The continued importance of Content

There are of course many reasons why faculty and administration don’t feel comfortable sitting next to each other in the same room. But we'll leave most of those aside to focus on a basic difference. No matter how theoretical and abstract a professor’s work may be, it always involves a distinct commitment to a specific content. There is a subject area, a set of texts, or data, a problem with many thorny questions to solve. Something tangible that motivates and inspires, students in the class, researchers in the lab, writers at the keyboard.

What is troublesome about administrative operation, and indeed most management techniques generally, is their disengagement from the specific content of the work they are managing. Just as many successful store managers don’t really have to care about the product they are selling beyond the basic ability to interact with customers, so too administrators do not need to know the specifics of faculty research. They rely on general formulas to determine the success or failure of that research, but these formulas leave unaddressed the specific material questions that the research addresses. Whether you write on the history of medieval cities in Tuscany or methane gas abatement in coal mining facilities you are judged by general indicators, such as student enrollment, number of publications, placement of students, that have no direct connection to the actual subject matter of your research.

From the administrative perspective, it is important to evaluative criteria that reach across difference departments and colleges so that the many apples and oranges within a university can be compared. From the faculty perspective these general categories often have an implicit bias towards one type of research over another, even as they make no explicit attempt to judge the qualitative material of research.

Without directly addressing the long history of critiques made against the rational organization of knowledge and culture, we could jump to one key early debate in this to compare Kant’s architectonic organization of knowledge into a system in which the philosopher places individual sciences in relation to each other, in order to evaluate both how complete their claim to knowledge is and to judge whether these sciences set together into a whole serve the ethical needs of humanity, and Hegel’s historical account of how the material substance of knowledge and art both enables and restricts the expression of ideas.

Hegel argued that Kant’s formal organization of the basic preconditions of knowledge or beauty failed to account for the physical, hands-on, material substance that underlies any expression of thought. This debate between Kant and Hegel has implications for every discipline in the university. So for example, you could ask: Does architecture consist in a schematic plan drawn on paper or a computer screen, or is it the space created out of light, air, and the stone, wood, glass or steel as it has been shaped into a unity?

In general, most academic knowledge is created from an engagement with materials—data, texts, objects. Kant, even at his most formal remove, knew that science requires empirical data in order to develop reliable results. He added though, that the scientist sometimes did not have the full picture of what his research meant, and it was the job of the architectonic philosopher to bring the many strands of knowledge together into a coherent whole.

I hope all the administrators out there reading this blog appreciate the comparison to a Kantian/Socratic philosopher.

Alas, as it turns out, of course, the criteria in a university are more economic, than Kantian, even if they share a similar formal apparatus.

Inauguration: Enthusiasm for the Enlightenment

More than a few people around here have commented that Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address constituted the return of the Enlightenment. His assertions of constitutional values, universal aspirations, the re-establishment of science as the basis for policy, even his scriptural invocation of putting aside childish things, reminded some of Immanuel Kant’s very definition: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” In other words, the childishness that we ought set aside was produced by those whom we let rule over us. It is not natural, but rather a stupor we let others induce upon us. (See, just thinking about the speech gets you writing complex clauses.) So the speech was marking the end of that rule and its accompanying immaturity.
Copying the President’s speech patterns is just another way expressing admiration. If Obama revived the Enlightenment, he did so by rallying a vast crowd, not the usual way of spreading rationalism. The thrill of hearing the inaugural speech was in being reminded why one had voted for him, that he is articulate beyond most speakers you hear in public, I worried that his earnestness will wear on people, that the public will in a short time want some happy news. He was wisely kept out of sight during the transition, so that his appearance revived the enthusiasm felt at the election, though this time without the immediate anxiety that it could all go wrong. Having been contested for the last two years, this time the revival of the Enlightenment was secured not only by debate and reflection, but by rhetoric, pageantry and the long-term stability of the government-- a touch of the baroque.