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Panel discussion lacks substance as cult of celebrity scholars attracts stargazers

Last Thursday afternoon, I felt like a groundskeeper at the baseball All-Star Game. I was the microphone guy at the April 27 panel discussion entitled "How Can Values Be Taught in the University?"

At a star-studded event with so much potential for rich debate, what the McCosh audience received was actually more show than substance. Hence the All-Star Game atmosphere.

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It was quite a distinguished group of panelists — President Shapiro, University professors Toni Morrison and Peter Singer, Smith College President Ruth Simmons, columnist George Will GS '68 and Johns Hopkins ethicist Susan Wolf. The event opened the University Center for Human Values' 10th Anniversary Celebration, which included four other discussion panels on April 28.

I suppose most people in the crowd came for the high-profile panelists. That is one of the great things about the Princeton name — famous people come to speak here. But when we are not helping to pass microphones around, why do we go to events such as these? Is it to fill that lazy section of the day between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m.? Is it to see the personalities, not to hear the speeches?

The McCosh 50 seat-fillers are like All-Star Games. The appeal is not really about the content. Rather, we come for the ritual and spectacle of the events.

Politics professor Amy Gutmann, the director of the Center for Human Values, began the April 27 event by saying that each discussion question would be far too challenging to be answered in the time provided.

She was right.

The panelists spent two hours mainly affirming that teachers inevitably endorse certain values. But they avoided the hard question: "What values should they teach?" As Harvard professor K. Anthony Appiah, a participant in a Friday panel, noted, "One of the privileges of the [panel] chair is to pose questions, and the privilege of the panelists is not to answer them."

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Some of the panelists brought up compelling points, but no one was able to reach a final conclusion. Will wanted to talk about virtues instead of values, but he did not really say what those virtues should be. Singer asked whether the goal of his classes should be to change his students' views, but did not answer that question either.

Simmons came the closest to making a clear statement on how to teach values. She said that putting students in diverse environments will help them learn the right values. But when it came time to make a specific value judgment, she did not. Simmons brought up an example in which a student refused to turn in a friend for cheating. The student valued loyalty over academic integrity. But Simmons did not say whether she agreed — whether she punished the student or let her off.

Though the panelists danced around the issue, it was still entertaining. But why?

We go to these panels for the same reason we watch the All-Star Game — the rituals and the personalities.

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The formalities are comforting: The panel chair's introductions. The long table with the white table cloth. The microphones. The plants on the floor. The glasses of water with the Princeton logo. Phrases like "as it were" and "part and parcel." The applause at the end.

And, most importantly, we get to see "distinguished" — academia's euphemism for "famous" — people. Going to these lectures is similar to seeing celebrities enter the Shrine Auditorium before the Oscars. It does not matter what they do; we just want to watch them.

Take Morrison. Maybe she can talk intelligently about values, but we mainly enjoy her presence on the panel because she is a well-respected celebrity who has won prestigious awards and written prestigious books that we have actually read. Morrison emits rays of fame.

She was the Cal Ripken of the panel. Ripken is clearly no longer the best third baseman in the American League, yet his impressive past accomplishments and especially his impeccable personality have made him so revered that people perennially vote him into the All-Star Game. One could argue that Dean Palmer is a better third baseman. But who goes to a baseball game to see Dean Palmer?

Wolf opened her speech by saying how she was a bit intimidated by the "distinguished" credentials of the panelists. If the presence of writers Morrison and Will on a panel about values makes a trained ethicist like Wolf shake in her boots, then the celebrity factor must have overshadowed the discussion's content.

I asked one philosophy professor whether the event's spectacle eclipsed the discussion's substance. "Absolutely," he said. "We are here to celebrate ourselves." I would not go that far — the panel had good intentions. But we should not kid ourselves. We watch the All-Star Game to see the players. What happens during the game is beside the point. Zachary Pincus-Roth is from Chevy Chase, Md. He can be reached at zacharyp@princeton.edu.