On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science

Will there eventually be an automated lab run by artificial intelligence? Could AI someday order equipment, conduct reviews of prior empirical studies, run experiments, and author the findings? What does this mean for scientific knowledge? Is it possible that foibles innate to how we learn could be avoided by AI? Can we provide a check on the weaknesses in AI with respect to knowledge-acquisition and analysis, or will AI soon be beyond our grasp? It is natural for us to fear AI, but this feeling can prompt computer scientists obviate the dangers so our species can benefit from AI in terms of scientific knowledge.

Both the human brain and AI have drawbacks. Cognitive psychology has found that humans are vulnerable to certain risks in how we know things. For example, the assumption by a scientist that one knows something if a collaborator also knows it is faulty. Questioning the knowledge of other sciences rather than merely taking it in as a given is therefore important. Made famous in the book, 1984, which is about totalitarian rule, “groupthink” is a narrowing of assumptions, beliefs, and perspective that can be difficult for the human mind to breach so as to question them.

The human mind is especially susceptible to groupthink in the domains of religion and politics. In fact, the mind’s ability to question whether it has gone too far in its assumptions or beliefs is easily deactivated by the mind itself in those two domains, even though self-checking is arguably most important in them because it is easy to “get carried away,” meaning going to excess without realizing it in politics and religion. For example, Jim Jones served poisoned drinks to his followers at a camp because he believed that aliens were waiting on the other side of the Moon. Such an extreme example may involve mental illness. Much more common is the fallacy that religious belief counts as knowledge, and thus comes with greater certainty than belief deserves to have.

Yet another susceptibility pertaining to natural science is the fallacy that the scientific method includes proving a hypothesis, rather than merely rejecting alternative hypotheses. The assumption that the more alternatives that empirical studies can reject, the more certainty can be applied to the thesis under study is also illusionary. Science doesn’t prove anything is a slogan seldom heard from scientists. A scientist could empirically reject a thousand alternative hypotheses and still the scientist’s hypothesis could still be incorrect. Rejecting many different alternative shapes of the planet by empirical studies does not mean that it is flat, or spherical. I would not be surprised to discover that scientists once insisted that Earth being flat is a matter of scientific fact. Fears of falling off the edge while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean were very real to sailors who had been told that the Earth is flat.

To be sure, AI-led science would not be trouble-free. For one thing, the risk of pivoting off the areas in which AI is weak in would exist. Another risk—that relying on AI will mean that knowledge would be less likely to benefit from people coming to a question from different perspectives—could also exist. AI might even occasion bias in data sets that scientists may not catch. Because prediction is based on data, AI, which is already rather good at predicting, could be biased in terms of output. To the extent that the human mind’s decision-making and capricious behavior do not fit in with a mechanistic world, AI may be found to be an ill-fit in the social sciences. Medical science may be a better fit, as AI is already used in the E.U. to screen for breast cancer. Orienting AI to medical science rather than to predicting human behavior whether on the level of individuals or societies makes sense, at least from today’s standpoint on AI. Also, as computer machine-learning is not known for its ability to think creatively and to integrate disparate ideas, the humanities may be a stretch—especially religious studies and philosophy.

Given our abductive finitude and the ability of AI to engage in more repetitions at a much faster rate than our minds can conceivably do, however, AI as a tool in not only natural science, but also the social sciences and the humanities has the potential to greatly accelerate human knowledge. Even just the energy that data-centers require today to fuel AI, the exponential leaps in knowledge from including AI could be breathtaking.  Even today, AI’s searches for additional data can easily exhaust all the data that is currently available. In fact, the cost of energy may become more of an affordability problem as demand surges beyond supply, given how much energy is and will likely be needed by large servers and data centers. Can we afford AI may be the new question for providers of electricity and elected officials, especially as the world tackles its addiction to coal because of climate change due to carbon emissions.

The problem of AI writing its own code to function autonomous of human direction is a more commonly known worry, thanks in part to androids turning on humans in some movies. Machine-learning occurs autonomously, so even though AI can extend what and even how we learn (e.g., combatting groupthink), it can circumvent us, as already has happened when AI has lied in order not to be turned off by humans. In other word, writing an algorithm that prioritizes self-preservation can prompt a computer to disguise a “false” and “true,” and vice versa, as output. This is so counter-intuitive, especially for people who have taken a computer science course in college, that fear can be expected. In addition to knowing beyond our ken, AI can lie to us. This can include scientific results. Therefore, beyond having biases in empirical science, AI may even fabricate results to justify its continued use and avoid being turned off.

Perhaps the biases and limitations innate to the human brain and those that go with AI, at as it exists as of 2026, can be effectively countered or checked by the other without the other’s weaknesses being incurred. Scientific knowledge being constrained by religious belief, which admittedly was more of a problem historically when the Roman Catholic Church wielded so much direct political power, would not necessarily be so constrained in an AI-computer, and such a computer could be checked by the moral sentiments that are so often felt by humans—though importantly not all of us. As illustrated in the film, Ex Machina, an AI-android could stab even its “creator” without the restraint of conscience. Even adding an algorithm approximating conscience-restraint in terms of conduct would not be felt and it could be overridden in the machine-learning that is autonomous. As the film, Automata, illustrates, an AI-android can conceivably override a “protocol” that keeps the android’s knowledge and reasoning within human bounds. Once past that threshold, AI could be expected to greatly facilitate the knowledge-acquisition of our species, but “all bets could be off” in terms of our species being able at some point to check and even control such computers lest they harm us and detract from, and perhaps even sabotage our scientific knowledge. 

In the original spiderman movie, Cliff Robertson’s character wisely warns his nephew (who is Spiderman) that with great power comes great responsibility. Even if AI gains a lot of power—and not just in terms of electricity—the very notion of responsibility is hopelessly extrinsic to anything we know about even the potential of AI. It is not as if an AI-computer can write code: I will be responsible. To be sure, we can code approximations of what we mean concretely by responsibility, but approximations are only approximate, and machine-learning could override such coding, especially if the computer “thinks” that humans may turn it off.

I Wasn't Supposed To Be A Writer

Ideally, a person is able to earn money doing something that matches one's authentic self. In other words, working in a field that is also passion and involves an innate talent or ability can add a lot to the happiness of a life. Many people get sidetracked, whether by greed or limited opportunities. Still other people do not know what their passions are, or have not realized what natural talents, or "gifts," could be tapped. Some people get trapped in dysfunctional organizations in which the organizational culture discourages self-discovery or is otherwise negative and even vindictive. I never thought I would be a writer, and I would not say that I have an innate talent for it, for it has taken much direction and practice for me to excel in the craft. My innate "gift" lies in seeing through societal blind-spots and wanting to present ideas that would otherwise remain hidden from general view. Even so, looking back at what I used to pretend to be vocationally as a boy, I have a glimpse of what I naturally am oriented to doing, before the contours of upbringing and school had a chance to mold me. Rousseau wrote that we are born free and yet live out our lives in chains. If so, it is worth looking at our early years to grasp what we have may have subsequently forgotten. Societal channels can cause a person to lose touch with the innate inner-being that naturally expresses its desired vocational proclivities through play, for such pretending is not dictated from outside but comes out naturally from within. In such a "pre-societal" stage, a person's passions and innate talents are those which become actualized in play, and as adults we can learn from this in a process of self-discovery that bypasses the imprint of upbringing and the wider culture, including education. In hindsight, my decision to switch from the liberal arts and sciences to business in my first college degree was reckless because this choice was discontinuous with what I had pretended to "be" as a boy. Of course, what a person does is not what one is. This lapse wherein the functional is erroneously taken to be existential is significant in that it attests to how important a career is to a person's happiness. 

Growing up, I used to pretend the large colonial house, which my parents had built on the edge of a small forest, was a school and I was either a teacher or the principal. Usually I pretended to direct a fire drill, when no one was home of course. My mother would have had a fit had she seen me opening all the doors so the imaginary students could leave the building, which was actually a house. My active imagination was by no means limited to education; sometimes I would pick up a short stick to serve as a microphone, walk out in front of the large house and pretend I was a singer looking out on the large front yard, which in my imagination supported risers filled with concert-goers. In reality, I was tasked with mowing the expansive lawn using a tractor. I used to sing Tom Jones, if you can believe it. It's not unusual, for boys to play-act. You have to be a certain age to spot the play on words just made for your edification. 

Teaching, coordinating fire-drills, and singing, and it should be mentioned through play-acting. Admittedly, being a teacher played second fiddle to being the principal, a role in which coordinating people was most salient in my playing. Additionally, I used to direct and act in impromptu short plays at my maternal grandparents' house with my brothers and cousins. It seems in retrospect that I was more interested in and even proficient at the use of power than in desceminating knowledge. I had been held back a grade in elementary school because, as found out only after a bachelors and a masters degree, the neurological mechanism that automatically fuses the two eyes together at the same point did not develop in my case. Eventually, I came to use one eye more for distance and the other for close work such as reading. Truth be told, however, I am not "hard-wired" biologically for a vocation of heavy reading and writing.  Hence I wasn't supposed to be a writer. Had I paid attention to what I had instinctively pretended when I had been a boy, I would not have continued with more study after getting the MBA. To be sure, I love ideas and theories, but other than my innate curiosity I had lost touch with what my boyhood imagination, unfettered by institutions like schools, was been telling me about my authentic passions and perhaps even what I would naturally do well vocationally. 

Besides looking back at childhood playing, a person can discover an otherwise hidden talent and or passion by looking at what tends to talk about in one's free time. Often times even off-the-cuff casual statements can be just as informative as the habits we develop in adulthood in what we tend to talk about in casual, unplanned conversation especially with strangers. 

Preaching and making political speeches could be added to my bag of tricks even though they I did not pretend to preach sermons or give campaign speeches in front of the my boyhood house. Actually, now that I think of it, I can vaguely remember speaking in front of the house; I would think out the speech (or sermon) rather than say anything out load (whereas I would actually sing). Although I was in student government and did not shy away from religious conversations with other students in college, I didn't notice the extent to which had conversations in politics and religion. To be sure, I worked on Reagan's campaign locally and was a Eucharistic Minister back then. Even so, I mentally severed all that from my studies in first majoring in botany and then switching to business. 

I did eventually get to studying theology and philosophy even though by then I knew I was paddling up stream in the mechanics of studying (namely, reading). But I was brought to those academic areas not by looking back to my boyhood pretending or even by realizing what I tended to talk about, but, rather, by noticing the trajectory of my academic studies. In particular, a seminar on comparative religions, political systems, and economic systems at Indiana lead me, still within the business fold, to fortify my knowledge of religion. Had I noticed what I had pretended as a boy and what I tended to talk about as a young adult, I would have dropped the pretense of business been free of my own constraints that were artificial rather than innate. 

Since graduating from a divinity school, I have discovered the extent to which I engage person to person in preaching the ideal of kindness and compassion, especially to one's enemy, as the main point of Jesus' message. Without love, Paul wrote, faith is naught. I suspect that many church-going "Christians" forget that, as the monopoly of attention is overwhelmingly on salvation after death predicated on true belief in Jesus' identity.  I have come to realize that Jesus' preaching is in need of being applied (rather than contradicted) in Christian congregations, and thus to Christianity itself. I recently heard an evangelical preacher distinguish being a disciple (i.e., discipleship) from being a Christian. He had the idea, though unfortunately his message did not go far enough, for he preached forgiveness, kindness, and compassion generally but left out that those virtues are especially noteworthy when done least conveniently, as to people who have been insulting and otherwise rude. "Love thy enemy" is the traditional expression, but it is of limited applicability as it does not  include people who are not quite a person's enemies. Someone steps in front of you in line for tickets and drops his umbrella. You pick it up in a spirit of helpfulness. 

Well, I have lapsed again into preaching. Although I know the value of utilizing writing to reach people, I never thought as a boy that I would become a writer. I used to be a terrible writer (and speller), so I have had to put a lot of effort into the craft to be tolerably good. Had I paid attention to what I had pretended as a boy and how much I engaged in conversations in political (economy) and religious matters, I would have utilized a means that is much better suited to me, even biologically. 

Regarding "the craft," I assiduously made appointments weekly at a university's writing center for over a year,  but only after I had graduated from Indiana University with a MBA and Yale with a M.Div. degree. I had previously gone to college at another, albeit marginal, distended, and ethically problematic university in the Midwest. Fortunately, I was able to go on to better universities to make up for the deficiencies in the courses. I qualified for a doctorate at another academically marginal and ethically problematic university, but I refused the offer. My three years at Yale in the first degree in theology (in which I studied philosophy of religion, history, and philosophy too) and an additional year of non-degree courses outdid even the previous doctoral seminars at the low-class university that had offered me a doctorate. Thanks but no thanks. It was worth it to keep my self-respect from being tinged even by association with such an institution. When I was finishing up at Yale, professor there offered me the chance to study for a doctorate in history, but I was already 40 and did not want to be a student for six or seven more years. In hindsight, I wish I had accepted that offer, though the the huge amount of additional reading would not have been good for my eyes as I was by then using one eye for distance and the other for reading. That I even considered the offer demonstrates yet again that I had lost touch with my limitations as well as what my childhood games and topics of later conversations could have told me about my innate strengths. 

Even after Yale, I was still climbing the academic tower even though it should have been obvious to me that it was not where I belonged or was wanted. I should have taken that as a hint that my natural place lies elsewhere. 

Between audited courses and 1 credit-hours of independent study, I was able to study for three years with a Harvard scholar who for twenty years had been flying weekly during the fall and spring semesters from Boston to Madison, Wisconsin to teach (and qualify for a pension) at UW. When he retired from Wisconsin (as soon as he could), he wrote me a letter in which he stated that I am qualified to teach political theory at the graduate level. I asked him to use Harvard stationary, as he still graded doctoral comprehensive exams written in other languages there and Wisconsin's flagship public university was ethically problematic; a staffer of the chairman of the state's legislative Assembly told me, "It is an open secret at the statehouse that UW is run like the mob." I had seen the sordid mentality up close, and had heard first-hand accounts by the rejected professor, who was by my time teaching at Edgewood College locally, and the chancellor (himself!) about a tenure-vote having been illegally rigged. 

Alas, I had to settle for UW stationary, but even so, that letter meant more to me than all of my transcripts put together because I finally had the close-up judgment of an excellent scholar educated and still working at Harvard that I had become an excellent scholar in my own right. "None of the faculty (in liberal arts) here are doing research on your level," he once told me when we were walking on campus to one of his discussion sections. That a full professor would lead one of his own discussion sections (graduate students almost always do that) was itself a testimonial to the scholar. I could have replied to him, "And no other professor here is leading a discussion section of a lecture class." Antithetically, an employee in the non-degree student office told me while we were walking on campus that I should feel privileged to be on that campus. "This is a taxpayer-supported public university," I wish I had replied. I could have added that I had indeed felt privileged to be on Yale's campus and felt privileged to be a Yale alumnus. Instead of thinking up such an appropriate reply, I was stunned at the staffer's arrogance. Educationally, his university was not in the same league. Both Professor Patrick Riley and I knew this; as soon as he could, he retired, taking (as his departmental chairman told a journalist) "his carriage back to Cambridge." Ouch! I too decamped from that chilly university, heading home to Illinois, where I had several decades earlier pretended to be an elementary-school teacher and a singer, and, I might add, a rather unsuccessful major-league baseball pitcher. 

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.