The University's Responsibility for Moral Guidance

By Dallas Willard
Philosophy
University of Southern California

In his “President’s Report” for 1986-1989, Derek Bok, then president of Harvard University, made reference to some current, well-known moral failures in financial circles and in the political life of the nation. He wondered what universities might do to strengthen moral character in their graduates.

“Religious institutions,” he remarked, “no longer seem as able as they once were to impart basic values to the young. In these circumstances, universities, including Harvard, need to think hard about what they can do in the face of what many perceive as a widespread decline in ethical standards.” (For elaboration and references, see my THE DIVINE CONSPIRACY, pp. 2ff).

This statement must have appeared quite astonishing to faculty who heard it, and, in any case, no one would have been prepared, in their role as faculty, to give moral guidance in the form of correction to their students.

The moral character of the faculty had long since ceased to be of any relevance to their work, and moral instruction—that is, actually telling students what is right and wrong, who is good or evil, and trying to influence them toward the right and the good—would be regarded on all hands as screamingly out of place.

Being at least mildly disrespectable by old-fashioned standards had, by Bok’s time, become a qualification for being heard within the university context. Faculty and others wanted, in John Dewey’s memorable words, “to be good, but not goody.” Fear of being thought goody had then and has now an absolute lock on the actions of faculty.

This went hand-in-hand with the settled and socially enforced conviction that in the area of morals there was simply nothing to be taught. By the middle of the century, those “in the know” in faculty circles were certain that the issue of morals did not qualify as an area of knowledge but only as an area of feeling.

As a matter of fact the university constantly gives moral guidance to its students. What Bok should have said is that the universities give the wrong moral guidance to students.

Universities give instructions about what reality is and, accordingly, what human nature and life amounts to. This vision of reality and life—constantly hammered into the student through all that the university teaches by what it says and what it does—is what guides students in their thinking and choices about what to do and who to be.

The view of reality that is sponsored by the universities is that human beings are animals in a completely physical environment. Social life is just a function of DNA and brain chemistry. Well-being is success in terms of power, security and pleasure. Morality is only a matter of balancing the power, security and pleasure of others with our own. (Anyone who wishes to see a fairly standard presentation of how this is now worked out might read a recent book by Owen Flanagan, THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL.)

It is what we are that determines what we ought to do. If we are wrong about what we are we will be wrong about what we ought to do, and we will find a reason to do what we think we ought not to do (Doesn’t everyone do that?).

The university pretends not to give moral guidance officially because it (supposedly) does not preach and does not include moral instruction in its course content. Perhaps some faculty sincerely believe they are not giving “moral guidance.”

In fact, however, a moral instruction—who we are and what good people do--is constantly conveyed by how life is organized on the campus, by body language, tone of voice, what is selected for discussion and what is not, and what is rewarded and what is rebuked. It is a code as rigorous as any ever seen on earth, and you only have to get cross-wise of it to find that out.

But by pretending not to give moral guidance the university avoids having to rationally defend the moral guidance it gives. And this is convenient, because much of the moral guidance it gives (diversity, tolerance, radicalism) could find no possible basis except in a view of reality—the theistic one of the Judeo-Christian-Classical tradition—that it explicitly rejects.

On the other hand, no one has found out that the theistic understanding of reality from which the ethics of divine love (agape) arose and nourished itself is false. For all the shameful failures of “Christian” civilization, and for all the discoveries in special fields of knowledge that have been made since 1600, nothing fundamental about our knowledge of ultimate issues—what reality fundamentally is or who we are—has changed.

This claim requires much careful, detailed work to substantiate or render it plausible. That has to be a given for anyone really interested in and serious about these matters.

We cannot simply return to the Christian past of the universities; the honest, critical inquiry which the university at its best has always aspired to must prevail. The university must forsake its reactionary position against the worldview from which it arose and devote its attention to an open and free-minded scrutiny of the claims of Jesus Christ, placing them alongside the alternatives that now try to tell us who we are and what we ought to be.

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