THE I N AU GURAT IO N OF FR E D E R ICK M A R TIN L A W R E NC E | I N AU GURAL SY M P OS IA
HUMAN VALUES, GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND THE LIBERAL ARTS
TUESDAY, MARCH 29
DAVID CUNNINGHAM, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY
Revisiting the Campus Arena
Among the many joys of inauguration celebrations is the opportunity they provide for collective reflection upon our values,
goals, and challenges. This week’s events serve as a sort of window into Brandeis’ past and future, and in that spirit we might
consider the university’s first presidential transition, in 1968, as an interesting counterpoint to our ongoing exchanges. Not
surprisingly, conceptions of social justice were at the center of that year’s inaugural symposia, organized around the theme of
“The Campus as an Arena.” While Brandeis’ aspirations have always been diverse enough to nourish many coexisting arenas,
in those contentious times it was clear that participants were concerned with the campus as a political space as well as an
intellectual one. Economics and Heller School faculty parried with Bayard Rustin over questions of racism and its academic
manifestations. Our current colleagues Gordie Fellman and Jerry Cohen debated former high-ranking Kennedy and Johnson
administration officials about campus riots and the morality of the draft. An evening service featured a keynote by Coretta
Scott King, delivered exactly six months after her husband was tragically assassinated in Memphis. In an address titled “Can
There Be An America?,” she pondered the university’s role in stamping out divisive ideologies, so that we might “seek a reign
of justice, of mercy, of equality, of peace, and of brotherhood.”
While our obligations to pursue these values endure, today the boundaries of the university’s salient “arena” are much
murkier. As in 1968, contention and political struggle dominate daily news reports. Much of that conflict is global in nature,
though that in itself is not necessarily a recent or novel shift (indeed, incoming President Morris Abram’s 1968 inaugural
address labeled that era’s Brandeis students as “perhaps the first generation in all history who are really prepared to be citizens
of a common country and a common world”). Rather, it is the immediacy of our connection to distant events that continues to
evolve. As revolutionary action unfolds, Twitter posts, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, Skype reports, and Flickr photos
provide unvarnished details of on-the-ground action. If it is striking to be able to witness so closely the progression of ongoing
events in, say, Wisconsin, it seems exponentially more so to access real-time updates from Tunisia, Egypt, or Yemen.
As our access expands, our community’s orientations to those struggles are transformed as well, often in surprising
ways. To provide just one example, a much-discussed image posted last month to an online photo sharing site showed a
protestor in Cairo’s Tahrir Square holding a yellow sign that read “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers: One World, One Pain.”
It turns out that the photo was tied to the efforts of a leader in the University of Wisconsin’s teaching assistant’s union, who
also happened to be a Ph.D. student writing a dissertation on social movements in Egypt. As mass protests over public
workers’ collective bargaining rights heated up last month in Madison, Tahrir Square was being transformed into ground zero
for a mounting Egyptian revolution. Spurred by the urgency and rapid pace of events in both places, he hastily purchased a
plane ticket and spent a week in Egypt gathering research data. Upon returning to Wisconsin, he immediately re-immersed
himself into local union organizing work, and shortly his efforts to bridge the two struggles materialized online.
If such globalized connections – mediated or not – have the potential to reshape our sense of the permeability of
campus arenas, they also call into question how social justice might appropriately be pursued within such spaces. I do not
know how this Wisconsin student’s dissertation will ultimately be shaped by his direct engagement in these dual struggles, but
the question of the commensurability of that work with his activist goals has long shaped core debates about the intersection of
politics and scholarship. Max Weber, in a now-classic essay adapted from his 1918 lecture at Munich University, cautioned
against engaging with value-laden, and thus political, questions under the guise of scientific inquiry. While freely
acknowledging that science’s own suppositions undergird the methodologies and processes of its practitioners, Weber argued
that, beyond those postulates, the scholarly scientific enterprise should be in the service of “facts” and not shaped by personal
or political values. Relative to efforts to “determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural
values,” he asserted, ”it is quite another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the
question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous
problems.”
At the other pole stands Marx’ classic final statement in his Theses on Fueurbach: “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Less polemically, social theorist Craig Calhoun
notes that the impetus toward engaged scholarship stems from tacit Enlightenment premises that knowledge can be both
authoritative and democratic, advancing expert agendas while in service to public dialogue. Today, while debates over the
appropriateness of adopting strongly ideological positions within the university remain alive and well, it has become a
mainstream intellectual stance to reject absolutist distinctions between “facts” and “values.” Related rear-flank critiques
similarly demonstrate how even the most rigorously scientific inquiry can be reflexively motivated, and less consciously
shaped, by values in political or ethical realms.
Brandeis, with its founding emphasis on social justice, is a unique place to consider how such debates bear upon
efforts to integrate scholarship and service. Weber’s strong advocation for politics-free scientific pursuits can be read in part as
his effort to carve out an autonomous arena for scholarly inquiry in the face of nationalistic and anti-Semitic sentiment that he
feared would continue to erode alternative possibilities for academic freedom. As an institution whose very founding
condemned discrimination and exclusion, Brandeis from its outset has carved out a more expansive space for open inquiry,
welcoming – and in some cases even demanding – consideration of how knowledge serves various audiences. Today, we
remain beneficiaries of this legacy, teaching and learning on a campus infused with possibilities for publicly-engaged
scholarship. While fulfilling this Brandeis ideal requires considerably more (among other things, this essay stops short of
interrogating, as our colleague Ted Johnson has in his prescient contribution to this panel, the significant challenges associated
with translating these sorts of institutional values into practice), we should heed the opportunities we all have to seek truth’s
innermost parts in an arena expansive enough to integrate the laboratory, the classroom, and the public square.
Bibliography
Calhoun, Craig. 2006. “The University and the Public Good.” Thesis Eleven 84: 7-43.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1845]. The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
Meyer, David S. 2005. “Scholarship That Might Matter.” Pgs. 191-205 in David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Charlotte
Ryan, eds., Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Weber, Max. 2004 [1918]. The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing Company.