Morality and the Modern University

__A Survey of Recent Articles__

The University of Chicago and other elite colleges and universities are "fundamentally amoral" institutions. Aside from issuing formal condemnations of cheating, plagiarism, and academic fraud, they make almost no effort to give their students any moral guidance. Once it was different, of course. But the founding religious purpose of the University of Chicago and many other institutions was lost, and the effort by social scientists to develop an independent "scientific" morality proved a failure. "Today, elite universities operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral purpose, and they pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter."

What sounds like a serious indictment of the University of Chicago in particular and of academe in general is, in fact, drawn from an unusually candid address on "The Aims of Education" that was given last year to Chicago’s incoming freshmen by John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the university. Philosophy and Literature (Apr. 1998) reprinted the speech to kick off a symposium including seven other scholars. The issue: whether institutions of higher learning are, or should be, in Mearsheimer’s words, "largely mum on ethical issues."

Universities, in his view, have instead three aims: to teach undergraduates "to think critically...to broaden [their] intellectual horizons [and] to promote self-awareness." A University of Chicago education also serves as "a meal ticket," he observed. Though costing more than $120,000 over four years, it enables those who possess it "to make lots of money" and "achieve an upper-class lifestyle." Not that moral questions are unimportant, or that students should pay them little mind, Mearsheimer said, but "for better or worse," his university and other such institutions offer little help in finding answers. Few classes at Chicago, he said, even "discuss ethics or morality in any detail."

Wayne C. Booth, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Chicago, says that Mearsheimer doesn’t seem to know what is going on at their university. "Teaching about morality and how to think about moral issues goes on almost everywhere here— most obviously, of course, in the humanities, but also in the sciences." How, he asks, could anyone teach "Aristotle’s Ethics, the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the novels of Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Jane Austen and Melville, the works of Plato, Kant, and William James—to choose just a few from this year’s rich offerings—without engaging students in genuine inquiry about what is moral or ethical behavior, and on what kind of persons they should try to become?"

In response, Mearsheimer concedes that students have the opportunity to discuss moral issues in detail in a "few" classes at Chicago, though even in them the teachers properly leave the students "to figure out their own answers."

To John D. Lyons, a professor of French at the University of Virginia and former editor of Academe, however, the university Mearsheimer describes "strikes me as a wonderful place, though very atypical of American higher education.... It looks to me as if the university, and particularly the faculty, is today more involved, collectively, in providing moral guidance to students than at any time in the last century." Their guidance takes the form of speech codes, rules of sexual conduct, and other attempts to enforce political correctness.

That elite institutions of higher education have strayed so far from the traditional ideal of a liberal education as Mearsheimer’s description suggests "stunned" Patrick Henry, a professor of French at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and coeditor of Philosophy and Literature. "Mearsheimer’s educational project is strong on critical thinking and promoting selfawareness but, despite the talk of broadening one’s horizons, it looks rather self-enclosed, contains no social conscience, and lacks an ethical dimension. Its so-called benefits are elitist, monetary, and egocentric." Henry favors "forcing students to do critical moral thinking and to come to terms with the concept of moral excellence and with what might constitute the attainment of the good."

The elite universities "probably have to be just what Mearsheimer says they are," observes Eva T. H. Brann, dean emerita and a tutor at St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Maryland, a small liberal arts institution with a required "Great Books" curriculum. They are less communities than "disparate collections of atomic individuals joining in shifting patterns to accomplish various goals, among which the education of the young is not the least, but not the first either." Moreover, the many "assertively equal and vigorously competing disciplines" within the universities inevitably result in a multiplicity of "intellectual and ethical standards."

The elite university will eventually disintegrate, Brann predicts, as "its own polymorphous and protean propensities drive it— aided by electronic substitutions—into increasing physical dispersion." Meanwhile, she says, colleges and small universities can uphold the tradition of higher education. They can enforce certain standards of ethical behavior, and, at the same time, through common reading and conversation, in class and out, encourage "critical reflection about morality and virtue, about rules of action and ways of being."