Freedom, Coercion, & Authority (1999)

Freedom, Coercion, & AuthorityAuthor(s): Robert N. BellahSource: Academe, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1999), pp. 16-21Published by: American Association of University ProfessorsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40251713Accessed: 05/10/2010 14:30

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Freedom, Coercion,

By By Robert Robert N. N. Bellah Bellah By By Robert Robert N. N. Bellah Bellah By By Robert Robert N. N. Bellah Bellah By By Robert Robert N. N. Bellah Bellah

16 ACADEME January-February 1999

Authority DISCUSSIONS OF

higher education today at- tempt to balance "freedom and responsibility." Such a concern is not unexpected in

these rapidly changing times. Freedom is the highest American value, something before which every academic administrator and every faculty member regularly genuflects. We all want "freedom from outside interference," and we often reaffirm the traditional understanding of "academic freedom." But we live in society and cannot exist outside it. We therefore pair our central totem of freedom with another moral term, responsibility. The autonomy we desire must be balanced by something we give in return, by responsibility toward our students, our communities, the public that finances our work, and the nation and world of which we are citizens.

I think the pairing of freedom and responsibility is a fruitful one, and that we can learn much from reflecting on it. But in this article I want to discuss a term much more troubling than responsibility, to argue that freedom must be balanced not only by responsibility, but also by authority.

I will take a leaf from some recent work of the political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain, who in turn extrapolates from Hannah Arendt, in questioning the tendency of liberal social philosophy to think that social life can be satisfac- torily conceived of as a conflict between freedom and coercion. By "liberal" I do not mean what is called liberal in current American politics, but the classical liberalism that lies at the root of American politics from right to left. This liberalism, in the form of neo-laissez-faire or neocapitalist ideology, is today more evident among so-called conservatives than among so- called liberals.

Missing in the polarity between freedom and coercion is the concept of authority, which liberals tend to equate with coercion, but which an older tradition of political philosophy saw as the condition of freedom, not its antithesis. Indeed, following Arendt and Elshtain, one could argue that when authority disappears, freedom col- lapses into coercion. The standard logic of freedom and coercion today equates the "market" with freedom, whereas government, and indeed all the nonmarket features of social life, including, for example, tenure, are equated with coercion. This way of thinking is peculiarly Ameri-

Robert Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of Habits of the Heart (University of California Press, 1985) andThc Good Society (Vintage Books, 1992).

I I

ACADEME January-February 1999 vj

can, and deeply rooted in an Anglo-American tradition of social thought, but is now increasingly shared by the rest of the world. It is particularly attractive to former communist societies that have suffered an intense form of state coercion.

Coercion of the Market IT IS NOT ONLY THE STATE, HOWEVER, THAT CAN COERCE, but the market as well. When the market is not moderated by re- sponsible government and other nonmarket mechanisms through- out society, then the market can become very coercive indeed, even totalitarian. That, I think, is what is happening to our society gen- erally, especially higher education. Are there today, in an anti- authoritarian age, any forms of authority that might help prevent market freedom from catapulting us into an "iron cage" of total coercion? Authority, as I use the term, refers to a normative order, even to what has been called a "higher law," which provides con- ceptions of a good society and a good person, and sets limits on what kind of behavior is acceptable. In this conception, authority can be, and in certain circumstances ought to be, challenged - and it must respond to such challenges with good reasons. But as in sci-

studies programs from which I benefited - to Cold War needs. During these long Cold War decades, universities, especially the great research universities, grew dependent on federal funding not only for particular programs but also for overhead support.

These developments worried many in the academy. During the Vietnam War, the tie between universities and the government gave rise to much criticism and some student violence. I remember vividly that twice during the late sixties, the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley was bombed. The Center for Japanese Studies, of which I was chair, was on the floor above the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, so these attacks came close to home, though the bombings were at night when the offices were empty. The students had an exaggerated view of the ac- tivities of the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, where, they claimed, the Vietnam War was "being planned," but they were not entirely wrong in seeing that enterprise, like many others, including my own center, as serving partly as information-gathering institutions for the more effective pursuit of Cold War aims.

Just how deeply Cold War collaboration corrupted universities was brought home by the publication in 1997 of Rebecca Lowen's book about Stanford, Creating the Cold War University. If Lowen

I worry that in stressing the responsibility of the teacher we forget the student. It is the teacher, not the student, who knows what the student ne why is the student there at all? ence, where everything cannot be doubted at once, an effective normative order and the authority derived from it must be taken for

granted much of the time. The equation of authority with coercion, and its general delegitimation, I would argue, opens the door to

tyranny. I contrast authority rather than responsibility with freedom

here because responsibility is, in more than one sense, a source of our problem, even a reason why we have lost the capacity to speak with authority. The double-edged nature of responsibility became

apparent in the relationship between higher education and the state during World War II. In a period of general mobilization, especially during a war most people believe is morally just, like World War II, it is natural for the university to accept responsibility for helping out. Not only natural scientists but also social scientists were mobilized to assist the war effort, and many cam-

puses devoted themselves to training military officers and special- ists. Even though universities abdicated much independence to assist in the war effort, administrators and professors felt little un- ease. The cause was obviously just, and the mobilization, it was as- sumed, was temporary. In previous wars, most notably World War I, universities had collaborated with the war effort and then

quickly returned to "normal" after the war was over.

Cold War University BUT THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II WAS DIFFERENT. IT was followed not by "normalcy" but by the Cold War. During the Cold War, especially its early decades, universities had an unusually close association with the government compared with their history before World War II. Universities tailored many programs -

particularly in the natural and social sciences but also in the area

is right, the Stanford administration ruthlessly tailored academic decisions to Cold War needs, considering such fields as classics and natural history irrelevant because they did not contribute ide- ologically or financially to the Cold War university that Stanford had become. At Berkeley we never treated classics the way Stan- ford did, but the University of California nonetheless undertook one of the greatest of all Cold War academic responsibilities, namely the running of nuclear laboratories, including Los Alamos, where the atomic bombs were designed and produced. Many faculty members, myself included, have fought for years against support of these labs, but the relationship remains in place, though the mission of the labs today, it is declared, is only to guarantee the functional effectiveness of existing bombs.

While the evaluation of the Cold War in retrospect must certainly be complex (not everything we did even in World War II is above criticism - I think of the carpet bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the Soviet empire was a real threat, and our vigorous response to it surely helped to end it. My point is not that academic mobilization for Cold War aims was in any simple sense wrong, but that it had an unfortunate consequence. It led us to defend our institution in terms of an outside contribution, a util- ity, a responsibility, if you will, to an extrinsic end. It muted our capacity to pay attention to the purposes of higher education. We lost the authority to speak of our own intrinsic values when we spoke so incessantly of our contribution to external ends, however good they might be. And since our engagement with government during the Cold War years was also an engagement with industry, so closely linked to government in many Cold War projects, it was natural, perhaps, when the Cold War ended so abruptly and unexpectedly, for us to continue to justify our work by its exter-


nal contributions, now not to government in its Cold War effort, but to industry and the economic prosperity of our people.

Higher Education in the Economy HIGHER EDUCATION HAS BEEN A ROAD TO UPWARD economic mobility from the beginning in America, and its expan- sion in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, has enabled millions of young people from working-class backgrounds, often the first in their families to go to college, to enter middle-class occupations and better their standing in society. That is an achieve- ment of which we can be justly proud. But to make the upward mobility of our students our primary mission is a serious distortion of everything we stand for, or ought to stand for. It has further consequences in the ideological climate of the present day: it makes us simply a sector in the market economy, the higher education "industry," as it is frequently called, and subject to all the strictures that apply to any other part of the economy. This self-understanding is tempting as mass production gives way to information supply as the most essential component of our economy. Aren't we the ones who will make our students at home in the information age by help-

respensibility of the eds to learn; otherwise,

ing them become computer-literate "symbolic analysts," as former U.S. secre- tary of labor Robert Reich calls the members of the new

elite? What better way to justify ourselves in an era of tight resources (though we might ask ourselves why resources are tight in a high-growth economy)? And after all, isn't there even a moral as- pect to this self-justification in that we contribute to freedom when we contribute to a free economy and to producing graduates who can use their skills to live lives with a greater abundance of choices? What a lovely marriage of freedom and responsibility.

We have come of late in America to identify freedom with the free market. Indeed, democracy is associated so closely with the free market that if a society like mainland China has a free market but not democracy, then experts are ready to assure us that "in-

evitably" it will gain political democracy too. But I want to chal-

lenge this assumption. What is freedom in the market is tyranny in other spheres, such as the professions and politics. A decent so-

ciety depends on the autonomy of the spheres. When money takes over politics, only a facade of democracy is left. When money takes over the professions, decisions are made on the basis of the bottom line, not professional authority. This issue is be-

coming acute in medicine as the dominance of for-profit HMOs grows. And in higher education as well, the bottom line is beginning to dominate decisions.

The tyranny of the bottom line drives academic decisions in several ways. When the university is seen simply as part of the economy, then the normal pressures for market efficiency set in, and the consequences are nowhere more ominous than in the

sphere of personnel decisions. Contemporary industry wants to control labor costs, and downsizing is a common mechanism for doing so. In the academy, downsizing takes a subtle form. It is difficult to cut the number of instructors, since a certain number of classes must be taught, and in public universities rising enroll- ment is creating pressure for more classes. Nonetheless, some col-

leges and universities have resorted to simple downsizing by cut- ting faculty, expanding the teaching load, and increasing class size. Many more institutions, however, have reduced the percent- age of faculty who are tenured or on the tenure track and increased the number of part-time and temporary instructors, at considerable savings in salaries. During the recession years of the early nineties, the University of California cut its tenured or tenure-track faculty by about 10 percent - some say more - with vague promises to restore the positions later. I have no firm statis- tics, but I have seen no indication that the cuts are being restored, nor do I believe they ever will be. The institutional consequences of increasing the proportion of part-time and temporary instructors were discussed at length in the January-February 1998 issue of Academe, and I will not repeat what was written there, but the consequences are all bad in terms of academic purposes other than economic efficiency. The recommendation coming from a con- ference often academic associations published in that issue is that the proportion of part-time and adjunct faculty should be de- creased, not increased.

Another negative consequence of the tyranny of the bottom line is the tendency to encourage, or at least not discourage, relationships between research laboratories, particularly in the natural sciences, and business. Such relationships blur the line between non- profit and profit-making concerns. Since criticisms of this trend have been widespread in recent years, I will not discuss them here.

One feature of the dominance of the market I do want to ex- amine is the idea of consumer sovereignty. It is an obvious consequence of seeing higher education as part of the market economy. If we are simply supplying a market product, why shouldn't the consumer be sovereign? Sometimes consumer sovereignty is dressed up and spoken about in terms of responsibility to students, a concern for course evaluations and outcome assessments, even "faculty productivity." While I am certainly not unsympa- thetic with concern for improved teaching, I worry that in stressing the responsibility of the teacher we forget the responsibility of the student. It is the teacher, not the student, who knows what the student needs to learn; otherwise, why is the student there at all? But the model of an economic transaction starts from a fixed preference in the mind of the consumer, who simply shops for the best way to fulfill that preference. In the teacher-student relationship, which is not intrinsically an economic one, there can be no fixed preference in advance. I oppose the whole notion of outcome assessment, not only in the university but even in kinder- garten, because it denies the essentially creative and unpredictable nature of the learning experience. We are not mere transmitters of predigested information, on which the student may be tested at the end of the course. What we teach are ways of thinking, even ways of feeling, and what the students learn often surprises us as much as it does them, which is as it should be. If you want information, go to an encyclopedia or to the World Wide Web, not to college. College is supposed to teach you what to do with information, how to think with and about it, and there are no algo- rithms for doing that.

Education for a Wider Purpose I AM NOT FOOLISH ENOUGH TO IMAGINE THAT WE CAN ever ignore the very real utilitarian value of higher education for students, or the fact that, as I have already implied, it has its own

ACADEME January-February 1999 19

legitimacy. But there is a way to combine the ideas of education for career advancement and education for the development of charac- ter, citizenship, and culture. That is through the concept of calling, vocation, and profession in the deepest sense of those words. Pro- fessionals - we are, after all, in the business of educating future professionals - need not be hired guns, selling their expertise to the highest bidder. We can help them understand that through their profession they can contribute to the larger aims of society, that professional ethics are not some last-minute add-on, but the very core of the meaning of professionalism. It was never easy to make this link, but it's more urgent than ever to do so now.

In today's America, where economic criteria dominate every sphere, how can we resist the pressure to abandon every one of our defining beliefs for the sake of economic efficiency? It may be difficult to do so, but we must. We must make a claim to legitimate authority, to the authority to expect students to look things up rather than be spoon-fed - and much more than that. We must say that contributing to a vibrant economy, or even helping students get good jobs, is only one of our purposes, and probably not the most important one. An effective democracy requires in- formed and thoughtful citizens. Traditionally, it was administrators who articulated one of the central purposes of the university:

What is our purpose, what are we here for, what is the good we pursue contribute to the self-understanding of society, so that both individually make sense of our world.

The task becomes difficult indeed when the university is equated with a shopping mall, something that fundamentally un- dermines the teacher-student relationship. Students who come to school with a consumer mentality have difficulty accepting, even provisionally, institutional authority or the authority of their professors. They are, I would argue, coerced by their preexisting de- sires, and unable to take advantage of the freedom that openness to the intrinsic values of the institution would make possible. I was disturbed, but not surprised, when a few years ago I heard that a student in the Stanford Business School had, after the first few class meetings, shouted at an able young sociology instructor, "I didn't pay $40,000 to listen to this bullshit," and then walked out of the class. I have also heard of undergraduates who, in argu- ing about a grade, said to their instructors, "I'm paying for this course," as though they felt they weren't getting the value paid for. I have not heard of anything quite so crude happening at Berkeley, but I have had several angry students come up after a lecture in which I had mentioned Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, telling me that I had no right to mention so many names they had never heard of. I'm afraid I told them that if they hadn't heard of them, that was their problem, and they should look them up. In short, I was not surprised by a story in the San Francisco Chronicle last January about UCLA's annual survey of first-year college students that carried the headline, "College Freshmen Called the Laziest in a Generation." But it's not just laziness that leads undergraduates to think that they should not have to look up unknown words or names that professors use - it's the attitude that college is a consumer marketplace.

This consumer attitude that the university is a place to meet preestablished needs tempts some to say that we need to empha- size learning rather than teaching. The teacher is simply a facilita- tor who helps the student find the information necessary for career enhancement; perhaps ultimately all the student will need is a computer for "distance learning." I would argue, however, that only through the genuine interaction of teacher and student can the deepest kind of learning occur; conveying professional knowledge in a context of ethical responsibility requires such interaction. Only a teacher who can model that kind of knowledge in his or her own life and teaching can really transmit it to students; that can happen even in a large lecture course, but not, I believe, through a computer screen.

the education of citizens. In our complex world, in which citizens are called on to understand and make decisions about many is- sues, this function is more important than ever. But few university presidents today, and not many professors, talk about it as en- thusiastically as they speak of the critical contribution we make to the economy.

Academic leaders - presidents, chancellors, and deans - can make a significant contribution to public understanding of our

purpose and value, one that goes well beyond economics, and they can do better in this regard than many of them have been

doing lately. But I believe that an articulate professorial defense of our mission is equally essential. Few professors, however, see themselves as representatives of the academy as a whole, or even of the institutions at which they teach. Most of them feel a primary identification and loyalty to their discipline. But even in their disciplinary identity, professors can offer a broader definition of their role than our utilitarian world is used to hearing.

The "Calling" of Our Disciplines A LEADING FIGURE IN THE PAST GENERATION OF AMERICAN sociologists, Edward Shils, for example, spoke of the "calling of sociology." This calling, he said, was not to provide society with clever techniques for social manipulation - such as opinion polling and focus groups - but something altogether different. "The real deficiency of technological sociology," he wrote, "which would remain despite its scientific rigor, its moral naivete, and its harmlessness (hitherto) is its failure to grasp that the true calling of sociology is to contribute to the self-understanding of society rather than to its manipulated improvement."1 This, at least to me, seems a splendid definition of the calling of my profession. What is our purpose, what are we here for, what is the good we pursue? It is to contribute to the self-understanding of society, so that both individually and collectively we can make sense of our world, can orient our action, and can make better decisions in many spheres - family, community, nation, and, to be sure, economy as well.

I think, and I suppose Shils would have agreed, that technical work in sociology can contribute to increased social self- understanding. But I am also aware, as was Shils, that technical sophistication can become an end in itself, a form of disciplinary nar-


cissism, outweighing any larger conception of our calling. I remember when, a few years ago, my department at Berkeley received an outside review, as all Berkeley departments periodically do. We were chided by the review committee for inadequate formalization, mathematicization, and computerization. (Fortunately, at Berkeley such reviews have no coercive power. I suspect that although we now have more than a little technical sophistication, a similar review committee would find us deficient in these regards to this day, even though we remain among the top three departments in na- tional ratings.) But what really struck me was the failure of the review committee report to mention that seven or eight members of

H |_ - our department J || IS IU ^ave ma ^ *

far beyond the discipline. Examples in- clude Todd Gitlin's

work on the media and the Vietnam War, Arlie Hochschild's work on two-earner families, and a book on American habits of the heart, two of whose authors are members of our department. The review- ers paid no attention to these contributions.

Although the Berkeley department has managed to weather criticism from review committees, other institutions have not been so fortunate; they have been compelled to focus on technical sophistication over social self-understanding. Such a focus can have serious consequences. At another campus of our university, I am told, the sociology department was forbidden by the dean to appoint anyone who had not published an article in the American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociol- ogy, the two most prestigious reviewed journals in our field. Now it's not just that most articles, with some notable excep- tions, in these journals are boring; it's also that a survey of members of the American Sociological Association a few years ago found that a majority admitted that they couldn't understand most articles published in the American Sociological Review. That gave me pause. Neither of these journals is a vehicle for reaching a larger public or, apparently, even for reaching most sociologists. Given that hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions in sociology often depend largely on a technical expertise that has little practical application, why should anyone care whether our discipline lives or dies?

Pitfalls of Practicality I BELIEVE THAT SHILS'S DEFINITION OF THE CALLING OF sociology can be generalized to all the disciplines in the academy, and that the survival of the university as we have known it depends on our awareness of that definition. Technical expertise can receive a justification of sorts when it has a practical payoff. But I can envision a university of the future in which every field that lacks practical payoff will have been jettisoned. When I hear of so- called "liberal arts colleges," most of whose undergraduate majors are in business administration, law enforcement, nursing, or com- munications, with philosophy and religious studies majors few and far between, I think that we are already most of the way there.

Some disciplines have long understood themselves as contribu- tors to social self-understanding. History, for example, helps us know where we have come from and therefore, in part, where we

are, as members of the human species. The disciplines that study literature can also help us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and en- large our humanity. And the natural sciences, as part of a liberal arts curriculum, lead to understanding of the cosmos of which we are a part, and thus enhance our sense of who we are.

A relatively new field, environmental studies, illustrates Shils's point in an area that cuts across the distinction between the natural and the social sciences. A field that shows us what we are doing to the environment would seem to be of great importance, and many campuses have been increasing resources in this area. Not without problems, however. Business and agricultural inter- ests in California have used their legislative influence to pressure the University of California to decrease its emphasis on ecological and environmental studies; these groups view such studies as a threat to the economic growth of our state. Such actions reveal the importance of the traditional idea of academic freedom and the tenure system that protects it. In this example, the academy's obligation to contribute to the self-understanding of society col- lides head-on with the idea of the education industry as just one more part of the global economy.

By now, most readers will have probably figured out my strat- egy. By quoting a leading sociologist about the importance of contributing to the self-understanding of society, I have ended up defending the traditional purpose of a university education, the ideal of Bildung: to produce not technicians, but educated human beings, persons of broad cultural sympathies, knowl- edgeable, ethical, and aesthetically sensitive. You may say that that is an elite ideal, and so it is. In spite of our commitment to the democratization of education, the university remains one of the most stratified institutions in America. And just as polariza- tion increases in every other sphere, so perhaps only a few elite institutions will be able to maintain the traditional conception of higher education.

I think of Rollins College in Florida, which some fifteen years ago abolished the undergraduate business major and started a classics major. The college has been thriving ever since, though not exactly as a role model for other institutions. I also know of a recent religious studies graduate who taught a course on religion for the University of Phoenix, a frill to be sure for that institution. But the instructor nonetheless found her students eager and in- quisitive, willing to work and to learn. And I have a friend who re- cently taught a course on French literature at a community college; she found the students in that utterly nonutilitarian course to be enthusiastic and able. Does our future promise a real education for the few and a little frosting on the utilitarian cake for the many? I am afraid that if we do not mount a better defense of our own intrinsic purposes than we have for quite a while, even a good education for the few may not survive for long. To be effective, our defense must speak with authority about the aims and goals of higher education, about its intrinsic goods, about the kinds of institutions we need, and about kind of graduates we should produce. I am reasonably confident that finding the courage to do that will enhance our self-respect and strengthen our capacity to fulfill our calling.

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Freedom, Coercion, & Authority (1999)