Leader Guide | Created Order and Disorder Module 6 | Order, Scholarship and the Academy

Leader prompts:

• Consulting the diagrams attached to this session may help with bringing the different functions of the university to mind.
• It may also be helpful for participants to reflect on their own time in the university (whether as a student or an academic) and consider how they have grown through it.
• Discovery of truth, knowledge of the world, knowledge of self, growth in virtue (through perseverance and the attainment of the academic virtues), exchange of ideas, friendship, empathy for others and appreciation of the ways in which they are different from us (in scholarship, particularly in the humanities and social sciences), love of neighbour by attending to that neighbour (whether as colleague or the as the subject of one’s research), promoting human flourishing through research outcomes (curing diseases, addressing social problems, technological advancement, etc), training students to be agents of flourishing in their future careers.
• Hopefully identifying these goods will motivate participants in their pursuit of them!

Leader prompts:

• Helpful categories to consider might be structure, characteristics, and cultural habits. Again, the diagrams of different parts of the academic life will be helpful in answering this question.
• For each domain, ask ‘why is it structured this way? ‘Who decides? Who benefits?’
• Some examples might include equitable admissions and hiring processes; effective and efficient administration; an engaged and diligent student body (who do not use AI to write their essays!); effective teaching which equips students for future study or work; high levels of academic virtues among the faculty; research outcomes which discern truth effectively and contribute to the common good; good work-life or study-life balance; effective pastoral care systems; fair distribution of resources; etc.

Leader prompts:

• It may be helpful to focus on one or two of the domains given in the diagrams. Consider how the academic virtues might be expressed in each.
• In some places flexibility or freedom will be appropriate, and some relationships will require a greater degree of structure.
• In some places hierarchy will be appropriate, but hierarchy should always be governed by the obligation to treat all people fraternally and as of equal value to oneself. This might be applicable when disciplining students, e.g. for academic misconduct. In other situations, hierarchy is inappropriate.
• If, as Biggar claims, God’s moral order is universal, then even if a certain behaviour is part of a university culture it may still be subject to critique.
• Having an advanced degree, a university post, a public research profile, or even just being perceived as intelligent or an authority are all things which confer status in most modern societies. We must be careful not to allow ourselves to feel or act like these things make us superior to those who do not have them. Having a high place in society does not make anyone more ontologically valuable than another person.

Leader prompts:

• This question asks participants to explore the flaws or the fallenness of the academic institution and in the scholarly enterprise.
• Biggar names insecurity, the lust to dominate or maintain social power, the desire to advance one’s career as factors which can hinder the discernment of truth among academics. Sin might prompt us to inflate the significance of our findings or exclude counter-examples so our papers look more impressive. It might prompt us to resist accepting evidence which disproves our theory because we don’t want to admit we were wrong. We might denigrate proponents of a rival theory, or refuse to accept when they have a valid point because we disagree with the rest of their ideas.

Leader prompts:

• It may be helpful to distinguish between two different types of interdisciplinarity: those that involve a field that makes normative or moral claims, and those that do not. Interdisciplinary work between biology and theology or philosophy (which make normative claims) would be an example of the first category, and interdisciplinary work between biology and engineering would be an example of the second.
• Some participants may reject the premise that the quest for truth is necessarily social, at least in respect to their field.
• Halliday: ‘It is a verity of sociolegal research that good intentions don’t always produce good laws, and good laws don’t always result in good outcomes. A gap invariably opens up between laws-on-the-books and law-in-action. … It appears to me that the ethicist and social scientist must be working together, as complementary disciplines. One elaborates the ideals of a Godly moral order. Legal and social science scholars on law will deploy these yardsticks to discover if laws and legal regulations, market and legal institutions, measure up to those ideals.’

Leader prompts:

• Kinds of uncharitable behaviour which we might want to counter: unnecessarily aggressive questioning in seminars or oral examinations; using ad hominem, strawman, or other fallacious arguments; exhibiting cultural tribalism or polarisation; unwillingness to admit one’s mistakes or to have our research challenged; cronyism and nepotism; penalising students who disagree with our positions; treating others as less important than ourselves.
• While making this point, Biggar writes of the need to inculcate and protect a culture of free speech, especially as it is practiced by people with whom we disagree. There might be various perspectives among participants in your group about the degree to which your context permits freedom of speech; you might also be in a context where freedom of expression is not a salient political value. You might wish to explore how these factors influence your answers to the prompts.
• Friedrichs models responding calmly and charitably to a challenge to his academic integrity.
• Encouraging charitable discourse might look like creating spaces where contentious topics can be discussed respectfully, as Gill has modelled. It might also impact our behaviour at conferences and seminars, or be something we demonstrate through our teaching. It may, on occasion, mean correcting a colleague who does not display this charitable behaviour.

Leader prompts:

• Biggar’s list includes:
  • Humility – acknowledging accurately the limits of one’s knowledge.
  • Docility – being teachable, or willing to admit to being wrong.
  • Patience – acknowledging that discerning truth takes time, and being gracious with those people and processes which take longer than we would like.
  • Justice – being fair in our depiction of others’ views.
  • Charity – being generous in our assessment of divergent or unwelcome views; treating people with grace.
  • Courage – being willing to assert unpopular truths, or to stand up for people or perspectives which are not treated fairly.
• Friedrichs gives a worked example of how they operate in practice.
• Wolterstorff suggests that Christian scholars experience two emotions in their work: ‘the emotion of awe before the intricacy and immensity of God’s creation, and before the ability of human beings to understand something of that intricacy and immensity and their ability themselves to create things of supreme worth, and the emotion of horror when considering what human beings have done to each other, to God’s creation, and to the Creator.’