Abstract
My purpose in “Out of Step” was to articulate some core academic virtues—desirable character traits that a professor needs to do his job responsibly and well; and to show how recent changes in the way universities are run tend systematically to erode and compromise those virtues, resulting in what I regretfully described as a steady loss of moral muscle tone. So my criticisms of the use of surrogate measures of academic quality, on which Derpmann, Düber, Meyer, and Rojek focus, were just one thread in a much broader tapestry.
[Universities] ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground … .
—William James
William James, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” Harvard Monthly XXXVI, no.1 (March 1903): 1–9, p. 7.
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- 1.
“Out of Step: Academic Ethics in a Preposterous Environment,” in Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, expanded ed., 2013), 251–67, 313–17.
- 2.
Or of course, as I said, her job; but to write in that politically-correct way of “he or she” throughout would make this response unbearably complicated, and convey the false impression that it is somehow about feminism.
- 3.
I had in mind changes in the way US universities are run; but the warm international response to my paper (which appeared in Chinese [2010] and Portuguese [2011] before it appeared in English in 2013—the same year it appeared in Spanish) suggests that the problem extends to much of the world.
- 4.
Steven M. Cahn, Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia (1986; 2nd ed., Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994).
- 5.
See, e.g., Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 109, 196 ff., 319–22; “The Ideal of Intellectual Integrity, in Life and Literature” (2005), in Putting Philosophy to Work (note 2 above), 209–20, 307–09.
- 6.
That is, roughly, in the interests of the advancement of their career. The phrase, “interests in the vulgar sense,” comes from John Stuart Mill, “Sidgwick’s Discourse” (1835), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X—Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/241, 166–205, p. 200.
- 7.
Susan Haack, “‘Know’ is Just a Four-Letter Word” (written in 1983, but first published in the second edition of Haack, Evidence and Inquiry [1993; 2nd ed., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009], 301–30).
- 8.
C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and (vols. 7 and 8) Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58). 5.396 (1878).
- 9.
On this topic, see Susan Haack, “Formal Philosophy: A Plea for Pluralism” (2005), in Putting Philosophy to Work (note 2 above), 235–50, 310–13.
- 10.
When, in the past, I was asked to take part in these evaluations, I was given ten days (!) to rank roughly 80 programs in several different areas of philosophy. In footnote 29 of “Out of Step,” I explain how much longer than this it took me to evaluate just one department in a serious way.
- 11.
W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (1877); reprinted in Timothy J. Madigan, ed., The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), 70–97, p.78.
- 12.
“The Fragmentation of Philosophy, the Road to Reintegration,” pp. 3–32 in this volume.
- 13.
Susan Haack, “The best man for the job may be a woman … and other alien thoughts on affirmative action,” in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (note 2 above), 167–87, p.172.
- 14.
See Susan Haack, “‘We pragmatists …’; Peirce and Rorty in Conversation” (1997), in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 31–47.
- 15.
Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham: Acumen, 2011). Alexander Rosenberg, An Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). See also Susan Haack, “Brave New World: On Nature, Culture, and the Limits of Reductionism,” in Bartosz Brozek and Jerzy Stelmach, eds., Explaining the Mind (Kraków: Copernicus Center Press, forthcoming 2016).
- 16.
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903; New York: Random House, Modern Library Paperback ed., 1998); Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1924; New York: Signet Classics, 1998).
- 17.
This was a main theme in “Preposterism and it Consequences” (1996); in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (note 18 above), 188–208, to which Derpmann et al. also refer.
- 18.
The phrase comes from Butler, The Way of All Flesh (note 19 above), p. 291. I borrowed it before, in “The Ideal of Intellectual Integrity” (note 6 above), p. 220.
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Haack, S. (2016). Ethics in the Academy: Response to Simon Derpmann, Dominik Düber, Thomas Meyer, and Tim Rojek. In: Göhner, J., Jung, EM. (eds) Susan Haack: Reintegrating Philosophy. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24969-8_16
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