School of Arts and Sciences
Graduation Ceremony Address for PhD and MS & MA students (2006)

Brendan O’Leary
Lauder Professor of Political Science
Director of the Solomon Asch Center

Dean Bushnell, Dean Nagel, Dean DeTurck, Dean Rose and Dean Billmyer,

It is a profound honor to address all of these certifiably  intelligent  doctors, and masters of the sciences and arts;  and to speak before parents, relations and friends who have helped you to be certified – through dispensing love – soft or tough;  counsel, good or very bad,  and, no doubt,  money – all of it very well spent.

Brilliant, hard-working and elated graduates, may I suggest that you begin by standing up and applauding those who have helped you, your parents, relations and friends…. 

I’m sure most of you did not make it here just through self-help.

Parents, relations and friends; these former students, these wonderful students of our School of Arts & Sciences, have appropriately said “thanks” to you.

But I’m sure you’ll all agree that “thanks is not enough”.

They don’t escape their indebtedness, moral and financial, that easily. Handclaps are not enough. More than gratitude is expected.

And while you are basking in your success, remember what Oscar Wilde said: “Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success”.

As professional graduates, as doctors or masters of a discipline, you have a duty to use your certified intelligence for the public benefit, as well as for your own careers, of which you may have many.

And we have this moment, before food and drink, to reflect on the institution you have just been through, the university. It is important to reflect on its role and functions,  especially but not only if you are going to stay in it, to finish a doctorate after your masters, or to go as a post-doctoral fellow to a university like Penn, or to work in places which resemble a university, in research and development units, think tanks, and hospitals. 

Let me begin our reflections by considering relations, since they are here, and since, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, they are unchosen.

This March, in New York, at the annual academic conference of the Association for the study of Nationalities, a young and striking East European woman introduced herself to me with a smile, and then mentioned her first name and then her surname.

Both names had more than enough syllables to test the public speaking skills of a well known US political  family.

Despite the intense engagement of her eyes, I managed to remember that her surname ended in “-shenko”. While I was digesting that, and desperately trying to recall the preceding syllables,   she said, “I am your grand-daughter”.

Since I am only 48 –  “only”  is how I like to put it –  and as my only child, my daughter Anna,  is now only 6, I was taken aback. 

Before I had time to check through my personal history, in which complex polysyllabic surnames have not been common –   nor East Europeans –  she relieved me of the perplexed look that had come over my face.

She explained that her PhD supervisor, Dr Abigail Innes, had been supervised by me.

When Margaret Thatcher was told her child had given birth she said “We have become a grandmother”.  I felt no such royalist elation, but like you do today, thought that a key passage in my life had occurred.

I am an academic grandfather; in fact I have been one for quite a while. When Dean Jack Nagel asked to make this address a week later, I felt my grandfatherliness had been  officially recognized  on both sides of the Atlantic.

The point is that universities create lineages, clans, and tribes, but they are curious clans.  They are based on merit rather than blood-ties. My own lineage goes through the late Ernest Gellner, who examined my PhD, and through him to Bertrand Russell, who was the godchild of John Stuart Mill. Check your own supervisors’ lineages, and the merit of the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’ will quickly become apparent to you.

Lineages link teachers and supervisors to cohorts of students, those who succeed them, and transmit their ideas, their oral traditions and informal practices;  and sometimes, of course, young cohorts overthrow the ideas and practices of their parents, showing their faults, blindspots, and, on occasion, vested interests; and sometimes, without knowing it,  they recover the arguments of their grandparents.

Universities are based, however, not on the kinship of blood, but on an adopted allegiance to an idea, one that is too often forgotten, seeking truth, veritas. Universities are reflective truth-seeking institutions.

Admittance and certification in graduate institutions should never be based on family ties, no matter how honorable or rich the family, but on the judgments’ of teachers on the talents of the applicant. 

Universities, as they developed, successfully sought to escape the first tyranny of humanity: the tyranny of the family; the tyranny of rule by one’s cousins.  Don’t get me wrong: I am not about to preach against donations to universities by relatives of students, or to say that faculty should never marry – or have civil unions – with other faculty. My point is simply that universities enjoy their reputations because it is presumed that their certifications of knowledge are based on disinterested judgments, established by good procedures, beyond blood kinship.

Children are necessarily subject to parental authority: to both authoritative and authoritarian guidance. A parent sometimes has to say, “because I say so”, to give the child its first lessons in Hobbes’s theory of the state. But in a university no  professor can say, “because I say  so” – “dixi”  as the Roman emperors put it – without betraying the core mission of his or her profession.

The professor’s task is to support reflection and truth-seeking, not to terminate it. Tenure is abused when authoritarian rote-learning of a professor’s personal beliefs displaces the more difficult task of authoritative guidance in truth-seeking.

Our universities stem from both the European and Islamic civilizations - and Islamic civilization is part of Europe’s and America’s heritage, just as Europe is part of Islam’s heritage. Civilizations interact and modify one another; civilizations do not go to war with one another; governments, and governments and insurgents, do that.

Though the ancient Greek and Roman and Hebrew worlds had many outstanding philosophers, lovers of knowledge, they did not have institutions like ours. Plato’s Academy had no faculties – no deans, no curricula, no academic degrees, like those conferred on you today. It had no “nations”, the name European medieval universities gave to the groups of resident students who were clustered in dormitories, “houses”, according to their languages of origin. The mission to internationalize universities is in fact a form of ‘back to basics’.

Universities, as institutions, have their roots in monasteries and cathedral schools, and in their Islamic equivalents. Indeed it is probably from Islamic teaching practices that we have our “chairs” and our “readings” of subjects.

The word  “university” does not  have its etymological origins in the pursuit of universal knowledge – though that is how I think we should presently understand our mission. The word ‘universitas’ is late Latin, and referred to any kind of corporation or brotherhood: sisters did not become full citizens of our institutions until the last century.

It  was as guilds, with masters and apprentices, that universities first entered the legal order. They supplied law, theology and medicine. Along the way, medics, mere bachelors or masters of medicine, somehow managed to steal the title of doctors, and that status feud remains unresolved today.

The medieval university, like the monastery, often required of its teachers and students, three things: poverty, chastity and obedience. Today we only require graduate students to experience temporary poverty.

The European university was originally dogmatic: it taught dogma. The teaching clergy transmitted theological and other certainties to their charges. The liberal arts were confined to grammar, rhetoric and dialectic – the trivium; there was also the quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry and music. There was no empirical or experimental research.

Students were taught in authoritarian ways. There were the authorized texts, the auctoritates, and the commentaries which explained them. In the lectura the material was repeated and expounded by the teachers, while the students took notes. I was astonished when I came to the University of Pennsylvania, America’s first university, and its first secular university – and of course its best university, that is an unquestionable truth, or,  if you prefer,  a necessary truth – to discover that classes were called “recitations”, an echo of medievalism.

Though universities originated as dogmatic transmission belts for Islamic and Christian faiths, they also institutionalized the teaching of Aristotle’s logic and rules of argument  -  which would eventually both reorder and undermine the faiths they had been expected to preserve. The lecture, the seminar, the disputation, became mechanisms for evaluating arguments, for truth-testing. 

Universities were genuine guilds, protecting their members’ interests, and developed the idea of tenured academic freedom. Thereby, in the long-run, they contributed to a partial separation of organized knowledge from both organized political and religious power, one of the important institutional innovations and enduring legacies of western liberalism.

So our university institutions contain three major accomplishments – autonomy from the tyranny of the cousins, autonomy from the tyranny of clergy, and autonomy from the tyranny of the state – even though universities for centuries have pragmatically served  the material and cultural interests of families, churches and states. 

Universities’ next stage of development came in the Humanist proclamation, notably in Italy, of the ideal of the universal man - today we would say person -  i.e. the rounded educated individual, immersed in the sciences and the arts. It is not an accident that this ideal coincided with the growth and consolidation of the European state, with its need for diplomats, bureaucrats and lawyers.

Our predecessors as faculty became skilled at teaching the art of persuasion, as well as logic. The obligation to take roles in arguments, for and against positions, is a practice at least five hundred years old: those of us who teach the humanities and the social sciences, especially, still try to excel at this practice.

Rhetoric, Aristotle taught, is the art of persuasive argument when we are uncertain of our premises. It remains an essential part of the political education of our republics and democracies.

The modern university, however, is typically no longer straightforwardly expressive of the ideals of the humanists.

This university was set up by a man born three hundred years ago, who was famous for emphasizing usefulness, and American philosophical pragmatism famously, or infamously, conflates usefulness with truth.

The expansion of knowledge and the intensification of the academic division of labor have rendered the ideal of the Renaissance Man ever more impossible: most of us can barely keep up with the critical innovations in our own sub- sub-fields, let alone command a range of disciplines. Bi-disciplinarity is tough, let alone multi-disciplinarity.

Some modern universities try to provide a humanist education to undergraduates, while building, at graduate level, what are significantly known as ‘professional schools’, i.e. the old professions of law, medicine, and finance, along with the new scientific professions of modernity, as well as the business school, the representative of the ancient god Mammon at the feast of knowledge.

And modern universities, as a collective agency,   no longer educate an elite; we train huge proportions of the population of developed economies, even if access is not as we mostly want it to be. The university which began in freeing itself from the family, religion and the state now has an additional imperative:  it must retain its autonomy from the corporations of the modern economy, and their officers. They must be among our valued patrons; they must never be our masters.

Humanists often lament these transformations, and hanker for a world lost: the world of the partially imagined Renaissance. The social sciences have their feet in both the humanities and the sciences – in romance, and in utility; focused both on the unique and that which can be covered by law-like explanation.

But humanists and social scientists equally exemplify and are equally dependent on the academic division of labor, and the successes of the practical and experimental sciences have made previously unimaginable resources available for the successful maintenance of older crafts and knowledge; indeed more people are now educated in the humanities and the social sciences than in any previous epoch.

The rigidity of the historic universities often forced the separate development of natural science education, scientific academies, and research and training institutions – which then  modified the teaching practices of the humanists and medievalists. We should learn to avoid unnecessary organizational splits.

Indeed it is vital for the old ideal of humane flourishing  that universities remain exemplars of a very German Romantic idea, that is illustrations of “unity in diversity”.

There is much talk and considerable evidence of diversity, both sincere and public relations, but where is the unity?

As you are about to leave these tents today, I suggest that you ask  what you all have in common -  apart from the ability to speak and write American, apart from sentimental affinity for the colors of what is now your alma mater, and apart from the shared hunger and thirst which  are  intensifying as you urge this speaker to finish. 

My answer is that you are a branded product of a truth-seeking institution. One, which in its ideals, and substantively in its practices, rewards the pursuit of truth, values the demonstration that past verities are false, or in need of modification, and one which has, with luck, taught all of us to be wary of reciting what the late John Kenneth Galbraith excoriated as  “conventional wisdom”.

It is easy, in the buzz and confusion of laboratory experiments, essay-writing and calculations, in the competition for grants, conference papers, and publications, in the ambitious quest for recognition, honors and prizes, in getting and spending, to forget that our often mutually inaccessible sub-fields are regulated by a shared ideal, namely the pursuit of truth.

Even our post-modernists, today’s successors of the ancient relativist skeptics, are part of this pursuit. They are our jesters; they joke  at the courts of truth; they  remind  us that the truth is rarely simple, and rarely easy. And, they should remind us that there is joy and fun to be had in pursuing truth: the mission requires no vow of solemnity or  pomposity. Gravitas  and levitas  may tell truth together.

When you reflect back on your time at this reflective institution – long after the champagne has lost its bubbles – I hope that in your own way, in your own field, you will want to display that most important fundamentalist branding of the modern university, the critical rationalism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment produced a “cognitive ethic”, according to my own teacher, Ernest Gellner.  It developed a series of prescriptions about how the world should be investigated. All ideas, data and researchers are equally liable to testing; all cognitive claims have to compete; they are not allowed to be wholly circular, or unfalsifiable.

That cognitive ethic, which Benjamin Franklin’s university exemplifies, has transformed the world.  It has its bright and its dark sides – and its cold side, but you bear its impress, I hope, for good.