The Calling of Education : The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education 9780226753409, 9780226753386

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THECALLING OF EDUCATION

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EDWARD SHILS

THE

CALLING OF EDUCATION

The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education

EDITED, AND W I T H AN INTRODUCTION, BY

Steven Grosby FOREWORD BY

Joseph Epstein

THEUNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Chicago and London

EDWARD SHIM ( I 91o- 1995) was profrssor in the Cornmittee o n Social Thought at the University of (Xcago and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University. The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Exxon Foundation in the publication of this book. The University of Chicago Preas, Chicago tio(ig7 The L!niversity of Chicago Press, Ltd., Imndon 0 1997 by Thr University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 19!)7 Printed in the United States of America

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I\RN:

0-22(i-73338-7 (cloth)

ISBN:

0-226-75539-5 (paper)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shils, Edward, 1910-1995. Thr calling of education : the academic ethic and othcr essays on highrr rducation / Edward Sliils ; foreword by Joseph Epstein ; introduction by Steven Grosby. p. cm. Includes hibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-75338-7 (cloth : alk. paper). - ISBN 0-2267 (paper : alk. paper) 1. Education, Higher-Philosophy. 2. Education, Higher-Aims objectives. 3 . College teachers-Professional ethics. 4. Universities and colleges--United States-Administration. 5. Education, Higher-Social aspects-United States. I . Title. LB232.5.S439 1997 578’.01--dc‘Ll

8 The paper used

arid

97-18654 CIP

in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48- 1984.

CONTENTS Foreword, by Joseph Epstein

vii

Introduction, by Steven Grosby

xi

The Academic Ethic

3

The Criteria of Academic Appointment

129

Do We Still Need Academic Freedom?

153

The Eighth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities: “Render unto Caesar . . .” Government, Society, and the Universities in Their Reciprocal Rights and Duties The Idea of the University: Obstacles and Opportunities in Contemporary Societies

177

234

The Modern University and Liberal Democracy 2 5 0 Index

291

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FOREWORD The university was Edward Shils’s field, milieu, turf, the scene of his best and strongest passions, and he was a very passionate man. He loved the university in general, and the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge in particular, and in the last decades of his life came to have grave worries about its future. Although he pondered a vast deal of things, higher education was never far from his mind. Nor, really, could it have been, for he lived the best part of his life in universities, and taught more than sixty years at Chicago. Edward Shils thought the university a place of great privilege and the men and women who were able to spend their lives in it themselves greatly privileged persons. In a university one could devote oneself to books, science, paintings, documents, the study of languages, things of the mind-elevated things that put one outside the necessity of daily life with its mad crush and demanding insistence on earning a livelihood. He had great regard for anyone who had mastery over any serious craft; he also thought running a good shop a useful task; but if he had to point to one form of the good life above all others, my guess is that he would have designated the life of scholarship lived within a university. Because Edward Shils loved the university so ardently, he greatly disliked inroads, not to say onslaughts, against itwhose ultimate affect could only be to diminish it. People who were at the University of Chicago during the student disturbances in the late 1960s report that Edward Shils’s role as the chief adviser to President Edward Levi was of key significance. No need to rehearse the history of those days here, but one can say, without much qualification, that the University of Chicago came away with its integrity less battered from those events than did Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, and nearly every other major American center of higher learning. Because Edward Shils knew what was at stake, because he knew from long study how delicately placed the university is in modern society, he was able to offer unequivocal advice, which came down, finally, to the advice to remember why the university is important, what makes it important, and why it was necessary not to equivocate with students who may have had all sorts of other goods in mind but not that of the university, the institution that he, Edward Shils, knew and revered above all others. vii

Edward Shils’s understanding of the university can be likened to that of a great symphonic conductor to his orchestra. He knew the value of all its instruments and sections, he knew them separately and he knew their power when properly integrated. Early in “The Criteria of Academic Appointments,” which he originally composed for the University of Chicago in 1970, Professor Shils made plain the balance that needed to be maintained between the parts and functions of the university if it is to perform as it is intended to do. “A university faculty is not merely an assemblage of individual scientists and scholars,” he wrote, “it must possess a corporate life and an atmosphere created by the research, teaching, and conversation of individual scientists and scholars which stimulates and sustains the work of colleagues and students at the highest possible level.” Among Edward Shils’s many gifts was that of superior perspective. His was a perspective formed by wide historical reading and relentless common sense. He never forgot how easily things in an institution as intricate as a university could go badly awry. Where standards are allowed to slip in one place, the slippage is certain to be felt in another, I can remember Edward Shils’s anger at what he thought were poor appointments in departments at his own University of Chicago-appointments that, from the outside, one might not have thought central. But he didn’t see it that way. Appointing a pretentious, or merely fashionable, or badly wrongheaded faculty member he saw as a form of letting down the side, no matter where it occurred. “Every appointment of a mediocre candidate,” he wrote, “makes it more difficult to appoint a distinguished candidate later and it makes it more difficult to bring outstanding students to the university.” Professor Shils, who wrote a brilliant book on the subject of tradition, had the most lucid notion of the role of tradition in the university. I remember once asking him his opinion of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He didn’t doubt the right, in intellectual distinction, of most of its members to be there, but what he regretted is that such a place took many distinguished scientists and scholars out of the stream of influence on students that they undoubtedly would have had in universities. He saw this as an unfortunate break in the necessary linkage of knowledge that passes from teacher to student. But worse than unfortunate were those lapses in intellectual courage on the part of university administrators of the kind that he saw as more and more prevalent in an age when university presidents ceased to be educational leaders and more and more became chiefly fund-raisers and public-relations officials. Even worse than the want of intellectual cour-

Foreroord

ix

age on the part of university administrators and faculty was their true ignorance of their tasks. When in Randall Jarrell’s novel, Picturesfrom an Institution, someone calls one of the characters, a college president, a hypocrite, the narrator retorts that this isn’t an accurate description, for the man hadn’t yet arrived at that stage of moral development in which it would be fair to call him that; to be a hypocrite, after all, one has to know right from wrong. So it is with so many people now running arid teaching in universities who haven’t the least notion of what constitutes academic freedom, the responsibility of teachers, the mission and place of the university in the larger society. Edward Shils knew all these things in his bones; he knew all the questions, and he never forgot the right answers. I d o not think it in the least an exaggeration to say that Edward Shils, owing to the most sedulous study and to personal experience filtered through meticulous understanding, knew these things better than anyone else in the world. The essays in this volume provide the core of Professor Shils’s knowledge and wisdom about what might be called the first principles of higher education. As such, they provide a book of inestimable value for anyone who cares about the fate of higher education in our time. Joseph Epstein

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INTRODUCTION The Academic Ethic by Edward Shils is the product of a study group of the International Council on the Future of the University.’ It was first published in 1982 in volume 2 0 of Minerua, the journal of science, learning, and policy founded by Edward Shils in 1962 and edited by him with tireless scrupulosity until his death at the age of eighty-four on January 23, 1995.Since the first University of Chicago Press edition of The Academic Ethic ( i984), there has been a steadily growing recognition of the essay’s importance. It now reappears along with other of Edward Shils’s significant writings on higher education. This book underscores the importance of The AcademicEthicby supplementing it with an additional five essays, each of which takes u p in greater detail its particular themes. Two criteria were employed in the selection: first, that these essays be representative of the best work of Edward Shils on higher education during approximately the last twenty years of his life, and second, that they had not already appeared in the three volumes of Shils’s papers already published by the University of Chicago Press.‘ The essays chosen continue to speak very much to the issues, questions, and problems of higher education in our day. The Academic Ethic is concerned with elucidating-and, by so doing, reaffirming-the ethical obligations of university teachers, researchers, and scholars. These are the obligations that arise from the methodical discovery and transmission of truth, and the integrity and freedom of inquiry integral to that discovery and transmission. In The AcademicEthic, Edward Shils promulgated a set of guiding principles to govern the academic profession’s custodianship of knowledge in teaching and research, its role in the internal conduct of universities that sustain the academic life, and its participation in life outside the university. According to Shils, the distinctive task of the academic profession is I . For the history of the study group, see Edward Shils’s introduction to “The Academic Ethic,” Minrruct X X / i - z (Spring-Summer 1$)82):105-6. 2 . Edward Shils, The Intrlldunls a n d the Po7u~rsand OtherI;ssays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 ~ ~ 7 2Cmlrr ); crnd Poiphery, h’s.~ayin il.lnc.rosoc.iolog) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1975); and of particular relevance to many of the themes of The Academic Ethir are the essays contained in T l i ~Calling of S o r i o l o ~and ~ Othm h’ssays on the Airsuit of L~rrining(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

xi

xii

Introduction

both research and teaching. In asserting the unity of research and teaching for the academic profession, Shils reaffirmed Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideal of the task of the university. He did so while being fully aware of the dramatically new conditions and demands on universities that have emerged over the past forty years, among them, the consolidation of the image of the mass “research university.” Even though Shils grew more pessimistic about the academic profession’s adherence to von Humboldt’s ideal-to the point of fearing that Bonaparte’s technocratic view of the university as an institution devoted to practical tasks in service to the state had become ascendant’-he never wavered in his own belief in the unity of the discovery of fundamental truths and their transmission as integral to the academic profession. This continued reaffirmation of the necessary unity of teaching and research is nowhere more evident than in “The Idea of the University: Obstacles and Opportunities in Contemporary Societies,” included in this volume. Along with clarifying the fundamental obligations to research and teaching, The AcndemicEthic takes up, of necessity, the obligations of university teachers both to their own disciplines and institutions and to their surrounding societies. Among the most practical of such obligations is that of making academic appointments. It is through academic appointments that the commitment of the university teacher to his o r her discipline, students, and university is concretely manifested, namely, in the adherence to both the criterion of achievement in teaching and research and the criterion of academic citizenship. Because the criteria employed in academic appointments directly affect the quality of a university, it was decided to include in this volume Shils’s article “The Criteria of Academic Appointment.” The article was actually the report of an official committee of senior members of the faculty of the University of Chicago constituted to clarify the criteria of academic appointment. The committee was chaired by Edward Shils and the report written by him. Shils consistently maintained the criterion of achievement in teaching and research in the face of demands that other criteria be employed. In particular, he took a strong position against the criteria of affirmative action and “pluralism of standpoints.” The continuing controversy over these matters was another reason for including the article here. The question whether permanent tenure is desirable in the light of its consequences for the adequate fulfillment of the obligations of the academic profession has increasingly been posed, especially of late in 3. See Edward Shils, “The Service of Society and the Advancement of Learning in the Twenty-First Centiiry,” M i w n m X X X / 2 (Summer 1992): 242-68.

Introduction xiii

the United Kingdom. One of the main arguments for tenure is that it is necessary for academic freedom. Given the continuing controversies over permanent tenure and academic freedom, it was thought worthwhile to include the essay “Do We Still Need Academic Freedom.”‘ Shils knew very well that relations between the academic profession and universities, on the one hand, and governments and their societies, on the other, have in the past forty years become increasingly complicated.3 These relations are a major concern of The Academic Ethic, not least in the consideration of the different ways in which threats to the academic ethic arise out of‘ the existence of mass, bureaucratized, and increasingly politicized universities.” The complicated relationship between government and universities in the United States was the topic chosen by Professor Shils when, in 1979, he was selected by the National Endowment of the Humanities to be its Eighth Jefferson Lecturer. Professor Shils delivered three lectures-the first in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1979; the second in Chicago, Illinois, on April lo: 1979; and the third in Austin, Texas, on April 1 7 , 1979. The themes ofthe lectures were, respectively, the claims of governments on universities, and the limits to those claims; the legitimate claims of universities; and a declaration of the rights and duties of universities. The decision was made to include all three lectures in this book despite a small degree of repetition because, taken as a whole, they are every bit as intellectually powerful and vital as The Academic Ethic. Ten years after his Jefferson Lectures, in “The Modern University and Liberal Democracy” (the final essay in the present volume), Shils returned to many of the problems of both The Academic Ethic and his Jefferson Lectures. In this essay, however, he took a different approach to the problems by analyzing the modern university within the context of liberal democracy, its institutional arrangements, and the various, occasionally conflicting traditions that constitute liberalism. Edward Shils was such a prolific writer that any collection of his papers could easily and properly be twice as long; and this is certainly true of’ his writings on the academic ethic, the pursuit of learning, and the problems of higher education-subjects on which he brooded throughout his long career. But it is the hope of the editor that the essays in this book 4. See also Edward Shils, “Academic Freedom and Permanent Tenure,” M i n m ~ l XXXIII/i (Spring 1995):5-17. 5. See, for example, Edward Shils, “The Service of Society and the Advancement of Learning in the Twenty-First Centurv,” ~ M i i i r n mXXX/.r (Summer i$)