With Toni Morrison, I acknowledge that what I think and do is already inscribed on my teaching, and all my work. Indeed, we do "teach values by having them," or at least cannot but reveal our values in the classroom in one manner or another. This is not a voluntary option for those of us who teach in higher education or anywhere else: it is a permanent feature of the human condition. I sit at my computer overlooking a grass commons between suburban houses. As it's a warm New Zealand summer, neighborhood children below are playing an improvised game of cricket. Mr. Gagliardi from the house opposite mine appears with his lawnmower and asks the kids to give way so he can mow the lawn. Today he's doing my side as well, because my old mower is still in the repair shop. They patiently wait by the side of the commons for him to finish, though it takes some more time when he shuts down the mower to chat a bit with Mr. McConchie next door. When the children later resume their play, Mr. Gagliardi helps out with some batting instruction, guiding them with his usual care and patience.

When I think of "teaching values," I find it hard to keep my mind focused on university classrooms. The promulgation of moral principles in the classroom or lecture theater plays a real but overestimated role in the moral enculturation of young people; more important in my opinion is the human example set by teachers and other adults in the ordinary conduct of life. If morality could be instilled by teaching principles in the same way that mathematics can be taught through principles, then Moral Principles 101 would long since be required in every university. As things are, the moral education most people receive at the university is continuous with the moral example being set by Mr. Gagliardi for the children down on the commons: his demonstrated sense of communal responsibility, his kindness and friendliness, his willingness to take time to help them with their play. He's not sermonizing from a pulpit, sacred or secular, he's just mowing the lawn, and setting a decent adult example.

Ask me for an account of the principles which ought to underpin higher education today, and I'd turn back to East Prussia in the eighteenth century, specifically to Kant's answer to the question, What Is Enlightenment?, and to his even more developed thought reproduced as the digressive section 40 of his Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant saw three principles he believed ought to characterize the mind of the modern, enlightened individual. First, we must think for ourselves as individuals and never allow others to think for us, to prejudge for us. To let others do our thinking for us is the essence of prejudice, he says, the passive abandonment of active, independent thinking.

The second principle is "to think from the standpoint of everyone else." In moral evaluation, or scientific hypothesizing, or ordinary discourse, Kant believed we should struggle always to set aside our egocentric vantage-point on the world in order to see it in the eyes of others. This is part of his conception of disinterestedness; it's not cold objectivity, it's just trying to overcome one's own personal preoccupations and desire for personal advantage. It means that the scientist must ignore the desire to be proven personally right and judge a theory or hypothesis through the eyes of science as a discipline; the hypothesis must be a path to truth and not merely an asset to further a scientific career. It means that in making moral judgments about others we try to understand how they see their world and themselves in it. Kant also speaks of his second principle as a call for "enlarged" or "broadened" thinking. To be broad-minded in Kant's terms is to think beyond petty, personal preoccupations to a larger world of fact and opinion. (We should remind ourselves here that Kant himself had a capacious and hungry intellect. Beyond his famous metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology, he studied and wrote extensively on topics from astronomy to the characters of foreign cultures. He authored substantial physical geographies of North and South America, and in his great theory of art, the Critique of Judgment, repeatedly refers to the arts of tribal peoples, as though to shake his readers out of their Eurocentric prejudices and broaden their conception of what art might be. New Zealand philosophers know that he actually mentions the elegant facial tattoos of the Maori at one point in the Critique of Judgment, which is remarkable for a German text dating from the eighteenth century.)

Finally, Kant advises that our thinking must be consistent. He means by this that we should apply the same rational and moral principles to all domains of thought. We must not set one standard of behavior for ourselves and a different one for other people, one set of causal principles to explain natural events and another to account for miracles of our religion. Nor can we use keen logic to refute our opponents in argument and allow ourselves comfortable fallacies as it pleases us. Reason itself demands this, and we ignore the demand at the cost of self-serving incoherence.

Kant's credo for the Enlightenment was Sapere Aude--"Dare to think for yourself"--and the key to this goal is an unprejudiced, broad-minded, consistent approach to thinking. It's not a bad way to express the goal of university education as many academics would like to think of it, even today. For instance, in a speech given in 1997 at the University of Chicago for the benefit of incoming freshmen, John J. Mearsheimer argued in a Kantian spirit that the university's job was to promote the ability of students to think critically about any topic, to broaden their intellectual horizons, and to thereby give them greater self-awareness (this last goal sounds to me more like California than East Prussia). Mearsheimer added, to the horror of some, that he regards the university as essentially an amoral institution; that is, he believes the university ought not to be set up to promote any particular moral view of the world, except in its internal governance (morally condemning cheating, for example). "Amoral" is sometimes misused to mean "morally insensible" to the point of being "very immoral." Mearsheimer meant it in the proper sense that we might argue that the university should be asexual or apolitical.

Mearsheimer lays his greatest emphasis on the potential of a university education to teach critical thinking. As a brief example of how this activity can be accomplished in a classroom, I take some pleasure in recalling the most successful undergraduate course I ever taught in the field of political philosophy. It involved a close reading of a superb book by the University of Michigan philosopher Carl Cohen. The idea of Cohen's Four Systems is delightfully plain. It is divided into four sections of roughly equal length. Each section presents the most forceful and vivid argument Cohen can build in favor of each of four political systems: (1) Socialist Democracy (a left-wing, communitarian democracy such as you might find in a Nordic state), (2) Individualist Democracy (roughly American democracy with a strong libertarian bias), (3) Fascism (such as Italian fascism of the 1930s), and (4) Communism (presented as a plausibly practical ideal, without the fatal defects of the old Soviet system). Cohen's prose is lucid and the book has no concluding chapter to indicate which system is "right" or best. It is a brilliant invitation for students to try imaginatively to discover the attractions and advantages of political systems that will be foreign to them.

The energetic defense of contradictory ideas requires students to challenge their biases in favor of or against political systems that they may only understand through vague reputation, or via shallow media exposure. In this respect, Cohen's book fights prejudice, and forces students to think through political issues for themselves. What if communism really were the best system, and had never been given a real chance to work? Four Systems invites honest meditation on that question. In this way it encourages students to be more broad-minded, to see the political world from the standpoint of others. It gives them facts about political forms they will not have ever considered. Finally, it also cannot but enforce Kant's demand for consistency, especially in classroom discussion, because inconsistent standards or criteria for analysis become obvious when the systems in question are presented in Cohen's open-minded and even-handed manner.

What Carl Cohen's Four Systems does in its execution is to express the highest moral ideal for a modern university. Cohen does not recommend or exhort a morality from a secular pulpit; rather, as Toni Morrison puts it, his work stands as a paradigm of his own lived values as a teacher and scholar, both exemplifying and requiring the values of critical thinking, open-mindedness, and consistency.

In this respect, I must admit to surprise mixed with impatience when I hear Toni Morrison's rhetoric about "mandarin, exclusionary domination" in the university, the "mask of disinterest" (presumably a mandarin subterfuge), or that "scholarship is often, even habitually, entangled in or regulated by ideology." Complaints that disinterestedness is a myth, along with "objectivity" (presented within vaguely ironizing quotation marks), usually comes from academics seeking to justify their own ideological biases. The implicit argument is that since objectivity and disinterested inquiry are nonexistent, then we needn't even try to achieve them: go ahead and choose (and teach) your narrow-minded prejudice, since everybody does it anyway. It's a self-serving argument, but it's also curiously self-refuting: if all scholars do is brainwash their charges with unexamined ideology, why have universities in the first place?

In fact, the most mandarin and exclusionary departments in the modern university are not the sciences or disciplines that traditionally claim some measure of objectivity. They are rather the very departments where denunciations of "objectivity" and disinterestedness are most frequently voiced: humanities departments that traffic in literary theory and Marxified cultural studies. Here obfuscation and jargon reign, normally used to give the dazzle of science to political agendas: theorists mimic rigor and profundity, often to enshroud in verbal fog the banality of what is actually being said. Consider a recent winning sentence from the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

A better instance of the typically exclusionary strategy of self-aggrandizing scholarship would be hard to find. Whatever the sentence (by literary theorist Judith Butler) means, it certainly is not intended clearly to communicate anything at all. Personally, I get the feeling that we are supposed to lie prostrate before it, as though in the presence of a profound bearer of truth which we, simple souls, are not meant to understand.

I've expressed doubts that morality is ever adequately taught by the promulgation and enforcement of rules and principles. Carl Cohen's book sets a "value" example in the way it conducts argument and analysis that is vastly more impressive than if he sermonized about the importance of open-mindedness, critical argument, consistent standards, and so forth. And in general, if moral values are best instilled by the examples of individuals, what kind of exemplars or "role-models" do academics make? Consider two garden-variety virtues: kindness and courage. In personal impressions I have gained over the years, and in spite of the complaints we hear about the nastiness of university politics, I would say that academics in general rate very highly in their kindness toward colleagues and especially toward students. With courage, I'd take a dimmer view. For instance, in today's university it takes no courage whatsoever to oppose sexism and racism. But how about someone who opposes campus speech codes which are ostensibly imposed to combat sexism and racism? Such codes, with their chilling and stifling effect on open, robust debate among faculty and students, have often gone unopposed by faculty who will deplore them in private. Despite the extraordinary privilege of tenure, many have preferred not to speak out against codes--not wanting to "rock the boat" or make enemies: to get along you've got to go along. Academics are certainly no more brave than other citizens; considering tenure protections they enjoy, many strike me even as cowardly.

That academics are not moral paragons to set before students, but fallible and sometimes eccentric people, subject to the same virtues and vices we see everywhere, is not a point lost on novelists: from David Lodge's careerist Morris Zapp to Mr. Ramsey, the self-absorbed philosophy professor in To the Lighthouse, all the way back to George Eliot's desiccated, myopic Casaubon, fictional scholars are portrayed as everything from bumbling and ineffectual to downright evil. The most recent fiction, Elaine Showalter remarks, has tended to satirize them as "predators and poseurs." Of course, it's unfair (though novelists have never been "fair" to businessmen or politicians, either). But misfits and creeps show up so often in campus novels because they do represent types of people who do show up on campus.

As Toni Morrison points out, the university started to give up the religious mission of instilling moral values in the flowering of the Enlightenment. What she described as the present "state of arrest over values and ethics" in the university strikes me as entirely appropriate, and far more desirable than a situation where moralizing faculties set themselves up as beacons of moral virtue, quick to shove "values" down the throats of students. We can't have it both ways: a university that instructs in ideology as revealed doctrine while at the same time professing to teach the kind of intellectual independence that questions all doctrines (yes, including the value of intellectual independence itself). Open, uncommitted inquiry and intellectual independence is simply not compatible with unquestioning obedience to officially sanctioned and sponsored moral values in the university. You can have the University of Michigan as we understand it, or you can have Taliban U. You cannot have both.

Leave ethics, therefore, where it belongs, as an object of study in philosophy, history, and psychology departments. There's enormous benefit, intellectual and more broadly human, derived from examining the history of moral thinking and analyzing the theory beneath it. I note, however, that despite their hold on the subject and belief in its benefits, no philosopher I've ever known claimed that studying ethics is likely to make students better in the character and conduct of their lives. For that, I'd defer to Mr. Gagliardi.