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Me, I’m all for conflict. I’m coming out here as against reconciliation. I do not valorize reconciliation as a comprehensive goal, since conflict is a crucial part of intellectual—and personal—growth. I am a philosopher working in ethics, so I am writing about good and bad conflict, that is, productive and destructive conflict, in the academy.

Let me begin by sketching the academic life as a life, in utopian terms. By “utopian” I mean prepare for a fairy tale. The intellectual life might be spent pursuing a greater understanding of important questions, artifacts, and cultures, enriched by sustained work in one’s own discipline and by other disciplinary inquiries and agendas. Teaching would be a part of this sustained work, for it has profound value to the ongoing life of the discipline and to the society in which the university itself is embedded. The work of service to departments and programs would also be understood as vital and would be shared as part of our common life together. The university would support all this work with mechanisms of fair evaluation and support for innovation and by acknowledgment of the time and energy the life of the mind requires.

I do not think it possible to separate such a way of life from the possession of certain virtues, intellectual and moral. Intellectually, we certainly need attentiveness, imagination, courage, and scholarly truthfulness. But for the maintenance of academic community, we also need such social virtues as generosity, compassion, forbearance, and forgiveness. Persons with these qualities make trustworthy scholars and, beyond that, trustworthy persons capable of enacting a community that can generate the sorts of conflict so necessary for intellectual and social progress. Such necessary conflicts include differences of method, explanation, argument, and authority. Less comfortably, there must be differences of agenda and goal as well. It is my hope that these conflicts will breed better critical perspective, better “tools” for inquiry, better students, and better curricula. But this takes scholars willing and able to brave the stress of such disagreement. I would say that it takes individuals with the virtues. Without them, ruinous conflicts persist within and across departments and schools—conflicts generated by territorial safeguarding, self-aggrandizement, spitefulness, and vendetta. Imagine that.

But the onus for the sustenance of good intellectual life is not merely on individuals. Indeed, we shape persons through the social pressures to which we subject them. The university must also acknowledge and reward conduct—and conflict—which contributes to the sustenance of intellectual community. In canny institutional support for the academic life as a life, research would be valued, but not fetishized. Teaching also would be esteemed and rewarded. And service, that despised orphan child of the academic life, would also be accorded both greater recognition and understanding of the wisdom and time it requires. The inherent tensions in these activities would be acknowledged and adjudicated, so that colleagues might be rewarded for excellence in each of these, and not pressed, impossibly, to pursue all, all at once. Such institutional justice would facilitate a return to academic life as a life—that is, one to be lived and not simply endured. And it would produce this by acknowledgment of, and tolerance for, the lived conflicts embodied in these distinct but equally vital components of the life we live.

Without these institutional movements, what will be bred instead is a culture of boorish entrepreneurism, in which personal success is valued above all else. Of course, this would be not incompatible with a growing corporatization within the academy: faculty will be seen as producers, and the goal is to press them to produce as much as possible. Thus, there might be an ever-spiraling demand for research, a demand for simultaneous matching excellence in teaching, and crushing augmentation of service obligations. There would be little recognition of the tensions between these various responsibilities or of the brutality of their continued escalation. Such conflicts do us no good.

I am not saying we are living in this dystopia yet. Rather, what you hear from me today is a lover’s complaint: a complaint that the inestimable goods of the academic life, a life I love, are becoming harder to achieve. I do not want to reconcile myself to a diminished expectation. What the university can be is a society of individuals, individuals of talent and creativity and moral energy, coming together respectfully to foster interesting disagreements. And in this present time, it is the individuals in the university who sustain my hope and support my own endeavors. I would like us to think further about how to eliminate the conflicts that punish rather than create—that is, about how to avoid the community that is not one.

This essay is an edited version of Pamela M. Hall’s remarks from last January’s Reconciliation Symposium session on “Reconciliation in the Academy.”