The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common. 

While visiting California, I spent some time on UC’s main campus. I was "testing the waters" on signing on to be a visiting scholar there. I was dissuaded from any such elongated affiliation within days, however, because the director of that university's visiting scholar's program (such scholars merely use the libraries) refused even to meet with me. Because the program at the time charged $750 for the first year and $1,500 for the second year for what is essentially access to the libraries with a university ID (and use of the campus shuttles), it was entirely reasonable for me to discuss the program with its director, but, alas, she was too important for that, and thus lost some revenue as a result. Her reply to my email went beyond rude dismissiveness. 

I met enough faculty, nonacademic administrators, and doctoral students, moreover, to be able to quickly grasp the university's organizational culture, which, incidentally, I found locals knew of surprisingly accurately. One retired scholar who had studied at the University of San Francisco told me that the faculty and faculty-administrators at Berkeley (Cal) only value certain scholars as colleagues, and meanwhile make it intentionally clear to others that they are not wanted. This is the antithesis of scholarly collegial courtesy. This is the bottom line that scholars visiting Berkeley should know. 

I witnessed and in fact was subject to the passive-aggressive rude behavior of the director of the university’s Institute of European Studies as he apparently quickly sized me up and reneged on his offer to meet with me concerning my scholarship on the E.U. and U.S. (perhaps this comparison put him off), and then rather blatantly excluded me (and another Yale alum) from his introductions of faculty to each other as we waited to hear a lecture on Churchill. The director, having blown off meeting with me by writing that maybe he would see me at a talk or two, literally stood over the two seated Yalies—myself and a retired Yale College graduate—in the small seating area while introducing his colleagues (actually coworkers) to each other. This explains the lack of scholarly collegiality being extended to scholars from other universities; academic courtesy does not extend to everyone who holds the Ph.D. degree; rather, academic colleague only pertains to the faculty at his university, Cal. During the reception after the talk, he looked over and laughed at me at one point, which explains why he blew off my email so blatantly, and it was clear to me that he had dissuaded the speaker and a similar fellow from speaking with me. I was not alone in noticing this; a local retired restauranteer observed it too. One student working at the wine table told me that it was typical behavior at that university, and the other student working there told me that the faculty in the philosophy department are known for being particularly nasty. 

For example, a senior professor of ethics said to me as soon as I told him that I had gone to Yale, "Cal is every bit as good academically as Yale." We could throw Harvard in too. Well, the rankings simply don't support that view. Neither does even a quick contrast between the main reading room of Sterling Library at Yale, where you can hear a pin drop even when the all of the chairs are occupied with even plenty of undergraduate students, and the reading room in Doe Library at Berkeley, where ongoing conversations are not only ongoing, but also stubbornly so. The immaturity and inconsiderateness alone bely any claim to intellectual maturity. So too does the starkly different occupancy levels in the two reading rooms on school nights. One of my favorite phrases is, the proof is in the pudding. Sterling library is open every day during the semesters (except holidays); in contrast, Doe Library, and thus its periodical and reference rooms, is closed on Saturdays even during semesters. There is no film library (the film archive's "library" label is a bloated misnomer), whereas one is housed on the seventh floor of Sterling Library at Yale. Perhaps the biggest difference lies in the capabilities of the managers and the student employees of the respective libraries, especially in fixing problems versus pretending that they simply do not exist. Inflexibly adhering to a broken status quo is a basic sin of management. 

 

Although the weather is better in Berkeley than in New Haven, and the interpersonal climate is admittedly harsh at both universities, the faculty (and faculty administrators) at Berkeley stuck me as particularly hostile with regard to visitors (whereas too many Yale employees, including faculty and fundraisers, relish intentionally inflicting anger by excluding some insider groups but not others). The ethics professor at Berkeley, whom I had emailed in vain before my arrival and met at a talk, even felt inclined to insult Yale in talking with me. "I bet its cosy and accommodating there," he said with a smart-ass. demeaning tone. He clearly didn’t realize that a cosy and accommodating organizational culture is a good thing. I could gleam from his assumption that the cultural mentality dominant at his university was not at all cosy and accommodating, and definitely not to visiters! Not welcoming for sure. Nevertheless, I was polite; I held myself back from replying that being cosy and accomodating is better than being frosty and hostile towards visitors.

Regarding visiting scholars who affiliate with the university  library to do their own research for a year or two, I found out that that UC charges them $750 for the first year, and $1,500 for the second. This implies not only a certain institutional greediness, but also an implicit refusal to extend collegial courtesy to scholars, which is to say holders of true doctoral degrees (e.g., Ph.D., Ed.D., J.S.D., D.Sci.M., D.B.A., and Th.D.). I don't understand why a scholar would stay there even a few months, given how dismissively faculty regard outsiders not on the faculty. You’re not one of us is a very primitive, tribal instinctual urge that Nietzsche would likely say is out of control in the weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. I saw a lot of passive aggressive weakly constituted inhabitants on what is outwardly a very beautiful campus during my visit to the Bay Area.

 

I've hardly been uncritical of Yale in my writings, but this has ultimately been geared to improving the university by raising awareness among my fellow alums of the wordening atmosphere on campus. In contrast, I don't think the conceited mentality of bloated intellect and primitive ill-will towards people deemed "outsiders" at Cal deserve the fruits that come from improvement. A professor in Cal’s law school had gone to Yale; I met him in person at Cal on the second day of my visit. He claimed to have left teaching at Yale because of the toxicity at Yale’s law school, that toxicity being definitely true, but in not replying to my subsequent emails, he too seemed rather toxic to me; perhaps one toxic organizational culture had spit him out and he subsequently added to the toxicity of another university. I attended a talk at that law school during my visit. Tellingly, the event coordinator took over the Q&A when the speaker from Harvard would have called on me. I left immediately,  disgusted even as I passed the awaiting reception food. A bad odor nixes even good food.

 

Even doctoral students at Cal talked down to me as if they were spoiled, immature children dismissive of an adult. I told them that I am a scholar visiting from somewhere else and had studied at Yale, but I was to be put in my place anyway. The philosophy students whom I met, both undergraduates and doctoral students, seemed eerily to resemble so closely the immaturity and the abrupt anti-social characteristic of the philosophy professors I had met that I couldn’t help but remember that an apple doesn’t fall far from its tree. Paul wrote that you can know a tree from its fruit. Who would stay long in a room of pretentious,  rotting fruit?

 

To illustrate: I sat in on two lectures in a class on Nietzsche; the professor, it seems, was incapable of replying to emails that she herself admitted she had received, and her graduate student behaved quite boorish to me. “I’ll take those!” he harshly as I was returning extra copies of a handout to the professor. That student had heard me introduce myself as a scholar from elsewhere at another talk (where I had met the "ethics" guy)  I complied with the teaching assistant politely; had I been equally demanding and disrespectful, I would have put the copies on the professor’s desk, and told her disciple, you need to go through your professor rather than talk to me directly. After all, he was not even a colleague. 

Besides applying reason to master that temptation into fueling my decision not to return even though I was keenly interested in Nietzsche’s startlingly paradigmatic philosophy. Days later, an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy admitted to me at a reception that that department is even more toxic than the university moreover. It is nice to have one's hunches confirmed. When I had been a student at Yale, it was common to avoid the philosophy department there, as it was not yet in recovery from the toxic implosion from contending personalities that had nearly rid that department of its faculty. That such deep thinking as philosophy encourages could be associated with such petty, even mean people would seem to defy some natural law.  

 

Perhaps a dysfunctional organizational culture is simply a tree whose fruit is sour. Such culture is notoriously difficult to change. Besides the sheer number of people who conveniently conform to viciousness to feel a sense of belonging—of being on the inside—and to feel plearure by excluding outsiders, group-think is very hard and thick against internal and external second-guessing. The sheer distance between an organization’s leader and the herd animals who reside within an organization enables the status quo to continue even as the organization’s own message to itself and society is quite different. I think a dysfunctional organization must decline quite a bit before its inhabitants have to recognize that being more welcoming is in their own self-interest.

More than one local resident in Berkeley told me that in part due to budget cuts from the government of California, Cal-Berkeley had been in a slow decline for twenty years. “They feel threatened and are defensive,” I was told by more than one scholar who lived in San Francisco at the time of my visit. One such scholar, who had received her doctorate at the University of San Francisco, said, “The faculty at Cal want specific people; they treat them like shit. If they have sized you up even as a visitor, it won't get better.” That is to say, the faculty administrators, like the director of European Studies, and the faculty quickly size outsiders up and are not shy about slamming the door shut in a way that is intended to say, you aren’t worth anything to us, but other people are. That mentality is quite toxic and yet it can thrive because of the pleasure that is gained by self-love from exercising the underlying sordid instinctual urge. According to Nietzsche, the strong are able to master even their most intractable urge, whereas the weak cannot. Hence they are slaves to it.  This is perhaps partly why the weak resent the strong and try to bring them down, such as by insisting that a university saturated with immaturity and hostile pettiness  is nonetheless equivalent academically to a Yale or Harvard. Such a claim, made by such people, belies its own validity and actually makes transparent the probable thesis that petty, immature professors don’t come up with mind-blowing new theories that are paradigmatic. Instead, such "scholars" are pedestrian academics.  

Patrick Riley: An Antiquarian Scholar of Justice as Love and Benevolence

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.