Philosophy, Education, and the Art of Leadership*

*Editor’s Note: This was a speech given by the author to a Special Seminar under the current title chaired by Editor Suncrates, 18 August, 1987, at the First International Symposium on Thomé H. Fang’s Philosophy, Taipei. The speaker was introduced as a paradigm of academic leadership for over half a century. In the concluding session he was well justisfiably hailed by historian Orient Lee as the Dean of American Philosophy!

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this overly generous presentation. I think you arouse expectations that no one, certainly not I, could live up to in terms of the founding and developing of certain departments of Philosophy. I hope I did something to help to develop programs at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Washington University, and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. And the last time I went to Washington University, for example, I found that they have my picture as former chairman of the department alongside that of Professor Arthur 0. Lovejoy, who preceded me by some 48 years there. It is true, moreover, that the doctoral program of their department was founded under my leadership. The topic of today’s seminar I learned shortly after getting off the plane here. Fortunately, however, it is an excellent topic for this group, which, as I see from looking around the room, contains many experienced administrators and leaders in philosophy and education. I shall be happy to count on their wisdom for help with this discussion. I shall first make a fairly brief opening statement, and after that, I hope the rest of you will be carrying most of the discussion.

The topic for our seminar "Philosophy, Education, and the Art of Leader-ship," is a very important one on which philosophers in the West since Plato and in the East at least since Confucius have had much of value to contribute. In connection with my presentation on "Thomé H. Fang and the Spirit of Chinese Philosophy" I touched on Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist concerns with moral, aesthetic, and religious education. In the West we are all familiar with Plato’s famous program as set forth in the Republic for educating philosophers to become leaders in society and philosopher-kings, or rulers in government. Plato’s insistence that the guardians or rulers of a nation should be educated people who make use of expert knowledge in tackling national problems and in deciding questions of better or worse has formed the point of departure for many discussions of our topic, and of course we have much to learn from him, whatever reservations we may have concerning such features of his position as his account of the place of the arts in society. I think our artist friends understandably have misgivings on his notion that although art is very important, the net result of giving it free expression would be to seduce people away from the standards he wants to set for his guardians. I think we can do better on that particular aspect of his account. From my point of view, however, we may have even more to learn from such other accounts as that of John Dewey. I share the latter’s notion that the basic aim of education is to help us to grow as persons, and central for this end is more effective use of reflective inquiry, or scientific method as some prefer to call it, and broader and deeper appreciation of quality in nature and the arts, or of what some refer to as the intrinsic values of experience, ones which are worth having on their own account. Education in this sense is not merely preparation for a distant future. Nor is it simply an instrument. Rather, properly carried out, it is intrinsically valuable. Growing is an experience with unique intrinsic values.

But perhaps a further word on the first of these two essential aspects of human growth is in order, at least to help indicate where I am coming from. Hu Shih, for example, is one of those who preferred to call problem solving scientific method, for he felt correctly that the sciences had been conspicuously successful in applying intelligence to overcoming problems or difficulties; but I like the more general term, reflective inquiry, better, because it seems to me that the field of knowledge is broader than science, important as science indeed is. Using the term scientific method in this connection, in German fashion, may well suggest a more restricted sense of knowledge or inquiry than we would want to have. In German, of course, they use science in a very broad sense to include virtually all forms of systematic knowledge. In this sense they would have some advantage over our more usual narrower conceptions of science, but for most of us speaking in terms of reflective inquiry may be less confusing.

In formulating the title of our seminar, however, the organizers of this symposium may well have had in mind a bit more restricted account, namely, what we as philosophers can contribute to leadership in education. In terms of Plato’s philosopher-kings, we may nonetheless know that in recent times the great Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan served as president of his country as well as for many years as its leading philosopher. And other instances, happily, can be cited. But even if we center attention primarily on the role of philosophers in educational leadership, this too is no simple matter, for the leadership may take many forms, any of which might be appropriate for our discussion. I propose, however to begin with philosophers as departmental chairs, heads or directors of institutes, deans, academic vice-presidents or provosts, presidents or heads of academic institutions, or perhaps members of boards of trustees or outside governing groups for educational institutions.

In this connection, Professors Shu-hsien Liu and George Sun may recall my colleague Professor Willis Moore served on the Board of’ Trustees for my own university, from my point of view for too short a period; but out, institution never had a better board member than in the time he served. It made it possible for the board to make decisions with the aid of at least one member who knew from personal experience what goes on in a university, which I think is quite helpful.

There is, however, more to be said about this. It seems to me that in spite of some lamentable exceptions, the training, background, and temperament of philosophers in admirably qualify them for educational leadership in a number of respects (Dr. Orient Lee [who had attended Henri Bergson’s lectures in Paris] as a historian will forgive me for bias in favor of philosophers. I think historians do very well also, because both historians and philosophers tend to benefit from each other and take the large view of things.) At any rate, the traditional training of philosophers aims at breadth. Philosophers of science, for instance, normally have some background in the sciences. Teachers of aesthetics, or philosophy of art, commonly have a lively interest in and some familiarity with literature and the other arts. Teachers of introductory problems courses in our field are led to acquire knowledge of various outside fields. Incidentally, there is perhaps no course in our field more difficult to teach properly than the introductory problems course. Sometimes we turn this course over to our junior colleagues, and they bring a certain liveliness and rapport with students that sometimes senior colleagues may lack, but I think there is much to be said for having mature scholar-teachers teach the introductory problems course. But my initial concern in bringing this up here was that teachers of this course are led to acquire knowledge of various outside fields to deal adequately with problems concerning the nature of the world and our place in it, the ways of knowing, morals and ethics, and so on down the line.

To cite yet another instance, however, teachers of elementary logic become sensitive to problems of formulating statements clearly and unambiguously, developing their implications, and explaining the common ways of falling into error; and these techniques often make philosophers valuable members of interdisciplinary policy committees. Quite frequently, moreover, professional philosophers have at least a strong minor in some field other than philosophy; and these days a host of philosophy of programs, which in our country at least seem to be proliferating all over the place — philosophy of education, philosophy of law, philosophy of medicine and the health sciences, and a number of others — have led many of us philosophers to take degrees in some of these fields and in the process have broadened the outlook of the rest of us.

A second important feature of philosophic training is that it aims at making effective use of reflective inquiry and rational techniques for solving problems. Dialogue, of course, is central for philosophy, and I am convinced that, with all its shortcomings, it is still a better of dealing with differences than confrontations or resorts to force. As long as we are talking, there is hope of resolving our differences or, if not solving them, learning to live fruitfully with them. And dialogue is also crucial for interdisciplinary problems within a university. For that matter, of course, one strength of conferences such as this one is that they enable us to enter into fruitful dialogue with colleagues from other countries and vastly different perspectives, and, parenthetically, I think Professor Thomé Fang would have been delighted to participate in a conference of this sort, for he too was convinced of the value and strong need for dialogue. In spite of the difficulties of communication at international congresses because of the different languages involved, I think we learn a very great deal from conferences of this sort. We get fresh or different perspectives that encourage us to think of our problems at home from a somewhat different vantage point. And it is amazing how sometimes upon coming back to old problems that we have been struggling with for a colleagues at a conference such as this gives us just what we need to handle one or more of these problems. In particular, attending international philosophical symposia enables us to go back home better prepared to deal with interdisciplinary problems in our own institution.

In the third place, philosophical training encourages appreciation of the contributions, actual or potential, of each of the major fields of learning, for philosophy needs all of them. In this regard, once more there is a parallel philosophy and history because history also has to deal with all of them, and it seems to me that people in history and philosophy do have to do something to train for leadership and to prepare for positions of leadership. Also, philosophic training aims at seeing things in context rather than simply in absolute or general terms. Putting a problem or issue in context frequently goes a long way toward resolving it. We have been noting throughout the conference how much Thomé Fang emphasized the importance of context and his insistence that a problem can not be solved once and for all in simply general terms, since each problem turns out to be not just one problem but a sequence of problems.

Well, perhaps some may think that I overemphasize what the training of philosophers, in my view, can contribute to educational leadership, but it seems to me that such training has yet other significant values. At this point, however, I shall cite only one more, namely, the fact that it tries to achieve comprehensive vision in terms of a world view or a method or way of speaking which is applicable across disciplines. I used to put this exclusively in terms of world-views, but some of my philosophical colleagues have other ways of attempting to achieve comprehensive vision. At Oxford University, for example, some prefer to put it in terms of ways of speaking, and they hold that some ways of speaking are applicable on a more general basis. They are also concerned with having modes of speaking which enable them to communicate with philosophers of different points of view. They even grant that metaphysical language may serve useful purposes. In that connection I cannot forebear mentioning that I am doing a volume on Sir Alfred J. Ayer for our Library of Living Philosophers, and I think he was chosen largely because of his Language, Truth and Logic, which sets forth a kind of logical positivism and proclaims that metaphysics is utter nonsense, something to be avoided at all costs. But this was in the 1930s, and by the 1950s the Oxford analysts, Ayer among them, were noting that not all metaphysics is bad. If one does it in the Oxford manner, it might be acceptable. So world views have a way of finding their way back into the scene even when a particular philosophical method or philosophical system tries to get rid of it. At any rate, traditionally philosophers have sought to make comprehensive sense of our world and our place in it. This does not always take the form of developing a metaphysical system. It may be done in various ways, but still the fact that we do try to make comprehensive sense is one reason why we need our colleagues in other fields and why we see the value of what people in the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities do. I mention this mainly for its value for us as philosophers, but an important by-product is that it helps make philosophers better educational leaders.

In discussing the art of educational leadership, laying down hard and fast rules does not seem to me the way to go about it. Rather, I think, the best we can do in this regard is to suggest some working hypotheses and try to take them in appropriate context. The arts provide some useful analogies. Most artists agree that there is no formula or set of rules which guarantee a great work of art. If we lay down fixed rules, the product very frequently is a form of artistic scholasticism. It loses the liveliness that makes for great art so that artists almost invariably insist that laying down rules is the wrong way to do it. The same is true for leadership. If you try to draw up easy rules for how to be a great leader, almost always the product is not one of the better leaders. Having said that I am not going to attempt to lay down rules, I shall instead throw out a few suggestions or hypotheses we can test in experience.

The first is that it is well for who have just become administrators to realize that all of us are leaders in some respects. Accordingly, the new administrators do not have to do everything for themselves. Rather they should ask people in their departments, schools, divisions, and universities for suggestions and take advantage of the suggestions and the accumulated wisdom of the members of the group. In this connection, as I have already indicated, many of the members of this symposium are very experienced administrators, wise in the art of educational leadership, and our seminar group can learn from them.

My second suggestion is that administrators should not forget that scholar-teachers and students are focal for a university. I have been distressed to find that some able teachers who become administrators, after a short while seem to forget about scholarship and teaching and become so absorbed in the paper work so necessary for most administrative positions, that they forget that scholarship and students are the reason why educational institutions exist. A primary reason for having administrators is to facilitate the teaching and scholarly activities of the faculty and the learning of the students. Accordingly, a good administrator is one who has a measure of success in facilitating these activities; and an important reason why professors are willing to curtail their own scholarly work to become administrators is the satisfaction they derive from seeing how much they can accomplish in connection with this facilitation process. I feel confident most of the experienced administrators I see around the table will agree that this is a primary reason for their continuing with administrative work.

In the third place, good administrators are more concerned with developing, or maintaining good academic programs, recruiting and retaining good professors, and bringing in and retaining good students than in making a name for themselves. If they succeed in achieving these goals, others will hear of their accomplishments. As I do not need to tell the members of this group, good administrators are quick to give credit for good ideas faculty or students may contribute. Unless you have a situation which encourages faculty and students to make suggestions to the administration, administrative activities are not going to go as well as they might otherwise.

Fourthly, effective administrators must be willing to work hard and carry out efficiently the mass of administrative paper work that goes these days with smooth functioning of a university and yet not become so immersed in it that they lose sight of the central educational tasks of liberal arts and sciences in a university or college worthy of the name. On this score, however, a word in defense of administrators is in order. Many faculty members do not at first realize what a heavy load administrators carry. In fact they sometimes wonder whether there is any reason for having administrators. I think if they did not have them for a while, enough disruptions of their work would ensue that they would soon see why we have administrators.

In the fifth place, responsible administrators need to set up and maintain clear lines of communication with faculty and students concerning their common interests. In the short run it may appear to the new administrators that the basic work of the unit can be performed more efficiently with a minimum of consultation in view of the time it takes, but in the long run better results can be had through consultation even if it does take more time. Improved faculty and student morale outweigh the inconvenience and extra time required for consultation. Administrators who keep this in mind are likely to be those who facilitate most helpfully the operations of their university or colleges.

As a sixth and final suggestion, it seems to me that a principle drawn from aesthetics and the arts is applicable to educational leadership. This is the Principle of Optimal Effect. I suggest that administrators in evaluating programs and projects do well to ask whether, under the circumstances, they will contribute to optimal functioning of the unit as a whole. If not, are there feasible alternatives which will more nearly realize this end?

In conclusion, I have made a number of suggestions, perhaps too many, concerning philosophy, education, and the art of leadership. Now it is time to hear how you think our topic should be interpreted. What do you understand by the three central terms, "philosophy," "education," and "the art of leadership?" What can philosophers bring to educational leadership? How do you interpret the art of educational leadership? What principles, if any, seem to you to apply in this art? What other relevant questions or comments do you have in connection with our topic?