After the intensity of engagement that had characterized the previous academic year, and despite the challenges posed by relocating the family, the first weeks of our sabbatical year in London (1969–70) felt comparatively relaxed. We settled into the house on Blackheath Park which, with Creina McCall’s assistance, we had managed to rent. It was a slightly shabby but roomy Edwardian structure possessed of a very nice walled-in back garden. And we enrolled all four children in a pleasant, if overcrowded, council school within easy walking distance of the house. The children were to have quite decent memories of that school, though they recalled being nagged at by the lunch ladies to “eat your greens!” “Greens” referred, in fact, to unpleasantly overboiled cabbage, though the children were convinced that it had to be some unfamiliar but unquestionably noxious vegetable native only to the British Isles. They were quite quick to make friends both in the neighborhood and at school, and I can still hear, running through my mind, a memorable jingle that Deirdre and her friends used to chant while skipping rope outside the house:
Not last night but the night before,
A pickle and a lemon came knocking at my door,
When I went to let them in
They hit me on the head with a rolling pin . . . .
And that endlessly repeated jingle eventually induced me to confer on her the affectionate nickname of “Pickle.”
During the course of the year, we drove north for two weeklong visits with my mother in Liverpool, heading out at about 4:30 a.m. in order to avoid traffic, with the children dozing off on pillows in the back of the car as we passed by Big Ben and the parliament buildings. And we prefaced the second of those visits with an exploratory trip through the Welsh mountain country. In-between those visits I took each of the children up to Liverpool by train for individual weekend visits with their granny so that they could get to know each other better. In Blackheath itself, the year proved to be a rather social one, punctuated by dinner parties with the McCalls and other people we had come to know. But the big adventure proved to be the three-week trip we undertook in January 1970 in order to go skiing in Austria at a small place called Stuben which a colleague at Williams had put us on to. Situated in the Vorarlberg not far from the more fashionable Lech and Zürs, it turned out to be favored largely by German tourists. Apart from an English couple, we were the only visitors there from the Anglophone world.
In preparation for that trip, I had decided that I would do well to try to polish up my active speaking capacity in German and had enrolled for a few weeks of conversational lessons at a Berlitz language school on Oxford Street. This turned out to be a wise decision as I had to hit the ground running in German as soon as we got to Stuben. The only things I can remember clearly from those lessons, however, are that they took place in a room whose window fronted gloomily onto the grey-painted brick wall of an adjoining building and that the tutor assigned to me was a fiftyish Austrian who sipped tea and ate rather crumbly biscuits while he talked, so that his waistcoat tended to be adorned always with a scattering of crumbs. And one sad little moment lingers in the mind. While we were talking about skiing, which he had done as a younger man, he said, staring fixedly out of the window and at the grey wall that hemmed us in, “Ach, Herr Oakley, wie sind die Jahre geflogen”—“how the years have flown!”
To get to Stuben we had purchased a German Railway package which happily included couchettes, so we were able to get some sleep during what seemed like an interminable journey from London to Dover by train, thence by ship to Calais across a very turbulent English Channel, and then by train due east across northern France to Strasbourg, followed by an even longer stretch south along the Rhine valley to Switzerland and then east to Austria. At Stuben we settled in at a comfortable ski lodge and, language barrier notwithstanding, Brian and Tim were soon playing cards with the innkeeper’s little boy—“Fish/Fisch” if I recall correctly. And, though we were to have a very enjoyable time there, the snow was so heavy that winter that the local slopes came to be closed one by one because of the danger of avalanches—signaled in one instance (and to the excitement of the locals who watched it all through binoculars) by the movement of mountain goats across the face of one of the mountains and away from an area where a small avalanche did indeed ensue. Shortly thereafter a German couple whom we had befriended and who had a car invited Chris and me to join them on a trip over to Lech where the skiing was better and we gladly accepted. They were a nice jovial couple in their fifties (I would say) but I was taken aback by their antipathy to Willi Brandt who had recently become chancellor of the German Federal Republic. Weren’t English people upset about that, they wanted to know, and they were surprised when I told them that his election was viewed very favorably in London. After all, although I didn’t say it, so far as possible Nazi affiliations went, he was clean, having spent the war in exile in Sweden. To this nice couple, however, the choice of exile was precisely the problem. They pointed out, quite unselfconsciously, that he was clearly no German patriot and that it was disgraceful that he should now be leading the country. With that, rather than pursuing the topic, I retreated behind the inadequacy of my German, but I couldn’t help wondering, a little guiltily, where they had been and what had been their attitude during the war.
When it was time for us to leave for home, it was snowing so heavily that the road to the railway station at Stuben was blocked, so we missed our train. Early the next morning, on the advice of the innkeeper, we drove into Stuben as soon as the road was open and spent the rest of the day in a hotel room we had secured, waiting for the evening train. Meanwhile, I had to go to the station to get new tickets. When I got there my heart sank a bit as there was a long queue at the ticket booth, composed mainly, so far as I could make out, of restless commuters to Innsbruck. When I got to the front of the line I had to conduct my somewhat complicated business in my nervously flawed German, explaining why we had missed the train the day before and requesting replacement tickets, uneasily conscious all the while of the impatient people behind me. In the end, however, all went well. Replacement tickets proved to be no problem and I was even able to get reservations for three couchettes at least. And, as I left, the clerk asked me if I were Swiss. That I took to be a linguistic compliment, and it was followed by another, rather more precious one, when I got back to the hotel room proudly brandishing the couchette reservations. “Yeah for Daddy!” the children yelled, jumping excitedly up and down on the beds.
The electricity at the station had failed by the time we boarded our train and the journey itself was not to be without incident. With Claire-Ann and the children safely ensconced in their couchettes, I roamed the train looking for an empty compartment where I could stretch out and sleep. I found one but it proved to be First Class and I was ignominiously ejected from it in the morning when we reached the French border and a rather surly French train crew took over. We had all agreed to meet in the morning in the dining coach, which was up near the front of the train, and we were able to have a nice, leisurely breakfast there. When going back to the compartment which Claire-Ann and the children had occupied along with another woman, we were aghast to discover that the rear portion of the train in which that compartment was situated had been decoupled and was nowhere to be seen. All their luggage was in that compartment and, more important, Claire-Ann’s passport and Deirdre’s well-worn but cherished floppy and soft comfort toy, this last leading her to burst into tears and wail “My doggy! My doggy!” At that moment I could get little more out of the chef du train than “Coupé! Monsieur, coupé!” but I eventually learned that extra carriages coming up from Italy had been added to the train during the night and it had proved necessary, though no announcement had been made, to divide it into two. So our journey up the Rhine and across the flatlands of northern France was dogged by worries about the whereabouts of the second train, which was still nowhere to be seen. We were destined for Calais Maritime (the second station at Calais), where we were to pick up the boat for Dover. But, on the advice of the chef, I got off at the first station, Calais Ville, to await the second half of the train and to secure the luggage. I waved goodbye to the children, who were crowded forlornly at a window and clearly wondering if they would ever see their Daddy again. And then, not without mounting apprehension, I waited. Finally, after about a quarter of an hour, I heard the puffing of an old steam engine and the train appeared. I caught a glimpse, leaning out of the window, of the woman who had shared Claire-Ann’s compartment and who was by now becoming very concerned about what to do with the belongings Claire-Ann and the children had left there. In the event, everything proved to be fine, and it was with great relief that I found Claire-Ann’s passport which, because I had only recently become an American citizen, covered all the children too. The Channel crossing was an uncharacteristically smooth one, and when we arrived finally at Blackheath Park, we had the distinct feeling, after all our adventures, of coming back to something more than a temporary home.
Right from the start of that year of leave I had settled into a regular routine of research in the British Museum. There, I gradually got to know several other scholars similarly occupied, among them Jinty Nelson of King’s College, London (now Dame Janet Nelson and one of the world’s leading experts on late Carolingian history). I had a twice-daily commute of about an hour in the morning via Southern Railway to Charing Cross, followed by a decent walk up to Bloomsbury and the museum; in the evening the reverse. But while I settled into a reasonably steady routine, I did succeed in making room, at least during the first few months, for a couple of avocational activities. Claire-Ann and I both signed up for riding lessons at some very nice stables in Mottingham, south of London, an establishment which boasted of an interestingly laid out cross-country course which I very much enjoyed. And, having decided that I should revive the violin playing that had provided so much fun when I was a student, I also started weekly violin lessons again, this time with a young teacher at a music conservatory in South London. But while he soon had me working away on Handel violin sonatas, it gradually became clear to me that if I wanted to make the sort of progress I was intent upon I would have to put in on a daily basis more than the hour’s practice time that was all I could work in (usually late in the evening) between family time with the children, two hours of commuting, and the day’s research work at the museum. And when we got back to Williamstown after that leave it proved to be even more difficult, in the face of proliferating professional obligations, to protect enough time for the amount of practice needed. As a result, my playing became more intermittent and I eventually gave it up—a cause of great regret to me and of a certain amount of self-recrimination about my lack of discipline. Other things, especially research and writing, always competed more successfully for whatever time was left over from my regular professional and family responsibilities.
While my central scholarly interest has always focused on the history of ideas, especially political ideas, my initial work on Pierre d’Ailly, who was a philosopher-theologian of some note before he became a bishop, cardinal, and ecclesiastical statesman of great eminence, had, in my further scholarly work, pointed me in two, very different, directions, leading me to engage with quite different issues as well as with different groups of scholarly experts in North America and Europe. But as I found of quite compelling interest both of the disparate areas involved, I tended across time and down to the present to alternate between them.
The first area, and the one with which I have spent more time, was the history of the conciliarist ecclesiology—in effect, a form of ecclesiastical constitutionalism and the role it played in the ending at the Council of Constance of the Great Schism of the West, the greatest crisis and scandal ever to have overtaken the medieval church. To that line of investigation I was to return again and again in a series of specialized articles and chapters contributed to books before bringing it all together. This last I did (at the genial prompting of Heiko Oberman) by making it the subject of the Berlin Lectures that I delivered at Oxford during the Michaelmas term of 1999–2000 when I held the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas there. And in 2003 I developed those lectures into a book for Oxford University Press entitled The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870.
The second direction was somewhat less gritty in nature, more abstract and philosophical, focusing on what I would call the voluntarist theme in natural theology along with its subsequent impact on the early modern period. That impact made itself felt, on the one hand, in the arena of natural philosophy and the eventual emergence of the Newtonian science of nature and, on the other, in political theology as it found expression in tangled and continuing debates about the prerogatives of popes, emperors, and kings that stubbornly persisted across the years from the mid-twelfth century down to at least the late seventeenth. At the heart of my interest in this area was the struggle of the medieval scholastics to reconcile disparate Greek and biblical views of the world and of the natural order. For they sought to bind together the ancient Greek notion of an eternal world possessed of an immanent and necessary order—the very foundation of its intelligibility—with the biblical notion of an omnipotent God who had created the world out of nothing, who could, had he so chosen, have created a plurality of vastly different worlds, and who, having by his will imposed an order on the world he had actually chosen to create, retained the power to abrogate that order or to act (miraculously) in ways that contravened it. That struggle, or so I concluded, was, in the end, nothing other than an attempt to render compatible the incompatible and harmonious the dissonant. For that reason, if I may evoke a terrestrial image, I have come to think of the landscape of our Western intellectual tradition as a highly conflicted one, riven by a profound geologic fault that runs right across its length, reflecting a sometimes invisible and half-forgotten line of troubled intersection between separate tectonic plates of rival Greek and biblical provenance. In their effort to come to terms with such issues, the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century scholastics, in this like architects designing buildings for earthquake-prone areas, had tried so to position themselves that they could cope with the outbursts of seismic activity prone to occurring along that great geologic fault. On the one hand, they had to “manage” the threat to intelligibility that the concept of divine omnipotence could so easily pose. On the other, they had to try to deflect the threat to the freedom of the biblical God posed by the notion of an immanent and necessary world order that was part and parcel of the Greek philosophical legacy. In the end those scholastics did so by deploying across a broad array of theological and philosophical subfields the distinction between God’s capacity and his volition. That is to say, the distinction between what God of his omnipotence can do, speaking hypothetically and in abstracto, and what he can do but taking now into account the orders of nature, morality, and grace that he has actually willed or ordained to establish. The distinction, in effect, and using the terminology that came in the early thirteenth century to be standard, between God’s power considered as absolute and that power considered as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata). In so doing, they substituted for the typically Greek idea of a natural order that was immanent, necessary, and eternal one that was radically contingent, dependent as it was upon God’s will and sustained only by his promise and covenant. And those disparate notions of order came across time to be reflected, and influentially so, in disparate notions of natural law and (physical) laws of nature.
With that recondite but important distinction I have spent over the years, from 1960 onwards, a great deal of time. In connection with it, at least in my own estimation, I did some of my most original work and I am not altogether sure, even now, that I am quite finished with it. It came to play a significant and fascinating role in the emergence of the Newtonian science. It also came to play, by self-conscious and explicit analogy (as I discovered in the mid-1960s), an important role in discussions in the canon and civil laws, as well as in French, imperial, Spanish, and English prerogative law concerning the power of popes, emperors, and kings. For there a crucial and analogous distinction came to be drawn between the absolute and ordained (or ordinary) power of the ruler. I began to publish articles on these issues in the early 1960s and I examined them in more broadly sweeping ways in my Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order (1984), a book based on the Mead-Swing Lectures that I had been invited to deliver at Oberlin College in the fall of 1981 at the instance of Marcia Colish, a distinguished historian of medieval religious and intellectual life whom I had known as a graduate student at Yale and who was now well on the way to becoming president of the Medieval Academy of America. I did so again in my Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights (2005), a book destined eventually to find its way into Chinese translation, but based, this time, on the Merle Curti Lectures in intellectual history delivered in 2001 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
In the former book, having indicated discontent with some of the postmodern modes of thinking fashionable at that time and while indicating my broad sympathy with the approach to the history of political thought being pursued by Quentin Skinner and others affiliated with what was coming to be known as “the Cambridge School,” I took sharp exception nonetheless to Skinner’s casual dismissal of the approach to the history of ideas earlier advocated by Arthur O. Lovejoy of The Great Chain of Being fame. Lovejoy was a scholar possessed of a precise and discriminating philosophical mind. He had written extensively on metahistorical questions, and his methodological prescriptions clearly overlapped, in fact, with those of Skinner himself. While I had not had the pleasure of meeting Skinner, we had exchanged letters over the years and, even when he disagreed with me on one thing or another, I had always found him to be courteous, encouraging, and supportive. His sweeping claim, however, that Lovejoy’s approach was a misguided one, wrong in principle, resting on a fundamental philosophical mistake, one, indeed, that could “never go right,” inspired in me the uncharitable thought that he (Skinner) could comfortably plead innocent to the charge of having read him (Lovejoy) or, at least, of having read him with any degree of attention. And I was led to wonder if he was not guilty of assimilating Lovejoy’s approach to the cruder one evident in J. B. Bury’s Idea of Progress, a book which he also excoriated.
That being so, though not myself happy with Lovejoy’s theoretical talk (based on an analogy drawn from analytic chemistry) about “unit ideas” (unchanging atomic particles that across time entered into or broke away from various idea-complexes), I did find his general attempt to write the history of an idea complex and, in effect, a tradition of thinking both warranted and illuminating. In my Omnipotence book, then, I set out, using a modified version of Lovejoy’s approach, to chart across several centuries and in more than one realm of thought the history of the distinction between the absolute and the ordained power of God, treating it as a tradition of thought, the pivot of a coherent scheme of things entire which, during those centuries, constituted the chief rival to the notion of the great chain of being itself.
Because there was a good deal of disagreement about the very meaning of the distinction in question, this line of work involved me in a prolonged (if reasonably civil and certainly fruitful) scholarly controversy involving German, Italian, English, and American scholars, notable among them the distinguished medievalist William J. Courtenay of the University of Wisconsin. But as it became clear across time that the distinction had possessed more than one form right from the start, controversy subsided and in 2002 I was able, with a goodly measure of confidence, to analyze the distinction’s historical significance and to sum up the scholarly state of play as it stood at the time in an Étienne Gilson Lecture delivered in 2002 at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. While I thought then that I had no more to say on the matter, about that I am no longer quite so sure.
Scholarly obsessions of this sort being apt to puzzle those not caught up in them, I can’t help worrying that the gentle reader may well find all of this distressingly abstruse. And in some ways I suppose it is—though not for me. I would hasten to add, then, that across the years I have also undertaken writing projects broader in their reach and more readily obvious in their import. When I went on leave in 1969 it was my plan to write such a general book on the history of medieval political thought. But having begun my work with a close reading of the first three volumes of Eric Voegelin’s splendid Order and History, I was drawn thence to probe the work of Old Testament scholars (mainly those affiliated with the so-called “Myth and Ritual” and “Uppsala” schools of interpretation). Thence, and beyond them, I was also led to probe the writings of cultural anthropologists and of students of comparative religion on the worldwide phenomenon of sacral kingship which came eventually to loom large in my preoccupations. This work, undertaken originally as preparatory ground clearing for my main project, I found eye-opening, enormously stimulating, and hard to relinquish. Pondering such broader perspectives, which I had come to realize were directly pertinent to our understanding of the medieval political experience, I realized that I could easily in my comparative ignorance be betrayed through impatience into messing up the project as a whole. So I put that project temporarily on hold. But, through teaching topics pertaining to it in seminars and tutorials to a fine succession of students over the course of thirty years and more, I learned a great deal that was to prove pertinent and that encouraged me to reshape the project. It was only in 2005, now in my retirement years, that I finally sat down to begin the writing of the book envisaged long before as a single volume but now planned as a trilogy. And it was after completing a draft of the third volume of that trilogy late in 2014 when, without having earlier thought of doing anything of the sort, I backed into the writing of this memoir.
One of the subsidiary efforts that had emerged from my initial work on the project in 1969–70 was an attempt to come to terms with the powerful interpretation of medieval political thinking being put forward around that time, and with great insistence, by Walter Ullmann, an Austrian émigré who had risen after the war to professorial eminence at Cambridge. From that pivotal and influential position, for he was clearly a very gifted and inspiring teacher, he had succeeded in peopling history faculties across the length and breadth of Britain with former PhD students of his. And I had come to know and admire a group of them, along with Brian Tierney of Cornell, who had chosen to pursue a career in the United States. Their work came to enrich the type of medieval history hitherto cultivated in Britain, extending it to embrace topics in intellectual history and in the comparatively new but very promising subfield devoted to the history of canon law. The earlier work that had propelled Ullmann to scholarly prominence, though it had not been without its critics in Germany, had focused largely on the medieval papacy. In the 1960s, however, he had begun to scratch a persistent scholarly itch of a different type and in a whole series of acclaimed interpretations of the course of medieval political thought. The latter pivoted upon a rather rigid distinction between what he labeled as the “ascending” and “descending” theses of government and law. While his whole approach involved what I came to view as highly idiosyncratic readings of pivotal texts, and while I found myself increasingly puzzled by it and could not help noting that I was by no means alone in being so puzzled, it remained the fact that in the reviews of his work the voices of acclaim were more than balancing those of troubled dissent. Again and again, the reviewers had been moved to laud Ullmann’s “mastery of the sources,” the “richness” of his ideas, the “profundity” and “range” of his learning, the “subtlety” and “penetration” of his analyses, the “force” of his argumentation. References to “the magisterial sweep of Professor Ullmann’s scholarship” and even (this in the staid old English Historical Review no less) to “the preternatural brilliance of his vision” represented merely the less restrained modulations of a laudatory theme to which his ear must long since have been no stranger. And the cumulative effect of such compliments served to make it clear that, in this series of studies, Ullmann had achieved a novel and powerful synthesis, with the fearful symmetries of which anyone seriously interested in medieval political and constitutional thinking had now to come to terms. So, having returned from London at the end of my sabbatical and having put my own attempts at synthesis on hold, that is precisely what I set about doing. I carefully reread all the books and articles of Ullmann with which I was already familiar and undertook a similarly close reading of the more recent ones I had not yet absorbed. Then I set about the composition of a lengthy critique which I entitled “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited: Walter Ullmann’s Vision of Medieval Politics.” The whole exercise proved to be a highly labor-intensive and demanding one and it took me more than half a year to bring it to completion. But, having hammered out a clear, if highly critical, appraisal, I was left with no doubt that that investment of time and effort had been worthwhile. As the critique concerned the work of the scholar who, at that time, could lay reasonable claim to being the leading authority in the Anglophone world on medieval political thought, I judged that the obvious periodical in which to try to place it was Speculum, the leading medieval journal in North America. With that move, however, I encountered a strange and unexpected snag.
Over the course of the decade since 1960 when I had published my first article, I had encountered little difficulty in placing my articles, translations, and notes in the appropriate scholarly journals—several of them, indeed, in such leading journals as the American Historical Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and Speculum itself. The two that I had a bit of difficulty with, one on late medieval theology and the emergence of the Newtonian science of nature and the other on Jacobean political theology, I now view as being among the most original of my efforts, and the untraditional point of view they expressed may well have got in the way of their ready acceptance. The latter paper, indeed, was returned to me from one journal with an oddly angry negative appraisal and looking for all the world as if the reader had eaten a contemptuous breakfast on it (bacon and eggs, if I interpreted the stains correctly, and perhaps also some sort of sausage!). This time, however, an impediment of an unusual type was involved. From the editor of Speculum I received a letter saying that, while the article was “lively” and “very well written,” they viewed it as “too much of an attack ad hominem” to publish in that journal. I was very taken aback by this and, given the feedback from other scholars that I received after the article was eventually published (and, at that time, I heard from a lot of people), I had good reason for puzzlement. While my critique was largely a negative one, it was seen then to be reasonably dispassionate. And for good reason. The fact of the matter was that I did not know Ullmann and had no grounds whatsoever for launching any sort of personal attack on him. Quite the contrary. A few years earlier he had given my Pierre d’Ailly book a favorable review—a great relief at the time because he had a well-established reputation for being capable of quite scathing reviews. Later on I was to hear via back channels that I had fallen victim to what one might call the micropolitics of international scholarship and that Speculum, as the leading American journal in the field, was simply reluctant to publish so sweeping a critique of the work of a medieval scholar of such prominence on the British scene. Of course I didn’t approve of editorial decision-making of that sort. My critique was by no means vituperative, nor was it driven by any sort of personal animus. Nor did the editors of the British journal Past and Present view it as such. Despite its length (forty-three printed pages), they published it without revisions and did not comment negatively on its tone. That tone, indeed, can be gauged from its concluding words. There I evoked as pertinent a remark once made by John Stuart Mill, “For our part,” he said,
we have a large tolerance for one-eyed men, provided their eye is a penetrating one; if they saw more, they would probably not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened up by systematic half thinkers.
To which I myself added:
Taking this statement, then, and applying it to Ullmann’s vision of medieval politics, my own verdict overall would run very much as follows: Rich? Undoubtedly. Striking? Without question. Original? In no small degree. Speculative? More, perhaps than he would care to admit. But fundamentally valid as a key to the understanding of medieval political thought? I would argue not.
Though the piece was to attract a lot of attention, often from grateful former pupils of Ullmann’s or (more distressingly) from mortal enemies whom he had at some time offended, he himself never deigned to reply to it. But subsequent scholarly commentary suggests that it did succeed in undercutting the appeal of Ullmann’s rather coercive descending/ascending typology and, forty years later, his whole interpretative approach, which for a while had risen so high, appears now to retain surprisingly little appeal.
So far as I myself was concerned, the whole effort had at least succeeded in clearing the interpretative decks for my plan to embark eventually upon an appraisal of my own concerning the trajectory of medieval political thinking. And while, with eighteen years of administrative work supervening, it was to be a full three decades before I was finally able to sit down and begin the attempt to realize that ambitious plan, I had in the meantime tried my hand at writing two other books that were quite broad in their reach. The first, a sort of interpretative essay on the Middle Ages in general, written largely from an intellectual historical perspective, I undertook as a result of an invitation to contribute such a volume to a series being published by the now late and lamented Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York. Once in print (1974), it was picked up almost immediately by a small publisher in England and then by Alianza Editorial of Madrid, who brought it out in Spanish translation. And, later on, it was selected by the Medieval Academy of America for inclusion in its Reprints for Teachers series (now published by the University of Toronto Press), and after forty years it still remains in print. The book was a joy to write, and if it took me little more than six months to produce it, that was in no small part because, in teaching a couple of courses several times, I had already hashed out most of the particular issues on which it focused. The first was a sequence course required for the history major concerned with topics in medieval and early modern European history approached from a comparative historical perspective. The second was one of the two introductory sequence courses required for the history of ideas major and entitled “The Christian Vision.” Over the years it has been wonderfully encouraging to hear from readers in both the Spanish-speaking and Anglophone worlds who found the book a source of intellectual stimulation and a pleasure to read.
I undertook to write the other quite general (if somewhat more specialized) book in the mid- to late 1970s after returning from the best and most productive academic conference I have ever been fortunate enough to attend. Organized by Heiko Oberman—by then, I think, back in Europe at Tübingen—and Charles Trinkaus, the leading Renaissance historian at the University of Michigan, it was an invitational affair involving about fifty-seven scholars, all working in the field of late medieval and early modern religious history. Oberman and Trinkaus later published its proceedings under the title: The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (1974), and this was to prove to be an influential landmark publication in the field. I felt, and feel, lucky to have been included in the conference. It helped acquaint me with new and stimulating lines of scholarly investigation in a field I had previously tended to view as being a bit torpid. It also encouraged me, as I was teaching a course on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in the sixteenth century, to embark upon the writing of a book investigating the late medieval background of those great, transformative upheavals. The broad-gauged research I undertook for that book came to inform quite deeply the way I was to teach that course in the future. At the kind suggestion of Geoffrey Barraclough, with whom I had been intermittently in touch, I submitted the completed manuscript in 1976 to Blackwell’s Press in Oxford, then still presided over by the scholar-editor with whom he had dealt in the late 1930s when publishing a couple of books with them. This proved, however, to be a mistake. Having heard nothing for the better part of a year, and having inquired of them about the fate of my submission, I received a truly embarrassed reply to the effect that the reader to whom they had sent it for evaluation had contrived, somehow, to lose the manuscript! Maybe he had, but as an excuse for incompetent handling of an author’s submission it strained credulity almost as much as the delinquent schoolboy’s pathetic excuse to his teacher that the dog had eaten his homework! As a result, I withdrew the project from what appeared to be faltering hands at Blackwell’s. (I was, however, to have a very good experience with them later on with another book after they had reorganized and modernized their whole publishing operation.) I went on to submit the manuscript to Cornell University Press, which accepted it without delay, proved to be very good to work with, and kept the book in print, in both hardback and paperback versions, for about thirty years. As the language of hungering and thirsting for God is present everywhere in late medieval spiritual and mystical writings, I had originally entitled the book Hunger for the Divine: The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages and I now regret that I didn’t stand firm against editorial insistence that I drop that title and substitute for it simply the subtitle. Having kicked the original title around the editorial office a bit, they confessed to me that it had evoked for them above all the unfortunate image of “a missionary feast on Cannibal Island!” Faced with that measure of gentle derision, I had caved in on the issue.
Some of my more specialized scholarly efforts—technical articles, for example, on the contested attribution of various late medieval texts—had little direct relation to my teaching. My students, after all, were all undergraduates and not graduate students. But in one way or another most of my scholarly work did relate to my teaching, either helping to inform it or, alternatively, being informed by it, or, for that matter, both of those things. There was an identifiable interaction between my scholarship and my teaching and, as often as not, it was reciprocal in nature rather than unidirectional. The sense that attention to scholarly research somehow diminished one’s commitment to teaching, a view that I had detected among some of my senior colleagues when I first joined the Williams History Department—in effect, the zero-sum game approach to the two—simply did not accord with the realities of my own experience as I pursued my career as teacher-scholar at a small liberal arts college that placed a marked emphasis on effective teaching. Nor, I suspect, was my own experience all that different from the experience of my colleagues. When, in 1986, in preparation for our decennial reaccreditation round at the hands of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the small committee that I chaired and which was charged with the task of writing a statement of mission and objectives for the college was able, without a moment’s hesitation, to sign on to the affirmation that “among us . . . the proposition that teaching to be truly effective must be nourished and sustained by scholarship is not in dispute.”
That being so, I was later taken aback by the fact that one of the subthemes emerging in the course of the culture wars, or battle of the books, that rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, and reflected the profound and embittered alienation of neoconservatives from the American academic culture, turned out to be a refurbishing of the zero-sum game approach to the relationship between teaching and research. Beyond that, indeed, it eventuated in a vituperative onslaught on the quality, value, and significance of academic research in America. The titles of some of the books that appeared at that time are revelatory: Page Smith, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (1990); Charles Sykes, Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1990); Martin Anderson, Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating our Students of their Future (1992). And the message such books conveyed was a singularly depressing one. At their harshest, they insisted that despite (or because of) the great emphasis that they saw the university placing on research, and the mounting body of publications resulting therefrom, much of what was being produced was trivial, dull, pedestrian, esoteric, or—God forbid!—some mind-numbing combination of all four. Academic research and writing, according to Anderson, constituted “the greatest intellectual fraud of the twentieth century.” Similarly, for Sykes, “Much of what passes for knowledge creation . . . is merely humbug.” Moreover, he argued that teaching was being radically undervalued by the academy, that in the frantic attempt to mount their overpriced and oversold research effort, academics had come increasingly to discharge their teaching responsibilities less conscientiously and less effectively than they had in the more distant past; that the academic culture (thus Sykes) is not merely “indifferent to teaching [but] is actively hostile to it”; and that “in the modern university,” indeed, “no act of good teaching goes unpunished.” And so on.
Such attacks, launched from outside the academy or from its fringes, unfortunately drew some support from people within the ranks of the professoriate itself. Hyperbolic though they were, they drew a fleeting measure of credibility from that fact. Thus, in 1992, an op. ed. piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education trumpeted, quite dogmatically, that there was “an inescapable incompatibility [between] the demands of teaching and research.” Hence the rise to damaging prominence for a few years of attacks upon the so-called “publish or perish” syndrome and upon the threat that the university’s allegedly characteristic lack of commitment to teaching was seen to pose to the quality of undergraduate education. That issue had clearly “arrived” in 1995 when it was made the focus of a classic 60 Minutes exposé on CBS TV. The episode in question was entitled “Get Real!,” those words constituting Lesley Stahl’s considered response to the parental dream of a college-bound child heading off into a “wonderful intellectual world . . . [in which] great professors . . . [share] their ideas with eager freshmen: that sort of thing. The great professors are there,” Stahl declaimed, “no doubt about it, but your soon-to-be freshman is not going to find it easy finding one. We had difficulty finding one at the University of Arizona.” And so on. The segment then proceeded, via some fleeting footage of instructors mumbling away unintelligibly in Tucson, to glancing exchanges with sundry (but oddly obliging) academic types willing to say the most extraordinary things about the lack of attention paid to teaching at that particular university. One of them, indeed, cheerfully confessed by way of an arresting wrap-up to the whole segment that, because of that lack of attention, he himself was “waiting for some powerful parent to sue the university for consumer fraud!”
On this very issue some of us doubtless do have horror stories to relate. And such horror stories certainly found an honored place in the potpourri of anecdotage that the critics of American higher education were at that time substituting (on this as on other related issues) for any real attempt, however critical, to come to terms with what was actually known about the matter in question. Certainly, what they were saying was very much at odds with my own experience as an academic. And so bothered was I by the misleading picture of the academy that they were propagating that in 1995, as chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), I decided to focus on the issue of scholarship and teaching in my annual address to the assembled delegates of the learned societies. That address was later to be published as an ACLS Occasional Paper and then reprinted elsewhere. I had earlier touched upon the topic in a book on American higher education that I had published in 1992 when I was still president of Williams and I had at that time rummaged around a bit to see what sort of statistical information existed that might help nudge the issue out of the anecdotal realm in which it had come to be mired and onto the more secure footing provided by uncontroverted factual data. There turned out to be enough such data to render particularly puzzling the current reliance of the critics on episodic comments and tiresomely recycled anecdotage. For the period stretching from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, we have in fact at our disposal quite rich sets of data concerning the attitude of faculty nationwide towards teaching and research, concerning the time they devoted to these and related activities, concerning research productivity as measured by the publication of articles, monographs, and books, and, more recently, concerning the correlation at our leading liberal arts colleges between the successful pursuit of scholarship and the effectiveness of teaching performance. These data have been analyzed (and have been added to over the years) by such accomplished social scientists and commentators on higher education as Everett Carll Ladd, Seymour Martin Lipset, Ernest Boyer, Martin Trow, Oliver Fulton, Howard Bowen, Jack Schuster, and Robert McCaughey. But it has been their fate to have been ignored almost entirely by those critics alleging the occurrence in the academy of some sort of “flight from teaching” and proclaiming the relationship between research and teaching to be a zero-sum game. More surprisingly, they have also been ignored by most academics themselves whose understanding of their own profession has been accordingly impoverished. Rarely, so far as I could make out, had either the critics or their bruised mainstream academic respondents attempted to take into account the broad and exceedingly diverse range of higher educational institutions in America or the differences in the priorities and preoccupations of those who were teaching in them. Instead, they tended to focus obsessively on what was alleged to be going on at a mere handful of leading research universities. Not least among the differences that marked the various institutional sectors was the variation in the degree of scholarly engagement that distinguished them one from another. “Publish or perish” was no doubt a hallowed and beloved cliché among academics and their acerbic critics alike, but, having perused the pertinent statistical data, I couldn’t help noticing that American academics were clearly contriving, without perishing, to do little or no publishing. The available data sets had (and have) a great deal to tell us about the relationship between teaching and scholarship in the American system of higher education as a whole, much of it tending to reshape the issue among more complex lines, rendering it less rewarding material for those characteristically energized by the joys of polemic. And the most helpful of those data were those stemming from the surveys, every five years, of faculty attitudes and behavior conducted by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education between 1969 and 1994. I much regret the discontinuation of that survey program. It leaves us threatened with an unhelpful return to the world of misleading (if frequently diverting) anecdotage and the insistently autobiographical mode of witness to the academic scene that, in our discussions of the state of higher education, has served us so very poorly in the past.
The Carnegie-generated data had been subjected, I found, to careful expert scrutiny, most revealingly by Trow and Fulton, who had published in the mid-1970s an intriguing analysis of the 1969 data. And those data, on the matter of teaching and research, turned out to be broadly consistent with those generated twenty years later by the 1989 survey. In their painstaking analysis, Trow and Fulton had extracted from those data a set of conclusions that would not have startled earlier researchers on the subject (people like Talcott Parsons and Gerald Platt) but would probably surprise many an academic at large today. And those conclusions should certainly serve to reassure any observers outside the academy whose views about faculty attitudes towards teaching have been formed by the sensationalist charges advanced by commentators like Anderson, Sykes, and Smith.
Naturally, a great diversity of attitudes proved to be evident among those teaching in the various institutional sectors of the academy, from our research universities to our two-year community colleges. That notwithstanding, I suspect that the reader may be surprised to learn that 77 percent of faculty overall and 50 percent of those at the high quality universities had indicated in 1969 that their primary interest lay in teaching rather than research. And that was true even of the faculty teaching at our largest public research universities—places where, one assumed, the “publish or perish” syndrome was most deeply entrenched. The analysts concluded, accordingly, that, judged at least by the faculty’s “self-conceptions,” the American higher education enterprise as a whole had to be recognized as primarily a teaching system and that, on the basis at least of the data collected, the widespread suspicion that a commitment to teaching was generally trumped by a preoccupation with research was simply not grounded in fact. Moreover, if one took the further step of working into the equation actual research productivity as measured by publication activity, the picture that emerged was broadly consonant with what faculty members themselves had reported about the primary focus of their interests. Overall, more than 50 percent appeared to have been inactive in research, and even for our leading research universities the figure exceeded 20 percent. Less than a fourth, other studies conducted in the 1970s revealed, were publishing at all extensively, and a surprisingly large proportion of the books and articles produced turned out to be the work of a smallish group (say, 6–10 percent) composed, one has to assume, of compulsive recidivists. Taking higher education as a whole, Trow and Fulton concluded, there was indeed something of a division between the so-called research and teaching institutions. But the division they detected was not one between the universities with a substantial commitment to graduate and professional education and the four- or two-year undergraduate colleges. Rather, it lay between the universities and the top tier of four-year colleges, on the one hand, and the less highly selective undergraduate colleges, on the other. On this they noted that, as on other matters, a veritable “fault line” ran between what they called the “high-quality four-year colleges” and the rest, with those high-quality colleges showing levels of research and publication activity approximating those prevailing at some, at least, of the research universities. And that same fault line was to be evident again in the data generated by the later Carnegie surveys.
Trow and Fulton went on to address a final set of questions pertaining to the relationship between teaching and other professional commitments at those research universities where most of the work was being done. And they had found that the faculty who published most frequently paid more or less as much attention to undergraduates, whether informally or in the office, as did their less research-active colleagues. At the leading research universities, indeed, the level of teaching activity turned out to be much the same among the researchers as it was among the non-researchers. And, so far as governance and administration were concerned, the most active researchers were “much more likely [than their less research-active colleagues] to be involved in the administrative processes of their departments and their institutions.” The data being mined, of course, spoke no more to the quality of that teaching and administrative service than they did to the quality of the research being produced. But they do suggest that one should not simply assume that some sort of zero-sum game is necessarily involved. The common view that commitment to research is necessarily bought at the price of reduced attention to teaching is clearly not warranted. In aggregate, at least, it does not appear to be true even of highly productive scholars at our leading research universities. Such people seem to do more of everything, and the crucial variable distinguishing them from their less-active colleagues may well be, not differing priorities or interests, but differing levels of energy.
Assertions, then, of the “inescapable incompatibility of the demands of teaching and research” should be met with a robust measure of skepticism. They are not borne out by what we know of the behavior (at least in aggregate) of faculty teaching at our leading research universities and they come into direct collision with the truly impressive scholarly track record long since achieved by faculty teaching at our leading liberal arts colleges. There, student expectations for effective teaching are enormously high. There, too, the institutional commitment to the central importance of good teaching has remained clear, consistent, unwavering, and proudly so. In 1994–95, Robert McCaughey, dean of the faculty at Barnard College in New York, published the results of a careful, detailed, probing, and very “hands-on” investigation he had carried out of the scholarly and teaching activities pursued in the humanities and social science faculties of some two dozen of those leading liberal arts colleges (Williams among them), those institutions seen as accurately representative of a larger group probably numbering around three dozen. While faculty of those institutions, he said, “differ from [research] university faculty in accepting that the primary mission of their employing institutions is [that] of teaching undergraduates,” they are nonetheless committed to the view that published “evidence of scholarly activity” should be necessary for the award of tenure and claim, at least, to “see no contradiction between their personal identities as scholars and their institutional responsibilities to be effective undergraduate teachers.” Nor, according to McCaughey, were they indulging in wishful thinking. Using a control group composed of over seven hundred full-time faculty in the same disciplines at three of our major research universities (Columbia, Princeton, and Yale) and taking the humanities and social science faculties of his two dozen colleges as a whole, he concluded that about a quarter of the latter “perform at levels of scholarly activity typical among their colleagues at Columbia, Princeton, and Yale.” And, of those, about a half “perform above those levels.” He also concluded, after an intricate comparison of “externally generated scholarly ratings” of the faculty included in his study with “usable local ratings of . . . [their] teaching effectiveness,” that there was an overall correlation between scholarly engagement and teaching effectiveness that was clearly positive.
That there was nothing idiosyncratic about those findings was strongly suggested by another, more broad-ranging study undertaken around the same time by Alexander Astin and others at the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute. It concerned “institutional climates” at a carefully balanced sample of some two hundred universities and colleges, public as well as private, of all levels of selectivity. Among other things, the study revealed that of the eleven institutions in that sample ranking “high” on both “student orientation” and “research orientation,” all were private, highly selective, residential liberal arts colleges, Williams proudly among them. Astin and his colleagues also found, it is true, that the ten institutions ranking at the top in research orientation but at the bottom in student orientation were nearly all large, public research universities. But their findings and those of others about the leading liberal arts colleges serve to demonstrate that there is nothing in principle necessary about the existence of a conflict between a given institution’s commitment to research and its commitment to effective teaching. At such colleges the two commitments contrive somehow to go hand in hand. In the sort of collegiate setting they provide, Astin concluded, it does seem possible in this respect to “have one’s cake and eat it.” In that judgment, having completed at one such college a career that spanned more than forty years, I heartily concur.