Spalding 1
Mark A. Spalding
Manchester College
17 June 2008
The Academic Spirit
The Academy, with its roots in classical Greece, is built upon principles of debate and cooperation. Those ancient disciples who retained a teacher to guide their discussions were our exemplars. In the spirit of cooperation, they pooled their resources to engage a tutor, who was there to preside over the day’s activities. The students brought to the table their questions and interests, debating the issues with their peers. The teacher was more a resource and a guide than is the custom today, posing questions and moving the conversation along when there was a lag. Although conversation is by nature argumentative, it is also congenial, and so it was in the ancient Academy that every member of the group contributed to the discussion. His comments were taken seriously, and he was viewed as both a brother and a friend.
So it is in the University today. Unfortunately, in our busy and often competitive world, many have lost sight of what it means to be a part of the Academy. Instead of bringing our questions, concerns, and expertise to the table and participating in the Great Conversation, we tend, with our consumer’s mentality, to look upon education as a transaction. We paid for it, and so the professor must provide.
For the academic, however, it is the collegial spirit which must prevail. Each member of the group is there to participate in the Conversation for the good of all concerned.
I’ve infrequently been approached by students who are angry for one reason or another—usually because they were in Advanced Placement classes in high school and felt themselves above the General Education class in which they were enrolled.
A case which comes to mind was a presentation I gave on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. I made only passing reference to the use of masks, and a young woman who had prepared a detailed project on the topic rather dismissively criticized my oversight afterwards. Had she properly understood her role, she would have volunteered her knowledge to the group. Instead, as the class progressed, she felt that she knew too much to be there and ceased to attend, thereby removing a valuable resource from our midst.
In a dog-eat-dog world, where individualism is admired, it may be difficult to understand the academic perspective of collegiality. For those, however, who are involved in sports, it is clear that teamwork is paramount, and that a rogue player, who places himself above the spirit of cooperation, is a liability rather than an asset. So it is in the academic world.
As we make the transition from a personalvision, to an academic one, there is a subtle shift in mentality which must take place. Each individual brings a unique perspective to the conversation and his voice must be heard. Every point of view, no matter how outrageous it may initially seem, must be considered—not in a spirit of antagonism, but in a spirit of reason. Because someone disagrees with you does not make of him an enemy, or suggest that his position is one of animosity or ignorance. Most people hold to their opinions sincerely, not out of malice.
In general, we judge on the basis of our gut reaction to an issue. We instinctually respond to the world according to patterns in which we have been conditioned to think. Many influences may be brought to bear: the way our parents think; our educational background; the prevalent thought patterns of the area in which we grew up; our religious beliefs, and so forth.
At the University we are expected to put our prejudices aside, to relinquish our conditioning, and to examine the world with an open mind, accepting, for the sake of argument, that a different perspective might be the correct one. Naturally, this is difficult to do. To close the lid on our Catholic or Methodist or Presbyterian upbringing isn’t easy. To box up our grandmother, or father, or mother is more difficult yet. To close the lid on our Republican or Democratic beliefs is also difficult. It is particularly difficult when the Religious Right denounces the academic perspective as a liberal plot to undermine conservative values, or as a means of subverting our youth. It is nevertheless in the academic tradition to open the mind and to encourage consideration of various perspectives. It was during the Middle Ages that the University as we know it developed; and it was the light of Reason, shining in the Dark Ages, that brought us to the Renaissance and into modernity.
I was chatting not long ago with a new acquaintance—a university graduate—about various authors and asked him if he had read anything by James Clavell. When he asked what Clavell had written, I named Shogun, and A Children’s Story. I particularly recommended the latter.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “it’s about what appears to be a socialist takeover of the United States. The old, tired, chalk-dusted teachers are replaced by vibrant, young, neatly uniformed teachers who, in the course of a single afternoon, change the students from avid capitalists to committed socialists by manipulating their minds.”
“Oh,” he said. “College professors are good at doing that.”
We were not well enough acquainted for him to know that he was speaking to a college professor, and I was a little startled by his comment.
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I am a college graduate, and in my experience most professors expect you to agree with them completely, or they give you a low grade and call your work‘unacademic.’”
I must confess that I was saddened by his perception—one often championed by conservatives, and especially by the Religious Right. Saddened, I say, because he had been to college and had clearly failed to grasp the essentials of academic thinking and inquiry.
His claim that professors insist on complete agreement may be true in the case of a few fanatics—usually activists who champion causes and have an axe to grind, which they grind regardless. For the most part, however, I would have to say that his perception is misguided.
Professors are trained academics, and the academic mind undergoes a lengthy period of formation. The true academic “sees” differently from the man in the street.
In the United States, we pride ourselves on our independence—and democracy has, in many respects, taught us to value our own opinions and to hold them fast. It has also made us, in some ways, rather stubborn in our personal views.
The academic worldview is more open. The Academy, after all, consists of people from all nations and from every walk of life—old and young, liberal and conservative, western and eastern, gay and straight, black and white, Asian and Hispanic, religious and atheist, artist and scientist, male and female, activist and pacifist, political and indifferent.
As part of such a community, academics question everything. They are constantly in search of Truth, no matter how uncomfortable the “Truth” may be. They also recognize that what is “True” today may not be quite so True tomorrow. As knowledge expands, so perceptions change, and so our understanding of the world shifts to accommodate new realities. Sometimes we must discard old ways of thinking and seeing altogether. Non-academics often have difficulty with this concept. In many instances, they want to hold on to the comfortable and familiar, often refusing to see what is obvious. Take, for example, the long-accepted view that the world was created in precisely the fashion described in Genesis. Although such a view is no longer academically tenable, there are those who cling to the old notions regardless—or those who, rather than relinquish them, try in some pseudo-intellectual way to champion a compromise such as “Intelligent Design.” Pseudo-intellectuals—some of them firmly ensconced in our colleges and universities—will frequently perform academic acrobatics, making clowns of themselves in the process.
The challenge of being an academic is to relinquish what you cherish in favor of the Truth (or the closest approximation to it). It is always difficult to let go of an old love—but when the fire has gone out, there is really no point in stoking it.
Academic thinking begins by asking questions. It never begins by proposing answers. Although questions may lead to answers, it should never matter what the answers are, or whether the one who is asking likes the answers he is given.
Last semester I struggled to convey this thinking to a student [I will call her Jane Doe] who wanted to prove, without reference to the Bible, that God and Jesus really exist. I had already given a general directive that I did not want students writing research papers on religious topics such as Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Since the Bible is, of course, our only source for supposing that Jesus was in any way singled out from the rest of humanity, I had to wonder what academic avenues Jane proposed to follow. When questioned, her answers were vague. Since it is hardly possible to knock at the archive’s door in Jerusalem and ask to see Jesus of Nazareth’s birth certificate, or to visit a lab and examine his DNA, I needed some notion of what she proposed doing. It is unlikelythat there remains any direct evidence of Jesus’ existence, let alone proof of his divinity. He was, after all, a Hebrew peasant living in an occupied country. Even within Judah, he was a despised Galilean. There are—at least to my knowledge—no extant written references to Jesus, other than a few tangential remarks by Josephus (which are very likely Christian interpolations). When all my inquiries proved fruitless, I told Jane that she could not write the paper. She was initially angry, claiming that “God and Jesus are NOT a theory.”
Now in all fairness, I am a Roman Catholic who believes in God and Jesus. Since religious faith does not depend on proofs, I have never given the matter of the Deity’s existence any great deal of thought. However, as an academic, I had difficulty seeing how an undergraduate (without so much as an outline)could expect to present a truly academic paper on a subject so esoteric as the extra-biblical existence of God and Jesus.
Jane’s next topic proposal was (inexplicably, from my perspective) along the same lines as her first. She wanted to prove the existence of life after death. I suppose that my major objection to both of her papers was the word “prove.” The very presence of the word suggested that she had already determined the answer to her research question and was going to make the evidence fit the conclusion, come what may. Academics don’t work in that way. They have utterly no vested interest in the answer to the research question. My own thesis examined the fairytales of Charles Perrault. In view of a common perception that fairytales were really written for adults, I began with the research question, “Did Charles Perrault write his stories for children, or for grownups?” Frankly, it was neither here nor there to me whether he told his tales with adults or children in mind. It would simply be interesting to know.
In Jane’s case, however, I rather suspected that any conclusion contrary to the one she already entertained would have been unacceptable.
Jesus and God, she said, were “NOT a theory.”
If Jane could not acknowledge the possibility that Jehovah was no more a god than Zeus, Woden, or Ahura-Mazdah, she should probably not have been writing an academic paper on the subject. Where the researcher is emotionally invested in the answer to the research question, the results are going to be biased, and the Truth will not be served.
When I first moved to the United States, I was startled out of reverie one afternoon by a phone call. Someone was conducting an interview and wanted a few minutes of my time. He wanted to know whether I was “Pro-Life,” or “Pro-Choice.”
Unfamiliar with the terms, I asked for an explanation, then told him I was Pro-Life. “But why?” he asked. I made some general remark about being a Christian, but after putting the phone down felt somewhat perplexed. Although I knew that I was Pro-Life, I didn’t feel that my response was sufficient. Clearly, not everyone believes in God, and so from a non-Christian perspective my response would be irrational and therefore fallacious.
In many instances, people reach conclusions based on faulty logic. In academic circles such conclusions are referred to as logical and emotional fallacies. It is an academic’s responsibility to avoid these and to reach fair and logical conclusions.
The Religious Right always presents abortion as a logical fallacy (specifically, the Either-Or Fallacy). According to their way of thinking, the whole issue revolves around the “child’s right to life” and the “woman’s right to choose.” Clearly, based on such logic, the child’s right to life should supersede the woman’s right to choose (in precisely the same way that a non-smoker’s right to breathe clear air should supersede the smoker’s right to light up in public).
The fact of the matter, however, is that nothing is so simple. One can certainly look at the issue of abortion from those two perspectives. But the academic’s responsibility is to be entirely dispassionate. To have a balanced point of view, one must look at the issue from ALL possible perspectives and recognize that there are other valid ways of “seeing” beyond our own.
Abortion may be considered in at least twelve different ways:
(a)As aright to life issue
(b)As a right to choose issue
(c)As a moral issue
(d)As a theological issue
(e)As aphilosophical issue
(f)As a population issue
(g)As a personal issue
(h)As a legal issue
(i)As a social issue
(j)As a psychological issue
(k)Asa medical issue
(l)As a practical issue
Until one is able to think through each of these issues in depth (and no doubt others which I haven’t even considered), and to debate the merits of each, one has—at least from an academic perspective—no real right to an opinion.
Several years ago, I visited Bombay, India. I was seated on the aircraft, reading the Bombay Times, and was appalled to find an ad, placed by the Indian government, encouraging women to have an abortion. Candidates who presented themselves voluntarily at a clinic would be given $350. If someone referred them, then that person would get $150. Essentially, what that meant in poverty-stricken Bombay was that a family could make $500 simply by going to the abortion clinic (and perhaps repeat the process nine months down the road). The whole thing seemed immoral and ill conceived.
And then I got to Bombay! From the moment the aeroplane touched down, the poverty was visible. Lean-to homes spread from the fence of the runway. It was monsoon season, and for forty miles our taxi wended its way through traffic, past cows wandering in the street, past once beautiful colonial buildings green with slime, shanty dwellings everywhere. When the taxi pulled up at a red light, beggars in loin cloths, their skin streaming with rain, swarmed around the car, clawing at the windows and crying out, “Please, sahib! Please, sahib!” Children with missing limbs, or with eyes gouged out so that they could live lives of permanent beggary, flocked to the foreigners’ taxi—and human squalor and degradation, before then unimaginable, spread as far as the eye could see. I was horrified, and for the first time I was able to comprehend that perhaps abortion was a viable solution. At very least, I understood why it must seem so to the Indian government.
Several years later, as a high-school English teacher, I intercepted a note which was being passed. The young woman who had written it said, “Please don’t read it out loud.” I looked down at the note, on which she had scrawled, “I was absent from school yesterday because I had an abortion.” I folded the note and placed it in my pocket.
After class, she said, “Thank you for not reading the note.”
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “I’m only sorry you had the abortion. Any child of yours would have been beautiful.”
“Well,” she said, “it was a hard decision. But the dad was a real ass-hole, and I knew if I had the baby he and his mother would be in my life forever.”
I thought about that afterwards. Who was I to judge? For the girl, it was an important personal and practical solution to a very real dilemma. I would rather she hadn’t had the abortion, but it wasn’t up to me to decide.
Our responsibility, then, as academics and researchers, is to the cause of Truth, Fairness, and Honesty. It is our responsibility to ask questions, to truthfully seek out answers (i.e., without putting our own “spin” on the facts), to shun prejudice, to present findings only after considering all of the possibilities and issues, and to examine multiple perspectives before drawing conclusions. It is not that we don’t formulate our own opinions, but that we have identifiable reasons for thinking as we do. Above all, we must remember the collegial nature of the Great Conversation and present our findings in a rational and cooperative(and therefore uncontentious) spirit.
Remember, the academic life is a considered life, and to live it irrationally, or to unthinkingly let one group or religion or philosophy govern it, is to sell that life short.