A Sanctuary of Their Own: Intellectual Refugees in the Academy (review)

A Sanctuary of Their Own: Intellectual Refugees in the Academy, by Raphael Sassower. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 111 pp. $70.00 ($22.95)

In his new book, philosopher Raphael Sassower addresses some of the most fundamental questions of human existence in general and of organizational life in particular. He asks, what is the optimum balance between autonomy and external control, both for individuals and for organizations (in this case, for faculty and for their institutions)? Though the meaning of "optimum" is somewhat ambiguous, he appears to construe it as "productive" and "satisfied" for individuals and "effective" in the long run for institutions. Optimum, in addition, means "moral." Resolution of the issues, says philosopher Sassower, is undergirded by epistemological assumptions and organizational behavior presuppositions. He speaks primarily to the social psychology of the unit/environment interaction--between individuals and their organizations and organizations and their surround.

The framework for his discussion, though not explicitly stated by Sassower, is that all human "systems" (individual, group, or organization) have relatively open boundaries (except, perhaps, for certain paranoid schizophrenic individuals and for utopian societies). Hence, as Parsons (1951)--but not Sassower--notes, they must attend to cross-boundary problems of securing resources from the outside, distributing them efficiently inside, establishing salient, achievable goals, and integrating different parts of the system so they are coordinated in their efforts. Inasmuch as most individuals (as systems themselves) work in the context of organizational systems, for each to be effective there must be a symbiotic connection between them. These intersystem objectives and relationships, again, faculty-institution and institution-environment, are the substance of the book.

For Sassower, the balance between autonomy and external control in individual and institutional systems of higher education has shifted much too far to the outside. The result has been a movement away from individual autonomy and toward external control--e.g., by various publics and institutional managers. Moreover, the moral quality of these controlling external agents has, in Sassower's eyes, so deteriorated that they have compromised the ethical integrity of both institutions and individuals in higher education. In the book Sassower proposes remedies for this unhappy state of academic life.

The remedies, of course, are keyed to Sassower's judgments about the causes. Primary, according to the author, is the confusion among faculty as to what the university (by which he means to include all kinds of higher educational institutions) role in society should be and about how faculty should balance their teaching and research role obligations. The role ambiguity in turn stems from the principal reliance of academics on modernist, rationalist perspectives and not enough on qualitative, personal narratives. Sassower notes: "The voice of reason could bar potential actions and could confine us all to the cradle of rationality from which we exit only feet first. When there are exceptions, when individual academics do defy the rules of their games, they are in too small a minority, marginalized and patronized" (p. 13). Although various alternatives to traditional epistemological assumptions about higher education have arisen of late, Sassower suggests that these are not yet salient for most faculty. Consider, says the author, "poststructualism, deconstruction, and postmodernism, not to mention the various feminisms that permeate contemporary critiques" (p. 17).

Sassower's radical solution is to create societally subsidized, organizational "sanctuaries," where faculty may do as they wish, literally wasting time and assets if and when they deem it necessary, and "madly" [sic] pursuing their whimsical fancies and fantasies in the hope that they will find satisfaction for themselves and, not incidentally, contribute to a more humane society. Coincident with this "crazy" [sic] effort, faculty must commit themselves (presumably non-rationally) to addressing moral issues that arise out of such horrendous events as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Says Sassower:

I suggest that a discussion of the transformation of science and technology must be central to a discussion of the academy and its cultural role...