How to Think Well
Intelligence needs nine helpers.
A set of bad intellectual and academic practices, often perpetrated by senior academics, often fêted, have spread in some of the world’s most prestigious universities: smearing by association, the authoritarian pulling of professional rank, careless misrepresentation, the setting up of straw men, unjust bias, false assertion, axiomatic ideological abstraction and evasive omission. And through these practices, moral vices such as malice, arrogance, impatience, uncharity, injustice, unfairness, dishonesty and cowardice have become widespread.
Moreover, what is spread in the lecture hall or seminar room doesn’t stay there. It walks out into the streets. For, graduate bankers, businessmen, healthcare staff, military professionals, journalists, civil servants, politicians, and government ministers who, making decisions that are careless with the truth, arrogant, unteachable, impatient, unjust, uncharitable, and cowardly are bad decisions that cause real damage to institutions and to the human individuals who inhabit or depend upon them. For that reason, we cannot afford universities that are morally tongue-tied. We cannot afford them to be eloquent about transferable skills while speechless about transferable virtues.
These vices and the malpractices they generate impede the common pursuit and discovery of the truth, which is the specific vocation of universities. They permit the perpetrator to avoid listening to opposing views, from being challenged by them and provoked into thinking, lest they be provoked to rethink. They allow him to refuse contrary opinion the basic respect of letting it stand on its own terms and of engaging with it honestly, albeit critically. Thus, they corrupt academic dialogue by making its friction throw out heat rather than light.
Universities, therefore, face a choice. Either they appoint and promote professors who display and disseminate intellectual vices, or they reward those who exemplify and cultivate intellectual virtues.
