Influence of Expectation: the Academic as Agent of Authority

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Influence of Expectation: The Academic As Agent of Authority

Lance Kirby

Abstract: My intent is to demonstrate that the academic, in the role of public intellectual, has an ethical

obligation to consider carefully the views and opinions they may espouse in the public sphere as they

carry an authority with them into the public sphere that then carries over and legitimates thoseopinions. This is the effect intentional or not, I argue, because the public has certain expectations

concerning academe as a social institution and of the individuals it legitimizes. I have applied Max

Weber's conception of bureaucracy to the academy to help define and illustrate the nature of this

institutional authority or "prestige" as he terms it.

In this essay I will seek to argue that the teacher's action's outside the classroom have an1

influence through their perceived authority by the community, a form of bureaucratic authority as

defined by the nineteenth century sociologist Max Weber. In recent years many academics have made

ill-advised judgments upon everything from the inefficacy of vaccines, to the value of philosophy as an

academic discipline, to what is generally believed by consensus to be pseudo-science in general, and

pronounced upon them to the public at large in the role of public intellectuals. I will seek to show that

the teacher has a preconceived persona that elicits a trust arising from social expectations to which a

teacher is perhaps at the very least obligated to acknowledge. I shall first discuss the nature of a

teacher's authority in terms of its legitimacy as outlined by Weber, and the trust elicited in the

community by the respect for its legitimizing institution, a trust derived from expectations of a set of

preconceived behaviors and performance. It is through this trust or “prestige” as I will show, that the

communities expectations for the academic role predisposes them to interpret any view presented by

the teacher as the authoritative view and thus, a role not to be taken lightly when entering the public

sphere.

I. Legitimate Authority

1 Through out this essay teacher and academic will be used interchangeably.



The responsibilities of the academic must first be addressed from the perspective of authority

and legitimacy. The teacher represents authority, and that authority is granted to the teacher by an

institution which legitimizes it. This much can be agreed upon as given. If this were not the case then

anyone might teach without regard to accuracy or proper knowledge of the topic to be taught, and

diplomas would count as less than air. Of course, credentials are not an absolute requirement to teach,

as the act of teaching itself is separate from the role of teacher. As I will explain, credentials are a

symbolic embodiment of a community's trust in one's abilities, and thus carries with it the weight of the

larger institutional authority.

Traditionally the teacher has held a status in the community of respectability through trust

shared with professions of similar regard, such as the police officer and the doctor. All of these

professions acquire the same legitimized authority from their respective institutions. It is of course this

legitimized authority which in turn grants them respectability through trust.

Now I must examine the nature of this trust:

If we follow the helpful descriptive characterization of legitimate authority outlined by Max

Weber my meaning may appear more clear. In his book, The Theory of Social and Economic

Organization, he argues: “In general, it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every system of

authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of

which persons exercising authority are lent prestige. ”2

As with the examples already presented, trust in this instance, is given by a community out of a

2 Weber, M., Parsons, T., & Henderson, A. (1964). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. pp. 381-82.



respect for their legitimizing institutions, as we have come to certain expectations of, for lack of a

better term, quality control from said institutions. They are thus, in Weber's conception, “lent prestige”

by this association. In other words, society has developed/evolved universally agreed upon standards

of conduct and performance which these professions are expected to exhibit. Without those

expectations there would be no trust that those professions were reliable, and trust, which is the

currency of a society's institutions, would quickly be devalued if not rendered worthless. Thus, to be a

teacher is to imply certain presupposed expectations on the part of students and the larger society

outside the classroom as a whole. This “prestige” is not a quality that can be surrendered at the end of

the teaching day but is carried by the teacher with the full weight of this institutional authority in

perpetuity, wherever they may go. As I will explain, this authority carries a common sense ethical

consideration on the part of the teacher and the view's they may endorse which always are given a

greater credibility by this institutional association.

What are these expectations?:

Following Weber's lead, we may view a teacher's authority as the outgrowth of the authority of

their larger legitimizing institution. Said institution grants the individual the authority to teach by

whatever means the legitimizing institution deems a necessity, e. g. a doctoral degree. Under these

terms therefore, in the eye's of the legitimizing institution, only individuals who have obtained such

legitimation may be considered teachers in this formal sense. Thus, behind every legitimized teacher

stands the same authority granted to the police officer, and the doctor, and thus, one is obliged to trust



as one may the larger legitimizing institutions behind them. Whether we trust them on an individual3

personal level or not is not the issue here, but rather the implied communal trust from expectation.

In Weberian terms the teacher is a kind of bureaucrat, and as such is a small representative of a

larger structure. This characterization is suitable in many senses with modern academe:4

“(a) a clearly defined sphere of competence subject to impersonal rules,

(b) a rational ordering of relations of superiority and inferiority,

(c) a regular system of appointment and promotion on the basis of free contract,

(d) technical training as a regular requirement,

(e) fixed salaries, in the type case paid in money.”5

Though of course not an exact one to one correlation, the rolls are similar enough to suffice.

To help further illustrate with a more palpable example, the army, in its very essence a bureaucracy,

functions by a chain of command where the general at the top distributes his authority through his

subordinates, and finally to the lowly private. The teacher in this sense is thus a part of a machine, and

as such cannot act independently without bringing this communal expectation with them. In their

bureaucratic role as teacher they stand outside the community at large and reflect back upon the larger

machine of which they are a part.

3Again, I should concede here that to be a teacher does not require credentials as such, only the special nature of the

academic who is imbued with such credentials are viewed as such by the legitimizing institution and thus imbued with

“prestige” by the community as well.4 The characterization of which is highly telling in light of the current trend of corporatizing modern universities:

“Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge. This is the feature of it

which makes it specifically rational. This consists on the one hand in technical knowledge which, by itself, is sufficient to

ensure it a position of extraordinary power. But in addition to this, bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who

make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the

service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of

documentary material peculiar to themselves. While not peculiar to bureaucratic organizations, the concept of ‘official

secrets’ is certainly typical of them. It stands in relation to technical knowledge in somewhat the same position as

commercial secrets do to technological training. It is a product of the striving for power.” Ibid. p. 339.5 Ibid. p. 343.



However, contrary to Weber, who characterizes bureaucracy as: “...something distinct from the

sphere of private life.” I contend that the persona of the academic, as I will explore below, stands as6

an exception to this general rule. The special nature of the teacher, as I have already stated, is one that

holds an authority or “prestige.” The authority is of a special kind which is embodied in the person

who holds it and cannot be relinquished outside the academic setting. The doctor is always a doctor

and the police officer is always a police officer on duty or off, and this is the responsibility one is

invested with upon taking up the role.

II. The Teacher's Persona and the Community

Every academic is a specialist, and in academic terms this is her authority. However, such a

distinction is invisible to the larger public which endows the term “academic” or “professor” with a

larger meaning. However mislead the community may be to hold every academic to this higher level

of competency, there remain good reasons for this understandable deference as I will explain. Despite

the myriad academic disciplines and their separate spheres of influence, all are united in that their

practitioners are all instructed with a shared pedagogy and a regulated process that admits of few

surprises. The heart of this pedagogy, at least at the undergraduate level, is founded upon a few core

principal skills, chief among which are: critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. These core7

skills are typically the primary means of instruction throughout a student's academic career, beginning

at the elementary level, and continuing till the end of high school in the United States. At the

commencement of their college career these skills are often reinforced again in an introductory

6 From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946) p. 197.7 Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago

Press, 2011), p. 108.



composition class.

If the student progresses through the undergraduate to the graduate level they will hopefully

have passed many classes requiring ever more subtle and sophisticated refinements of these skills so, at

the end of the process we may reasonably expect an individual who has brought these skills to a

superior level. It is with this expectation that the individual is granted the degree of doctor. And,

though granted in a specific area of study, it is always underpinned with the assumptions and traditions

of a liberal education that implies broad learning and shared communal values of accepted pedagogy

and peer review. In the eyes of the community therefore, the academic is thus viewed as one whose

work is that of “thinking” in a broad sense. He or she is under an expectation of being, if not a clear,8

than at least a superior thinker, regardless of how much actual original thought an academic may in

reality produce. In terms of those academics in tenure-track positions, the requirements of academic

publication reinforces this view, even if it validates it only occasionally by the actual material

published. This is in relative terms a recent development of course, but its recentness does not

invalidate the larger claim of the academics perception as one whose business it is to think, if only in

this generic sense.

Such expectations are perfectly within the rights of the community to hold, and such authority

again, is the basis of the academics position within society to teach. These expectations are not those

of the community outside academe alone however, but are fostered by the institutions and the

8 Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2004), p. 3.



academics themselves. They are also the shared expectations of each new group of students to be

admitted into university life.

III. Conclusion

We have attempted briefly to demonstrate in these few pages that a teacher has a persona, with

certain expectations from the community. That those expectations are perfectly reasonable to hold in

light of the nature of teaching, which we argued is a methodology for the refinement of thinking, at

least as it is perceived from the outside community. From this we conclude that the nature of teaching

is one which holds a high authority in the community and that with this authority it is implied its

practitioners uphold a high standard of character as representatives of that authority and the influence it

elicits through their capacity as teachers over the shaping of opinion within the community, a sphere of

influence created through expectation. If this conclusion is thus accepted it would imply at the very

least that the academic has an ethical responsibility for the opinions they may hold upon any issue

publicly, and should be more mindful than the regular citizen of the legitimizing factor that their

authority brings to those opinions and their influence.9

9An excellent illustration of what I mean by this ethical responsibility can be found at Massimo Pigliucci's blog: “Rationally

Speaking: Lawrence Krauss: Another Physicist with an Anti-philosophy Complex.” (2012, April 25).

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html.

“...here Krauss is forced to reveal his anti-intellectualism, and even... his intellectual dishonesty: “‘Well, yeah, I mean, look

I was being provocative, as I tend to do every now and then in order to get people's attention.’” Oh really? This from

someone who later on in the same interview claims that “‘if you’re writing for the public, the one thing you can’t do is

overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you.’” Indeed people are going to believe you, Prof. Krauss,

and that’s a shame, at least when you talk about philosophy.”



References

Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses .

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Graff, G. (2003). Clueless in academe: How schooling obscures the life of the mind . New

Haven: Yale University Press.

Rationally Speaking: Lawrence Krauss: another physicist with an anti-philosophy complex.

(2012, April 25). Retrieved from

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html

Weber, M., Parsons, T., & Henderson, A. (1964). The Theory of Social and Economic

Organization .

Weber, M., In Gerth, H. H., & Mills, C. W. (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in sociology .

New York: Oxford University Press.

Weber, M., In Parsons, T., & Henderson, A. M. (1964). The theory of social and economic

organization .

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html



Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Kristof Vanhoutte for commenting upon an earlier version of this essay.

Influence of Expectation: the Academic as Agent of Authority

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