An Ethical Don Quixote

An Ethical Don Quixote

My connection to the University of San Diego is strong enough to cause me to travel forty miles back and forth twice a week this semester to get to my two classes. Those classes start at 7pm so I go a bit early and grab a bite before my two and three hour classes. Last semester I was in the habit of going to a noodle cafe near the University, but this year the new business school building has a cafe just steps from my classrooms in addition to a fully automated digital cafe that’s open 24×7. My dining habits on Tuesday and Wednesday nights are hardly worthy of a story even though I find the digital cafe an interesting new part of futuristic life since I keep finding myself saying that punch line to an old joke, “how do it know?” Despite all this interesting connection to an up and coming academic institution (the campus was just rated the most beautiful campus in America, which I’m sure lots of others might challenge), my connection to the school administration and faculty is slight at best. I get an email or two from the two chairpeople that run the two departments that I teach in. Those emails ask me to take on the course and deal with a few administrative issues, and I am sure to send them each my syllabus for the courses so they know I am doing my job, but the only other contact involves an emailed gig contract that tells me how much I will be paid and the terms of my temporary employment.

One of the communiques beyond this limited email chain was a note asking if I could make use of a visiting professor from Spain, who would be on campus for several weeks in the early part of the semester. It seems that this philosophy and ethics professor from Madrid would be available to address my course in Law, Policy and Ethics. Given my minimal involvement with the USD academy, I felt it incumbent on me to make an effort to accommodate, so I modified my syllabus to move a planned class on the Law, Policy and Ethics of globalization in a world increasingly galvanizing, regionalizing and nationalizing due to issues ranging from COVID to the war in Ukraine. The question I posed to the class and to the visiting professor was whether globalization was dead at the hands of the Ukraine conflict. I did not make up the topic, it’s been all over the news. The intention was to get students to consider the legal, policy and ethical issues of globalization and which choices faced by companies were right and wrong in the broadest possible perspective.

I have, in the last six years, become a very political person after a lifetime of working hard NOT to be a political person. Needless to say, the event that swung me to this new posture was the “unexpected” ascendancy of Donald Trump to the national stage and presidency. I hear all the time that many (to be honest, on both sides of the political divide) have been so galvanized by the man. What a strange figure to get so much attention, but isn’t that always the way it seems to go? It seems always to be the person most unlikely to change the world who does so. Donald Trump May forever be the poster child of that concept. It seems simultaneously energizing and unnerving.

This change in personal philosophy has become a dominant theme in my daily life and like most emotions, my half-Latin blood makes me wear it all too much on my sleeve.That is socially intrusive enough as it is, but in taking on the role of a professor of law, policy and ethics, I view it as in need of serious moderation. My approach has been to create a stated position with my classes that I declare my political leaning and apologize for its likely natural bias and challenge the class to try to look past it because the course must not be about espousing any professor-imposed self-righteousness, but rather the importance of open-minded thinking and acceptance and tolerance for views other than one’s own. I feel strongly that is a main ingredient in our getting through this period of extreme national divisiveness.

So, on the occasion of the arrival of my unknown guest lecturer, I made arrangements to meet him an hour before class for a “coffee”. Given his origins, I correctly anticipated that dinner st 6pm would not be in line with his biorhythms. When we met he was all smiles and gentility, but I could tell that his English skills were at best a B-. His halting English might not hinder some topics, but I was concerned that more subtle topics like ethics might suffer in translation. There was nothing to be done, so we launched forth into class. I gave my colleague a rousing send-off, declaring the value to students of getting an on-the-ground European perspective on globalization as well as the views of a professional ethicist rather than my amateur ethicist standing.

That was when this older and genteel gentleman surprised me. I imagine Miguel de Cervantes, while traveling through the region of La Mancha, southeast of Madrid, may have run into a character like this professor in the early Middle Ages. He would have been courtly and well-read, but perhaps a bit more of a philosopher than a pragmatist. His studies would have made him quite resolute and determined to put heavy emphasis on both his civility and righteousness. The Christian dominance of a country like Spain, especially with Moorish influences abounding would have been quite notable and prominent in a man of such breeding. Of course, Cervantes would create Don Quixote to this role model and record what is considered the first modern novel.

Well, once at the lectern, my genteel ethicist Spaniard became quite the Msn of La Mancha. Despite his English language limitations, he spent the next hour telling my students exactly what I tried so hard NOT to tell them, which is what is right and what is wrong. There were more windmills being tilted at than I had imagined existed in the topic of globalization. In fact, the one Spanish student in the class, a woman named Lola, who had logically introduced herself as a fellow countryman before class, began to look to me like the fair Dulcinea. As this Quixotic tale unfolded with ethical jousts left and right, I realized I had unwittingly made myself Sancho Panza to my students, facilitating this epic but disconnected from reality battle of good versus evil.

In our heart of hearts we all love Don Quixote and wish the world were a better place where our ideals were all that mattered against the realities we all face. I feel it is my duty to ground my students in the pragmatic cost/benefit of ethical actions, reminding them that while righteousness may be its own reward, it also bears economic fruit if considered and applied carefully and judiciously. But I now realize that there may be no better way to prove that point and still maintain that righteous perspective than to cause them to watch a few windmills being tilted at. I did not expect the arrival of Don Quixote in my class, but I was glad he had come and gone.