Wearing Lightly the Burden of Precedent

Over the past few years, I’ve been editor of a little, century-old, book series for ASOR: the Annual. From time to time, I get asked whether a proposed title would be appropriate for this series.

My general response is “sure!”  A brief perusal of the series’s history shows that we’ve published all kinds of things. Most volumes are decidedly archaeological in character, but that’s more of a concession to the historical scope of ASOR publications than necessarily the character of ASOR per se or the interests of our members. In other words, I take precedent with a grain of salt.

The same is true for my time at the helm of North Dakota Quarterly. Over the past few months, I’ve been rather casually researching the history of the Quarterly. It is striking how much the journal has changed direction, focus, content, and style over the past 90+ issues. 

These experience got my thinking a bit about precedent. Over the last 20 years in higher education (and kicking about institutions like ASOR and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens), I’ve heard a good bit about precedent. In most settings, precedent in an excuse not to do something. Deans and provosts evoke precedent to refuse faculty (and presumably student) requests. Precedent is trotted out in committee and board meetings as a potential consequence for a particular action. In these contexts, it seems to be the fear of setting a precedent that is a powerful motivating factor these days.

It has always struck me as odd that groups and administrators seem so shackled by past actions. What is particularly disappointing is that the constraints purportedly imposed by precedent exist outside of the growing body of articulated policies and rules. In other words, precedent in an additional, self-imposed, burden that administrators and committees take on to further constrain their actions.

This has always struck me as a bit bizarre. After all, universities (and professional organizations) love to celebrate “unprecedented” aspects of their institutions whether it be campus construction projects, research, or new programs and departments. In fact, the ability to defy precedent is by definition a key element of “innovation” in research and teaching. It is fundamental to the Kuhnian notion of “the paradigm shift” and is almost synonymous with knowledge making. Any teacher worth their salt knows that in the classroom, we have the ability to innovate and experiment without setting precedent. In fact, I regularly tell my students that I want to try something new and stress that this is NOT precedent setting. Indeed, the key difference between policy and precedent is that the former is quite difficult to escape whereas the latter almost begs us to defy it.

This is all a preamble to say that one of my projects for the New Year is to wear more lightly the burden of precedent and encourage others to do the same especially in institutions and organizations that already struggle under the weight of too much regulation and policy (and are bracing for another round of regulations in the near future). Now seems to be a particularly good time to defy precedent and encourage others to do the same.