In the 2000s, I had the honor of studying under Patrick Riley, a scholar of historical moral, religious, and political thought. Even though I had had "old-school" professors in the course of my degreed studies at Indiana University and Yale, Riley's approach can be said to be medieval. After four years of auditing his courses and those of many of other professors at Riley's request at a large Midwestern university, I received not a degree nor even many academic credits, but. rather, a hand-written letter in which he let his colleagues know that I could teach graduate-school level political theory. It is no accident that he periodically visited the University of Bologna, which, aside from hosting the huge project of publishing Leibniz's correspondence, was as the first university in Europe, founded in 1066. Back then, I bet letters of recommendation were the principal way in which scholars got hired; a scholar became recognized as one when the scholar he studied under realized that the budding scholar knew enough of the field, which is more than merely doing well in some classes. How technocratic and artificial contemporary universities would seem to ancient and medieval scholars. I think they would be startled at how many pedestrian scholars there are, who relish making narrow distinctions based on technicalities. In contrast, Patrick Riley a product of Harvard, where he continued to work and live even during the many years in which he took weekly flights during the semesters out to a Midwestern university, viewed European intellectual history in the great book tradition and was thus able to see intellectual inheritances well beyond Augustine's in Plato and Aquinas' in Aristotle. Riley traced how the theory of justice as love and benevolence came together from strands of thought in Plato and Augustine in the thought of Leibniz, and how the social contract school of political thought changed in going from Hobbes to Kant. Moreover, I admired Riley's relating of historical theological and moral thought to the political thought. How technocratic or pedestrian so many other twentieth-century scholars were, but not Patrick Riley.
Riley was
an extraordinarily kind man, an excellent scholar, and admittedly a flawed man,
which made him human like the rest of us, and a man who struggled with mental
illness, which presented challenges for me. All this made for an idiosyncratic
man even if his academic ideas were rather orthodox (i.e., he was a Leibnizian rather than a
Nietzschean, though he and I had studied the German philologist and philosopher enough to agree that he was not an existentialist). Perhaps even more than the ideas in his
classes, Patrick Riley left a greater imprint on me by having passed on to me
historical uniquely-academic values and customs, which, although not generally
esteemed in American society and modern universities, can nonetheless withstand
encroaching usurpers at the university level, depending on the university and
local environment. The arrangement that Riley made for my study with him
was not only distinctly academic, but also reminiscent of the world of academia
before the advent of the modern university.
Because of the richness of Riley's knowledge and the quality of his idiosyncratic lectures (the first of which that I attended--a seminar on Kant and Leibniz--featured Riley's voice on a tape recorder, as he was out of town that day), I extended my studies past my formal education. My tutelage under Riley was what he and I made of it, as his chairman at the University of Wisconsin would never accept Patrick's request for a visiting student out of resentment or dislike of the senior professor. Riley and I made of my four years of study with him as close to formal as we could by using 1 credit-hours of independent study. I attended every lecture of every class he taught during the period, and even repeated one of his survey courses so I could finish all of the 12 or 14 books assigned and cement the basic knowledge. In addition, I was able to audit courses in the philosophy department thanks to Riley. My studies under him worked out so well because we both valued the pursuit of knowledge, perhaps too much to fully realize the sacrifices made.
I approached Riley doing a year of research at the university's business school, which had been a great disappointment to me. I found that the professors were not really scholars. One even warned his seminar of doctoral students to alter survey results in case they would otherwise interfere with future consulting opportunities. The night before I left the school to study under Riley in political science, a tenured professor specializing in insurance advised me to be careful because only the faculty in history read books; faculties in the other departments read only professional journals. These business professors have really no clue about academia, I thought to myself. Wow! It was telling that the business school building looked like a bank. Its inhabitants were business practitioners training and being trained.
I was already aware of the illegal political ploy that the business school's dean had used a decade earlier to lie to the university committee on tenure about the results of a business ethics professor's tenure vote in order to get rid of the ethicist, whose interview on public radio criticizing the bank that had endowed a banking professorship, and thus the occupant thereof. The ethicist's lawyer discovered the alleged election fraud. I had known the ethicist during my doctoral studies, as we had both been in the same department, and he was still living in Madison when I was there. So on one cloudy morning outside the administration building sitting atop Baskin Hill from which the Wisconsin Capitol can be seen, I asked the university's chancellor about the fraud, and he replied, that the ethicist had been "a problem," as if that justified the unethical (and illegal) conduct. As a business ethicist myself, I felt the business school to be a chilly place even a decade after the fiasco.
Even so, I was taken back when I sat in on a doctoral strategy seminar one day. the professor actually urged his students to check with the respective managements of companies before publishing empirical research articles so to not to inadvertently cut off the opportunity for a consulting role. This occurred years before the financial crisis of 2008. That other managements, including those of investment banks, might rely on published "knowledge," presuming it to be unadulterated rather than warped, was apparently of no concern to the professor (who would go on to become a full professor!). I thought of this in the midst of the crisis because a hedge-fund company in Connecticut had relied on a flawed academic metric for assessing risk. Perhaps the metric had been "adjusted" to understate systemic risk so managers at financial companies would feel comfortable taking on more risk.
It was from the sordid, moneyed interest of the University of Wisconsin's business school that I ventured out after the one-year appointment and found Patrick Riley in the political science department. I initially approached him because of his early work on federalism. While at Yale, I had wanted to study not just historical theology, Christian ethics, and philosophy of religion, but also history, constitutional law, and film studies. Regarding law and history, I had spent considerable effort studying the federal systems of the E.U. and U.S.; I had even stayed at Yale two years past my graduation to audit constitutional law courses and learn by teaching (as a teaching assistant) in the renowned history department (one course being on the history of European integration since 1950). It was amazing to be affiliated with History and Law when both were ranked number one, at the very least in the United States. I would learn only years later that philosophy of religion was tied for number one with Princeton. But I still wonder whether the sacrifices I made to extend my studies so far beyond my doctoral studies were worth the value of my Yale education.
Even so, in approaching Riley at Wisconsin, I leapt at the opportunity to add real intellectual depth to my previous studies on federalism at Yale. I was impressed that the governance system had been able to hold such antithetical political cultures as those of Arizona and Massachusetts within a more general political system. To me, the benefits stitched into a federal system's very design outweighed the fact that bad laws such as slavery could be perpetuated without the anti-slavery states being able to stop the practice.
Riley demurred on even discussing the topic of federalism. I was admittedly disappointed even though I could understand why. Sadly, he was still disgusted by the overly self-confident German professor at Harvard, Carl Friedrich, who had been the federalism expert on Patrick's dissertation committee. Furthermore, Riley's mind had traveled quite a distance from his dissertation on the history of thought on federalism, so he instead kindly invited me to study social contract and justice theories under him. I was honored by his welcoming demeanor; I had experienced no such attitude at the business school.
I followed Patrick's advice to take two years of French, German, and Latin as a test-taking auditor approved by the relevant departments and audit seminars on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and historical ethical theory in the philosophy department. Patrick generously arranged all of that. In the spirit of jest, he did not appreciate my desire to learn German so I could read Nietzsche in the original. In fact, so ensconced in the historical ethical edifice was Riley that he refused to give his final lecture at UW on the radical German philosopher. Leibniz and Kant were Riley's favorites. As idiosyncratic as Patrick was, his thought was purely orthodox.
Others have written on Riley's scholarly accomplishments, so I need not get into those. Instead, I would like to add what Patrick himself told me of his approach and values. We had a conversation about his emphasis on relating theorists to each other ideationally, and, moreover, focusing on the thought of other scholars rather than coming out with his own theory. He demonstrated the value of having one’s own thought being on that of others (i.e., who had original theories), on how they relate to each other, and in interpreting not only their thought, but also how both similar and different ideas (of others) relate. I had asked him why he hadn’t come out with a new theory. Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and Leibniz’s wise human love (caritas sapientis) as universal benevolence (within what is reasonable, or wise) were well worth introducing (and living out) in Riley’s day and in sync with one of Riley’s own doctoral professors, John Rawls, whose ethical theory emphasizes people who are worst off in organizational, governmental, or societal systems. In academic terms and I suspect in his personal life as well, Riley sympathized with the individual up against obstacles, whether internal or external.
Only in writing now do I see a thread through Riley's early and later work. Specifically, Patrick ended his dissertation with a second reference to the American Confederacy. I contend that the American Confederacy, and especially its stain of slavery, was clearly on Riley’s mind as he wrote his dissertation. In fact, Patrick may have selected historical theories of federalism as his topic because greater knowledge off it could stave off sordid applications in the future or in order to give a fuller account of why the American confederation came to be. The message, in other words, is perhaps that the history of federalism in theory at least contains a weakness. Riley's disapprobation of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865) may result from the high value he placed on Kant's Kingdom of Ends—treating other rational beings not only as means but also as ends in themselves—and Leibniz’s wise, upward-directed love as universal benevolence to other rational beings (i.e., all human beings).
I initially said to Patrick after one of his lectures, “I don’t see how justice can be founded on love.” I believed that love is above justice because the dominant justice notion had long since shifted to public legal justice. Justice as love and benevolence had long since gone extinct. Riley wanted to resurrect it. Instead of taking a pound of flesh, dispensers of justice could base it on love used wisely as universal benevolence. In the space of a few years, I had a much broader and deeper knowledge of justice itself. I already had a doctorate whose fields included business and religious ethics as well as (international) political-economic theory. My studies with Patrick provided theoretical depth not only to these fields, but also widened my prior theological studies at Yale include understanding how Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and Leibniz's justice as universal benevolence relate to Jesus’ notion of neighbor-love. Paul's dismissiveness toward the wisdom of Athens, I realized, is premised on a false dichotomy.
As for the administrators in UW's governance hierarchy, I contend that both the Kingdom of Ends and wise justice were recessive. Patrick and I had to arrange my informal study ourselves because he had to contend his department chair, who would not allow him to set up a formal visiting scholar arrangement for me out of spite for Patrick. We tried to do so in the history department, but its chairman was corrupt. In a French class, I told a student that I was researching comparative federalism by comparing the E.U. and U.S.; the instructor, a young French graduate student, was offended at the comparison so she lied to her professor that I had insulted her to the point that she was crying. The chairman of the history department would barely listen to my disavowal of the fiction. A year or so later, someone from a legislative office at the statehouse admitted that it was an open secret there that UW as "run like the mob." That is, organized crime.
I was often frustrated in dealing with Riley outside of class because he would often evade academic conversations unless they were conducted in a classroom. An undergraduate student told me that Professor Riley was most comfortable around impressionable young students, and that I should not take his anxiety personally. Admittedly, Patrick's excuses could be quite entertaining. The most so was his tactic of suddenly running down the hallway from his office in North Hall, as if he were Euthyphro suddenly remembering that he has an appointment just as Socrates has torn apart Euthyphro’s notion of piety. “You are a rascal!” Socrates finally says.
To be sure, Patrick was not on solid ground at Wisconsin. University administrators had it out for him. One told me that Riley had unethically added his son’s hotel expenses to his own from an academic conference. That university-level administrator advised me not to study ethics with Riley. “He’s not the one I would learn ethics from.” Riley subsequently told me as he sat in his darkened office and I stood just outside the doorway that the additional receipts had been an oversight on his part. He sounded sincere, but I can only remain agnostic, not knowing for sure. It is possible that Riley created the legal fiction to help his son, but it is also possible that the university's administration did not take his word out due to the climate of distrust.
My own attitude toward that university’s administration had already soured not only from what I knew of the business school, but also when the director of the Memorial Union and Union South ignored two student referendums in which the vote went against a new bond issue to be paid by students to renovate Memorial Union and rebuild Union South from the ground up. The third time, the voting was made so difficult that the students who used the unions were, I suspect, of a higher proportion of the actual voters. Shady! As a 1-credit-hour special student, I joined the opposition's efforts in "chalking the pavements," which was commonly done on that campus. We were so good at it that one of the administration's student-sycophants complained and I then discovered something I had chalked on the front page of one of the newspapers. Shady!
When Patrick showed me a story on the front page of the local paper in which his department chair makes fun of Riley, my estimation of the university’s dominant hierarchy lowered even more. The chair had unloaded on Riley to a journalist, who in turn published that the full professor was a problem because the antiquarian did not use email. Further, Patrick’s participation in the department was too limited because he "takes his carriage back to Cambridge" every weekend. Ouch! What sort of participation occurs on weekends? Whether out of ressentiment or a grudge held much too long, the chairman had gone too far. He had eschewed academic courtesy as if it were a stained, short-sleeved, and button-down white shirt.
Shortly after the story's publication, Patrick sat on a table in the small room of his social-contract seminar, looked at me in hurt astonishment, and said, "My own chair did that to me." I saw the man behind the scholar—a man who perhaps did not understand how a rational being could act so opposed to Kant’s Kingdom and Leibniz’s wise love. Instinctively, brewed perhaps from Leibniz’s caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis, I readily provided emotional support by replying, "The problem is him, not you. As I see it, your feelings make sense. I would be hurt too." I supported Patrick in his wavering decision to go to the chancellor on the matter. Neither of us thought it would make any difference, as the hierarchy was very corrupt, but we both thought he should do it on principle, based on the illusion perhaps that accountability exists even in dysfunctional organizations.
I had a good idea by then why Patrick had moved from Madison back to Cambridge twenty years earlier (after his sons graduated from High School) and continued to maintain a relationship with Harvard even as he commuted by air weekly to his day job in the Midwest. I was not surprised at all in 2007 when Patrick retired from Wisconsin as soon as he could at the age of 65 and decamped to Harvard, where he would teach and write until his death in 2015. Sometimes when I wore my Yale sweatshirt to one of Patrick's large survey classes at UW (I didn't own any UW clothing), he would teasingly bring up the matter of the rivalry between the two Ivy-League schools. In actuality, we were on the same side.
Fortunately, at Harvard, like Yale, academic custom was (and presumably still is) valued enough to accommodate at least an appreciation of the uniquely academic customs that don’t necessarily fit in a business or bureaucratic thicket. Riley in turn doubtlessly respected Harvard more than the University of Wisconsin, even given the great difference of academic quality. Interestingly, this thought occurred to me when just today I saw a picture of Patrick teaching in retirement at Harvard; whereas at Wisconsin his longish white hair had been disheveled (in a mad-scientist way), at Harvard his hair was styled. Respect goes both ways.
Regarding
the value Patrick Riley placed on academic quality, respect for distinctly
norms and values, and disdain when exogenous norms or values presume
superiority in academic institutions, the imprint that Riley left on me was
indeed a valuable gift. As a scholar, I would say to Patrick today, "I
have decided to be what you made me." He would of course think of
Rousseau’s Emile. "But where in that is there a will, a
choice?" Patrick would ask. "Perhaps the word decided here
really means realized, so I have realized that I am what you made
me as a scholar." Riley resisted my efforts to resolve a good paradox, so
he would no doubt reject my attempt here. Trying again, I might suggest
that mature wills have some discretion to choose whether to
carry on as they were made or select to be otherwise based on a myriad of
influences that pile up as a person ages. The paradox would still exist for a
young person such as Emile, having been taught so recently by Lycurgus.
As Patrick and I used to compare the study of others' thoughts to coming up with a new theory (which are not mutually exclusive but can differ in emphasis), I would be inclined to add that a mature will, along with a unique perspective not dependent on the dominant assumptions in a field of knowledge, can result in new theory. Nietzsche explicitly warns his followers to strike out on their own rather than continually interpret Nietzsche’s own philosophy. Nietzsche also claims that no philosopher is a person of his or her own day. Even though Riley remained a faithful exponent of Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant, the quirky twentieth-century scholar raised on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood was not a man of his day. Indeed, that a kid raised in such a decadent neighborhood came to love classical music and historical ethical and political thought seems to dispel the inevitability of Emile's declaration. At some point, Riley's mature will likely realized its ability to choose and then could proudly exclaim on Sunset Blvd, "I have decided to be other than you made me!" By that time, Riley would have had access to an alternative education of the formal sort.
A commercialized pseudo-corporate business school, such as the one at Wisconsin, would be hard-pressed to recognize the value of a course of academic study that was not formalized into an academic degree, which in turn could be monetized vocationally. The contemporary university of the time, moreover, would be hard-pressed. In the first few decades of the twenty-first century, students would find that they could earn a doctorate "on-line," meaning through a computer. While I was studying under Riley, I taught an online course at Walden University A doctoral student who was taking my masters course in leadership of all things unacademic, demanded to know why I was requiring students to have a thesis statement in their term papers. He wanted to know why only I had the requirement only after I had to tell him what a thesis statement is! He was about to turn to his dissertation, having completed his coursework. I felt bad for the guy, for he had lacked an academic relationship with a senior scholar who would have been able to flag the student even though the coursework requirements had been met. My letter from Patrick Riley means a lot to me because it goes beyond what even good grades course by course could say. I am a scholar in the old sense of the word, something that is not recognized by or even recognizable to administrators or even many "scholars" from the twentieth century on.
