September 01, 2000
Ethics Center hosts summer faculty seminar
Should the values of responsible citizenship, community service and social criticism be pursued throughout the university, or just in certain contexts?
From May 16 to May 23, 2000, the Center For Ethics in Public Policy and the Professions hosted and sponsored a 20-hour faculty seminar, “The Morality of Professional Development and Socialization: Implications For Teaching, Mentoring, and Institutional Oversight.” Fifteen faculty members from various schools and divisions participated. Through discussions, presentations, and readings, they explored the variety of challenges that confront today’s institutions in their preparation of professionals.
As might be expected, discussions were as wide-ranging as they were provocative. Participants inquired, for example, about the essence of a university’s mission: Is it to enable the development of clear- thinking, morally upright citizens to function wisely in a liberal polity; or to nurture future scholars in the search for wisdom; or to train a coterie of competent doctors, lawyers, nurses, scientists, ministers, therapists, or business professionals? Should the values of responsible citizenship, community service and social criticism be pursued throughout the university, or just in certain corners? Is it even possible to adopt a consensual vision on these questions given the extraordinary diversity present in a uni-versity?
Many of the seminar discussions focused on the practical preparation of professionals, especially scholars. The last decade has witnessed a dramatic “raising of the bar” for performance at elite universities, so that junior faculty are faced with an extremely challenging journey toward tenure. The familiarity of sixty-hour or more work weeks—whose teaching and scholarly dimensions involve ever-increasing amounts of committee work, participation on institutional panels and university work groups, engagement in national organizations and committees, and the never-ending quest for extramural funding—gives one legitimate pause about the just degree to which the academy can demand the labors of its personnel.
Complicating this problem is another that participants referred to as “diseases in the professions.” Ideological schisms within professional disciplines—such as literary theory, history, the mental health professions, and, for most of its modern history, philosophy—are extremely commonplace and can threaten the integrity and value of contemporary scholarship. Moreover, much criticism was leveled at how today’s academic scholarship has become hopelessly esoteric, as well as insulated from immediate or pressing social concern. A related issue is the importance of an institution’s mentoring program for junior faculty aspiring towards tenure. Without appropriate counseling and guidance, such faculty might base their productivity around a misconception of its institutional worth. Only too late do they realize that certain activities count more than others in the tenure system; and that after a certain point, nothing substantive can be done to remediate an untenurable situation.
Concluding recommendations for the socialization of professionals targeted the ways that learning environments should develop so as to encourage faculty and students to care for themselves in “narcissistically healthy and satisfying ways.” The great challenge to institutional leadership, as seminar members saw it, is that it refuses to capitulate to forces that can fragment and divide the intellectual community—forces that, given a university’s embrace of intellectual freedom and its tolerance of ideological differences, are always present. As Parker Palmer noted in The Courage To Teach: “The university should be unstable and dynamic, even have an element of danger. But it should also be a place where people feel nurtured, where they can come to grow, develop and thrive, not just as scholars but as people and as members of a community.” Faculty participants remarked that a token of this seminar’s success consisted in securing precisely those feelings, and they suggested that similar opportunities for reflection and discussion be developed for Emory faculty.
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