A SMALL TALENT FOR HYPOCRISY

ZACHARY ERNST

I NTRODUCTION I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Missouri. I have had a number of disagreements with my colleagues over the past several years, some of them heated. Whenever I felt it 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 was a genuine disagreement, and that reasonable people could disagree on the issue. But on plenty of other occasions, I felt that others were consciously hypocritical, bullying, or dishonest. This has happened more often than I would have hoped. It is no secret that academia is the home to some of the worst politics and the most deeply entrenched absurdity that one can nd anywhere. 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 of sexism. This, too, I have seen far too often. Recently, the University of Missouri gutted its grievance procedure for faculty. Appeals processes have been done away with, and there is now no signicant recourse for faculty other than taking legal action. Given the massive legal resources of the University and the often prohibitive cost of taking on such a large institution, legal action is difcult, to say the least. It is rarely practical. Informal appeals to administrators and chairs of departments often go nowhere instead of receiving a fair hearing, the people who bear responsibility for the conduct of the university too often decide to circle the wagons, keeping any complaints at arms length. In my opinion, the only remaining institutional protection for faculty is tenure. Without a meaningful grievance process, without a union, and without practical legal recourse, the only realistic option for faculty is for us 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 can teach, 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 this is because the very people who would most likely speak their minds are the ones who are denied tenure and are forced to leave academia. Ironically, the ranks of the tenured faculty are lled with the people who have no use of it because those are the people who are not ltered out by the tenure review process. Maybe this is why the taxpaying public who pay our salaries see tenure as an excuse for laziness. Despite my belief that
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ZACHARY ERNST

tenure is crucial to the proper functioning of the university system, I cant say that I blame anyone who sees tenure as nothing more than a guaranteed paycheck, handed out to aging professors until they collect their pensions. P HILOSOPHY As an academic discipline, philosophy is unique in several ways. Philosophy has no particular subject-matter there is nothing we can point to and say, that is what we study. We are unlike botanists, particle physicists, and economists in this way. We are notorious for disagreeing about what we do, as a profession. I can honestly say that I have never heard much agreement from philosophers about the nature of philosophy as a subject-matter. In contrast, I often hear a great deal of agreement about why the university should continue to support a philosophy department. What we like to tell administrators and students is that philosophy is where you study thinking and reasoning. In the rest of the university, you will be operating within a narrow and unspoken set of assumptions and boundaries. But when you go 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 examined; this is where the foundations for the other academic disciplines are reconstructed. Physics students can come and ask about the nature of scientic theories; math students can study what makes a piece of reasoning valid; and anyone is invited to question their most fundamental religious, ethical, and cultural convictions. But more than this, we often say that people should ask these questions. Philosophy is shot-through with the ethical imperative that introspection, critical examination of entrenched beliefs, and constant questioning are good things. When students ask, whats this good for? we may give a set 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 coincidence that Socrates, who did more than any other single person to set philosophy on its current track, was a martyr, having been killed for questioning the religious beliefs of his day. Given this fact, it would be strange if philosophy did not turn out to be fundamentally at odds with the modern university. For if there is any institution 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 nd a better example of those characteristics. I cant think of anything else that even comes close. Maybe this is why Ive heard more than one person compare the uncountable layers of university administrators to the hierarchy of the Catholic church. My view is that when a philosophy department is entirely dependent for its continued existence on the university, the clash between the universitys values and the ethical standards of philosophy can end in only one way: with the total capitulation of the philosophy department. Or perhaps more 2

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ZACHARY ERNST

precisely, it will end with the total capitulation of philosophy, since the department as an organization will adapt itself to the university landscape. This is not the beginning of any kind of conspiracy theory; the university does not need a sledge-hammer to beat the faculty into submission. Even if there were smoke-lled rooms in which the nocturnal council meets, there would be nothing for them to discuss. After all, the university is the gatekeeper it decides who joins the faculty in the rst place. And if a mistake has been made, the tenure review process will provide all the necessary correction. If one grants the single assumption that universities are highly resistant to change, then you can predict exactly what kind of person would be allowed to join its ranks. The most dangerous thing for any such institution is tenure in order to maintain the status quo, there must be a guarantee (or as 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 way of coercing a tenured faculty member, it must ensure that the faculty will police themselves. So now the question is how to identify those people. Personally, if I were trying to nd the most docile people, I would look for the most narrow specialists in their elds. The last person I would want would be someone who actively seeks interdisciplinary work and collaboration. This is because it is the people with broad research interests who are most likely to take a broader interest in the university, if for no other reason than that they see more of it. A system of incentives would be set up to reward large quantities of narrowly-focused research and disincentives would be used to discourage breadth. I dont think it even bears mentioning that this is exactly what we nd. 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, action theory, game theory, logic, and philosophy of science. The chair of my department was unhappy about this, and he told me so. He said, quite explicitly, that it would be very difcult for me to get tenure with such research breadth. This may sound unbelievable to someone outside of academia, but his reasoning was quite sound. Tenure decisions were made largely based on whether the faculty member had developed a reputation in the eld. And it is easier to do that if you repeatedly publish in the same narrow 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 several distinct areas be considered a liability? But on the other hand, I had to admit that he was right, and that this was good advice. The second personal story also stems from a conversation I had with the same faculty member. In our department, faculty raises are determined by a formula that is supposed to take into account both the quantity and the quality of ones published output. As I kept receiving very small raises, I 3

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ZACHARY ERNST

asked the chair what it was that made my evaluations so low, relative to the other 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 it was any good because it was so far outside his own expertise. In short, he told me that because he was unqualied to evaluate that work, he couldnt attest to its quality. He repeated this to me when he was evaluating my publications during the tenure review process. When Ive related these incidents to faculty from other institutions, theyve usually said that they were shocked. What I think is really shocking is not that this is how ones work as a faculty member is evaluated, but that my chair was so forthright about it. Having internalized the values of the university so thoroughly, it simply would never occur to him that such standards are totally absurd. I think that these observations explain a puzzling feature of the university. As we are all aware, interdisciplinary research is the big trend. Administrators talk endlessly about breaking down the barriers to interdisciplinary research at the university. They claim that they want to see more collaboration, more interdisciplinary grant applications, new centers that cross traditional boundaries, and so on. And I think they are quite sincere when they say these things. But over and over again, the goal proves to be incredibly difcult to achieve. There are some notable successes, of course, but these are few and far between. My personal theory about why its so difcult to encourage interdisciplinary research is that faculty with broad research interests have largely been ltered out of the system. The reason why there is so little uptake for interdisciplinary research opportunitites even when they are quite generously funded is because the faculty who are best able to conduct such research were never admitted into the system to begin with. Indeed, the vast majority of my colleagues cannot even see why anyone would ever be interested in collaborating with someone from another department, and they have told me so in no uncertain terms. In short, the university is an ecosystem in which only the narrowest survive. Those who are willing to uphold the status quo can do very well for themselves. This is not despite the freedom that comes with tenure it is because of the freedom that comes with tenure. Because tenured faculty cannot easily be policed, they must police themselves. This view is also not a conspiracy theory; in this ecosystem, conspiracies are totally unnecessary. 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 it puts down roots. The question is answered the same way for both if they behaved otherwise, they wouldnt be around for very long. Intentions are irrelevant; its the behavior that counts. A minor hypocrisy is the inevitable result of the clash between philosophys core values and the realities of living within a philosophy department. Faculty are required to sincerely tell their students that no assumption is immune from critical questioning, that entrenched belief systems 4

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ZACHARY ERNST

may be overthrown by a single person, that logic and reason are at the very center 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 to imagine the heaviest, most blunt, blood-soaked axe in the worlds worst horror movie. Its that kind of axe. I went up for tenure and breezed through the whole process a few years ago. This year, a female colleague of mine is up for tenure, and she 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 you should denitely bear this in mind if you decide to keep reading. Im not a disinterested third-party; however, I happen to believe that this tenure vote 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 most gifted hypocrite. Its hard to argue against a negative tenure vote every tenure case is different because every faculty member is different. But in this case, its a lot easier because we can compare it to my own tenure case, which was just a few years ago. In the past several years, our department has changed very little out of seventeen faculty, weve had one retirement and one hire. These are not nearly enough to signicantly change the dynamics of the 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 department, and so on. In terms of the documentation I provided, about threequarters of it related to research, and almost all the remaining one-quarter was related to teaching. My research was strong, my course evaluations were good, and my service was adequate. It took very little effort to put the dossier together. Nobody ever asked me anything else about my teaching; and I didnt expect anyone to question it. After all, I had taught all the courses I had been given, my course evaluations were slightly above average in the department, and it just wasnt an issue. The same was true of my service to the department. In our department, after all, we are not given a choice as to what courses we teach or which service obligations we are assigned. They are both determined entirely by the chair, who does not seek anyones advice or approval. For my tenure case, everything came down to research, and my research record was strong. I had about a half-dozen co-authored publications, and about another half-dozen single-authored publications. The journals were excellent, and I had started to garner some invitations to 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 which were refereed, and others of which were invited. My record was not the 5

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ZACHARY ERNST

research record of an up-and-coming star in the profession, but it was certainly 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 my own case. Her teaching evaluations, for example, were far better than mine, consistently. Her teaching evaluations are among the very best in the department, and she teaches large classes with hundreds of students, which are usually the ones that have the lowest teaching evaluations. Every semester, her evaluations were signicantly better than mine. And yet, she has been faulted for providing insufcient evidence of her teaching quality. She was specically faulted for not providing enough sample examinations and paper assignments as evidence of her teaching ability; and this despite the 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 additional documentation, it should have been me, since my course evaluations were inferior to hers. She was also specically faulted for failing to design new courses for the department. If this strikes you as odd, it should after all, I have also never designed 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 as Ive already mentioned, our courses are assigned by at by the chair of the department, without our input or approval. And as you might expect by now, this issue never arose during my tenure process, despite the fact that both she and I taught exactly what we were assigned. Regarding her research, she was faulted because several of her papers were co-authored and as Ive mentioned already, co-authored work and collaboration of any kind is discouraged in our department. However, a much larger percentage of my own publications were co-authored, often with three other colleagues. And predictably, this issue about co-authored publications was never raised during my tenure review. In fact, our department had recently adopted a policy about credit for co-authored work, which was scrupulously followed by both of us. If anyone should have come under criticism for this issue, it should have been me. I could go on. She had a vastly greater number of more prestigious presentations than I have ever had, many of which were in international forums (none of mine were). She had a larger number of invited articles to the most prestigious presses in her eld, 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-dominated eld such as ours, its easy to spot hypocrisy and sexism. I would submit that this is one such case. After all, women are expected to be teachers, and so one would expect that the tenure review process would tend to focus on 6

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ZACHARY ERNST

teaching when the candidate is a woman. On the other hand, since men are not expected to be teachers (we men are researchers), a mans teaching record will hardly be scrutinized. Only a sexist would demand more than twice as much documentation regarding teaching from a woman, despite her superior teaching evaluations. Similarly, only a sexist would assume that a womans contribution to a co-authored work is not evidence of her intellectual abilities, but a mans contribution to a co-authored work is. But all of this is almost beside the point, because her inexcusable sin wasnt being a woman it was being a strong-willed woman. This is the clearest example of sexism in the tenure review process. As Ive argued above, universities dont take kindly to criticism. But when this level of intolerance and resistance to change is combined with sexist attitudes, the result is dramatic. My wife is the most strong-willed person I have ever known. 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 word for it for every argument she has had with a faculty member, I have had two. And yet, I was never criticized or taken to task for being argumentative or confrontational. But she has been. She has been downright disobedient. Because she and I joined the philosophy department at the same time, other comparisons are easy to make. In our very rst day, we discovered that we had no ofces. Our chair made the immediate suggestion that my wife could take an ofce downstairs, in the Womens Studies Department, and I could stay with the rest of the philosophy faculty. I need not comment on how sexism played into that particular suggestion. F INALLY I could go on. Examples of sexist treatment of women and bullying are too easy to come by. Ill just conclude with a few observations. When Ive discussed this sort of issue with other people, their reaction is almost always one of bewilderment: How is such blatently unethical behavior 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 difcult to acknowledge that this sort of behavior is all too common in academia. The faculty are, indeed, highly intelligent professionals. They are trained in critical reasoning, logic, and even ethics. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that in addition to critical reasoning, logic, and ethics, a professional philosopher must also cultivate a small talent for hypocrisy.