Recently, it was reported in The Guardian that the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Dame Jacinda Ardern, has been appointed as a lecturer at the University of Sydney, based in the School of Health, and that “her work will focus on empathetic leadership, social cohesion and civic trust.” I sparked an unexpectedly passionate debate on a social media platform, when I shared the article. Among other things, I editorialised as follows:
I don’t care what their politics are—celebrity professors are not a good thing—particularly when those of us who have toiled up through the ranks do not get such care or assistance towards housing. In fact, I feel that those of us who work at the coal face teaching and researching are taken for granted.
I reiterate here: my point is not about Ardern personally, although I understand that there are people who object to her appointment because of her political actions.
My point is a broader one about “celebrity academics.” It could be Jacinda Ardern, the progressive former Prime Minister of New Zealand, it could be Boris Johnson, the conservative former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, it could be a rock star or an actor of no particular political bent, and I would feel the same cynicism, particularly in an age where universities protest that they are too financially straitened to undertake various other activities.
I worked for four years as a sessional (adjunct) university lecturer before I achieved a permanent position in 2010. Actually, compared to others, I was lucky: I got a job as soon as I finished my PhD. It’s important to note that I was required to submit my PhD before any law school would hire me on an ongoing basis. Prior to that, I’d applied to several law schools, and had been knocked back. Until the early 2000s, you could attain an ongoing position with a “mere” Masters thesis, but by the time I entered the academic job market (in 2006) that was no longer possible.
These days, without a PhD, you are very unlikely to be considered for an ongoing positions at an academic institution. It is regarded as necessary because it demonstrates that you can write a sustained, lengthy work which is sufficiently novel to contribute to your field. If you then wish to progress in academia, you must then publish, teach and perform administrative tasks. As I’ve outlined long ago, my strengths are in research and teaching, and the areas in which I research are also the areas I teach in.
Of course, there are many ways of learning, and many different forms of knowledge and expertise. I was a practicing lawyer for six years, and I’m here to tell you that the best way to learn how the law works from the inside is to practice it. Reading statute books and textbooks is not the same. This is why, when I undertake comparative legal projects, I always speak to locals and try to gain an understanding of the local culture and language. What I see in the books does not necessarily reflect the way in which it operates in practice. My experience of practice did not contribute to the university’s decision to hire me.
For academic knowledge, there is a given way of attaining it and demonstrating it: research, publication, dissemination of knowledge to students and to the world. The word professor is derived from the Latin verb profiteri (“to declare openly” or “to acknowledge”). It denotes a person who publicly declares their expertise or teaches a branch of knowledge. In Australia, just as in England, you are not simply a professor because you are an academic. This is by contrast to the United States. In Anglo-Australian institutions, “professor” is a rank which you attain after many years of academic work and after proving your global impact. When I gained the rank of professor in 2019, I had written or co-written four books, and written numerous articles and book chapters (20+).
My gut feeling about Ardern’s appointment was that she did not deserve it, regardless of whether one believes she was a good politician or not, and regardless of whether she has a lot of practical knowledge to impart. Practice alone would not have given most lawyers I know such a position in the modern academy; but they are not famous.
When and why do we think someone is deserving? And how do we react when those norms are undermined? As it happens, when I wrote the above-mentioned PhD thesis, I thought long and hard about what it means to deserve something. In what follows, I will adapt my thoughts from that work.
In his work on the norms of desert, Joel Feinberg said, ‘To say that a person deserves something is to say that there is a certain sort of propriety in his having it’.1 A person who deserves something cannot say that they have a right to it; rather they can only argue that it is proper (given our wider societal norms) that they be given an interest in the thing.
When we decide questions of desert, we look to a person’s past qualities, actions and status.2 Questions of desert are (or should be) deeply personal, in that an assessment should link to the specific conduct of the person involved.3 The conduct of third parties should be irrelevant. Importantly, you must look at someone’s actions, not only their words. Talk is cheap, and humans are very good at self-deception.
Despite the personal nature of desert norms, convention (in the sense of broader social norms about what we believe is proper) is very important to questions of desert.4 This convention reflects the principles of the rule of law.
We have a convention that a person deserves the same or similar treatment to that which is given to a person whose qualities and actions are the same as theirs. It therefore follows that someone can only be said to have received their ‘just deserts’ if there is parity between the treatment of that particular person and the treatment of other people who have done the same thing. In other words, the rule of law requires that like cases should be treated alike.
We could call these norms of ‘reciprocal altruism’, involving conventions around the exchange of costly goods and services between individuals: “I will give you this, if you give me that.” We have certain patterns that we expect others to follow. Humans are not the only animals to have norms of reciprocal altruism. As primatologist Frans de Waal illustrates in the video excerpt from his TedX talk below, monkeys may also have a notion of reciprocal altruism.
At the outset of the experiment, two capuchin monkeys get paid grapes for handing over stone tokens (an identical task). Then the researcher gives one monkey cucumber, while still giving the other grapes, for doing the same task. The researcher allows both monkeys to see this unequal payment. Clearly, capuchin monkeys strongly prefer grapes to cucumber. The monkey who gets the cucumber notices that she is being treated unequally, for performing an identical task. What happens next is famous: the monkey who is paid cucumber loses her temper, protests, and throws the cucumber and tokens at the researcher. The other monkey continues to collect her grapes, unconcerned by her colleague’s unequal treatment.
We might laugh in response at first. This is because we recognise and empathise with the feelings of the unequally treated monkey—we are simply surprised to see norms which we think of as so very human written visibly and viscerally in the behaviour of another species. Who hasn’t wanted to throw a piece of cucumber, when life is just not fair?
Hence, the primatologists who conducted the experiment, Brosnan and de Waal, hypothesised:
People judge fairness based both on the distribution of gains and on the possible alternatives to a given outcome. Capuchin monkeys, too, seem to measure reward in relative terms, comparing their own rewards with those available, and their own efforts with those of others. They respond negatively to previously acceptable rewards if a partner gets a better deal. Although our data cannot elucidate the precise motivations underlying these responses, one possibility is that monkeys, similarly to humans, are guided by social emotions. These emotions, known as ‘passions’ by economists, guide human reactions to the efforts, gains, losses and attitudes of others. Clearly if these reactions evolved to promote long-term human cooperation, they may exist in other animals as well. It has been proposed that nonhuman primates are guided by species-typical expectations “about the way in which oneself (or others) should be treated and how resources should be divided.” As opposed to primates marked by despotic hierarchies, tolerant species with well-developed food sharing and cooperation, such as capuchins…may hold emotionally charged expectations about reward distribution and social exchange that lead them to dislike inequity.5
Desert also reflects the human notion that when a person expends labour, they deserve remuneration or reward in some way. As the monkey experiment and our reaction to it shows, if we both do the same task in the same way, and one person is given a higher payment, for reasons we think are irrelevant or which don’t make sense to us, we regard this as deeply unfair. And unlike capuchin monkeys, humans keep a score in the longer term: they display calculated reciprocity. Our notions of reciprocity are not only based on the symmetry based reciprocity (reciprocity based on similarity to one’s self) nor attitudinal reciprocity (reciprocity based on the relationship between the parties and one party’s recent or present behaviour) but on long-term interactions and calculations.6
So maybe my gut reaction towards Ardern’s appointment reflected the fact that I worked really hard to get my position, and struggled for years, teaching large subjects, and my practical experience was not valued. It felt like she walked into her position, because she’s a media darling. Throw that cucumber, Katy!
The straitened financial situation of academia more generally also contributed to my reaction. If we were all swimming in resources, I don’t think I’d mind so much.
Of course, not all labour is deserving of reward. As Lawrence Becker states, ‘we must hold the principle of desert to be totally inapplicable to cases in which gains are gotten by violating moral prohibitions – e.g. by unjustifiably overriding the rights of others.’7 Thus, if I expend a good deal of my labour on a bank robbery, we would agree that even if I worked very hard, this is not deserving of remuneration or reward.
Nonetheless, both our law, and human societies more generally, have a concept that labour should be rewarded when it benefits other people.8 It should be observed that hard work alone is not always enough. We may still not achieve the outcome we wanted. When students are disappointed with their grade, they often say to me, “I worked very hard. I deserve a better mark.” I have no doubt that the student worked hard. But a law school grade is not a measure of “how hard did I work?” It is a measure of “to what extent did I answer the questions in a way that matched the expected answer?”
I have a confession. The two subjects for which I worked hardest in my undergraduate law degree were Property Law, and Equity and Trusts. I went well beyond the set curriculum. I read everything. In Property Law, a notoriously tricky subject, I won the subject prize for that year. My hard work paid off. Therefore I expected the same stellar result in Equity and Trusts, because of the kinship between the two subjects. Alas, it’s my worst undergraduate grade (66%, third class honours).9 I stuffed up the exam entirely, and took several wrong turns in answering hypotheticals. I do wonder if I’d stuffed my brain with so much information that I couldn’t see the wood for the trees.
In any case, life isn’t always fair. This is why we say desert is a matter of propriety, not entitlement. Hard work doesn’t always pay off in terms of the immediate outcome. On the other hand, despite bombing in the Equity and Trusts exam, I certainly did not lose my fascination with, and love for, the topic of equity and trusts. Equitable remedies and trust law are one of my specialties, and I am now a world-expert on several topics in this area (including accounts of profit and other equitable remedies, but also offshore trusts and comparative trusts). I have taught Equity and Trusts, off and on, since 2007. My hard work did pay off, in the longer term. It gave me a life-long sense of that area and love for it. If we step back and recall that the point of study is to learn the subject matter, rather than to achieve a particular grade,10 then my undergraduate study was not wasted.
Fundamentally, we respond like other primates to unfairness and to questions of desert. There is no surer way to create resentment in an organisation or in society than to prefer the undeserving and to ignore the deserving. It does not matter in what particular direction the system is rigged. If it is rigged against people who work hard, who display valuable characteristics, and who could contribute to society, it violates our norms of fairness. It creates perverse incentives. This is particularly the case if resources are scarce.
If I give a student a bad grade on the basis that I hate their haircut, or I give a student a good grade on the basis that their taste in music is similar to mine, that is unfair. Recall that this is a basic instance of reciprocal altruism: “If I do this task to an acceptable standard, I get a reward.” Even capuchin monkeys understand these rules.
The more I think about the importance of norms of desert to academic judgment, the more disturbed I am. If academic institutions are inclined to ignore norms of desert in a given instance—and Ardern’s appointment seems like a comparatively mild instance of such, because presumably Ardern is intelligent and polished, and will have interesting observations as a result of her experiences—how can we be sure that this doesn’t happen more often? How can we be sure that academics who ignore norms of desert will grade their students fairly? How can they fairly review other scholars’ work? How can they teach others to teach and assess the work of others? I always mark blind where possible, because I do not want to be affected by any bias.
More broadly, over the past ten years, my faith in academic institutions generally has been shaken. I do not think I am alone.
Academics are there to teach, and to assess whether students have learned effectively. We are there to preserve existing knowledge, a role that seems to be sidelined in the current day. We are there to add to knowledge, with our research and writing. We are there to have civil disagreements, in order to test our research, and learn from others.
My new Vice Chancellor, Professor Carolyn Evans, seems to have a similar vision of our role. She has emphasised in recent announcements that we must be curious, connected and courageous, and noted the importance of civil disagreement. I hope that this will help us recall that our role is not only to profess, but also to learn from constructive and practical dialogue with each other. There is nothing I enjoy more, whether it is with students or with colleagues.
Joel Feinberg, ‘Justice and Personal Desert’ in Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1970) 56.
Matthew Harding, ‘Justifying Fiduciary Allowances’ in Andrew Robertson and Tang Hang Wu (eds), The Goals of Private Law (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2009) 341, 352; John Kleinig, ‘The Concept of Desert’ (1971) 8 American Philosophical Quarterly 71, 73; David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976) 85; Lawrence Becker, Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations (London, Routledge & Paul, 1977) 50; Stephen R Munzer, A Theory of Property (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990) 257; James W Harris, Property And Justice (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996) 205.
Harding, ibid, 352–53.
Harding, above n 2, 353. See also Harris, above n 2, 207–08; Feinberg, above n 2, 82; Miller, above n 2, 91.
Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, ‘Monkeys reject unequal pay’ Nature 425, 297–299 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01963
Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, ‘A proximate perspective on reciprocal altruism’ Hum Nat. 2002 Mar;13(1):129-52. doi: 10.1007/s12110-002-1017-2.
Becker, above n 2, 51.
Harding, above n 2, 355-56.
My best friend at law school: “What the actual hell? That’s your worst grade? Stop moaning!” At that time, generally at least half of the students only got a pass grade in any given subject. Bell curve, what bell curve? More like a sleeping camel.
This is one of the issues with teaching. Tests are supposed to incentivise students to learn, and measure knowledge, but the grading of tests always suffers from the problem of being caught by Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.” The grade itself becomes the aim, rather than the learning and the knowledge.
I grappled with the word desert (was sure you didn't misspell) before found that the correct phrase was 'a just deserts'. Always thought it was 'just dessert' in the way you deserve that Black Forest.
Regarding the ethics, Caroline Norma commented on X, "This is just a golden parachute" and I'm amused by the notion that Aussie academics taught it as an example of Japanese corrupt capitalism and yet in Australia...
An excellent piece. Thank you. From now on, whenever I feel I have been treated unfairly, will be throwing cucumbers!