between individual projects; (2) the
use of ideal models to describe and compare different styles of
collegial life; (3) the evaluative priority of group over
individual ideals; and (4) the combination of moral and
prudential considerations. I have not here gone much beyond
mapping out some issues that the Aristotelian approach brings to
light; but I hope I have convinced you that the issues are there
to be addressed. |
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