On his retirement from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, legendary organizational theorist Jim March addressed his faculty colleagues, reflecting on the varied motivations for human action, one of the enduring themes of his scholarship. March observed that the social sciences, particularly economics, portrayed human action as the result of a rational choice. March called this form of reasoning the “logic of consequence.” It is the domain of incentives and calculation.

But March cautioned his colleagues not to forget “a second grand tradition for understanding, motivating, and justifying action,” a tradition that views action as “based not on anticipations of consequences,” but as “attempts to fulfill obligations of personal and social identities and senses of self.” He called this the “logic of appropriateness.”

While these observations may seem incongruous, given the occasion and the audience, March assured his colleagues that they held “some mundane implications for those of us who claim to be educators.” We teach and write, March said, partly because those activities produce consequences that we value, but we also engage in those activities as an expression of our faith in the intrinsic value of ideas. We teach and write because we feel impelled to do these things, not for potential rewards, but because being a teacher or a scholar is who we are. March compared institutions of higher learning to temples:

A university is … a temple dedicated to knowledge and a human spirit of inquiry. It is a place where learning and scholarship are revered, not primarily for what they contribute to personal or social well being but for the vision of humanity that they symbolize, sustain, and pass on…. Higher education is a vision, not a calculation. It is a commitment, not a choice. Students are not customers; they are acolytes. Teaching is not a job; it is a sacrament. Research is not an investment; it is a testament.

Does this resonate with you? It does with me. For March, this attitude toward higher education has real-world implications:

The complications of confronting the ordinary realities of day-to-day life often confound such lofty sentiments, and I would not pretend that it is possible or desirable to ignore consequences altogether. But in order to sustain the temple of education, we probably need to rescue it from those deans, donors, faculty, and students who respond to incentives and calculate consequences and restore it to those who respond to senses of themselves and their callings, who support and pursue knowledge and learning because they represent a proper life, who read books not because they are relevant to their jobs but because they are not, who do research not in order to secure their reputations or improve the world but in order to honor scholarship, and who are committed to sustaining an institution of learning as an object of beauty and an affirmation of humanity.

I don't know the backstory here, whether March was reacting to a particular dean, but it reads like he has had some experiences with "deans, donors, faculty, and students who respond to incentives and calculate consequence." I count myself fortunate that my deans have been uniformly excellent on this front.

If you want to read March's entire speech, the published version of it is here.

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