Moral Regimes of Excellence: The Production of the American Student

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Meaning-making: morals, ethics, and affect

Abstract

This article theorizes elite American universities as national moral orders that cultivate emotionally restrained, rhetorically structured, hierarchically deferential, and professionally future-oriented students. Drawing on 144 interviews with Israeli doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty across more than forty U.S. universities, the study uses the outsider-insider vantage of Israeli scholars to reveal tacit moral assumptions that American academic actors rarely perceive. Integrating Durkheimian moral education, Bernstein’s educational codes, Bourdieu’s habitus, and Lamont’s evaluative regimes, the analysis shows that these institutionalized norms form a coherent moralized habitus that rewards composure, politeness, and procedural discipline. Yet this very moral order may jeopardize core aims of higher education: by discouraging intellectual risk, muting disagreement, and channeling inquiry into safe and institutionally legible forms, it can constrain creativity and suppress the spontaneity that fuels scientific and humanistic innovation. Cross-national mobility thus provides a methodological lens for exposing the moral infrastructures that shape -- and potentially limit -- academic excellence.

Author

• Gad Yair, Hebrew University of Jerusalem