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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
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THIS I BELIEVE Cultural competency, academic bills of rights, speech restrictions, syllabi with required “here are my moral commitments” and “here’s what you might find morally offensive in this course” sections, and now “ethical competency” …You just can’t seem to stop people from meddling and mandating in the American university classroom. All you can do, if you’re UD and it’s the morning of the fifth of July and you’re exhausted from yesterday’s blowout, is keep trying to swat this stuff down. UD admires Candace de Russy, the SUNY trustee who’s relentless in going after the academic follies of the public university system of New York (most recently, she wrote scathing things about the introduction of a “casino“ major in some SUNY schools). But her latest opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed is a real mess. It’s a mess in the same way opinion columns defending cultural competency, and university reports defending mandatory summer camps in diversity training for faculty, are a mess. All of these pieces of writing take on the same vast, complex, and delicate human matter: how we engage with one another in the world. You can formalize this matter to some extent, as in moral philosophy; you can describe variations, as in anthropology; you can analyze things like religious imperatives (“Do unto others…”) as in theology. You can’t stick it into your curriculum and make your students moral. Remember Randy Newman’s song, “Sandman's Coming”: “It’s a great big dirty world/ If they say it ain't, they’re lying.” Students understand this because they’re in the world; business school and economics students really understand it, because they’re on the cutting edge of the market-based world of the United States -- a world that the French, for instance, in rejecting the EU Constitution, cited as too down and dirty for them. You can try to make market capitalism kinder and gentler, as the French wish to do; you can attack it outright; you can defend it. What you cannot do is what Russy attempts to do in her Insider Higher Ed piece: pretend that it doesn’t encourage unethical behavior. Alan Greenspan acknowledges that it does in a recent speech at the Wharton school, when he notes that despite endless legislation and rules, there’s still significant, high and low profile corporate corruption: But recent corporate scandals in the United States and elsewhere have clearly shown that the plethora of laws and regulations of the past century have not eliminated the less-savory side of human behavior. Greenspan goes on in a vague way to call for more oversight and perhaps yet more legislation; he concludes, even more vaguely, by saying this to Wharton’s graduating class: A generation from now, as you watch your children graduate, you will want to be able to say that whatever success you achieved was the result of honest and productive work, and that you dealt with people the way you would want them to deal with you. … I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world, and far more satisfying, when it comes without exploiting others. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake. UD finds this eloquent and empty. More substantial is the reality, as Russy herself notes, that “in his book Moral Dimension, Amitai Etzioni equates the neoclassical economic paradigm with disregard for ethics. Sumantra Ghoshal’s article “Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices,” in Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal, blames ethical decay on the compensation and management practices that evolved from economic theory’s emphasis on incentives.” Yet Russy averts her gaze from this pretty straightforward truth and, bizarrely, locks onto poststructuralist philosophy: [T]he efficient markets hypothesis is itself a reflection of a deeper and broader philosophical positivism that is now pandemic to the entire academy. …Over the past two centuries the assaults on the rational basis for morals have created an atmosphere that stymies interest in ethical education. In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume wrote that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” so that morals are emotional and cannot be proven true. Today’s academic luminaries have thoroughly imbibed this “emotivist” perspective. …[T]o learn to act ethically, human beings need to be exposed to living models of ethical emotion, intention and habit. Far removed from such living models, college students today are incessantly exposed to varying degrees of nihilism… But rather than go on to defend Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights or something like that, Russy then shifts course again and says anyway it doesn’t matter what nihilistic relativist philosophers teach; what matters is how they act: professors must be living embodiments of morality, and if they’re not, they should go: [T]he growing influence of nihilism within the academy is deeply, and causally, connected to increasing ethical breaches by academics (such as the cases of plagiarism and fraud that we cited earlier). Abstract theorizing about ethics has most assuredly affected academics’ professional behavior….It is time for the academy to heed the AAUP’s 1915 declaration, which warned that if the professoriate “should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of … the unworthy… it is certain that the task will be performed by others.” Whether it’s from the left, as in mandated cultural reeducation, or from the right, as in mandated morality-embodiment, it’s the same coercive effort to engineer a great big pretty world. |