What are the academic virtues?

Which virtues do we value? There are big cultural variations. For example, the virtue of honor does not have a place in American society at large (as Tamler Sommers discusses in his recent book on the topic), but it still seems prized in some subcultures, such as in sports (taking one for the team, etc). 

In The Lakota way, Marshall uses anecdotes and stories from his family and community to examine which virtues are valued among Lakota. Some of these do not have a clear equivalent in mainstream American culture. For example, humility is prized in the Lakota, but not in the US. Humility will not get you tenure, political office, or fame. By contrast, among Lakota, humility is a virtue that further amplifies and enhances other virtues. Crazy Horse showed leadership and courage, and those were amplified by his humility. 

Virtues can clash, both within and across cultures, leading to tensions in our ethical values, as Owen Flanagan details in Geography of Morals. This is clearly the case for academic culture. Academia has specific virtues and values which are sometimes in tension with the virtues we grew up with. For example, I grew up in a working-class environment in Belgium, where virtues like thrift, modesty (including a gendered version of this), and good manners were valued.

What are the academic virtues? With academic virtues I mean the dispositions that academics generally strive toward and that they find laudable in others, for example, that they mention in obituaries or when speaking of the recently deceased (Mark Alfano has systematic work on this, which I haven't done here, my sense is just an informal appraisal of how people speak of dead academic colleagues). Here's my attempt at fleshing them out. 

Ambition: Aristotle says in Nichomachean ethics that having the proper amount of ambition is good and laudable. You should not claw your way to the top at the expense of everyone else, but you should definitely not be too modest. My sense is that ambition can go very far in academia before it is regarded as improper. 

Excellence: This is probably the most tiresome and daunting of the academic virtues; in brief, you need to be better than other people. You need to perpetually be excellent, outdoing others both in in quality and (to some lesser extent, but still, also) quantity of work. There seems to be no upper limit to how excellent is excellent enough. 

Fortitude/perseverance: this is the hardest one to learn. Academics value fortitude in the face of adversity. If you are for years on the job market, working under difficult circumstances, you basically are expected to suck it up. People may be sympathetic and say how difficult the market is, still, they accept adversity as a reality that you will need to live with. Relatedly, any academic needs to accept multiple rejections (papers, grants, etc.) without grumbling, and just keep on trying and trying, until hopefully they succeed. 

Truthfulness: This is the virtue that guards against such practices as plagiarism, falsifying data, p-hacking, etc. You are expected not to mislead or knowingly falsify data or present work in a misleading fashion. In philosophy, which is less empirically driven, this is perhaps less a concern than in other fields. 

Magnanimity: In an Aristotelian sense, this is the virtue where you know you're worthy of honors and behave accordingly. I think that Aristotle's definition of this term comes pretty close to what I see is expected among academics of a certain seniority (especially "academic stars").

Benevolence: This comes close to the Mengzian idea of rén or humaneness/benevolence, where academics are supposed to show compassion, for instance, to graduate students or to people in precarious positions. While this virtue might not be immediately obvious, I've heard many people speak warmly of academics who showed compassion and were benevolent to them in a difficult period in their lives. 

Edited to add: Originality of thought: Marcus mentioned creativity as an important academic virtue, and while it is indeed a good thing to have, I wonder if we can be more specific to talk about originality of thought, as we don't hold it against academics to re-iterate the same idea for decades, for example. Originality of thought is ideas/concepts you come up with that are specific to you and that define you, in some cases, that are like a trade mark of you, e.g., rigid designators, Gettier cases, Frankfurt cases... While most academics do not have such a trade mark they're still expected (even already as job candidates) to have their specific, original idea that is unique to them. 

I am probably leaving several important virtues out, and maybe people here will disagree with some I listed. Some of these virtues have costs: fortitude/perseverance can lead to sunk costs where people are stuck in suboptimal adjuncting situations but they keep on going in the hope that they will get a job next time round. Magnanimity has problematic aspects of academic hero-worship, clubbishness among elite departments, etc. 

Still, to thrive in academia, you need to either internalize the academic virtues (i.e., the virtues prevalent in academia), or at the very least understand them. Understanding and emulation without internalizing gives rise to "code-switching" where you are in academic mode or in home mode. As Jennifer Morton argues in her recent Moving up without losing your way, this comes at some ethical cost. How to balance the academic virtues with virtues you value for yourself? 

Comments

[GB]

Interesting discussion. If those are the virtues, I would think some of the virtues are incompatible with others. For example, ambition today almost always requires making a name for yourself as the person associated with a certain view (at least one, maybe several). But being associated with a certain view requires not changing your commitment to the view. But what do you do if you come to see that your view isn't true, or unlikely to be true? Truthfulness requires abandoning it or weakening your commitment to it. But then your ambition is at stake insofar as you risk no longer being associated with that view.

These are loose thoughts, but connected to my idea that publishing can be an epistemic vice, because you're under dual pressure to maintain your thesis/argument 1) in the face of referees' resistance and 2) in light of the fact that you're now associated with the view. Whereas if you don't publish, those pressures disappear.

[poweredbyloathing]

- "we don't hold it against academics to re-iterate the same idea for decades, for example."

"We" may not, but I certainly do. I'd like to propose "having a functioning sense of shame" as an academic virtue we could all do more to cultivate.