Celebration of Academia
James Acheson, Distinguished Maine Professor
May 9, 2009

Honored guests, members of the Board of Trustees, President Kennedy, graduates, families, friends, and faculty, it is my great pleasure and honor to be here.

I was instructed to talk about something academic and to make it short. Usually you can't accomplish both of those ends, but I am going to try.

In 1929, two sociologists Helen Merrill Lynd and Robert S. Lynd, completed a landmark study of a place called "Middletown" (really Muncie, Indiana). One of their most basic conclusions was that while Middletown was an industrial city in the middle of the 20th century, it had values and an ethos right off the frontier.

People in Middletown valued independence and making their own decisions without much interference, paddling their own canoes so to speak. They valued what one social scientist has called the "sanctity of individual decisions." What is the matter with this? The basic problem is that it makes it very difficult for us to act in the public good in many instances. The reason is that what is optimal for individuals can often lead to disastrous consequences for larger social units.

Two examples: First, people who ran our banking and financial industries wanted to make use of some innovative financial instruments to make money, and this could not be done with the regulatory rules that had existed since the Great Depression. As a result, they lobbied to get those rules relaxed or abolished.

They then set up some unusually risky investment instruments, particularly in connection with the housing industry, which were very profitable for a time. The collapse of these risky types of investment systems is one of the primary causes of the severe financial problems being experienced by the banking and financial industries at present, which has sparked a serious recession.

Here is a case where the financial industry, operating with the "sanctity of individual decisions" in mind, produced a disastrous situation for the people of the United States and the world.

Now you might say, "Those are New York bankers and we all know about them. We would never act that way." Really? This brings me to my second example. In Maine, we have vast potential to develop renewable energy to help free us from our dependence on foreign oil.

This means we are going to have to bear some costs in the interests of the common good. Most of us in Maine will not think it optimal for us personally to have wind generators on the horizon, transmission lines in the back yard, and tidal generators possibly killing fish in the Gulf of Maine, and we are not going to want to pay the higher fees and taxes necessary to develop this infrastructure. Will we be willing to sacrifice in the common good to develop renewable energy? I would not want to bet on it.

What is it we can do about this situation? The answer is probably not much. Can we change the frontier mentality of the U.S.? The answer is probably "No."

Cultures are very persistent; once a pattern starts, it continues. However, it is can be helpful to recognize the underlying cause of so many of our problems, namely that in many situations there is a conflict between what is good for individuals and what is good for the society. In your own life, you can ask when faced with a major decision, "Is this in the common good?

If everyone did what I am thinking of doing, will society be better off or worse off?" If you conclude it might be worse off, you might consider changing that decision.

Goodbye! Good luck! Be responsible! Do something useful! When you get a chance, work for the common good! Thank you.

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