Morality and Expediency

The Folklore of Academic Politics

F.G. Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351504577
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is about micro-politics: that kind of manoevre to control or avoid being controlled, to claim friendship or proclaim enmity, which takes place between people who know one another, and who must temper and adjust their actions towards one another because they share other activities. They are members of the one community and of the same organization, and this not only moderates their actions but also provides them with themes for use in the political arena.

These justificatory themes and the irresolvable contradictions between them, and what is to be done when decisions cannot be made through rational procedures, is one subject of the book. The setting is the university world of committees and dons and administrators, but the inquiry is into general questions about organizational life. How are value contradictions resolved? Why are some matters discussed openly and others only before restricted audiences? Could we dispense with confidentiality and secrecy? What masks are used to make a person or a point of view persuasive?

It is impossible and therefore wholly unwise to try to attempt to run such organizations in a wholly open and wholly rational fashion: without an appropriate measure of pretence and secrecy, even of hypocrisy, they cannot be made to work. At a basic level organizations require secrecy and confidentiality to run effectively.

CHAPTER ONE

Myth, Reality, and Politics

Three Callings

Invoking the name of Lewis Henry Morgan, we honor a scholar industrious in the collection of fact and ingenious in its interpretation; a man of collegial bent, rejoicing in the company and the conversation of others who, like Morgan himself, took their pleasures in serious discussion of the serious intellectual questions of their day; thirdly we honor a man who was deeply involved in the world, as a lawyer, as a man with investments to manage and–from time to time and without great success–as a candidate for and holder of political office.¹ Those three aspects of Morgan’s life represent the ‘academic dilemma’. In fact we should call it a ‘trilemma’, since there are three horns on which to lose one’s academic manhood.

Firstly Morgan was interested in answering intellectual questions: in collecting facts, discovering a pattern within them, and solving problems as yet unsolved. For him, as for any scholar, this activity was, in some degree at least, an end in itself. He was unstinting in the time and energy and expense which he devoted to the understanding of kinship systems and the evolution of human societies. Of course, like anyone else, he rejoiced in fame and recognition, was hurt and annoyed by what seemed to him to be destructive criticism, but in no way can one imagine that ‘fame was the spur’. For any scholar one part of his life is a contest between himself as an intellect and the brute disorderly objective universe of Nature. The real satisfaction comes from perceiving a pattern where none was known before. Whether or not the pattern will help people survive an illness or get more to eat or be slightly less objectionable to their fellows is an entirely secondary consideration. Knowledge, new knowledge, the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity is its own reward.

The second horn is collegiality, membership of the community of learning. Morgan, like some but not all scholars, enjoyed the community of his fellows and was an enthusiastic organizer and joiner of learned societies, the object of which was the exchange of information and opinions on scholarly topics. These societies and the correspondence in which he engaged increasingly as his reputation grew, constituted for him the equivalent of his ‘university’, his ‘community of learning’ (what was missing was the urge to teach the young: he refused an invitation to join Cornell, saying that he had neither the patience nor the temperament to undertake such work). At first sight membership of the community of scholars is no more than an extension of private enquiry and entirely complementary to it; from exchange and criticism come new ideas; and, indeed, it is a truism that knowledge which is not disseminated and made available for scrutiny by others is not knowledge at all. In fact the matter is not so simple and, to an important extent, some forms of interaction with other scholars tend to blunt the fine point of scholarly inquiry or at least to restrict the range of its probing.

Morgan’s third life, and the third horn of the ‘trilemma’ was the world beyond scholarship. For Morgan, as for the rest of us, there was a reciprocity in this third aspect of his life. As a successful lawyer, man of business, and an indifferently successful politician, he made the living which provided resources for his scholarship. We too depend on resources got from outside to maintain our scholarly activities, but in a way different from that of Morgan: for us the subsidy is direct, and is available to the extent that the world outside can be convinced that what goes on in universities is worthwhile. The other direction is the obligation, felt strongly by Morgan and to a very varying extent by scholars of the present day, to provide the kind of knowledge which will make life better in the world beyond the Academy. Morgan, as you well know, was a lifetime champion of Indian causes and, more generally, held the conviction common in his day, that knowledge was for use and that reason was the path to follow in perfecting society.

There is a fourth aspect to life in universities which, since three horns are enough, can be regarded as a branch of the third: involvement with the world of power and resources. This road, within a university, is trodden by service on committees and by accession to positions of power as a departmental chairman or an academic administrator. These people (together with those who stay away from such responsibilities) will be the principal actors in my play. These are the people who, to pick up one of Morgan’s concerns, must never be allowed to exercise power in an arbitrary fashion. But they are also the gatekeepers, extracting resources from the world outside, adapting standards of scholarship to meet the realities of that world and keeping out the forces of evil and disruption.

Summarizing, there are three kinds of goals:² the pursuit of learning for its own sake; the benefit to be derived from belonging to a community; and the goal of power. These goals may occasionally complement one another, but mainly they contradict.

Given three or more captains on the bridge, none agreed upon a destination and none strong enough to eliminate the others, if the ship is to move at all, one would expect procedures for reaching compromise. In order to examine these procedures we move first to discourse, which will be comfortingly familiar to an anthropologist or sociologist, but to those in other disciplines may seem frivolous, certainly unscientific and even threatening because it is subversive of all that a university stands for: the rule of reason and the existence of an objective truth. This discourse concerns myths.

Myths

A myth tells what one should desire (like scholarship, collegiality, or power) and how to get it; the way people are and how they should be; the reasons why things happen the way they do, especially when they go wrong; in short, myths provide values and meaning and ideas and plans and stratagems and alternative forms of social organization. Only through a myth does one see the ‘real’ world. A myth is a form of pretence, an oversimplified representation of a more complex reality.

You may wonder why the word ‘myth’ is used rather than such honored equivalents as ‘collective representation’, ‘culture’, ‘values’, ‘ideas’, ‘plans’, ‘stratagems’, ‘personal constructs’, ‘eidos’, ‘ethos’, ‘cognitive map’, ‘value orientation’, ‘model’, and so on. There is indeed a rich harvest of nearsynonyms, but ‘myth’ suits my purpose best. Firstly, the Greek word from which it is derived has the primary meaning of the spoken word, and you will see later that an interest in face-to-face politics leads to a compelling curiosity about that which is not or cannot be codified, with communications which pass from the mouth to the ear, which frequently are kept behind the scenes, because they will cause embarrassment or they will self-destruct if they are subjected to codification and made open to everyone. This is an arena where finesse is king and the term ‘myth’, reminding us that the spoken word generally leaves open more options than the written rule, conveniently recalls that arena.

Secondly, ‘myth’ is attractive because the word has a nice mixture of the sacred and the derisory. In its second meaning in the Greek ‘myth’ means a fable, something which obviously is not true. When we say of another person’s cherished beliefs that they are nothing more than ‘myths’ we mean firstly that they are fanciful and, secondly, that the other person, because he believes in them, has to be either stupid or cynical (only pretending belief for some ulterior motive). The suggestion that the other person is foolish or insincere can clearly be a move in a competition to gain power over him or to deny him power.

Anthropologists, in the same rubher-glove way that they handle terms like ‘corruption’ or ‘faction’, have tended to overlook this sense of purposeful derision and to ask instead what is the function of a myth and to imagine what would happen if those who believed were overnight turned into unbelievers. They ask sensible questions. To phrase anything in terms of function and dysfunction may tend to take the poetry out of it: but in this case, it should be remembered that the word ‘myth’ in the sense of a belief or a story or a value or a person somehow removed beyond the limits of doubt and questioning, accepted on faith alone, is the entire subject matter of religion. This is what the character Relling, in The Wild Duck called the ‘Basic Lie that makes life possible’. The ‘basic lies’, how they fit or fail to fit one another, who holds them, what plans of action he derives from them, and what use he can make of them to manipulate other people, and, finally, what relation these lies bear to their complement (‘reality’ or ‘experience’) are the subject of this book. Politcs is the art of bringing unacceptable myths into, and preserving one’s own myths from derision.

To summarize in a metaphor. Somewhere beyond us, ‘out there’, is a reality which is invisible, intangible, incomprehensible, inaccessible at least in any direct way. Nevertheless, although we have no direct apprehension of reality, like a person whose sight or hearing is defective, we can put on spectacles or use hearing aids and so begin to sense and feel and experience. But this sensing apparatus comes in many different styles and depending upon which type you happen to own or happen to choose, or happen to have thrust upon you, the world and people seem a different place. How some sets of apparatus are judged better than others in the light of experience is a problem to which we will come later. Meantime the metaphor is being used to make two summary points. Firstly, if the apparatus is destroyed, nothing is left, at least nothing that we can talk about. If you command me to cease talking about myths and mythical characters and to concentrate upon the ‘reality’ of university life, then either I must be silent or take this as an invitation to try out another set of myths to see if you can understand them better. That is the second summary point: you can visualize the politics of a university, or indeed any politics as an attempt to convince the other man that he would be better off if he used your spectacles instead of his own, either because they are better or because, if he persists in his refusal, you will beat in his head.³

Private and Public

The suggestion that a crack on the skull is the way to deal with someone who refuses to accept your myths about the way the world is and should be, brings us back to the subject of compromise.

When debate turns into argument and argument moves to quarrel, the contestants are backing away from the shared ground of reason and stockading themselves in principles. No longer does each expect to convince the other, still less to be himself won over, but both have become intent on asserting a truth which they believe but do not know how to demonstrate to someone who does not accept that truth as self-evident. Within the same society, within the same community, even within an organization principles stand in contradiction with one another often enough to make an orderly continuation of social life impossible, were it not for certain remedial devices.

One of these devices is a retreat from reason (reason requires a successful search for those common principles which would make debate possible) into ritual and ceremonial activity (which is the assertion of some general overriding all-transcending myth of commonality between the contestants: they are the children of the one God, dependent for their prosperity and health on his will, required to show harmony and mutual concern in his presence–or something of that nature.) Asserting this mutual dependency through symbolic activities, they apparently transcend irreconcilable differences of principle. But the differences remain unreconciled, the quarrels unresolved, and stand ready to break out again at some later time. Ritual, which appears to bring peace, in fact brings only a truce, doing nothing to change the conditions which at first allowed the debate to grow into a quarrel.

There is another way in which differences of principle can be resolved. It is done by enticing the contestants out of their principled stockades back into the field of reason and compromise and bargaining, where they discover that fundamental principles are not so fundamental after all and can be traded off against one another. When there is a tradeoff–and there is, constantly–this process is pragmatic and practical. (It is also scientific to the extent that it deals with ‘can’ rather than ‘should’.) It comes into operation when men stop trying to reason their way towards truth and become ‘reasonable’.

To be ‘reasonable’ in this sense indicates that one is willing to abandon, or at least to compromise, a principle which one has publicly proclaimed to be fundamental, firm and unchanging–an eternal verity, sacred enough to defy negotiated erosion. The negotiations, accordingly, are likely to be conducted behind a screen of privacy. Our analysis comes to be dominated by the distinction between what is said out in the open, where anyone can listen, and what must be communicated to a more restricted audience. In the refusal to say what one thinks so that everyone can hear, in the often painfully learned hypocrisy of saving face and using the white lie, in the world of bluff and the hidden agenda and confidentiality and even gossip lie the mechanisms which preserve the purity and sanity-giving quality of principles which are asserted to be fundamental and unchangeable.

The procedures through which political contests are moved to and fro between the front and the back, not only prevent contests from degenerating into fights but also serve as a means of adjusting myths or principles or fundamental values to changing situations. Principles have consequences inasmuch as they are guides for action. Not all principles are fundamental. Some are offered as means to other desirable ends, and if these ends are not achieved, the principle is likely to be modified. But even those principles which are ends in themselves, nevertheless exist in a world of experience which may change so as to make their attainment impossible. While every normal person might accept that this side of heaven his ideals cannot be totally fulfilled, there is also a threshold of failure beneath which the ideal becomes pointless and is abandoned. In short, in looking at contradictory values and the trade-offs made between them, we are also looking at an adaptive system by which the whole corpus of values and ‘eternal’ verities finds adjustment with the world of experience.

So far we have two main distinctions: myth opposes reality or experience; political procedures are relatively public or relatively private. A third dimension links these two. The further it is removed from reality and experience, the more a myth takes on the style of caricature, a simplified bold outline of one, or at most a few, features.

This is also characteristic of open politics. Roughly speaking, the bigger the audience, the simpler the message. The reason is obvious: those who are engaged in politics, especially in open politics, are not looking for an objective truth: rather they are attempting to make a point of view stick, probably in the heat of the moment, probably before an audience which they sense is similarly combative, and in such conditions unqalified assertions of irrefutable truth, delivered with simplicity and directness, are more likely to win the day than a delicately sculptured, minutely reasoned and cautiously qualified, infinitely sophisticated exposition of a limited, but possibly tenable, point of view.

The range of myths, therefore, which occur in any particular kind of institution, is likely to be limited. University myths,⁴ especially the competing themes of ‘community’ and ‘organization’ are the subject of the first part of the book (Chapters 2 and 3). Those who subscribe to the myth of organization look for a product, prefer one that can be measured and so insist on accountability, and define the normal and healthy relationship between people as essentially impersonal. The myth of community reverses each of these values: people are to be treated in the round, as ends in themselves rather than instruments at the service of an organization; the community has no particular product and is intrinsically valued, as an end in itself, and to ask for accountability is at best a misunderstanding and at worst a wicked perversion of the true nature of the institution. These and other myths contain values which both guide and are resources for actors, in their efforts to impose definitions of what is and what should be upon each other and upon an audience. We examine their use both within the university and in its interactions with the world outside.

The second part of the book (Chapters 4 and 5) examines arenas: sets of rules which lay down how competition should be conducted, and, beyond these, other ‘rules’ which advise not on how to play the game, but how to win.

The arenas vary between the poles of public and private. When the contest moves to a more private arena, the myths are brought nearer to reality, and people are less willing to comfort themselves with pretence because they...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter One: Myth, Reality and Politics
• Chapter Two: Community and Organization
• Chapter Three: Outsiders
• Chapter Four: Committees
• Chapter Five: Arenas and Enmities
• Chapter Six: Masks
• Chapter Seven: The Unexpected
• Chapter Eight: Privacy, Community, Order and Change
• References
• Index