Academia’s Big Five: a normative taxonomy for the epistemic responsibilities of universities

Introduction

In this paper, we propose a normative taxonomy of what we call the ‘Big Five’ in academia: five core epistemic responsibilities of universities. Epistemic responsibilities are responsibilities that have to do with the attainment of knowledge, understanding, insight, rationality, and explanation. This is not to deny that universities have other important responsibilities. Among them are moral responsibilities (like providing safe environments for students and faculty, and taking care of the wellbeing of human and animal test subjects, treating native people fairly); legal responsibilities; financial responsibilities; social responsibilities (like producing useful technologies and effective medical interventions), and more¹. However, all institutions and companies have various responsibilities of these kinds, not only universities. What sets universities apart from many other organizations and institutions is that their main goals are epistemic in nature: to produce knowledge, to understand, to gain insight into phenomena, and so on. That is why we focus on epistemic responsibilities in this paper.

For each epistemic responsibility, we distinguish five levels describing the extent to which a university meets that responsibility or strives to do so. Our proposed taxonomy is meant as a tool to assess the degree to which a university meets its core epistemic responsibilities. The format we use is inspired by the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines² that journals can use to describe the extent to which they meet the goals of Open Science.

The taxonomy proposed here is a product of two research projects funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation: Science beyond Scientism (2013–2016) and The Epistemic Responsibilities of the University (2016–2019)³. The first project explored which questions science can and which ones it cannot address, as well as whether natural sciences are the only reliable source of knowledge. The second project explored what the core epistemic responsibilities of universities are, given various contemporary challenges, such as hypercompetition, publication pressure, the marginalization of the humanities, and the commercialization of the university⁴. In both projects, philosophers worked in close cooperation with biomedical and social scientists. We present this as work in progress, as a starting point for gaining experience with using the taxonomy and consensus building for a more mature version. We will do so in a third project entitled Epistemic Progress in the University (2020–2023) that was recently funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

This paper is structured as follows. First, we provide our proposed taxonomy by specifying academia’s Big Five epistemic responsibilities and detailing five levels of meeting them (§2). After that, we argue that these are indeed five core epistemic responsibilities of universities (§3). Finally, we lay out which future steps we aim to take to test, amend, and implement the taxonomy (§4).

A normative taxonomy

Our proposal distinguishes five epistemic responsibilities (see Table 1). We assume each to be of more or less equal importance, so the order in which we present them is not hierarchical. The attainment levels I through V for each responsibility, however, are meant hierarchically: each level presents a more advanced stage of meeting the responsibility at issue. We think of these responsibilities as attaching primarily to entire universities. So, in order to meet them, each responsibility should have consequences systematically, throughout the university and its faculties, departments, institutes, or other organizational parts. If a university strives to teach for intellectual virtue at the highest level, for example, students throughout the university should be instructed in what these virtues are and stimulated to cultivate them through virtue-building teaching activities.

This doesn’t mean that there cannot be an internal division of labor when it comes to meeting epistemic responsibilities: giving humanistic inquiry a proper place will primarily fall on humanities departments, although humanities scholars will teach in other departments and collaborate with scientists in other departments as well when a university strives for level V of this responsibility. Similarly, not all departments and research teams will have to serve society in the same way or to an equal degree. There will be significant differences between, say, the theoretical physicists and the nutrition scientists.

We will now clarify each responsibility briefly and motivate why it belongs on the list of epistemic responsibilities of universities.

1. To foster research integrity. Research integrity is fostered by getting rid of perverse incentives, stimulating good mentoring, having an open research climate, and so on. Detrimental research practices include both rare major research misbehaviors like fabrication of data and highly prevalent minor misbehaviors like selective reporting⁵. By ‘responsible conduct of research’ we mean behavior that meets the principles and standards for good research, as laid out in major codes of conduct for research integrity⁶. This can be done on the level of individual scholars, but also that of groups, such as research teams or departments. Ideally, research integrity is promoted for both individuals and groups.

The results of scientific and scholarly research play a crucial role in modern society. Universities carry out a substantial part of this research and educate and train researchers who perform the studies and apply the results. To ensure the validity and trustworthiness of findings research needs to be performed according to the principles and standards for research integrity. In recent years it has become painfully evident that there is substantial room for improvement in the level of compliance to these principles and standards⁷. Surveys indicate that 2% of researchers admit to having fabricated or falsified data themselves, while one third says that they have been engaged in less serious questionable research practices⁸. Only 10 – 40% of study results turn out to be reproducible when the study is repeated⁹. This is often due to small sample sizes, selective reporting, and other questionable research practices¹⁰. Although these phenomena are understudied, it is to be expected that more transparency¹¹ and specifically preregistration¹² of study protocols and data analysis plans will lead to improvements. This epistemic responsibility entails not only the adoption of transparency and educating staff and students in responsible conduct of research, but also removing perverse incentives from the ways in which researchers are assessed¹³ and performing research on research to strengthen the evidence base for optimizing research integrity.

2. To teach for intellectual virtue. Among the intellectual virtues are: openmindedness, attentiveness, charitableness, intellectual courage, creativity, curiosity, discernment, honesty, intellectual humility, objectivity, parsimony, perseverance, studiousness, wisdom¹⁴. Educating for intellectual virtues is part of the traditional ideal of Bildung. Moral virtues, such as generosity, kindness, or benevolence, may well also be important and universities might have a responsibility to cultivate them, but, if so, this isn’t an epistemic responsibility. When universities choose to teach for intellectual virtues, they can do so, minimally, by merely bringing up these virtues in educational settings; or they can explore them through case studies of intellectually virtuous scientists and scholars and their contributions to epistemic progress, or, most advanced, they can actively cultivate intellectual virtues in their students by having them mimick and practice intellectually virtuous behavior. Developing intellectual virtues requires not merely instruction about virtues or reflection on them, but also training and exercise¹⁵.

Teaching for intellectual virtues is a responsibility of universities almost by definition. Intellectual virtues are broadly understood as qualities that make someone a well-trained thinker or inquirer¹⁶. Hence, the two main tasks of universities, research and teaching, are both served by teaching for intellectual virtue. By aiming to train students to become skilled thinkers (perhaps among other things), universities set an ambitious goal for education. Similarly, academic research also needs skilled thinkers. Moreover, the intellectual virtues are widely relevant outside the university: in politics, journalism, medicine, law, law enforcement, social work – it’s hard to think of any sphere of life were good, analytical, critical, clearheaded, creative, or otherwise high quality thinking wouldn’t matter.

3. To address the big questions of life. By ‘the big questions’ we mean such questions as: What is the origin and ultimate destination of all that exists? What is the future of the earth’s ecosystem? What is consciousness? Do humans have free will? Is there (objective) good and evil? Can the human mind understand the world and, if so, how? Does life have meaning? Does God exist? How does science relate to religion? These are universal questions in the sense that they have been asked in most cultures and societies throughout history, up to the present; they are not restricted to local concerns or specific academic disciplines.

Addressing the big questions of life is an epistemic responsibility of the university for a number of reasons. First, these questions are too important to be left entirely to non-academics. The big questions are everyone’s concern, academics included. Second, many academics themselves are greatly interested in these questions, even if their specialized science and scholarship do not or even cannot answer them. Third, clarifying and attempting to answer these questions affects how we look at ourselves and what we deem important. Fourth, several big questions are factual questions – highly abstract and large scale, but factual nonetheless. They are not questions about tastes or preferences. It seems like they admit of true or false answers. So, at least in principle, they fall within the purview of scientific and humanistic inquiry. Fifth, big questions can inspire smaller and more manageable research questions. For example, asking about the fundamental nature of reality led to the hypothesis of atomism in Ancient Greece¹⁷. Ideas about God’s perfection and omnipotence led Galileo to assume that mathematics is our best guide to understanding the orbits of the planets and hence that heliocentrism rather than geocentrism is correct¹⁸. Darwin asked whether humans are unique or whether all life on earth is monogenetic, which led him to develop evolutionary theory¹⁹. Einstein opposed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics on metaphysical grounds, as he didn’t believe the universe could be fundamentally probabilistic²⁰. For these reasons universities cannot and should not operate as if the big questions don’t exist or cannot be taken seriously. Rather, they should take them seriously and mobilize their intelligence as well as their state of the art science and scholarship to address these questions in an intellectually responsible way.

4. To give humanistic inquiry and education a proper place. Universities ought to have room for the full range of academic disciplines, in both the sciences and the humanities. Many of today’s most urgent challenges in society cannot be solved by purely scientific or technological means; successful solutions require compelling communication, consideration of moral values and norms, in-depth understanding of cultures and religions. All of these things, and much more, are studied in the humanities. Hence, universities ought to facilitate and embrace humanistic inquiry and teaching, and stimulate interdisciplinary collaborations between scientists and humanities scholars. Of course, some universities – technological universities, for instance – do not include humanities departments. For them, this responsibility may be interpreted as follows: the responsibility to give due weight to knowledge and understanding produced by humanities departments in other universities. Of course, this does not remove other epistemic responsibilities that are met primarily in the humanities, such as the epistemic responsibility to address the big questions of life.

Giving the humanities a proper place is a responsibility of the university for one basic reason: the humanities can deliver truth, knowledge and insight in areas where the sciences cannot²¹. The humanities have their own objects of study: they study objects that have “meaning” in a special sense, viz. meaning that derives from human conventions, from human intentions, and/or from human purposive behavior²². The knowledge and understanding the humanities provide differs from the knowledge and understanding that the sciences offer, in that the former is often ‘indexical’ (that is, related to human interests and concerns), ‘perspectival’ (it specifies how things look from, say, a romantic perspective), and value-related (that is, related to social, political, moral, aesthetic, or religious values)²³. In addition to this, the humanities are particularly suitable for educating students to become well-informed, critical citizens who can reflect on socially urgent questions about life, health, education, justice, equality, liberty, etc. and participate fully in society and politics²⁴.

5. To serve society. Universities can serve society at a number of levels: local (a city or region), national, or international, humanity worldwide. What we have in mind here is serving society epistemically, that is, to help society acquire true belief, knowledge, and understanding about important issues. Of course, universities sometimes also serve society in a more practical manner, e.g., by way of proposing effective policies, producing medical interventions and other technologies. Such practical interventions are often based on scientific evidence, so the epistemic and the practical are not entirely separate, but they can be distinguished for analytical purposes. We focus on the former here, as our taxonomy concerns the epistemic rather than the moral, practical, or social responsibilities of universities.

Universities have the epistemic responsibility to serve society by, among other things, disseminating knowledge and understanding about issues that academics have investigated. Let us stress that we have knowledge dissemination rather than knowledge utilization in mind here, since we are concerned with epistemic rather than practical responsibilities of the university. So, what we have in mind are such things as press releases, expert advice, popular articles, opinion pieces, public lectures, interviews, and so on.

Serving society, however, is a two-way street. It’s not only about disseminating knowledge that has been produced by scientists, but also requires taking onboard insights from society and the general public. Universities can thus also serve society by taking in urgent questions, analyzing social concerns, and incorporating the perspectives and criticisms of non-scientists²⁵. Going even further, initiatives under the banner of ‘citizen science’ and ‘science with and for society’ promote the co-production of scientific knowledge by scientists and citizens²⁶. Such initiatives shouldn’t be thought of as replacing traditional science, but rather as complementing it in order to let science serve society better.

This is a responsibility for at least two reasons. First, many scientific and scholarly discoveries are so complex that if academics do not disseminate their knowledge, those discoveries will remain unknown among the larger audience. Second, it often requires extensive academic knowledge to understand the importance and ramifications of various discoveries. Knowledge and understanding are of intrinsic epistemic value. If the university does not serve society by sharing academic knowledge and understanding, then, for much academic knowledge and understanding, that value will be attained only by a very small group of academics in the relevant field. If the university takes its epistemic responsibility of knowledge dissemination seriously, then much larger groups – academics in other fields, society as a whole – will attain those epistemic values.

Finally, we should be clear that we don’t want to deny that the epistemic responsibilities we distinguish are related to each other in various ways. For instance, responsibility 1 (to foster research integrity) has to do with responsibility 2 (to teach for intellectual virtue): a university cannot be serious about research integrity but without teching for for curiosity, open-mindedness, thoroughness, and intellectual perseverance. The exact relations between these responsibilities is up for debate; we wanted to leave room for different opinions about this while working towards a potential consensus that these are indeed key epistemic responsibilities of universities. Even so, it is useful to draw analytic distinctions between the responsibilities. The way we formulated them makes it possible to check their presence relatively independently from one another and we consider that an advantage of our approach.

Future steps

As indicated, we propose our normative taxonomy as a tool to assess the degree to which a university meets the Big Five epistemic responsibilities. Our proposal is a first attempt; in future work we aim to validate, test, amend, and implement the taxonomy. Particularly, we will work on distinguishing the five levels postulated for each epistemic responsibility more clearly and we will explore in more detail how our taxonomy differs from others and whether it can serve as a tool to rank universities. We envision doing this in four consecutive steps.

First, we want to fine-tune our taxonomy in a Delphi Study^27,28 with international experts that aims in its first round at adding, replacing, and reformulating various epistemic responsibilities. The second and third Delphi rounds will seek consensus on the corresponding levels of meeting the responsibility at issue and explore what the best practices are in reaching higher levels of specific responsibilities.

Next, we will organize co-creation workshops²⁹ with representatives of relevant stakeholders in order to discuss a penultimate version of the taxonomy. The focus of the workshop will be on the operationalization of the levels of meeting the different epistemic responsibilities in a way which makes application of the taxonomy feasible, transparent, and as objective as possible.

Then, we will test and qualitatively evaluate the taxonomy in a number of universities, resulting in a definitive description of the responsibilities, the levels, and a tool-kit of best practices.

Finally, we will publish and disseminate the results on a dedicated website and explore whether the taxonomy is a suitable alternative for, or addition to, the currently dominant Academic Ranking of World Universities³⁰ and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings³¹.