On Agnes Callard, on the Art of Governing Teaching & Learning and student protests

I really liked and admired Agnes Callard’s essay, “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead” in The Point (September 29, 2024) [HT Dailynous]. My post is, despite some quibbles, primarily about amplifying a point Callard (Chicago) makes. I do so not just because there is considerable overlap between our positions (recall here and here), but also because she advances the discussion on the nature of campus speech.

Before I get to our agreement, I accentuate one difference first. Callard presupposes as a normative or practical ideal that universities are sites of leisure: “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” On Callard’s view this is only possible once “a world of justice, peace and plenty” has been achieved. And because we are not there yet universities engage in a bunch of non-intrinsic activities: “Forced to find a place for itself in a world unfriendly to sheltered gardens, the university employs police, hedge-fund managers, construction companies, a fundraising office and PR teams.”

Now, I have remarked before (in responding to Jennifer Frey here) that the serious cultivation of leisure is very far removed from the public ethos I inhabit (in a relatively underfunded public university). Students and faculty (as well as the PR teams) are like hamsters kept on a treadmill of busy-ness often without obvious relation to any intrinsic nature of the university. I am increasingly convinced that this contributes to the existential and medicalized psychological crises among our students. So, Callard’s comments resonate.

However, while I respect the idea that a university might be “a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time,” I don’t endorse the idea that this is the only worthy conception of the university one might have. I advocate that understood as self-governing corporate (and eternal) entities (in the old-fashioned medieval sense of ‘corporate’), universities ought to figure out, each and every one of them, what their particular mission is. I am myself committed to the idea that a university is supposed to advance knowledge discovery, knowledge transmission, and preservation of knowledge alongside whatever else it deems valuable. As Callard herself notes, universities pay increasingly hollow lip service to the notion of an intellectual mission worth taking seriously alongside other self-proclaimed missions.

One way this turns out to be hollow is that the performance of university leadership itself is often utterly removed from the intrinsic nature of universities. That is, university leadership often fails to lead by intellectual example (as Callard diagnoses aptly). And the renewed drift toward ‘neutrality’ in the art of leading universities is not just impossible to achieve as Shannon Dea has argued (and I agree), and so not obligatory, but also has the wrong picture of what university leadership is about. Commitment to neutrality pretends that university ‘governance’ is only about creating the pre-conditions of other people’s active contributions to the university mission — and then ‘get out of the way’ — and not itself partially constitutive of it.

This is also how I understand Callard’s main point:

I have focused so many of my criticisms on my own university administration because it seems to me to have a grasp—however twisted and deformed—of the one form of leadership that would not undermine its intellectual mission. “Neutrality” is a bad way of getting at a good idea, which is that the university leads by learning. If the university must be a leader, let it pioneer inquisitive leadership.

Inquisitive leadership is the kind of leadership a teacher practices in a classroom, and also the kind of leadership a student practices, in the same classroom, when she raises her voice to ask or answer a question. In that context, you might argue for a side, but you don’t “take a side,” in the sense of “standing up for” your “principles” or avowing any “commitments” or “fighting” any “forces.” All of these modes of speech proclaim some matter settled when there are people out there who disagree. Inquisitive people are alert to the danger of overclaiming knowledge, and inquisitive contexts are precisely those in which there is no need to do so—neither for the teacher, nor for the student. Declaring yourself ready to fight on a given side is how you project leadership outside the classroom, but inside the classroom leadership works differently: we don’t need to fight, because all of us are ready both to teach and learn.

There is much to admire about this. Too rarely does academic leadership project that it is ready to teach and learn; both teaching and learning require inquisitive leadership. I wish (recall) I had used these phrases alongside my appeal to renew the ‘spiritual authority’ of university leadership when I lamented that universities failed to appreciate that protests could be moments of mutual learning (as sites of teach-ins and genuine public debate). The world would be a better please if university leadership exhibited a disposition to and aptitude for teaching and learning in office.

As an aside, let me illustrate this with a pet-peeve. After protests had escalated on our campus, we were suddenly overrun by administration sponsored events in which departments could ‘learn and reflect on the events.’ The university leadership never participates in these as students who might learn something despite a campus full of genuine expertise. In addition, even when these events were earnest and helped re-establish some lines of intra-departmental communication, their agendas were not conducive to real, enduring learning. I can’t tell you how often I was asked to come talk to a department for five-minute speaking slots to pontificate on academic freedom in a mosaic of speakers on a wide diversity of topics in rapid succession. (I always declined.) It is as if university administration has no idea what the conditions of teaching and learning are.

Be that as it may, — okay, so this is not just amplifying a signal, but also disagreement — universities are themselves not best or exclusively modelled on a classroom. Universities also involve labs with controlled experiments, libraries for quiet contemplation, and public spaces for different kinds of collaborative learning in addition to many other forms of social collaboration. Often these places are inhabited by experts with very different disciplinary norms and methods. Recognition of this epistemic, disciplinary, and methodological plurality shapes my view that academic freedom is never just one thing, but specific to particular research and learning contexts. But how to safeguard all of this and to make it flourish is not reducible to the nature of classroom leadership. It also requires the art of government in a wider sense, where there is a place for trade-offs and tactical sacrifices in the service of the university mission.

While Callard and I, thus, disagree over the art of university government, lurking here is a more fundamental disagreement with Callard. Callard sees university protesters fundamentally as exposing the hypocrisy of university mission statements. It’s hard to disagree with this. But she treats student protestors themselves as trying to use “force to get what” they want and “entitled, by the justice of their cause, to ignore and disrupt the university’s normal pursuit of its mission.”

As regular readers know I am not especially enamored of much of what passes for student protesting, and the glorification by some faculty cheerleaders of street riots as a fantasy-first step into the mass strike and political revolution or decolonization. This just invites the enemies of learning and those enamored by violence for its own sake onto campus. In Amsterdam, we have seen this up close.

But that particular student protests are disruptive does not entail that they are inevitably without intellectual or epistemic merit. That is, there are two things off in Callard’s position: first, as she herself implies, often student protestors may well be the ones trying to make universities live up to their stated mission statements that may have enticed them to campus (in defense of ‘citizenship,’ ‘democracy,’ or ‘moral leadership’). And so, student protests often exhibit a public conscience for intellectual and moral integrity.

Second, because Callard has a singular understanding what true education involves modelled on what we might call a ‘Socratic classroom,’ she refuses to engage with the possibility that student protests are themselves sites where teaching and learning takes place along many dimensions [including the art of citizenship, the art of collective mobilization, mutual education how different kinds of injustices intersect, etc.] and, as I have argued, that they may well be collective experiments in living that have non-trivial albeit imperfect epistemic significance to the students, campus life, and (without being too hopeful about this) wider society.

Now, this in turn, requires that student protests reconceive themselves as participating in the practice of learning and teaching or experiments in living with all the obligations and self-restraint and self-discipline those require. Unfortunately, academic leadership rarely enacts the disposition to teach any of this by example. And so we end up requiring our students to be wiser and more thoughtful than those that purport to be exemplary.

• An earlier, modestly corrected version of this piece appeared at Digressionsnimpressions.