Moral Orientation of US Universities and the Emergence of Evil

The Wisconsin Idea

In 1905, Charles van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, addressed a Press Association to explain what is now known as the Wisconsin Idea.

“The knowledge and wisdom of mankind are the slow accumulations acquired through the ages by the expenditure of uncounted sums, inestimable labor, and infinite pain. He who hopes to do any large thing in the world must spend from one-quarter to one-third of his life in hard labor, acquiring the knowledge of the past. It is therefore imperative that the University be of the highest grade in order that the time there spent shall be the most fruitful. The University is a state institution not supported in the interest of or for the professors. They are merely tools in the service of the state. It is not even mainly supported for the direct benefit of the students who take advantage of its opportunities. It is supported that they may become better fitted to serve the state and the nation. It is supported that the knowledge and wisdom of the generations, as well as the achievements, may reach all parts of the state, thus securing the enjoyment by the people of the great intellectual and moral experiences of the race.

I shall never be content until the beneficient influence of the University reaches every family of the state. This is my ideal of a state university”[i].

This Idea contains both a promise and a threat. The promise is the elevation of common good as an end. The threat is to force people to become “merely tools in the service of the state”. The Idea still appears in official documents of the University of Wisconsin and comes quickly to the lips of faculty who have worked there for any length of time. A web page organized by College, Topic, and County illustrates application of the Idea with dozens of examples[ii]. They include things such as Planning for Outdoor Recreation and Child Support Policy Research. Van Hise might well have been proud of all these examples, but they do not constitute overwhelming affirmation of his vision, which included acquiring technical knowledge so that Wisconsin would avoid being a state “which places its sons and daughters at a disadvantage.” It is from a son of Wisconsin that a powerful example emerges, navigating the channel between threat and promise.

Charles Russell Bardeen was born in Michigan, attended high school in Germany, obtained a BA at Harvard, and graduated from Johns Hopkins, the school that pioneered modern medical education, at the top of the student list in the first year Johns Hopkins granted the MD. Van Hise hired him as a professor of anatomy to UW Madison in 1905. In 1907 Bardeen became the founding Dean of the University of Wisconsin medical school. Charles had a son, John, born a year after the medical school in 1908. John grew up in Madison and was educated through undergraduate and Master’s degrees at UW. In 1947 while working at Bell Labs he developed the theoretical ideas enabling creation of the transistor. All of electronics and information technology flowed from this idea, and he shared the Nobel Prize in physics for it. In 1951 Bardeen went to the University of Illinois as a professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics. He is one of the most self-effacing figures in history given the magnitude of his accomplishments. As I grew up in Champaign-Urbana in the 1960s his influence radiated around me[iii]. My fifth-grade classroom, in an integrated school on the north side of Champaign to which I caught a bus each morning, was a pilot site for the world’s first educational computer. Plato 5 was also the first touchscreen computer. As I went into middle school the age of information technology was born around me. Students and faculty invented email, chat, messaging, multimedia publication, interpreted computer languages, and multiplayer games. I saw with my eyes two graduate students invent a prototype of the floppy disk drive that later entered the Sony patent base. In my brother’s elementary school classroom, kids figured out how to hack into a Star Trek game grad students had written for themselves.

To the extent any normal person has a sense of where electronics came from, they think of California not Illinois. Yet the flame of history passed through Urbana. John Bardeen was on the Xerox board, and in 1970 he persuaded Xerox leadership to preserve the fledgling Palo Alto Research Center[iv]. PARC developed prototypes for the personal computer and personal printer, soon commercialized by Apple, Adobe, and many other companies[v]. In any country but the United States, Bardeen’s name would be known to every child, since he not only invented the transistor but then went on to solve the problem of superconductivity, for which he became the only person ever to win two Nobel prizes in physics. Yet in the late 90’s a physicist friend of mine saw him shuffling to the front of the line for an economy ticket to Champaign at O’Hare airport, unremarked by anyone else in the airport. Bardeen had little interest in money or fame[vi]. After he invented the theory of superconductivity he sent the graduate student and postdoc who collaborated with him to the first national meeting at which this theory was announced, to make sure they got proper credit. They shared the Nobel Prize with him. Bardeen is said to have made some money from his consulting for Xerox, but his life was humble. When my grandmother was in her final months at Clark-Lindsey Village in Urbana Illinois, magazines for Bardeen’s wife Jane were still coming to the public reading room. She had recently died and was eventually buried next to her husband in Madison Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Idea suffered indignity in 2015. Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker proposed changing University’s mission statement as follows[vii]:

36.01  (2)  The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing develop in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and human sensitivities, scientific, professional, and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research extended training, and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.

These changes were revoked, and the original text retained. But the Idea has suffered such damage in Wisconsin and in every other public university of the United States that the changes Walker proposed and abandoned should really be viewed as acknowledging reality.

Conventional wisdom holds that universities are left-leaning institutions. This is based on political affiliation and self-identified beliefs of faculty. Debates about the claim have to do with which survey to trust, and how to interpret the data[viii]. What faculty select on a Likert-scale survey to indicate what they want others to think they believe about themselves is not completely uninteresting, since in fields such as history, journalism, and education it may affect what they teach. However almost no faculty in the STEM disciplines have any inclination to allow their beliefs to show in the classroom, and they are particularly shy about mentioning matters touching on political affiliation or religion. Undergraduate student allegiance to liberal and conservative positions does change during their education, without evidently favoring one side or another[ix]. Rather than only asking faculty to report what they believe, one might also consider what they do in their lives. Overwhelmingly they follow an ideology of self-interest, independent of what they say.

This follows from how faculty are hired, promoted, and rewarded. Market principles rule every aspect of the process, although not always with the literal use of money as the sole arbiter of performance. The reward structure shapes how faculty make decisions, and the sum total of faculty decisions in turn follows from and contributes to the direction of the institution.

The Rules of the Game

The hiring and promotion of university faculty in the United States follows an elaborate set of rules, utterly familiar for the current and prospective faculty whose life rhythm runs by them, and utterly unfamiliar to those not actively playing the game.

Faculty hiring is based on promise, promotion and tenure upon performance, in three categories: teaching, research, and service. The importance of these three measures varies according to the institution and particular job title. At institutions that grant only undergraduate degrees, or for adjunct positions at research universities, there may be little weight on research. Tenure-track positions at research universities emphasize research above all else. Service is usually an afterthought, although institutions depend upon it, and it can be very time-consuming.

Table 1: Numbers of universities by 2018 Carnegie Classification

The US has 6527 institutions of higher education[x]. Out of these, at 1249 the highest degree granted is doctoral, at 901 it is the Master’s degree, and at 776 it is the Bachelors’ degree. A taxonomy of the institutions is provided by the Carnegie classification in Table 1.

Carnegie wishes the classification to be viewed as descriptive, but it functions as a ranking with universities aspiring to climb up. The R1 universities bring in the most money per faculty, and partly for this reason have the most prestige. The Carnegie ranking by itself confers prestige.

At universities granting doctoral degrees, faculty fall into two categories: tenure-track, and non-tenure track. The tenure-track faculty are hired on the basis of their research accomplishments and research plans for the future. In applying for jobs they present a teaching statement, but training and preparation to teach can vary greatly from person to person and rarely determine who is hired. Once they are hired the tenure clock starts ticking. Within six years, the faculty member must provide proof of excellence in some area of research, and also needs to provide evidence of competence in teaching (although failure on this point can usually be offset by sufficiently strong research) and some evidence of service, such as membership on a committee. Excellence in research is established by numbers of publications, the prestige of the journals in which articles are published, the numbers of citations gained by the articles, the numbers of articles on which the faculty member is primary author, the number of grants for research support awarded, the total amount of money brought in, the number of graduate students supported, numbers of invited talks at conferences, the strength and enthusiasm expressed about the candidate in letters of recommendation, and the prestige of the letter-writers. Competence in teaching can be established by student ratings on end of course surveys, by peer observation and evaluation, and by student testimonials. Service can consist in membership on a university committee,  service to a journal on the editorial board, or to a professional society.

Lecturers or adjuncts at all the different sorts of universities, as well as many faculty at institutions not classified as having high research activity, are mainly hired to teach. They have one-year contracts and are not eligible for tenure, even if they climb a promotion ladder with title changes that mirror those of their tenure-track colleagues. If they face no expectation of performing research, the expectation for service may correspondingly increase, and can take forms such as course coordination.

The essential point in this tedious recital of criteria for faculty advancement is that the faculty at all levels are judged on the basis of individual accomplishments. How many articles did they publish? How often were they cited? How much money did they bring in? How much did students like their classes? The committees on which they serve are usually established by university administrators for reasons to consider later. At no natural point does this reward structure motivate the faculty to pay attention to any societal goals for which the public might have the impression the university is responsible.

That universities, and particularly the public research universities, flagships of their states, reward faculty in this way, and that faculty fiercely and most often unreflectively strive for success on the terms presented to them represents a triumph for the morality of self-interest.

Categorical Imperatives

Kant’s first categorical imperative in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals[xi] reads “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should be universal law” [422, p. 39]. This imperative ingeniously establishes an axiomatic foundation for morality, from which principles guiding an ethical life ought to follow like special cases from a mathematical theorem. Kant derived a second formulation of the categorical imperative, one that he said followed from it by logical necessity. “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, as an end and never as a means only” [429, p. 47]. The reason this follows from the first statement is that people can and do differ on the worth of almost anything, but they cannot and do not differ on the intrinsic worth of human life[xii]. Therefore, actions in support of the intrinsic worth of human life are the only actions guaranteed to be consistent with universal laws of morality.

When Kant published these principles in 1785, he was battling a pragmatic view of morality: “We cannot too much or too often warn against the lax or even base manner of thought which seeks principles among empirical motives and laws, for human reason in its weariness is glad to rest on this pillow. In a dream of sweet illusions (in which it embraces not Juno but a cloud), it substitutes for morality a bastard patched up from limbs of very different parentage, which looks like anything one wishes to see in it, but not like virtue to anyone who has ever beheld her in her true form” [426, p. 44].

Adam Smith championed the bastard. With weary realism in Wealth of Nations in 1776, one of two founding documents of the United States from that year, and maybe the more influential, Smith was writing about the somewhat narrow question of whether nations should restrict imported goods, but his words have taken on much greater significance.

“Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society….Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worst for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good to be done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need to be employed in dissuading them from it[xiii]” [p 400].

A limited generalization of Smith’s imperative comes from Milton Friedman[xiv]. He wrote: “In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”  This goes far, but not far enough[xv]. If the responsibility of the business is to make as much money as possible, then there is no reason for it not also to be the responsibility of each executive towards his own person. Responsibility to employers or shareholders, conformance to ethical custom, may be productive tactics at times, but at other times they will just stand in the way. Pursuing self-interest to its logical conclusion, let us replace Kant’s second categorical imperative with this one: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as a means to your own profit.”  Call this Smith’s imperative, although Smith himself avoided this extreme: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

It is not much of a surprise to find that Smith’s imperative is very influential with American companies[xvi]. It is more of a surprise that this moral principle infuses America’s universities. It produces ironies. Across the university, faculty study topics explicitly connected to the public good. Seen in the context of their professional life, these causes are a means to the end of their personal advancement. Someone who works on food insecurity of children in tribal communities needs to do the best work on food insecurity in tribal communities, and will increase their chance of advancement if they can have an impact. The widespread harassment of colleagues and junior researchers in academia, an open secret[xvii], is a consequence of badly suppressed competitive drives. Ethics itself becomes a means to promotion, and not an end in itself. The most visible face of ethics at many universities is not in the philosophy department but in the business school. This is because the outward form of ethical behavior is a proven technique for increasing profits. No one knows the shape of the sheep’s clothing like an ambitious wolf.

The temptation of using people as means not ends becomes most severe for university administrators. Some fraction of the faculty who make their way successfully through tenure begin to rise in administration. At the level of Dean or above, it has become customary to use corporate search firms to fill administrative positions and cast a net across the country when vacancies need to be filled. The individuals who throw themselves as candidates into these searches have committed to a life where they hop from one university to another, hoping with each hop to obtain a position at a higher rank and at a more prestigious university.  Universities are very hierarchical, with strict codes of conduct determining who is allowed to speak to whom, and the people at the top have regal powers. It is a fine day when a new administrator arrives at a campus, coming from a distant state, and immediately begins declaring awestruck allegiance to the traditions and mission of the new institution. In some cases, this is genuine. In other cases, it is not. In the latter event, rather than the administrators serving the university, the university serves the administrators. All faculty and staff find they must contribute what they can to the new true purpose of the university; for the Dean to move somewhere else as Provost, for the Provost to move somewhere else as President, and for President just to move somewhere better. In pursuit of these goals, the administrators dismantle key programs of their predecessors, freeing up money for their own signature projects. They appoint committees on matters of interest or controversy and staff them with respected faculty charged to consider matters out of their areas of expertise. The faculty can put the committee service on their vitas for use at promotion time, while the administrators can put the creation of the committees on a web page, ignore the recommendations, and take whatever actions seem most likely to create outcomes, often involving money, that will appeal to a search committee in another state when they look for the next job.

There are many reservoirs of idealism left in universities, both among faculty and administrators. Still there is a reason a typical faculty member will happily sigh, upon hearing a colleague has moved into administration, “Ah, they’ve gone over to the Dark Side.”

Erosion of Ethical Custom

The desire to pursue self-interest is as old as humanity. In describing how it works out within universities, maybe we are just describing the way things have always been, a state of being as good as it gets. No one says that competition within markets is perfect; just that on balance it produces better outcomes in the end than alternative forms of social organization.

Market competition does seem to be very good at providing us in the US with inexpensive personal computers of remarkable quality, dishwashers, and cars. Within the university the current reward system succeeds in motivating faculty and staff to work enormous hours and pursue opportunities from federal grants to alumni philanthropy with intelligence, energy, and resilience.  What reliance on market principles will not do is to ensure that universities keep obeying the rules of society embodied in ethical custom. Only law provides limits. An example of a customary function of universities that is eroding over time as Smith’s imperative grinds down on it is the production of teachers for the K-12 schools.

Figure 1: US Teacher production across all categories. Source: US TITle 2 data collection.

Figure 1 shows that teacher production from traditional university programs fell by around 40% between 2009 and 2018. In the spirit of market competition to address the shortage, the country has been trying two experiments: the deregulation of university teacher programs (Alternative, IHE-based) and granting permission for teacher preparation to new entities including school districts and for-profit companies (Alternative, not IHE-based). The quality of teachers produced outside of universities is lower than the quality of those produced within, and in any event the numbers of teachers produced from these experimental channels has been falling as well[xviii]. A variety of social ills follows from the inability to provide teachers in perennial areas of extreme shortage that include special education, physics, and computer science. For example, we push the students we call underrepresented without their consent towards the service sector and manual labor. The problem seems very complex, yet it is very simple. The nation built a network of public universities in part because of an assumption embodied only in custom that they would provide enough teachers for the schools. Universities are not doing it, so the job is not being done[xix]. I present the case of teacher preparation because it is an area where I have personal knowledge, the responsibility falls so clearly on universities, and the failings are so easy to document. This does not mean the self-interest imperative has not been equally corrosive in other areas as well. The future of science and technology, economic prosperity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness depend upon a change in course.

The Emergence of Evil

To adjust the moral orientation of universities requires us to acknowledge there is a problem, and to stop giving up all ground to Smith’s imperative without a question. There is little hope if one begins by accepting the reality that universities are a business. Universities have budgets, but this does not make them businesses, just as families have budgets and this does not make them businesses. The motivations of students, faculty, and staff depend upon complex considerations where individual profit and loss play a role but are not always decisive.

Consideration of morality, of leading an ethical life, presents a different structure for evaluating individual and institutional decisions. It seems archaic, but it should come back. Hegel has harsh words for what we now take for granted:

“Where all previously valid determinations have vanished and the will is in a state of pure inwardness, the self-consciousness is capable of making into its principle either the universal in and for itself, or the arbitrariness of its own particularity, giving the latter precedence over the universal and realizing it through its actions – i.e. it is capable of being evil [xx]” [139, p. 167].

The word evil seems over-wrought unless one is willing to consider that universities and their faculty actively contribute to injustice, despite assertions of personal virtue. The particular form that evil takes in US universities today is emergent. The temperature of a fluid is given precisely by the average kinetic energy of its molecules, but any single molecule has an energy more or less than this average, and one cannot say it has a temperature at all. Temperature is an emergent property of the ensemble. Similarly, the ethical life of the university emerges from the sum total of the activity in its community and any given faculty member has the ready excuse that their own necessary contribution to the good of the whole cannot even be defined. The tools of manipulating individual self-interest in a competitive frame become impotent when they confront many tenacious social pathologies. Institutional bias, which perpetuates the exclusion of marginalized groups from education, wealth, and power, is not remotely addressed by giving every member of the faculty and staff implicit bias training. Nor to address broad societal goals is it more than a good first step to have every applicant to the National Science Foundation write a Broader Impacts statement[xxi]. University flagships are presumed to sail boldly through clear and uncharted waters, but this does not correspond to the dilemmas that arise in hard problems such as those connected to energy, environment, education, or ethics.  A better metaphor would be that the flagships are huge freighters making their way in narrow canals. Policy-makers direct these educational behemoths in two ways. The first is to set up competitions so that some of the crew run as fast as they can in some direction on the deck and the winners get a prize. The second is to pump a huge amount of fuel suddenly into some single engine. In neither case is anyone paying much attention to the officers that hold the rudder, the direction it is pointing, and the challenge of moving ahead while staying clear of both banks.

It should at least be possible to discuss university practices by bringing up questions of good and evil, duty and honor, social justice, the universal in and of itself, and treat money as subservient to these aims, not always the end. A way to separate genuine commitment to these causes as ends, rather than as means to something else, will be to check if recommendations for university change make aspects of the budget their servant rather than their master. Individuals who made life choices to accept positions of lower status so they could perform greater service should obtain increased respect or even official reward.

Philosophy departments might seem to be a home for people to confront the rest with these questions, but philosophy faculty have been tangled up by Smith’s imperative like everyone else, studying technical questions as a means to advancement in highly specialized subdisciplines. This has left a hole in the soul of the university and society in general that is being filled by business consultants, social workers, journalists, lawyers, artists, and a handful of activists from every discipline.

University administrators steer their institutions. Candidates for administrative posts who come from and plan eventually to return as a member to the community they serve have a natural advantage in orienting universities towards their ideals over those with a history of moving from state to state in search of advancement, but place of birth is not decisive. The whole process of using search firms should be viewed with increased caution, and every candidate — but particularly external candidates — should be scrutinized for whether they intend to use the institution as an end in itself or a means for advancement. Do they truly support some form of the Wisconsin Idea?

Doctors take an oath. Lawyers take an oath. Politicians do too. This has never prevented ethical failings, but at least it makes clear that they matter. The slow and labored turn of US universities towards a new moral direction could begin there:

I pledge to serve The University of my State, and all the state’s residents to whom it belongs. I will always tell truth and treat each person well. I will uphold the best traditions of my university, end practices that are no longer needed, and reflect on the common good to know the difference.

Acknowledgement

This essay owes its existence to Michael Marder. But in the end the opinions expressed are those of the author alone. And the author owes his existence to Norma Marder, who brought him to life and taught him ethics.

Notes

[i] https://www.wisc.edu/pdfs/VanHiseBeneficentAddress.pdf

[ii] https://wisconsinidea.wisc.edu/

[iii] The name Bardeen appears nowhere in the index of Rankin, J. L. A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018). The creation of information technology and the Illinois PLATO system appears nowhere in Hoddeson, L. and Daitch, V.True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen (Joseph Henry Press, 2002) or Riordan, M and Hoddeson, L. Crystal Fire. The Birth of the Information Age. As a young physicist, I heard from other physicists in Bardeen’s circle that he had played a crucial role in bringing people together at the U of I and seeding ideas. Attributing a role for Bardeen in creation of the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory might just be the Matthew Effect in action, or it might be the most logical explanation for the extraordinary rise and fall of information technology in Champaign-Urbana in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

[iv]Bardeen’s role in first saving (and later failing to save) Xerox PARC is well documented. https://www.the-dispatch.com/article/NC/20111221/News/605129165/LD and Chapter 13 in Hoddeson and Daitch, note iii.

[v]It probably matters less whether a single visit by Steve Jobs to PARC was a seminal event than that Bardeen carried a spark from Illinois to California and ignited kindling. https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

[vi] Another midwestern kid, Robert Noyce, did become rich from the invention of electronics, navigating the channel closer to the other bank. See Wolfe, T. (1983, December) The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce. Esquire. Retrieved from https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html.

[vii] https://badgerherald.com/news/2016/05/27/records-show-walker-wanted-to-change-wisconsin-idea/

[viii] Magness, P. W. (2020, October). Tenured Radicals Are Real. Arguments that academe does not slant left misconstrue the data. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www-chronicle-com/article/tenured-radicals-are-real . The word “data” appears 15 times, five times as “the data”. On the other side, see  Oreskes, N., & Tyson, C. (2020, October). Reactionary Propaganda Rides Again: Is academe biased against conservatives? No: Reality is. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www-chronicle-com/article/reactionary-propaganda-rides-again . The word “data” appears 11 times, although never as “the data”.

[ix] Rockenbach, A. N., Mayhew, M. J., Giess, M. E., Morin, S. M., Staples, B. A., & Benjamin P. Correia-Harker & Associates. (2020). IDEALS: Bridging Religious Divides through Higher Education. Retrieved from http://ifyc.org/sites/default/files/navigating-religious-diversity-9-27.pdf

[x] https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/InstitutionByGroup.aspx

[xi] Kant, I. (1785) Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. L. W. Beck (Bobbs-Merrill, 1959) [422] p. 39.

[xii] Absolutely not.

[xiii] Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Volume 1 (Dent, 1910)

[xiv] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

[xv] Hegel (note xix) [257, p. 275] says the state has its “immediate existence in custom.” Friedman also invokes custom as a barrier to aggression in pursuit of profit.  Yet once a principle other than the worth of people in themselves is granted, the pursuit of self-interest seems to violate more and more boundaries over time, including customs that were inviolable until they were not.

[xvi] My uncle was a consultant and horrified onlooker at Scott Paper in the 1990s during the period it was destroyed by “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap. Dunlap’s career ended when he committed accounting fraud, but if he had avoided crossing this line he would probably have been viewed as one of the greatest CEO’s of all time. He was a pioneer in eviscerating the custom that corporations should take care of their employees and he found how to profit by firing them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap.

[xvii] In my discipline of physics see Kirby, K and Houle, F., Physics Today 57,  p. 42 (2004)   https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1839376 . 40% of early career physicists reported personal knowledge of ethical violations including fabrication/falsification/plagiarism and harassment. The survey on which this was based was repeated in 2020, with similar results.

[xviii] Marder, M., David, B., & Hamrock, C. (2020). Math and science outcomes for students of teachers from standard and alternative pathways in Texas. Education Policy Analysis Archives. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.28.4863

[xix] For a more detailed consideration of teacher production, including evidence on the quality of teachers from different sources, impact on children of marginalized groups, the specific actions universities could take to remedy the problem with existing resources but are not taking, and why they are not taking them, see

[xx] Hegel, G.F.W. (1821)  Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, tr. H. Nisbet  (Cambridge 1991).

[xxi] https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/special/broaderimpacts/ . The Broader Impacts criterion originated with Neal Lane: https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/bios/nflane.jsp