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There is a role in discourse for truisms and tautologies. There are times when saying “it ain’t over till it’s over” is appropriate in order to rally a team that’s behind on the score, and times when saying “you can observe a lot just by watching” is an adequate call to patience and observation. Sometimes, the reason for stating, and arguing for, truisms, is that they are being disregarded. Such is the case, at present, when education is increasingly becoming a for-profit enterprise (e.g., Waterson, 2015); schoolteachers are pressured into teaching to the test because of ever more powerful standardized testing (Nelson, 2013), and academia is generally seen to be at the service of enterprise rather than the personal growth of students and the growth of society in general (e.g., Stevens, 2012) . In this paper, an erstwhile truism is argued for: that academia ought to play a creative role in society and that such a role requires an organizational environment in which students, teachers and researchers feel safe, and are able to fulfill their roles with positive emotions. To this purpose, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) is used; and the role of positive emotions in individuals is proposed as a model of the role that academic institutions play in society. Therefore, a preliminary discussion of models is in order.
A model is an abstract construction upon which several phenomena can be precisely mapped with regards to certain specified characteristics (Beer, 1984, pp. 8-12). In as much as the different phenomena can be mapped onto the same model, the phenomena in question exhibit systemic invariance. For example, percolation theory describes the behavior of connected clusters in a random graph. It serves equally well to describe and predict how a liquid will move through a porous body over time, the likelihood of a fire spreading throughout a forest depending on its density, whether a virus will become an epidemic in a given area, or how news will spread in a social network. The model deals only with the aspects of the phenomena described which are invariant: it does not account for the species of the trees in the forest, the symptoms of the virus or the content of the piece of gossip (Cfr. Beer, 2008, p. 15).
Therefore, so to speak, making a model implies squinting, seeing only selected features of phenomena. This means that models are neither true nor false, but, rather, more or less useful (Cfr. Beer, 1984, p. 9). A model is precise in as much as it moves from an intuited similarity between phenomena (e.g., gossip spreads like wildfire), to finding that knowledge of one phenomena is useful in understanding the other (if the density of a forest aids the spread of the fire, then perhaps the number of connections in a social network aids the spread of gossip?), to finally a rigorous abstract formulation (Cfr.Beer, 1984, pp. 8-9). Whereas analogies can be abused (life may be like a box of chocolates, but towards the end it does not contain just the white chocolates that nobody wanted, etc.), models cannot, because they specify precisely what aspects of phenomena are being mapped (cfr. Beer, 1984, p. 12).