APP EDITORS’ NOTE:
The essay below, Stephen Turner’s “Beyond the Academic Ethic,” which will appear here in serial form, originally appeared in F. Cannizzo and N. Osbaldston (eds.), The Social Structures of Global Academia (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 35-52, and is reproduced by permission.
Stephen Turner is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. You can read more about him and his work HERE.
Introduction
In the early 1980s, Edward Shils, together with others, undertook the task of defining what he called “The Academic Ethic” and elaborated these ideas in a report on principles and considerations governing academic appointments at the University of Chicago ([1982] 1997) and in his Jefferson Lecture on the relation between the University and the State (1979). It is perhaps best to think of this task in terms used by Alasdair MacIntyre in many of his writings, in which he observes that the explicit formulation of an ethical doctrine typically came at the point where it was no longer a matter of general tacit acceptance, but was becoming lost, as when heroic virtue of Agammenon is articulated by Thrasymachus in the non-heroic world of fifth century BC Athens (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 130), on the public virtues of Roman society, which have been rendered obsolete by social disorder, are articulated by the Stoics, in a burst of ethical writings, as private virtues (MacIntyre, 1966, p. 108). Shils’ exchanges with his friends and collaborators who commented on the project bear this out: they understood the changes in circumstances that had made what they took to be the traditional academic ethic obsolescent if not obsolete, and were formulating it in order to defend it in the face of these changes.
Shils understood science in terms of what might be called “the liberal theory of science,” which treated scientists, and by extension all of academia, as independent agents seeking truth in their own ways, governed by their own sense of what was promising to research, bound together only by their mutual dependence as scholars and teachers and by a strong tradition of truth-seeking and mutual respect. At the time he was writing, the threat could be understood in terms of the problem of the relation of the university to the state, and the conflicts between the intrinsic aims of the university and the temporary aims of the state.
Today we have a new problematic, which is being defined, in an outpouring of writings by academics about the audit or performance culture, as the rule of universities by administrators, and their effects on science and academic life generally. These writings typically also appeal to a vestigial form of the liberal theory of science. Although there are attempts to replace this theory, none of them adequately express the new situation. And like Shils nearly forty years ago, this is an “owl of Minerva flying at dusk” moment. The authors recognize that the damage has been done and is irreversible. They protest against it. They are also paralyzed by it.
What is the relevance of these “traditional” academic values today? If the liberal theory of science is dead, what are the reasons, and what are the practical realities that have replaced it? To answer these questions takes us to the heart of problems of the organization and financing of academic life, the audit culture, and the question of truth itself. It also requires avoiding nostalgia for an imagined past, and gaining a realistic understanding of the past, and of the reasons it cannot be returned to. For those who are happy with the present, and there are many beneficiaries of the current order of academic life who are (despite their complaining about not getting enough of what they want quickly enough), these are non-issues. For those who are not, there should be a way of self-understanding that is an alternative to pure despair.
Understanding the present also requires a deeper understanding not only of the “traditional” academic past of the mid-twentieth century, but of the status quo ante the world of academia and learning prior to the research university and to the spread of the German model of the late nineteenth century which inspired the research university. This prior, and much older model, still can be detected in a few formal features of academic life, and prowls around, as Weber puts it, like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. It is this prior model, or so I shall claim, that perhaps provides the best answer to the question of what sort of vocation or calling for the life of the mind exists and should exist today.
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