Adams’s Education

The argument of this book has been based upon one major assumption, namely that epistemologies have ethical implications, that ways of knowing are not morally neutral but morally directive. Accordingly, the major contrast developed thus far has been between the Weberian epistemology that connects knowledge fundamentally to power, to the prospect of technical mastery of the world, and communitarian epistemologies that connect knowledge fundamentally to understanding, to the pursuit of the truth of matters. This broadly articulated contrast has in turn informed two distinct conceptions of academic life and of the nature and purpose of the academic vocation. On one account, the soul of the university is Wissenschaft, on the other, edification. My discussion, in this epistemological and ethical context, of religious matters, especially the suggestion that certain spiritual virtues are indispensable to learning, has thus far been justified primarily on historical grounds. I have tried to show, first, that the Weberian conception of the academic calling derived in part from a transmutation of religious terms, and second, that for most of Western history religion and higher learning were interdependent in ways that have largely escaped the notice of many present-day analysts of the university. Then, in Chapter 3, I tried to demonstrate that, in spite of the triumph of Weberianism, practices that are central to the academy, such as teaching, learning, and scholarship, still depend for their success upon the exercise of spiritual virtues like charity. If these observations are correct, my analysis and criticism of the current understanding of the academic vocation are not yet complete. For the following questions arise: Why do so many contemporary academics believe that their sense of vocation ought to conform to the ideal type developed by Weber even as they at the same time resonate to the more spiritualized conception of teaching and learning articulated by Parker Palmer? Is there a peculiarly modern and secular spirituality that gives a deep measure of meaning to the academic vocation as Weber described it and at the same time blinds its practitioners to their own necessary reliance upon virtues that are distinctively religious?

Communities of Learning

Thus far I have tried to show that our present-day conception of the academic vocation is based at least in part upon the transmutation of ideas that were originally religious in origin and implication. In the next two chapters, I shall try to show why a reconception of the academic vocation should involve the reappropriation of certain religious virtues. I do not, however, intend this to be an atavistic undertaking: I have no patience for nostalgic returns to medieval syntheses of one sort or another. I shall accordingly argue in this chapter that what I take to be one of the main currents in contemporary thought—the resurgence of the question of community—both invites and to some extent warrants a religiously informed redescription of academic life and the academic vocation. In the next chapter, I will endeavor to provide just such a redescription as a corrective to the Weberian account I have already analyzed. The resurgent interest in the question of community is an exceptionally broad phenomenon that embraces social and political theory, jurisprudence, theology, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, even the history and philosophy of science. I shall, however, restrict my attention here to the manner in which the community question impinges upon activities and aspirations that are central to the tasks of higher education—teaching, learning, knowledge, and truth. At the risk of drastic oversimplification, I will summarize this more restricted development as follows: over the course of the last twenty or so years, the question of community has replaced the epistemological question as foundational for all other inquiries. The answers to basic human questions, such as, What can we know? or How should we live? or In what or whom shall we place our hope? have come to depend, for a large number of intellectuals, upon the answer to a prior question, Who are we? As a way of both documenting and deepening our sense of this decisive shift in the current climate of opinion, I propose to consider briefly two very influential books that appeared within four years of one another, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Parker Palmer’s To Know As We Are Known.

Conclusion: Adam’s Exile

“In Adam’s fall/ We sinned all.” This ditty from the New England Primer belongs quite literally to the alphabet of early American schooling. Its theology belongs ultimately to Augustine, the author of the doctrine of original sin. But what became, for centuries after Augustine, one of the orthodox teachings of Western Christendom became for Henry Adams, the self-styled fallen American, a mere conceit, a presumptuous play upon a name. By subverting the Protestant ethic, Max Weber, Adams’s exact contemporary, formulated the modern academic ethos. By inverting the Augustinian version of the Christian story, Adams developed a beguiling image of the modern educated personality. I have tried in this essay to explore the considerable historical significance of these subversions. To read Max Weber is to understand the utterly distinctive character of the modern research university as itself the result of those forces of modernity that Weber analyzed as acutely and extensively as anyone else in the twentieth century. To read Henry Adams, feeling with profound ambivalence these same abstract forces of specialization, intellectualization, and disenchantment, is to witness the creation of the modern university graduate. Indeed, as I have tried to show here, Adams’s Education represents something of a modern manual of spiritual development from unity to multiplicity, from innocent wonder to “committed contextual relativism.” We have seen that Weber defined the modern academic vocation by transmuting a religious vocabulary drawn from the Reformed tradition. We have therefore reappropriated from the Reformed and from other religious traditions the language of the spiritual virtues to develop an alternative account of the academic calling. This redescription permitted us to see that many contemporary practices within the academy still depend for their success upon the exercise of the very spiritual virtues that the prevalent Weberian ethos would deny or obscure from view. In a manner and with a purpose very much like Weber’s, Henry Adams and James Joyce appropriated and sometimes subverted the mythic vocabulary of the great Biblical creation narratives in order to develop distinctively modem expressions of spiritual formation.

The Academic Vocation

In this chapter, I shall try to advance our thinking about college and university education in the United States through a critical study of contemporary conceptions of the academic vocation. Current reflection upon the state of higher learning in America makes this task at once more urgent and more difficult than it has ever been since the rise of the modern research university. Consider, for example, former Harvard President Derek Bok’s 1986–87 report to the Harvard Board of Overseers. On the one hand, Bok repeatedly insists that universities are obliged to help students learn how to lead ethical, fulfilling lives. On the other hand, he admits that faculty are ill-equipped to help the university discharge this obligation. “Professors,” Bok writes, “. . . are trained to transmit knowledge and skills within their chosen discipline, not to help students become more mature, morally perceptive human beings.” Notice Bok’s assumptions. Teaching history or chemistry or mathematics or literature has little or nothing to do with forming students’ characters. Faculty members must therefore be exhorted, cajoled, or otherwise maneuvered to undertake this latter endeavor in addition to teaching their chosen disciplines. The pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue are, for Bok at least, utterly discrete activities. To complicate matters still further, the Harvard faculty, together with most faculty members at other modern research universities, would very probably resist the notion that their principal vocational obligation is, as Bok suggested, to transmit the knowledge and skills of their disciplines. They believe that their calling primarily involves making or advancing knowledge, not transmitting it. How else could we explain the familiar academic lament “Because this is a terribly busy semester for me, I do not have any time to do my own work”? Among all occupational groups other than the professoriate, such a complaint, voiced under conditions of intensive labor, is inconceivable. Among university faculty members, it is expected. Never mind the number of classes taught, courses prepared, papers graded, and committees convened.

Spirited Inquiry

All communities of higher learning are formed in large part by an ethos or spirit of inquiry. Indeed, all higher learning depends not simply upon the possession of certain cognitive skills but also upon the possession of moral dispositions or virtues that enable inquiry to proceed. Academies, if they are to flourish over the long run, must therefore cultivate and sustain in their members those virtues that are required for the kind of learning they hope to promote. Taken together, these virtues constitute the ethos of inquiry. As epistemologies differ, however, so too do spirits of inquiry. I have argued that the Weberian ethos, connected as it is to a purely instrumental view of reason, exhibits its own characteristic set of motives (mastery, manipulation, and control) and virtues (clarity, honesty, diligence, dedication, and devotion to a rigorous regimen of disciplinary procedures). By contrast, communitarian epistemologies necessarily favor virtues that are less matters of purely personal integrity and more interpersonal or social in character. For communitarians, the pursuit of truth is linked inextricably to care taken with the lives and the thoughts of others. Though Weber banished charity and friendship from his conception of the academy, virtues such as these have constituted the spirit of inquiry for most of Western history. These virtues have, moreover, been spiritual in at least the strictly historical sense that they arose initially within communities that were self-consciously religious in character. In this chapter, I propose to redescribe the present-day academy by examining the sense in which and the extent to which the conduct of academic life still depends upon such spiritual virtues as humility, faith, self-sacrifice, and charity. I offer this critical redescription as a corrective to the Weberian account of academic life, as an answer to Bok and others who are concerned about the ethical dimension of higher learning but who seem uncertain about where properly to locate the ethical within the academy, and as an effort to enrich current, communitarian accounts of learning. First, I shall mention briefly some historical warrants for and some cultural implications of linking spiritual virtues to learning and teaching.

Questions and Considerations

To insist, as I have, that conversation is central to the life of the mind and then to fail to act upon this claim would be at best a serious lapse in judgment. I have accordingly framed a series of questions that my friends and colleagues, all of them named in the Acknowledgments, have actually raised about the analysis and arguments I have thus far advanced. Most of these questions involve practical matters, and they arise from doubts about the desirability of some consequences of my general recommendations or about the feasibility of realizing any one of them. Other questions, however, pose difficulties for some of my basic assumptions. None of them invites an easy “answer”; I have therefore responded to all of them with a set of considerations designed to advance our thinking, not to settle the issues that they raise once and for all. However well intended and even persuasive the alternative account of the academic vocation might be, its effect is likely to be unfortunate. Will it not give aid and comfort to the mediocrities on all college and university faculties, since it will seem to warrant their lack of scholarly publication by legitimating all sorts of other activities as worthy of academic respect? The inadvertent promotion of mediocrity would indeed be unfortunate, but so too would be the acceptance of the implicit equation that the question draws between academic mediocrity and lack of scholarly publication. There may well be an empirical correlation between these two things, but there should not be, for that reason, a strong conceptual link presumed between them. The explanation for the often alleged statistical correlation between mediocrity and low scholarly “productivity” has less relation to the intrinsic connections between scholarship and teaching than to sloth, the vice that leads both to poor teaching and to a lack of publication. It may be that the apprehension that gives rise to the present question involves the conflation of two sets of distinctions into one. One set is qualitative, the other generic; one embraces the excellent, the good, the mediocre, and the bad; the other embraces the academic monograph, the book review, the essay, the textbook, the critique of a colleague’s manuscript, the written lecture, in brief all inscribed instances of pedagogy.