Educational Misdirections: Attending to Levinas’s Call for Ethics as First Principle

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a shift of significance, movement from faculty to increasing administrative impact. The consequence of this change is not only structural but impacts the very nature of an academic calling and vocation. The university is increasingly a business run by an ever-expanding pool of managers. The lament of Benjamin Ginsberg, in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, provides the background conversation for this essay. Emmanuel Levinas’s framing of ethics as first philosophy offers a response to this historical shift in higher education. The task of this essay is modest and perhaps fundamental; there is no attempt to change this historical moment of higher education. This essay explores Levinas and ethics with a hope of sustaining educational commitments in the midst of an educational era of misdirection.