W. Robert Connor is Director of the National Humanities Center. This essay is adapted from a keynote address delivered on March 6, 1998, at the inauguration of Michael F. Adams as President of the University of Georgia and presented to a panel at the Center in September 1998.

I. The Modern University

We have not been stingy in our expectations about the modern university. We expect it to take eighteen year olds—whose performance by any international standard would be considered mediocre at best—and over the course of a few years produce the leaders our country needs for its future. We expect this to happen at the same time the institutions to treat students as consumers and provide them "the four best years of their lives," with pool tables, gymnasia, televisions, visiting rock bands, and other amenities.

We expect the university to be an engine for economic growth. It should not only produce the trained personnel needed to sustain America's competitive position in a globalizing, rapidly changing economy but also stimulate economic growth in the area in which it is found. If that happens to be a historically impoverished area, we expect the university to step in and do what the market has been unable to do.

We expect it, moreover, to provide a model of an equitable society and to redress centuries of injustice in which parts of our population were denied equal access to law and to education. We now expect the university to do so without using race as a criterion for admission or financial aid. We expect it to produce world-class athletics without, of course, in any way departing from the highest academic standards.

We expect it to look beautiful, tranquil, and rural and be cosmopolitan and high tech at the same time.

We expect it to deliver personalized, concerned instruction and support services while holding costs down to indices based on other areas where technology has made possible significant reductions in staff levels and costs. The astonishing thing to me is that the American university has met so many of these expectations. It has done surprisingly well, for example, in making up for the flagrant deficiencies of U.S. K-12 education. It knows how to encourage technological innovation, and to benefit from it. In 1996, for example, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, research universities earned more than $336 million from licenses on inventions they had helped create, and in that year, 1,776 new patents were awarded to American universities. The modern American university is, to be sure, fallible and imperfect, but it has achieved remarkable successes in many areas. Behind these successes is a secret that works in many different ways—the specialization of knowledge.

That secret comes at a price, however, for it can induce a kind of amnesia, a forgetfulness about another part of the historic mission of the American university—the transmission and advancement of moral knowledge. Here the successes of the university are less clear. Can we claim to have transmitted, clarified, and added to the store of moral understanding at anything like the pace at which knowledge of the natural world has grown?

Andrew Delbanco, in an extraordinary book called The Death of Satan, has reminded us again that "a gulf has opened in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it." We could extend his observation in other directions, not least to the discrepancy between the explosive growth of new technologies and our understanding of how to use them. The biological revolution is perhaps the most dramatic, but not the only, challenge to our ability to understand the appropriate uses of the new knowledge we are accumulating every day. Delbanco is right, however, in paying special attention to seeing evil, to the development of technologies that bombard us with images of cruelty and brutality, and in the simultaneous impoverishment of the vocabulary we have for making sense of what we see.

The phenomena to which Delbanco points are the result of deep-seated changes in our society. The university is neither uniquely responsible for these changes nor capable of singlehandedly devising effective responses to them. Nevertheless, we in higher education do have an obligation to understand these changes and to do what we can to close the gap between moral and technological knowledge.

Most of us who have chosen college teaching as our profession would like to respond in that way, despite the obvious difficulty of the task. We chose our profession because we hoped we might help young people lead better lives. We say that with some diffidence, with dread of being found wanting or hypocritical, and with determination not to proselytize. Still, most of us very much want to help our students think through their values and to encourage their alertness and responsiveness to the needs of others.

It does not take X-ray vision to look outside our offices, labs, and classrooms and see how much our society needs such responsiveness. The moral and ethical problems that confront us are not becoming less intense. We see this in business, medicine, and national affairs and at every level of our society. People look to those of us who are privileged to be parts of the university for guidance and leadership in these matters. Sometimes those expectations are wildly unrealistic. We are not the Taliban's Ministry for the Advancement of Virtue and the extermination of vice. Nevertheless, the university does have an obligation to advance moral knowledge, along with the other kinds of knowledge in its mission. Or, to put it more bluntly, one clause in the implicit social contract that binds the university to the society that sustains it is the obligation to advance, transmit, and invigorate moral knowledge. If we fail to fulfill our part of that implicit contract, we should not be surprised when society is slow and stingy in delivering on its part of the bargain.

We should be cautious about, but not embarrassed by, the idea that moral education is one of the obligations of the university. We should never get into the business of proselytizing the impressionable young, or teaching dogma, or transmitting any ideas—moral or otherwise—uncritically. But if the university fails to enlarge the capacity of students to imagine the experience of human beings in other times and places, it breaks what Bob Connor calls the "social contract that binds the university to the society that sustains it." Our unmet challenge is to find a way for this indispensable kind of education to go forward in institutions whose chief enterprise is the production of "new" knowledge—an activity based implicitly on the idea that the past is dispensable and the future, by definition, is superior. Moral knowledge does not fit this model of planned obsolescence. The question for humanists is how to educate through literature, history, philosophy, art, and music—disciplines that demand of us the concession that we are in the unglamorous business of helping students achieve insights and pleasures that may have been known in the past but that must be experienced anew if they are to have meaning in the lives of the citizens to whom we entrust the future. Andrew Delbanco is Chairman of the Education Programs Committee at the National Humanities Center and Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

This is perhaps the most difficult task confronting the university today. Society as a whole is deeply divided on many ethical issues—perhaps atomized would be a better term, since the fracture lines are so extensive and complex. The university reflects this atomization. There is, however, another problem that complicates the university's response. When universities attempt to deal with the issue of moral knowledge, they most commonly try what has worked well in other areas—namely, delegation to specialists. This has meant the introduction of requirements in moral and ethical reasoning, the development of new courses in this area, and therefore the appointments of more ethicists and moral philosophers and the establishment of more centers for values or ethics in various professions. (There are now more than ninety such centers at colleges and universities around the country, and more are on the way).

Such responses treat moral knowledge as if it were just another academic field to be advanced, as most of them are, by providing additional resources for specialization. After all, if we feel that learning Swahili is important for more of our students, we hire more specialists in Swahili. Or if we need more rocket scientists, we beef up the appropriate departments in engineering. If society requires a greater level of morality, the reasoning goes, then by all means hire more ethicists.

I do not wish to belittle work in ethics and moral philosophy, yet I very much doubt that they can, of themselves, do what is needed. Indeed, the strategy of advancing moral knowledge through specialization seems to me flawed at the outset. It will work only when other fields, perhaps all fields, within the university are brought into the picture.

Before we can do this, though, we need to confront the question of whether there is such a thing as moral knowledge. Much depends on the answer. If moral knowledge exists, then surely it is subject to rational evaluation and, like any other knowledge, can be transmitted from one person, or one generation, to another. If moral action in some degree depends on moral knowledge, then it is indeed a pearl of a great price and universities should honor it and hold it up for all to admire.

If, on the other hand, all actions are genetically determined, socially conditioned, or the result of whim or random choice or divine inspiration—as we say in the academy, they are epiphenomena—moral knowledge is irrelevant. Claims to have such knowledge would be best left to anthropologists or historians of culture, who can illuminate why people sometimes believe in and value such knowledge. Under these circumstances, it becomes a mere curiousity, and in such a case certainly no university should waste its resources attempting to transmit some body of alleged "moral knowledge" from generation to generation.

Unfortunately, many of our colleagues would, I suspect, take precisely that position. In doing so, however, they depart from a long tradition of Anglo-American higher education and leave students and the rest of us adrift in a time of deep perplexity.

We should not, then, lightly abandon the long-standing commitment of the university to advance and transmit such knowledge. I will not, however, attempt to prove the existence of such knowledge. That is beyond my abilities, but I would like to characterize this kind of knowledge and suggest that it is significantly different from other types of knowledge, especially the scientific knowledge so conspicuous in our universities today and so highly esteemed in our culture. Moreover, we do not develop it through specialization as is the case with so many other kinds of knowledge.

II. The Growth of Moral Knowledge

The growth of moral knowledge, we all know, comes very slowly. That is true both for an individual and within a culture. Think about

"Thinking of [Socrates], I sometimes wonder whether moral knowledge has grown in the past two and a half millenia."

the changes in various fields of knowledge since Greek antiquity: the astronomical schema of Ptolemy, brilliant in its day; the atomic theories of Democritus, a dazzling breakthrough; the medical principles of the Hippocratic physicians who so wisely repudiated the superstition of their predecessors. The cosmological speculation of the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose insistence on the intelligibility and order of the universe were essential for all subsequent science, demand our respect, but no one would rely on them today. On the other hand, the moral insights of a Plato or an Aristotle may need reformulation, but they have lost none of their vitality.

Or think of Socrates. If you—or I—had the moral alertness and determination of Socrates, we would be living a better life than we are right now. Thinking of him, I sometimes wonder whether moral knowledge has grown in the past two and a half millenia.

It certainly has, of course, but moral knowledge grows in such distinctive ways that we may be tempted to think of it as stagnant. Its growth is not marked by discoveries of new phenomena and does not conform to the scientific method. To be sure, from time to time we propound new ethical theories—utilitarianism, for example—and much effort is required to assess the coherence of these views and to comprehend their implications. Nevertheless, we cannot properly call them "discoveries," nor should we expect that adding specialists or funding new centers or programs will produce conspicuous and salutary results.

Moral knowledge advances in ways that are quite different from those that work in many other disciplines. Indeed, from time to time, it might be almost parasitic on other disciplines. Semantics provides one example. We know how easy it is to kid ourselves when either pleasure or self-interest is involved in a moral choice. Over the past few decades, we have become more alert to the semantics of moral choice, the ability of language to cloud our thinking, and the importance of finding the right term to describe an action. Is it "a respect for the wisdom of the market" or is it "greed?"

Moral knowledge has grown, as well, by the increased awareness of the diversity of human cultures. What once seemed a dictate of universal moral law may now seem an idiosyncratic feature of a small group of societies. To be sure, the anthropologists and ethnographers who have done so much to advance the idea of cultural relativism may be subtracting from what in the past passed as moral "knowledge." Just the same, their work has surely helped us be more tolerant of others, without compelling us to accept the argument that local abuses of human rights are simply a reflection of "Asian values" or other cultural patterns.

Similarly, the advances of psychology, genetics, and neurophysiology pose questions of the greatest significance for our understanding of what constitutes moral choice—if, indeed, we can use such terminology. We have just begun to consider the moral implications of the amazing scientific discoveries and technological innovations we have made over the past century. As has always been the case, new technological and scientific knowledge can be used for good or for ill. Assimilating what we know will surely take a long time, but the process can be immensely facilitated if universities can take advantage of the talent and skills represented in their faculties and alumni bodies. Institutions of higher education—and I include centers for advanced study in this judgment—have not to date done very well on this front.

In so many of these cases, the advancement of moral knowledge comes far more slowly than does the growth of the technology with which it is concerned. Moral knowledge grows primarily through a slow, sometimes agonizing examination of individual cases, in the hope of eliminating obfuscatory and tendentious language, cutting through self-deception, and trying to weigh alternative outcomes. "Casuistry," one might dismissively say, but casuistry in its original sense of examining each case on its own terms can be immensely valuable, especially when a knowledgeable and insightful interlocutor acts as guide. The result may not be the discovery of a generalizable proposition but can be immensely valuable nonetheless.

In all of this, the moral philosopher has much to offer and can rightly claim to advance, albeit tentatively and slowly, toward a kind of moral knowledge. Another form of the advancement of moral knowledge, however, seems to have quite a different nature. It is the slow, usually contentious and painful growth in the circle to which long-established moral principles are seen to apply. It is not an easy process to realize that the principle "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" applies to all men—white or black, rich or poor, plantation owners or slaves—and to all women. It took a while to figure this out. Some people still haven't got it. If, as a society, we turn our backs on children who are neglected or abused, on the mentally ill, or on the homeless or the hungry, then the circumference of that circle is still too small.

When we say we "know" that treating one person differently from another solely because of his or her race is wrong, we are affirming a kind of moral knowledge. We are saying something that people would not have widely affirmed a few centuries ago. The growth of moral knowledge is real, but the process by which it grows may seem essentially political rather than intellectual. To be sure, imagining the end of slavery or the vote for women occurring without abolitionists, suffragists, and other organized pressure groups is difficult. They achieved their goals through political processes—lobbying, strikes, demonstrations, electoral campaigns—rather than through the logic and coherence of their positions. Yet, behind these groups often stand individuals who can see that a widely acknowledged moral principle applies to a wider circle than has previously been recognized. They can imagine a more just society and convey their vision to others.

These comments on the growth of moral knowledge suggest that it differs in fundamental ways from knowledge in many other areas of human experience, especially, perhaps, from knowledge of the natural world. Moral knowledge does not consist of a body of facts, generalizations, or "laws" that we then apply in various ways. It is neither the product of research nor is it a state of "being knowledgeable about such things," as one might be knowledgeable about the periodic table or the editions of Shakespeare. Rather, it seems to me an activity, ongoing, constantly reacting to experience, monitoring responses, contemplating alternatives, seeking ways to understand how things appear to affect others, confirming or revising patterns of actions and habits of the heart, searching for ways to change. It is, in other words, a heuristic, a way of finding out rather than a content or a set of rigid moral laws. This kind of knowledge bears some resemblance to knowing how to play basketball, or to clone, or to speak a foreign language. There are methods that work, but the knowledge can never be totally separated from the practice.

(More, to Part 2 of 2)

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