Moral Man and Immoral Academy?

Abstract

Weeding through a file drawer other day I ran across something I'd written in halcyon days of my academic adolescence when I was young and tenured. It was, I flinched at recalling, a challenge flung in faces of my peers in academy to view nature of our professional role as an opportunity to witness in and out of classroom to our existential commitments. It announced, among other things, that academy possessed the freedom to encourage its faculties to select them if need be to push student beyond professionally dictated confines of his discipline so that student approaches ultimacy in its cognitive forms: in an examination of [a given] dicipline's epistemological, and thus ontological, presuppositions; in following of a given proposition to its ultimate implication; in perceiving potential relatedness of all separate wares hawked in academic marketplace. It went on to suggest that the scholar must draw himself within circle, must accept engagements within class as well as without, must acknowledge and act upon existential roots of his own intellectual structures. He must . . .witness to his own confrontation with ultimacy so that cognitive wares he sells may be confronted in their entirety [and] deny that clean lines of efficiency, however admirable they may be, are next to godliness. Rather, he is commanded to witness to integrity of I-Thou in