by Margaret A. Miller
What is now proved was once only imagined.
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
A s I was reading through this issue, I was intrigued to find that several articles assumed a set of professional norms for academics. The discovery in turn reminded me of Lee Shulman’s injunction, to people involved in the Carnegie project on the education doctorate, that one of our key responsibilities as educators is to pass on to our students professional ethics and norms of behavior—mostly by modeling them, it seems to me. In order to do so, though, we need to be clear about what they are.
It may be that every profession has one overriding imperative that fundamentally governs it. A doctor’s imperative, for instance, might be to succor, or at least to do no harm (a norm that survives the obsolescence of the Hippocratic Oath). A lawyer’s overriding ethical imperative would be to defend, an elementary school teacher’s to nurture, and so on. So what would that imperative be for the professoriate?
I nominate to discover and speak truth(s). The assumption that we’re in the truth business seems built into a lot of what we say and the judgments we make. Peter Ewell makes this assumption in beginning his article with a telling dependent clause: “For an enterprise dedicated to truth...” And Douglas Bennett excoriates the marketing practices of higher education because they violate “our professional, academic norms of evidence, careful argument, and fidelity to truth-seeking.”
That’s a demanding imperative, and it has a number of entailments.
Truth-seeking calls on our keenest professional skills, which we need to keep in good working order. Among other things, it requires continuous self-renewal, which isn’t just a matter of keeping up in our fields—it also means cultivating a scientific or childlike curiosity. Truth-seeking means looking past disciplinary boundaries to see where what we’re discovering links up with what other people know. I love Lewis Thomas’s description, in Lives of a Cell, of biological research as expressing “our conjoined intelligence.” He wonders if we “are linked in circuits for the storage, processing, and retrieval of information, since this appears to be the most basic and universal of all human enterprises.” He then goes on to quote Zieman to the effect that “this technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of knowledge, has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than any one individual can exert.”
Truth-seeking is also arduous. The most insidious form of sloth for me personally is busyness. Busyness impedes the business of truth. Staying too busy at daily professional tasks means not stilling the mind enough to know what we really think, not thinking things through, not following speculation to its sometimes unwelcome conclusion, not picking at that unsatisfactory sentence until the whole piece comes unraveled. As we face multiple deadlines and overload commitments, the temptation is to be satisfied with work that’s merely sufficient or fashionable, like the verbal pyrotechnics in the humanities that can sometimes substitute for thought or disguise lazy thinking. Science may simply repeat what it already knows (“salami science” comes to mind) or take refuge in shortcuts (does a sample so small really prove anything?) The pressures of busyness, unopposed by clear ethical norms, sometimes produce downright dishonesty: plagiarism or scientific fraud. Boundless curiosity and intellectual playfulness go a long way, it seems to me, toward countering the temptation to laze even as we work ever harder and run busily about.
Truth-seeking also requires humility—the willingness to bow to evidence and logic, however invested one’s ego and reputation may be in conclusions that are not, in the final analysis, warranted. Unlike theologians, our dedication is not to the Truth but to truths, multiple and less than transcendental, that we hold provisionally, if firmly, until evidence and reason and the power of consensus suggest a need for modification or abandonment.
One way of skirting that requirement is making claims that aren’t remotely falsifiable, which postpones forever the day when a pet theory must be abandoned. Or we can succumb to the desire to not fail. Bold theories and experiments necessarily run the risk of failure—if they don’t, their purported truths are even less than provisional: the result is usually safe but mediocre work, or daring and flashy but untestable play.
Finally our dedication to truth-gathering can’t be merely intellectual—it also has a dispositional and emotional side. As Antonio Damasio has shown (in Descartes’ Error), “systematic correlations between damage at given brain sites and disturbances of behavior and cognition” reveal that the search for truth(s) necessarily calls upon our limbic system to give us a fuller understanding of, and enable us to make decisions about, the phenomena we study. As he says, “Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason.” Moreover, the inhumane humanist, the social science researcher who treats his subjects as objects, and the scientist who lies to her children all fail to live by the ethical/emotional imperatives of their disciplines.
Truth-telling also has an emotional side. It can require courage (a moral virtue) to be eccentric, to be impolite in polite circles. The most compelling truth-teller in literature may be Lear’s fool, and none of us wants to be thought a fool. (Professorial scruffiness, our fool’s livery, may be a sign of, but is certainly no substitute for, intellectual independence.) The academic freedom that is tenure’s chief justification prevents some of us from being left out on the heath for speaking truth to power, but the temptation to avoid unwelcome truth-telling and its penalties anyway is understandably powerful.
Truth-telling also requires us to examine our own teaching as willingly as we scrutinize texts or particles or chimpanzees. What would happen to our pedagogy, Carl Wieman asked in an earlier Change article (September/October 2007), if scientists demanded that their pedagogical practice be as rigorously scientific as their research is? Shouldn’t our teaching, like our research, be based on the ongoing gathering of results, subject to modification as new evidence comes in? Douglas Bennett points out that this pedagogic self-reflexivity entails a need to know (not just guess or assume) how effective we are collectively, as well as individually, in producing learning.
So if these are the imperatives of individual academics, what characterizes an environment in which faculty can thrive and do their best work? A good college is one where the reward structures line up with the ethical norms of the profession. It’s a dialogic environment, where different opinions jostle until one wins out or the friction generates a new hypothesis. It’s a place where skepticism is seen as the right and proper response to unsupported truth claims, where “teaching the controversies” (in Gerald Graff’s phrase) is respected as an ethical response to competing truth claims.
Such an environment requires a culture that not only rewards success but also values risk-taking (with its attendant failures) as an inevitable price of seeking truths. It’s a culture whose leaders are willing to discover and speak truths not merely about particles or texts or chimpanzees but, equally important, about the institution—thereby modeling ethical professionalism for all of us. That culture, for my money, is what creates the kinds of educational institutions where truth-seeking and truth-telling truly thrive.
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