Ralph J. Hexter (with Craig Buckwald)
Like the poet of the Aeneid, I come to sing of troubles and challenges, formidable ones, even beyond our expectation, and so I might join Virgil in asking, incredulously, “Can there be such anger in the hearts of the gods” (“Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?” Aeneid 1.33)? I cite Virgil for a number of reasons, not least because it takes me back to my familiar haunts as a classicist. A long interpretive tradition has seized on Virgil as a poet who, especially in the Aeneid, focuses on showing how difficult it can be to follow an ethical course for those who are looked upon to lead, but also how important it is. This last point, especially as it applies to my own professional position of university leader, is the focus of my essay.
It is well and good for us to come together in this symposium to affirm the importance of reading ethically and to explore how the humanities might play a key role in removing this practice from the endangered species list. I thank Peter and all of the organizers and participants for making this symposium possible, and also express my admiration for the noble motive behind it; I am hopeful that it will have an impact. Let me begin by describing four challenges that are faced by a university leader who desires and attempts to read ethically.
Challenge 1: The Epistemological Problem of Ethical Understanding
When we think about the practice of reading unethically, I suspect that most of us first conceive a moral failing—an embrace of or surrender to the dark side. This is the charge that Mercury levels at Aeneas when, visiting him in the lap of love and luxury in Carthage, he says Aeneas is “forgetful of [his] kingdom and fate,” or “affairs” (“Regni rerumque oblite tuarum!” Aeneid 4.267).
But we must consider an alternative scenario of not being forgetful, but unable to see—because it is an elementary lesson of ethics that the best course is not always clear to us. In fact, rather than having to choose between an ethical and an unethical course of action, we often are faced with a number of potentially conflicting choices, each of which makes a valid claim to being ethical. In other words, we face an epistemological problem. Probably the best-known example of the difficulty of determining the right ethical course involves the potential conflict between deontological and consequentialist ethical perspectives—that is, one holding that we must be ethical in our actions and the other maintaining that the ends justify the means.
The value of this sort of parsing can be seen in how it helps us to understand the so-called Torture Memos that are one motivation for our gathering. In his reading of the Constitution and international law in the memos, John Yoo maintains he was an honest and accurate reader, even though there is little doubt that the ends that his reading served have helped to define his reading’s ethical status. It is clear that some of those who support Professor Yoo’s reading see it as honest and accurate, if also disturbing; others see it as violating honest reading in the service of a another all-important principle, sometimes called “national security.” It is my belief that a conflict of ethical perspectives, rather than brazenly unethical conduct, is chiefly responsible for the enduring controversy surrounding the memos. But let me be clear: Sometimes we are right to regard someone as a villain, regardless of how the villain views himself or herself.
As I have mentioned, for this panel on “The Ethics of Reading and the Professions,” I draw on my experience as a professional of sorts—a university administrator, specifically, provost of the University of California, Davis—but it is as a professor in the humanities that I reflect on the challenges of my current office. Again, there is a valid parallel to be drawn between my position as provost and that of Professor Yoo when he worked in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. In both cases, the office holders are often asked to “read”—in the sense of publicly interpret—various texts in order to support a leadership function. In the case of the university administrator, this reading is performed on foundational texts, such as a state constitution or an institution’s mission statement; dialogical texts, such as task force reports or scientific studies; and the real-world texts of current or historical events. Being pulled in different directions by two or more ethical claims is at the heart of these types of administrative reading. Let me cite a couple of cases from my own institution.
The first has to do with our campus task force on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The task force was recently reactivated in order to provide advice to the university on new regulations addressing the possession of “culturally unidentifiable remains”—that is, remains not linked to a federally recognized tribe according to certain definable protocols. Many remains so classified are currently in the possession of the Davis campus and other University of California campuses.
In reading NAGPRA and the new regulations, I recognize the validity of a number of different and potentially conflicting ethical imperatives: to be an honest and accurate reader of a federal law; to serve the Native American tribes that have strong cultural connections to the remains in question and remains in general; to look after the university’s interests in the matter, which are also in large part the interests of historical and ethnographic research; and even to preserve and foster a harmonious relationship among the Davis campus (some of whose students, faculty, and staff are Native American), Native American tribes near and far, and the people of California. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the interests of the different stakeholders are thoroughly interrelated, and serving one interest often serves another as well, though passionate advocacy may obscure this.
The second case I wish to cite has to do with the reading of a document known as the California Master Plan for Higher Education, whose original version was written in 1960. The Master Plan is an ambitious scheme for public higher education in California that designates distinct roles for the University of California system, the state university system, and the community college system. But the Plan is better known as a formal expression of California’s promise of educational opportunity. As such, the document specifies the percentages of top high school graduates that the University of California system will admit.
In reading the Master Plan, the administrator is pulled in at least two directions: toward both a literalist reading that respects the original admit goal and a looser reading that accommodates a modification of the goal for practical reasons. Both readings, it might be said, have ethical justification. This example is especially important because at its heart is one of the most important ethical questions facing public higher education today: How does one divide resources between students and the university at large? Or, to put it differently, how do we balance the goal of maintaining broad educational opportunity with the goal of advancing institutional excellence (especially as the latter is perceived nationally and internationally)? As we saw with NAGPRA, the ethical situation here is all the more tangled in that directing resources to one entity may potentially, if sometimes indirectly, benefit the other as well.
Challenge 2: Corporate Reading
The second challenge to the administrator who desires and attempts to read ethically has to do with being part of a university structure. It is a reality of large and complex organizations, such as major research institutions, that a top administrator, alone, has neither the time nor the requisite knowledge and expertise to give an adequate reading for larger audiences of all of the written and real-world texts that come his or her way. For this reason, a leader typically practices what I will call “corporate reading,” which I use in a neutral rather than nefarious sense (that is, one referencing for-profit corporations) to designate “shared interpretive labor.” Let me cite one more case from my institution.
The relationship between the First Amendment and campus protests was of urgent concern on the Davis campus for several months after the collective trauma of the pepper spray incident of November 18, 2011. This concern intensified with subsequent protests against a bank branch on our campus and also with an event at which two Israelis, one a soldier, spoke on campus amid significant disruptions.
As provost, I have found it necessary to “read” the First Amendment and related law to various campus and public audiences. But being neither a constitutional scholar nor an attorney, I incorporated into my reading that of the university’s general counsel, but not solely his, because for all his general legal expertise there are others—for example, professors at our law school and the law school dean—who have even greater specialized knowledge of constitutional law and greater credibility with faculty, students, and much of the public. In fact, as is typically the case, my readings of the First Amendment are the products of a rather larger group of individuals at the university, with different areas of expertise and at different levels. It is truly a collaborative effort. This is not only a necessary way of proceeding, but also arguably a more ethically responsible one: The process is designed to keep someone from saying more than he or she knows.
On the other hand, corporate reading undoubtedly presents challenges to ethical reading. For example, whenever I cite or paraphrase a colleague, administrative or professorial, I believe but cannot be absolutely certain that he or she has fully complied with the ethical responsibilities of due diligence and honesty. But in the absence of some sort of red flag, and after exercising reasonable testing, it is my job to trust in my colleague’s contributions and utilize them as needed. As a result, my provostial readings—ones that are presented under my name and administrative office—may inadvertently mask another’s ethical transgressions. This matters because, in such a case, my readings might further legitimize untruths or bad-faith analyses and thereby facilitate bad institutional decisions. My perception is that various control mechanisms, formal and informal, have prevented such pernicious elements from afflicting my provostial readings, but this structural vulnerability must be acknowledged.
Corporate reading also presents a second challenge to ethical reading, one that is perhaps more powerful and more frequently encountered. Because it divides interpretive labor among numerous individuals, corporate reading can more easily allow an individual’s ethical awareness to slip between the cracks, get lost in the shuffle, or simply be eclipsed by the immensity of the process itself. In a worst-case scenario, corporate reading can foster a myopia in which institutional interests, narrowly defined, are placed above higher principles, the university’s true mission, or the real interests of those that the institution is intended to serve.
Challenge 3: Conflicting Subject Matter, Conflicting Technologies of Reading
The third challenge to ethical reading that I wish to cite addresses the chief hypothesis of this panel, if not the entire symposium, namely that ethical reading in the professions can be fostered by importing humanities training and knowledge into the public realm. The argument for the humanities as a key to promoting ethical reading can be stated, with extreme reduction, as something like this: Humanities training and knowledge make us more skilled readers as well as more ethical individuals.
Clearly, as stated, our hypothesis seems to rest on the dubious assumption that the humanities are, for important intents and purposes, homogenous. It assumes, alarmingly, a sufficient identity of content and practice throughout the disciplines that are grouped under the name “humanities.” This is problematic for more important reasons than the fact that the list of humanities disciplines often varies from one institution to the next. The heart of the problem is that there are many differences in subject matter and practice across the different humanities disciplines that we have every reason to suspect may, most often if not always, produce significantly different reading abilities and practices, different sensibilities and dispositions, and possibly even different sorts of people. Indeed, given the great variation among corresponding departments at different institutions and even among the faculty in a single department, the heterogeneity seems to run very deep. All of this is to say that when we imagine saving the species of ethical reading by bringing the humanities into the public realm, it is far from clear what product we contemplate importing.
This is not the place for me to attempt to explore in any comprehensive way how the heterogeneity that pervades the humanities bears on their ability to foster ethical reading, though the topic surely deserves further exploration. Instead, let me just share a question about my own primary field, literature.
I wonder if it makes a difference to our overall ethical capacity and behavior if our literary knowledge and training skew more toward so-called traditionalist or old reading and its favoring of the canon, or toward newer, more theoretically informed varieties and their greater willingness both to venture beyond the canon and to ask rather different questions of texts. The debate over new and old reading, which is now largely passé, centered on passionate claims about the difference one’s affiliation would make in accurate reading—and often in one’s ethical awareness and character. Although we must avoid making easy assumptions about correlations between a reader’s ethics and what or how he or she reads, the existence of those correlations—weak or powerful—seems at least plausible. Not to admit this would be to maintain that different interpretive practices and literary texts, each of which can be said to provide a unique ethical education, do not also possibly shape ethical awareness and values in unique ways. At least in our present state of ignorance, this is an unsupportable position, I would say. I will return to this subject a little later.
Challenge 4: Ethical Courage
The final challenge is the one touched upon at the beginning of my talk, when I referred to Aeneas’s difficult decision between a life of ease in Carthage with Dido, and the punishing but god-ordained fate of founding Rome. Dido accuses Aeneas of having a hard heart. But sensitive reading, I think, suggests not an unfeeling hero but rather a hero struggling and succeeding in making his heart hard once he realizes his ethical duty. Within the framework of Roman pietas, his duty is not only to the gods but also to his father Anchises, his son Ascanius, and the people who follow him, for the quality of their future is at stake along with Roman greatness. My point is a commonplace: It is often extremely difficult to follow the ethical course even after one identifies it. But I make this point anyway because, for all I can tell, the modern individual is very adept at rationalizing unethical behavior—behavior that, without certain inducements or pressures, he or she would readily identify as unethical.
One might counter that the practice of cleverly excusing the inexcusable has a long history, a fact powerfully reflected in many canonical texts. Think Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s Iago, the Callicles of Plato’s Gorgias, or the Odysseus of Sophocles’s Philoctetes. In the sixth century B.C.E., Theognis of Megara was already lamenting the decline of ethics as wealth and individualism rose. My goodness, we can go back to Cain and his “primal eldest” murder and rationalization.
Although I am not able to resolve this question about how the modern period may or may not differ from earlier ones with respect to rationalizing unethical behavior, all is not lost. My main concern is not to establish that this pathology is uniquely modern, but rather to acknowledge that it is currently flourishing. Yet it might also profit us to consider how the unique conditions of our historical moment—including but not limited to the growth and influence of professional specialization, so-called corporate culture, and public relations practices—may be especially nurturing of that pathology, or at least of its current forms.
So far in this essay, I have focused on challenges, all of them formidable and complex. Before I conclude, let me at least attempt to do something that administrators aspire to do: problem solve. Once again, I call your attention to the Aeneid. Before Mercury’s wake-up call, Aeneas had a plan to take a sort of middle course, to be able to enjoy love and luxury in North Africa while at the same time honoring his destiny to found Rome. He would do this by building a joint empire with Dido in Carthage. In the same way, all of us have powerful motivation and great capacity to avoid ethical imperatives. But Aeneas—as Virgil constructed him for an Augustan audience and from an unavoidable Augustan perspective, which was perforce post–Punic Wars—came to see that there was no middle course that would serve both desire and duty. In the same way, I believe that we must get better at making difficult choices regarding our ethical behavior, and I have a few suggestions for university leaders with respect to reading.
In Reading, the Ends Do Not Justify the Means
As readers—that is, as interpreters—we should skew deontological as Odysseus strategically steered nearer Scylla than Charybdis, on his first pass at least, minimizing his losses. That is to say, we should be ethical in our process rather than use ends to justify unethical means. I say this because, if we cannot be relied upon to read in good faith, with accuracy and without ulterior motive, the solid ground of truth is lost in our larger discourse, and our communities become fragmented and acrimonious. These are costs that even ostensibly enlightened institutions such as universities have grown comfortable paying, at least from time to time. But they are too dear.
But what, you may say, about our responsibility to keep an eye on the future, on making sure that our reading will produce ends that are beneficial to the communities we serve? Fortunately, there is a way for the administrator to fulfill that duty too, as an executive, which includes both decision making and advocating for certain policies. The well-rounded administrator must be both an ethical reader and a competent executive, performing the duties of both according to the trust that the public has placed in him or her.
Regarding the Challenges of Corporate Reading and the Heterogeneity of the Humanities
I have said that one danger of corporate reading is the development of a myopia that puts the interests of the institution, narrowly defined, ahead of higher principles, the university’s true mission, or the interests of those the institution is intended to serve. An argument in favor of this myopia is that the institution must be served if it is to survive and do anyone any good. There is some force to this argument, but its invocation should always be regarded with a healthy skepticism—for, in essence, it is a trickle-down argument that may promise general benefits that never materialize.
Regarding which reading technologies to apply, as administrators we should keep an eye on what our duty is to the varied constituency that we serve, and how well suited a technology is to fulfilling that duty. Given that an administrator is expected to communicate clearly and honestly to individuals who have very different backgrounds and areas of expertise, he or she should attempt to speak in a generally accessible language of words and concepts. At the same time, and for obvious reasons, the administrator’s reading should concentrate on topics and issues that are of concern to the general public. Finally, the administrator should read the whole truth in the sense of addressing all that his or her reading pretends to address—in other words, all that is relevant and important. I would also urge the exercise of the practice of “interpretive charity,” by which I mean striving to read a text—whether written or “real world”—with fairness, respect, and at least an initial working assumption that it contains or may lead to wisdom that the reader presently lacks.
Although the administrative reading I am describing may seem more traditionalist than not, it will ill serve its proper purpose—and its public—if it does not avail itself of some of the skeptical, demystifying, and even deconstructive techniques regarded as of more recent vintage. I do not believe this joining of traditionalist and nontraditionalist reading practices means producing some monstrous, Minotaur-like hybrid. Indeed, I think I could make the case that the aforementioned new techniques have much in common with the old ones. An important example is the Socratic elenchus.1 But I would also draw your attention to moves that blunt and parry the thrust of such clever critical attacks—for example, the almost perversely literal reading of Caesar’s coin with which Jesus confutes the Pharisees’ entrapping questions about taxation.2
But the date of our reading techniques is not the issue, nor is the date of the real-world or written texts upon which we use them. If we want to promote ethical reading in the professions, our attention is better directed toward gaining a deeper understanding of how different sorts of texts and reading practices help to shape our ethical awareness and values. Only then will we be able to make a reasonable appraisal of what in that vast and heterogeneous world called the “humanities” we should work to import into the public realm. Having said this, I will add that I have personally known humanities scholars of every field and theoretical persuasion who have had great success in furthering the ethical education of their students.