Hedgehogs, foxes, and academic portfolios

This week I am participating in an academic portfolio institute facilitated by Peter Seldin, Beth Miller, and a number of faculty members at my institution. Good stuff! Together with several colleagues, I am now revising my academic dossier, re-writing my teaching philosophy, description of teaching innovations, summaries of research projects, highlights of my service work, and the like. The point is to find common threads in one’s work, the overall purpose that drives what we do, and use this to guide the next steps of our careers. You can read about it in Seldin and Miller’s book. Since I am starting a new position this summer, as assistant director for career planning at my institution’s faculty development center, I see the institute as a welcome opportunity to think about what’ll come next.

So I’ve been busy writing my way through my past career, working on the common vision behind it all. And it got me thinking, which is a good thing: Does there have to be one overarching vision, a common purpose, a grand plan behind all the different things I’ve been doing? Honest question! I can see the ayes as well as the nays. (And, yes, I know that voice votes use “ayes” and “nos”, but I think this text needs more “y”s.)

Aye: It is good to know that I’m doing what I’m doing for a purpose, and that the purpose is one that I agree with. (Maybe even one of my choice!) It is good to be able to say yes to things because they belong to what I’m doing and no to things because they don’t belong to what I’m doing. It’ll make life easier. Also, knowing my professional purpose will make it easier to decide what the things are that I want to do before retiring (yeah right, retirement!), and to get them done. Maybe I’ll even become a peak performing faculty!!

Nay: This is so not me. I’m an empirical political scientist who has specialized on U.S. courts, and do you know the topic of the article that I recently read and found really exciting? Comparative political theory! On my commute home, I listened to Philippe Jaroussky’s recording of Verlaine songs, and that was the most important thing I think I came across today (sorry, Seldin, Miller, and colleagues ). Actually, the most important thing wasn’t Jaroussky but something I’m not going to write about beyond the note that it overshadowed everything else. And that’s how life is: it is not streamlined according to purpose or plan, it is multi-centered and whirling apart!

But then. We need meaning. We want to see connections. Scientists value parsimony. Religions seek the unifying vision, force, or deity. We like consistency in our ethics and politics.

Isaiah Berlin, in an essay on Tolstoy, cites the poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” (Here is the first section of the essay, which states its premise.) According to Berlin, “hedgehogs” reduce their view of the world to one system, a few central principles, while “foxes” accept the variety, confusion, and contradiction of life. Berlin puts it much more nicely than I can summarize:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. (p. 2)

Berlin clearly sympathizes with the foxes and distrusts the hedgehogs. Ronald Dworkin, in one of his last books, Justice for Hedgehogs, provides a counterpoint and argues for a liberal perspective that establishes a philosophical foundation connecting ethics, justice, and law.

I don’t really have a conclusion here. No big picture that connects everything and makes meaning here. Sorry!