Science without a conscience?

I want to comment on Wanyu's recent entry appeared on 9 November. [I was going to write it on her blog; but it turns out to be tooo long, and a quite independent topic by itself]

She found out that she personally learns a lot from her doctoral research on (what I understand to be) 'Teaching Shakespeare in English higher education'. And she wonders whether it is 'unprofessional' to think that her study could 'let me think about my own everyday behaviour'.

I think it's nothing like 'unprofessional' to find a link between academic project on the one hand and a personal life on the other, one enriching the other. Far from it; professionality of academics rests not on the absence of relationship between the two things, but rather on conscious development of that relation.

Imagine that there were no link whatsoever between one's academic project and their personal points of view. A supposedly 'professional' academic so conceived would be quite bizarre. Let me focus on how this 'professional' is bizarre. Doing so will lead me to emphasize the vital role of morality in the making of ‘professional academics'.

If that were the case, academic studies would/should then have no impact on your (and by extension, others’) private perspective. But, crucially, it also follows that your point of view had in principle no impact on your analytical perspective. So the professional academic is here conceived as value/perspective free, whose study is conducted without informing, nor being informed by, any personal values, sensibilities, or judgements.

Let me insert an anecdote to think about what this 'professional' would look like. I once went to a memorial lecture on Japanese diplomatic relations, where an invited scholar constantly told us that he only intended to 'clarify things, without imposing any political judgement upon you'. Such judgement, he suggested, was left to the audience. So he was a kind of 'professional' we are talking about, in that he maintains a separation between his academic pursuit and private (political) judgement.

This seems on the face it convincing. But, I have to say his contrast between the task of 'professional' academics (i.e., clarification) and the task of the audience (that is, judgement based on the clarification) is a false dichotomy. When he chose a particular topic, and a specific perspective within the topic as worthy of academic pursuit, that choice and perspective inevitably involves a set of assumptions that cannot be held to be 'neutral'. So, I should say his pose was either a mark of intellectual laziness, being unwilling to point out his own predispositions as a professional academic, or else evidence of a malicious intention of promoting his political position under the dubious blanket of neutral 'clarification'. Here comes an alternative definition of 'professionality’ of academics: it rests neither on the air of neutrality, nor on the dyad of neutral clarification and political judgement; instead, it rests on our awareness of the inevitable blurring of such a dichotomy, and self-awareness of our underlying assumptions on which we often find ourselves building our academic constructs.

Besides, if 'professionals' are by definition not supposed to inform our perspectives on daily life, it would help legitimize a lifeless specialization that can sustain itself without informing anything but colleagues of their closed disciplines. I do not mean to imply that academic studies ought to have an immediate impact on our daily life generally conceived. True, learned dissertations on Lockean theology or Shakespeare in English higher education would not change our world in a day. But, it does not vouch for the divorce between 'professionals' and the society at large in which they operate. Indeed, the very idea of the division of labour (or the social function of academic) does not make any sense, if without a clear indication of what all those minute academic pursuits can tell us about.

Conventional wisdom supports my position. Significance of the academia (esp. humanities) has been so vague and dubious nowadays. Think about how difficult it is (alas!!) to get funding; or think about its cynical counterpart that professionals sustain themselves only by endless esoteric controversies or worse by self-congratulation. Against these general degradation, ‘professional’ academics who are divorced from the outer world can do nothing fundamental. Making a clear link between academic expertise and society at large of course sounds impossible; and so it is. Whoever claim themselves to be a 'professional academic', however, ought to face the 'mission impossible' of this kind. We should not forget this impossibility once and for all; we need to come back to it again and again. Those who do forget this would perhaps undermine their own positions even further. What I take to be a sincere‘professional’academic, in contrast, begins their academic conduct by asking‘Does my research tell us anything more than about myself?',‘Does it tell us more than the preoccupations of my scholarly field?’,‘What then does it tell us about?’These questions are not simply to bedevil scholarly activities; on the contrary, they work as a creative force that could lead us to an untrodden pass. So, here comes my second alternative definition: a‘professional' academic is one who take the link between their expertise and the society seriously, using this inevitable tension as a drive for innovation within the field.

Taken together, the‘professional' academics I examined live in their specialized disciplines, whose operation is held to be‘neutral'. But at the same time, the apparent neutrality often exposes their academic laziness, or worse serve for their covert interests. One the one hand, those who seek to observe and consciously develop the mutual relation between their academic expertise, and their own perspectives as well as the society at larger will resist ‘science without conscience’. They will examines a set of assumptions and personal sensibilities on which their academic questions are based, while asking seriously how the implication of their academic pursuit might go beyond their immediate disciplinary boundary.

I think the feeling that our studies can 'let us think about our own everyday behaviour' is a piece of this larger search for the relation between academic puruist and daily life, both personal and collective. So, Wanyu's comment perhaps shows a drop of scholarly conscience that should go hand-in-hand with all scholarly operation. Without feeling the impact of academic learning on yourself, how can we justify the significance of our activities in collective or social scale? After all, humanities (or better still, human science) cannot be divorced from conscience. The origins of these words tell us the truth; conscience should always present when people seeks to develop common learning (con+sciencia) . (13/11/2005)