Skorupski's Law

Why is this website called "Skorupski's Law"?

Skorupski's Law states: the more vain one's ambition, the more redundant one's grasp of morality. My experience at the University of St Andrews was that if a sufficient number of significantly placed people in a particular community attempt, through vanity, to realise unrealisable ambitions, a collapse of moral and intellectual judgement filters down through that community. A particularly good series of illustrations of this state is provided by the circumstances surrounding the destruction of evidence relating to the Corner-Esler report by a member or members of the Executive of the University of St Andrews. However, if one wanted a single paradigmatic example, one might look to an archetype that has been bequeathed to us by the eponymous philosopher, Professor John Skorupski of the Department of Moral Philosophy, University of St Andrews.

On 19 and 20 January 2001, one of my former "colleagues", who did not appreciate my standing up to his constant bullying, circulated two e-mails to ten people besides myself which suggested that I was psychiatrically ill. Had I been psychiatrically ill, this would not have been a particularly wise way of coping with the problem. As it was, I had never been so diagnosed by any medical practitioner, and the circulation was thus defamation pure and simple. I pointed this out to my immediate line managers — of whom the senior partner was Professor Skorupski, then Head of the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies at the University. Obviously there is a clear responsibility on a line manager to take clear and decisive action regarding defamation. However, Professor Skorupski ignored my representation, so I wrote to him again. This time he replied, saying:

I didn't respond to your earlier email... because, having heard all sides of the case, I concluded in this latest disagreement you were the person at fault.

Professor Skorupski, a professor of moral philosophy, has never clarified how someone can be at fault for another person's circulation of defamatory comments (see Note 1). Since it is not possible for the victim of a defamation to be responsible for that defamation, there must have been some other reason for Professor Skorupski's failure to respond to it (see Note 2). This was not the only example of blaming the victim that I came across by Professor Skorupski and other senior managers at the University of St Andrews, as these web pages make clear. But it provides a nice illustration of a certain kind of scapegoating "culture" that is at the heart of the complex that is at issue here.

Obviously Professor Skorupski is not responsible for all of the abuses that are documented on these pages - any more than the eponymous Murphy and Parkinson are responsible for every instance of their respective laws. Indeed one might say that Skorupski himself became a victim of the St Andrews management style since members of the University Executive found fault with his management (see the Corner/Esler report) while failing to acknowledge their own shortcomings. By naming the web site in Skorupski's honour, the intention is to draw attention to the fact that a certain kind of manager — who is typically found in the position of head of an academic unit — faces certain difficult practical and moral choices. Increasingly the resolution of these choices seems to be moving in a very dangerous direction for the future of universities.

Clearly I cannot get inside Professor Skorupski's head. Nor can I offer an explanation for his actions that might satisfy all philosophers (or lawyers). Let me, then, as a matter of strategy, depersonalise both the problem and the solution to that problem, and make them more general and abstract. The general problem thus becomes: how should one make sense of a situation where the head of an academic unit (who need not be a professor of moral philosophy) has concluded that someone who manifestly was responsible for a certain behaviour was not responsible for it? And conversely, how should one understand the conclusion reached by the same individual that someone who was manifestly not responsible for a certain behaviour was responsible for it?

Many years of teaching theoretical anthropology have led me to the conclusion that most people are not comfortable with abstract problems let alone philosophical conundrums. It might, therefore, help to set some parameters so that the problem can be understood in a specific context. In this case the context is that of institutions of higher education that are keen (or desperate) to defend their reputation in the face of periodic government inspections. Given this frame of reference, what kind of interpretation might account for our problem? Why would the head of an academic unit choose to blame not the perpetrator of unacceptable behaviour but the target of the delinquent's abuse?

I cannot prove that the conjecture that I am about to offer adequately explains such a situation. However, there is good reason (i.e. plenty of supporting evidence) to believe that it is a reasonable conjecture. Bear in mind that we are now talking about a general problem rather than offering a commentary on the eponymous paradigm given above.

Suppose, to flesh out the context, that we have an additional piece of information. The perpetrator of the original abusive behaviour is what is commonly known in universities as a "research egoist" — i.e. someone who generally avoids any work that detracts from his or her research time, his publishing output, and his attendance at conferences. Suppose, too, that the head of the unit is also a research egoist, but has regrettably found himself temporarily in a managerial position as a means of internal advancement within his university. And suppose that both of these figures see their true destiny as a star at a university that has an unambiguously high research status, and is decidedly not in the provinces.

The problem for such a head of unit is that his status ambitions are crying out for an obvious solution — to ignore the problem so that he can get on with his own quest for research glory. To confront a bully potentially means an enormous drain on one's time and energy, not to mention the inherent unpleasantness. On the other hand, the managerial responsibility of the unit head demands that he stands up to bullying. He has a dilemma. Or does he?

Suppose that there is another "player" in the drama — the manager(s) to whom the head of unit reports. For the sake of simplicity, let us refer to these managers collectively as "the Executive". The problem for our head of unit is that his loyalties are torn between the academics and students who depend on him to run his unit justly and with regard to all of their needs, and the Executive managers who want "results" for the institution. From the Executive point of view it is desireable to protect and promote (figuratively and literally) research egoists because it is their output in the form of publications and attendance at conferences that will raise the research ratings — and these provide the only index that managers at universities and in funding councils can easily use to differentiate one university's status from other.

Suppose that Dr A is a brilliant and conscientious teacher enjoying great rapport with his students and faithfully fulfilling his administrative obligations, while Dr B is a hopeless and lazy teacher whom students avoid like the plague and who runs away from all administrative tasks. It can easily be seen that this might be of little concern to the Executive. As long as someone does the teaching and administration, there is no need for the Executive to become involved. If, on the other hand, Dr A's conscientiousness in regard to his teaching and the welfare of his students means that he publishes much less than Dr B, then this is of concern to the Executive. Clearly Dr B is to be rewarded and Dr A told not only that he is a fool for neglecting his own personal ambitions but that he is harming the university's reputation in the wider world. Nobody needs to know what his teaching is like, but everyone can see what his research output is.

Dr A thus needs to be reminded what the university is there for — i.e. to be as high in the league table of universities as humanly (and, if necessary, inhumanly) possible. From a certain kind of managerial viewpoint the idea that a university is for the benefit of students — top-up fees or no top-up fees — is an antiquated, misguided notion that has no relevance in the contemporary reality of institutions that are competing for resources and status.

The dilemma of our head of academic unit is thus happily resolved. He can ignore the bullying research egoist because this is what his managers are encouraging him to do. Evidence that the Executive of the University of St Andrews not only turned a blind eye to abusive behaviour in this kind of context but destroyed evidence that it had itself collected in relation to abuse can be found by looking at the circumstances surrounding an internal University investigation.

Note 1: One may concede that there is an epistemological problem here as well as a moral issue, but one assumes that professors of moral philosophy also know something about epistemology.

Note 2: The Director of Personnel Services subsequently asked Professor Skorupski to take action on this defamation as a matter of urgency. Skorupski then asked the offender to withdraw the defamation, though he claimed at the employment tribunal, rather self-servingly, that this was not because of pressure brought by the Director of Personnel Services. In any case, Professor Skorupski's request to my abusive former "colleague" did not entirely do the trick: the individual in question failed to notify the other recipients of his e-mail that he was withdrawing his defamatory accusation. The defamation, therefore, still stood and stands to this day. Defamation is, of course, actionable in a court of law.

The author

**********

Skorupski's Law: "The more vain one's ambition, the more redundant one's grasp of morality"