Practice: Discussing

I would like to take up MacIntyre’s “The Nature of the Virtues” via Brianna’s discussion of the oscillation of internal and external goods that accompanies our chosen practice of study: her post strongly parallels my own experiences justifying my studies, and I would appreciate a discussion of how the (corporate) university and larger western society privilege the achievement of external goods over internal ones as well as how we perpetuate this valuation through our discussion of the study of English. Here’s my interpretation:

In suggesting that “[t]hose who lack the relevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods” (sorry, I have no page numbers), MacIntyre emphasizes that outsiders’ under-appreciation of the internal goods of particular practices is inevitable. However, I wonder what models we as insiders to the practice of studying English literature, have of those who have attained the internal goods of study, or better yet, what models we have of those who have not.

I can think of several professors I admired during my undergrad, but I have no means by which to assess their achievement of internal goods except to say that I felt the manner in which they conducted themselves, the ways in which they could discuss literature and edify hinted at some level of pleasure and gratification in their accomplishments as scholars. I interpret this as a marker of success and achievement of internal goods, yet because the evidence internal goods is only empirically observable, their presence must be taken in academic faith. We can only guess at who has achieved such internal goods, and we discuss such achievements only in private and seemingly never as a collective. Can we talk about our internal goods to one another? To those not engaged in the same level or area of study without the risk of pontificating? Or should we pontificate?

Furthermore, our discussions of the profession focus on those who are tenured and employed by research universities as if these are the only ones who have truly succeeded in achieving internal goods through their studies; all others slope down towards academic mediocrity for failing to achieve employment that will support their continued cultivation of internal goods.

This, of course, is a banal stereotype: we all have worked with sessional instructors, TAs, and college or trades instructors who disprove such hackneyed understandings, yet we are still told on a daily basis that there will be no work for us. What actually seems to be meant by such grey predictions is that there are few tenure track positions at research universities with a 3/2 teaching load for us to slip into upon graduation. This statement privileges a particular position in academia. I think it also reproduces what MacIntyre describes as Homeric understandings of virtue, which the corporate university seems to have taken up with some gusto: one’s academic position (virtue) is validated insofar as it supports one’s social role (educator). The more tenured, Ivy League, or published you are, the more you are fulfilling your social role. Internal goods are nowhere to be seen in this model nor it would seem in universities or academics that accept it.

This brings me to MacIntyre’s discussion of the institution. I wonder if the individual academic has not become (and is being encouraged to be) more like an institution in the corporate university, with a primary goal of self-reproduction and perpetuation, and less a member of a practice community (I see Elliot as protesting something similar in his discussion of how artists are problematically seen as individuals separate from a larger culture in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).

Is the study of English literature a practice in which “we enter into a relationship with its contemporary practitioners,” or have we as individuals become like institutions “characteristically and necessarily concerned with […] external goods…. structured in terms of acquiring money and other goods” and focused primarily on “power and status as rewards”? I’m struck by how moralistic this sounds, but individual scholars are rarely discussed in terms of their internal goods so much as their placement or publications, a troubling trend that lifts the academic out of a community or culture and evaluates them as individual talents.

I haven’t touched too much on ethics here, but for those interested there is a good blog post that discusses Tom Flanagan, an tenured professor in Political Science at the University of Calgary who suggested Julian Assange should be assassinated in a recent interview on CBC’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, and academic freedom:

http://www.academicmatters.ca/bloggers.blog_article.gk?catalog_item_id=4589&category=/blogger/unbecoming

Flanagan’s case strikes me as an example of the institutionalization of the individual scholar, and makes me question the role of tenure in the modern university: it offers protection, but in some ways tenure appears to perpetuate the institution more so than the scholar in the corporate university, yet this is the carrot the 19 of us are supposed to be grasping for. Thoughts?