Universities are bastions of advanced knowledge. At their finest, their faculty members and students are dedicated to the methods, standards and ethics of expert scholarly inquiry. But in today’s politically charged environment, many question the importance and integrity of American universities. To answer those questions and acknowledge the importance of academic excellence and integrity to our mission, UC Irvine has designated 2024-25 as the Year of Scholarly Values.

For this academic year, the campus community has been discussing the essential role that scholarly values must play in knowledge discovery and dissemination across our various and diverse disciplines.

To explore its importance at UC Irvine, the Anteater Insider podcast will present a series of discussions on the multifaceted concept of scholarly values within the academic community. Hosting is Duncan Pritchard, Distinguished Professor of philosophy and director of The Anteater Virtues, an initiative devoted to bringing educating for virtuous intellectual character into the heart of UC Irvine’s curriculum. He’s also the chair of the Year of Scholarly Values committee.

His first guest is L. Song Richardson, the former dean of the UC Irvine School of Law and the former president of Colorado College. She recently returned to UC Irvine as the Chancellor’s Professor of law. Pritchard and Richardson will discuss how to define scholarly values, their importance in academia, and how they shape research and teaching practices.

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TRANSCRIPT

Duncan Pritchard:

First off, I will begin with a hard question, which is how do you go about defining scholarly values and, related to this, whether you think scholarly values vary across disciplines or whether there’s a core set of values common to us scholars?

L. Song Richardson:

I do think, for the most part, some values are common across disciplines. However, I found it challenging to think about how I would define scholarly values. As I was thinking about this, Duncan, a story came to mind of something I experienced when I first began teaching as a law professor. Someone gave me a piece of advice. Because I had come from being a criminal defense lawyer, I was accustomed to listening to different ideas, changing my mind, making arguments, and all of those things. And what this fellow law professor said to me was essentially to perform the role of a stereotypical scholar. In other words, not to be myself. So even if I had heard a question several times, and I got the same question, and I knew what my answer was, the person said, what I should do is pause and pretend that I was thinking deeply about it <laugh>.

I did not follow that advice. I thought it was terrible advice, actually, and yet I have heard people speak this way since then. And so, as I think about our scholarly values, how do we teach them, how do we communicate about them? I think the most difficult one – and you mentioned this one as the most difficult, but the one we often talk about and that I subscribe to is – integrity, acting with integrity. And I think that’s so hard to do. But integrity is a form of courage, defined as being afraid to do something but doing it anyway. And I think it takes courage to hear your ideas being challenged or to challenge someone else’s ideas, especially if they’re senior to you and have power over you.

I’ll just list the rest – vulnerability, openness, self-knowledge and curiosity – and the only one I’ll expand just a bit on is self-knowledge. What I mean by that is, though we like to think of ourselves as being objective, we aren’t, whether it’s conscious or unconscious biases that impact our thoughts, our behaviors, our actions, the way we interpret what we say, and what others say. I think self-knowledge about what those biases might be is critically important, a critically important scholarly value.

Duncan Pritchard:

Well, that’s all music to my ears because the kind of traits that you’re describing we try to indoctrinate into the UC Irvine students through this Anteaters Virtues project.

L. Song Richardson:

Which is why I love the Anteater Virtues project so much.

Duncan Pritchard:

I am also interested in the piece of advice you were given. You’re right. It was terrible. It occurs to me, though, that there might be some good advice, which superficially is in the vicinity of that and would be good advice rather than bad advice, which is to look at exemplars, the people you think of as scholars whom you admire. What would they do in this scenario? And I could see that being good advice because they will be the kind of people who have all these traits you just described. If you think about what they would do, and you emulate them, then that might be a good thing. But what the person was suggesting to you just sounded kind of inauthentic.

L. Song Richardson:

Completely inauthentic. And I think what the person meant to do for me, though, was show a bias in the scholarly world against people who have not been in the scholarly world. As I mentioned, I’d been a lawyer for almost a decade before I transitioned into becoming a law professor and a scholar. I think this person was trying to ensure that I didn’t appear too polished, because appearing too polished is, from their perspective, not scholarly <laugh>.

Duncan Pritchard:

Interesting.

L. Song Richardson:

It was very interesting. I love thinking about it <laugh>.

Duncan Pritchard:

We said in the introduction that there seems to be a certain crisis of confidence in higher education, particularly in America, at the moment, and it seems, in general, we face some challenges to scholarly values. Would you agree that there are some challenges, and if so, what are they, and how should we go about meeting them?

L. Song Richardson:

Absolutely I think there are challenges. Our definition of scholarly values evolves. And I think they should. We should constantly be thinking about what those values are and what they mean in the current moment. It’s not going to surprise anyone when I say that, in our current moment, we are living in such highly charged and partisan times that it’s difficult to live up to these scholarly values, especially because of the worry and the fear of being vilified, called out, personally attacked or doxed because someone disagrees with our point of view. And especially when I was president at Colorado College, this culture of fear permeated the staff, the students and the faculty. And it’s certainly not a conducive atmosphere to share one’s ideas.

When you test new ideas, you can get judged and called out for that. So, making mistakes, trying out new ideas and challenging one’s or others deeply held beliefs and values is difficult right now. And I worry about what that means for our scholarly values moving forward. I have a lot to say about this.

I started teaching again this academic year, and I have about 50 people in both of my sections. We created shared norms for the class and how we were going to engage together and allow people to make mistakes, try out new ideas and not attack each other. We’ll see how that works. But this was my effort to try to create some shared norms in the classroom so that when I teach criminal law, we can be more comfortable, all of us, in testing out our ideas and challenging each other.

Duncan Pritchard:

I think you’re right about that. It’s something a lot of academics I speak to are very concerned about. There’s a feeling of a kind of self-censorship that goes on.

L. Song Richardson:

Right? Exactly.

Duncan Pritchard:

In my discipline, it’s very difficult because part of what we are meant to do as philosophers is to ask difficult questions. Even if we all agree on what the answer is, you’ve got to ask the questions to work out why we all agree on this.

L. Song Richardson:

Exactly. Are you now finding that challenging in the classroom?

Duncan Pritchard:

To some degree, like at the intro level. I worry about that because I teach a large intro course in which we ask questions that could easily be misconstrued as if we are recommending some course of action or something. We’re just trying to get people to think about thinking. I’m quite lucky, though, in general, and I thank my lucky star. My research field isn’t particularly controversial, but I know other people who – because their field might include something controversial – are always tiptoeing around and worrying about what they might say.

L. Song Richardson:

It’s true. Criminal law is controversial. Just the other day, we were studying a case that involved cannibalism, and one of my students said cannibalism is wrong. And I said, is it? Come up with arguments and tell me why.

Duncan Pritchard:

It’s so funny because that’s one of the examples I was given. When people are in an intro course, one question you would ask is, is cannibalism wrong? And, of course, everyone agrees it’s wrong, but what’s interesting is that it’s not obvious, depending on your moral theory. It’s not obvious why it’s wrong. According to some moral theories, it seems it should be OK, actually, because eating animals is OK. So why can’t you eat dead people? Right. That’s the idea of these discussions.

L. Song Richardson:

Oh, exactly. Right.

Duncan Pritchard:

Getting students to think about why they believe what they do. But, of course, it can sound as if you’re saying to go outside and eat people. But that’s not what you’re saying.

L. Song Richardson:

No, no. I hope people listening to this do not think Song Richardson thinks cannibalism is OK. <laughs>. I do not.

Duncan Pritchard:

So, how do we meet that challenge? Is it the responsibility of we academic leaders to take the lead, show this integrity and ask these difficult questions so that others can follow? Do we need new institutional norms?

L. Song Richardson:

I think it’s both. Just to think about leaders, right? You can think about a faculty member in the classroom as being the leader of that classroom. That’s what one of my students told me yesterday. And that’s why I think the Anteaters Virtues program is so important. Because it’s communicating the values and allowing students, faculty and staff to practice them. It’s really hard, and I don’t think we can separate living our scholarly values and living through these difficult times from how we as individuals, students, staff, and faculty address difficult moments ourselves.

Because it’s that reactivity that we feel when we’re triggered by something we so disagree with, and being able to control ourselves enough so that we can actually listen to what someone is saying and not what we’re thinking in our head about what they’re saying that is so important. And yet I don’t think we spend enough time giving people the tools to do that. So that’s one piece.

The second is the organizational piece – the shared norms, values, and culture we all sign up for. We rarely do that, right? When students come in and when we hire faculty, do we share our values and norms, especially as they relate to scholarly values? I didn’t experience that coming in. I think that’s another missing piece because it can help us build trust and have the difficult and beautiful conversations we might want to have together.

Duncan Pritchard:

What is interesting about what you said – and I haven’t seen this anywhere else – is that Chancellor Gillman, in his commencement address, does outline these principles of scholarly values and so on. He is very explicit. He usually has five, 10 minutes devoted to this. And it struck me when I first heard this. I’d never heard anybody else do this, but it seems like that’s an obvious thing to do. You know, you’re welcoming people to the institution and letting them know this is what we’re about.

L. Song Richardson:

Exactly. And then to repeat it. Always constantly because it’s easy to dismiss it as just more kind of blah, blah, blah. Right? But if you continue to focus on it, model it and talk about it, I think that’s how we can begin to move in that direction.

Duncan Pritchard:

You said an interesting thing a few questions back about the need for evolution in scholarly values. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that, because the traits you described looked to me like they’re universal. Pretty much all cultures have some tradition of admiring these sorts of qualities in people. So when you were talking about evolution, what did you have in mind?

L. Song Richardson:

I’ll give you a specific example that I heard from a group of recently tenured faculty. I won’t even talk about the institution, and I don’t want to identify them or anything like that. But it came up as we were dealing with the war and trying to figure out how to have conversations about it. And what these junior faculty said to me was that they were hired because of their particular expertise and viewpoint about a particular subject. So when they are being asked to be open to help our students see different points of view around the subject matter that I teach, these faculty said it’s wrong when you’re asking them to model something else.

They say, you’re telling me that I can’t speak about my strongly held beliefs and try to convince others because I thought that’s why I was hired. So that’s what I mean, right? We have these values that we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, and then we have these ideas that maybe these values are not important in the same way that they were before. Maybe what it requires is transparency about where I’m coming from, but not necessarily after that. Some openness to changing my views about it. These are conversations I’ve had with faculty, especially the more recently tenured across a variety of institutions. And I hadn’t heard that before these past couple of years. I haven’t heard that framing.

Duncan Pritchard:

I can see that. That’s really interesting. That seems like a good point of a juncture on which to end. Thank you very much for this very interesting conversation, Song, and for joining the Anteater Insider podcast.

L. Song Richardson:

Thank you so much, Duncan, for having me. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.

Duncan Pritchard:

Me, too.