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Plain Pointed Shoes and the Higher Good

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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 noth- ing 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 indi- vidual 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. Plain Pointed Shoes and the Higher Good 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 sug- gested 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 univer- sity 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 univer- sity 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 or- ganized 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 teach- ers. 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 re- search 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 stu- dents. 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 al- ready 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 peda- gogy 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.
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