If you’re new to New College Madison’s web site, perhaps you’re wondering what “prophetic inquiry” is all about.
“Prophetic Inquiry” is a term invented by the sociologist Kenneth Underwood in his book The Church, The University, and Social Policy (1968).
Basically, “prophetic inquiry” seeks to highlight the ethical content of any particular investigation and to make it conscious, and include it in the thinking of the university community.
In the Old Testament, for example, the prophet Jeremiah not only describes the state of Jewish life at the time of his writing, but he evaluates what he is describing, and points the way to a better and more sustainable way of life for his community. One way of thinking about what we are about, therefore, might be to ask: “What might Jeremiah do and say if he were a faculty member or graduate student in today’s research university?”
Today, in the research university as it now stands, many people are under the impression that “value-free” knowledge is what we are all about.
But “value” assumptions nevertheless pervade what kinds of knowledge is sought, how and why topics of investigation are chosen, and what ultimately is to be done with the knowledge that is the result of university investigations.
(There are also ethical questions involved in the inner process of knowing itself, but more on this in another post down the line. One question at a time!).
Including ethics in any way, except for considering it as a specialized topic in the department of philosophy, is not popular in the research university. As a well-known ecological economist once remarked on one of our programs, “Getting too interested in ethics in today’s university might be bad for your career!” (Herman Daly, “Forging a New Economics,” 1991.)
Obviously, we disagree. We fell that the normative aspects of what is done in the university ought to be conscious rather than unconscious. Furthermore, to push matters even further, we think people ought to ask whether they have the right normative assumptions or not.
By focusing on the ethical element in university research, both theoretical and practical, we feel that we are adding to the drive for “understanding,” the ultimate goal and “reason to be” of the research university, and a necessary component of a more just and sustainable way of life in the 21st century.
