Ideas of the University: Common Goods

Over the next several weeks, I am going to work through a series of views of college. While I have recently read through Declining by Degrees, a 2005 collection of essays that serves as the backdrop for a PBS documentary, I want to start with Clark Kerr’s 1963 revision of the moral virtues that Robert M. Hutchins believed necessary for a university president. Hutchins at the University of Chicago at the height of American Modernism believed in courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence; Kerr at the University of California on the cusp of the Postmodern, in judgment, courage, and fortitude. Prudence and justice. What have these ideas to do with higher education, with advanced learning in the 21st century?

First, prudence. Kerr removed (perhaps was pressed by his context to remove) the deliberations of the wise from the enterprise of learning. I will avoid bringing up Aristotle’s discussion of the virtue of phronesis (as I would surely misrepresent it). But I will turn to Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on the “Self and the Ethical Aim” (from Oneself as Another, 1992). At the beginning of his “little ethics,” Ricoeur argues that ethical practice has its roots in the trajectory of a human life. Rather than cycling between ends and means, he looks for the constitutive rules (always socially established) that give a game (a chess match, a soccer game, a human life) its direction. For a human life, it is phronesis or more importantly the phronimos that or who give voice to the constitutive rule. Ends and means cannot help to determine the aim; the community works it out in a place at a time through a dialectic between self-esteem and self-interpretation (a search, as Ricoeur puts it, for “adequation between our life ideals and our decisions”) done in the view of others (p. 180). Living a good life (and I will argue against notions of higher learning that consider living a good life irrelevant) entails reflecting on phronesis and engaging the phronimos in public. The smart and courageous student, researcher, university president who is not also prudent is likely to lose her way.

At what cost? The cost of justness. The choice here (still channeling Aristotle by way of Ricouer) is between power in common and domination. A just president (or student or teacher or researcher) is continually confronted with the equality of the other, of all others. Arguments grounded in means (this will be possible or cheap) and ends (look at what will be accomplished) that dismiss as significant the cost to another are, on this definition unjust. I am not so naïve as to believe that university presidents can make an endless string of win-win decisions. In fact, I believe that in a social space where there real conflicts, the win-win decision is a myth (a wise mediator once told me that if the conflict is real, no win-win decision is possible). I content that a president has to acknowledge that decisions enable some stakeholders to be agents and other to suffer. A just president offers reasons for making decisions (these will involve means and ends) but also an analysis of impact. The community (that is, the phronimos) already knows which impacts, whatever the ends, are unacceptable.

These reflections raise for me questions about human development and the place of learning within that development. The process is inherently risky and historically contingent (where one can go is dependent on where one is). There is in Cardinal Newman (as Kerr tells him) and the models of Robert Paul Wolff a Romanticism that I find a bit annoying. The belief in the individual in isolation strikes me as wrong-headed and not especially useful thinking. What Wolff does that seems critical, though, is to push a materialist/political-economy analysis far enough to notice the conflation of need, felt need, expressed demand and to consider the causal structures that link those quite distinct concepts. He (and Newman for that matter) argue for a space for normative discourse that makes no recourse to profitability. They wrestle to get to a constitutive rule that might take the place of profitability.

What is unsettling for me in Kerr and Wolff is their belief in . . . professors. I, like the students that Wolff describes, love the university. But I struggle to see it as a progressive institution. I look to figures like Will Allen and . . . Deborah Pontillo and Brian Bansenauer for progress. They find themselves at odds with late capitalist institutions (though they cling to the edge of colleges).

What idea is in view here? The urgent need for spaces where a phronimos can practice and my commuities—in and out of college—in pursuit of common good. I can hear the howls about that final phrase. That may be compelling proof for the assertion.