An ethic of responsible custodianship in irresponsible times
People often seem confused at the stances I take, the battles I fight, the lines I won’t cross. I put together my code of institutional quixotism to explain it.
There are two underlying principles at play here.
- Universities are not owned. They are held in trust for the future.
- Any concession we are forced to make to the neo-liberal consensus must cost them dearly.
I first read Don Quixote as a twelve-year old. I don’t think I took the intended lesson from it. I never saw Quixote as a delusional fool. I saw him as an idealist who didn’t let the world tell him what it meant to be a person. A dreamer who held space so that a forgetful age would still remember the ideals he represented. Someone who chose battles not because they were winnable but because he thought them necessary. He is heroic because he fights for what he believes in despite the cost. The win, should it ever manifest, is incidental.
I’ve been compared to Don Quixote many times in my professional life by those who prefer the more common interpretation. I’ve decided to reclaim quixotism as a moral philosophy of character, not a cautionary tale of madness.
A note of caution is necessary regardless. This is a doctrine that comes from a place of deep privilege. It requires the security of tenure and an acceptance of career stasis. It’s not that I don’t want professional advancement. It’s that I don’t want it at the price at which it’s marked. I’m in a position to be able to accept that with no real downside to my life other than perceived status in a ludicrous hierarchy. I’d rather be able to live with myself.
Proprioception is the physiological quality of instinctively knowing where you are and where you can be. It’s knowing what is around you and how it relates to your presence. There is a psychological equivalent I call ethical proprioception. It’s knowing where you stand in a system, when you are being pushed, and from which direction. It tells you how hard you can push back while retaining your footing. It’s not a quality we naturally possess – it’s a quality we must choose to practice.
What ethical proprioception argues is that we do what we can, where we can, for as long as we can. Institutional quixotism inherently accepts our weakness and frailty. We get tired – so tired. A code being impossible to live up to doesn’t prevent us from trying. This is an aspirational ethic, not an unyielding one. Like Quixote, we fight not because it says something about the system, but because the fight says something about us.
What does this mean in practice?
That’s up to you – you need to act with ethical proprioception and you are the one who embodies your own sense of clarity. However, some things I try to do consistently, even if I know I fail often:
Scholarship
- Create and protect space for calm reflection
- Open up scholarship rather than close it off
- Prioritise meaning over glory
- Cultivate wisdom rather than just knowledge
- Reject fragility by valuing principled disagreement
- Treat meaningful critique as an expression of respect
- Protect the imaginative life of colleagues and students
- Downplay metrics in conversation
- Celebrate the weird, the speculative, the unfinished, the transgressive
Service
- Dismantle status hierarchies and reject pomposity
- Choose kindness even when systems forbid it
- Document and defuse harmful procedures
- Push against absurd bureaucratic interpretations
- Intercept unreasonable demands aimed at more vulnerable colleagues
- Ask the difficult ethical question others avoid
- Build redundancy into harmful systems
- Name the harm in the rooms where it’s happening
Community
- Be an umbrella against pressure, not a funnel for it
- Offer support beyond contractual obligations
- Value the time of others as much as your own
- Recognise humanity and integrity as their own form of achievement
- Amplify the voices of the sidelined
- Attest to people’s experiences of harm
- Refuse to let failure be leveraged as ammunition
- Induct early-career scholars into the culture of stewardship
- Be the mentor you wish you’d had
Self-Care
- Accept that the flame might falter sometimes, but never let it go out
- Forgive yourself for not winning the unwinnable battles
- Fight them anyway