What’s Good and What’s Bad about the Professions as Currently Constituted?

It is very important to distinguish among the several professions—there’s a risk in painting with too broad a brush across the vast professional landscape. (I’ll deal with some of the pivotal differences in subsequent blogs.) That said, on the whole, contemporary professions still lay claim to mandating high levels of technical training and, in general, to fulfilling the expectations associated with their status and roles. They typically exhibit a high degree of expertise. And through professional organizations (e.g. the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association), they cling assiduously to their special status.

This tenacity may include the adoption of rough tactics designed to prevent any impingement on the power and status of the profession. In this respect, the physician is much better protected than the licensed taxi-driver, who has little recourse against his neighbor who decides to become a driver for Uber. On the other hand, when individuals generally considered to be professionals—like college professors—join a union, they may signal that their professional status does not suffice to secure for them the rights to which they believe they are entitled.

On my initial formulation, an important part of each profession is its claim to provide services in a disinterested way. The question has been raised about how far such disinterestedness does and should extend.

Let me take an example from journalism. Decades ago, Leonard Downie, an editor of The Washington Post, did not exercise his right to vote. He felt that even the appearance of aligning himself with one candidate rather than another undermined the disinterestedness associated with his role. Nowadays, this stance seems quaint to most observers. Yet the question arises whether journalists should feel free to march in favor (or against) particular social or political causes; whether they should be permitted to oscillate between ‘objective’ reporting and personal opinion pieces; and whether they should share their instant views on issues of the day—for example, by tweeting.

I am conservative on this issue. I don’t think one can separate “Jones the reporter” from “Jones the marcher”; and “marcher Jones” dilutes the power and veracity of “reporter Jones.” That said, I don’t mind if my doctor supports a particular political candidate or tweets about a favorite television program, so long as the messages have nothing to do with her medical practice. In other words, the dividing line is the possible overlap between one’s professional role and the particular cause one is espousing.

There will be ambiguous cases: if the doctor’s research is supported by a certain drug company, I need to know this and to be persuaded that her recommendations have nothing to do with that support. And, to return to the journalist, it does not bother me if a political reporter announces that she supports a particular baseball team.

Thanks to commentators Pat Barry, Thomas Ehrlich, Linda Greenhouse (who cites Anthony Lewis), Tom Hoerr, and Jason Kaufman. 

This is the second in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

Q&A with Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder of Design for Change (Part 1)

By Daniel Mucinskas

Design for Change is an international movement dedicated to providing students with the tools and knowledge to shape the world for a better and more sustainable future. Over the past several years, the Good Project and Design for Change have partnered to support one another’s complementary missions and perform assessment of the impact of the Design for Change curriculum. We recently spoke with founder Kiran Bir Sethi about the organization’s 2015 Be the Change conference, aspirations for the future, and the role of teachers in spreading Design for Change’s messages. Part 1 of an edited version of the conversation is below.

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Q: How was this year’s Be the Change conference, which took place from September 25-26, 2015, in Mexico?

A: The conference was a global meeting that brought together all of our partners from many different countries. We developed the groundwork for furthering Design for Change’s global initiatives, and we also viewed exemplary student projects that have had a positive social impact.

Q: What were some of the unique and memorable projects you saw at the conference this year?

A: What was really interesting was where all the projects were coming from. For me, the highlight was that projects were submitted from the remotest parts of different countries. For instance, in Brazil, we received projects from the Amazon. Cases like this are a reaffirmation that Design for Change’s particular framework—Feel, Imagine, Do, Share—is tangible for all children. By using the same four steps, students can create change in their communities.

All kinds of stories were shared at the celebration, ranging from simple dog adoption projects to the construction of a mini-plane that plants seeds across great distances for growing crops or reforesting. There were projects dealing with urban issues like traffic and a couple of stories on bullying and inclusive schools. Overall, a really interesting range of ideas was presented, and because we were in Mexico (for the first time celebrating outside of India), it was very exciting to see so many stories from Mexico as well. The conference cut across demographics, geography, and languages to give these children a platform to demonstrate their “I Can” superpowers to change the world.

Q: Will the conference now be in a new country each year?

A: Yes, that is our intention. We really want the Be the Change conference to capture the full flavor of our global movement. We began in India to get the event rolling, keeping student work as our focal point. We have two countries bidding for next year’s the event. All the partners who attend will get to see a different cultural context and also witness how much Design for Change is growing.

Q: What do you think the role of teachers will be in the expansion of Design for Change?

A: Everything we want to achieve must eventually involve teachers, since children in most countries must attend formal schooling. I’m not sure if or when that will change and a new form of education, but Design for Change is of course still working on partnerships with teachers to demonstrate that empathy, ethics, excellence, and elevation are important subjects to teach in addition to the more typical subjects. We need to get away from “either/or” thinking about character education and more typical subject education. Curricula usually make space for content of character to be taught, and I think Design for Change fits right into that niche.

I’m hopeful that as we make the right noises with the right partners, we get more traction within education and society as a whole. Our responsibility is to continue to create conditions where people start taking these issues seriously.

Q: What are the long-term plans for Design for Change?

A: We will be continuing everything that we have been doing so far, and we will build new partnerships and add new voices. We want to take a global standpoint and show the world that Design for Change resonates with all children. Secondly, beyond breadth and expansion, we want to have a deep impact. Finally, we also leave time and space for more organic interactions: if a need or opportunity arises, we will take advantage of it. Currently our priority is to strengthen our global community and incorporate more voices.

You can find our more about Design for Change at their website by clicking here.

Read Part 2 of our conversation, in which Kiran shares her thoughts about the Design for Change curriculum and the importance of empowering children to make good ethical decisions.

Responding to “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict”

I’ve been very pleased—and, to be frank, happily surprised—by the large number of public and personal responses to my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” Initially, I thought that I would write a single omnibus essay, commenting succinctly on the various points that have been raised. But by virtue of the number and variety of comments, I realized that a single response would either ignore many of the points or dwarf the original essay in length! Instead, I have posted a series of blogs, each directed to a single issue or a closely related set of issues.

Here’s the outline of posts:

Posting #1 What Are Professions, and Where Do They Come From?
Posting #2 What’s Good and What’s Bad about the Professions as Currently Constituted?
Posting #3 What’s Confusing about the Professions?
Posting #4 Disruption #1: Markets
Posting #5 Disruption #2: Digital Technology
Posting #6 Revisiting the Arguments of Richard and Daniel Susskind
Posting #7 Disaggregating the Professions: Comments on the Law
Posting #8 Disaggregating the Professions: General Comments
Posting #9 A Global (as Opposed to American) Perspective
Posting #10 Next Steps, Including Positive Resolutions

Often my postings include direct responses to points made by commentators. In the spirit of a blog (as opposed to a scholarly paper), I do not cite specific comments or references but acknowledge the individuals whose comments were particularly germane to that blog. Apologies if I miss any names.

I welcome additional comments on this series of postings and may address these additional comments in future postings. I hope that, taken together, the original essay, responses, and postings will function as a text on the nature of the professions, their current challenges, and their future course.

What Are Professions, and Where Do They Come From?

Origins: The professions as we know them in the contemporary world have existed for more than a century; in the United States, we might say that “progressivism ushered in professionalism.” But the professions were preceded a millennium ago by guilds—collections of tradesmen. As re-invented guilds, professions exhibit some of the positive characteristics of their predecessors (high quality work, solidarity, and an ethical core of service) as well as some more negative traits (secrecy, exclusivity, tribalism, and aversion to competition). Once training for the professions became the province of institutions of higher learning, credentialing became more public; but until the last half century, access to the professions remained largely restricted to certain demographic groups (chiefly white, male, and of Christian and Anglo-Saxon background).

Defining Characteristics: Professions are generally defined in terms of several characteristics. To begin with, provision of standard training leads to certification of competence and, typically, an accepted title (e.g. Doctor, Professor, Esquire). It is assumed that professionals will embody a core set of ethical values (e.g. the Hippocratic Oath) and will transmit these values to younger aspiring professionals. Professionals are expected to deal with complex technical and ethical issues under conditions of uncertainty and to do so in a disinterested way. Their accredited status provides legal recourse to individuals who have been ill-served by a certified professional; it also allows the launching of procedures against individuals who have claimed credentials which they have not actually earned.

It is useful to distinguish these defining characteristics from features identified with the role of the professional: kind personal relations, a wise person (sometimes called a trustee) to whom one can turn, a good member of the community, one who embraces an ideology of service. In my framing essay, I lamented the apparent waning of these desirable attributes.  In the next blog, I critique the professions as they are currently constituted.

Thanks to commentators Pat Barry, Steve Brint, Stephen Gardner, Jason Mitchell, and Dennis Thompson.

This is the first in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

The Varieties of Disinterestedness: Who should judge the judges?

For over a decade, my friend Judge Mark Wolf, of the Federal District Court in Boston, has presided over a dauntingly difficult case. Gary Lee Sampson, a white male with a long history of crime, was accused of murdering three people over the course of a week. Though the death penalty is against Massachusetts law (and indeed is opposed by most citizens of Massachusetts), it is considered to be valid in the Federal Courts. In 2003, Sampson was tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. Appeals of the death penalty take a long time, and even if the sentence is upheld, it typically takes a decade or more until the convicted killer is executed.

The appeal process was unfolding when it emerged, in 2008, that one of the jurors on the original trial panel had lied extensively during the empaneling process. Accordingly, Judge Wolf ordered a new trial.  The trial was scheduled to begin in September 2015. However, before that date, the prosecution filed a motion asking Judge Wolf to recuse himself from the proceedings. The reason for the request: in the summer of 2014, Judge Wolf had moderated a discussion of a documentary that was critical of conditions in American prisons. While moderating a panel about a domestic issue is a valid and indeed often recommended process for a judge, it turned out that one of the panelists might have been subsequently called as a witness for the defense in the trial.

In a 114-page decision, Judge Wolf reviewed the situation and, as befits any thoughtful jurist, discussed many requests for recusal in previous cases. In the end, he elected not to recuse himself from the case. I found his decision convincing.

In reflecting on this unusual case, I realized that it embodied several discrete instances of the notion of ‘disinterestedness’—a key concept in the professions. Despite its odd derivation, disinterestedness does not mean ‘lack of interest’; it denotes the capacity to put aside one’s own interests and inclinations and to make a decision based on the merits of a case.

It can be argued that lawyers in criminal cases—prosecutors and defenders—are mandated to defend the interests of their clients (in this case, the state and the accused, respectively). That is why we need to have juries and judges—individuals who are presumed to be able to put prejudices and pre-judgments aside and think as objectively as possible about the facts as they are discovered and presented in the courtroom. The juror in the original trial had described herself inaccurately, and so it was assumed that she was not disinterested—hence, the retrial of the case.

But I want to delineate here three other connotations of disinterestedness relevant to this situation:

1. The judge. Like all human beings, the judge has his or her own interests and causes, but he or she cannot carry out the role of judge properly if those interests are allowed to color judgments. Judge Wolf argued that his involvement in a panel discussion did not constitute grounds for recusal.

2. The hypothetical ‘reasonable citizen.’ According to statutes, a judge should only recuse himself if a ‘reasonable citizen’ would have cause to conclude that the behavior in question had the appearance of a conflict of interest. Most of Judge Wolf’s reasoning as spelled out in his lengthy decision entailed an attempt to put himself in the shoes of a reasonable citizen.

3. A friend of the judge. As I stated at the opening of this blog, I (and my family) have long been friends of the Judge and his family. And so, in writing a blog like this, it is reasonable to ask whether I can be disinterested, or whether, consciously or not, I will bias my account in favor of the Judge and his decision in the capital case.

Which of us can be truly described as disinterested? And under what circumstances? Who decides? And what happens if the ideal of disinterestedness vanishes?

Postscript: In early January 2016, after this blog was drafted, Judge Wolf decided to step down from the case. He cited competing commitments and the heavy workload of a death penalty trial with its potential appeals.

Additional reading:

–“In Defense of Disinterestedness in the Digital Era,” The Professional Ethicist blog, The Good Project

–“Reclaiming Disinterestedness in the Digital Era,” in From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age (2015: University of Chicago Press), eds. Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light