Plain Pointed Shoes and the Higher Good

Rothman, Kors, O'Brien, Allen, and Agresto 21

but higher education itself does not create the one or the other quality, and uneducated vice is less powerful in its ability to succeed than educated vice. The higher primates are curious about the world, and it is ultimately from that curiosity, in the highest primate of all, that all of our academic sciences arose. The human being also has empathy, and from this so much of the hu- manities arose. There are individuals with a burning hunger for excellence, fulfillment, self-awareness, knowledge, and the means of truly critical thought: put them together, and you have some institution of higher learning. Attack those ethological drives and private passions as regressive, as has been done since the 1960s, and you paradoxically end up with the self-indulgent beast teaching the potential human being. Banish the criterion of social responsibility from our universities, and you paradoxically might restore our curiosity and our drive to critical excellence to the central place of honor in academic life. What is the responsibility of higher education to society? Absolutely nothing beyond obedience to the laws that govern this free society, but those laws protect against fraud, deceit, and tort. What is the responsibility I should love to see you all embrace? It is the responsibility to your own true self, created by your disciplinary and intellectual hungers and by the passions of your individual minds, spirits, and sensibilities. That is the light our universities need in the darkness created by the mania of social responsibility. There is no social justice; there is only justice. Social justice is a denial of justice itself. There is no social responsibility beyond maintaining (at, indeed, individual cost) the rule of law that is the sine qua non of our individual, voluntary pursuits. Be- yond that, there is no social responsibility; there is only responsibility; so-called social responsibility, we see daily, is a denial of responsibility itself.

Dennis O'Brien: president emeritus, University of Rochester and BuckneU Univer- sity. His most recent book is All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

I want to place the question, "What is Higher Education's Responsibility to Society?" within the framework of the overall conference theme: "Our Univer- sities and Our Culture." The obvious problem with a topic like '~Our Universi- ties and Our Culture" is gaining perspective on "our." Like all self-reflective activities, discoursing on our universities is likely to be defensive, political, idealistic, distorted--anything but a sober, dispassionate assessment of the nature of our beloved or beleaguered beast. Reflecting on self-reflection suggested to me a radical strategy for my remarks. I propose to discuss 'Their 22 Academic Questions / Fall 1999

Universities and Their Culture." Accepting that task, the next question is "which there for their?" What other universities and cultures would give perspective? It seemed to me that the most uncontaminated "other"--yet one with the most profound connection--would be the very first universities in order to contrast their sense of self and society with ours. The earliest documentary evidence we have for the existence of the university is in a papal decree of 1209, Ex litteris vestre. The document contains Pope Innocent III's reply to an appeal from the masters of Paris. The appeal is lost, so we have to reconstruct the situation from the Pope's reply. The principal issue was that some of the young masters of arts (m0derni doctores liberalum) were not wearing the proper costume and refusing to attend the funerals of deceased colleagues. In order to correct such breaches of conduct, eight depu- ties from the faculties of theology, law, and the arts had drawn up statutes. A certain Master G., having refused to swear allegiance to the new regulations, had been expelled. Master G. then repented his ways; he indicated his willingness to take the oath of submission in order to obtain reinstatement. The original provisions evidently did not provide for repentance. The masters of Paris asked the Pope whether it was proper to re-admit Master G. Innocent replied that if Master G.'s amends satisfied the masters, he could be readmitted. Lest one think that proper costume and funeral duties are trivia accidently dredged up from the dust-heap of history, I would point out that in the fa- mous statutes of the University of Paris drawn up by Cardinal Robert of Courson in 1215--statutes which are widely regarded as the magna carta of the university movement--funeral arrangements for members of the university are the most elaborate and detailed of the provisions. Nor was costume neglected: Courson's document dictated that, when lecturing, masters were to wear "a simple black round ankle length cope, a pallium, and plain shoes with pointed toes. "~ In the trendy spirit of deep deconstruction, I consider plain pointed shoes the central point of my remarks. Before we get to the shoes, a few broad observations. The fundamental revelation which emerges from Ex litteris vestre is that by the year 1209 there existed in Paris a guild of masters prepared to establish their own internal rules of conduct. After all, there have been teachers and masters since Pythagoras, but what marked the university movement was the formation of a corporation, a "legal person" which would have perpetuity beyond the life of a single master or a collection of individual masters. Thus, the significance of Innocent III's ruling that it was up to the masters to decide who could and could not belong to the corporate body. It is the corporation which we call "university" that is at issue. I repeat, there have been teachers, intellectuals, scientists, philosophers, artists, and so on as far back as we can scan human culture. Most of them have not been members of the corporation of the university. If one were to take an area of the greatest significance to the modern university corporate body, natu- Rothman, Kors, O'Brien, Allen, and Agresto 23

ral science, it is worth recalling that most of the modern history of science took place not only outside the university, but in opposition to the university. One of the great mistakes in discussing the university is to confuse the body corporate with high science, art, and intellectual endeavor. The university is a corporate, self-regulating body with specific curricula, faculty qualifications, and the like; it may or may not be a safe haven and creative center for science, art, intellect, and moral insight. University regulations may accept only faculty who wear pointed shoes, and miss the discalced genius. Recall that Socrates was notoriously "shoeless." As we all know, the term universitas in the middle ages did not designate educational institutions as such. Universitas was the designator for various organized bodies; there was a universitas of weavers, a universitas of gold-smiths. In Paris in 1209 it was a universitas of masters whom the Pope addressed. At Bologna, in contrast, the corporate entity was a universitas of students which hired faculty, set wages, and determined what was to be taught. Our university is the descendent of the universitas of masters, not of students. A universitas was a guild organized around a specific trade or skill. One of the peculiar aspects derived from Ex litteris vestre is the fact that there was one universitas, one guild, for three different skills: law, theology, and the arts. The medieval model should have created three guilds--the precursors not of the university but of the American Bar Association and the MLA. That there was one Paris universitas of masters from different skills has led a leading historian of the period to suggest that what united the group was the common skill as teachers. The original universitas was organized as a place of teaching skill. If the original universitas was united as a teaching guild, it would not be inaccurate to characterize our universities as a research guild. I do not wish to engage in yet another of those endless pointless pious discourses about research and teaching that infest contemporary academic promotional rheto- ric. I don't believe that pursuing research means that one avoids students, neglects preparing classes and correcting papers, and all that propaganda. There are great researcher-teachers, there are mediocre researcher-teachers, and we have more than enough complaints from thirteenth-century literature about poor teaching in the medieval schools to realize that Paris was not a paradise of pedagogical practice. I suggest that the sense of teaching as a common skill for the universitas rests on a deeper assumption than energy expended in the presence of students. Medieval faculty were teachers because there was a teaching which they were obliged to convey. It is the belief in the existence of a teaching that is missing--or at least recessive--in the research model of our universities. The absence of a teaching is both the glory and the limitation of our universities in relation to our society. To say that there is a teaching implies that there is authoritative truth already at hand; authoritative truth, the teaching to be taught, was assumed by 24 Academic Questions / Fall 1999

medieval scholars. If there is anything that we are clear about from the pedagogy of the first universities, it was its reliance on the method of authority. In 1209 there were authorities everywhere from the Bible to the Fathers of the Church to the dictates of the Roman Pontiff. This was true as well in the area of science: physics was a commentary on Aristotle, medicine a gloss on Galen. The intellectual revolution that resulted in our universities can be marked in Descartes's reflection on his university education:

I have been nourished in letters since my childhood, and since I was given to believe that by their means a clear and certain knowledge could be obtained of all that is useful in life, I had an extreme desire to acquire instruction. But as soon as I had achieved the entire course of study... I entirely changed my opinion. For I found.., that the effort to instruct myself had no other effect than the increas- ing discovery of my own ignorance. And yet I was studying at one of the most celebrated Schools in Europe.

This quotation is from Descartes's treatise titled On Method. It was the method of authority that he experienced at the Jesuit college at La Fleche which Descartes rejected. The only study that Descartes found fruitful was mathemat- ics, because it relied on rational intuition, not the sayings of the ancients. Descartes's inspiration that true knowledge must be founded on some sort of immediacy, whether of rational insight or stubborn empirical fact, is central to the research spirit of the modern university. Immediacy of evidence contrasts sharply with the medieval notion that truth is uniquely mediated through authorities. The central pedagogy of the medieval university was the lectio in which the master explicated and commented on some authoritative text, a recovery of the truth therein. The governing effort of the contemporary university is not recovery, but discovery. Truth is not already there in Aristotle or Galen, it awaits on-going research. Descartes's rejection of authority as an appropriate university method is widely and deeply accepted. The medieval pattern of study and its latter-day successor, the classical curriculum of our nineteenth-century colleges, are regarded as narrow, parochial, and constrictive of academic freedom in the name of religious dogma. University presidents happily welcome the freshman class by presenting higher education as a challenge to parochialism. Rather than the medieval defense of dogma, modern higher education aims at dedogmatizing the student body. I do not want to denigrate Descartes's scientific impulse. I firmly believe that modern medicine is better than Galen. One obvious and much used answer to the role of our universities in our society is that the university is a superb provider of scientific knowledge and technical invention. That should be sufficient rationale for our enthusiasm and financial donations. However, if the role of the university in society is justified in this manner, it is because society has been defined as economic society. The university provides useful Rothman, Kors, O'Brien, Allen, and Agresto 25

products and skills for the economic well-being of the nation. So it does, so it is continually defended, but such a vision of the university is sharply at odds with the medieval universitas magistrorum. If we are to recover any appreciation of the medieval assumptions, we have to look at those movements in the contemporary academy that challenge the Cartesian assumptions of the research university. There is such a challenge within the complex phenomenon of modern feminism. Feminist critics in and outside the university object to the Cartesian model for its pretension to an impartial, impersonal perspective. The Cartesian voice, it is claimed, is anything but impersonal and impartial; it is the voice of patriarchy, of male domination, a disembodied voice out of touch with the embedded, bodily reality of humanity, and female bodies in particular. Given the rejection of a transcendent impartial observer, feminism reverts to a method of authority. If we seek the female voice, we want the authoritative voice. Who speaks authentically for women, of women? The search for the authoritative voice is undertaken at least in part through methods similar to that of the medieval masters: the interpretation of texts. The difference between a medieval Franciscan interpreter and a modern feminist interpreter is that the former approaches traditional texts with a hermeneutic of faith, the latter with a hermeneufic of suspicion. Feminist critics read traditional texts for the feminine truth that has been suppressed, rather than the truth expressed. Nevertheless, it is through the interpretation of texts that one hopes to recover the hidden voice of women. Consider Luce Irigrary's review of the history of philosophy, which she regards as a "fling," an "intro(sed)uction" to philosophy. Advocacy of feminist perspectives within the modern Cartesian university has caused deep concern. Feminism, along with various other ethnic or sexu- ally oriented studies, seems based on a denial of the impartiality of truth. Political correctness triumphs over dispassionate investigation; academic freedom is compromised as certain views are banished as sexist, racist, and pho- bic. All this can be genuinely worrying. When Robert of Courson drew up the statutes of the University of Paris in 1215, it was explicitly stated that the faculty was prohibited from teaching Aristotle on natural philosophy and the heretical works of David of Dinant, Amaury of BNne, and Maurice of Spain. Since Aristotle in his natural philosophy asserts the inferiority of the female species and elsewhere the existence of natural slaves, one could imagine a modern PC advocate banishing Aristotle from the curriculum. Heresy is not just getting some fact wrong or muddling a proof, heresy denies the method which gains revelation and truth. Thus, for the Cartesian mind, political correctness is an academic heresy since it seems to deny the very methodology of fruitful science. Upping the rhetorical ante: the life of science is undermined. Feminists and medieval scholastics would argue in rebuttal that the impartial life of science is not life female life or human life--in all its partialities and personal meaning. 26 Academic Questions / Fall 1999

In the University Statutes of 1215, David of Dinant and Amaury of B6ne were judged heretical. Why? It seems that they were some sort of pantheists. Pantheism, the absorption of God and all else into nature, offers a fundamental threat to the particularity of the historical voice--the human or divine person. Christianity was based on an authored text that revealed the voice of a personal God, and thus, so it was held, the authentic voice of sinful humanity. If one is searching for a method to explore human life in all its culture and quirks, something other than transcendent observer status is necessary. Inter- est in human life, authentic human life, the good life calls for strategies above, beyond, or below the Cartesian mind-set. Maybe I can now try to address the question, "What is the responsibility of higher education to society?" I have already suggested that in one sense that is an easy question to answer. The university's responsibility is to produce knowledge, skill, and invention for the society. That justification is fundamentally economic but, for whatever it is worth, that was not the responsibility of the medieval university to its society. Aristotle and the whole classical tradition in ethics made a distinction between the goods necessary for living: food, shel- ter, health, and so on and the good life. The goods necessary for living are economic goods--recall that oikonomia is the Greek for "managing a household"--and they are sharply distinguished from higher goods, which deter- mine the good life for individuals and society. In pursuit of higher goods one may forgo any or most of the household economic goods. The soldier puts his life at peril, the monk abjures wealth. The goods of the soldier, monk, artist, or leader of the polis are what Charles Taylor calls "hyper goods." If higher education has a responsibility to society beyond household goods, it will have to deal in hyper goods; it will have to discuss, define, and defend visions not just of goodies, but the good life. The medieval universities were, of course, very much into hyper goods in so far as theology was the defining discipline, the queen of the sciences. If the university is to have a responsibility to society beyond household goods, my contention is that it will have to do theology or a reasonable facsimile thereof. The queen of the university sciences will be a defense of hyper goods, the good life, the authentic human life. Without get- ring into the metaphysics of theology and hyper goods, what is needed is a methodology for the higher things. Affirmation of hyper goods is nothing more or less than affirming the authoritative voice of human experience-- men, women, sinners, and all the saints. The medievals were confronted with various competing authoritative voices proclaiming hyper goods and authentic life. Medieval theologians had to deal with their own complex Biblical tradition, the Sic et Non of the Patristics, the subtlety of Averroes and Maimonides, the scope of Aristotle's natural philosophy. For better or worse, they thought that they could argue across this range. A medieval theologian would construct a summa that ordered, evaluated, and hierarchized the various claims. Faced with a cacophony of competing voices, Rothman, Kors, O'Brien, Allen, and Agresto 27

the medievals differ from present day multiculturalists by seeking a methodology of resolution, rather than delighting in Derrida's "dance of innumerable choreographies." Lacking a methodology for assessing and ordering hyper goods, one falls into easy tolerance, meaningless difference, and inarguable relativism. I said that I would comment on funerals and pointed shoes.Johan Huizenga in his classic Waning of the Middle Ages comments that in medieval times life was stark. When it was light it was light, but when night fell it was darkness itself. A cry in the night, the tolling of bells rang out in the ambient silence of a world without motor cars and radio chatter. Cities were clearly defined spaces with formidable enclosing walls, not the sprawling conurbations of the modern world. Let me pick up that theme and speculate on all those detailed funeral proscriptions. If the world was stark, so indeed was the distinction of life and death. Death was an ever-present reality, the thief in the night. Present life was crucial for eternal life. Having a good life was not something merely to pon- der and postpone. Funerals were powerful reminders of the stark reality of life. A master who skipped a funeral may have been regarded as misunder- standing the very situation of life, which it was his duty to profess. Socrates said that the purpose of philosophy was "learning how to die," which meant, of course, learning how to live the sort of good life for which one might be willing to die. If the fundamental point of education is the good life and learning how to die, funerals are powerful symbolic moments not to be trivialized by a serious educator. I close with plain pointed shoes. The costume ensemble dictated in the statutes of 1215 was part of university and church reform initiated by Inno- cent III. (Robert of Courson who promulgated the rules was the papal legate to France.) There had been repeated complaints about the luxurious living of masters: great banquets, excessive drinking, rich garments. The statutes of 1215 restricted banquets, urged that clothing be given to the poor, and established a plain clerical black for the masters. In its own way, these clothing restrictions were an outward sign of the noneconomic function of the university. If the university were simply a place which merchandised goods for the society, there was no reason that the traders in such goods should not enrich themselves by that trade. But if the university was a place that dealt in hyper goods, these were goods not subject to economic evaluation. Masters and monks who championed hyper goods should, display a life style and costume in keep- ing with that belief. I suppose these remarks end by advocating that faculty reinstate the vow of poverty. This will hardly win me friends in the AAUE But while I am not advocating a return to monasticism, a black ankle length cope, and pointed shoes, I do think that the university in exercising responsibility for society should (1) look beyond economic goods, (2) champion hyper goods, and (3) seek with all earnestness an ordered methodology for assessing hyper goods. 28 Academic Questions / Fall 1999

Note 1. Principal data regarding the origins of the university are from Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics 1100-1215 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). This reference appears on pages 307-8.

Education as M6tier: Finding the Fabulous in the Universal

William B. Allen: professor of political science, Michigan State University, East Lan- sing, MI, and former director, State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Dr. Allen's most recent book is The Federalist Papers: A Commentary (Peter Lang, Inc., 1999).

I wish to recall something of inestimable value in this culture, which is the first peaceful transition of government from one party to another. Thomas Jefferson accomplished that and, thereby, established that a great ambition could be realized: the ambition to end the cycle of regimes, to enable people to contest for political power within the confining structures of a constitutional regime, and without resorting to coups d'6tat (which are the customary human practice when it comes to making political changes). Our country is unique in that respect (which is not to say that the English constitution has not been long lived). But our country is unique in having deliberately set out to construct a way of life in which people could contest differing conceptions of their political future without having to resort to prac- tices of exclusion, outright warfare, and the defeat of the enemy in order to produce constitutional changes. It used to be (consult Aristotle's Politics and you will discover it laid out as clearly and analytically as is possible to be laid out) that you could not envision a change of regime, a change of ruling structure or of those prevailing in office, without contemplating a literal overthrow of those in office. That does not happen in the United States. All happens quite peacefully, within a constitutional structure that is accepted by all par- ticipants. There is no legitimate political ambition--no legitimate political ambition--that cannot be pursued within the confines of the Constitution of the United States. And it was Thomas Jefferson and his election of 1800 that, with some difficulty to be sure, nevertheless established that wonderful prece- dent, consistent with the designs of the Founders. Now approaching another such change in this country, we are made somewhat humble by the reflection that it is two hundred years roughly since we first learned how to do it. So, perhaps we should not take over-great pride in our accomplishment, when we recognize the size of the giant shoulders upon which we stand in practicing it.