“Valuing Integrity,” by Darryl Wright

(This talk was delivered as the keynote address at Harvey Mudd’s 2024 convocation ceremony.)

I’d like to thank our dean of faculty, Tom Donnelly, for inviting me to give this brief talk.  And before I begin, I’d like to welcome everyone in the incoming class to the college.  I hope you’re settling in well, are not missing family too much, and had a good experience during orientation last week.  My chief aim in this talk is to put some ideas out in intellectual space about what kind of a place we should want Harvey Mudd College to be, ideas that I hope you, the incoming class, will resonate to and that might guide your thinking about how you’ll participate in the life of this institution.  And I hope what I have to say will be interesting, and perhaps helpful, to others here, too.  

I want to speak today about integrity, because this is a concept that features in our institutional self-conception and arguably deserves an even more prominent place there than it has.  It comes up, of course, in conjunction with the Harvey Mudd honor code.  At the top of the student and faculty web pages dealing with the honor code, there is the following language in large, bold type:  “All members of ASHMC are responsible for maintaining their integrity and the integrity of the College community in all academic matters and in all affairs concerning the community.”  This statement of responsibility is restricted to members of ASHMC because it comes from the ASHMC Constitution; it’s a high-level statement of what the honor code requires of students.  Other language on ASHMC’s honor code website explains these requirements in greater detail.  But I take it that the basic obligations set forth in this statement apply to everyone with a role in the institution.  Presumably, we’re all responsible for maintaining the Harvey Mudd community’s integrity and our own.  Thus, for example, faculty have an obligation to participate in the honor system we’ve established on campus, by extending certain forms of trust and freedom to students in academic matters, and by referring cases of academic dishonesty to the honor board in prescribed ways.  I’m not going to be discussing the honor code much further today; Professor Erin Talvitie of the CS department gave an excellent talk about that at convocation a couple of years ago.  Instead, I’d like to offer some thoughts about what integrity is and what’s involved in valuing it.  We can apply the concept of “integrity” not only to persons and institutions but to buildings (“structural integrity”), art works, data sets, and various other things.  The commonalities and divergences across these applications are worth pondering, but since time is short I’ll gloss over all of that and restrict my comments primarily to integrity in the case of individual persons and, more briefly, in the case of the college community.  Individual integrity may be the more familiar idea.  But we do speak of the integrity of organizations and institutions when, for instance, an organization is acting so as to uphold its core principles or in ways that contradict them; we might then describe it as acting with integrity or showing a lack of integrity.          

The language about integrity in our honor code originated, or at least was updated, in the early 1990s.  I recall that it came before the faculty for discussion in some connection or other.  I think part of the issue was whether the honor code applied to students’ behavior off campus, because there’d been a couple of unfortunate incidents.  As applied to individuals, “integrity” often seemed back then to be a placeholder for doing the right thing or, in today’s campus vernacular, not being a jerk.  The reference to community integrity seemed to be based on the idea that when students violate the honor code, this stains us as a community, especially if the violation involves some wrongdoing off campus.  And perhaps also the idea was that violations breed more violations and tend to weaken the fabric of trust that allows us to be a place where students have substantial freedoms and faculty are relieved of having to police the academic environment in unwelcome ways.  In any event, though the terminology was used loosely so as to encompass the honor code’s broad reach, it seemed meaningful and important to affirm that we wanted people to have integrity and wanted this to be a community of integrity.  Thirty years out from those discussions, as we navigate difficult conflicts on campus, in American society, and globally, we might benefit from thinking more searchingly about integrity and its importance.  

When we consider what’s involved in an individual’s maintaining their integrity, it can’t just be a matter of their doing the right thing, since that just leaves integrity out of the picture.  “Integrity” is a multifaceted concept, and there are various different philosophical accounts of it and many truly interesting, challenging questions to ask about it.  I obviously can’t go into those details here.  But as applied to persons, integrity is usually understood as having to do with upholding one’s own convictions and values.  So it can’t just come down to conforming to some external standard of what is right.  Integrity has to do with the nature of one’s own agency, with one’s agency being unified or integrated around a worked out set of values that establish the terms for how one lives one’s life—a set of values that one will not sacrifice to please others or gain some superficial advantage.  One question philosophers have discussed is whether there can be such a thing as “bad integrity”—the “integrity” of a homicidal maniac or a relentlessly authoritarian politician or of other people who in less extreme ways are basically bad actors.  If the answer is “yes,” then integrity is not unequivocally good and should not always be encouraged or welcomed.   I’m on the side of those who would answer “no.”  To a first approximation, I think that exercising one’s agency is only valuable when one acts from one’s best rational judgment.  Some people’s actions are driven by prejudices or obsessions that do not arise from careful if mistaken judgment, but from rationalizations, self-deception, or other non-cognitive motives, and I don’t think people like that have integrity even when they act self-consistently.  But in a community like this one, we extend to one another the presumption that those around us are not like that (even if, in particular cases, we’re sometimes forced to conclude, in the privacy of our own minds, that this presumption must be withdrawn).  We extend this presumption and rightly expect others to extend it to us.  That’s why we treat honor code violations not just as wrongs but as violations of the perpetrator’s integrity: we see them as violations of our shared commitments to one another.  And we presume that at least some violations of integrity can be repaired.  (Another philosophical question about integrity is whether people can have it in some areas and not others, or to varying degrees.  I intend my comments to be non-committal on these issues since there isn’t time to delve into them.)    

So integrity involves one’s values and convictions, not just one’s actions, and if what I was saying before is right, it demands more than just self-consistency.  It also involves doing one’s best to ensure that one’s values and convictions are well-justified (whatever that might come to, in a given area of thought or action).  And this requires, among many other things, being open to counter-arguments.  Only insofar as one really is committed to exercising one’s best judgment is it a virtue (the virtue of integrity) to stand by one’s judgment in difficult circumstances.  Nevertheless, even if there are constraints on what kinds of convictions and values can be the foundation of a life of integrity, people of integrity need not—and do not—all share the same views across the board.  This is an important point.  If we value integrity in ourselves and others, then we have to want others, when their integrity is not in question for us, to abide by their best judgment even when, by our own lights, it’s mistaken.  From this standpoint, it can make perfect sense for you not to want your best friend to sign the petition you’re gathering signatures for (at least not right now, given how they look at things).  To quote from an article by philosophers Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, “The point of attributing integrity to another is not always to signal unambiguous moral agreement. It is often to ameliorate criticism of another’s moral judgment . . . . [In such cases] it is largely the point of attributing integrity to open a space for substantial moral disagreement without launching a wholesale attack upon another’s moral character.”  (Cox et. al.)

 Part of why we need the concept of integrity is that we don’t automatically grasp what’s true or good.  If we did, nobody would owe any special loyalty to their own judgment; if anything, we’d owe our loyalty simply to whatever facts and values were transparently staring us in the face.  As things stand, if we’re to have any hope of getting things right, we need to arrive at our understandings of what’s good and true by effortful work that each one of us must initiate and sustain for ourselves.  It’s a fallible process, it’s one that we have to discover how to navigate, and it’s one that depends crucially on the intellectual honesty of each thinker.  It’s largely a matter of understanding rather than simple apprehension.  It’s obviously also a process that engages us with others and requires us to rely on and build on their insights, advances, and expertise.  It’s important to be a person of integrity because our integrity is fundamentally all that any of us have to guide us, since the true and good don’t just reveal themselves to us.  Moreover, we count on and need the integrity of others, given that we’re social beings who rely on cooperation with others in order to survive and flourish.  

The philosopher Cheshire Calhoun has argued that integrity is both a personal and a social virtue, similar in this regard to self-respect.  Calhoun says that self-respect “is a virtue exercised both by holding oneself to standards and by demanding rightful treatment from others” (Calhoun 253).  Similarly, she argues, integrity has both personal and social dimensions:  

To have integrity is to understand that one’s own judgment matters because it is only within individual persons’ deliberative viewpoints, including one’s own, that what is worth our doing can be decided.  Thus, one’s own judgment serves a common interest of co-deliberators. Persons of integrity treat their own endorsements [i.e., convictions, values, conclusions] as ones that matter, or ought to matter, to fellow deliberators. Absent a special sort of story, lying about one’s views, concealing them, recanting them under pressure, selling them out for rewards or to avoid penalties, and pandering to what one regards as the bad views of others, all indicate a failure to regard one’s own judgment as one that should matter to others. [Calhoun 258]

If Calhoun is right, then we do others no favors in concealing what we really think from them, when that reflects our best efforts to figure out what to believe and value.  And we do ourselves no favors in trying to intimidate others into thinking as we do or demanding their automatic agreement with our conclusions.  As Calhoun puts it, each of us needs to “stand for” for what we think is right, because none of us can escape the need to form our own judgments.  But everyone’s judgment is fallible, and thus each of us has a stake in knowing how other persons of integrity view the issues of concern to us.  I believe that this sort of insight is an important part of why what we refer to as “liberal arts education” is valuable and why Harvey Mudd College’s aspiration to be a liberal arts STEM institution is important.  To be such an institution, we must regard one another’s integrity as valuable and not to be sacrificed, and we must reflect this perspective throughout our practices and institutional culture.  Not caring about the integrity of others, or too readily questioning its very existence, are signs that one’s own commitments may not be anchored in integrity but in something else—fanaticism, dogmatism, or grandstanding, perhaps.  We maintain “the integrity of the college community” partly by our concern with one another’s integrity and by working to realize our institutional commitment to a liberal arts ideal.  (That ideal also speaks to why, even though Harvey Mudd students typically have a wide variety of colleges to choose from, and no one is forced to come here, it’s still desirable to have significant curricular flexibility, so that students with varied interests, backgrounds, and perspectives can find a fulfilling path from matriculation to graduation.) 

To make the preceding rather abstract points somewhat more concrete, let me share a passage from a recent lecture by a philosopher I admire, Christine Korsgaard of Harvard.  In her 2022 John Dewey Lecture for the American Philosophical Association, Korsgaard reflected on her education as a first-gen college student who received her undergraduate degree from the the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then went to Harvard for graduate school.  (The Dewey lectures always have this autobiographical component.)  Here is part of what she says about her dissertation supervisor:

Some brilliant intellectuals nevertheless fail to attract students; some seem to overshadow and cripple them; some demand that their students sign on to their own research program, and produce clones. [He] managed to inspire his students without inspiring imitation in the bad sense; to be supportive without easing up on standards; and to evince a respect for the minds of his students which helped us to develop a respect for our own minds. [Korsgaard 12]

The respect for students’ minds that Korsgaard refers to here is a type of concern for their integrity, a concern to foster and support their efforts to find their own voices intellectually and think for themselves.  Respect for students’ minds is, I believe, indispensable to good teaching.  As Korsgaard makes clear, it’s perfectly compatible with challenging our students and maintaining high standards.  I believe Mudd faculty do, in myriad ways, demonstrate a deep respect for the minds of our students and of our colleagues.  I don’t think any academic institution can truly flourish, or effectively serve any important educational mission, unless such respect for one another’s minds permeates its culture.  It needs to set the terms for how students and faculty interact inside and outside of the classroom, how faculty (and administrators and staff) engage one another, and how students live together.  It should be as much a part of residential life and of the overall environment of the institution as it is of academic life.

Respect is not just a feeling—not just an affective state—though it engages affect in various ways.  We respect one another’s minds (and our own) by observing certain norms of intellectual life.  These include (for a start) engaging sincerely and honestly in the work of knowing; recognizing that reasons and evidence are the levers of thought; striving to accurately represent views with which we disagree; avoiding psychologizing and intimidation; and defending intellectual freedom.  In addition, I agree with Peter Elbow, the writing pedagogy theorist, that what he calls the “believing game”—actively attempting to see the world from other points of view—is as important to good thinking as the “doubting game,” the critical scrutiny and stress-testing of those views (and one’s own).  The believing game, as Elbow presents it, is multifaceted, but one of its facets is very simple: to listen to what others have to say. 

I don’t think that respecting people’s minds requires us to approve of their ideas and decisions or even keep silent about our disapproval.  What it does require is rejecting the initiation of force in all of its different forms.  It requires that, when one’s arguments fall short of being convincing, one never attempt to destroy the values that others have created as the penalty for their non-compliance with one’s ideas or demands.  It means settling differences by discussion, not coercion.  It is, of course, completely legitimate (and can be an act of integrity) to refuse to sanction or support ideas and policies with which one disagrees.  If a business in my local community is financially supporting a campaign to pass an anti-abortion ballot initiative, for example, they have no right to the money I choose not to spend there, if I’m a supporter of abortion rights.  They have no right not to be criticized in my social media posts.  They have no right to suppress their critics’ negative judgments of them.  But they do have a right to operate their business free of forcible disruption.  To deny them that that right is to engage in a pretense—the pretense that knowledge comes to us magically without effort.  It doesn’t, and I’ve been suggesting that fundamentally that’s why integrity matters.

There’s obviously a lot more to be said on all of these topics, and I’ve been using pretty broad strokes in setting out what I wanted to say.  Let me end just by wishing the incoming class and everyone here a wonderful first week of school and a wonderful year.

(Darryl Wright is Professor of Philosophy and Willard W. Keith, Jr., Fellow in the Humanities in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts at Harvey Mudd College.)

References

Calhoun, Cheshire (1995).  “Standing for Something.”  Journal of Philosophy, 92: 235–260.

Cox, Damian, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine (2021).  “Integrity.”  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/integrity/>.

Elbow, Peter.  “The Believing Game or Methodological Believing.”  English Department Faculty Publication Series, University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://umass.edu.

Korsgaard, Christine (2022).  “Thinking in Good Company,” American Philosophical Association Proceedings and Addresses.