Should College Graduates Swear an Oath to Social Responsibility?
Peter Singer writes favorably about a new trend at Harvard Business School. New MBAs are taking an oath to use their skills and credentials to promote corporate social responsibility rather than just the bottom line. For years, mainstream capitalist theorists, such as Milton Friedman, have argued that the only responsibility corporate managers have is to make as much profit as they can for their stockholders (as long as they obey the law). Now, with the meltdown of the housing and credit markets, some MBAs are thinking they need to have a wider ethical perspective.
Singer admits that over 80% of Harvard MBAs have not signed on board to be more ethically minded, but he has hope. This made me wonder whether college graduates shouldn't be encouraged to think about their social responsibility. As Singer points out, the idea of professionals swearing to "do no harm" is not a new idea. We should remember that the idea of a bachelor's degree comes from the medieval notion of having succeeded at being a baccalaureus--literally a squire to a knight. That is, one has mastered a set of special skills supposedly to be used for the benefit of society (saving widows and orphans and such).
There is a Graduation Pledge Alliance that champions the idea of college graduates taking such an oath. The oath goes something like this: “I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organizations for which I work.” The idea has not really taken off beyond a few liberal arts and religious schools.
Is the idea of college graduate social responsibility an idea whose time has come or naive wishful thinking?
Religiosity and College majors: Where are all the Faithful?
For some reason, education seems to be the major that attracts, keeps, and strengthens the faithful in college, according to this study. Interestingly enough, the scientists are not turning the youth into atheists with their theories of evolution and such (yet, even though they don't think its important, they go to services anyway?). Seems that honor goes to the folks in departments like sociology and political science. The humanities are not far behind in making us secular humanists, though.
Mark Rudd as Commencement Speaker? (or What can Kids today learn from a terrorist)
I can't imagine OSU ever doing this, but one can dream. Timothy Noah, over at Slate.com, suggests that colleges and universities shouldn't recruit successful people to give the commencement speech at the end of the year. Instead, schools should get failures--people who have screwed something up in their lives and can talk about the wisdom they gathered from the experience. One of his examples is our old friend, Mark Rudd. Here is Noah:
"Mark Rudd. Rudd (author of Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen) is a refreshing departure from Weather Underground veterans like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who continue to glamorize their radical past and to deny the Weather Underground's violent intentions. Rudd sees "very little positive" in the Weather Underground and much to be ashamed of, including its destruction of Students for a Democratic Society, the anti-war group the Weather Underground grew out of. He does not deny that the explosives that killed three of the Weather Underground's members in a Greenwich Village brownstone in 1970 were intended to kill soldiers and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix, N.J. He feels bad about the toll his life took on his parents. Worthwhile message: Don't intellectualize violence."
What a great talk that would be! (And I agree with Noah's review of Rudd's work in comparison to Ayers. Fugitive Days is a bore and a tad pompous. Rudd actually has some lessons for people about politics today)
Check out Mark talking about his new book on C-Span here.
Not much, according to business folk over at Business Week. Forget about critical thinking. Less than 5% want people with liberal arts degrees. They want you to show them that you know how to take orders.
Grad school? They say its a waste of time. Just find a job.
Museums, Memory, and the Logic of Coercive Institutions
National Public Radio has a new series on museums in the United States. People often think of Americans as sports fans or infatuated with pop culture entertainment, but it turns out that we quite the museum goers. Almost 900 million people visit museums annually.
Why are museums so popular?
Philippe de Montebello, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director, answers: "A museum is the memory of mankind."
But we know, too, from many psychological studies that human memory is a very fragile and confusing thing. It is often unreliable and susceptible to being framed and influenced by extraneous forces. We know too often that sometimes people remember things that did not actually happen or not in quite the same way according to different people's recollections.
That why The Pinky Show offers a very interesting take on the museum as a cultural institution. Instead of being neutral repositories of our collective memory, museums may in fact be coercive institutions, run by elite groups who take it upon themselves to disseminate "official" (that is, ideological) versions of history for the masses. Actually, that sounds too Marxist. Kim the kitten puts it better:
Should Students be Publically Humiliated for Plagiarism?
An instructor at Texas A & M International University was recently fired for his treatment of plagiarism in the classroom. According to the report on Inside Higher Ed, Loye Young informed his class that any acts of plagiarism would result in public humiliation in addition to any penalties given by the university. When he found six students engaging in academic dishonesty, he published their names on his course blog.
In my discussion of academic dishonesty with Courtney Campbell, we talked about plagiarism as a kind of moral harm against the academic community, disrupting bonds of trust and amounting to a kind of theft. On this issue, we agreed with Loye Young on the seriousness of the problem.
The question is whether the penalty of public humiliation, above and beyond the failing grades, is justified. At Oregon State, there is a procedure to follow in informing students of allegations of plagiarism. Students are usually given a chance to see the work and the evidence amassed by the instructor that led her/him to accuse the student. Based on that discussion, the case can be sent to the administration and the student may have the right to appeal. In addition to academic grade penalties, the student may have to attend workshops.
Its not clear that the students were given a chance to know about the finding of suspected plagiarism and had a chance to respond. From Loye Young's blog, it appears he completed the grading and posted their names almost immediately. This seems to me the wrong way to go about it. I often find it the case that students simply do not know what constitutes academic dishonesty, especially if they come from backgrounds in which they are the first to attend university. In those kinds of instances, there is an opportunity for education of academic standards. I've never hesitated to fail a student on an assignment for plagiarism, but I have sometimes not recommended further discipline if I felt, after a discussion with the student, that they were simply uninformed or ignorant. In other words, ignorance of the law is no excuse, but leniency in sentencing is sometimes called for. Loye Young seems to think that shaming is an appropriate response to academic dishonesty. I assume the idea is that if plagiarism is a harm against the community, then the community should know how it was harmed and by whom ( a form of punishment not unfamiliar to our Puritan ancestors). Assuming that students had been informed about the policy beforehand in the course syllabus and the students had been informed that they had been caught in academic dishonesty, would public shaming be a just punishment?
Can we Trust Joe Biden? Plagiarism and Moral Character: A New Engage Podcast
Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper had to face down a peculiar political scandal. It seemed that he had been caught plagiarising a speech from Australian Prime Minister John Howard. You can see Harper's notorious speech next to the original here.
In an article for the website Inside Higher Ed, Jonathan Beecher Field wonders why we in the United States aren't outraged that Joe Biden is a contender for one of the highest public offices in the land, considering that he is habitual plagiarist. It seems that not only did Joe Biden fail a class in law school for plagiarising, he was later caught stealing from a speech during his 1988 bid for the presidency. Field says that all academics should be outraged at the choice of this man for the VP position.
In the newest Engage interview, Dr. Courtney Campbell, the Hundere Professor in Religion and Culture at OSU, talks with me about the moral nature of plagiarism and why it should be condemned as a practice. We discuss what kind of harm plagiarism causes and how we should understand and evaluate the character of people, such as Joe Biden, Martin Luther King, Jr. and now, Stephen Harper, who are public figures, seeking the trust of their communities, but have been shown to exhibit this kind of moral failing.
You can listen to this interview at the new Engage site here.
I just had a conversation with my friend Dennis about the difference between political philosophy and political theory (as usually taught in Political Science Departments). I tend to think that political philosophy is more normative, that is, its concerned to examine whether or not politics ought to be a certain way, whereas political theory is more interested in explaining the foundations for why politics is the way it is now. For instance, I tend to think political philosophers are more interested in questions of utopia than are political theorists.
From Public Reason: the questions that motivate social and political phlilosophy
Can't argue with the list (which includes heavy hitters such as Plato, Wollstonecraft, Descartes, Marx, and Freud).
Of course, I would have added something along the lines of Locke and the idea of "rights" and the "social contract"--in general, the revolutionary view, at least in terms of the history of political philosophy, that the primary purpose of the state is to promote the general welfare of its citizens.
Who Makes Us Think? The Top Intellectuals in the World Today
Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazines are conducting a poll to determine who the top public intellectuals are in the world today. You can vote here for the top 5 individuals who have made significant contributions to their fields and have increased awareness of their ideas to broader spheres.
The third largest group in the top 100 are philosophers. What's interesting about the select group is the number of North Americans and Europeans. Could this be ethnocentric bias or a reflection of the difficulty of doing intellectual work in the rest of the world? What publics do global public intellectuals reach?
Look what you can do if you are only a professor part time!
But seriously, the problem of an over-reliance on piece work professors is quite severe in the U.S. The opportunities for exploitation are enormous and exacerbates the issue of the corporatization of the university.
The conservative position in the culture wars is usually that colleges and universities are failing the public because they no longer teach the classics and have given in to feminism, multiculturalism, and race studies. Philosopher Roger Scruton makes that argument here, adding that there is no longer a religious foundation to our education either so we are in a moral vacuum.
Anthony Kronman adds a new twist to all this. His view is that colleges and universities are failing us because humanities departments are no longer helping students to ask the Big Questions : "Why are we here?", "What is the meaning of life?" Instead, we have universities in which natural and social sciences have taken over in providing analyses of social, political, and economic life, but no moral direction. Young people today are supposedly craving this kind of value discussion and the only place they find it is in religious contexts. Higher education is failing them by not being able to talk about the really important matters--the kinds of issues that are brought up in great works of art and literature. (Disclaimer: he says that there are a few schools that do this; Reed College in Portland, Oregon being one of them. I am a Reedie and did, in fact, sit through and enjoy years of talk about Homer's The Iliad.)
Kronman's argument is a little odd. I'm not sure if he has ever stepped into a philosophy class at Yale, where he used to work, but I can imagine such questions are raised quite a bit there.
More importantly, this is a version of blaming the victim. As this article, on the book that gave rise to the conservative backlash against multiculturalism (The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom in 1987), indicates, American undergraduates are not abandoning the humanities because they would rather go into women's, black, or peace studies. Most of them are going into much more "practical" areas such as business or engineering so they can get a job at the end of their 4-6 years that will allow them to pay off their massive student loans. Universites and colleges are not failing students by cheating them of more English and philosophy courses; the country is failing universities and colleges by not providing affordable higher education for more students. The market doesn't value the kind of person who can be versed in the Big Questions, unless that person can also design a marketing campaign or build a bridge.
But there's another aspect that I find interesting about these kinds of "back to the classics" arguments. There is an assumption that the great works will teach us important lessons about human nature, our emotions, etc because they have "eternal themes". I think its clear that these works can have very different interpretations (and not all of them are good ones, of course). The question then is this: how do we know which interpretations are the good ones and which are not? Are the classics valuable because they engage us in asking these questions about interpretation? But then, aren't we asking them to give us answers we already know?
For instance, James Dillion writes a fine piece about why the movie Troy is a really bad interpretation of The Illiad ( I kinda liked the movie until I read this essay). Essentially, Troy turned a really complex story into a sappy, Hollywood love tale, removing the layers of conflict and nuance that make this a great work.
The same goes for 300. As an example, here is this famous scene in which the proverbial gauntlet is thrown down between the Spartans and the Persians:
So why is this bad? Well, 300 is indeed based on Book 7 of Herodotus' Histories (another work we read at Reed during the first year). But the historical inaccuracies in this film are quite legion and telling. Despite all the talk about the rule of law and freedom and such, Leonides acts without a lot of virtue here. Killing a messenger was indeed the mark of madness--it was considered more than rude; it was to be without xenia. One could argue that Leonides was responding to the insult of the Persian messenger and that the messenger was the one who violated the ethical relationship of host and guest that was central to both of these cultures.
Greek literature is filled with these kinds of episodes dealing with conflict and xenia. The Trojan war, as recounted in the Iliad, begins because of an violation of xenia--Paris steals Helen away from Menelaus and whisks her back to Troy. But an example closer to this scene is found in Euripides' play The Suppliant Women. There, the ruler of Athens, Theseus, is confronted by a messenger from another Greek city state who proceeds to insult the democratic way of life and then threatens Athens with destruction. However, Theseus does not proceed to kill the herald--instead he gives a speech on how important it is to obey the rule of law and the moral teachings of the gods and then sends the messenger away (but I guess those Athenian philosophers and "boy lovers" aren't men enough to kick people down wells when they are angry)
The end result of 300 is more a metaphor for our times (angry, threatened, millitant) and a reflection of Frank Miller's own conservative, almost xenophobic, views and in that way, it is more like Troy than an opportunity to reflect on Herodotus and whatever we can learn from that great work. So how do we know when we get at those parts of the works that really truly answer the Big Questions?
