ernst - a small talent for hypocrisy.pdf

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A SMALL TALENT FOR HYPOCRISY

ZACHARY ERNST

INTRODUCTION

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Uni-versity of Missouri. I have had a number of disagreements with my col-leagues over the past several years, some of them heated. Whenever I feltit was appropriate, I didnt hesitate to call a decision into question or call

someone out if I felt they were being dishonest. Often, I felt that there wasa genuine disagreement, and that reasonable people could disagree on theissue. But on plenty of other occasions, I felt that others were consciouslyhypocritical, bullying, or dishonest. This has happened more often than Iwould have hoped. It is no secret that academia is the home to some of theworst politics and the most deeply entrenched absurdity that one can findanywhere. I have also witnessed this more often than I would have hoped.And it is also well-known that academia is the home to no small amount ofsexism. This, too, I have seen far too often.

Recently, the University of Missouri gutted its grievance procedure forfaculty. Appeals processes have been done away with, and there is nowno significant recourse for faculty other than taking legal action. Given the

massive legal resources of the University and the often prohibitive cost oftaking on such a large institution, legal action is difficult, to say the least. Itis rarely practical. Informal appeals to administrators and chairs of depart-ments often go nowhere instead of receiving a fair hearing, the peoplewho bear responsibility for the conduct of the university too often decideto circle the wagons, keeping any complaints at arms length.

In my opinion, the only remaining institutional protection for facultyis tenure. Without a meaningful grievance process, without a union, andwithout practical legal recourse, the only realistic option for faculty is forus to simply stand on top of a soapbox and say loudly whats on our minds.Indeed, this is a large part of what tenure is for it exists so that faculty canteach, conduct research, and express their views without fear of retaliation.It is easy to lose sight of why we strive so hard for tenure. Perhaps thisis because the very people who would most likely speak their minds arethe ones who are denied tenure and are forced to leave academia. Ironi-cally, the ranks of the tenured faculty are filled with the people who haveno use of it because those are the people who are not filtered out by thetenure review process. Maybe this is why the taxpaying public who payour salaries see tenure as an excuse for laziness. Despite my belief that

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A SMALL TALENT FOR HYPOCRISY ZACHARY ERNST

tenure is crucial to the proper functioning of the university system, I cantsay that I blame anyone who sees tenure as nothing more than a guaranteed

paycheck, handed out to aging professors until they collect their pensions.

PHILOSOPHY

As an academic discipline, philosophy is unique in several ways. Philos-ophy has no particular subject-matter there is nothing we can point to andsay, thatis what we study. We are unlike botanists, particle physicists, andeconomists in this way. We are notorious for disagreeing about what wedo, as a profession. I can honestly say that I have never heard much agree-ment from philosophers about the nature of philosophy as a subject-matter.In contrast, I often hear a great deal of agreement about why the universityshould continue to support a philosophy department. What we like to tell

administrators and students is that philosophy is where you study thinkingand reasoning. In the rest of the university, you will be operating within anarrow and unspoken set of assumptions and boundaries. But when yougo into a philosophy class, you are allowed to question virtually anything.This is the place where orthodoxies are held up to the light and critically ex-amined; this is where the foundations for the other academic disciplines arereconstructed. Physics students can come and ask about the nature of sci-entific theories; math students can study what makes a piece of reasoningvalid; and anyone is invited to question their most fundamental religious,ethical, and cultural convictions.

But more than this, we often say that people shouldask these questions.Philosophy is shot-through with the ethical imperative that introspection,

critical examination of entrenched beliefs, and constant questioning aregood things. When students ask, whats this good for? we may give aset of canned answers. But the truth is that in order to live a good life,one must be willing to engage with philosophical questions. It isnt a co-incidence that Socrates, who did more than any other single person to setphilosophy on its current track, was a martyr, having been killed for ques-tioning the religious beliefs of his day.

Given this fact, it would be strange if philosophy did not turn out tobe fundamentally at odds with the modern university. For if there is anyinstitution that is reluctant to change, steeped in unquestioning tradition,and dominated by hierarchies of authority, it is the university. Personally,I think you have to go to the church to find a better example of those char-acteristics. I cant think of anything else that even comes close. Maybe thisis why Ive heard more than one person compare the uncountable layers ofuniversity administrators to the hierarchy of the Catholic church.

My view is that when a philosophy department is entirely dependent forits continued existence on the university, the clash between the universitysvalues and the ethical standards of philosophy can end in only one way:with the total capitulation of the philosophy department. Or perhaps more

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precisely, it will end with the total capitulation of philosophy, since thedepartment as an organization will adapt itself to the university landscape.

This is not the beginning of any kind of conspiracy theory; the universitydoes not need a sledge-hammer to beat the faculty into submission. Even ifthere were smoke-filled rooms in which the nocturnal council meets, therewould be nothing for them to discuss. After all, the university is the gate-keeper it decides who joins the faculty in the first place. And if a mistakehas been made, the tenure review process will provide all the necessarycorrection.

If one grants the single assumption that universities are highly resistantto change, then you can predict exactly what kind of person would be al-lowed to join its ranks. The most dangerous thing for any such institutionis tenure in order to maintain the status quo, there must be a guarantee (oras close to a guarantee as possible) that only the right sorts of people will

be granted the privilege of tenure. Because the system has no obvious wayof coercing a tenured faculty member, it must ensure that the faculty willpolice themselves. So now the question is how to identify those people.

Personally, if I were trying to find the most docile people, I would lookfor the most narrow specialists in their fields. The last person I would wantwould be someone who actively seeks interdisciplinary work and collabo-ration. This is because it is the people with broad research interests who aremost likely to take a broader interest in the university, if for no other rea-son than that they see more of it. A system of incentives would be set upto reward large quantities of narrowly-focused research and disincentiveswould be used to discourage breadth.

I dont think it even bears mentioning that this is exactly what we find.But Ill relate two personal stories. While I was still an assistant professor,I had published in several different areas I had papers in ethics, actiontheory, game theory, logic, and philosophy of science. The chair of my de-partment was unhappy about this, and he told me so. He said, quite explic-itly, that it would be very difficult for me to get tenure with such researchbreadth. This may sound unbelievable to someone outside of academia,but his reasoning was quite sound. Tenure decisions were made largelybased on whether the faculty member had developed a reputation in thefield. And it is easier to do that if you repeatedly publish in the same nar-row subset of the academic literature. Spreading myself around too much,I was told, might result in my having failed to achieve a reputation. At the

time I had this conversation, I had two distinct feelings. On the one hand,I felt that this was totally absurd how can the ability to publish in sev-eral distinct areas be considered a liability? But on the other hand, I had toadmit that he was right, and that this was good advice.

The second personal story also stems from a conversation I had with thesame faculty member. In our department, faculty raises are determined bya formula that is supposed to take into account both the quantity and thequality of ones published output. As I kept receiving very small raises, I

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asked the chair what it was that made my evaluations so low, relative to theother faculty. His response was that when he looked at my formal work in

logic or game theory, which is quite technical, he could not tell whether itwas any good because it was so far outside his own expertise. In short, hetold me that because he was unqualified to evaluate that work, he couldntattest to its quality. He repeated this to me when he was evaluating mypublications during the tenure review process.

When Ive related these incidents to faculty from other institutions, theyveusually said that they were shocked. What I think is really shocking is notthat this is how ones work as a faculty member is evaluated, but that mychair was so forthright about it. Having internalized the values of the uni-versity so thoroughly, it simply would never occur to him that such stan-dards are totally absurd.

I think that these observations explain a puzzling feature of the univer-

sity. As we are all aware, interdisciplinary research is the big trend. Ad-ministrators talk endlessly about breaking down the barriers to interdisci-plinary research at the university. They claim that they want to see morecollaboration, more interdisciplinary grant applications, new centers thatcross traditional boundaries, and so on. And I think they are quite sincerewhen they say these things. But over and over again, the goal proves to beincredibly difficult to achieve. There are some notable successes, of course,but these are few and far between. My personal theory about why its sodifficult to encourage interdisciplinary research is that faculty with broadresearch interests have largely been filtered out of the system. The reasonwhy there is so little uptake for interdisciplinary research opportunitites even when they are quite generously funded is because the faculty whoare best able to conduct such research were never admitted into the systemto begin with. Indeed, the vast majority of my colleagues cannot even seewhy anyone would ever be interested in collaborating with someone fromanother department, and they have told me so in no uncertain terms.

In short, the university is an ecosystem in which only the narrowest sur-vive. Those who are willing to uphold the status quo can do very wellfor themselves. This is not despitethe freedom that comes with tenure itisbecauseof the freedom that comes with tenure. Because tenured facultycannot easily be policed, they must police themselves. This view is alsonot a conspiracy theory; in this ecosystem, conspiracies are totally unnec-essary. It is equally unnecessary for people to understand why they behave

the way they do, just as it is unnecessary for a plant to understand why itputs down roots. The question is answered the same way for both if theybehaved otherwise, they wouldnt be around for very long. Intentions areirrelevant; its the behavior that counts.

A minor hypocrisy is the inevitable result of the clash between philos-ophys core values and the realities of living within a philosophy depart-ment. Faculty are required to sincerely tell their students that no assump-tion is immune from critical questioning, that entrenched belief systems

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may be overthrown by a single person, that logic and reason are at the verycenter of a good life. Those are laudable values, but only if they are never

applied.At this point, I have to come clean I have a very large, nasty axe to

grind with my department. If you want a good picture of the axe, try toimagine the heaviest, most blunt, blood-soaked axe in the worlds worsthorror movie. Its that kind of axe.

I went up for tenure and breezed through the whole process a fewyears ago. This year, a female colleague of mine is up for tenure, andshe has just gotten an overwhelmingly negative vote from our department.Thats the axe. The reason why its a nasty axe is that she is my wife. So youshould definitely bear this in mind if you decide to keep reading. Im nota disinterested third-party; however, I happen to believe that this tenurevote is the clearest case of sexism I have seen in my career. Not only is it

a blatent case of sexism, its a case that would test the powers of the mostgifted hypocrite.

Its hard to argue against a negative tenure vote every tenure case isdifferent because every faculty member is different. But in this case, itsa lot easier because we can compare it to my own tenure case, which wasjust a few years ago. In the past several years, our department has changedvery little out of seventeen faculty, weve had one retirement and onehire. These are not nearly enough to significantly change the dynamics ofthe department. There have been no changes to our tenure policy.

When I went up for tenure, I was asked to provide the usual dossier:publications, vita, teaching evaluations, record of service for the depart-ment, and so on. In terms of the documentation I provided, about three-quarters of it related to research, and almost all the remaining one-quarterwas related to teaching. My research was strong, my course evaluationswere good, and my service was adequate. It took very little effort to putthe dossier together.

Nobody ever asked me anything else about my teaching; and I didntexpect anyone to question it. After all, I had taught all the courses I hadbeen given, my course evaluations were slightly above average in the de-partment, and it just wasnt an issue. The same was true of my service tothe department. In our department, after all, we are not given a choice as towhat courses we teach or which service obligations we are assigned. Theyare both determined entirely by the chair, who does not seek anyones ad-

vice or approval. For my tenure case, everything came down to research,and my research record was strong. I had about a half-dozen co-authoredpublications, and about another half-dozen single-authored publications.The journals were excellent, and I had started to garner some invitationsto contribute pieces to highly-placed books and special issues of journals.I also had about a half-dozen or so talks at various places, some of whichwere refereed, and others of which were invited. My record was not the

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research record of an up-and-coming star in the profession, but it was cer-tainly good enough for the University of Missouri. All the votes for my

case were unanimous, all the way up through the university system.I was blindsided when issues were raised about my wifes tenure case.

For her, a series of questions were raised that were never relevant in myown case. Her teaching evaluations, for example, were far better than mine,consistently. Her teaching evaluations are among the very best in the de-partment, and she teaches large classes with hundreds of students, whichare usually the ones that have the lowest teaching evaluations. Every se-mester, her evaluations were significantly better than mine. And yet, shehas been faulted for providing insufficient evidence of her teaching quality.She was specifically faulted for not providing enough sample examinationsand paper assignments as evidence of her teaching ability; and this despitethe fact that I never provided any of those things, nor was I ever asked

to. Of course, if one of us should have been required to provide additionaldocumentation, it should have been me, since my course evaluations wereinferior to hers.

She was also specifically faulted for failing to design new courses for thedepartment. If this strikes you as odd, it should after all, I have also neverdesigned a new course for the department. Nor was I ever asked to do so.But in my case, this issue never arose. Finally, with respect to her teaching,she was faulted for not teaching a wide enough variety of courses. But asIve already mentioned, our courses are assigned by fiat by the chair of thedepartment, without our input or approval. And as you might expect bynow, this issue never arose during my tenure process, despite the fact thatboth she and I taught exactly what we were assigned.

Regarding her research, she was faulted because several of her paperswere co-authored and as Ive mentioned already, co-authored work andcollaboration of any kind is discouraged in our department. However, amuch larger percentage of my own publications were co-authored, oftenwith three other colleagues. And predictably, this issue about co-authoredpublications was never raised during my tenure review. In fact, our de-partment had recently adopted a policy about credit for co-authored work,which was scrupulously followed by both of us. If anyone should havecome under criticism for this issue, it should have been me.

I could go on. She had a vastly greater number of more prestigious pre-sentations than I have ever had, many of which were in international fo-

rums (none of mine were). She had a larger number of invited articles tothe most prestigious presses in her field, many more than I have ever had,despite the fact that I am two years senior to her. And despite all of this,my tenure case was a breeze, and hers has been a failure.

When a man and a woman are being evaluated in a male-dominatedfield such as ours, its easy to spot hypocrisy and sexism. I would submitthat this is one such case. After all, women are expected to be teachers, andso one would expect that the tenure review process would tend to focus on

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teaching when the candidate is a woman. On the other hand, since menare not expected to be teachers (we men are researchers), a mans teaching

record will hardly be scrutinized. Only a sexist would demand more thantwice as much documentation regarding teaching from a woman, despiteher superior teaching evaluations. Similarly, only a sexist would assumethat a womans contribution to a co-authored work is not evidence of herintellectual abilities, but a mans contribution to a co-authored work is.

But all of this is almost beside the point, because her inexcusable sinwasnt being a woman it was being a strong-willed woman. This is theclearest example of sexism in the tenure review process. As Ive arguedabove, universities dont take kindly to criticism. But when this level ofintolerance and resistance to change is combined with sexist attitudes, theresult is dramatic. My wife is the most strong-willed person I have everknown. In fact the only person in our department who has ever been as

stubborn and confrontational is me. Here, I will ask you to take my wordfor it for every argument she has had with a faculty member, I have hadtwo. And yet, I was never criticized or taken to task for being argumenta-tive or confrontational. But she has been. She has been downright disobe-dient.

Because she and I joined the philosophy department at the same time,other comparisons are easy to make. In our very first day, we discoveredthat we had no offices. Our chair made the immediate suggestion that mywife could take an office downstairs, in the Womens Studies Department,and I could stay with the rest of the philosophy faculty. I need not commenton how sexism played into that particular suggestion.

FINALLY

I could go on. Examples of sexist treatment of women and bullying aretoo easy to come by. Ill just conclude with a few observations.

When Ive discussed this sort of issue with other people, their reactionis almost always one of bewilderment: How is such blatently unethicalbehavior even possible? These are highly intelligent professionals! Surely,if this were really happening, everyone would realize it immediately.

That response sums up why its so difficult to acknowledge that this sortof behavior is all too common in academia. The faculty are, indeed, highlyintelligent professionals. They are trained in critical reasoning, logic, andeven ethics. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that in addition to criti-

cal reasoning, logic, and ethics, a professional philosopher must also culti-vate a small talent for hypocrisy.

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