If you've spent any time here at Emory, you've probably had a couple of phrases hammered into your head from repetition in Emory press releases, campus signage, and promotional materials. Phrases like "courageous inquiry" and "ethical engagement" are presented as the cornerstones of Emory's "mission". Our own Vice President Gary Hauk even co-edited a book in 2010 entitled Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University, where according to Emory Magazine, Hauk explains "Emory has endured because of the virtue and stamina of individual men and women who knew where this courageous inquiry should lead."
More recently, President Wagner authored a column in Emory Magazine titled "Is Teaching Ethics a Waste of Time?" that appears coupled with a large photo of a jocular James Wagner. When you read the article, it's your typical thesis - antithesis - synthesis argument starting with a rather surprising assertion that "ethics is impossible to teach". Wagner asks, "can a university even hope to teach people to be ethical as well as to merely cogitate and talk about ethics?" Although he feels that "[a] lot of people would say no–that the level of ethical engagement students leave with is not much different than what they arrive with, and that, with few exceptions, staff and faculty members work month after month without much change in their general sense of the good and their ability to follow the rules," he then takes a stance on the issue: "I respond to these questions by going out on a limb and saying–maybe. Maybe a university can teach ethical engagement." As expected, by the end the reader learns that those of us who are courageous enough can stand up and teach a subject as obscure and elusive as ethics.
Never mind that ethics is a central course offering of many a philosophy department around the country. Obviously, the column strains credibility when it asks whether ethics can be taught. So this got me thinking: why ask this question in the first place? Why would President Wagner feel the need to communicate this message to alumni, donors, and whomever else might be leafing through the latest issue of Emory Magazine?
The two core platitudes above - courageous inquiry, and ethical engagement - each offer a point of departure for your typical piece of Emory boilerpate. Here, I think Wagner did something novel: he attempted to apply one onto the other. It probably went something like this: "Let's see, I've got this upcoming column to slog through... should I talk about Emory's incredible ethical engagement, or our commitment to courageous inquiry? I know! I'll engage in my OWN courageous inquiry - why should we, Emory, even be ethically engaged?"
It's definitely a creative twist, although it created bizarre results. Most people who have had a liberal arts education were probably scratching their heads just from the title. But let's take his question at face value. Perhaps courageous inquiry doesn't always lead us where we might expect it to go. Perhaps we should applaud the President for asking the question, even if the result seems obvious, and the logic rather clunky. That's what being a university scholar is all about, right? Asking questions, and seeing them through to their answers, no matter what they may be.
One of the primary jobs of scholars in both the humanities and sciences is developing questions. The sciences tend to frame their questions as hypotheses - often with explicit binary answers at stake - whereas the humanities are often tasked with a more open-ended form of scholarly inquiry. They ask questions precisely because no answer seems apparent, available; perhaps a glimmer of one is on the horizon. Although their methods are slightly different, scholars in both domains strive to avoid asking questions with pre-determined answers because it creates bias and can lead to logical fallacy. And shouldn't that be what courageous inquiry is - taking the brave risk of asking questions without knowing the answers? Doesn't the courageousness precisely lie in the uncertainty, the unknowing?
In order for President Wagner's Winter 2011 column to qualify as scholarly inquiry, the answer would have to be uncertain, at least at the outset. However, the question "Is teaching ethics a waste of time?" has a laughably obvious answer. No serious academic would advocate the abandonment of ethics in a college curriculum, either as a dedicated subject or as a part of a course in medicine, science, pedagogy, and so forth. And although the president's doctoral degree is in Materials Science and Engineering, an applied sciences field that is somewhat detached from the liberal arts, I find it hard to believe that he might be oblivious to the answer, either. Wagner is not asking a provocative question in order to spark a lively and creative discussion. Instead, he posed an obvious straw man to easily tear down under the guise of courageous inquiry. President Wagner knew the answer to his question before the column was written, but posed it anyway, as a kind of self-congratulatory exercise.
And this isn't simply a flaw in President Wagner's personal philosophy. Let's revisit what his Vice President, Gary Hauk, said when describing his book Courageous Inquiry (emphasis mine): "Emory has endured because of the virtue and stamina of individual men and women who knew where this courageous inquiry should lead". If the virtuous men and women of Emory knew where their courageous inquiries should lead before they even began the journey, how is their inquiry courageous? How is it even honest?
President Wagner, Vice President Hauk, and, in all likelihood, other top Emory administrators do know where they want their "inquiries" to lead, where they want their conversations to go. As we've seen over the last several years, administrators make decisions without serious engagement with members of the Emory community who will be affected. And once decisions are made, they are never re-negotiated. They have avoided responsibility for poverty wages and denial of health care benefits for contracted workers at Emory. Their financial aid office has manipulated student income data, resulting in the denial aid to deserving students. They presided over the implementation of cuts that deny educational opportunities promised to students, terminate the employment of staff and non-tenured faculty, shut down graduate programs around graduate students, and throw into uncertainty the future careers of tenured faculty - all without clear assessment of the affected departments. To use the final example - what kind of courageous inquiry is this, where the answer - programs will be cut - is known with such certainty that no one asks why, or how? The answer is that it is not courageous inquiry. It is not courageous to shut people out of decisions that affect them. It is not courageous to engage in top-down, unilateral management practices, and it is not courageous to rhapsodize about the decisions ex post facto by romantically turning to antebellum politicians. The Emory administration deploys the phrase "courageous inquiry" to obscure the pre-determined and exclusionary nature of their decision-making process.
Now, administrators are a necessary part of a university. Few people would deny the necessity of management and directed organization, and most people would agree that change is inevitable, and that priorities shift. It's important to note, however, that administration is different from academic scholarship. Yet Emory's administration feels the need to co-opt the vocabulary of courageous inquiry and scholarly virtue in order to justify their management decisions. Management decisions which include subverting governance processes, executing curricular changes while avoiding accountability, removing education opportunities from students, and firing faculty and staff. And throughout this entire process, these administrators shut out the very scholars they are ventriloquizing.
Let us not allow administrators to define the terms of the debate with their own staged questions and co-opt our voices in columns in Emory Magazine, or in press releases, or in PDFs attached to emails sent out on Friday afternoons. It's time for academics to use their scholarly abilities to ask their own questions of administrators about the direction of their University. It's time for us to conduct our own courageous inquiry. Ask administrators how they manage faculty, students, and staff, and why they make the decisions that they do. Ask administrators for financial transparency. Ask how financial decisions were made, and why. Staff members, ask for accountability from your employers. Students, ask how your tuition investment is being used.
And, as you conduct courageous inquiries of your own, ask yourself - do I deserve better? Does Emory deserve better? And whatever your answer to this question, if you are a graduate student, please VOTE on Tuesday.
Katherine Bryant is fourth year Neuroscience graduate student from Highland, Md.
