A Constitution Day message – UCI News

Duncan Pritchard, Distinguished Professor of philosophy and chair of the Year of Scholarly Values committee, shares this Constitution Day statement:

Constitution Day commemorates the moment in 1789 when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention – the framers – signed the document they had spent four months drafting. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the significance of this document and the hopes – and expectations – of those who wrote it.

(It is a little ironic that this Constitution Day message comes to you from someone born in England, albeit now a naturalized U.S. citizen who has enthusiastically adopted this country. Mind you, many of the framers had recent ancestry from the British Isles, so perhaps this is not quite as ironic as it might first appear).

As a philosopher, I am naturally drawn to the Constitution’s philosophical foundations. Consider the opening words of the Preamble to the Constitution: “We the people”. These words embody what was then a radical conception of a nation being a collective endeavor on the part of its citizens. Unfortunately, the initial realization of this conception was not radical enough, as it tragically failed to include all the people living in this nation. It would take a long struggle to even get close to realizing the promise contained in the Constitution (and which is implicit in these words), of a democratic society where everyone deserves to be treated with dignity as equals.

Reading these opening words today, it is useful to reflect on how the framers of the Constitution saw civic virtue as being essential to the young republic. If this new form of government were to work – if the incipient nation were to thrive – its citizens must have a sense of civic duty, not only to uphold its laws and principles, but also to promote the public good. One must not merely enjoy the rights and privileges of citizenship but help protect them for all.

Civic & scholarly values

The framers wanted citizens to be engaged in the life of the young republic, lest the welfare of everyone suffer. The guiding thought is that we can all flourish as individuals only if we each participate in this collaborative project. This does not mean, of course, that we will agree on political or ethical (much less religious) issues. It does mean, however, that we need basic shared civic values and collective goals.

We need to be able to set aside our narrow self-interest, recognize the interests of others and seek the common good. It means that, as we exercise our liberties – of thought, speech, and association – we bear many solemn responsibilities. To honestly engage in productive argument. To work toward finding shared solutions. To accommodate legitimate concerns expressed by all parties. And, perhaps most importantly, to be charitable to our opponents. To see them as deserving of dignity simply in virtue of being people, whereby we gain empathy for them and understanding of their values. To see them, in short, as free individuals like us.

Notice that it is these civic values and virtues that drove the civil rights movement, which ensured that the promise of the Constitution – whereby the inherent dignity of all who live in this nation is equally respected – begins to be fulfilled.     

The Year of Scholarly Values

UC Irvine’s campuswide theme for 2024-25 is The Year of Scholarly Values. Across a series of activities, we will come together to examine the academic values that are central to what we do as students, teachers and scholars. Like other U.S. universities, we directly benefit from the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution by how they underpin freedom of speech and, more specifically, academic freedom.

Just as the framers took a thriving democracy to require shared civic virtues and values, I suggest that a scholarly community like UC Irvine only thrives when it exhibits intellectual virtues and values. The intellectual goods we seek include truth, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. How we seek out these goods is also important, however, which is why we need the intellectual virtues. These are admirable character traits aimed at these intellectual goods, such as intellectual humility, intellectual tenacity, intellectual integrity, and curiosity. (It is not a coincidence that these four intellectual virtues are the Anteater Virtues). 

Scholarship often involves dealing with opposing views, for example. But one is unlikely to gain much understanding if one engages with one’s opponents in a dogmatic and dismissive spirit. Think of someone you regard as an exemplary scholar. I’d wager they are intellectually humble, aware of their fallibility as inquirers and keen to understand the views of others, even when they are trenchant opponents. 

This point reminds us that good scholarship is fundamentally a collective enterprise. We come together with others – especially those with whom we disagree – to generate, and then transmit, new knowledge and understanding. We do so in an open spirit of honest engagement with each other. We individually prosper as scholars by being part of, and contributing to, a collaborative culture animated by scholarly values and virtues.  As UC Irvine’s motto demonstrates, our role in the world is to cast light upon it.

On this Constitution Day, I encourage everyone at UC Irvine to reflect on the Constitution and the civic virtues that the framers thought were required for a democratic society to flourish. As you do, I hope you will also consider the parallels to our own scholarly community, and the intellectual virtues and values that enable it to flourish.