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: Owen's Rhetoric

By Andrew

Disinterestedness, of the good sort

Stanley Fish writes for today's Times. The column rightly, to my thinking, notes that the head-administrator at an academic institution ought to restrain from taking political-like stances:

The obligation of a senior administrator is to conduct himself or herself in such a way as always to bring honor and credit to the institution he or she serves. Just what this general imperative requires will vary with the particular situations an administrator encounters, but at the very least we could say that an administrator who brings attention of an unwelcome kind to a university is probably not focusing on the job. He or she may be doing some other job ? speaking truth to power, standing up for free speech, protesting against various forms of injustice ? and those jobs may be well worth doing, but they belong to someone else.

I agree; though I got the hunch that Mr. Fish sounds more controversial than the point of his lines.

After reading the piece, isn't he arguing for disinterestedness? Such behavior, or lack thereof I reckon, is the hallmark of the academic pursuit; and seems to be the point of an academic administrator's job--as Fish would say.

Any event- the disinterestedness to which we aspire to is that condition wherein we can think of a subject, listen to and understand the inputs of information (arguments from different perspectives), and make sound conclusions unaffected by prior-held convictions. That disinterestedness (free from the interest of bias) is the academic standard from which Columbia's president fell recently (in remarks preceding Ahmadinejad's talk.

Full post as published by Owen's Rhetoric on October 01, 2007 (boomark / email).